partum intelligendo

Upcoming training course

The next masterclass on storytelling that we're doing with Melcrum is fast approaching on 17th November 2009 in Central London.  Details and registration are here.

I'm also speaking next week at the Leeds Castle Leadership programme for local government.  These will be the last two public speaking engagements this year.  I've got a couple of planned sessions in January and will post details of those shortly, but I'm not now taking any more until February.

For those interested, I've got the slides and MP3s for the talk at KCUK 2009 earlier this year, where I talked about "Retaining business capital" - a long-winded and jargon-laden way of talking about sharing experiences and knowledge.

The slides are here: Download 001 Retaining essential business capital and the audio - in four pieces - is here: Tony Quinlan part 1

Tony Quinlan part 2

Tony Quinlan part 3

Tony Quinlan part 4

(Thanks for the recording go to Kathryn Chin - the excellent now-freelance conference organiser. Tweet/thank her at kat_mandu_)

Melcrum masterclass details

Details are finalised for the "Storytelling for audience engagement" masterclass with Melcrum.

The date is Thursday 29th January 2009, it'll be 9am-5pm and held at Broadway House, London, opposite St James' Park tube station.

More details here and you can register from the page.

Comments from previous sessions include:

Excellent course. Very relevant, very practical. I have
tools and techniques I can take back to work and use
straight away.

Diverse hearts and minds

(Tomorrow I'll confirm the Melcrum masterclass details and how to register.)

I notice in the CommsNetwork mailing list there are recent emails asking for advice on how to "engage people in values".  My inference (and I think most correspondents' implication) is that they're actually asking how they get everyone to conform to the values as best as possible.

Responses cover the usual sins and techniques, focusing on events, comms vehicles, etc.  Nowhere is there the helpful response of "You'll never make them all sign up to the values and behave accordingly".  And even less so the addition "And if they did, it would be disastrous for the organisation"

Why do we continue to indulge this lazy thinking and idealistic, managerial way of working?  There are legal requirements around diversity in the workforce - diversity of colour, gender, ability, age, etc.  Assuming that you've got people who are different in their experiences, their outward qualities, what on earth makes you think they should think the same?

You want people who think and act differently - it's how you make the business effective, robust and innovative.  The real challenge for communicators should be how you enable conversations, dissent and then action from the diverse population.

Upcoming conference

I've agreed a couple of further public engagements in the first quarter of 2009, and won't be taking any more conferences/internal events now until after April/May, although I'm happy to talk now about later events.

One public one that's agreed now is the Ark Group's European conference: "4th annual internal communications: a vital business function in difficult financial times".  I'll be chairing for the two days 11th-12th February 2009 in London.

Further details on Ark Group's website at www.ark-group.com

 

I will be re-running the Narrative Tools masterclass with Melcrum later this month, but there's some confusion over dates - I'll put details up once it's confirmed.

Kiva

One of the great things about being part of the Medinge group is hearing about new social ventures.  And being able to recognise some of them in the annual Brands with a Conscience awards.

I have some reservations about the rigour of the process by which we decide on these awards, but some organisations speak for themselves.  One such this year was Kiva, an organisation that facilitates small loans from individuals to teams and people in developing countries.

Nominated by Tim Kitchin and Johnnie Moore, I hadn't heard of it, but have subsequently signed up and got involved, making loans to groups in Cambodia and Tajikistan.

At a time when banks aren't making loans to solid prospects, it's nice to be able to take matters into my own hands and help more directly where it will do more good.

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

What do I do?

At a closed doors conference recently, I got asked many times, "Great title. But what do you do?"
The truth is that, although my title is Chief Storyteller, I've long since stopped working with people to tell better stories. Stories and narrative techniques are still part of the toolbox but only occasionally the end result.
I realise the question may be another consequence of the categorising instinct. The question behind the question is often "What box can I put you in?"
And our work doesn't fit in the standard boxes.
At heart it's about helping people see alternative ways of thinking about their world. Seeing other perspectives. Reaching real common understandings. Breaking out of entrained patterns.
Which still doesn't answer the question. I like that.
I spent a lot of time in narrate's early years with advisers insistent on boxing it up, usually around limited ideas of culture and communications. Yet in the last 18 months we've done projects around branding, leadership, HR, visioning and strategy.
Time to drop the boxes altogether...

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

Masterclass - Change Management in the Public Sector - 6th December 2007

Just a brief note to let you know that we're managing to squeeze in one last masterclass in 2007.  It'll be in London on 6th December, with details available from Ark Group at the following link:

Change management in the public sector - the Ark Group

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Mythology, leaders and leadership

Normal blogging returns next week, now the book chapter's done and out of the way.

And, at last, the ebook on leadership is ready.  This being the first, I seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take to turn my chunks of words into a nicely-designed piece of work - so my apologies to everyone that was expecting it a while ago.

Finally, however, here it is: Mythology Leaders and Leadership - Narrate on leadership.pdf

We are also going to be running two workshops looking at the material in the ebook - one in London, one at Cranfield.  Details can be found in the ebook at the back.