stories & organizations

Eglantyne Jebb was an extraordinary woman who cofounded Save the Children with her sister, Dorothy, in 1919.

I’m researching the Save the Children Alliance just now so I skimmed the great biography by Clare Mulley which tells her story as the original humanitarian. There’s always great interest for me in finding the founders or foundations of an organisation, ever since a psychotherapist I know pointed out to me that the imprint of the founder can never be escaped (thus making most change programmes entirely redundant in her view). I’m not going to dwell on any of that, because you can read it all for yourselves, but I wanted to pick out three knowledgey/storytelling things that struck me with great force:

1| The marriage of narrative and analysis

I’m rather wary of the polished Big Brand Story, and of much organisational storytelling which tugs at the heart strings in order to wrench some emotion back into the dusty, shrivelled settings of many emotional spaces. My inner humourless researcher (who lurks just below the surface at all times I suspect) rises up at the charming little anecdotes, whose delicacy or poignancy is a gateway to the bigger sell. I like my stories well drenched in solid facts and my facts deliciously illuminated by good, but slightly raw storytelling.

In 1915, four years before Save the Children was launched Dorothy, with Eglantyne roped in, started to publish ‘Notes from the Foreign Press’  - translated extracts:

Things quickly snowballed, and soon [Dorothy] was supervising a major operation with vast teams of voluntary linguists and specialists in current affairs translating over a hundred papers a week…carefully representing a balance of royalist, socialist, conversative, republican and independent editorials. (p.213)

She and her sister knew they were up against it at the end of the first world war, fighting xenophobia, and the casting of the German as the demon other, and the they needed somehow to finder a cooler, more neutral campaigning space too, even while they were engaging hearts, and some years before the founding momentum crystallised into the organisational entity. A kind of massively considered ‘in their shoes’ to make the story more complex than the ‘us and them story’ of wartime (much as the compelling Alan Bleasdale ‘Sinking of the Laconia’ did with its uncomfortably good U-Boat commander. Disturbing our assumptions and prejudices must be what good storytelling does? I should add that according to Bleasdale on Front Row, he used the frustrating lull between commission and fundraising to read up every scrap of archive and writing he could find on the subject, so the facts lurking behind the story are robust. That’s connected thread on storytelling which we shouldn’t be diverted by now, but one to do with the selected suppression of inconvenient stories by those in power: it didn’t suit either the Germans or the English that there should be a U-Boot-Kommandant mit einem Herz.)

When it came later to Save the Children, Eglantyne carried with her this knowledge  that facts were vital to make her case in sufficiently neutral territory to persuade, to invite while exhorting, and went to extraordinary lengths to gather in the facts that would marry to feelings. If that’s not knowledge management spliced with a coherent take on the point of an orchestrated storytelling approach, I don’t know what is.

2 | Multi media campaigning

Eglantyne was an arch campaigner (‘passion, compassion and daring publicity’ p.272), decades ahead of her time, and was probably the first to make the most of bringing the story down to human levels with provocative pictures a starving child splashed onto posters. 

In fact, she wasn’t even that keen on children, as children, and her first ambitions were for a National Relief Fund, but was astute in deciding on  the strategic and tactical case for sticking with a focus on children, partly because of the evidence, partly because children represented the future, and could be, in turn, the supporters of a more humane world order in generations to come. She was therefore, homing in on a brand message which made a lot of sense on many levels, present and future.

3 | A tin of condensed milk

And to her personal storytelling, she was quite diffident as a speaker, although able to engage enough people to turn up to the founding meeting at the Royal Albert Hall for there to be queues round the block. 

She was the closer:

“Every tin of babies’ food which private effort can send out comes as a token of sympathy and a message of new hope to some despairing mother.” p. 245

And here is the masterstroke that sends a shiver of appreciation down my spine:

Looking round at her now-silent audience Dorothy realised that they had carried the moment, and she sealed the success of the meeting with a brilliant piece of adlibbing. ‘There is a more practical morality in this tin’, she called out, waving a tin of condensed milk above her head to tumultuous applause ‘than in all the creeds’. So Save the Children was launch as a spontaneous collection was taken up round the hall. p. 245

I’ve been wondering whether they still have that selfsame tin of condensed milk in the archive. In terms of using objects as storytelling vehicles, it’s hard to think of a stronger moment, (the SDC use the term ‘moment fort’ to describe storytelling moments in their work, and I think that’s a nice turn of phrase to apply here.) Springboard storytelling without peer.

She died, rather suddenly at 52, following a stroke, only a few years into the work, but Save the Children grew rapidly, and has sustained its position as an enormously influential global collection of national organisations which last year reorganised as an alliance. I think I’m right in saying that it’s the only NGO to run a global cluster: the rest are all run by UN agencies. 

And so back to the knowledge management. This must be the best single knowledge-enabled corporate strategy I’ve ever seen anywhere. She wrote:

“Let us clearly understand that it is not impossible. Three things are required to save children from their misery: Money, Knowledge, Good Will.

We have the money - but we spend it on other things. We have the knowledge - only we do not apply it. Can we not cultivate this good will, which will enable us resolutely to utilise our resources in money and knowledge for the saving of the children of the world and with them the future of the race?”

I’ve been looking over some of the research I did earlier this year when exploring knowledge mangement for emergency preparedness and response. I thought it might be useful to share an edited version of an email to my client after a wedding where I explore the possibility of a common communication protocol for written and verbal briefings that expands and contracts, depending on time, place and circumstances to be more or less storied. I don’t suppose I have either the exact terminology or the facts right. I don’t think that matters.

Dear all,

I was at the wedding of a friend on Saturday.  At lunch I sat next to a friend of hers, M. who has been to Afghanistan twice and is about to come out of the British Army.

We had a long and interesting (to us, but doubtless dull to the others on our table) conversation about the passing of knowledge and information in emergency settings and how the complex of humanitarian agencies and organizations makes for a cultural mishmash on which it’s very difficult to impose a structure, although apparently the Army is suprisingly individualistic and varies from regiment to regiment, but also has to deal increasingly with the UN/NGO set up to get its work done.

Most interesting was our conversation about the British army orders, which I think we might want to look into more.

The current version of orders was invented, a bit by accident it seems, in Northern Ireland about 30 years back. (The person who I spoke with knows the originator who was his Brigadier). It’s a very structured form of developing briefings with a template of questions that the briefing needs to answer.  

In training (and very realistic simulation), soldiers are taught to write and deliver briefs.

They start from the principle of the most comprehensive orders you could write if time were unlimited and then work towards the condensed version.  Because templates are so structured, people carry them in their heads and when orders are delivered under stress and need to be truncated, this template for an order allows the deliverer of the message to have people who are listening know how it is being shortened and take it on board.

There’s lots of adapatibility in orders structure, while being so structured and individual leaders deliver them in very different styles.  They also take account of the emotional conditions (say killing people or dealing with injury) and introduce quite an element of personal storytelling into those orders where an emotionally complex situation needs to be conveyed.

We spent quite a bit of time considering the training challenge of setting up orders as a key tool for the passing of information and knowledge in a humanitarian aid emergency response.  It would have real benefits as a unifying cultural device (a step beyond the current weekly reporting and regular OCHA meetings, which have some of the qualities I’ve listed) that bridges institution and hierarchy, and seems to have possibilities as an idea that marries structure and adaptability, organization and individual.  

The challenge would be to look at how to adapt it and how to insist on something like this across many different organizations and settings.  This could be a great topic for the operational research that the knowledge strategy as it currently stands has as a priority.  Also, in a way, it’s a pretty simple and vivid idea to take to the frontline of emergency in different countries and organizations and use as a way to have an intelligent and reasonably neutral, conversation about what can be done to re-engineer communication, verbal and written, towards the frontline of action.  

The idea that military communication is a useful source of ideas for humanitarian aid is a common one anyway, and evident in the increasing role of people with a military background in different organisations involved in emergency preparedness and response.

We spoke briefly about After Action Reviews too: they might take five minutes or several months, but these are also key and highly democratic.  In the moment of feedback, everyone from the ordinary soldier upwards can be frank about what the leaders did wrong and this gets taken and  used actively in reviewing procedure.  M. thought again the structure and flexibility of the AAR a key knowledge tool for frontline action.

While I was listening to M., and then later when thinking about it, the image of the orders structure as a concertina came to me. At full compression, it’s not a story at all, it’s an urgent briefing, but the listening hooks are there in the listening soldier to take that and use it wisely. At full expansion it can loop and wind and bend and weave and be fully storied, backed up by the facts, to give room for the puzzling out and making sense and personal interpretation that will make it a shared risk management resource. In the middle it’s a kind of storylite, fast on its feet, travels well, with enough texture and context to snag in the soldiers’ memory and do its work.

The discipline of expandable and contractable structures that echo each other feels a solid idea to me and it’s worth more design thinking to join the verbal and written (or composed) versions in some organisationally useful way. It’s certainly one of the key principles of designing and installing story systems that I’ve been working on for the past few months.

You might, by the way, think that doing research at a friend’s wedding is a bit odd, but you don’t chose the times and places of discovery or who you learn from. You just need to be present and notice.

I’m writing from Hammamet, in Tunisia, where I’ve the privilege of spending some time with colleagues from around the world who work together on preparedness and emergency response in health. I’m not here directly as part of the training that’s going on, but to support it and work alongside it on the work we’ve been doing for a little while on an information and knowledge strategy in this context. It is one of the most satisfying strategy pieces I’ve had the privilege of doing, both because I got to go to Darfur and use a version of our narrative research method with an enthusiastic client, and because of the appreciation, right across the client, of what Sparknow and our approach can bring to building intelligent, workable and meaningful strategies.

This, and some other interesting tussles over the years, has led me to think pretty hard about knowledge strategies and their development (especially given that I recently looked out my first strategy, developed between November 1996 - June 1997 and was hit as they say by a sense of deja vue all over again). I’ve set myself the task of making A Useful List of pointers for others that I will share in due course. I’ve also recently read a terrific article, under peer review, by Patrick Lambe, on the messy origins of knowledge management and I’ll bring that in too, with his permission.

For now, I do know, though, people tend to look in the wrong place and want a product, when really what they need is a lively and continuous process. In this sense, as my client was saying this afternoon, the least important part of a knowledge strategy is the product and its real importance is in its role as a negotiating instrument that convenes people around a subject and gives them a heated conversation space, and a reason to change their habits, build relationships of trust, take a few risks, stay on board when things get a bit bumpy, bring their own ideas in and see them taken up across the organisation. There’s a mix of demand and encouragement that needs to thread right through the process, over years with the kind of coherence that makes it possible for people to invest themselves fully.

All of our best and most satisfying work in this area has been where the client throws themself into a participatory process where we find out together where they need to head, and help them to get ready to set off in that direction at the same time.  This was borne out recently when we went back and looked at a small assignment with Natural England, two years on. It turns out that part of the method had triggered a new reflection process that has been seeded into knowledge projects coming up next year. We’re just updating the case study now to publish in the next couple of weeks.

The process also needs to give room to find an ambition that makes sense of things, as Antoine de Saint-Expurey has it:

If you want to build a ship, don’t gather your people and ask them to provide wood, prepare tools, assign tasks. Call them together and raise in their minds the longing for the endless sea. 

Much along the lines of an old quote I’ve always liked from Simon Armitage in the New Scientist Where Science and Poetry meet (August 2006)

Science didn’t take men to the moon. It may have worked out the trigonometry, but it was a poetic dream that propelled us into the heavens.

I do feel it’s important to fight for the poetry in strategy, for the vital threads of raw experience that make meaning of abstract concepts, and for the room for full bodied contribution, with the right to dissent and challenge right across the organisation, that combine to result in a strategy for everyman.