stories & organizations

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.

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’