partum intelligendo

Nicotine as a workplace lubricant

I regularly bring it up at seminars and in Q&As, but now the FT's on the case:

Little research has been done on smoking in the workplace. Much of what there is focuses on how smoking bans encourage people to quit, or how non-smokers resent smokers leaving their desks for a puff (surely less of a legitimate gripe when so many people waste time surfing the internet without leaving their desks).

But I have not been able to track down any research on one of the most striking aspects of workplace smoking groups: their heterogeneous make-up. Companies spend money on activities such as Outward Bound adventures and cookery classes, hoping to encourage bonding between different departments. Smokers already cross those boundaries. Look at any group congregating for a cigarette: you will see senior executives and security guards, marketing and IT support.

Does smoking produce business benefits? “There’s no doubt in my mind that it inspires cross-departmental collaboration,” one FT commercial manager (and smoker) told me. “You get to know people who you otherwise wouldn’t, and get a feel for what they do. If you’ve half a spark of creativity about you you’ll doubtless stumble across an idea you hadn’t thought of before. It also allows for the ‘off the record’ conversations between departments that grease the wheels of business. I’d be pretty lost without them.”

The best time to smoke at work was probably from late 80s, when it became unacceptable to smoke at your desk, to the early 2000s, when you had to smoke outside the building rather than in the smoking room. Like so many well-intentioned "effectiveness measures" like coffee machines instead of tea trolleys, organisations have succeeded in breaking many of the social rituals and meeting places and instead are wondering why the coherence in the organisation is less strong than it once was - and they're having to encourage people to try online social media to collaborate instead. And employee engagement programmes to try and reinstate some sense of cohesion.

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?

Employee engagement

Satire and ridicule is a great way to damage rumours/stories/beliefs (Robert McKee talked about Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" putting paid to the old western genre until Clint Eastwood came up with "Unforgiven" to give it a gritty twist from the old versions.)

So I'm delighted to see Dilbert putting the boot into the fluffery that is Employee Engagement.

While I like the idea of employees being engaged, let's be realistic - and less managerial. I'm not engaged in my business all the time - and I own and run it. Nobody can be. And if this is truly about employees, why is it always proposed by someone else? I wrote some years ago about Employee Engagement, like Loyalty before it, as an inherently flawed concept. Engagement and loyalty require an exchange - of trust, of communication, of many things - and yet these programmes are traditionally more about the organisation engineering a response from its employees without engaging itself in the requisite exchange.

The dictionary definition of engagement is sixfold:

1. a pledge of marriage, a betrothal;
2. an appointment or arrangement, esp. for business or social purposes;
3. the act of engaging or condition of being engaged;
4. a promise, obligation, or other condition that binds;
5. a period of employment, esp. a limited period;
6. an action; battle

Be honest, which of those is yours?

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.

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_)

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

Random stories or last.fm?

There's an increasing trend I've noticed recently among people looking at stories - to take a brief look at stories to find the ones that "typify" the organisation.  And, because of the perception of storywork being highly resource-intensive, it's generally a very small number of stories that are used.

Somewhat akin to the periodic iPod randomizer memes that crop up (the latest being here) - fun to see what comes up, but from such a small sample it's impossible to tell what's actually the dominant taste.

For example, my five random songs this morning were:

Beachcomber Voodoo by Julee Cruise (The Art of Being a Girl)
Haunted House by Leon Redbone (On the Track)
Better Be Home Soon by Crowded House (Farewell to the World)
Somebody Told Me by The Killers (Hot Fuss)
Losing My Religion by REM (Precious Rarities)

And it would be very easy to see patterns and make assumptions about my musical taste from that.  Even more so if, by chance, an artist were repeated.

Yet a better way of seeing the bigger picture is to look at Last.fm (my profile is here) which builds up a cumulative picture from thousands of pieces.

Similarly, it's more accurate to look at larger volumes of stories and pick out patterns than it is from taking a small sample of stories from within the organisation.  And, despite the assumptions, it doesn't have to be either difficult or expensive - it's relatively straightforward to build systems that gather and collect story material in volume and to be able to see the patterns that emerge. Software like SenseMaker^TM make it very simple to look at thousands of story fragments quickly.

From those patterns, it might be possible to see specific stories that dominate a culture, but they'll be far fewer and not necessarily the ones that come out of a simple sample of a few hundred stories...

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.