partum intelligendo

Playing with SenseMakerTM

On Monday this week, I spent the day with four smart people playing with Cognitive Edge's SenseMaker software and a collection of just over 1500 stories. What was most encouraging was that, up to that point, most of us had used it and looked at material and wondered why we didn't get it, when everybody else did.

Having been at the core of the project and therefore having a reasonable understanding of how/why the signifiers had been chosen meant that I had the context to look for meaningful patterns in the many stories.

It's a phenomenally powerful tool, and I realise that for future projects I'm going to budget a lot more time for looking through material. There are so many ways to look at the stories and see how they inter-relate and how different elements and qualities interact that it could wrap me up for days as I strive to find the one magic answer...

...which of course doesn't exist.

It taps into an old pattern of thinking/concern for me - that what I'm not looking at is more important than what I am looking at. That I'm missing something crucial. (On a bad day, that extends into "that crucial bit I'm missing invalidates everything I am looking at")

Some of the benefits of Monday - having a bunch of us looking at the same material, coming up with answers and thinking through what they meant (and sometimes they didn't mean anything) were:

1. Feeling less stupid as it became apparent we were all getting something from using SenseMakerTM, but none of us felt we were getting as much as we should
2. Coming up with a rough process to start analysing new sets of data/material as they come in
3. Knowing some strategies to see the major results quickly and then being able to check for specific pieces

All in all, a very positive experience of a great tool. And I feel less of a chump than when I started...

MESH is a mess, but Apple is a huge temptation

I've recently come across two outstanding examples of customer service - in many ways elements that should be simple business-as-usual, but because of the rarity of such common sense practices they stand out in my mind.  And, as direct results of those processes, the companies in question have won substantial new business from me.

(These are particularly notable in the wake of two spectacularly bad pieces of customer service - step forward MESH Computers and SEAT cars.)

The first example is my mobile phone provider, 3.  Early in the last contract, there were problems with 3 - billing and technical problems that made me re-think the decision to switch to them.  They resolved the technical issues quickly - "here's a new, more up-to-date phone that'll work better.  No charge." - which left the billing problems.

We'd come in on a special tariff that was difficult to implement in their billing systems.  No-one was debating the tariff or trying to move us, but for two months, we were over-charged.  Then, on the next customer services call, the agent made this response:  "It's difficult to see that this hiccup won't repeat later and I don't want that.  Can I make this suggestion?  We put you, for billing purposes only, on tariff XXX, which would mean £X over the course of the contract.  But our agreed tariff would mean only £Y over the course of the contract, so we'll credit you the difference into your account immediately, so that a) you only pay the agreed amount of the contract and b) no more billing problems and customer service calls.  There is a c) you don't have to pay us anything until that credit is used up - so nothing to pay at all for another X months..."

I'm impressed.  A system that genuinely puts the customer first is a rarity.  As are people trained to think round the system and the problem to come up with a solution.  And managers willing to let processes be circumvented openly.

Needless to say, when it came time for renewal I did.  And subsequently gone for their mobile broadband too.

The second example is an easy one, but still significant.  After fighting for almost 10 months with MESH Computers to get a functional Windows PC, I looked again at Apple.  Yes, the products look well-designed.  Yes, there are people who are utter evangelists for the company.  Yes, they say they can do most things.

But how do I get convinced to a point where I'm ready to throw out a decade of investment in Windows kit, software, habits, etc.

The website's good and checking through I discover that there's an AppleStore half an hour from here and that I can book a one-hour business consultation to talk things through with them.  Not bad.

Before the session, I get a friendly phone call - what am I looking at?  What are my concerns?  I talk through my main ones - the stuff that I do on my systems that's slightly quirky but helps keep me running.  Programmes like Easy2Sync for Outlook.  Come the meeting, Steve's got answers ready, along with healthy advice ("You don't need the top of the range laptop, just go with this model.")

I'm pretty much sold - the products are good and I'm impressed with the service I'm getting.  (With the constant proviso that this is pre-sale, and things often change afterwards...)

And then comes ProCare.  Apple's top of the line service offering - drop the machine in and we'll sort it at the Genius Bar.  (Given that MESH's helpline and seven booked engineer call-outs haven't fixed the current PC, I like this.)  And, let us have your current PC and we'll transfer everything across for you...

And the "let us have the machine for 24 hours once a year and we'll give it the once over, tune it up, etc" is just a dream come true.

You mean you'll give me the product, help me with training (Apple's One-to-One), easy service (which may turn out to be more run-of-the-mill disappointment like others, but nothing about Apple has disappointed so far) and then once a year you'll take it off me and repair everything I've tweaked or uninstalled by accident.

I'm shifting to Mac.

For me these two companies have one thing in common - they genuinely see the customer and have chosen to understand the customer from the customer's own perspective.  They've then amended their processes and offerings to make life simpler for the customer.

KCUK - Building a change management strategy

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week's workshop at the KCUK conference.  Various odds and sods off the back of the session:

• My presentation slides are here

• The basketball video I mentioned.

• The Harvard Business Review article on complexity/leadership/decision-making by Dave Snowden
• Dave's in-depth article on complexity and its implications, "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world"

It was a distinctly Reduced Shakespeare Company take on the subject - so we're thinking of building a full one-day masterclass around it.  Thoughts to me at tony@narrate.co.uk

Undiverse diversity

In recent weeks I've spoken at or run workshops at conferences on knowledge management, employee engagement and change communications.  Very few moments in those that excited, but one over-riding element that depresses me.

The subtext of so many of the questions I get asked and so many presentations I sit through is "How do we get everyone thinking the same way?"

STOP IT!

At a purely practical level, organisations are legally required to have gender, race and age diversity - disparate types of people working for them.  What on earth makes you think they'll think the same when their experiences, perceptions of the world and cultures are different?

At a strategic, health-of-the-organisation level, everybody thinking the same is positively dangerous - stifling innovation, suppressing warning signals, locking out possible alternative ways of seeing the world.

You don't really want everyone thinking the same, parrotting the corporate messages back at you (even if they believed them, which they don't).  You want instead to learn ways of working with that diversity of opinion, voice and approach.

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

In the last couple of years, there's been a lot of interest in social networks - and (somewhat belatedly) communications professionals are starting to look at greater use of informal networks and word-of-mouth.  There's still, however, the temptation to look at the model Malcolm Gladwell sets up in The Tipping Point as one where certain people (Gladwell calls them Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen) have a strong effect on the rest of the world.

For communicators, it's very seductive - if we can just discover who these people are, we can focus our efforts on them and allow the network to take care of the rest...

Earlier this year, however, Duncan Watts studied the problem more rigorously and discovered that it doesn't actually work that way.  He created a model of a social network - a virtual environment where he could adjust how strong the connections were between people, how much more influence some had than others, etc.  Fast Company reported on the article in Is the Tipping Point Toast? 

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

For communications/engagement/PR this has really important implications.  As, I think, it does for leaders.  The individual (no matter how much influence they have) has less effect than the readiness of everyone else to hear the message.

"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

So, communicators can (and do) spend lots of time crafting the right message.  Or training the leader to communicate better.  Or identifying the right vehicle or channel for communication.  All of which are roughly equivalent to getting a really neat spark together.

Instead, if you really want to ignite change, prepare the ground.  Raise awareness of the problems, shift the environment, stimulate the conversations.  And through these, stimulate the social network, don't analyse it.  Because, in traditional complex vs complicated terms, you'll spot the influential in retrospect and expect them to take that role next time.

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn't their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

So for communicators, or culture change agents, it's better to invest in two other areas altogether - preparing the ground and trying lots of sparks.  Some will die out, but then some will catch in ways that you can't predict.  And that unpredictability is, I suspect, why few comms teams are so far willing to go this route.

Newton vs free will

From Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y:

"Newtonian cause and effect suggested that someone wound the original clock and set it ticking, and that every single action in the universe could be predicted - if you had something powerful enough to do the prediction.  There's no free will in that world: a world where everything can potentially be known.  In that world, I'll get up in the morning and do what I have been programmed to do: as though all my actions are just computer-game dominoes, triggered by other computer-game dominoes.  It's what happens when you try to combine God and science.  It's narrative, pure and simple.  There's a beginning, a middle and an end. And the middle is only there because the beginning is; the end is only there because the middle is.  And in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Take away that cause-and-effect narrative and you have the quantum world, disturbing enough in its own way, with all the possibilities of multiple universes and infinite probability.  But if you don't take it too seriously, and if you factor in evolution and economics, and everything else that's taken for granted in our world, then you have at least the illusion of free will."

The dangers of facilitation

An interesting experience last week in one of my other identities as a school governor.  There's a debate going on regarding whether or not a Trust is formed in Mid-Beds under Samuel Whitbread Upper School and whether we join it or not.  So, mindful of wanting to understand different perspectives before I decide, I went along to an invited session to look at the realities of building a Trust.

I won't go into the details of much of the afternoon that I witnessed, but after presentations, the afternoon's facilitated invited us to break out into groups and carry out some exercises.  I've no doubt that they were thoughtfully designed but intentionally or not, they made it appear that what had been billed as a listening/sharing thoughts event was in fact pure sales.

The exercises were:

1.  On the red sheet, think about all the problems inherent in the current status quo for us, our schools and the pupils.  (The focus on the pupils was high in all the preceding presentations - something that worked heavily counter to the speakers' intentions.  Keep reminding us of our responsibilities to 5,400 children and we'll keep wondering whether we should entrust them to a new, unverified venture...)

2.  On the green sheet, think about all the opportunities and possibilities available if we join this potential Trust.

A classic sales process - ramp up the discomfort factor in people's present state, then sing the praises of the future state under your chosen result.  And even better, get them to do it for themselves, so that they own it.

If it wasn't intentional it was spectacularly naive and, once exposed (I had little option - there are moments when these things need to be said to facilitate a more honest, open discussion), served only to increase the distrust already in the room.

The facilitator, I accept, may have simply designed what he may have thought was a helpful tool to engage people in the Trust.  But coming from a public sector background and, presumably, not having a sales background meant he fell into the trap of confusing engagement with persuasion.

Patience that produces common sense

Last week, as part of a visioning/future planning exercise for local education, I ran a Future Backwards exercise with Year 4 - a group of 8-9 year-olds.  It reinforced the power of the exercise - but also that if you create the conditions for discussion, allow time for that to happen and wait for things to emerge, they will.

To the horror of some of the adults around (a visiting party of headteachers who couldn't help themselves but interrupt and offer inappropriate judgments until they were herded away), initial thoughts ranged from "a big swimming pool for the boys and a little one for the girls - and the boys one is filled with jelly" to "lady teachers with big boobies".  After a while it moved through "but that's too much play - we want to have some lessons" onto real, useful thoughts and concepts.

Much the same concern often crops up in other organisations, particularly those with faintly (or strongly) paternalistic views of their staff.  "We can't let them just talk about anything, they'll get so negative/unrealistic/etc"

Patience, a simple setup and permission to be negative/unrealistic will, in short order, create useful emergent ideas.

Boxing up complex concepts

Tomorrow should see the publication of Melcrum's Practitioner's Guide to Employee Engagement - in which I've contributed the chapter on using stories and narrative.  It's been an interesting experience - having abandoned the attempt to fit a gallon into a pintpot early on, I aimed instead to convey the complexity (sic) and excitement of the issue and some hints of different approaches - only the readers can judge my success.

I also wanted to avoid too strong a focus on "storytelling" - as I say in the introduction to the chapter

Storytelling is a misnomer. It conjures up the image of a passive audience sitting listening to someone with the charismatic, persuasive power to entrance them. It revolves around a carefully-constructed story designed to carry you out of the day-to-day to somewhere else and change your thinking while you’re there.

What is on offer here is more powerful and more positive than that simplistic view. And while it involves storytelling throughout, some of the greatest opportunities for employee engagement lie in listening to stories, not telling.

The real power and opportunity for using stories in organisations is in listening to stories, helping others to create their own authentic stories and making sense of the stories told.

Even that, however, proved problematic.  One of the points that I focus on early in any change workshop or project is that employee engagement and culture change do not fit straightforward, 12-step projects.  And "best practice" varies - what works in one organisation will not produce the same (or, on occasion, even similar) results in another.

The editors - generous in their comments and advice - wanted something simple that anyone could pick up and put into practice.  For me, it felt like the Mullah Nasruddin story that Dave Snowden references here (about 2/3rds of the way down the post).  I've always liked it, but now see exactly how a propos it is.

In the field of communications, I've often felt we do ourselves disservices by dumbing down.  Sometimes we need to stretch to reach that bit further.  Stretch our minds in particular...

 

Technorati tags: melcrum, employee engagement, storytelling, dave snowden, internal communications

My (ineffective) life as a categoriser

I realised a couple of years ago that, although I love the concepts of working more with relationships rather than objects and categories, my natural instinct is still to categorise and try to put things in boxes.  (Reading Fritjof Capra's "The Web of Life" opened my eyes to the possibilities of, for instance, creating a business where job titles/departments were less relevant than ensuring information flows and relationships.)

It's something that comes through very strongly from the Cognitive Edge training - that tendency, particularly in Anglo-Saxon societies, to place things rather than see the interweaving relationships.  I realised that recently, when working with the Cynefin framework as a tool to look at how to progress various projects with a client.  Rather than looking at the dynamic movements of tasks/projects between the various domains or the transitions, I was categorising tasks and then identifying approaches accordingly.

One way of using it, but akin to using a DeLorean car as a grocery-shopping runabout.  (Everyone knows they make far better time machines.)

The knock-on effect (for me) is that I'm consciously trying to change how I approach projects.  I'm currently putting together some feedback for a client and find myself falling back into old habits - over here's the audience category, over here's the vehicles category.  Having caught it, of course, I'm able to choose something else - audience-relationship-need-vehicle and interlinks between them all.  More difficult to present and fit into PowerPoint slides, but much more helpful in making sense and taking action.