stories & organizations

‘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.

These were the words of one of the participants in the first round of the World Cafe held on the second afternoon of the 4th conference on knowledge management and organizational learning in Bogota.

Actually these were not precisely her words, as I was hearing them through the veil of translation, with my brilliant and kind translator who sat with me patiently all afternoon and made it possible for me to be present and contribute.

The whole experience of my day at the conference impressed me. Apart from anything else, where in Europe would you have the first keynote speaker starting at half past seven in the morning and the closing panel finish at six and have a pretty full house right the way up to five o’clock - something around 130 people I think.

This was also a World Cafe with a twist, as Juanita Brown, one of the originators of the concept, was actually on her family ranch in the US and the Bogota anchor was Luisa Sucre. A cameraman roved, through whose eyes Juanita got as close as she could virtually to what was going on in the room. This was the first ‘Cinema Cafe’ and it worked, so I think we can expect more extensions of the World Cafe format into virtual spaces.

I’ll write another time about the World Cafe experience, as what I want to note here is some of the observations that came from a highly focused group of participants who heard two presentations about speed, social media, connectedness and networks, and then my offering on how we need to find breathing spaces, the story spaces in an organization where values, insights and experiences can be passed from one generation to the next.

• How does the speed, urgency and shortness of, say, twitter, fit with stories which need more room to expand and find their shape?
• How do we find the time for stories?
• How can we apply these techniques to retaining knowledge as people leave?
• How can we apply stories to illuminate the technical - for example technical and procedural manuals?
• How can we move away from the written word and work more thoughtfully across all different media?
• How can I marry my professional preferences for structured knowledge with the unstructured approaches that social media provides?
• Can I reorganise shift meetings to be less functional and embrace a more storied approach?
• How can I make sure the voices of frontline experience are properly heard?
• How do I learn to ask good questions?
• Not everybody is a good teller. Do we need to have training in telling stories, not just for our knowledge management team, but for the whole organization?
• Where do we start with building in storytelling?

Those are a few of the questions and conversations I recall, and that’s just my small part of the warm conversational soup that was being stewed up all day.

This was a highly practical and curious audience who left no scrap of what they were offered unexamined. Unusually, this was coupled with an almost completely wholehearted acceptance of storytelling approaches as holding promise, even by the most technical, scientific and structured thinkers there. Not only that, but a subtle understanding of the fact that this is a marriage of process and product. The process of engagement by which stories tumble out and start to take shape and form, must be prized as much as the end product and I was bowled over by how this vital insight seemed to have been grasped by this audience so very fast.

I’ve been tussling with the relationship between social media and story myself and this brought the struggle under a very bright light for me. The fever of instantness, global connection and speed, compounds th relativeness lightness of touch working across the world through quite flimsy relationships with relative strangers to increase the viral channels through which a small story can gather pace and travel very fast, putting a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.

That kind of speed feels magic, wondrous, almost addictive. It also prizes the lurid, the grotesque, the dramatic, the bizarrely banal turned on its head, except in cases where the conveyer of the hashtagged snippet feels a sense of responsibility to others in what’s being conveyed - say in hashtagged eye witness accounts of the Japanese nuclear disaster, or after the Haiti earthquake. I’ve not done the research, but I’d say there’s an interesting exploration of the language, tone and seriousness with which people use the media depending on how they see themselves as helping others to act.

There’s nothing wrong with speed as an attribute of stories: Steve Denning’s springboard story concept is all about witty compression of a big idea into a small space so that it can jump out at you like a jack in the box and do its work.

All the same I call to mind Ray Bradbury’s brilliant Fahrenheit 451, the science fiction book about a world in which the task of firefighters is to burn books, all books. Those who wish to continue to have books must become them by learning them by heart and live in constant fear for their lives as refugees from a society that hunts them down:

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information’. Then they’ll feel they are thinking. They’ll get a sense of motion without thinking. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

Don’t we need more melancholy if we are to feel?  As my World Cafe table companion said, what you don’t feel you don’t experience. My troubled take on social media is that it can so easily be an obstruction to feeling, creating a slippery surface over which we skate, rather than giving us room to sink into things and touch and be touched by them.  Evidently there is both and. Also, social media is young and energetic and will, over time, settle and find a way of slowing things down as well as speeding them up. The jigsawed crowdsourced shaping of a much bigger narrative from tiny, immediate, eyewitness accounts is intriguing and I know at least one PhD who is looking at how one can crowdource scenarios. Crowdsourcing stories and changing the story by so doing is clearly already happening in the Arab spring, among other things. Just that we story people and Louis Fourie’s social media and networks thinkers haven’t yet pooled our thinking as intently as we might.

I don’t really have a fiery or witty bon mot to end on here, as I’m still fumbling to find the question I’m asking, so I’ll end with a rather useful list for story making that derives from our work on value stories with the ADB.

a handy checklist for shaping stories of value, values and impact

• 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? The discomfort? The melancholy?
• 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? What questions does it leave me with?
• 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?
• In a big, predictable case study, have you found a way to come at it sideways, an unusual angle that hooks me in, despite myself?
• 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?

‘If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching’

Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘The Blue Flower’

And here to end with from my day out with Louis Fiori, Professor of Information Systems at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, a picture comes from Montserrate, a church high up over Bogota.