stories & organizations

Last week we ran a workshop on narrative interviewing techniques and one of the topics that came up was how to report back in a way that’s engaging and, if necessary, hard-hitting without being off-putting.

It reminded us of a piece of research we did a few years ago around the merger of two large and well-established organizations. Our task was to:

1 | Understand how staff were feeling and get a sense of their perceptions about the change.

2 | Give them a chance to share their views and be heard.

3 | Find stories to bring the change to life and to illustrate current behaviours, positive and negative.

4 | Help business areas better understand where they could make local changes.

5 | Feed back the stories and views to the Board and show up the gap between ambition and reality and suggest ways of closing it.

With this in mind we designed and ran a series of workshops. We did a pretty good job of understanding how the staff were feeling, we gave them plenty of opportunities to share their views, and we certainly found stories to bring the change to life and illustrate current behaviours.

The challenge was, they were not exactly the sorts of stories the senior management had in mind. We had designed the workshops as a particular kind of narrative journey – from personal to organizational and from factual stories to shared fantasy.

The shared fantasy was a way of enabling the workshop participants to articulate views they would have been inhibited from expressing in a more literal way. So we came away with stories with titles such as:

• Dwarves in Green Tights – a story about Robin Hood and his Merry Men merging with the Mining Dwarves
• The Car in Front – a car manufacturer whose parts are from Volvo, process from Toyota and instruction manual from Ford
• Recycled Geezers – a story about the inappropriate merger of a scrapyard and an old people’s home.

So how were we to report back to the Board of the great and the good, some uncomfortable truths told through the medium of fantastical tales? How were we to get them to be open to a story with a title like ‘Dwarves in Green Tights’ that might hold a truth that they needed to take on board?

The solution came from a most unexpected source.

At the time, I was reading Herman Hesse’s Fairy Tales. They are odd and fascinating mixtures of the ordinary and the extraordinary.  Some of them also tell about telling stories. And it was the first Fairy Tale, called ‘The Dwarf’, that caught my attention.  It is an old story of a beautiful lady, a love potion, fidelity, infidelity – ‘all that is at the heart of every adventure and tale, old and new’, as Hesse says. The Dwarf is a master storyteller, whose job is to entertain his mistress.

‘He had learned the art of storytelling in the Orient, where storytellers are highly regarded.  Indeed, they are magicians and play with the souls of their listeners as a child plays with a ball.

His stories rarely began in foreign countries, for the minds of listeners cannot easily fly there on their own powers. Rather, he always began with things that people can see with their own eyes, whether it be a golden clasp or a silk garment. Then he led the imagination of his mistress imperceptibly wherever he wanted, talking first about the people who had previously owned the jewels or about the makers and sellers of the jewels. The story floated naturally and slowly from the balcony of the palace into the boat of the trader and drifted from the boat into the harbour and onto the ship and to the farthest spot of the world. It did not matter who his listeners were. They would all actually imagine themselves on this voyage, and while they sat quietly in Venice, their minds would wander about serenely or anxiously on distant seas and in fabulous regions. Such was the way Filippo told his stories.’

So the structure we used in reporting back involved luring the Board into the fabulous from the believable – starting with a listening exercise to get their ears working. And it worked and we can recommend it!

This week Sparknow attended Brian Storm’s workshop on multi-media storytelling at The Frontline Club in London.

I immersed myself in the methods of Mediastorm for one day. Weaving still images, video, music, text, ambient sound and interviews into pieces that tell stories is what they do so well.

Part of the learning process involved Brian talking us through the collection and production process behind some of their pieces, starting with the work they did with Danny Wilcox Frazier on his photos from Iowa: Driftless.There is a piece in Driftless called Harry and Helen. Like all good stories, it is about many things and these many layers of interpretation all work together quietly.

There are some method points that carry nicely into any form of storytelling…

• Set a sense of place.
• Make it a personal story first: lead with character, then deliver issues.
• Set up the problem up front with hooks that you pay off later in the story.
• Images transcend the boundaries of language.
• Do right by your characters.
• Build a relationship with your audience.
• Everyone has a story.

… and of story collecting and rendering

• When gathering materials, look for sequences and connective tissue.
• Gather more than pictures: always get voices and sounds too and build impact through attentive layering (1+1=3).
• Always look for multiple angles.
• Capture action and reaction.
• Make an interview setting a controlled environment.
• Pre-planning: find out what it’s all about before you come in with all your equipment, ask visual questions, build a scene before capturing it.
• Post-production: start with a scalpel, move on to a hatchet.
• Team screening: listen and look at materials together, see what works and challenge each other in production decisions.

Mediastorm’s pieces rely on one challenge only: is it a good story? Stories in this respect are products to create conversations and change and their impact comes down to more than aesthetics. It is also about making them useable, easy to embed elsewhere. Stories that travel as widely as possible, through multiple platforms and high value metadata that allows many levels of reading. These stories are acts of advocacy.

“Starving to death on a full stomach” are the words of Harry from Iowa, which I heard as being about the decay of farming, poor nutrition and illness, both individual and social. Can we also starve to death by being filled with too many messages? Is our advocacy role as communicators to push for stories that cut through? In Brian Storm’s words, a story spreads because it is either very funny or very amazing. Everything else in between is noise. 

This weekend saw National Libraries day. It’s a good time to put the short term turbulence into a longer frame.

Here’s a short thinkpiece to help shift to a longer, and eventually more positive, narrative, in which this is just one turning point.

[Charing Cross library, banners in English and Chinese, February 2012]

In Wim Wender’s 1987 film “Wings of Desire” Hans Scharoun’s library in Berlin is the place where the elderly storyteller Homer is seen recalling the city’s layers of history, silently, in his mind. They city’s story is told, over again, in the library. It is a space where different layers of time and experience cohabitate side by side, on the shelves and in the minds of visitors.

Last week Francine Houben of Mecanoo Architecten talked about their design of Birmingham’s future library as a “living room for the city”. More than just storage, a dynamic space for movement, openness and exchange. in a blog she calls libraries “the cathedrals of our millennia”.

The future of the library is, in some way, a paradox. So many of the long term trends are running against it that it is easy to assume that it is an anachronism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is worth spelling this out. Such trends include the rise of digital technologies, and the accompanying rise of audio-visual culture; the long wave of individualism since the late 1960s; the shift from public provision to personal provision; the pressures on public expenditure; the emergence of the e-book and the digitization of books generally. It seems only a matter of time before the library withers away.

But look again, and some other, emerging, trends come into focus. Rising oil prices and greater work flexibility increase the value of the local; the rise of digital rights management fuels campaigns around openness; the number of books published every year continues to rise; issues of access and equity - and affordability - come into sharper focus as one austere year rolls into another; the relationship between the tangible and the digital object becomes increasingly complex; new attitudes to ownership (using, not having) make the library appear as a pioneer. 

Look again, and you can start to think that if libraries did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. But what sort of library would we invent?

For some, the building remains essential: engagement with the library is a ticket to - and a membership card for - a local community.

Some say the building needs to be there, but not as “a warehouse of dead books”, but as a place to invent yourself, individually and socially.

For some it is a place of memory - and of memory yet to come, a place of inter-generational commitment, a place of conversation and convocation.

Others focus on its place in the digital world, where the library - founded on the principle of open knowledge - acts as a bulwark against the digital enclosure they see by media and technology companies.

Some see the wealth of digital data that a library holds as a resource waiting to be released, and reconnected, in the way that travel information and data has opened up a once closed world.

Others have a simpler view; as inequality rises, the library has a traditional role to play, of  providing access to all who need it. The symbolism of the library at Zucotti Park and its destruction by New York’s city authorities remain powerful.

Some of these future libraries would complement each other. Some seem to have a common core. Some suggest a fundamentally different model of provision and engagement.

Then there are all the users and non-users of the future: the X-box and BBM generation, students, parents, tomorrow’s refugees and immigrants, businesses (so often left out of library planning, as knowledge transfer research has shown), the hackers, nomads, chatterers of our children’s children’s generation. What role will libraries play for them? How can we, today, imagine the unknown users of the future?

The conversation needs to stay fully rooted in the long past of libraries, and fully explore what British society might become, and then look at the role of the library as experience, service, community, commodity, to all kinds of imagined, and hard-to-imagine future people. Let’s tackle this from the outside in as well as the inside out.

Two current discussions feel like they have a bearing on library futures.

On Radio Four on Saturday, Alistair Campbell was talking about what he thought was one of David Cameron’s few virtues: his interest in happiness and well-being. Asking the question about the future of the library through that lens can lead to some very different longer-term approaches, in contrast to the cuts and closures that dominate the present discourse.

And this weekend Richard Sennett’s new book was reviewed in the Guardian. “Together: the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation ” is the second in a series of three, of which the first talks about the craftsman and the third returns to a familiar Sennett theme, the city. In “Together” Sennett argues that community is pretty easy to create - like-minded people come together. Cooperation is much harder to achieve: different people meet across boundaries and negotiate cooperation. The more active stewardship it takes to bring about cooperation is a dimension of possible future libraries and their role in society.

It’s nicely prescient that the research Sparknow did between 2007 and 2010 into knowledge transfer between the cultural sector in London (people, places, collections, expertise) and business went by the name of “the bridge builder programme” between us colloquially and Sparknow was quite specifically badged as bridge-builder.

It’s not just with libraries that the intensity and swirl of present emotions and debates can crowd out the past and the future. One project that Sparknow was involved in a  few years back was the gathering of lessons of watershed management in Bolivia, Mali and India, each project using different narrative tools to find, consolidate and transfer experiences and insights. The Bolivian project had done long videos of farmers elaborating on water disputes. They’d also developed a way of visualising the story in which the present disputes were put into a 400 year history of water in those mountains, which weighed the present, in relation to past and future in quite and a different way. 

It’s important not to squash or sweep aside today’s raging debate and fierce campaign. It’s also important to lift ourselves out of it a bit and shift ourselves into looking at the longer sweep of the narrative and the other narratives that it interacts with. Without a past and a future the weight of the present is distorted. Without a past, the future cannot be imagined. The past, sometimes so heavy with nostalgia, can also obscure the future. As Stewart Brand has put it, the present is a ‘long now’ with a deep past and a long future.

There’s been much, in the current exchanges, about the past, so it’s worth spending a bit of time here on library futures, shifting the perspective from that of the library and those who currently have a lively relationship with it, to the future worlds in which a library will play a role and the people who will then have a lively relationship with it.

There are several ways of doing this, of which two are to imagine vivid future worlds, and to look around, today at the surprise, delight and potential in the activities libraries house.

First, let’s imagine what future worlds look and feel like, with different kinds of library playing a role in them. Let’s deconstruct the word library for the future and understand it better:

Library is

• warmth
• safety
• books
• community
• cooperation
• market
• advice
• books
• support
• childcare
• job hunting
• retreat
• memory
• meaning
• belonging
• provocation
• enquiry
• access
• signpost
• …and so on….

We can also use that description of the future that has been maybe a bit over-borrowed from William Gibson, the science fiction writer, who says that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. In parallel with stretching our imaginations about future libraries in future worlds, we can look around today and piece together clues to the future from what is already happening in and around libraries. These small stories accumulate and can break open the crust of the default narrative we have now taken up in Britain, whose summary is something like ‘good campaigners fight evil coalition’. That kind of oppositional, reductive storyline crowds out variety and gives no room to the texture and complexity of today, which holds at least some of the clues for tomorrow.

Iconic buildings such as Southwark’s new library in Canada Water, and Birmingham are great examples of inspirational possible future library space, bridging the gap between today and tomorrow. They are also strongly authored, by an architect, with input, but all the same, they are signature pieces by individuals. The activities they house, on the other hand, are mostly anon. That means that as well as the “cathedrals of our millennia” (and cathedrals were anon for the most part too, built by unknown craftsmen), libraries are also bazaars, co-created by users, providers and stewards of the activities that happen there. Let’s make sure we’ve fully discovered the potential in today’s libraries and carry that forward as well as figuring out the new.

If we open up the conversations that are taking place we have a chance to hold a thoughtful extended national conversation, even if it is one fueled by strong emotions. From that conversation can emerge the strands of vibrant but credible futures that can shape longer term policy and practice and put the campaign for libraries at the heart of the campaign for a different kind of future Britain.

[This piece was written by Andrew Curry of The Futures Companies, and Victoria Ward and Sabine Jaccaud of Sparknow. It is being published both on the Sparknow (longer version) and The Futures Company (shorter version) blogs.]

FURTHER LINKS AND REFERENCES

‘Getting down to business’ is a collection of documents and reports made by Sparknow in three years of research into knowledge transfer between museums, libraries, archives and businesses in London, done on behalf of MLA London and largely funded by the London Deveopment Agency. There are examples of great ideas from local libraries in the final ‘Getting down to business’ report.

What would wolf say is a recent blog about one of the techniques that can be used to give voice to an absent stakeholder.

The Role of the Librarian in a Knowledge Society is a paper written by Victoria Ward and Wendy Jordan, then at the British Council, following a workshop by Sparknow at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.

Wed 18 January – enroute to Madrid: if any further proof of how necessary innovation and creativity are to business and industry in the current economic climate, it is presented before I have even set foot in the city.  The Iberia in-flight magazine is carrying an ad for the 4^th International Congress on Excellence and the theme is ‘Enterprise and innovation in difficult times: 10 stories of success and 10 ways to achieve it’, just up Sparknow’s street; how to transform ideas into reality.

I was on my way to join a panel of experts for the Crea-Net 2.0  European Think Tank on Creativity and Business Innovation.  The focus is on stimulating SMEs to be more competitive and to get more collaboration between companies.  Again, just up Sparknow’s street.   A further outcome is to improve public polices as often the rhetoric about creating more entrepreneurs and support for innovation is way ahead of the reality of public investment.

Thursday 19 January – getting to work

The five other experts, Katja Tschimmel, Pia Mulvad Reksten, Gjis Van Wulfen, Ana Arroyo and Herman Hoving, represent a range of organizations and nationalities.  This team, as I really got the feeling we could be a team, was joined by representatives of the organizers and the partners, so 17 people were gathered and admirably guided through a wide agenda by Silke Haarich.

The fascinating thing about innovation and creativity is that there are so many roads into it and the backgrounds of  the expert  group  included psychology, economics, design and arts, education and  knowledge management, each of us applying our original disciplines to practical application and all committed to supporting the Crea-Net 2.0 objectives.  It was a very amiable group, a great bonus when I remember other panels I have been on where personal agendas were flying about and intellectual flame throwers were deployed!

One of the major themes discussed was education for entrepreneurs, which begs the question whether entrepreneurship can be taught, the popular perception is that they are born and not made, have a different outlook on business and they have enormous tenacity, following Samuel Becketts’ tenet; Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.   

However, entrepreneurs all need skills and there are now some very sophisticated programmes which enable business executives to develop their ideas and avoid the pitfalls of getting started. 

The role of creativity within innovation is critical and it could be regarded as a basic competency for entrepreneurial companies. While I have a fundamental belief that everyone can be creative, it doesn’t come from thin air.  Access to tried and tested techniques offered directly to companies would help in developing their creativity quotient. The idea of a tool box was discussed and as importantly, offering support for how to use the tools, as possessing tools does not make a carpenter.

One word which surfaced several times was ‘trust’.  If people are to work together they need to be sure that everyone is working towards the same goal and will not just take out things for themselves or steal clients.  Encouraging companies to work with others outside their field and developed cross- fertilization is a great way to foster innovation. 

The morning ended with the experts being asked to produce their wish list for enhancing innovation. Here are some of the ideas: 

• training in thinking skills for creativity and innovation,
  
• making collaboration tools and techniques widely accessible,
  
• start in schools and get peer evaluation going at a young age,
  
• reward innovation with tax breaks,
  
• focus on mentors and networks and evaluation,
  
• develop problem solving skills, intrapreneurship – using what you already know,
• develop employee driven innovation.

I am really looking forward to working on all the above over the next few months and blogging about some of the other themes that were explored. 

By Wendy Jordan Sparknow Associate (former Head of Innovation at The British Council).

Here’s an extract from a research series with Clive Holtham of Cass Business School which explores slowness at work.

The ubiquity of digital representation of the organisation can lead to a situation where knowledge workers are skilled in perceiving the organisation through digital lens, but lack sufficient skills in the perceiving the physical actuality of the organisation.

We have been exploring educational approaches, which can address this increasing area of risk, and improve the skills of managers in perception of the physical world. One of the most promising areas appears to be the dérive (Holtham and Owens, 2007), a term originally coined by Guy Debord (1958) and fellow Situationists, but which conceptually has more extensive historical predecessors. It is defined by Debord:

“One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psycho-geographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.” (Debord, 1958)

A dérive is a group-based slow “wandering” through typically an urban area, with an emphasis on close observation and recording of the physical actuality of that area (Jenks and Neves, 2001). It also emphasises the conversation and dialogue between the members of the group (Lee & Ingold, 2006; Pink, 2008). Although Parkins (2004) has some reservations about Debord’s thinking on slowness, we report on extensive experiences with slow dérives in a variety of professional educational contexts, in both teacher and manager education programs.

After accidentally initiating dérives, these have subsequently been self-consciously constructed as a means of enabling our trainees and students to learn with their peers through drift. In concrete terms this means that as academics working in two different fields we allocate periods of time to meet and learn together through a playful form of St Augustines (354-430 AD)  “solvitur ambulando”, learning through walking about. To date we have dérived together in and in between; London, Chester, Nottingham, York, Uttoxeter, Liverpool and Nuneaton.

We then individually use the documentation and theorization of this process to model these approaches to learning for our students together with the use of another time-honoured learning affordance, the reflective sketchbook (Holtham, Owens and Bogdanov 2008). We also provide a city-scape for the students to experiment in. For the MBA students this is the City of London, for the PGCE Trainees it has included; Venice, Florence, Prague, Amsterdam, and Barcelona. Time, place and space are created for a form of informal, critical learning not customarily valued in the self-pressurising technicist state of Initial Teacher education in England and Wales (Hill, 2007).

“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” (Debord, 1958).

Following Debord’s suggestion that the ‘most fruitful numerical arrangement’ to dérive is ‘several small groups of two or three people’ (ibid), the PGCE trainees organise themselves in this way. In addition three of four whole group sessions are scheduled into the week to allow for intercultural and interdisciplinary encounters that deriving does not allow for. For example, a two hour workshop in a school in which forty drama and art PGCE ‘s work together with 40 senior school pupils whose first language is obviously not English and a practical session with an applied theatre professional looking at the ways in which  drama operates in their cultural context.

Debord suggests that whilst the average duration of a dérive is one day it often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments. The PGCE trainees are encouraged to view the dérive rather than the organised sessions as being core to the week and so select which of these they might attend. The emphasis is on educating reflective practitioners rather than training technicians which places this approach firmly in the learner-centred  as opposed to teacher-centred camp in the on-going debates about teacher quality and teacher education in many parts of the world (Zeichner and Ndimande, 2008).

Holtham, C, Ward, V & Owens, A | Slow Work – designing space & learning, presented at the EGOS conference, Lisbon, July 2010

Add that to Sparknow’s attachment to curating experiences as you have a clue to awakening organizational imaginations. I was reminded of this when listening to David Hockney talk about new ways of seeing on Radio Three. Hockney can curate by translating, through his own art, into painting and things (sometimes via technology). I’m hamfisted and lucky that the smartphone gives me a way to record image, text and sound in ways that I can assemble to recollect and to see where the assembly takes me. 

Here’s my favourite Christmas hipstamatic snap, taken just before Christmas when I was, as my partner would say, dondering from the London Library to the 91 bus stop via Piccadilly. I love the company Leonardo now keeps:

And then, my other favourite from the run up to Christmas was a delightful romantic review of Sparknow’s new strategic position document (‘shift’) with Chris and Sabine on the 5th floor of Waterstone’s (soon to be catastropically deapostraphied) by accidental candle light because the bulb in the light over us had blown:

In which we explore the ‘felts’ of stakeholder points of view, Who am I stories, metaphorical equipment, small stories that make a big difference, story listening, finding practice partner, and a few useful references to go exploring in. We end with collectors template.

stakeholders

The word stakeholder is dangerously abstract, and there’s a tendency to see stakeholders as an amorphous blob, or as an abstract, or even menacing concept. But unless you know, quite precisely, who you are talking to, how do you know the best ways of getting them to hear what you’d like them to hear?

As well as having listened well, you need to hold your audience in mind, and have them know that you can see and hear them.

In one piece of work we did recently, we invited people to get right under the skin of a frontline member of staff – imagine their name, age, country of origin, where they lived, what they looked liked, weighed, what they wore, what football team they supported, their family circumstances, how they felt about where they worked and their job today, how it had changed, what kept them awake at night, what their dreams were. 

We invited people, in pairs, to step into, and inhabit, the bodies and shoes of their ‘factional’ characters (we called them factional because people pieced together their characters from actual personalities at work). What started as a bit of joke, even a bit of a caricature, surprised and moved people, sometimes almost shockingly so, as they came to understand, and feel for themselves,  the circumstances people  were facing and the threat that certain changes posed to their stability and wellbeing.

 This is pretty much like most user profiling work, especially that done in agile technology design and development, or like the characters the BBC uses to check its radio station brand tunings, but it seems to surprise people and is worth remembering. The ‘what would Wolf say’ technique I blogged about recently is another way to use narrative techniques to bring stakeholders into the room. The different here is that we are taking it right into what David Bohm calls ‘felts’: the imaginary felt experience. The ‘felts’ are very powerful indeed. Another imagined ‘felt’ that can help change angles and perspectives comes from techniques like those used to work with museum objects: imagine your point of view as the chair on which this spy was assassinated. 

A really felt sense of what it feels like to stand in the shoes of your listener will allow the story to shape itself so that the nature of the telling fits the circumstances.

Annette Simmons, in her book ‘Who Tells the Best Story Wins’ calls this the ‘I know what you are thinking’ story, which sounds quite confrontational but really means that you have a vivid internal sense of your audience, and hold that sense very present in your mind’s eye as you tell the story.

A white back I attended a graduation ceremony dressed in the kind of mediaeval pomp and circumstance which the newest, as much as the oldest, universities prize so greatly. Most of the speeches washed right over me and I spent a couple of hours listening to the names, sizing up the shoes and walks of the graduates as they walked the red carpet to and away from the handshake, and figuring out what degree most appealed to me (Arabic and English, closely followed by War and Conflict Studies). Then I sat up and listened, as the final speech started like this:

‘I’ve been sitting here watching the looks on your faces, and they tell a range of stories – joy, wonder, pride and, in at least one case, astonishment’

He saw them. You knew he’d seen them (whether he’d planned the speech or not) and you could tell by the shift in the sense and temperature of the hall that they relaxed a little, secure in the knowledge that he’d seen them. He had their listening ears. Recently I heard a bravura performance of the same kind from Greg Dyke at my daughter’s graduation. He managed, somehow, to acknowledge everyone in the room, as if personally. 

The advantage of having shifted the balance of your time and effort towards listening is that you’ll already have done a lot of the work to find the shape and size of feelings of the people you are encountering. It will also help you find ways to step into their shoes without needing to accept their point of view.

a note on ‘story in a word’ (with thanks to Madelyn Blair

One good way into showing people you’ve seen them can be to acknowledge the mountain of rusting jargon lying between you. It stops you really approaching each other and getting close. Outcomes and outputs and deliverables and milestones and silos and blue sky and out-of-the-box thinking and plates needing to be stepped up to and high horses that need to be stepped down off.

Values like integrity, accountability, transparency, community spirit, innovation, perhaps spiced with courage (Standard Chartered) and heart (BT) or neighbourliness (UN charter). All of this clutters the conversation space and at the same time provides people with tactical defenses, places to hide or something handy to lob into the conversation as a diversionary tactic.

Story in a word can help (and also pre-empts a little the next section on Who Am I stories). It’s a way of reclaiming words and infusing them with the collective sense of the stories of people as the examples in the margin illustrate.

Here are some ways of using that technique, whether it’s in, say, an anecdote circle, starting with a blandk sheet of paper or a trigger story, or as a research question, even on postcards:

‘I know we throw the word transparency about and I’m not always sure we mean the same things or even think we know what it means. Tell me a little bit about a time when you’ve seen transparency at work in this partnership or another partnership and it’s felt like a good thing to you – so I can get a bit of a handle on how you’re thinking about the word in this context too.’

Or

‘Yes, it’s a bit hackneyed to talk about innovation in this context, I have to agree. But maybe if I tell you about something that’s happening in another project that feels innovative to us, that might help a bit?’

Or

‘It’s the word ‘authority’ that clouds the issue about what we do. Let me tell you a small story about that word in action so that you can get more of a feel for what I have in mind and see what stories it calls to mind.’

If you want to find out more about it, you’ll find a version of it in the SDC story guide in the publications here.

…and a note on metaphorical equipment

Good strong metaphors can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you too. They can find you a space between you and your audience in which to start a fresh conversation. So having energetically de-cluttered, you’ll have room to start using a new vocabulary, more precisely chosen to build a shared meaning between you and others. It’s worth remembering, too, that metaphors can do a lot more work than dressing things up. On occasion they change the course of innovation.

A small recent example of analogy and metaphor leading directly to invention is something I picked up out of the free evening newspaper, the Metro:  the nozzles used inside Hewlett-Packard printer cartridges.

The idea of these is being redeveloped to help drug delivery and pain management.

One of my favourite examples comes from Jonathan Miller in his wonderful book of essays about organs of the body.

The heart was only seen as a pump when the combustion engine had been invented and was being used in sixteenth century mining, fire fighting and civil engineering.

Scientific progress in both cases, and many others, comes as a direct consequence of what Jonathan Miller calls in ‘The Body in Question ‘metaphorical equipment’. It took about 1500 years from first investigations into the heart until the analogies moved from lamps and smelter’s furnaces, through technological invention in an entirely different place, that a plausible analogy for the operation of the heart gave scientists a new take on things.

Max Boisot has written some good books on knowledge and information management. He comes from a background in architectural practice that he applies to the space he calls the information space. He talks about the continuum between conversation and commodity (i.e. between informal encounters and formalized exchange). But, says Max, the real moment of invention and insight is when you take something from one setting and put it into a new setting as a trigger to new thought. He calls this abstraction, and I don’t need to bother with it much more here, as this isn’t a knowledge management paper, but it may be useful background.

This isn’t to say that every metaphor or analogy will lead to transformation and invention, but it is to say that a well-chosen metaphor or analogy (or story) has a great deal more power than you may appreciate. Equally, a poorly chosen, or clichéd metaphor can close minds and end fruitful conversations. The balance is delicate.

who am I stories - Stripping off your organisational mask.

Annette Simmons also talks about the ‘Who Am I Story’, which is just as important. Look at any inspirational leader – Obama, Clinton, Mandela, or many people close to home who inspire you daily in quieter ways – and look at the pattern of their storytelling. You may get a polished version of the person, but with great leaders you’ll get a sense of them standing there, willing to be themselves, to see you and to accept the consequences.

A little while ago I had to step in at short notice for a colleague to run a workshop at a European investment bank, re-assessing their internal communication strategy in the light of the financial crisis. I was a stranger with no particular background in internal communications. Somehow I had to find a way to get them to give me permission to run the day. So I said

‘I was thinking on the plane over how much of a sense of déjà vu I had coming here. 20 years ago, I was sitting in front of the US and UK regulators trying to persuade them that index futures and portfolio insurance hadn’t caused the crash; 10 years ago I was part of an investment bank that was imploding because of poor governance systems. Here I am now, and I feel as if I’m in the same story that’s been going on for 20 years.’

86 words. So let’s say one minute of talking time. Maybe two.

What did I say? I said, in essence, you can trust me. I might not be a communications expert, but I really am familiar with the territory you are in and the challenges you face, because I’ve been there. So I can be helpful to you. I’d say it took me the best part of three hours to arrive at those 86 words!

Sometimes the Who Am I story might be offered to reassure. For example in a recent piece of research about transformation programmes, one interviewee spoke of the need to restructure the business and the importance, in delivering this message, of being able to stand there and say

‘We, the leadership team, are experienced. I’ve done this before. It ain’t easy, but I know what I’m doing, and you’re in safe hands, even if we have to make tough decisions.’

That’s a Who Am I story. Small, delicate, carefully judged reassurance that allows the listener to see and relate to the teller.

This is the kind of thing that Doug Lipman is so good at coaching people at. Try his story in a box, if personal storytelling skills is something you want to develop.

*small stories that say a lot*

Finally we have arrived at the telling part and are back to Svend-Erik’s pebbles.

What kind of stories are you telling?

I’d suggest you aim mostly for small, serviceable moments that you can collect swiftly and easily, share lightly that will go quite deep and open up new spaces for the listener and between you and the listener.

a gate in the fence

I’m reminded of a small firm of female architects I met years ago who’d describe the distinctive qualities of their firm along these lines:

‘We were doing a project for a primary school recently, who wanted to create a closer link between the building they had and the building next door that they’d just bought to enlarge their reception intake. We looked at all kinds of structural solutions, and in the end we recommended a gate in the fence that ran between the two gardens.’

In the smallest, most miniature sketch, a whole picture is painted of the values of the firm and what they stand for.

It’s these kind of miniatures that you’re equipping yourself with. Perhaps it helps to imagine these as small pebbles that you can throw into a conversation, whose effect can ripple outwards.

Who can tell the shortest story? Stuck in a pub, this story won a bet for Ernest Hemingway:

‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.’

It’s become a kind of cult with competitions happening quite regularly to find a story in six words.

from bat droppings to getting bums on seats

Natural England found just this when they recently created a management and staff briefing session about the story of knowledge at Natural England. They wanted to find conversation-starting anecdotes that would illustrate different aspects of knowledge Natural England people use to get the job done. A handful of people kept ‘decision journals’ for a week, then picked one decision that had been particularly tricky, to describe in a bit more detail.

Nine or so typical circumstances were turned into tiny tales – one- or two minute conversation starters. They ranged from detailed knowledge about bat dropping which affected the timing on plans for disabled parking at a local wildlife trust to figuring out how to get the right-sized chairs into a parish hall just ahead of a meeting about a parish plan (and in so doing drawing on a previous life as a roadie).

The bigger story that these nine tales tell is that the knowledge it takes to put Natural England into a role of active advocacy ranges from individual, professional expertise and operational experience to personal confidence in handling networks, to being able to hold a line in a tricky and emotional situation. That’s an easier story to hear, and see your part in as a member of staff, if you can see it through the kaleidoscope lens of a series of small vignettes.

decisions & dilemmas

A footnote on method here. We used a tool we call decision journals to prompt people to recall decisions they made, and reflect on them. We thought that tricky decisions would, naturally, lead to an interesting range of knowledge and expertise that told a good story, where asking questions about knowledge would have been a bit more obscure.

This is a pretty good test of where a good story might lie too – where’ve you been stuck a bit, and what you did to get unstuck is normally a good starting point for digging about for the story behind the stuckness`.

Both these ways of asking questions also provide a human scale of telling which helps with retelling. In more elaborate settings, Gary Klein’s critical decision method probes the same kind of territory, but do you also need to balance your collecting with what you plan to do with the collection, and try and size things so that you are neither stretching thin material too far or squashing intricate stories into forms that they burst out of.

an old tea caddy

A small object is another way to tell a big story too, sometimes a very moving one. At a  workshop a few years back we were exploring the role of archives in today’s business innovation and knowledge transfer, the John Lewis archivist bought a series of objects from their archive. One in particular is a battered old metal tea caddy with coins fused to the base. It was the staff tea money collection box and was retrieved from the bombed ruins of the store in the 1940s.

It’s used today to convey to staff the message

‘Look, we were bombed to rubble only 60 years ago. And look at John Lewis today. If we can survive that, we can survive this credit crunch.’

To help you start this process, and order your thoughts and noticings, we’ve attached a story sheet at thee end which can help you catalogue some of the more essential small stories that you find yourself collecting and wanting to use.

surprise and insignificant details

A couple of things can really help with organisational stories that tend towards the dull and predictable:

• Something people didn’t see coming – this could be in the way you reveal the story, or parts of it, including your own reactions, or it could be in the unintended consequences.
• Insignificant details (a striking image, colour, texture, a smell, a small object that plays a role), give the listener something to hook onto that help them carry the story with them. (Appreciative Enquiry is big on insignificant details, and they’re a great social connector too, if the question is posed in groups in a workshop as the details become, in turn, a kind of mnemonic for remembering stories and the people who told them.)

‘We were helping the islands build new roads, and of course they helped speed up vegetables to market and so on. What we didn’t expect when we started was to be providing young ex-offenders with a way back into the workplace through highway maintenance.’

(There’s a danger here to watch out for: what might seem surprising to you is something I’m already very familiar with. So, from the same sector. I might think that the leapfrogging of telephony over other technologies in Afghanistan and the power it gives to women, or to children to learn, or to people do to their banking, is interesting, but to everyone in the developing world, it’s normal and I look silly making too much of it.)

finding a practice partner

You’ll need to be vigilant at this point and most probably you’ll need to cast around for help from someone who can help you surgically remove all reportwriting and organisational jargon. As you’re acclimatized to it, it’s a lot harder than you think for you to do this alone. Find someone to sit down with and fumble your way through the first couple of tellings.

Here’s a set of instructions you can give them, adapted again from Svend-Erik Engh that the invited listener can use to provide feedback.

•  Thank the teller for telling the story.
• Say something nice about the way it was told.
• Tell the teller of the clearest picture in the story: your strongest image or memory left after listening to the story.
• Comment on what have you’ve heard and understood from the story.
• Ask if the response was useful and so invite the teller’s feedback on your feedback.

Appreciation of a story can be global: ‘I love the way you tell the story.’

Or it can be specific: ‘I really liked the moment when she opened the restaurant.’ ‘I could smell the mangos at the roadside.’

BRIO

Doug Lipman, who has great tips and hints to offer for becoming a confident and easy teller, also has a very neat trick for helping remember stories and having them readily to hand. He calls this BRIO: Brief Recollection of Image Order. Of course it’s nothing more than sequencing the order in which you want to retell a story with a mnemonic series of images, but it’s a neat trick and one worth remembering for more formal occasions.

sliding anecdotes into place

At this point you need to throw away every last scrap of the residue of that last communications training day (tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them). No. Just don’t.

Firstly you need to even think about whether to signal to people that you know you’re telling a story. It might be right.

‘Let me give you an example so that you can get a feel for it’.

But how much more interesting to creep up on them and surprise them:

‘You know, coming here, I ran over a fox, and that suddenly got me thinking about how vulnerable we all are to being hit by something we didn’t see coming…’

‘I wonder if you all remember that time a few years back when x did y…’

‘That brings to mind a meeting we were having the other day. Maybe it’s worth me taking a few minutes to tell you what happened there.’

I do find that being studiedly inconsequential is very useful on most occasions.

It appears not to place too heavy a demand on your listener, inviting them to come to what you’re offering in their own time and way.

Above all, you need to be yourself and you need to tell stories that have meaning for you. If it doesn’t mean anything to you, why are you telling it?

And why should it matter to the person you are telling it to?

the traces of the storyteller

Of course, there are situations in which you need to craft something a bit sturdier, longer, more studied, that will command attention. These are the kinds of stories you can craft over time as your distinctive practice takes shape.

And for this, it’s useful to end by going back to Walter Benjamin: ‘The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work – the rural, the maritime, and the urban – is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information, or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.’

You don’t need to wear the hard work on the outside. The more the story appears to have arrived, as if by chance, in an unsignalled way, the less you’re instructing people to react in a particular way and inviting them to choose to see and hear you and encounter you differently.

‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it.’ Lewis Carroll.

further reading, listening and watching

• Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk at Anecdote in Australia have a very practical and engaging website, bursting with useful resources.
• Annette Simmons who founded Group Process Consulting in the 1980’s as written two handy books and her website has useful resources on it too.
• ‘Building bridge using narrative techniques’ has lots of useful techniques and can be downloaded from the publications in the story section here 
• ‘Using story to carve out spaces in which the organisation can start to breathe’ by Victoria Ward, from an edition of AI practitioner edited by Natalie Shell in February 2008. is also available here
• Smart Meme has some useful resources and worksheets for campaigning and activist organisations, of which ‘The Battle of the Stories’ is a particularly useful one.
• Doug Lipman is an experienced storyteller and teacher who has plenty o
• pragmatic tips and ideas to offer.
• Sharing the stories of the Cairngorms National Park – a guide to interpreting the area’s distinct character and coherent identity. This is a great guide, whose principles can be applied in other settings
• ‘The Storyteller’ by Walter Benjamin was written between the wars. It’s the best single thing I’ve ever read about storytelling.

And three useful books of theoretical context:

• Ken Gergen ‘An invitation to social construction’ (Sage Publications 1999)
• Lewis Hyde ‘The Gift’ (Vintage Books, 1983)
•  Karl Weick, ‘Sense making in Organisations’ (Sage Publications 1992)

Four places to go to spring the imagination:

• David Lynch’s Interview project is good fuel for the imagination about how to make room for the ordinary to become extraordinary.
• ‘Geldof in Africa’ 8 Audio CD boxset published by the BBC, reference, BBC71850, is a tour de forceof storytelling (whether you care for Geldof or not, which I don’t)
• ‘Stuart: a life backwards’ by Alexander Masters, is structurally interesting for the way it weaves the forward journey of the author with the reverse journey of his subject, makes a predictable story surprising and demanding and carries the reader through a complex large story too.
• The incidental is a multi-disciplinary network founded by sound artist David Gunn which plays with soundscapes and storytelling in challenging new ways.

story sheet

• catchy name
• main time and place of events
• this is about a time when…(one sentence)
• themes and keywords
• main emotion
• notes about how you could use
• this story
• what happened
• texture and detail that will help you craft the story 
• for the record: any other people, materials, evidence or stories that could tell you more
• fieldnotes on what has happened when you’ve tried to retell the story in different settings

What follows is a toolkit partly disguised as a reminiscence Don’t be fooled. Everything that’s said here has beentried and tested to breaking point. It can be guaranteed togive satisfaction if you give it a go. The main points are:

•   Organisations are made up of people, people tell and listen to stories all the time, so organisations are stories.
• A discerning and planned use of story will help you get your job done, and be very satisfying to you personally.
• Listening to stories is the place to start.
• Collecting raw materials is a daily practice and can be quite surprising. Finding ways of telling people who you are and letting them know that you can see who they are and what keeps them awake at night keeps it person to person, and that’s where the space for a story needs to sit.
• When sifting materials to craft stories, it’s worth looking out for a few juicy adjectives, a handy metaphor and an insignificant detail or two that will help you draw in the listener and act as a quick reminder for you.
• Last and certainly not least, you don’t need to be an accomplished performer; in fact, the less of a performer you are, and the more you see yourself as a host, or custodian, or curator, the more you’ll contribute.

 when might you want to use stories at work?

There are lots of reasons when you might want consciously to introduce stories and anecdotes in a work setting. Use stories to:

• persuade, to carry people with you
• convey ideas, springboard the imagination about what’s possible
• illuminate a dense analysis
• handle a difficult situation
• allow more points of view to be seen, not just ‘us’ and ‘them’
• place something in its larger geographic, organisational or historical context
• show people that you can see, and empathize with them
• show people who you are, as the teller, so they can relate to you
•  invite people to see that you’re a good travelling companion
• share experiences that help people learn from your successes and failures, almosts and not quitea
• acknowledge the negative stories out there and by acknowledging, defuse their power open up a new conversation space by introducing a story from elsewhere

There are some things you might want to avoid too:

•  sob stories or defensive justifications
• stories of power and control, thinly disguised as democratic stories that trump or compete with the stories of others ways of telling that tell people what to think backfiring anecdotes
• providing too much family detail
• culturally excluding others in the room with specific references (see backfiring anecdotes) 
• the story/action gap: ‘why doesn’t your mouth tell your eyes that’
• taking a story told to you in private and circulating it thoughtlessly
• telling over-rehearsed stories that have lost their power to move you – your listener won’t be moved if you not
• imagining you are telling a story when you’re not
• filling the airtime with your stories rather than listening

 starting with the raw materials

The most important first step in telling good stories is not the telling. That comes pretty much last. Tuning in, looking around and seeing what there is lying around in your work life and the working lives of others, or the stories of your stakeholders is a great starting point. It gives you a chance to notice more acutely what makes a good story and when and where it does the job. It’s also an opportunity to collect colour and texture that help you shape stories and anecdotes.

Recently I’ve been introduced the delights of Georges Perec, who urges, in his absolutely brilliant ‘Species fo Spaces’  a different kind of witnessing…..’Note down what you can see … Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless … Force yourself to see more flatly …’

There’s a Danish storyteller called Svend-Erik Engh who suggests that organisational stories should be less like the buffed and polished gems of organisational case studies, and more like the driftwood, pebbles and shells you might pick up as you wander down the beach or along a river bank – something that appeals to you, that you’d like to have for a while, that you’ll eventually put back down and move on from as you comb the place for more things.

Looking for raw materials for stories is a bit like that, and as your discernment and noticing grows you’ll be surprise how useful almost everything is, whether it’s

• an object
• a startling image
• a good story told you to over a sandwich (food is a very good friend of stories)
• something that stuck from the last heated meeting with a disgruntled stakeholder
• a striking and slightly unusual metaphor (certainly not the stifling predictability of the tired cliche)
• a common cultural reference (childhood: Star Wars, topical: True Blood, The Wire, West Wing)
• a good proverb or fictional analogy that will bring something to life
• a surprising sound or detail to snag the imagination of the listener – what does your organisation sound like at work?

The minuteness of detail can provide all sorts of small ways to build bridges or provide a lintel for the story gateway, doorway or window I talked about in part 1. 

I’m working with David Gunn of the Incidental just now, on a learning programme to build reflective collaborative practice with WHO project managers, and he’s a great advocate of the unusual angle: lie on the floor to take a picture, or jump on table and look down from above. The same applies to whatever else you are observing and noting down.

It’s easier than ever to catch pictures or short videos, or sound clips on your phone as you go about your working day. The found materials that can be assembled into new versions for different settings are lying everywhere in your private and professional life, in your childhood memories as much as in what you’re experiencing today.

spotting good practices and ideas

As well as foraging for your own raw materials, prick up your ears and listen out for clues for  good telling among friends and colleagues, but also in other places:

• What was it that made you stop buttering your toast and listen to the journalist when she was talking about the latest Pakistan suicide bombing?
• Why did you get bored half way through the last Hollywood blockbuster?
• What is it about the keynote presentation at the last conference you were at that had you gripped?
• When was the turning point in a sticky meeting with an environmental group and was it a story that lay behind the turn?
• What was it that made you read on past the first sentence of the last junk email from a dying widow is some obscure African state with millions to bequeath you?
• Which are the brand stories that make you want to read on?

Collect everything.

One habit I have is to collect pictures from the ladies wherever I go. Here’s one of my favourites, recently from the WHO.

When Paul Corney and I were in Sudan with the WHO mission last year, I collected the sound of the Minister of Finance in El Fasher walking across the floor of her office: the rasping of shoe on sand paints as vivid a picture as any other one can imagine about the circumstances in which health action is taking place there.

If you have 11 hours to spare (a long car journey?) give Bob Geldof’s audio CD ‘Geldof in Africa’ a go. As an example of sustained telling that draws on an extraordinary range of personal experience and passion, observation, historical research, myth, evidence, fact, it’s hard to beat, and it’ll inspire you to take another look at the stories and fragments of raw material lying all around you.

listening stories out of people

‘The more self forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed on his memory.  says Walter Benjamin in his brilliant essay on The Storyteller. I was reminded of this recently when passing the window of a shop with videos in it celebrating 150 years of District Nursing. The district nurse’s relationship with the whole farmily is one of warm presence and listening companionably, much as Yiannis Gabriel presses the narrative researcher to do when he says in ‘Storytelling in organisations’  ‘While the researcher may ask for clarification of particular aspects of the story, the storyteller must feel that such clarification is asked in the interest of increased understanding, pleasure and empathy rather than in the form of pedantic enquiry.  The metaphor of the researcher as fellow traveler on the storyteller’s narrative suggests an inquisitive quality that combines passivity with activity.’  

becoming a self-forgetful listener

One of the best ways of finding stories is to listen to other people telling them.

This has the tremendous advantage of being profoundly satisfying to the person being listened to (as it’s quite rare in an institutional setting that you are listened to with full attention). It also allows you, as the listener, fully to absorb and take in the story shape as part of your own possible repertoire.

seven ways to grow your story listening

Some of these suggestions come from work we did with Roger Kitchen, who has done lots of work with the British Library, several years back when preparing for an oral history project with the Islamic Development Bank.

• You only get what you ask for… It’s a good idea to have done some groundwork that helps you know the kinds of story you are after and then spot, or make, opportunities to hear, these stories from those you think hold them. Do you want to know more about how to handle a difficult stakeholder moment? Are you trying to find out the truth behind how a strategic financial plan was actually implemented, not what was said in the press? Have a plan and seize the opportunity to collect stories both in formal and in informal settings.
• Be interested in everything… Taking an interest in the smallest detail can draw people into richer recollection. Practice unbroken attention that’s culturally appropriate, to establish the necessary rhythms, silences and gestures of encouragement.
• Listen, keep hold of clues and don’t interrupt the flow or challenge directly…
• Don’t see yourself as an interrogator. Remember, you’re not asking for opinions or advice, or offering your own interpretations and stories to improve on what you are hearing. You are, rather, an active understander, a fellow traveler engaged jointly in an effort with the teller, encouraging the best and most vivid telling out of them.
• Ask questions indirectly, hesitantly, or as probes… Use your prompts to encourage depth and texture, and to fill in the emotional landscape ‘It sounds like you must have been pretty scared when she grabbed your collar…’ ‘I can’t quite get a picture in my head…can you tell me what was going on just before that made him react that way?’
• Remember the qualities of a good story (memorability, vividness, character, time, place, something happening, feelings evoked), and use this to guide your questions too ‘So who else was in the room?’ ‘Where were you at the time?’
• Respect the individual… You may hear the same story from many angles, so it can be tempting to think you have a better grip on the story than the teller and stop listening. Try to be mindful of your behaviour and control frustration or reticence where it occurs. Always try to be positive and open, and make as few assumptions as possible.
• Hold onto silences… The power of silence is enormous. Don’t be tempted to jump in or be helpful to the teller. Let the story take its course.

jumping over the essential story

You’ll notice that these suggestions are a bit at odds with most organisational settings…and even more unlike a conversation down the pub. All the same, it’s worth trying these practices, which may feel a bit peculiar at first. You’ll be surprised how delightful the listener finds your solicitude and attention, and the breathing space you offer.

Be aware, too, of the factors that can affect your attitudetowards a storyteller (and theirs towards you) in the moment:

•  the person’s age, gender, status, class or personality, and the degree to which this mirrors or differs from your own
• their professional or personal relationship with you
• the ‘noise’ from other versions of the story knocking about.

As you become more practiced, you’ll also start to notice the stories that don’t get told. In his book ‘The Gate of the Sun’ Elias Khoury weaves together truelife stories of Lebanese refugee camps into a fictional setting. At one point, the narrator is talking to someone in a coma and he says ‘You only spoke about one woman, and even that one you only talked about a little. Piecing the tale together and arranging scattered sentences, I turned it into a story. But you only mentioned love incidentally. You jumped over the essential story as though it were a pool and you were afraid of drowning.’

A lot of stories do get jumped over, and you may piece them together, or leave them untold. In any case you’ll start to feel a lurking tale that you must decide whether to go back round and collect or not.

Finally, remember that you don’t need to do anything about what you’ve heard.

This is particularly useful where someone is pushing a story on you to get a result from you, which stakeholders often will. Your first job is to listen well, only later do you need to act, or offer other stories that help reshape shared understanding.

The next post will look a bit more at story finding and sense making in groups, at making sure you are stepping into the shoes of your stakeholders. I might detour via the Zappos culture book that I picked up from the post office today, and via some more heavy theory on where the narrative practitioner stands, possibly with a bit about derives to keep us on our toes.

‘This practice note makes some suggestions for developing your resources as a listener to, teller of, and shaper of stories for and about the place you work in.

It was originally written for a client, in 2009. I’ll blog it in short pieces over the next few days. Today I’ll cover a bit about

• what is a story
• opening a door or a window
• whose story is it anyway
• two checklists for shaping and assessing stories 

background

The stories not about the organization, they are the organisation. 

introduction

There’s a pressing need in most organisations to get on with whatever it is. Plans and strategies are shriveled to mission statements and bland reports and project plans and information. People insist on their own version of things rather than accepting a range of views, leaving no breathing space for the listener to come to their own conclusions about things.

Are stories dead in such places? No, certainly not. They’re as alive as ever, and to be found in the usual places: down the pub after work, the café over lunch, at the moment where you stroll down a corridor with a colleague to grab a coffee, sit on a train with them on the way back from a meeting, tell your partner over dinner about the kind of day you’ve had.

All the stories that are told in those places and at those in-between times are as much part of the fabric of the organisation and what makes it tick as and number of formal PowerPoint presentations and reports, if not more so.

All organisations are actually made of the stories and conversations that go on in and around them, stories and conversations started by the people who work there, between them and the outside world and by others about the organisation. One of the great workers in organizational story, Mary-Alice Arthur, calls this the story field.

 I tend to turn to theorists to help me understand things and there’s an organizational theorist whose work I especially like called Karl Weick. Now in his 70’s, in the early 1990’s he wrote an excellent book called ‘Sense making in organizations’ in which  he talks about how all there is to organisations is conversations and stories. He says that vivid, rich language, is absolutely necessary to survival and success:  ‘Vivid words draw attention to new possibilities suggesting that organisations with access to more varied images will engage in sense making that is more adaptive than will organisations with more limited vocabulary.’

This means that your stories, and the words you choose, and your willingness to listen to the stories of others, or work with others to make sense of the stories going around the place, are the organisation. You’re part or the story, not just on the receiving end of it, but part of making it. And how you choose to go about being part of the story makes a great deal of difference to you, to those around you, to the organisation getting its job done.

 For example, suppose you work with a Parks Authority, whose task is the tricky one of park governance. You may be having lunch with a colleague who is feeling down because he was buttonholed by angry residents in the pub the night before, or lambasted by an enraged environmental group about some failure in conservation.

The familiar choice would probably be either to trump their stories with even worse tales about a time when the same thing happened to you, or to lend a sympathetic ear and offer a pat on the back and some advice.

Neither of those things is story work. In the first you are behaving like a cuckoo, pushing them out of their own story space. In the second you’re offering a sticking plaster or advice and opinions that are quite crowding too.

What you could do instead is turn your attention fully to encouraging your colleague to tell their story and know that you’ve heard it well, putting aside your own responses while being aware of them. Being listened to well will help them find the story behind the story, perhaps put themselves in the shoes of the angry opponent, find a moment of insight into where the other person’ behaviour originates, the story behind what happened, and so figure out a considered response for next time.

 That subtle attention to detail, rather than competing for space or to be pleasingly helpful, is the most thoughtful approach you could take in such a situation, and it’s pretty rare in most organisational settings. 

So this practice note says a little bit about how you can go about that in a way that is satisfying for you and makes a contribution to the place where you work.

We’d also want to encourage you to think of this as work, not as a replacement for work, or an additional burden. In fact, most of the work suggested here is about doing less, standing still, becoming more aware, using all of your senses to gather in resources that you can then put to work pragmatically as the occasion arises.

what is a story?

 There’s plenty of theoretical and practical reading in script writing, creative writing, theatre, performance, narrative therapy, organisational research, social sciences and so on that you can turn to for a set of fully fledged ideas, but for us here now, it’s enough to know that you know one when you hear one and you know one when you tell one and you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a great deal of not-story in daily organisational life. And it’s not much fun.

 opening a door or a window

Perhaps most important is that a story does not tell you what to think, and nor should the manner of its telling. Rather, it invites you into a place where you find you want to make room for it. It opens a door for you in your imagination, which might be one you didn’t even know was there, or a door that releases you from the stuck place you are in. Or it opens a window on a world normally hidden to you, whether that’s a an entirely different world, or the world you are in, but from a different point of view. I especially like this quote from Penelope Fitzgerald in ‘The Blue Flower’  ‘If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching’ . I like it because it illuminates for me, rather beautifully, the role of a story in shifting the recipient from passive to active.

  whose story is it anyway?

Most important, it’s not your story, or their story, or my story. A story sits between the teller and the listener. The teller tells the story they tell and the listener hears the story they hear, bringing to it their own listening ears. So a story sits in a space in between people, and is made by them together in the moment of telling and listening. Mary-Alice Arthure, one of the greats of organizational storytelling, calls this the story field, and describe this as a kind of magnetic field where lots of stories are all at work – the many forces of newspaper articles, myths, gossip, memories, reports and case studies, meetings, all work with and against each other.

 Of course you’ll start by asking, what is a story?

You know one when you hear one because we’re wired that way, and because it makes a difference to you, even if you find it hard to pin down that difference in words. Anecdote, another great force for the power of organizational storytelling, have six criteria, which I’ve dressed up a bit here. They say a story

• draws you in, and, transports you to the time and place of the story
•  is about someone doing something sometime, somewhere 
• has something in it that changes 
• tugs at your feelings, a small jolt in the pit of the stomach, raised eyebrow or wry smile of surprise, or a quick laugh, a shudder of anxiety, or perhaps
• a taste in your mouth that takes a while to dissolve
• is memorable enough to leave a trace with you, on which you may decide to act, or which may persuade you to retell it or shift your view on something

Here’s a longer list, a checklist that came from work we did with an organization to assess their ‘impact stories’ the stories that conveyed the value of their work.

•  Are you holding me, your primary audience, in mind?
• Is the language the right language for the me?
• What change do you want to spark in me?
• Where’s the surprise?
• Does something change?
• Does something happen sometime to someone somewhere? (ie is there enough going on to have me step into the story and get interested?)
• Does the story need placing in a larger landscape – a geographical or historic context that gives it the right kind of weighting
• Does it generate empathy and emotional impact?
• Is it vivid, memorable, does it transport me there?
• Does it feel authentic?
• Is your organisation an authentic, unspun and distinctive presence?
• Who is the teller? Is their relationship to the story clear?
• Are there witnesses in the story that can help the reader/listener(s) to understand and relate to what is going on?
• Does it have a strong opening that draws me in?
• Does it have a strong close that opens a door, doesn’t tell me what to think?
• Does it have a clear turning point
• Do the structure and order help engage me?
• Are facts and analysis woven in without being clumsy or lumpy?
• If it’s a story about a big subject, is there small story that can act as a way in?
• If it’s a story I’m going to defend myself from (yeah yeah, you would say that wouldn’t you), have you got a surprise way in to catch me off my guard?
• If there’s ambiguity, discomfort or complexity, do you have a way to commit me to going through that with you rather than giving up?

In the next posting I’ll look at some practical aspects of collecting that I’ve come to rely on over the years.