sparknow

library futures

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:16:00 +0000

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.

transforming ideas into reality in Madrid

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:13:00 +0000

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).

uses of the dérive as a tool for learning programmes

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:10:09 +0000

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:

Sudan stories I rapid reflections on KMCA 2012

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:18:00 +0000

Its 3.30am and I am sitting at Khartoum airport waiting for the flight back to Heathrow at the end of one of the most exacting yet rewarding weeks I’ve had in over 35 years of working across many continents.

Sudan challenges you: its people are warm, inquistive with an insatiable desire to learn. And yet time management is a work in progress and the ubiquitous presence of officialdom and the ongoing sanctions a significant drain on effectiveness and enthusiasm.

Despite these constraints the young are vibrant, highly intelligent and moved to laughter and song with little prompting. The society is very oral; stories are the currency of communication. External opinion is highly sought after and there is a work ethic that is both surprising and refreshing. By way of illustration:

It’s 5.45pm on the first day of Knowledge Management Capacity in Africa 2012 conference held in the Friendship Hall Khartoum. This inaugural event on Knowledge Management which kicked off at 8am has attracted over 500 delegates and nearly 50 international participants though I am the sole European. The timing has gone awry by some distance.

I get to my feet to begin my presentation entitled “missions and knowledge production” and having summoned water bottles and moved everyone around, ask the assembled throng in the Omduran Room what they want to do.

By a unanimous show of hands they indicate a desire to continue and we ultimately finish at 7pm in time for a Knowledge Cafe.

The audience listens attentively and I get a lot of positive feedback.

At the Knowledge Cafe I lead a ‘table’ of young Sudanese women who are keeping up the pace. The session eventually ends at 8.30pm some 12 hours after the day began. It is an indication of things to come over the following two days (and nights).

The Conference Chair Gada Kadoda, a woman of astonishing capacity and vision, has assembled an impressive array of speakers and presentations: from Washington to Malaysia via the UK with a big representation from Africa. I have two presentations to give and as it transpires to facilitate the closing conference session on Saturday morning before a caravan of minibuses sets off in search of the Sudanese Pyramids.

Over the next week or so I will be drawing on some of the conversations and highlighting examples of knowledge at work in Africa; for now here are some high level thoughts after 3 days of the conference.

Technology I the ongoing sanctions means that some of the essential foundations for a dynamic knowledge society are absent. Software and hardware are in plentiful supply but access to the latest upgrades are restricted and effective support is difficult to come by even though maintance is included in the original purchase.
e-commerce is constrained by the lack of an effective payment platform such as PayPal which is restricted. While the new regulators can plan for a time when the situation returns to normality by setting up the distribution network now, it means they are unable to encourage the growth of an industry that would facilitate a faster move towards a knowledge based economy. To illustrate the importance of e-commerce, figures just released show that over 30% of all purchases over the holiday period in the US were conducted online.
Communications I the size of Sudan makes the laying of cable impractical; cell phone usage represents a high percentage of the communications media and some 22 million people have mobile devices (over 2/3 of the population).
Knowledge (and information) sharing I ‘my data is my soul’ is a phrase oft repeated. It illustrates more than any other the challenges organisations face in encouraging professionals to part with what they know.
Knowledge Management I is a discipline that’s attracting interest yet their are a fair share of cynics especially among those who seek substantive method and measurement. A number of prominent organizations have initiatives in train and like the citiens of many developing countries certification programmes are highly sought after. The term remains a deterrent for some and Knowledge Sharing was more readily endorsed.
Collaboration I group work is an accepted part of the culture and there is no reluctance to act as the spokesperson for the group or in expressing ideas and opinions. Most people have a Facebook account of sorts yet few have heard of TripAdvisor!
Food I plays a huge role in lubricating tongues. But everyone sits down at the first opportunity which tends to restrict conversation to those in the immediate circle.
Stories travel I in the past the travellers (or Bedouin) were the custodians of stories, today that role is being increasing filled by online connectivity which places an emphasis on effective means of collection, storage and dissemination.

I had the pleasure of working alongside/talking to a number of Sudanese graduates and undergraduates a number of whom presented papers on Wednesday. Two in particular interested me: one was about a process of measuring the effectiveness of km in a private company; the other an annual attempt at knowledge transfer by the students to rural areas in which they’d identified and engaged with a local stakeholder who became their voice and ears.

Perhaps though the highlight was interacting with so many people for whom the sharing of knowledge is critical for survival; where information that stays in someone’s head or laptop might save lives; where different techniques are needed to get the stakeholder buyin and ensure sustainability.

As the flight is about to depart, more later in the week.

story practice note, third and final part

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:09:00 +0000

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.’

‘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?’

‘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

the art of the narrative enquirer

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:42:00 +0000

A detour before the third and final part of the story practice note. I’ve been writing up narrative method and thought it might be useful to share this piece. It comes from a thing I wrote for Sage Publications a few years back, with some amendments. I’m relieved to find it seems to stand the test of time as a decent method statement.

‘In any research topic, there are two overarching questions that have to be addressed: what is the object of the enquiry and how can it be enquired into’ | Hollway, W & Jefferson T |Doing Qualitative Research Differently:Free association, narrative and the interview method

Narrative enquiry seeks to emerge episodes and materials which might illuminate a greater whole.

The narrative enquirer is often regarded as a ‘fellow traveller’ (Gabriel 2000) with insiders in the organization, even if only on a short journey. Paying careful attention to use of anecdotes, metaphor, language and symbol, to what is not said, to the context in which it is said, creates insight into the qualities of an experience which are not immediately accessible to the subject through their own literal interpretation of an experience and the meaning it holds for them. A goal is to pull the raw material right through the process.

Documentation of the collecting process needs to thorough, (audio, video, email exchanges, journals, fieldnotes, diaries, bulletins, images, and the objects which are created (reports, essays, oral materials) need to travel and do work beyond the immediate remit of the assignment, with both predictable and unpredictable results, while not compromising privacy or confidentiality.

One challenge in the enquiry is how truth is compromised by the storytellers motivations, memory and anxiety. Another is that people will tend to recall the extraordinary, the vivid and the luminous not the ordinary, the mundane and the banal, so routines are overlooked.

There are particular, ironic, challenges in narrative research, in that the tendency is to recall a well-rehearsed story. And a well-rehearsed story or ‘whole’ episode is likely to contain drama. Indeed the insight we seek may not qualify, in the mind of the subject, as a story at all. So we need to look for gaps and hidden qualities and apparent ‘nothings’, as well as the more evident something which story-seeking questions throw up.

There is something beyond the ‘nothings’ which is the hiddens, and these may, or may not be, easy or appropriate to identify. In his book The Gate of the Sun Elias Khoury weaves together true life stories of Lebanese refugee camps into a fictional setting. At one point, the narrator is talking to a 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 or scattered sentences, I turned it into a story. But you only mentioned love incidentally. You jumped over the essential story as though it was a pool and you were afraid of drowning.’

This can happen with narrative research too. Sometimes, interviewees will jump over the essential story ‘as though it was a pool’ and the interviewer must judge whether it is appropriate to pay attention to this or not.

Researchers cannot be detached but must examine subjective involvement to help to shape the way in which they interpret the interview data and other materials.

Sometimes fiction and fantasy, or imagery or metaphor might be a better way to access or convey difficult issues but are easier for sponsors to reject out of hand if it feels too counter cultural.

There is also the temptation for the enquirer to draw on other observations, outside the actual product of the interviews between researcher and subject. There needs to be agreement as to the degree to which inference is valid or peripheral vision – things noticed which creep beyond the scope of the specific piece of research – should be permitted. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) are very encouraging about completely situating the enquirer and encouraging them to journal and interpret. Embracing, but putting a careful boundary round, subjective interpretation, while making room for a shared view to emerge is an important, role that articulating the enquiry as narrative can make methodologically.

In addition, the positioning of the researchers needs to be considered. They need to be seen as clearly kinds of episodes collected through narrative research are, in part, skewed by the assumption of an authority figure and the relationship of the subject (or the enquirers) with faceless authority figures in general. Censorship and self-censorship arising from denial or partial perceptions, are often compounded by assumptions by the interviewee, in organisational settings, as to the sponsor, the sponsor’s real, as opposed to espoused, intentions, and the seriousness with which they as subjects of the enquiry will be paid attention to, so there are often politics or gaming, intentional or unintentional, in what’s being shared.

The challenges of developing consistent standards in this kind of approach are compounded by Sparknow’s particular leaning towards collaborative enquiry, often working in partnership with untrained volunteers in the client to build a sharper provocation and a deeper set of insights, while risking a more uneven, subjective and rawer approach. We take the view that this kind of situated learning has a value in its own right.

There is also a significant question of reality, truth and meaning. In qualitative and quantitative research it might be fair to say that you assume the subject knows himself well, has an accurate memory, can convey knowledge to a strange listener and is motivated to tell the truth. In our experience this is rarely the case. Often the processes associated with the whole of the working activity are regarded by the worker as subordinate to the ‘real’ parts of the work. Another challenge is that the holder of the experience can be genuinely unaware of their own filters and assumptions and so can only convey part of the experience, even with an experienced interviewer or sound process. Finally, as we’ve mentioned, there’s a tendency towards the dramatic, or to the inert and the indifferent.

This is a thing the organisation has done to me, and look what it’s doing to me.I told them all this when the put the system in.

So there’s an abdication of responsibility for process and so for giving a truthful rendition. Outsiders are shiny, interesting and a new channel for grievance, or they are to be paid lip-service to, because they can make no dent and will pass on, leaving the same on stuff in place. So the enquirer needs to be alert to the motives of participants in sharing particular aspects of the organization or their take on things.

The art, in crafting an intervention and decided how to thread narrativeness through its components, is to have enough of an early sense of the clients and the networks through which one must work, to create a firmly anchored but vivid place of engagement, reassuring, but with enough surprise shot through it that it interrupts (a narrative device in itself) expectation and draws people in despite themselves.

Clandinin, D Jean & Donnelly, F Michael, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research, Jossey-Bass, 2000, San Francisco

Hollway, Wendy & Jefferson, Tony ‘Doing qualitative research differently: free association, narrative and the interview method’ Sage Publications, 2000, London

Gabriel, Yiannis, Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies, OUP 2000, NY

a story practice note, part 2

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:15:00 +0000

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.

Khartoum calls I KM in Africa

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:45:00 +0000

By a stroke of serendipity (a meeting with one of the speakers while he was in London) I am going back to Khartoum early in the New Year to participate in an event run by University of Khartoum styled “Knowledge Management Capacity in Africa”.

It promises to be an interesting event since unlike last year’s mission to Khartoum, Nyala and El Fashar I will be based in one centre for the week. Also the list of practitioners and speakers is very heavily weighted in favour of the African continent and I think I am the sole European representative. An honour indeed!

I’ve been asked to focus on a couple of topics: Missions and Creative Commons. More on the latter in a subsequent posting. Here’s a taster from the abstract I’ve written for the event:

Missions are one of the key ways any development bank or agency can collect, disseminate and synthesize knowledge but the opportunities to do so are often overlooked or wasted.

Most of the processes are focused on producing a report (back to the office report- BTOR), managing risks and making decisions yet every component can be adjusted and fine-tuned or used in more than one way.

This presentation, based in part on a mission to Sudan conducted in 2010 by Sparknow working alongside the World Health Organisation (WHO), will examine a variety of mission collection methods and discuss how the ‘fire of the field’ can be brought back into an organization.

Imagine you are a bank looking to set up a new Islamic finance operation targeted at the private sector in West Africa. There are few peer groups you can look to for advice; it’s by and large unchartered territory. What are your options?

·       talk to the founding fathers of other Islamic institutions

·       undertake a scoping mission to the country

·       identify others in your own institution that have core skills you might draw on.

You actually do all the above but in addition you put in place a programme to ensure that you capture all the learning’s from this new venture; the nuances around operating ‘offshore’ from HQ; the peculiarities of the culture and the way things are done and; you create a missions guide and a mechanism for feeding back what you learn into your organisation. This charts Sparknow’s mission journey illustrated by some of the techniques we’ve found to be of value.

Oh and this time I am going to remember to take nice new shiny dollar bills and not my credit card.

a story practice note, part 1

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:33:00 +0000

‘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.

'Surfing Soweto'

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 07:36:00 +0000

‘Surfing Soweto’ was screened at the South African Embassy in London last night. Here are some thoughts on the storytelling.

A bit about the film first. It’s a film-length documentary, about 90 minutes. We follow the lives of three young men from Soweto, largely through footage they’ve collected themselves, over three years. Sara has taught them how to use the cameras and they come and borrow the cameras from her and return them.

Running throughout the film is the recurrent theme of the the trainsurfing, on top, on the sides, and under the trains that run between Soweto and Johannesburg. It’s an addiction, and the boys themselves are aware of this.

Although it’s the focus of the story, it’s really the lens through which other stories are being told, the most compelling of which is that of a generation where absent fathers mean that it’s almost impossible to become a man. Then just offstage is the quieter seed of hope that places like the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre in Sophiatown are playing in giving some of these young men a way to take on their lives and make something of them.

I can’t possibly do the film or Sara’s film-making justice here, and am not really paying attention to the big story here. But here are a few notes about the process that seem to me to hold clues to other kinds of storytelling that wants both to convey and to start to change the story. Mostly obvious, so I’ll be brief.

It started life as a 24 minute current affairs piece. It was only because of this that the three young men had the confidence, Sara thinks, that she would represent them accurately: without the current affairs piece trailing ahead, the film could not have been made.
She did only two days filming of the surfing itself, although it is spliced through the film. For the rest of the three years, she had a contract with each young man that they would not use her cameras to film surfing.
The film was made largely by them and ‘assembled’ (her word) by her. She held true to the belief that they needed to see themselves in this story. This has been evidenced by their relationship with the film. It crackles with almost unbearable authenticity. The relationship with addiction extends to drugs and alcohol, and the rawness with which we see this, and the family structures that struggle to hold together, is extraordinary.
It doesn’t attempt to tidy up the contradictions, or push a point of view, even though backed by the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (they are very much offstage, not even in the story at all really). It allows the layers of story, and the central themes, to emerge through the telling.

The train surfing itself is compelling, lyrical, poetic, unbearably on the edge. The young men themselves are compelling, lyrical, poetic and unbearably on the edge too. It’s a film I’d really recommend seeing, for itself, for the way it tells a huge story in an immediate way, for its integrity, and for it as a lens on the way storymaking can shift stories.

'but the rhino is facing the wrong way'

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:22:00 +0000

Fiona and I chorused in despair at the final session in a World Health Organization work/learning programme on collaborative meetings and products. Here’s a bit of the backstory but first I’ll tantalise you a bit with the rhino photo then wind my way back to it.

This is the second outing for a six-session series I ran for Alim Khan, working with WHO practitioners, whose projects and challenges range across the world, both in working to build robust health delivery capacity in a ‘business as usual’ way and in preparedness for, and response to, emergencies. There will be a book, almost certainly we’ll stay true to the spirit of the programme in using paperspaces, so there’ll probably be postcards and worksheet and storycube templates. There may be T Shirts. This time round I ran it with David Gunn from The Incidental, and it was a true delight to spend a couple of months that close to his inventiveness as a practitioner of participatory processes. Here’s an extract from the invitation

PRODUCING COLLABORATIVE MEETINGS & PRODUCTS AT WHO.

A programme of six half-day modules, run over two months where you will learn how to run meetings/projects in more effective, participatory ways and apply those skills to one of your projects as we go along

What will you get out of it?

more choices | when designing meetings and workshops to engage participants, to move beyond traditional presentations, and to build substantice outcomes
a wider range of engagement tools | for producing products (guidelines, technical documentation etc) and offering truly collaborative alternatives to traditional ‘draft and circulate’ practices
confidence to leverage a range of technology | including in-house solutions such as GoToMeeting as well as a variety of external tools at varying levels of complexity and cost
the full range of analogue to digital | stretching understanding of what makes a collaborative tool - from objects, to paper spaces, to room layout, to different facilitation tools and so on
redefinition of the meeting space | rethinking what needs to be done in’the meeting space’ and what can be done before and after to build momentum, focus and depth over a project journey
theoretical underpinnings | that allow you to grasp the broader impact of choosing or not choosing a particular set of tools as you implement your workplaces
case examples | from both WHO and external sources, including writeshops, unconferencing, meeting wikis, and more - from simple tools to improve a particular meeting to toolboxes that will improve the effectiveness of broader workstreams
a chance to contribute | to a creative, innovative WHO learning programme which will result in a published archive of practice in participatory techniques. This archive will be shared throughout WHO and with selected external audiences.

And we really did do a lot of that and were lucky enough this time, to have people who went off and tried stuff out, including a workshop in Mozambique, and came back to tell the tale. We also played with working in googledocs this time, where we’d used socialtext last time, and we were lucky enough to have a brilliant repeat webinar about webinars, through GoToMeeting, with Clive Holtham from Cass Business School. More will unfold, bit by bit, as we assemble our final document and I’ll share a bit of that here as we work on it, with Sebastian and Adeel, the two interns who have been with us for the last part of the ride and will see the project out with us.

[Marginalia | The best anecdote from our farewell drink with them. They’d just been to the CERN reactor Halloween fancy dress party for interns across Geneva, the only Halloween party, they said, where you’d find nuclear physicists dressed as molecules and Higgs boson particles….]

As we work up our final documentation, we’re being very much governed by Brian Eno thinking that David shared early on, and by our mutual passion for curation of experiences in order to show them from the inside out:

‘We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution… An important aspect of a design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy one-reading-only surface. I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of evolution. They are not dead yet …’

Meanwhile, a few snaps from my own collection. David insisted, after the first session, that we used the Hipstamatic app on iphones and the android equivalent (generation gap, David and I on iphones, Adeel and Sebastian on android phones). I’m afraid he only taught me how to shake it around to randomise lenses rather late on, although I think i did it by accident, and he was quite stern with me about getting odd angles to improve the wit. I’m working on it. Most of my shots look like the bottom of an uncleaned swimming pool, which I like but which David insists isn’t quite right for the aesthetics (a word he’s very fond of). Anyway, here goes.

The first couple are from module 3, when we played with storycubes as an extension of paper spaces, and as kind of three dimensional postcards. We also used a polaroid camera to collect portrait pictures of participants which we annotated in different ways, so you can see the camera, and Adeel’s hands, laying out the photos as a briefing session in the third shot.

This next shot is of Yolanda (whose first event is coming up in Colombia in November, and she’s also looking at using some of the approaches in development of training for ship sanitation certification. She’s having a lively conversation with Clive Holtham before the webinar, down the the other end of the webcam.

[Marginalia | satisfying that I’ve been able to hook Yolande up with people in Bogota from my May trip to Colombia, and to Juanita Brown, the originator of World Cafe, which is one of the tools Yolande is looking at using]

The final couple of shots are from our next-to-final event. We had to lug a ton of heavy chairs out of the room to stand a chance of rearranging it, and the symbolism of chairs in the corridor says a great deal about the default meeting room, but we did hang on to the tables to do a lot of archetype and clustering on pinboarding cards. Having got Adeel’s hands in earlier, here are Sebastian’s rather fine pair. The day had been pretty gloomy but the sun came out while we were doing this work and I tried to get the slanting shadows across the table.

[Marginalia | We’d thought about hexagons, but decided to stick with pinboarding cards, messier but nice. The clustering led to a neat concept that ended up being labelled as ‘wiggle room’: those parts of a meeting or collaborative process where you have a chance to reinvent, as opposed to those where to fly in the face of tradition and protocol is simply too hard until, unless, there’s a cultural tipping point. Talking of paper space, I’d become quite obsessed with the idea of using sandwich flags to map our landscape of collaboration on to David’s rather nice fractal maps, but we never got round to using either, partly through time and how the rhythm of our sessions unfolded, but also because the sandwich flags wouldn’t stick easily into the boards we had we we didn’t have time to get styrofoam backing for the maps. Next time. It’ll be the only expenses record ever that comes from Partyrama I expect.]

To the wrong-way-facing rhino.

We’ve been big on touch during these sessions, and on imagery, metaphor, mnemonics, rituals, having strong mechanisms, however subtle, of arrival, beginning, ending, departure.

[Marginalia | William Bridges is pretty good on this in Managing Transitions, but with a less storied feel than we were seeking: Daniel Kahneman on the remembering self is also an influence here.]

We wanted a good ending, which was also a beginning (a final session of transition, with people, having faced backwards or into the immediate present, or faced each other, turning together to face outwards towards the future and the next thing). So we asked people to bring with them an object that for them symbolised this experience of a cooperative enquiry into collaboration in some way or another.

Luck gave us a final meeting room in batiment X (definitely a kind of shadowy netherworld in WHO spaces) on the ground floor with windows that opened out onto a raised piece of land, now the ‘meadow’ with the WHO panoptican of a building rearing up over it in the background.

Chance had it that on our stroll up through leafy alleyways from the WHO building from a latish number 8 bus to our youth hostellish dwelling, we walked past a little ‘vide grenier’ outside a grand Swiss chalet in the lanes behind the UN complex (a bizarre juxtaposition of worlds and cultures). An old chair, a picture, a few bits and pieces of trash, and a children’s multi-coloured desk. We decided this would be our display cabinet. So David lugged it home and then back again the next morning, and we shuffled it past a very confused security guard and into the main atrium, along corridors, and into Batiment X where we tucked it away in a corner for most of the session.

With 30 minutes to go, we invited people to step up onto a chair, out through the window and onto the meadow and into our ritual of ending and beginning, in full view of all the (many) offices on that side of WHO.

Here’s David on his way out of the window:

I have to say, it was easier getting out than stumbling back in and here’s the ‘true’ position of the desk and objects while we did our ending thing:

I’m reminded very much of a bit of an interview with MarK Wallinger that I read in the Guardian during the time we’ve been running this CMP series:

‘I made a breakthrough when I realised that meaning is something you construct … it wasn’t until I separated out the elements of my art and began to trust them that I felt I made real progress. It was opening up to an honesty about the ingredients I was using. Not thinking there was some sort of magical sleight of hand that generates art. Actually you can put three things together” – he reaches out and randomly nudges together a phone, a ruler and a photograph on the table in front on him – “and you can say ‘have a look at that.’ Those three elements still retain their separate identities, but somehow, just by their juxtaposition, something else happens. I liked reaching the point where it felt I was opening up a dialogue with the viewer. That seemed more honest.’

Mark Wallinger from an interview in the Guardian newspaper September 2011

David decided to move the desk for a final photoshoot (the picture I opened with) with the WHO building in the background and then we had the most peculiar and delightful negotiation, quite spontaneously, about the arrangement of the objects. Adeel’s lunchbag on its side or standing up. It was quite odd we had a collective understanding. Except that David turned Fiona’s rhino to face outwards and we both yelled in unison, and quite distressed in fact:

‘but the rhino is facing the wrong way’

I have no clue why we both knew or why it mattered so much, but David reluctantly turned the rhino round (composition weakened, aesthetics under threat) and we were both mightily relieved. (We discovered some other things that matter to us both too, like closed doors and contained spaces.)

One of the shorthands we’ve evolved (derived from the project narrative worksheet we worked on in the first module) is ‘before the before’ and ‘after the after’, the parts of projects and meetings and collaborations in general that get overlooked but matter more than almost anything. In any case, David’s object was ‘Species of Spaces’ by Georges Perec. He’d bought it to lend to me, decided to read it first and so deferred lending, used it as his object (for very good reasons) and then decided it had become so freighted with symbolism that he needed to gift it there and then after the ending, so maybe just stumbling into after the after, at the Number 8 bus stop as we headed down to Le Rouge et Le Blanc before heading to the airport. I am reading it now, and only just restraining myself from quoting large chunks of it in delight.

Instead, I’ll end with a bit David Bohm and that seems like a good place to end for now:

‘…awakening…the process of dialogue itself as a free flow of meaning among all the participants. In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the group was much more important than to hold any position. Such friendship has an impersonal quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on a close personal relationship between participants. A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change. In this development the group has no pre-established purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. Thus far we have only begun to explore the possibilities of dialogue in the sense indicated here, but going further along these lines would open up the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise.’

D. Bohm ‘Unfolding Meaning’

what would Wolf say?

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:33:00 +0100

Here’s a take on introducing multiple perspectives into a situation. It comes from a very interesting 12-year project exploring how to revolutionize communication systems that’s based on Christopher Alexander’s groundbreaking work on pattern languages in architecture.

I’ll start with the background to the project, and a little bit about pattern languages, and head towards pattern 83, which is where ‘Who speaks for wolf’ is explored.

Liberating Voices, a pattern language for communication revolution is a 12 year project, in its 7th year, whose goal is to help

understand, motivate and inform the worldwide movement to establish full access to information and communication — including the design and management of information and communication systems

The idea of a pattern language was originally conceived by Christopher Alexander, professor emeritus of the Architectural and Urban Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley. From the late 1960s through to the first publication of ‘A pattern language’ in 1977, Alexander and his team worked towards a set of principles, translated into 253 interrelated planning, architectural and construction patterns, that could be applied together at any scale in building from minute details in a room to the design of whole buildings, complexes and cities. They also work at the metaphorical and narrative level, so, for example (quote in Liberating Voices) you might consider Necklace of Community Projects (16), Windows Overlooking Life (18) and Pools of Light (63) as narrative as well as practical patterns.

Both Sparknow and Cognitive Edge, through Dave Snowden’s constantly invigorating research enquiries, have been very interested in pattern languages, and during 2010, as I started to develop the consolidated Sparknow story system methodology, I spent quite a bit of time, working with Alim Khan at WHO thinking about how we might build Sparknow’s own method as a pattern language. In fact it’s through Alim, another ceaseless enquirer, that I discovered this attempt at a pattern language through a work learning project we’re doing with him at WHO on collaborative meetings and products.

This leads me to the flawed but fascinating project that is Liberating Voices, which I haven’t fully grasped, but seems to be a kind of open source, public project, an attempt to consolidate patterns that will give us clues about communication and participation in a fluid world where social, political and technological shifts are feeling and looking like irreversible paradigm shifts. What does that mean for information and communication. In terms of process, the construction of Liberating Voices has echoes of the voluntary submission of definitions which fuelled the development of the Oxford English Dictionary in a corrugated shed in his garden in Banbury Road, Oxford, by James Murray, which I’ve written about before with Clive Holtham.

Douglas Schuler, and his volunteers have consolidated 136 patterns which range through theory, organizing principles, enabling systems, collaboration, community building, self representation, projects and tactics - categories that don’t quite work for me. The patterns themselves are all written, as Alexander’s patterns are, in a structured way. The headings are:

Problem
Context
Discussion
Solution
Linked patterns

I’ve flicked through the whole book and need to go back through it. The quality of the work varies quite wildly, and on the whole the patterns stay infuriatingly abstract, by contrast with Alexander’s lucid cogency, indeed his poetry. There’s also a kind of wild and slightly woolly citizenship and sweeping greater good feeling to it which makes it hard to think about in a more pragmatic business context. The idealists and theorists are in the ascendency here for now, although of course there are still 5 years of the project to go. I can imagine, for example, that Occupy could quite suddenly turn into a pattern (154) just because it’s current, although there’s been a great deal of studious triage here to boil it down to a book of only 153 patterns.

All the same, I’ve turned under the bottom corner of a lot of pages (bottom corner bookmarking is research and referencing, top corners are bookmarks for where I’ve got to). The patterns that have got me thinking include:

Political Settings (7)
Memory and Responsibility (11)
Demystification and Reenchantment (14)
Dematerialization (18)
Teaching to Transgress (20)
Participatory Design (36)
Open Action and Research Network (45)
Future Design (88)
Document Centred Discussion (92)
Mirror Institutions (94)
The Power of Story (114)

The pattern that I thought it would be interesting to share, while I’m figuring this out is Voices of the unheard (83), or, in the spirit of Alexander, Voices of the Unheard. Here’s a synopsis.

Problem

Decision making and design is the poorer for missing the perspectives of those with a stake in the outcome.

Discussion

Gaps need to be repaired early on
It’s tricky getting the right stakeholders in the room early on
New solutions are more likely to be embraced if all those concerned have input

photo | Bruce McKay~YSP

One way to think of tackling this has its roots in an Native American story transcribed by Paula Underwood (1993) entitled ‘Who speaks for Wolf’. In brief, the story tells of a tribe in whom one man decided to learn everything he could about wolves. When he was away hunting, the tribe decided to move, and mistakenly moved into the middle of a wolf breeding ground. Eventually they had to move again, and, learning from their mistakes decided that at any future council meetings they would always ask themselves ‘who speaks for Wolf?’ to remind themselves of the perspectives of missing stakeholders (although I doubt that the Native Americans called them stakeholders exactly).

One challenge here, says the pattern, is to make sure that the authentic voice of the stakeholder can be present through an intermediary. Is someone really qualified to speak for Wolf? Should the meeting wait until Wolf can be present?

A variation that the pattern suggests is the imaginary board of directors: what would Gandhi/Einstein/Steve Jobs do?

Solution

Provide ways to remind people of missing stakeholders. These can be procedural, visual or auditory.

Linked patterns

Include Memory and Responsibility (11) Demystification and Reenchantment (14), The Power of Story (114)

Back to Victoria speaking and away from the pattern to end with…

I liked this, because it seemed like quite a neat and common problem and a nice, rather poetic, way of tackling it which could link nicely with some of the more felt ways of tackling missing voices that we’ve worked on through tools like Try To See It My Way and Walking In Their Shoes (see, we do the upper case thing too, even though we are clearly, largely a lower case organization…)

I’d urge anyone to get themselves the two main volumes of A Pattern Language. I’ve just given mine away to David Gunn as a birthday present when he came to spend time designing our last pair of WHO working sessions. It was a struggle, because I absolutely love them and they have been in my very small canon of core texts that govern my practice. But hey, gifts and gifting (I can feel another pattern coming on): what’s the point if it isn’t something you treasure?

Small conversations to identify useful lessons

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:22:00 +0100

Foraging in the archive (for which read desperately scrabbling through random unfiled stuff (see illustration below), I found this charming little piece from the online toolkit we developed with Defra a few years back.

We called these little things ‘back pocket items’ at the suggestion of Fiona Hiscocks, with the idea that it’s the kind of thing you could print out and tuck in your back pocket to use on the hoof.

This is the one we turned back on ourselves at the very last Advisory Group meeting.

D3 - LESSONS LEARNED & PASSED ON - Small conversations to identify useful lessons

At key moments in the formal process, you have the chance to have a small pause for reflection. For example, after the procurement processes have been completed, perhaps just before beginning the next phase, select four of the more actively engaged participants (one foresight team member, one procurement panel member, one commissioner, one person from the contractor).

Conversation structure

1. What was the main sequence of events for you in your role?

2. Is there one moment where you detect a turning point in the process, where things changed?

3. What did you observe about the experience from other people’s points of view?

4. What did you find most interesting or unexpected about the process? Most frustrating? Most pleasing

5. Is there an image, word or object which for you sums up this experience?

6. Is there anything that we as a project team might need to act on immediately?

7. If you were helping someone else going through the same kind of thing, what would your main two recommendations be?

8. What would your surprise tip be?

Conversation summary

Finishing by filling out a sheet of paper with four headings:

lessons identified
possible responses
whose action is it
what difference can the action make

Feeding conversation back

Are there people who would find it useful to know these lessons now?

Are there Defra processes which could usefully be amended in the light of this feedback?

Are there parts of the toolkit which need amending in the light of this feedback?

…..We’ve recently resuscitated the whole toolkit and put it back online, a bit run down, dusty and unloved in our version for a few years now, but still a cracking read. We’re going to play with it and see what we can do to recharge its batteries. It might take a few months though. Back to that filing..

can cultural assets stimulate innovation I observations from ECCI XII in Faro

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:47:00 +0100

Nurture trumps nature as far as creativity goes - in effect the skill of creativity can be taught. This is one of the findings from a recently published survey in Harvard Business Review republished by CityAm.

It was also one of the themes that emerged from the 12th European Conference on Creativity and Innovation. 300 global attendees arrived in Faro last week bursting with ideas, enthusaism and perhaps skepticism about whether in times of financial austerity organisations really do care about innovation; well not now anyway. Are they willing to invest for the future and to what extent can open collaboration prove to be the salvation of many stalled ideas units?

With the threat of increased tax on one of Portugal’s main products (wine) being openly discussed I wondered the extent to which spirits might be dampened and thirsts unquenched. Not a bit of it, the Vino Tinto and Vino Verde flowed in the quantity needed to absorb the ample portions of fresh lula (squid) and pão-de-ló (sponge cake).

And from the off everyone was energised thanks in part to a very interesting opening engagement exercise conducted in Faro’s main theatre featuring one of Portugal’s leading composers and musicians Carlos Mendes.

Carlos invited those who could fit on the stage (100+) to join him in a simulation of one of Verdi’s arias. A set of ‘muscians’ played imaginary instruments while the choir (which included me) pounded out the chorus in Italian. It proved to be a novel and effective icebreaker!

I was in Faro to present Sparknow’s thoughts and examples from recent work (including the Getting Down to Business report) while Lucie Huiskens my co presenter drew on work with DSM among others to illustrate the importance of art in creativity and innovation. ‘My’ session chaired by Professor Han van der Meer (one of only two people who’ve attended all 12 ECCI events) focused on the role of art, and cultural assets (including archives) as stimuli for creativity and innovation. Those who follow Sparknow’s blog and work will be familiar with our belief in the power of objects to provoke and inspire conversations and stories. It was fullfilling to see a full room and that many shared our beliefs. The challenge: finding champions in today’s measurement focused organisations.

The week before I’d met such a champion, Benoit Duverger, Managing Director of Pringle at the Sloane Square launch of their Archives Project.

As one of the oldest and most respected Scottish weaving and textile businesses Pringle had a wealth of knowledge to draw on upon and when it decided to tap that knowledge it found great examples of innovation (it was at the forefront of putting metal into woollen products for example) it was able to transfer into its current design range.

And it gave a group of young designers the opportunity to work with the archive collection to generate new design ideas.

At the launch I’d asked Benoit what the benefit has been of the process of curating such a collection and making it available. He said:

huge increase in media coverage and a much greater exposure/brand awareness

significant boost in the company getting behind the brand

stories people can buy into (customers and employees)

opening up new conversations with designers/suppliers and customers and

a set of exciting new designs

His passion convinced me and provided a great example of how an established organisation can use its cultural assets to stimulate innovation (and in this case design).

So having told the Pringle story (among others) and debated long into the night with some of the leading thinkers on creativity (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has informed much of Sparknow’s thinking on creativity and flow, was the conference guest of honour) what did I take away from ECCI XII and two weeks in Portugal?

art (especially Mural Art - thanks to Karina Jensen for triggering this in her presentation on the role of mural art in organisations) has a real place as a collective and collaborative catalyst. It is being used effectively in communities but how many companies might use a mural instead of words to depict a mission statement?
future stories have a real role to play in helping all people at all levels think about what clients will demand in years to come (thanks to Scott Bennett for a most stimulating lunchtime discussion about how to influence multiple stakeholders).
innovation managers and km professionals don’t talk enough (knowledge transfer is a key ingredient in innovation that few seem to have grapsed).
everyone is looking to measure ‘stuff’ in order to justify spend (thanks to David Cropley for sharing his CSDS model and a link to his book The Dark Side of Creativity).
creative people make things happen despite organisational structure which is often cited as the reason innovation is absent.
Pousadas of Portugal have to be the best value for money and the most historic accommodation in the world.

Evora Pousada overlooking the Roman Slaughterhouse

pocket guide to story collecting

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:30:00 +0100

Oftentimes we get approached to help with pieces of work/advice that fulfill more than one of Sparknow’s founding principles in this case, work that travels; work that benefits the global community.

Earlier this month the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Bogota, Colombia asked if we’d help them to think about how they might go about creating what they are calling

…a handy pocket guide to story collecting

Bringing the ‘fire of the field’ back from missions and the front line has been a constant theme of the work we’ve done with clients. Equipping researchers with tools and tips to collect the stories they see and hear seemed to us to be a natural extension of our work especially since we’d recently created a Narrative Practitioners Guide for a client which tackled many of the nuances and logistical issues that story collection materials normally overlook; naturally we were delighted to accept.

Our interest in the development arena dates back to our first encounter with Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation and the production of the story guide. It continued during the time we spent in the Middle East with Islamic Development Bank; in Asia with Asian Development Bank (where we introduced the use of found sound to amplify the experience and the concept of country mission books); and onto Africa during the mission to Darfur with World Health Organisation to help collect the experiences from the front line.

Simone Staiger Rivas (of CIAT) in the blog she recently published about this work seemed to us to capture perfectly the essence of what we’ve been attempting to do since 1997:

We were thinking about all the impressions that a researcher takes away from a trip, wherever the destination is: Amazing landscapes, surprising people, impressing sounds, curious objects from nature… What if we could motivate them to bring us some of those impressions “home”, what if we could share those impressions with colleagues? What if we could incorporate those testimonials in our blog posts, news items, and press releases in form of photo, video, sound? Wouldn’t we contribute to a common understanding of research for development challenges in a much concrete way? Wouldn’t this make our communication much livelier and richer? Wouldn’t we connect better with those colleagues and partners who we meet during those trips and with those who couldn’t be with us? The short answer and assumption is: Yes!

We join her in asking you to think about what you’d like to see in such a guide. Please take a peek at her blog post and comment.

Correspondence #1 | story systems for your company

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:22:00 +0100

I was trawling the archives and reminded of this letter, into which we put a lot of work, which I share, edited a bit.

Sometimes I think our letters should get a wider audience. Somewhere between meetings, proposals and email exchanges, a great deal of effort goes into inviting people to make sense of story system possibilities for them and we do that as often through letters as through other kinds of briefing notes or exchanges. I may, if I get daring, also forage in my extensive archives of complaints letters, of which my favourite recent one is to Richard Branson. Let’s see.

The letter, like the essay, is a much overlooked form of communication and invitation, and in particular the exchange of letters so favoured by 19th century romantic poets and such a critical part of scientific discovery, which presumably now happens in a more more patchworked way through messaging, email, academic paper and correspondence. There’s a line of enquiry. Correspondence. That’s a word to revisit.

September 2010

Dear Cornelius,

Story systems for your company

Philip and I both really enjoyed our meeting. At your request, I’m setting out some thoughts about how you and your company can take story systems and apply them to

the balanced scorecard
frontline engagement and toolkits
knowledge transfer
revitalising values
mergers, acquisitions and restructuring

1 | balanced scorecard

You’ve put a great deal of work into this new monitoring system, which has senior backing. Story tools will help with implementing the scorecard and building feedback channels such that it becomes a shared tool for monitoring, reflection and capacity building, not just a management instrument. The exchange of stories and insights that result also feeds back into material with which to engage employees and strengthen the brand story. By seeding story into management systems or existing workflows, you are building it right into the business rather than dressing the business in new clothes, and your suggestion about starting here is a really excellent one.

2 | frontline engagement & toolkits

Simple toolkits, with some training support strengthen front line management/ supervisors’ ability to engage with, problem solve with, and innovate with their direct reports. The whole of our recent experience with the national rollout of a train the trainer programme about making spaces for rehearsal, challenge, communication and exploration near the frontline of the organisation feels very pertinent and translates well to your company, as a classic manfacturing company. The trick with the our current work has been to find an approach whose simplicity hides its subteltly quite well. I’m attaching extracts from a handout shared at a key meeting in the middle of last year, to give you a flavour for both toolkits.

What we’ve also learned during the national rollout is how important it is to provide a very accessible written toolkit, with minimal theory, explanation or even reference to storytelling, so that it just feels like a practical resource, and one easy for the managers to take, adapt and use, rather than one that needs experts in it. This means that Philip has been constantly simplifying the materials, while also giving clues to those who are more interested in theory and context, as to where they can dig further.

3 | knowledge transfer

Virtual and face—face connections can be designed to stimulate and channel the exchange of information, insight and experience to enhance local performance based on the experiences of other parts of the business – whether across geographic, line of business or major customer boundaries. In particular, encouraging the transfer of useful insight from one place to another means that groups have to shift to making sense of what they know and expressing it in a way that others can use it. This can also build pride and confidence, so there are benefits within as well as between groups.

To go into great detail here would take a great deal of space, and is probably better handled in another meeting, if this turns out to be an area you want to look at. However, an example I can point to in the context of the knowledge transfer research and piloting we worked on with the London Development Agency from 2007 – 2010.

I’ll say a little here about the pilot programme in 2009 by way of illustration.

There were four pilots.

The first of these was an exchange programme. Around a dozen people from both museum/archive backgrounds and business backgrounds met monthly over six months in different locations, from John Lewis to the Foundling museum. Each meeting was structured to use the venue, the collections, the expertise of those present and outside speakers to explore a particular avenue, for example innovation, employee engagement, corporate social responsibility. Leading up to and away from these events there were blogs, newsletters, and careful archiving of the methods used, and the experiences and ideas shared. These were fed back into other meetings, toolkits and ultimately into the final report. Of the three other pilots, two took small grants (seed capital) to invest in experimental innovation in relationship between the cultural sector and businesses, and these stories in turn were then collected as material to share more widely as springboard stories for other practitioners.

There is no doubt that marrying the process of building new reflective capacity within a group to a kind of publishing and meeting strategy dynamic that fuels a broader discussion that can be carried much wider, has been very successful in that case and I see every reason why the bones of it could transfer (perhaps with a more competitive edge) into your setting.

I’ve plenty of materials on this, and am happy to share them.

We’re also currently working with a client on another example of building a story system that seeks to increase the lateral transfer of knowledge and experience. The idea starts with bringing a companion a recognised expertise in the field equipping the companion to be a story collector and translator, if I can use those terms. They’d have questioning and recording protocols, observing guidelines, PDA’s, recorders and so on, and the guidance to collect a body of materials and then recast these into items which make them accessible to others in the organisation. This is a quadruple win if properly managed:

building awareness in the story holder
developing the skills of the story collector
building their role as a broker of the materials (with which they’d be more intimate given how close they have come to the holder), and,
finding modular publishing formats that take this beyond a static storybank and into something quite different and dynamic.

Something like this could be applied either to existing travel, or job exchanges or moves, or be a new development, call them missions, that could also be knitted into organisational development and into planning meetings too for an extra kicker.

4 | revitalising values

Mission and value statements are hard to bring to life and sustain. You could use techniques such as story competitions or ‘story in a word’ to bring the ‘Our Values’ to life, making them relevant at the individual level and team level – shifting behaviours (in the right way), reinforcing the brand and brand values, improving coherence of the organisation (particularly if there is a direction of travel from many cultures towards a ‘One Business’ culture).

The theoretical underpinnings of this come largely from social constructionism and Ken Gergen’s work and we’ve used it extensively as a minor or major part of programmes of work, but perhaps the best example I can point to is the work that Madelyn Blair of Pelerei (a sister company) has done with the United Nations to refresh their charter.

A handful of ambassadors picked a word from the charter (say neighbourliness) and shared a personal experience of that word in action in UN work. The collected materials, on a DVD, are part of a communication programme within and beyond the UN to share those as trigger stories, and then invite others to share their own experiences of such a word, so taking it off the page, out of the charter and back into the lived meaning of the organisation.

I’ve also included a very sweetly designed example of story in a word in the appendices, not ours but really economical and simple in design and execution in its own cultural context.

5 | mergers, acquisitions, restructuring and change programmes

You spoke of a restructuring which has led to readiness for growth, either through building or buying. Story systems, in this context, can be a profoundly useful way both to honour the past, the new business(es) have their origins, and at the same time to make space for new joint possibilities. If there is to be a return to growth by acquisition as your trading position continues to improve, working with story can certainly help with the integration of new businesses into the organisation.

Our approach here is an embrace of fact and story, top down strategy and collections of personal, felt experiences that can help translate that strategy into an immediate and compelling invitation to the organisation to be participants, not passengers, in the change. We’d need to meet again for us to talk about this in more detail, but the moment of transition, ‘the neutral space’ as William Bridges calls it in ‘Managing Transition’ can be actively resourced with both the processes and the products of story to bring the new business about in a participative way that makes for an immediate and suprising statement about how things are different around here, and what role you can play in that.

I can also offer you here a more speculative design idea, building in part on the design of the Audit Commission research into strategic financial governance – in particular the successful use of timelines to prompt new insight, and on the knowledge transfer research programme.

I’m thinking in particular of one programme participant who worked at a major bank with many history archives (different banks, building societies and so on) that are regularly used for social research, but had not, until recently, been used for employee engagement.

As part of strengthening the brand, alongside the normal brand work, the communications team worked closely with the archivists to make sure that the distictive histories and characteristics of each of the original entities are woven into the broader engagement programme. So it’s a both and, brand & heritage, working alongside each other. I’m also reminded that Boots, in launching new products, will have an archivist, a research person and somebody from communications on the launch team and will use the stories from the archives to build the history of a product into the launch campaign.

Having sessions to find and share stories of individual product timelines, collectively, so that each of the merging entities gets a sense of the product history of the other, could be coupled with a knowledge transfer twist where several product teams across the divide could do this together and then explore the new possibilities that result from a better grasp of the histories, both recorded in the archives and remembered by participants. There might be some additional archive research, or use of objects here given how rich the language, imagery and history of of your product range is.

I hope that all gives you some useful expansion of our discussions in the meeting, and acts as food for thought.

I do also have various papers and case studies about knowledge things, and narrative work, and am sitting on a report on knowledge transfer in London businesses which is due to be published soon. I would be happy to share all of those, but don’t want to overwhelm.

I do hope your Great North Run went well. I’ve been watching swimming ladies training up in wetsuits for triathlons at the Ladies Pond and love the way the great outdoors is starting to be so much more part of our lives.

Yours sincerely

Victoria Ward

using stories and km to develop strategies people embrace

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:29:00 +0100

Strategy documents can be incredibly boring and couched in indecipherable language. Occasionally they reflect the views of people who actually undertake the day-to-day work. Frequently they are imposed top down after a lengthy (and costly) exercise in change management. And yet the people who have to carry out the implementation plan are at best indifferent and often disengaged.

The illustrations that follow are from senior people charged with developing and implementing IT strategies; how they used narrative and km to create and then reveal what technology might do for the business. In both cases the feedback was extremely positive and strategies approved.

The evolving role of the knowledge manager interviews have yielded a rich seam of material to mine, none more so than Sandra Higgison’s discussion with Barney Smith erstwhile CKO and CIO of Natural England and Defra respectively.

His description of how he and his team developed a strategy for IT struck a chord since it was similar to a piece of scenario building story work Philip Gibson undertook earlier this year for the CIO of a major reinsurance broker when he was preparing his IT strategy.

a Whitehall story

Here’s Barney’s story shown as an extract from his discussion with Sandra:

We went out to the business and painted portraits in words of what the service would feel like. We asked them to comment on what they felt about that. Then we interpreted that into techy, SLAs, statistical things. And we went back to them and said, this is what we’ve painted, this is what we’ve said. This is how we’ve interpreted it in terms of technology. It’s all a bit boring, but this is us hearing it from you.

The service was then rolled out both in Defra and in my user base. My user base had 15-20% higher user satisfaction with the same service.

Sandra:            Did you have different KPI’s?

No, same KPI’s, but because we explained and engaged with people in their language and they had an opportunity to contribute to what it would look like, they had more ownership and therefore were satisfied that they understood what they were getting and they were setting an expectation. We used KM techniques in doing that.

Sandra:            So what does a portrait in words look like?

A portrait with words is just a description of what it would look and feel like, in a way we could put out on the intranet. We did it as a Survey Monkey. We described something, said that’s what it looks like, imagine if a problem happens. This is what you would do, and this is the experience that you would receive. And then we asked them a series of questions against that scenario.

Sandra:            So is that what’s been put in place?

Yes. And we’ve subsequently done a satisfaction survey on what service feels to them and they’re very pleased with it. Whereas most people traditionally write an IT strategy by saying we’re going to deploy this technology and this thing in response to their stated needs. We actually did this.

We wrote 8 business scenarios, and then from that, we then devised what is the technology that was used. So now we started pulling out key messages—outcomes, visions, strategic themes, all joined to form these things. And then just to really get people really thinking differently we asked what people thought about business scenarios.

Sandra:            So this is a different piece than what you just talked about.

This is different. This came before we then went out to define the service levels. So we then mapped it against the corporate strategic outcomes. And we did something that a lot of people don’t do. We then conducted workshops with webinars, so people could see us live and about 10 other people on the phone, all audio conferenced in and seeing the same image.

We asked them a question. Put the mark on this slide somewhere between innovative and conservative and then decide on the rest.

—     Do we want our IT to be people-focused or technology-focused?

—     Do we want to do new development or concentrate on what we have?

—     Do we want to collaborate to do it on our own?

—     Do we want to be tactical or strategic?

—     Do we want to be front line or back office?

—     Do we want modular solutions or one-off solutions?

And these are senior managers across the business able to influence the way strategy works. And then we then also asked them to prioritize themes that came out of the issues. So we said, then we want you to prioritize the benefits. What are the benefits to building the evidence base? Is it low to high? Monetary? And from that we were monitoring, geographic literacy, mobile or flexible, collaboration, managing relationships, performance, and resource planning.

Again, and I think a lot of this, is v KMy. We’re not using technology language. We’re saying I’ve got the technology that’s working for me.

Sandra:            So if it’s not technology language, what kind of language would you describe it as?

It’s the language of the business. So it enabled us to do some prioritization, so we put maps against cost implementation, high cost here, low cost there, low to high benefit. We, the IT people defined that, the business defined that, and then we mapped it.

Sandra:            So what happened as a result?

That’s how we invested a substantial sum on IT.

Sandra:            What difference would it have made if you hadn’t had your background in KM?

I think we would have taken it more towards a technology strategy; what technologists driving the business would do, saying, wouldn’t it be great if we were all Macs or all PCs. Isn’t it wonderful what iPhones can do? But actually we said, let’s talk in the language of business. And my full time strategy person was a former head of knowledge management at English Nature. It was all KMrs that worked on this, but they then having done that analysis handed it on to the technologists to define, what do you do?

Sandra:            Interpreters.

And also in developing our strategy, it was okay, and in doing these things, we actually reached the objectives. How should we invest in setting standards? How can we have to invest in building technology and how much is it about the skills of the end user? And defining do we need a metadata framework? Do we need to build a new platform or application, or do we need new skills in the user base?

And some of these things, actually a lot of it was in the skills base. We have audio conferencing, but do people know how to use it? Do they know how to get the best effect out of it? We don’t want to give people more ability to send more emails. We want to teach people that when someone sends you an email, pick up the phone and speak to them.

a reinsurance story

While Barney was using km techniques to develop an IT strategy in government another client was using story scenarios to illustrate the potential impact that IT could have on the business. Here’s one of five business scenarios developed by Phil Hill, Managing Director BMS Management Services that illustrates what life might be like in the future at BMS for a new joiner:

scenario 5 | a change for the better

Jade Thompson is 35 and has worked in the London Market for 14 years. She has agreed to join BMS as a senior underwriter, moving on from one of the big managing agents. She wants to work for a company that really supports her initiative and drive – not one that swaddles her in red tape.

The week before Jade joins, she receives at home via courier a package from BMS.

Inside she finds an iPad, with a BMS logo with the slogan: “Using clever technology”. There’s also an iPhone, also with a BMS logo and her name.

She reads the attached note, welcoming her to BMS and giving her the logon and password information she needs to use the equipment. “Wow!” she says to herself, “this is great – they really know how to make you feel special.” Jade switches on the iPad and logs on as instructed. There‘s an icon on the first screen, “Welcome”. Touching the icon starts a video of the CEO welcoming her to the company. Various members of the board and HR provide insights into BMS and what she might expect in her first few days.

There is also a pointer to other information on the iPad, such as all aspects of the induction procedure including health and safety. Thrilling, she thinks to herself.

Checking further, Jade finds a comprehensive set of electronic brochures and videos about BMS and BMS products.

She accesses the Internet via a BMS Extranet icon. She can see the latest news as published by the Marcoms team, including details of her appointment.

Monday morning arrives.

She comes into the office with her iPhone and iPad. She meets HR to cover the final details – an unusually brief session. HR point out that her iPad contains a map of each of the BMS offices, and a directory of all staff, including photos, biographies and locations. She shouldn’t get lost. This information is provided by the office WiFi to which her phone and tablet connect automatically.

She is shown to her desk, which is clear of papers. She wonders how long it will stay like that. Then she notices that all the desks around it are similarly tidy. There is very little evidence of paper filing, and the office is airy and light. While her desk is in an open “trading” area, it feels as if she has plenty of space. She notices the effective use of the furniture, and again the lack of paper files.

She has a good session with Joe, her IT mentor. He is a member of her team responsible for understanding the opportunities provided by the company’s IT systems. Among other things, he shows her how to use of the CRM and content management systems, which are mandatory for all staff.

At the end of the day, she goes for a drink with a group of friends from her previous employer. They’re dying to find out about her first day. As she settles down, her friends ask what BMS is like…..

Phil has taken the concept of user profiling a stage further by demonstrating how a new joiner might be inducted into the business and the technology needed in support of his vision of the future. These scenarios were presented to the board who endorsed the 5 year IT plan as a result.

Intelligently applied stories and km techniques open up the most esoteric of topics; they create a sense of shared ownership improving the odds of people embracing the final outcomes.

knowledge tours = knowledge transfer (understanding puffins and olefins)

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:14:00 +0100

Those who follow our musings might recall that Sparknow (well Sandra Higgison mainly) has been interviewing a number of practitioners who’ve carved out interesting niche activities in the world of knowledge (management/transfer/exchange). The evolving role of the knowledge manager series is coming together nicely and throwing up many thrands (threads and strands) some of which we shared in a previous posting before the KMUK event held in June.

I’ve been trawling through the copious amount of content we’ve collected. And what an interesting and illuminating experience it has turned out to be.

Ahead of a trip to the ECCI creativity & innovation event in Portugal I was looking for examples of good knowledge transfer from km practitioners. Let me share one anecdote from an interview with Barney Smith a former CKO and CIO and champion yachtsman in response to a question on measurement.

Barney: 80% staff have attended a knowledge tour. Oh yeah, we did knowledge tours. That was cool.

Sandra: What’s a knowledge tour?

Barney: They were great! Natural England owns and manages about 0.6%% of England’s surface, its natural resource…we actually got people to leave their day job and come down literally. And rather than them doing job shadowing and things like that, we got them to build a day where staff could turn up and then could actually experience what that person does. And they could take 10-15 out. So if a person is responsible for monitoring environmental impacts around the Lundy islands, he would take people on a boat around Lundy island and looking at birds with a Lundy Warden.

Barney: Lundy (Norse for Puffin Island) is part of a Marine Conservation Zone managed by Natural England. The warden who lives on site managing it is actually an employee. We took our staff out to spend a day on the islands with the warden talking about puffins and things like that. But the point was for those people sitting in finance or those people sitting advising farmers on agri-environment schemes or those people who are promoting or designating the South Downs national park or New Forest national park, that’s what they’re doing at Lundy. And of course that was the pilot, great stuff. But we had the chief executives and senior staff who said everyone’s got 15 development days. One of those days must be knowledge tour.

And we even created one that’s virtual. So it was actually a guy walking land with a video camera, looking at things. And then he did a talk-over. It was done like a documentary.

It reminded me of a time long past when I was a lending banker managing a portfolio of energy clients. I knew little about hydro crackers and cat crackers, even less about olefins, polyamides and bottoms all of which were about to become part of my expanding oil and petrochemical vocabulary.

My boss, a visionary and talented Yale educated and very well travelled American who could and did argue vociferously in Arabic, Cantonese and English reasoned that if I were to be of value I needed to understand the practices and language of the industry I was working alongside. So courtesy of Mobil I attended a programme designed to educate financial people into the workings and economics of oil refining.

I never thought about that week at a refinery in Paulsboro New Jersey as a knowledge tour but now looking back I can see the connection and the importance of experiencing what others do in order to make better decisions. That this was a one off initiative and never replicated by the bank was regrettable since it gave me an insight into a world that would otherwise have been opaque and because I had a modicom of knowledge, the ability to have more meaningful dialogue with my clients.

Barney’s knowledge tours have become regular events, measurable as KPI’s and part of the knowledge charter used to mobilise and shape Natural England’s approach to knowledge management. That they are built into the calendar with compulsory attendance is key.

And finally and perhaps not unrelated the Lundy Puffin is no longer on the endangered list as a result of a programme to eradicate the island of rats.

back to life | using cultural assets to stimulate innovation

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:33:00 +0100

Writing this concluding blog reporting on the More than Money workshop on the road this warm Sunday afternoon in August, I am aware of how this reflection process which has not only allowed me to revisit the archives of research for the workshop and book Imaginative Muscle and have new conversations with people along the way, it has enabled a blog to be curated - longer than anticipated and one I hope you enjoy reading – that highlights how innovation and creative knowledge exchange in organisations and businesses can be explored through; objects, storytelling, human interaction and creative spaces and this is something to shout about.

Blog one we are not alone | illustrated the critical role of space and objects in knowledge exchange:

If there isn’t fluidity, comfortableness, adaptability the experience will not be an open and enjoyable one for the participants or the facilitators; we are not alone and we can listen and learn from our surroundings, colleagues, objects and buildings and takeaway an enjoyable experience, whilst learning along the way.

Blog two objects surface stories | stories provoke a response demonstrates:

Objects surface interesting stories, subjects, and avenues to explore; they overcome barriers in a group and are valuable icebreakers. We also found objects are catalysts for knowledge transfer and a powerful qualitative research tool.

The final blog back to life | using cultural assets to stimulate innovation tells the story of the workshop’s last exercise and how it opened up dialogues about businesses utilising heritage and cultural objects for business strategy and how objects play a key role as emotional indicators for innovative products to be developed. I use the term back to life, as the case studies used for the workshop, and Leeds Museums Galleries own stories, highlight tangible ways in which cultural objects and spaces and people can bring about relevant and innovation strategies in

* effective two way relationships expanding on a sponsorship partnership between a museum and a business

* a business; redesigning its headquarters, developing a cultural strategy: internal communications and branding through external communications

The case studies introduced attempted to discuss how a business uses an archive and objects as part of cultural strategy and to ask Leeds Museums and Galleries staff:

* can you think of good examples of business and archives working together in a two way relationship, how and why?

* how could a museum present to businesses advising them on how to develop cultural strategies through objects or if this is happening how and why?

One group told the story of how they had chosen the case study: Pringle of Scotland because they could relate to the processes and possible outcomes of the two-way relationship.

Case Study: The Pringle Archive 1815 - 2010

* Partnering with Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design

* Promoting and supporting talent through education project

* Completion of a comprehensive archive

* Development of future re-issues of iconic vintage styles and original Scottish manufacturing techniques

* BA History and Theory course researching and cataloguing the existing archive and hosting ‘Pringle Day of Record’ [see poster]

* Members of community bring along generations Pringle of Scotland and memorabilia to be recorded

* MA Fashion and Design Students design and create modern interpretations and exhibit at London Fashion Week
(source: Pringle of Scotland press release)

unique memories of the factory

We found this case study [Pringle of Scotland] was unique to the company. It was creating an archive from scratch. We felt that this was creating a historic archive where there wasn’t one, it was very much high knowledge transfer. It was all about gathering that knowledge. We felt that some of it was unique as Pringle of Scotland are trying to create something that would otherwise be lost and disappear; unique memories and artefacts related to the actual factory. Other companies who found themselves in similar situations [could use this] model.
The fact that it involved the training of students in research, oral history, collection management, interpretation, design skills and intergenerational interaction was important.
It potentially sounds like successful project, but it depends on the outcome and quality of the students’ work.

As part of this exercise the curator at Leeds City Art Gallery shared his story of how the paper collection was used in a two-way relationship project; a developed mentor project exploding the hierarchy in a law firm.

It started as an audience development project, asking people to come in and work with the collection. We invited a local firm of solicitors to select and curate an exhibition using artworks from the paper collection on the theme of landscapes. The firm did take a bit of persuading, as initially they couldn’t see what was in it for them. We weren’t thinking about business case scenarios at all, we wanted the employees to come and work with our collection. It ended up being a good case for the company as the participants were from all aspects of the company, not just senior management there were; senior management, partners and clerical staff. The project was about exploding the hierarchy within the business.

These kind of Community Choice exhibitions had happened before but people were simply asked to come and look at what’s in the store and an exhibition would be created from ‘Oh I like that, I’ll put that up’. We wanted to take it to another level, be a bit more of developed mentor in our approach.

We employed a facilitator to be a neutral voice, we didn’t want the ‘expert curator’ to dictate to the participants, and we didn’t want the curator’s knowledge and expertise to be relied upon. Participants looked at catalogues, and chose paintings they liked from a visit to the store. The facilitator asked people to start thinking about why they had selected that work and they ended up reconsidering their choices thinking about how their choices could work together in terms of an exhibition. This was revelatory, they saw that paintings weren’t just nice pictures on a wall, that they actually meant something and had a story behind them.

The project allowed people to mix with other people in the business they didn’t get to meet. It was a good example of developing people skills and confidence. The business used the exhibition as a communication tool to talk to their clients through a private preview event.

It is evident that the museum’s staff are working with objects in many knowledge exchange ways with business and other stakeholders. They are of course natural storytellers and More than Money enabled people to share new stories and experiences around objects that they work with everyday. One feeling that weighed heavy in this workshop was that new conversations, projects should be two-way and that outcomes of a project with a business are an important factor to be considered and implemented, conversations and relationships should be sustainable and not just be a fleeting experience.

A couple of snapshots of the businesses case studies used in More than Money follow. They identify the importance of objects; in archives, cultural artefacts, or human objects, for various business strategies:

corporate communications

In 2010, we started a series of history brochures - the first one was ‘Barings in the Middle East’ - designed to show clients that we have long tenure in the markets where we are operating. It has been pretty memorable putting these history brochures together because they actually involved me going to the archive and looking through the documents myself, with obviously Moira and Claire there helping me and obviously finding the right material and steering me in the right direction. There’s something special about looking through the old documents and seeing the letters that the partners themselves must have written at that time, it’s a real historical experience.

Alasdair Anderson [pictured below] Barings ’ Investment Communications Manager. To read more on Barings see the blog the function of a business archive

cultural strategy | building design

‘Standard Chartered is known for its strong values driven culture. Our values: courageous, responsive, international, trustworthy and creative, were here before this building. When our buildings are designed and planned our values are always at the back of everyone’s mind. The reception [picture below] reflects our business focus in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The different artefacts were picked to reflect out interesting history and culture. Art and artefacts are moved around the building from time to time to create freshness and surprise.’

Andrew Hunter, Group Head of Corporate Real Estate Services, Standard Chartered Bank, to read more see blog source the ‘heritage’ object

internal communications

Recently, I met John Entwisle, Group Archivist, Thomson Reuters for a coffee and catch up at the Museum of Docklands; his insight into the important business use of an archive is poignant in these austere times:

‘you ‘flog’ your heritage, it has a higher priority as it makes the business unique and interesting’

The picture below is John at his desk writing his ‘exciting’ story blog that he sources from the archive and distributes in a newsletter every few weeks to 56,000 staff. The blog has a huge response and the comments section is very active, often identifying related stories for John to investigate. It is seen as an important knowledge tool that staff can read in their lunch hour.
For more information please see the blog: what is an archive

I would now like to share with you some quotes from the book Onward; How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing it Soul by Howard Shultz CEO of Starbucks - a bit of light reading in-between PhD research books. The quotes sum up

* how a business in a time of trouble reflected on its practices and direction and went back to its finding aims to develop strategies that were relevant to changing times and sustainability

* how human experience is a key area of development internally to enhance to the customers experience

* how curation of its stores are crucial to the customers physical Starbucks experience amongst a stores objects are integral to its success

* how success changes and has to re-assessed but always be tied to founding aims and ethics

We can look at these and ask how could More than Money enhance innovation through objects?

A New Way to See

Feeling somewhat skeptical, I entered the large event space of Seattle’s Palace Ballroom for a three-day brainstorming retreat. Historically, I was not a fan of business consultants. Rarely had I looked to outsiders to tell Starbucks what Starbucks needed…

Starbucks’ leaders debated, disagreed, and occasionally laughed as we envisioned a future that involved much more than opening new stores.

We had a delicate balance to strike.

A balance between heritage and innovation.

Between meaningful tradition and modern-day relevance…

I told them [participants] the meeting was about much more than making money or putting bandages on old wounds. We needed to rediscover who we were and imagine who we could be….

Our ongoing challenge is to creatively nurture coffee’s essence, keeping it personal despite our size. I do not want Starbucks to be defined solely by its thousands of stores or millions of customers. More than our scale, the brand can and should be defined by the quality of its coffee as well as its values. Community. Connection. Respect. Dignity. Humor. Humanity. Accountability.

It is our mission to make sure the world sees us through these lenses.

Benevolence

Our partners’ attitude and actions have such great potential to make our customers feel something. Delighted, maybe. Or tickled. Special. Grateful. Connected. Yet the only reason our partners can make our customers feel good is because of how our partners feel about the company. Proud. Inspired. Appreciated. Cared for. Respected. Connected.

..we do have high expectations of ourselves as we try to manage the company through the lens of humanity.
Starbuck’ coffee is exceptional, yes, but emotional connection is our true value proposition.

..our founding mission [was] to achieve the fragile balance of profit with a social conscience.

Magic

I love to experience different stores…I am a sponge, always soaking up store design, layout, and salespeople’s behaviors…

..one of my favorite places to visit it Colette…The owners are curators, and shopping Colette is an adventure in discovery.

The merchant’s success depends on his or her ability to tell a story. What people see or hear or smell or do when they enter a space guides their feelings…I have always understood this. So when, in 2006 and 2007, I walked into more and more Starbucks stores and senses that we were no longer celebrating coffee, my heart sank. Our customers deserved better.

Paul and I hope you’ve enjoyed this story of More than Money out on the road and the extra little noticings that have been found on this journey. If you would like to hear more on how businesses can utilise cultural assets for innovation Paul is a guest speaker at 12th Biannual European Creativity & Innovation Forum 2011 14-17 September, University of the Algarve, Faro, Portugal on the subject of Flexing the Imaginative Muscle: how London’s businesses are using the capital’s cultural assets to stimulate innovation.

We’d like to thank the following in the development of this workshop: Camilla Nichol, Head of Collections at Leeds Museums and Galleries; Mark Gould, Head of Knowledge Management at Addleshaw Goddard, Manchester, Leeds, London; Alasdair Anderson, Investment Communications Manager, Baring Asset Management; Andrew Hunter, Group Head of Corporate Real Estate Services Standard Chartered Bank; Moira Lovegrove, Archivist, The Baring Archive, Bernie Harrington, Head of PR and Marketing,Pringle of Scotland; Stefania Riccini, Visitors Service Manager„Hunterian Museum Rachel Collins, Wellcome Collection, Judy Faraday, Partnership Archivist John Lewis Partnership; John Entwisle, Archivist Thomson Reuters; Sarah Mahurter, Special Collections Manager at University of the Arts, London; Martin West, Commissioning Editor, Gower Publications and to the funders of the Knowledge Transfer research: MLA London and London Development Agency.

Text from Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, by Howard Schultz with Joanne Gordon, 2011, A John Wiley and Sons, Ltd Publication is reproduced with kind permission of the publishers.

Author: Julie Reynolds [julie.reynolds@sparknow.net]

Contributing Editor: Paul J Corney [paul.corney@sparknow.net]

putting km tools to work I importance of facilitation

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:03:00 +0100

A blog from Swiss Development Corporation hit my inbox this week. In it SDC practitioners were examining how some of the tools promoted by their original km team had been used.

Applying Knowldge Management Tools at Work is worth a read as is the Knowledge Solutions set produced by the km team at Asian Development Bank and perhaps the best of the lot Overseas Development Institute’s knowledge and learning toolkit published back in 2006.

The blog caused me to reflect that while knowledge managers are not short of reference points or advice on how to go about things there is no one size fits all template to describe the role, where it sits and the skills to discharge it. Unlike CIPD or CIM there is no recognised industry body. And those that might be closely related such as SLA or CILIP have not claimed the km space. Instead conference organisors award ‘gongs’ at their events and others rely on the MAKE awards to signify progress.

Last week Victoria and I were in the Caribbean presenting the outcomes of a piece of km strategy work for a client. Ours was a rigorous and open discussion with senior management so it was gratifying to tackle head on some of the key issues many organisations face. We talked about how to capture the knowledge of impending retirees; how to ensure new staff are inducted most effectively so they understand the DNA of the organisation, moreover that their expertise is recognised and valued; and perhaps most importantly how to exploit their unique insights on the region.

Most km discussions though tend to land in the same place: what does a knowledge manager do, where do they sit in the organisation, what are there crossover points (Organisational Development, Learning, HR, IT, Strategy, Communications/Marketing) and how do we measure impact? Success depends on individuals, the passion they bring, their ability to judge what to do and when and the way they present to/influence many stakeholders.

In the research Sandra Higgison has been undertaking on the evolving role of the knowledge manager time and again the thrands (themes and strands) led us back to the need for good facilitation skills and in future posts we will be examining what that means in more detail.

By way of an illustration I will conclude here by describing courtesy of Martin White who drew my attention to this example of how good facilitation built into a process can encourage dialogue and hence knowledge exchange.

This picture, a typical wedding scene, shows the bride to be greeting all the guests before they enter the church for the ceremony. She introduces friends and family to each other so that there is no ‘bride and groom’ side of the church. People who have been introduced mingle and are more likely to converse at the wedding breakfast thereafter. This simple act of facilitation (a ingrained tradition) helps shape the event.

So while not every km professional can be a bride we can suggest that a core competence in putting the km tools to work is facilitation. Toolkits are vitally important but without the skill and processes to deploy them they are a wasted investment.