partum intelligendo

The problem with employee surveys - the right answer or the true answer?

Here's an interesting question - are you assuming that because people tell you the right answer that they believe in it?

I ask, because I'm looking at some interesting employee responses to a recent survey. With a colleague, we changed the usual response format from 1-7 Likert scales of "How engaged do you feel on a scale of 1-7?" to a combinations of triads and polarities going from one extreme to another. (See this previous post for the background.)

What's been interesting is the comments coming back from people appended to the end of the survey. A fair number of people have come back saying "I wasn't sure what the right answer was in this format, I hope I've got it right." It raises some interesting issues:

• Did we make it too confusing?
  Possibly - the new format wasn't explained in advance and the only instruction was "Please put a mark on the triangle to show where your answer is". The questions themselves and the language on the triads were commonplace and straightforward. More explanation or a chance to do it on a trivial example first might have helped.
• Was there a right answer anyway?
  Nope - we were asking which area(s) people thought the organisation was particularly good at. We were genuinely wanting to know what people thought - we had suspicions, but wanted their reactions.
• Why were they looking for the right answer?
  This is the crunch question, for my money.

Why were employees looking for the right answer in an employee survey?

It's a natural thing to spot the answer people are looking for in surveys - we do it pretty much unconsciously. You know if you're given a range of answers for a number that you discount numbers that don't fit the majority pattern and that you tend to go for the mid-point of a range. You know if you're given a standard scale of Bad-to-Good, people are looking for answers at the Good end of the scale. And the human instinct (unless you're a maverick or in a bad mood) is to "gift" the answer within your comfort zone. (So, you'll tend to the Good end of the scale, but you may not be comfortable giving 10, so you'll go 8 or 9.)

But to find people concerned about finding - and giving - the right answer seems to indicate a culture where it is more important to understand and replay the language - conforming to what they think the organisation expects. It's evident, too, in the actual answers - particularly because there is one triad where the "right" answer is evident, but people who have developed a pattern of putting there mark in the centre of a triangle (i.e. not being willing to commit to any particular strength, but taking the non-commital approach) put their mark in the centre because they've got used to that.*

It does, however, make me wonder about all the standard employee surveys - are they actually testing for compliance and the ability to feedback what the company has said to them? I have a horrible feeling that that's increasingly the case.

*The upshot is that this putting-it-in-the-centre-all-the-time could be useful. By possibly including one triangle where the answer is evident (and where the centre is inappropriate in most cases), we'll be able to check and filter out sets of responses where that easy default option has been taken.

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.

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

Qui persuadet persuadores

I've just got the December/January issue of Melcrum's Strategic Communications Management (SCM) magazine - presumably because the February/March issue will have a great case study of a project we did last year with a pan-European salesforce to improve revenue and sales on a particular product. I'll let you know in due course when that one comes out - and add a piece of additional material that got cut from the final article.

This issue, however, includes an article about something that always seems to get missed in most communications programmes: the communications team themselves.

Sally Jackson of EDF Energy writes about how to work with the internal communications team during change - focusing in particular on the often-overlooked fact that they may be trying to reassure the rest of the organisation, or at least clarify things, while going through substantial upheaval themselves.

I'd go further.

Too many communications teams are tasked with engaging and explaining the new vision or the new organisation to the rest of the business. (I'd challenge that there are better ways of going about all of this, but for now, let's assume that that's the process you're stuck with.) So, we have a bunch of people who have been given the task of making something appealing and understandable to everyone else.

How much time have the change drivers put into convincing the communications team? Have they been engaged or just presented with it and told to get on with it?

A decent team will, of course, ask questions to clarify matters for themselves and will be professional in communicating that onwards. But we know how subtle metaphors and cues can be in triggering responses from people. A professional team, with doubts, will give that impression in their work.

Increasingly, when we're involved in change processes, we insist on what appears to be a superfluous piece of work at the start of the project - working with the comms team as though they were the end-audience, engaging and explaining and working with them.

To twist the old maxim (and take liberties with my schoolboy Latin):

qui persuadet persuadores

Drawing lines - where's yours? Where's your organisation's?

One of the listservs I tune into had a fascinating conversation recently. Someone was asking advice about how to get in touch with staff who don't seem to read all-staff emails. It's not an uncommon problem and one of the assumptions is that they should read all their emails. Or at least the ones that they're sent by the Communications group, or the CEO, or... But you get the picture.

That people weren't reading them was a problem. The possibility that they weren't reading or responding because they weren't relevant or they were busy or they were in the wrong language was mooted early in the conversation, but then suggestions moved quickly along to techniques to get to the employees. Quite a few talked about "send the material to their home addresses".

Now, I can see some circumstances where that's inevitable - people whose roles rarely take them into any organisation building, who don't have a fixed base. The discussion wasn't about those people, however, it was about people who do have a desk, who do get emails, who do use the intranet. They discriminate and choose not to engage.

What concerns me is that the communicators don't seem to realise that there ought to be boundaries - they seem to think that communicating with someone while they are at home is acceptable practice in the day-to-day running of the organisation. That just because they have left the office is no reason to think they have a separate life.

It's the same concern I have when managers and leaders talk about how their employees are outside work and how they get them to be that in work. It's usually dressed in talk about them "being fully authentic" and "emotional intelligence" and more. The big catchphrase, of course, is "employee engagement".

It's informed, I think, by a misunderstanding, easily arrived at, but toxic if not challenged. Giving someone a job, benefits, bonuses and the rest does not entitle you to their every thought, action or emotion.

As a communicator at places like IBM, I can remember being asked to do something that struck me as crossing a boundary. The manager in question hadn't even perceived that there might be a boundary there - he was interested only in achieving a result and needed me to do that for him. Rather than go away and just do what I'd been told, I chose to raise the possibility that it might cross a boundary. It was a heated discussion for the first few minutes, but quickly cooled - and shifted to coming up with alternatives instead.

We can only recognise those situations if we have a sense of where those boundaries might be for us personally, and then for the organisation. Fixing them in writing is less than helpful - circumstances and environments will change and we need to have the ability to respond quickly. But writing down ideas might start our own process of seeing the limits.

So:

• Where does the line between work and personal life lie for your employees?
  • Geographically? Chronologically?
• How far do you go in telling a knowing untruth?

Practicalities and applications - SenseMaker in application

Two great sessions last week at the QEII Conference Centre with Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge. The shift from theory to practical application of new management techniques based on principles of complexity, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology and others has been remarkably swift in recent years - and even for those who've heard Dave in the past few years, there was noted surprise at how far things have come and the scope of the projects where these tools are being applied.

Any 3-hour seminar will be difficult to summarise in a single blog post - and this one even more so than usual. Of necessity, therefore, this will be a skim over the highlights that I picked up - feel free to add your additional thoughts and observations in the comments. Ron's already started over at The Ecology of Knowledge. (Ron mentions the video - we (he) did record the entire session, but it'll be a while before we even sit down to look at the 5 hours of video we've got, let alone think about what we do with it. Ideally, we'll just make it available, but we need to check first. Bear with us...)

The audience was highly diverse - researchers, psychologists, communications experts, innovators, CT specialists, social media analysts and more - but that reflects the diversity of issues that the tools and techniques - in particular SenseMaker™ - is being used to address.

The session started with a short jaunt around the Cynefin framework, in particular covering the difference between Complex and Complicated domains (a detailed partum intelligendo blog on the Cynefin framework is in the works). And then we were off.

Interestingly - and in many cases challengingly - the projects each meet the needs of multiple, diverse groups. Ideal in a world of better for less, but sometimes tricky to navigate the organisational waters.

Key elements from the sessions:

• A crisis is a wonderful thing - it means that we've reached the limits of our current thinking and something new will (has to) emerge. Cognitive, complex approaches look to be the main contender this time around.
• Ongoing, continuous capture of micro-narratives as things happen opens up vast new possibilities for communications, impact measurement, knowledge sharing and giving greater voice and self-determination to groups.
  • It also has implications for those looking for a handful of significant outcomes, but having to deal with vast amounts of data leading to those outcomes (e.g. IED detection in the field, pharma research teams in the laboratory)
• The new techniques allow for abductive research techniques, that reduce expert or interpreter bias
• Early discovery, fast recovery - problems spotted early are quickly (and more cheaply) resolved
• The spread of pervasive computing opens up radically new possibilities
• Narrative research combines qualitative information in quantitative volumes - combining the best of both sorts of research
  • Projects should, however, be run in parallel - each approach has its positives
  • Traditional qualitative techniques are highly biased - focus groups only manage at most 15 minutes before being swayed by facilitator feedback, however well-intentioned
• Pre-hoc, post-hoc approaches are a new approach to increase anticipatory awareness.
  • Collect lots of signified material from a human sensor network in their day-to-day activities
  • When a significant event has taken place, go back and re-signify from an expert perspective
  • That pattern of signification can then be applied to incoming data and used to ask people to linger in the same spot/watch for anomalies
    • It's crucial to understand that this is not prediction or even anticipation (in a complex space, both are unfeasible), but about increasing anticipatory awareness
  • Where there is large volume of data coming in and only a few significant outcomes to worry about, statistical or process approaches will fail, but SenseMaker offers an effective alternative approach

• Obliquity is important in complex environments - addressing the problem directly will not work, but addressing other elements will resolve the problem indirectly

 

Projects that were mentioned included:

GlobalGiving

A project run in a slum area of Kenya, local narratives were collected and signified. (The case study and materials on this fascinating project are at the Cognitive Edge website.) One of the interesting results from it was that, when stories were signified by development experts "as you would think a Kenyan native would signify it", there huge gaps between what locals wanted from development and what the western perspective believed. Locals wanted better social networks and relationships, Western experts believed they wanted better sanitation and clean water. (Locals believed that they would follow from a better social community.)

It's not an unusual element for this form of research to produce results that highlight the differences between expert views and those of the audiences we want to understand.

International social research

An approaching project is expected to collect day-to-day experiences from children in their communities - giving far greater insight into beliefs, mindsets and cultures than traditional research techniques. The original plan had been a small-scale pilot on a subset of European countries, but using SenseMaker the costs to cover all 27 members of the European Union were the same - so a full-scale project is planned. Schools in each country will be the conduit to collect the stories to look at gender issues - and participating schools will also have access to the material for their own use.

Employee engagement/communications research

Collecting fragmented narratives, signified by the teller, applies in all sorts of spaces. We've run projects, there was talk of more - linked to knowledge management and customer insight. An example of field engineers equipped with bluetooth pens and notebooks. Notes and stories - both from engineer and customer - made on the left-hand page, while the right-hand page holds a handful of triads and/or polarities. The stories captured are then good for customer  feedback, engineer training and induction, technical support, product design and - with the addition of a single triad specifically about how the engineer is feeling - employee engagement. All with built-in context, meaning and analysable data.

Suggestion schemes and innovation

A pause to cover innovation - and its non-link with creativity - and the pre-requisites for innovation being:

• Need
• Scarcity of resources
• Change in perspectives

Innovative people are sometimes creative, but creative people are not always innovative. One of the problems relates to mistaking causation and correlation - a frequent mistake by management writers who work from data and produce conclusions along the lines of: "Successful companies exhibit behaviour A. Therefore exhibiting behaviour A will lead to success." In inimitable style, Dave gave a specific example of Chief Executives and bowel movements. The details are unimportant...

For innovation, of course, suggestion schemes are often used - but one of the difficulties that has led to their disappearance has been the need to attend to each suggestion individually. Coupled with that, of course, is that each suggestion is (mis)interpreted by whoever is tasked with going through them. An alternative in play now is to use SenseMaker to signify individual suggestions as they come in, building up patterns of where innovation is suggested/needed over time.

Military knowledge capture and sharing - blogs vs doctrine

Experience from the US Army has shown that, while doctrine continues to be produced, the most effective way to share battlefield knowledge was blogging by Platoon Commanders. In essence, lots of fragmentary data from in situ is easier to use for decision-making than doctrine produced back at base and disseminated outwards.

One of the next steps forward is a project involving SenseMaker to collect and signify material from the field in the field and allow for real-time access to situations and reports.

As an aside, there is also a group working on metaphor-based communications - it is easier and quicker to communicate using shared metaphors and examples. Military history is ideal for the use, building with nuances of territory, geography, tactics, etc. Another example of metaphor-based communication came in the Star Trek Next Generation episode "Darmok". With metaphor-based communication, it's possible to boil down complex situations and tactics to a few words.

 

Two of the most interesting examples were the use of human sensor networks that have people inputing and signifying material around anomalies or anything else they think is significant. Different groups of people with different backgrounds can contribute and the patterns that emerge from the signifying data become extremely valuable. Both work not prediction of events (impossible in complex environments and spaces) but on identifying patterns and then prompting anticipatory awareness - or "keep 'em peeled" as Shaw Taylor used to say.

Child protection in Northern Ireland

Social workers and policemen and others focused on child protection are able to collect fragments and signify them as they're working using handheld devices. The combination of lots of data from different perspectives and a pre-hoc, post-hoc approach make it possible to have a confidential alert come up for visitors to at-risk houses to encourage them to stay another 30 minutes and ask some more questions as overall patterns correlate with previous experiences. It is all about anticipatory awareness again.

Security guards, IED detection

Saving one of the most interesting for last...

SenseMaker technology is currently being integrated into specific handheld devices to allow for anomaly-tagging in particular environments.

For example, airport security personnel see and tag quickly any event or situation they think important. (In previous systems, this would be discouraged - any situation you reported would require investigation, paperwork, interviews, etc) Much of the material tagged is small-scale and results in nothing significant, but the personnel become used to lots of quick and easy tagging of events. The pre-hoc, post-hoc approach means that after an incident actually happens, it's possible to build patterns of prior tagging that can lead to events.

Subsequently, similar patterns of tagging can generate real-time alerts to the hand-held devices triggering higher levels of observation, but without generating self-fulfilling states of unease.

The approach is being looked at around IEDs in Afghanistan and security guards in London.

One application suggested was also to spot bottle-necks of visitors and other hiccups around the 2012 Olympics - volunteers working around the village and events halls could use these to report all sorts of infrastructure elements that would allow for fast (and often cheap and easy) resolutions.

There was naturally far more than this, but this post should give you a sense. If you were at one of the sessions and spotted other elements, please add your comments, as I'm sure I missed much...

And I'd like to say a personal thank you to the Narrate family there - including Ron, engagement facilitator (including employees, pupils and cross-cultural programmes); Jim, communications supremo (including UN agencies, local and central government); Meg, all-round facilitator and speaking coach. The organisation of the whole piece was run, as always, with charm and efficiency (a rare combination) by Anne.

Get the story straight - Storytelling in Communications 1

The opening gambit of more than one past client project has been "help us get our story straight". Sometimes it's just that - the general story - sometimes it's something specific: "help us get our customer story straight", "our story on leadership". It's an interesting starting point, but demands a long conversation - and often a dash of cold reality - before anything else can happen.

The assumption is often that there is a story - just the one - that will be clear and simple (preferably fitting onto one or at most two sides of A4) and will convince everyone in the intended audience. There is, of course, no such thing - and nor should there be.

Clear?

Stories are rarely clear at a personal level, let alone an organisational one. Think about your own "story" - could you sum up the key points of your life thus far simply and clearly? And a story is rarely clear - it depends greatly on the point of view of the person that's listening, which will be different from the person that's telling.

There's a great temptation among strategy and communications people to boil the story down too much. As strategists and planners, we spend a lot of time building plans and predictability out of mess and possibility; while as communicators, we have often come through a career in which we were taught to edit and write in the most simple possible terms. Both are quite right - in their place. An organisational story demands more.

Simple?

Stories and narratives about ourselves and our organisations should be multi-layered, with strands weaving in and out as relationships build, deteriorate and drop away. Characters will change and adapt to the environment they find themselves in - a leader one day becomes a stubborn obstacle another and possibly a villain later, while a competitor in one field may be an ally in another and a customer somewhere else.

Too often - as Narrate did in the early years - "experts" try and build a fixed story against a framework, boiling down events and participants to fit into neat categories and stages. And boiling out much of the real interest and value along the way. The Hero's Journey is one such framework, but makes it all too neat.

Engaging?

No single story can ever convince or engage everyone. If it were possible, then Hollywood would have found that story by now - it's thrown enough money at the problem and experimented with so many variations. And hoping for a single framework story is still too much - the much-discussed (even by me) Hero's Journey structure is an over-simplified one that doesn't apply universally. The Hero's Journey is a neat framework, but overplayed - the temptation becomes to slot any event into the pre-defined categories, rather than lookin at what they really mean. Different cultures will also see the same event in different ways. (In this case, different cultures could be different countries, different departments or just different professional training.)

Let's be clear - in arguing that a clear, simple, engaging story is inappropriate, I'm not advocating a deliberately obscure, over-complicated story that turns people off. What I am advocating is something that instead works the way reality works, the way we know that people work and understand the world. Not through clear statements, but through building up a picture of the world from lots of snapshots.

And those snapshots include positives and negatives, aspirations and lines drawn in the sand, examples that apply in one situation but not in others. And they move all the time, evolving to meet new environments and new challenges, not applying old rules to new situations. By taking this approach, we treat people as the adults they are - able to understand the complexities of operating in the real world, able to discern and decide in the current circumstance.

All of this leads us to what do you then do, if you're trying to get your story straight? The good news is the answer is straightforward, cost-effective and - once you've got the skills - you don't ever need to go out to consultants again.

Previous approaches have included:

• Anecdote circles - organising gatherings of people in a sociable atmosphere. Throwing in careful questions to start the natural process of sharing examples of good and bad. "Get our story straight" is exactly where this example started from. Participants get a richer, clearer story that's usable in their day-to-day jobs. Sponsors get the stories that allow them to illuminate the way forward with examples from the past that everyone recognises. (Throw SenseMaker into the mix and you get to see the patterns of belief - giving you more and richer options for what you do next)
• The Future Backwards - sometimes to understand the story ahead, it's best to start with the story going back. (If you're taking over the Rovers' Return, it helps to know whose bloodstain that is on the wall and why!) It also enriches the overall story by looking at the negative possibilities as well as the positive ones - and the significant moments and signals on the way to each. For communicators, it's hugely valuable - in addition to giving you the overall picture of where people think they're going and fear they're going, it tells you where to look for the significant stories of progress. And it shows you what moments from the past can be re-told to help the current situation.

Both need real light-touch facilitation and good preparation. And the results of each can be used as-is, or to fuel further communications work - like constructing archetypal characters that can be used in different media to illustrate problems/change/solutions, etc.

And both can be used in multiple audiences - and the results compared between the two. (One of my favourite techniques is to take materials collected (with permission) from one audience and compare it with materials collected on the same topic from another audience - the differences and awarenesses that come out can be dramatic.)

Once you've gathered the initial material, the next stage can begin - often it's a process on how to build and hone a story that reflects the overall situation, the changes, etc - but importantly is built to reflect the reality of situations, the context in which they happen and the messiness of real life.

It's important to have gathered plenty of raw material first - the one time I tried to construct a story cold without the material it was excruciating. The story, for all that it was built on some examples, was unrealistic and stilted. An unconvincing story will exacerbate a bad situation and will undermine a good situation - the process of gather, build, test, rebuild, re-test, rebuild, re-test, hone is crucial. And the process requires the active participation of the actual people who need to tell the story - it allows them to develop a story that fits with their personality, their way of telling. Because, at the end of the day, a good story needs to reflect the storyteller and vice versa.

What you don't need is a story of exploration told by an action hero storyteller.

Employee engagement - new approaches to measurement. With added meaning!

Still busy writing. But in the meantime, Cognitive Edge has published a paper on More Than Numbers - Revitalising Employee Engagement. Very good reading.

You can download it here - an easy and important read!

The European story collecting tour

A great day yesterday spent with the full Narrate team, David, Ron, Ruth, Meg, Anne and myself.

In addition to thinking about the future and other projects, potential and real, we spent half the day reviewing our latest project - collecting a couple of hundred stories from employees in 11 cities in six countries in two weeks, using SenseMaker and signifying (see upcoming blog post for explanations) to get a couple of thousand perspectives on the stories.

All to see how a particular group of people see their world, what messages are needed and potential interventions to improve the company's results in the most practical, bottom-line way possible - increased sales!

The results were great - really useful insights into the population, coupled with stories to exemplify and share the challenges and solutions. And, best yet, it's all being fed straight into the comms and planning processes to make a real difference.

So yesterday was a comprehensive session on what had worked, what hadn't, sharing experiences (some of us worked more in some countries than others), along with (where appropriate) notes for what we might do differently next time. And of course general relief that no volcanoes erupted in those two weeks...

And I was also rather keen on the European tour t-shirts we made up for the team too!