partum intelligendo

Admitting to difficult choices

A recent conversation came round to an interesting communications point. A really important one, although it looks a bit pedantic:

We rarely choose to own the difficult choices that come out of a difficult environment. And in communications, we blame external factors. It's perfectly natural, but it gives everyone else a reason to dodge owning a decision. You know the sort of thing:

"Because of the recession/economic conditions/new legislation, we have to make some changes/redundancies..."

Or whatever language your organisation uses.

So what we're saying is no-one at the top of the organisation had a choice - or at least none are willing to own up to having to make one.

Hardly leadership is it?

Instead, I think we need to talk about the overall environment - the recession, etc - lay out the consequences of doing nothing, the best viable options and then someone - presumably the leader - says "It's a tough decision that I wish I hadn't had to make, but the alternative was worse. So I've decided to do xxxx."

Because there was a decision made - as a friend put it recently, it may be a choice between standing in four feet of s**t or standing in six feet of s**t, but it was a choice.

Because if the leader blames external factors for difficult decisions, why can't everyone?

Leeds Castle Leadership - the communications piece

Thanks to everyone at the Leeds Castle leadership event today - an whistle-stop challenge on communications, with an abbreviated Anecdote Circle thrown in. At the break a few of us were talking about The Future, Backwards and, naturally, I recommended Gary Klein's Sources of Power.

The slides are Download 001 Putting public in the picture.

Story seminar in London

It's obviously the time of year for seminars, etc. I'm giving three in the next week, but coming up on 19th-22nd November in London is Robert McKee's Story seminar (details here).

He is the expert on screenwriting and story for fiction/entertainment - and always useful for anyone dealing with narrative. His book Story is excellent, but the seminars are something else again.

A couple of years ago I did his one-day Comedy workshop, which included plenty of theory and a piece by piece dissection of A Fish Called Wanda that, unlike most dissections of popular culture, enhanced my enjoyment thereafter, rather than destroyed it.

The death of storytelling? Overstated

I know this was meant as a provocation, but I do get provoked quite easily, I'll admit.

When I first started exploring and experimenting with using stories in organisations, I loved the idea of carefully-crafted, fully-formed stories. (I had, after all, come from public relations where the skill to craft a coherent, grammatically- and politically-correct story was a pre-requisite of any job.) The temptation was to look down on those who couldn't come up with a story with a neat story or character arc, clear protagonists, other characters, etc.

The exceptions tended to be for the outputs of emotional audit exercises - stories created in tightened timescales by individuals to illuminate current patterns of belief. At that point, I valued more the content than the structure - how generous of me!

Since then, of course, I've moved increasingly away from the fixed idea of a story having to be so neatly defined. In fact, I distrust neat stories implicitly now, except in fiction. Too many organisations produce neat stories that are often, by virtue of their very neatness, not trustworthy.

And that's just the first element of why stories and storytelling are not being killed - they shouldn't be as neat and defined and structured as people like Ben think.

And if we decide that they don't have to be so clean and careful, it becomes possible to have them in all sorts of ways. Because Twitter and Facebook and all the other internet tools that are derided for eroding our attention span are creating stories all the time. They're just not on the page or on the screen - they're creating patterns and narratives in our brains. The cumulative effect of all of, say, Ron Donaldson, Dana Leeson, Dave Snowden or David Quantick's individual twitters create an overall story (with lots of mini-incidents) that is just as powerful a story, just not so succinctly told.

The point is that they are still stories - but in the mass, not in individual chunks. (There are, of course, exceptions: "machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time" being a personal favourite from Alan Moore.

Story timelines

From the xkcd.com blog, I loved this image, particularly the 12 Angry Men.

And, for added geekery, can you spot whether the Lord of the Rings timeline is from the books or the film?

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_)

The family stories, the family myths and Faure's Requiem

Spent last night at Merton College, Oxford, for a beautifully performed memorial service, with Faure's Requiem. The annual service for Mertonians who had died in the past year. My father and both of his brothers had gone to Merton - and two of them had died this year. The choir and musicians were wonderful - and the setting far more intimate, making the Faure Requiem more beautiful, than earlier this year at Westminster Cathedral, although that was more memorable and personal in its own way.

Amongst others, I seem to be acquiring various documents and pictures of the family record (much of it due to Bernard, who died last Autumn, and his painstaking research). Just skimming the material thus far has been illuminating - and on more than one occasion has disrupted my own sense of identity and heritage.

The story I'd always understood from my grandfather was of the Quinlans coming over from Ireland in the generation immediately before his. (I'll admit I didn't always pay attention to family history until recently, so may have received some of this wrongly, but it appears I wasn't the only one to have this or a similar impression.) Giving me a faintly romantic Irish heritage, helped by the "interesting" family crests he brought back (different each time) along with the family motto (also different. "Slow to anger, quick to retaliate, loyal to friends" was my favourite for its combination of oddness.)

Bernard's research showed us instead to have been living in London for considerably longer than originally thought - and that my grandfather was, in Bernard's generous words, "mistaken" in some of his professed roots. The headlines are interesting in their way - wine coopers, ancestors dying in Charing Cross and recorded as "paupers", etc. Turns out we were extras in Dickens' novels, not romantic celtic sons of the turf.

But a brief glance through the papers shows more interesting elements in the past couple of generations - little letters from one member to another, diary entries for the week before deaths, trivialities and banalities that paint a far more vivid picture than the headlines. And, throughout, an assumption that these things are of no interest to others or other generations. I disagree, it's in the little letters, the words passed from one to another, that I'm learning about my forebears.

Although, in fine narrate tradition, even where the stories have turned out not to be supported by the facts, the stories tell me about the people that told them...

Standards for England conference slides

I've spent the last couple of days in Birmingham with Standards for England at their Annual Conference. The slides are here: Standards for England presentation October 2009

It's highly pictorial, so may not make a huge amount of sense without the audio. Of which there isn't one for this presentation. I will, however, put up the audio and slides shortly from the KCUK session earlier in the year, which covered some of the same material.

Tony Quinlan, Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Five Tribes, not Two

A fleeting visit to Geneva yesterday - it's always nice to arrive at the destination at 9am, in sync with everyone else's working day, but leaving the house at 5am really doesn't work for me, particularly when there's a school governor's meeting at the other end of the day. But all that travelling means clearing some email and finally catching up on some of the recent TED talks on the iPod.

The one that struck me most was David Logan's on tribal leadership . Nice to see the focus being on groups of people rather than on the individuals - although I'm not sure about the categorisation of five basic types of tribe (with apologies to Frankie Goes To Hollywood for the poor blog title above). One thing useful that I'm going to think further on is David's comment about the need to communicate with levels above and below where we are - making the conscious choice to talk only to one level is fine, but often isn't it just an assumption that we're all on the same level. Or, more perniciously, the only people worth talking to are.

I was also intrigued by his comments on the Worldwide poll as being such a startling thing from a market research company. Shouldn't that be an obvious one, just difficult to implement?

It also plays into my concerns about how research and surveys are done - while they're great in some places, I've spoken a lot in recent years to communicators and influencers about the lack of meaning in survey results and hence the confusion about what actions to take next. I think surveys and market research are an industry and a model with a powerful sway and a need for continued investment that distorts there actual usefulness.

[In the interests of disclosure, I've spent much of this past year working on pilots for an altogether different way of looking at cultures around the world, involving stories naturally. There'll be more at appropriate moments on this blog.]

Written by Tony Quinlan, Chief Storyteller, Narrate

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...