partum intelligendo

Cognitive Edge training - day three comes free

The one course that I always recommend is Cognitive Edge's Practitioner accreditation - whether you're a communicator, facilitator, knowledge manager, leader, innovator... The new batch of courses have just been announced (details below) and they've changed the pricing structure quite a bit - if you've attended the practitioner two days, then the third day on SenseMaker is free.

The next London course is coming up at the end of the month (31 January - 1 February). I'm honoured to have been asked to co-teach the course with Michael Cheveldave, so I'm looking forward to it. Hope to see you there...

1) Cognitive Edge Practitioner Accreditation

The two-day Practitioner Accreditation course provides practical ways to manage under conditions of uncertainty, understand the power of business narrative and discover new ways to use human networks. Attendance at the course provides accreditation and membership to the Cognitive Edge Practitioners' Network. The SenseMaker® workshop will be free for all participants who attend the 2-day Accreditation Course. Please indicate in the 'Extra Information' box if you are attending the SenseMaker® workshop.

Accreditation course information is here:

http://www.cognitive-edge.com/accreditation.php

Register for Accreditation here (dates stated below are not inclusive of the SenseMaker® workshop):

• Washington DC, USA: 11-12 January
• Dallas, USA: 25-26 January
• London, UK: 31 January - 1 February

2) Cognitive Edge SenseMaker® Workshop

The one-day SenseMaker® workshop is focused on teaching how to configure, sell and interpret narrative projects that use the Cognitive Edge SenseMaker® software. In each location, it directly follows the Accreditation class (above). We recommend that participants from the two-day Accreditation Course also attend the SenseMaker® day if they would like to run narrative projects using the software. To attend the SenseMaker® Workshop (and not the preceding 2-day Accreditation Course which makes it free), there will be a small charge to cover room hire and catering. The charge will be 150 dollars, pounds or euros depending on the unit of your local currency. We have a capacity of 24 in these classes, priority given to those who are booking into the prior 2-day Accreditation Course.

SenseMaker® Workshop course information is here:

http://www.cognitive-edge.com/sensemaker.php

Register for the workshop here:

• Washington DC, USA: 13 January
• Dallas, USA: 27 January
• London, UK: 2 February

What's in 4,000 stories? What about 100?

Two contrasting weeks working on very different narrative projects - both fascinating in their own right. And both doing SenseMaker™ analysis under time pressure, but with datasets that couldn't have been more different.

1. At a conference with friends in the US, we gathered people's feedback on a particular organisational issue. Over two days, we collected just over 100 stories - about 8,000 words. Two of which were swearwords - I love it that people drop the pretence when they give feedback like this. Closing the survey at 8pm on the Thursday night, I had a few hours to analyse and feedback to the plenary session on the final day.
   
   The analysis itself was actually straightforward and fascinating - the difficult bit was deciding what had to be left out in the final version - I had only 20 minutes to present. And then generating the slides from the material. The results were well-received - and as always happens with narrative research, there were plenty of "oh! Really?" moments, as well as humorous ones
     
2. The second project has been a much larger affair. Over 4,000 stories collected over the past couple of months. Initial analysis of topline trends and outliers is easy - and equally fascinating. Again, it's possible to get headlines and interesting materials quickly from this much material but then you get into the nuances and hypotheses that arise from the first cut of results.
   A different difficulty arises here - there are so many interesting routes to take through the analysis:
3. 1. What happens as level of education goes up? Age?
   2. If I combine ideas about the future with ideas about poverty how do the results look? And then level of education? And age?
   3. How do all of the above change depending on a) time of day b) day of the week c) where we collected

The answer to both is, of course, to know what's interesting to the project owners and put degrees of focus in those areas after the initial top-level analysis. And to look for evidence around some of the key assumptions - are they right or misjudged? And to indulge in a small amount of exploration according to my own instincts - after all this time working in this field I've got a good (but not infallible) sense of spotting oddities and anomalies that need to be highlighted.

Egypt - social media was not a silver bullet

I've just seen another article about how social media caused change in Egypt. (I'm not going to link to it - or any of the others - as I don't want to encourage the causal thinking behind it.) The other element I've seen mentioned as important in the Egypt changes earlier this year is that "everyone stayed on message."

Now, the former element had a role to play - but it's too tempting to assign it too much importance in the piece. The second - staying on message - is just wishful thinking on the part of someone who wants to convince their salary-payer to stick to the script - which is a dangerous and seriously wrong interpretation that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny of the facts.

There are two important elements here that intertwine:

• Social media increased the level of interaction between people and groups - creating favourable conditions for conversations and information to flow quickly and to wider audiences than was previously the case. It created an echo chamber that would respond to whatever messages started to resonate with the people interacting in the networks. In that sense, it seems to be a preferable, but neither necessary nor sufficient condition for mass change.
  
  One of the products of a spread of mass social media in Egypt was creating an environment in which events that were small-scale could serve as catalysts to the change. There were probably many potential catalysts, but notice is usually only given to the ones that actually take hold and trigger events. Any full-scale analysis of the Egyptian situation would need to look at huge volumes of data, paying particular attention to the outliers - to events that were briefly talked about but petered out before taking hold on a large scale.
    
• Messages - in fast-changing, diverse situations like a fermenting country - are rarely designed, planned and executed. Or at least, they may be, but that's rarely a successful strategy. The second fallacy I mentioned above arises from looking at an end result (i.e. an apparent clear message*) and thinking "How was that successful?". That thought, for people who spend their lives planning communications, leads to the assumption that the communication was planned - and that everyone stuck to the message. (It's tempting, but roughly equates to assuming that life is the product of "Intelligent Design".)
  
  Instead, I offer this: in the vast, inter-connected echo chamber mentioned above, many and diverse messages appeared from thousands of different people. Some were picked up and re-transmitted, increasing the echo factor and making them louder. As this happened, weaker messages that did not have the same appeal diminished, making the dominant messages seem even louder - increasing the number of people hearing them. At some point, these messages reached critical mass, drowning out other messages (which would still have been being generated, but would have had a higher bar to reach in order to be heard) - and outsiders observing the system at that point would note that "everyone is on message."

While this doesn't apply everywhere - bounded applicability after all - I do think that if you're facing a dynamic, fast-moving complex environment, planning can only show you roughly what not to do and broadly what might be worth saying. More specific than that, I don't believe that analysis and planning can take you.

Instead, I think a better, faster and more effective route is to take an evolutionary approach - diverse (but coherent) vehicles and messages, fast feedback loops to show what effect is being had and then rapid adaptation. Not with the goal of finding a single message or a best practice, but to develop a constantly evolving, more resilient approach.

*Which I would disagree with at the most basic level - the appearance of a clear message is more down to misinterpretation from a non-Egyptian cultural perspective, missing nuances and differences in varying communications.

Giving voice to everyone - avoiding overload, cacophony

One of the great truisms in communications and development work (these days, I seem to be having conversations in both areas and am aware of their similarities) is that "we want to hear from everyone, give everyone a voice". The principled, idealistic side of us believes that, but the pragmatic side veers away from it - if everyone had a voice, the result would be nothing more than noise. Single voices would be drowned out, and all that anyone listening would hear would be the general hum of thousands of conversations - with the occasional howl of outrage emerging from the sonic ocean.

One of the benefits of using SenseMaker™ - as was shown last week in an interesting environment - is that it allows for lots of voices (over a hundred in this case, thousands in another current project) but allows for patterns of meaning to emerge, without getting trapped in the individual words.

While the voice that is collected is personal, contextual and authentic - allowing people to say what really matters and why - the next step is all-important. They then then put tell us what that story, that narrative, actually means - by simply putting it into a simple framework. Often, as last week, it's a simple mark on a triangle. And it's then the accretion of marks from hundreds or thousands of stories that produces the emergent patterns - the overall voice of the population.

(With some judicious demographics collection it's then possible to see how different groups' voices tell different stories too.)

And from the patterns, it's then easy to drill back down to the individual voices - meaning that everyone's voice is heard and recorded, that everyone's voice has equal weight in the emergent patterns, but we can hear the overall voice of the people rather than just a cacophony.

It's opening up some truly interesting projects - more on which in due course...

Feet on the ground once more

A nice feeling this morning - I realise that (for the moment at least), I've got two full weeks in the UK to work on projects - the first time I've had that long a chunk of time in one place since June/July. Hence the silence on the blog.

The upside of all the travel has been some great projects and sessions - most of them in North/South/Central America with the odd excursion to Europe - but I realise that when I'm doing substantial travelling and working, I'm not (yet) good at staying on top of email and other communications routes. I'm better than I was, but still - too big an inbox for my comfort, so one of the things to work on in the next fortnight (in addition to final reports and new projects) will be clearing out the emails. So, if you sent me something and haven't heard back, I'm not ignoring you - and there's a good chance you'll hear from me this week or next.

I'll also be back on the blog more - with opportunities for people who have schools nearby that might want to join in Children of the World. We're about to launch phase 2 of the project and would welcome anyone wants to get their local school involved...

Who are you? and Where are you?

At some recent conferences, the issue of identity has cropped up a few times - usually with the underlying assumption that each individual has a core identity. It's a seductive idea - and one that I've seen permeate organisational human resources, the self-help movement and research fields.

The inference taken from that assumption is that our identities are independent of our location or context, that work done to change an identity in one environment will "stick", transferring to other environments.

But it's not true. Our identities shift all the time - and our behaviours along with them. They change by location, by environment, by role we're playing.

Harry Eyres' recent FT article after a meeting with Amartya Sen hints at this here: "Many hats, not just one".

To give an example of how plural such affiliations can be, Sen writes that “the same person can be, without any contradiction, a South African citizen, of Asian origin, with Indian ancestry, a Christian, a socialist, a woman, a vegetarian, a jazz musician, a doctor”, and so on.

(My daughters know that my nationality depends on the shape and size of the ball being used on the screen and whether the sticks on the pitch are 100 metres apart and very tall, or 22 yards apart and waist-high. My patterns of behaviour and attitude will change depending on whether I see myself as being sibling/consultant/facilitator/mentor/offspring or parent.)

That shift between identities can be subtle - but I've often thought that, when we want to stress or un-stress a particular behaviour, one of the ways to do so is to look at the roles that generate it - and use that understanding to develop new approaches or interventions.

I love Sen's phrase in the article "viciousness of single identity politics" that boils someone down to a single role on which a group focuses. By looking farther afield at their other roles, we give them more humanity in our own eyes as well as giving us and them more choices to look at.

CASE presentation materials

Yesterday afternoon was another interesting presentation - this time to the CASE group of internal communicators from Higher Education. Smart people, fun afternoon and just to add to the mix, I got to speak with Ghassan Kharian of Kharian and Box, who I haven't seen in a while. Following his presentation was a challenge...

I promised to post a number of things here:

My presentation slides: Capturing an organisation's narrative.pdf (3573.9K)

Links to the method papers for Anecdote circles and The Future Backwards at the Cognitive Edge website

For people starting to explore using story in communications, this post might be a good place to start.

A new approach to corporate culture - scrap the values statements

This time last week I was in Brussels, talking about internal communications - and made the point I always do about the problem with corporate values. They don't work. There's no context, they're generally meaningless (who's ever going to argue with them) and they're too easy to twist around.

This week, Dave picks up on the topic coincidentally - and offers more structure to my comments last week. Stories - parables even - and archetypes is a better route. (It's a topic I'm picking up at the moment with some colleagues working on a global culture change project - instead of going for the standard approach of "The Future is Blue and Round, so let's give everyone paint brushes, pots of paint and sandpaper and measure their progress towards Blue and Round" they're going with "Let's look for where there are some brilliant success stories, share them and have people work out how to come up with ways to create stories like that where they are. Blue and Round is our general intention, but along the way we may find out that Indigo has more going for it and that Ovoid is more flexible.")

[That metaphor needs work. Lots of it.]

Pithy comments from Dave's post as he sowed, some fell by the wayside are here:

Aside from the fact that I have yet to see a set of organisational values that were not a set of well meaning platitudes, all you are really doing is teaching the politically manipulative the language of power.

...it doesn't follow that I don't think we shouldn't articulate values, but we need to do so in a way that carries with it necessary ambiguity so that the statements can adapt to context, and also so that their form allows for verification of actions, not just linguistic form.

The point here is that a story carries context with it, as well as the ability to create resonance. Critically it allows for ethical validation; saying that action X was consistent with a mission statement is easy, matching it against a story is far more difficult.

So what form could this take? Lets summarise a few:

• Parables are the basic method in the New Testament to convey complex ethical principles
• Fables are a long standing type of parable, but using animal proxies.
• Archetypal stories and characters represent complex learning and cultural statements in most societies. Anthropologies use the archetypes present in traditional stories to understand the culture of the society from which they have emerged; and they do emerge over time they are not created. One of the most used methods I ever created was archetype extraction, something we teach on the accreditation courses and which is more fully described here. The method also provides something more substantial than persona for software design by the way.

That Innovative Internal Communications workshop - the slides, the reading and the video

Friday was an odd start - I'm used to catching the 0430 train to St Pancras for an early Eurostar. I'm also used to clubbers getting off the train on their wasted way home as I get on on my equally wobbly way to work. What I'm not used to was whole families getting on trains that early in the morning with camping chairs, picnics, etc. It was, of course, the Royal Wedding that day and they were off to find their spot from which to view all the ceremonials...

I, however, left the country.

I was running a workshop in Brussels for European Commission colleagues on Innovative Internal Communications. And I promised, as always, to put up various things afterwards here.

The slides are here: Download 002 Internal comms masterclass - initial slides.pdf (4519.5K)

The basketball video can be reached via here: basketball video

The promised reading list is here: Download 006 Narrate recommended reading list.pdf (84.9K)

There were a handful of other publications I took that aren't on the standard list: John Kotter's Our Iceberg is Melting; Steve Farber's The Radical Leap; Robert Bolton's People Skills; Chip and Dan Heath's Made To Stick and a couple of back copies of ECO.

Stories on offer for artists - take these stories and make art from them

Read on - the offer in the title is real.

Just before Easter, I was in New York for an excellent project exploration meeting with Starlight Runner and others. (An opportunity to let out my inner sci-fi geek and talk all sorts of speculative fiction, from Jasper Fforde to Stephen Donaldson. And indulge a little comics talk too...)

One part of the discussion - making stories available for artists to use to produce new art - prompted me of two things.

When we were collecting stories in Pakistan as part of the pilot of Children of the World, the intention was that those same stories would become part of cross-cultural discussion - pupils and students engaged in international debating, but gathering source material from each others' narrative cultures. It's still in the plan for when we get the next tranche of Children of the World off the ground.

And, more recently, at Mat Locke's excellent The Story conference, (reviews here, here and here here here and check out Mary Hamilton's wonderful talk on Zombie gaming here) I talked briefly with Adam Curtis. His talk is neatly summed up here

Adam covered much ground in his talk, but among the elements that resonated with me were his comments about how we experience the world in fragments that only make narrative sense later, how the stories we hear daily are edited versions of the raw stories of people on the ground, how making those raw stories is better. I was keen to talk further, but timed it badly as Adam was headed off to meet someone.

Our brief interchange at the back of the hall, however, made me think. One of Adam's criticisms was that what we had done in various countries - gathering local people's stories, with their explicit meaning attached to each one - was "just information". He was more interested in what is done with those stories to create something new.

Which naturally, led me back to our intention from the Children of the World pilot.

So. As part of the Children of the World pilot, we collected some 1500 fragments of stories from people in Pakistan. These were collected Open Source, so are something I am willing to share - in order to create new art.

If you would like to get in touch to talk about using them, please do. Most are in English and are short snippets of experience in response to ambiguous pictures. They're available as a text file, but get in touch and there may be some interesting things to play with beyond the pure text.

Knowing what your customer values about you

Most companies think they know what their customer thinks of them - some through customer surveys, others through feedback. But most have it wrong - because their starting point for looking at what customers say is their own marketing and branding. So the values or marketing proposition they've defined themselves are the values they test customers against.

Yet they may have it completely wrong.

Some of the work we've been doing recently revolves around helping companies see themselves as their customers see them. Collecting stories about how they use services, about times when they interact with the call centre or the sales rep. Analysing those stories to see what differentiates negative experiences from bad ones, what sorts of interactions generate trust or erode it. And, instead of looking for "how many stories are about service/benefit A/problem X", looking to see what patterns emerge.

One client recently expected to see "speed of service" coming out as a crucial element (they were about to launch a programme to improve exactly that). Absent from the data. Not a sausage. Instead, their customers wanted to be sure about the quality of the service - to some surprise, big customers were relying heavily on it. (Company execs were assuming that it was a useful, but not critical, part of customers' business.)

Standard surveys would have asked about "speed of service" specifically and, because no-one will ever say "I want slow service", they would have got a positive response to wanting faster service - a reinforcement of their own beliefs.

Instead, they could divert the intended resources to quality - safe in the knowledge that that investment would pay real dividends with their customers.

To them it was a breakthrough - particularly given that these customers were large multi-nationals with high value contracts. A false step can cost tens of thousands - better to know for real, than to be reassured of a false result...

Business approaches for "complex" problems

With Andrew Moore at DAV Management, I've written a piece recently: "New approaches to 'big' problems".

It's a business piece talking about how new complexity-based approaches can offer major benefits in terms of better insights, reduced costs and greater customer loyalty over the traditional approaches to the problems. In particular, we talk about:

• using customer experience to drive innovation
• building empathy with your customers
• how to build early detection of (and hence fast response to) problems into your customer processes
• supporting sales reps when they are operating separately and in very difficult (complex) environments

And how the same, radically-different approaches offer better results than standard research/survey instruments for lower long-term costs.

 

Stalk like an Egyptian

 

I'm head-deep in my dataset of micro-narratives from Egypt today stalking results - I hope to put something up later in the week to show what emerges from all this fabulous data. (For a taster, here are a couple of quick triads from the project:

  

In the meantime, however, I wanted to point at two important blogs on narrative, particularly counter-narrative and the ideas around using narrative in security situations.

The first, somewhat inevitably, is Dave's blog today: Counter narratives. It's a subject I've been vocal on recently - and am writing about in a current piece - that the obsession among some groups with "developing a counter-narrative" is flawed, doomed and a waste of energy. The problem usually being addressed - the idea that some opposing group has an overarching narrative that must be resisted/countered - is in itself somewhat flawed, but the idea of a counter-narrative meeting story with opposing story will make matters worse, not better. Where narrative is concerned, you cannot disrupt a narrative with a stronger/more powerful counter. Instead you need to take a different approach - Aikido/Tai Chi for instance - deflecting the narrative and finding alternative narratives that divert, not confront.

The second blog I spotted today, was Cynthia Kurtz' piece, Narrative inquiry without participation, looking at narrative - initially in response to a recent conference on narrative in security, but with some excellent points about the more generic use of narrative and the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. (I should say that, while I haven't ever met or spoken with Cynthia, I enjoy her blog and the article she co-authored with Dave a few years ago is still one that introduced me to much of the world of complexity and, in particular, the Cynefin framework.)

Idiom a deus is dos

In the current climate, the title of this post seems to be increasingly appropriate.

Or it would, if it weren't utter nonsense. It's a fabulous example of people interpreting someone else's words and viewpoint. In this case, someone has entered into an online database the lyrics to a song - in this case, by the Cocteau Twins, a UK band in the 80s and 90s. While some of their material had lyrics, much of it didn't - Liz Fraser used her fabulous voice as an instrument. So sometimes she's just making sounds, not singing intelligible words. That didn't stop someone, however:

Ik does a dashik dozen
Ik does alone cheyenne
Mad at them who tease him scrawling

And I knew deeper darlin
Idiom a deus is dos
Indeared look he loves it
Your elan new sub dearie

The difficulty sets in when we use experts to tell us what was meant by what someone said, or symbols they use, or stories they tell. Sometimes they get it right, but sometimes they're so busy trying to make sense of it, they miss that there was no sense in the first place, just a general feeling. And of course, they can only ever get it to make sense in their frame of reference, their worldview. If it comes from a culture radically different, they will have to either ignore it or distort it to make it fit their culture.

Actually, maybe the idea of reading meaning where there is none is pretty appropriate in the current climate after all...

Missing the point - rules that confuse

In rules-based organisations, there is a real tendency to add new rules to suit new situations and when things are not going according to plan. It's not, however, effective.

Rules are like scaffolding around a building - they should be used for a while to support the building of the main structure, or in specific circumstances but not as a long-term strategy. Adding scaffolding to scaffolding creates a more rickety structure, increasingly unstable and susceptible to changes in the overall environment. And for people within the organisation, more rules simply gets more and more confusing.

[Picture from Britain being overrun by street signs | Reuters]

The other problem with lots of rules is that the response is usually to try and look for opportunities to get round the rules, as however well-intentioned they may be, they get in the way of the actual work getting done. They indicate a lack of trust - that people won't do the right thing without being told exactly what to do/not to do.

 

So (with notable exceptions that are genuinely complicated, not complex) more rules will reduce people's engagement/morale/whatevernamewe'regivingitthisweek and will make the organisation more brittle.

The alternative? Foster a culture that is mostly ideation(based on obligation to each other in a social environment), with rules saved only for particular rare instances.

Complexity

Improving sales, employee engagement using stories - the masterclass

Following the recent Pfizer case study, we've decided to run another masterclass - this time looking specifically at tools and techniques to apply narrative and storytelling in organisations.

Date: Thursday 7th April 2011, 9.30-16.30

Venue: Regus, Central London

Register: http://narrativemasterclass.eventbrite.com

Cost: £295 (Early bird tickets until 8th March £195)

This will be a very full day - expect to get your brain filled! We'll look at how to gather stories, as well as a conglomeration of the recent projects we've been working on - we've compiled a case study with all the learnings from a variety of different situations.

In the past few years, the use of stories has shifted from being "how you engage or tell your audience" to a much more sophisticated approach that monitors, measures and feeds back - making narratives the single most effective way to engage and understand audiences.

Narrate is at the forefront of using stories in organisation - including a recent project: Using stories to improve sales in Pfizer. (Case study from Strategic Communications Management here)

 

This intensive day will focus on how to collect, analyse and use stories to generate engagement, understand and adapt culture and improve bottom-line results through increased sales, greater innovation and spot opportunities for "more for less" approaches.

 

Collecting and listening to stories, however, requires particular skills that do not come naturally to most communicators. Nor is it something that everyone can pick up from a manual. This workshop will give participants practical advice and experience in using these techniques, along with feedback to guide them in using them effectively, including:

• How to collect stories in large volumes
• Pitfalls to avoid in capturing stories
• How to examine the stories for patterns of behaviour and belief
• Easier decision-making

Who should attend?

Anyone wrestling with complex problems such as:

• creating culture change
• increasing customer loyalty
• building trust
• improving sales results
• capturing the knowledge of retiring employees
• extracting lessons from projects
• improving service
• managing customer relationships

Masterclass - "a total lifechanger" for internal communications

I was talking with a client recently who asked me about the internal comms masterclass where we first met. Ark Group had asked me to run a masterclass that had got some great feedback and he wanted to know when he could send some of his team on a similar one.

We're talking about running a tailored version of the original one in-house for him, but I've decided that we'll run a public masterclass ourselves as an experiment as Ark have pulled out of the communications arena altogether.

As it's the first one and we want to keep it tailored to participants' needs, we're going to limit attendance to 10 people in the first place. I'll be leading it, but we'll be having some guest speakers along the way.

Date: Tuesday 22nd March 2011

Venue: Central London

Time: 9.30-16.00

Cost: £310
Early bird registration (before 8th March): £250

You can book online at Eventbrite: More for less - a one-day masterclass in internal communications

And we can adapt and offer it for in-house communications training - just ask.

The details:

In the current climate, individuals and organizations are under increasing stress. As a communicator, you are being asked to deliver more results in less predictable environments with fewer resources. Whether an experienced professional or a recent recruit, this masterclass will equip you with ideas, practical techniques and clear next steps.

It is perfectly possible to deliver "more for less" - what it requires is a new set of persepectives and tools to address employee engagement and internal communications.

This one-day masterclass will help you

• Understand and define the realities of internal communications in the current climate
• Generate understanding, buy-in and collaboration inside the organization
• Deliver and evaluate real behavioural changes
• Collect more content than you know what to do with
• Understand the limits of what you can do and can't do

Previous comments about Narrate masterclasses:

• Totally innovative! I’ve never done anything like this and enjoyed it. Am bursting with ideas for how I can apply this in my workplace – thanks for showing me all these things!

• A total life-changer!

• Excellent away-day. Practical and theoretical. Grounded in lots of examples and stories. Liked that it was a small group as lots of opportunities to share and network.

• A very useful course and I have learnt a lot of things that I can take back to the office re. communications.

• A very good course that I will recommend to colleagues.

An interactive day, focused and adapted to meet participants’ specific situations and challenges, it includes practical tools, principles, guest speakers and examples of communications from different sectors – to ensure that as a participant, you come away with pragmatic, useful material to put into action the minute you get back to your desk.

Masterclass leader:

Tony Quinlan, Principal Consultant and Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Tony is a business alchemist who founded Narrate in 2000 to create more effective, healthier organizational cultures and communications. He’s passionate about breaking out of rigid, purely rational communications to create real cultural and behavioral change. A member of the Cognitive Edge network, he is always exploring new ideas and practices, looking at current business practices from a different perspective. If you want 12-step models and the “same old, same old”, then you’ve got the wrong man.

A frequent keynote speaker and conference chair, Tony writes on communications, branding and culture for international publications and blogs at www.thenarrateblog.com. Today, he is a writer, keynote speaker, communications coach, masterclass presenter and international consultant. But he has also been a radio presenter, radar designer, TV tuner, dishwasher, lift attendant, software programmer and presented live public roadshows to 8,000 people at a time. Needless to say, he has stories about all of them.

Overall agenda:

9:30 Registration and refreshments

10:00 Introductions and objectives

• Making the course relevant

10:15 Thinking about internal communications

• Principles and goals

10.45 The role of the internal communicator

• Opportunities and obstacles
• Skills and support
• Collaboration and confidentiality

11:20 Morning Coffee Break

11:50 Communications in challenging times

• Mergers, redundancies and acquisitions

12:30 Innovative internal communications

• Better results on lower budgets
• The communications mix

13:10 Lunch

14:10 Dealing with major comms projects

• Values, change and organisational myths

14:50 Understanding the internal audience

• Using internal surveys
• Evaluating with meaning

15:30 Discussions and Next Steps

16:00 Close of Masterclass

Meeting at the Balawat gates

Yesterday morning, I managed to meet up with Shawn Callahan of Anecdote who's over in the UK at the moment. Coffee in the Great Court of the British Museum is always a treat, although the overcast sky outside meant the fabulous roof wasn't shown to best effect.

Afterwards I sneaked a look at a couple of the objects that features in last year's A History of the World in a Hundred Objects podcasts on the BBC.

And then popped into one of my favourite galleries - the Mesopotamian era. The blurred picture here is of the fabulous Balawat gates, which I stuck into the children's novel I wrote a decade ago. (No, never commercially published, although there are about 100 copies circulating among friends and family.) Rather than let it languish, I've started putting chapters of the novel, The Phoenix Egg, up here.

The Mesopotamian era fascinates me - although I haven't read half as much about it as I want. (The bookshelves behind my desk still feature my copies of Ancient Iraq; Mesopotamian Myths; and Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia - all of which still feature bookmarks halfway through them...)

My reading - is it something about a science training - mirrors what Dave talks about. If I skim a book, I always fear that I'll miss some crucial piece of information, so my reading is always every page, every word. I don't always take them in that way, of course: I read Dante's Divine Comedy twice in my early twenties in two different translations but can't honestly say I remember much of Paradise and little more of Purgatory. The Inferno, however, I found much more my thing. I worry what that might mean...

Customer insight - hearing their stories, their complaints their way

Customers (or clients or patients or...) are naturally full of stories about services that an organisation offers. And they regularly share them, particularly the stories from which we can find opportunities for improvement - complaint stories or call-centre phone calls.

These are actually more valuable than most focus groups or questionnaires - they reflect actual day-to-day usage and experience, rather than prompted specific examples. There are, however, two difficulties with them:

1. Our natural tendency to re-interpret the story or to categorise the teller in terms of unhelpful stereotypes. (A few years ago, we collected video stories from a wide range of people that experienced a client's range of services. Playing them back to senior execs turned out to be too basic - they slotted them into their pre-existing stereotypes: "he's a whinger," "that one's a never-good-enough," etc)
2. There are too many of them and it's difficult to see how they relate to each other except to divide them up into handy "buckets" - Inaccurate Sales, One-off Breakdown, Unrealistic Demand, Broken Product, After-Sales Service. (I use my own categories that seemed to fit the complaints 20 years ago when I worked with Canon on copiers, printers, fax machines, etc)

With a high volume of negative customer feedback, the learning opportunities are therefore lost.

But with minor modifications, it's possible to get some highly valuable feedback from this, including:

• Tracking of improvement/deterioration in customer perception of the organisation
• Specific highlighting of key problems that repeat in different areas
• Simple solution suggestions, derived from the complaints themselves
• Identifying the "understanding gap" between customers and the organisation
• Better product design and marketing decision-making

Ultimately, for an organisation suffering from a groundswell of complaints, it should be possible to see fast, low-cost potential interventions to turn around a declining perception.

Rather than just gathering the raw data on complaints, customers should be given the opportunity to signify their complaint - where does it sit in this triangle? Is it about product/service/support?

Signification - when done properly - means that it can't be re-interpreted in the organisation. And also means that overall patterns can be built up - and then only significant stories reported and addressed, rather than having to deal with each complaint on an individual basis.

 

 

Equally, where there already exists a large volume of customer responses, a different approach could be taken:

• Distribute subsets of the material (complaints, suggestions, responses to competitions) to willing participants in key groups of stakeholders
  • e.g. Marketing, Customer Services, Call Centre, Product Design, Sales force, Manufacturing
• Have those groups signify the material they've received (making sure there's overlap between the subsets so that some material is signified by everybody)
  • an additional twist might be to ask them to signify the material as they think the customer might have signified it. (Although that is more powerful with material that has been signified by the customer)
• Analyse for overall patterns - again, often challenging the expected results from an emergent picture.
• Analyse and compare patterns across stakeholders - when Call Centre sees problem X, Product Design sees Y and Marketing sees Z.

Often, from these emergent patterns and the qualitative information beneath come solutions that are substantially more straightforward and effective than traditional system-wide approaches. It is one of the perversities of working in complex rather than complicated problems - the answers can be simpler and cheaper to implement.

For instance, a batch of stories that address a fundamental misunderstanding of the product (perhaps due to over-enthusiastic advertising) might initially appear to be about a product defect. Spotting a correlation or cluster of stories of significance and then examining only the handful of stories at the centre (rather than having to trawl through the thousands that might come in from a global customer relations site) would provide context for how the product is perceived, along with qualitative information to show where the misunderstanding came from. And a discussion can then take place - it may be that, now they understand what customers expect of the product, designers can easily introduce new features that will meet that expectation; or it may be that an advertising campaign needs to be amended, or different responses needed in the call centre when customers call in.

Having real customer feedback that shows the problem from the customer's point of view that is difficult to re-interpret or twist for internal politics and that includes context can therefore make for a faster, more responsive, more customer-focused organisation. The potential is huge - generating real and lasting competitive advantage from a pile of customer complaints!

Complexity, SenseMaker

Using stories to increase sales at Pfizer

The secret's finally out - this project last year was with Pfizer. This month's Strategic Communications Management magazine features Pfizer Communications Director Nigel Edwards' case study on the overall project.

If I'm honest, we were very proud of this one. Fast response, fast gathering and fast analysis - and using SenseMaker produced some fantastic, usable insights.

 

In Nigel's words: 

"The approach of gathering stories paid dividends...the subsequent analysis gave us insights no other method would have."

There was one additional piece that wouldn't fit into Nigel's case study, so for completeness I'm adding it here. It comes from the breakout box on the last page: "Understanding the results." The article includes an example of a histogram (polarity/diad) but here's the same for a triad:

In the triangles, each dot represents one set of indexes from a rep – i.e. their response to a particular story.

The overall pattern, therefore, gives the relative strengths of perceptions on each issue.

Boxes have been drawn around major clusters, with the number of data in each shown

SenseMaker