partum intelligendo

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.

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.

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.

 

The joy of "No"

I ran an innovation session recently for a client's senior management team that featured an exercise that a lot of people shy away from. There is a great tendency for lots of people to stress positivity - building on ideas, reducing criticism, etc. I can understand that - but it's also unrealistic to stay in that positive mode. It creates an unrealistic situation, but more importantly it means that ideas and proposals are not robust, the people owning them are unrealistically optimistic and that there are traps in store.

I liked this recent article in the FT: Employee ideas thrown to the dragons - real challenge to the ideas, once they've been put together and had a chance to hone them. I suspect that one of the elements of this that works is making the challenge fun, making it part of the game.

The exercise I used is a Cognitive Edge one called Ritual Dissent. As the name suggests, it works by making it all part of a ritual. My experience has been that, once everyone's over the initial shock of "no positive comments, just criticism", the process turns into one that's full of fun. People can give full rein to their inner cynic, people don't take offense at the criticism because they know that's "just part of the game".

The room the other week was full of laughter, challenge and, by the end, more realistic, robust ideas that had been through an initial picking-apart and already knew what elements needed further work.

And let's face it, it's not as if new ideas won't get challenged anyway once they're presented to senior managers to try and secure budget. If they've been living in a little zone of unrealistic positivity until then, that challenge will hurt...

Complexity

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

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

Let the scales fall...

The other week I had one of those fun weeks where the situations and people are so different from one day to the next, I was at risk of getting whiplash. On the one hand, I was lucky enough to join Anne McMurray and a group of people running interesting SenseMaker projects in Northern Ireland. There was a real sense of collaboration and support between the groups as well as an excitement about exploring what the new tools were offering. Powerful new research in healthcare, third sector and social policy using tools that are only just becoming available.

A few days later, I was talking with academic researchers, some of whom were cut from less adventurous cloth. One particular thing struck me that's a simple, but profound, fix for people who are looking at engagement or satisfaction in an audience.

One of the slides that was put up was addressing the satisfaction (or otherwise) of students. From memory, the results were being taken from the National Survey of Students. Some of the discussion ran around struggling to make faculty directors realise that 80% was not a good enough satisfaction rating because that means that 20% of our students are dissatisfied.

There are many flaws in that to begin with - starting with what that statistic actually says (as opposed to what is being claimed), whether students should feel completely satisfied, etc etc.

It's interesting to me that, if you're measuring satisfaction (or happiness or engagement or...) it's usually done on a straight 1-5 or similar (Likert) scale with good/bad at either end of the scale. So everyone knows you're looking for scores as close as possible to one end of the scale.

(Of course, it ignores the possibility that their attitude might change depending on the time of day/who they're with/what they're doing, etc.) It gives a neat, tidy number that research designers everyone can understand intuitively. But some people just don't give 5's. Others always go to extremes. It's not long before the meaning supposedly buried in these rigorously numerical, deeply analysed numbers starts to fall apart.

And, for decision-makers, the simplistic focus on increasing the number ("What do we do about the other 20 per cent?) is tempting. And misleading. Set up like this, the problem is essentially Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise.  You will never get to 100%, but are judging yourself on your ability to do so.

One approach to start with would be to swap out that numerical scale. Instead of having your ideal at one end, put it in the middle of the scale. At either end you put two negatives - one is the complete absence of whatever you're looking at and the other is too much of it.

For student satisfaction on the quality of their course, a scale might be:

The subject matter was so easy as to be pointless ____________________________The subject matter was so esoteric, it was demotivating

So the data comes back a) actually telling you something about why it's not perfectly in the middle and b) without the snap criticism of "how do we fix the other XX per cent?"

Lego - from amateurs to professionals

I've been a fan of Michael Chabon's writing since I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in 2003 on holiday in Sicily. (I'd sneak away from the post-dinner political arguments with the excuse of putting the girls to bed, then sit outside in the evening warmth devouring the pages.) His latest, Manhood for Amateurs, is an entertaining and recognition-prompting series of essays and portraits of different stages of the male life. No, there are no expeditions to forests in hair shirts and poor sanitation in order to unite with the Wild Man, but there are nice observations on the double gender standards of parenting: standing in a supermarket queue when holding a small child prompts the comment, "You are such a good dad." Purely because said child wasn't crying/blue in the face/killing people. Whereas it's hard to imagine what a woman would have to do in a supermarket to prompt a similar comment...

A chapter on Lego, however, made me think of how we often work with new techniques and technologies. I'm not talking here about the vanilla Lego boxes (which seem to have all but disappeared) - the ones with a set ration of 4x2 pieces, 2x2 squares, a single basepiece, some long thin pieces and never enough roof pieces. Nor do I mean the scarily high-priced ones for grown-ups to make and display - a robotic dinosaur, a Ferrari or a Star Wars Cloud City. I'm talking about ones like the Police Truck and the castle Drawbridge.

First, we get the right equipment and the instructions and do it exactly the way some expert designed it. Then we take it apart and put it back in the toolbox. We may go back at some point and try to rebuild it, but when we can't quite find the right parts we substitute with others that come to hand in the box. It can take a bit of experience and trial and error before we can see what works and doesn't, but once we can see that something we originally thought essential isn't, we can start to be creative. At which point, it's like the spell is broken - what had been a right/wrong thing (i.e. there is only one way to build this) shifts to a rough framework around which we can improvise. (Try it with heads instead of battlements or with an unfeasible large chassis built out with standard blocks...) And from there it's a small jump to taking the initial building blocks and creating something new - often starting with a simple structure and adapting/evolving as we go.

And in organisations, our experience can be similar. Some people, of course, stick to what they've been taught in the first place, never deviating. Others can adapt a little, tweaking here and there. And then some of us get creative once we've got some experience under our belt, freely extrapolating and building new tools and processes to meet new needs. And - like any good post-instruction Lego creation - starting from something concrete, but ending up somewhere not exactly unexpected, but getting there in an unpredictable fashion...

Reflections on The Future, Backwards

Wednesday's session of The Future, Backwards was great. I played uber-facilitator, racing between the 8 separate groups, while Anne, Dick, Sally and Meg worked with two groups each more closely. That seemed to work pretty well - I walked miles, helped steer and got to see 4 distinctly different styles of facilitation taking place. And, as is always the case, we all sat back afterwards and said "I realise that I should have said X when I said Y..."

But some overall thoughts about the process:

• Only one step at a time.
  It's crucial to give people only small steps at each point. If they know what's coming up, some of them will start the next part in order to avoid what's being asked of them right now. Too many possibilities at one moment confuses some and can split the group at crucial moments. (I recall one that I participated in where everyone was given the whole instruction for the model at the start. One person sat out of the group and started writing elements of heaven and hell, another went off with a colleague to debate the starting point of the history, etc, etc.)
  
  
• Keep your groups close.
  If you're a single facilitator handling multiple groups, make sure they're close to each other. Obvious, I know, but worth repeating. And make sure that you've got somewhere that you can sit and catch your breath for 10 seconds out of sight of your groups, but where you can listen in.
  
  
• Aim for energy, not completeness.
  The finish of a stage is determined by the energy levels of participants, not whether they've got everything in the model. They never can - there will always be something that someone thinks of later - but it's more important to move them on to the next stage as you feel people's energy levels drop. Once they're drained because they've kept going to the bitter end, they'll find it really difficult to pick up the pace and enthusiasm again.
  
  
• Get facilitation support.
  It's useful to have someone else looking in every so often, so that if your way of explaining something isn't working with the group, there's someone to offer an alternative.
  
  
• Put like with like.
  Don't mix the groups up for this exercise. I did once - we ended up with a bland model that repeated back all the standard strategic talk, which was pointless. Put them in the most tightly-knit groups you can - so particular specialists sit together, long-serving people are together, etc. You're looking to get their worldview out as clearly as possible - so that others can see and understand the differences.
  
  
• Perfect your enigmatic smile.
  There'll always be someone in each group that keeps appealing to the authority in the room - you - for how this exercise should be done, or what comes next, or why what someone else just did was wrong. Smile at them. Say nothing. Irritates the hell out of them.
  
  
• Correct early, then step back.
  Be clear and, when necessary, corrective early on in the exercise. Particularly in putting down hexies - if they spread them out at the Present, pick a couple off, hand them back and indicate where they need to go. Similarly, if their Past timeline is broad, not long, pick up the first couple as they go down and re-position them. Then leave it - if you catch it before they get into a pattern and give them a clearer one, they'll usually follow it.
     
• Release the rapporteurs.
  Once the initial groups have seen each other's models, encourage someone to go and replace the original rapporteur. We found most rapporteurs found a way to slip away and look at everyone else's, but one was adamant that she had been told to stay, so would. It made it difficult for what came next, as there was a lack of seeing others' perspectives.
  
  
• Challenge the future possibilities.
  When they're building the "impossibly good/bad future", many groups tend to produce what they think is achievable. I probably shouldn't intrude too much on the process, but I do tend to challenge at that point - "is that really as good/bad as you can imagine?" Sometimes it is - I recall one group I worked with a couple of years ago, for whom there Impossibly Bad Future was 2/3rds full of hexies that started "Still doing...". I congratulated them afterwards - they were clearly 2/3rds of the way to Hell already...

One piece that proved more difficult than I've seen previously, and I don't think we've got enough answers to is this:

• Not enough specifics in the future timelines.
  When working back from Heaven and Hell (or Doomsday and the Golden Age or...), we found people falling back onto great hairy generalisations and concepts. And into easy answers, rather than actions/decisions/events that might have preceded the last significant moment. It might be a reflection of the sector and groups we were working with, but I'd be intrigued to hear others' thoughts about how you get participants to come up with actual events.