communication

This blog entry on Open Forum got me thinking.  Specifically this paragraph:

"Find some truth tellers. The first thing every CEO must realize is that everyone is lying to him (her too). It just happens. They didn’t coin the phrase “shoot the messenger” for no reason. There are many wonderful organizations out there for CEOs that provide truth-telling services. Vistage is an international group whose tag line is something like “Have your answers questioned.” It’s pretty clear that their ideal customer is the CEO who recognizes that even people who are closest to them might shield them from important information and feedback. "

One of our key offerings is creating "upward" communication channels in organisations offering CEO's and executives the opportunity to access un-filtered narrative fragments, giving them a view of the inner dialogue happening in the organisation. A key question for us is: Do you really know what people are saying about your strategy, your team and the organisation when they're standing around the water cooler? ....

CIO magazine reported on a research piece done by The Burton Group on why large organisations find it difficult to adopt social networking internally when their employees use it so easily outside of work.

Some of the key issues identified are the same ones that have hamstrung many KM initiatives.

Here's an excerpt from the article, I especially like the quote in bold towards the end of the final bullet point ...

Someone sent me this funny anecdote about the consequences of assuming the person you're communicating with understands what you mean ...

Employee; "Yello Bakery, how I can help you?"
 
Customer; "I would like to order a cake for Friday."
 
Employee; "What you want on cake?"
 
Customer; "Best wishes Suzanne." and underneath that, "We will miss you." 

The result ...

A futurist named Marvin J. Cetron who apparently predicted 9/11 has just released the outcomes of a study that Cetron’s Forecasting International carried out for the Pentagon.  This report outlnes several possible prime US terrorism targets and it makes for interesting reading.

The report outlines 10 potential scenarios.  What makes them really compeling (and chilling) is the narrative form in which they are written.  It proves what we have always advocated: using story or narrative is much more compelling and convincing than using statistics or dry facts.

Here's one of the scenario's listed (for all 10, go to Newsmax.com).

There's a constant challenge we face when working with narrative material in business - that at some deep level, employees feel a resistance to telling anecdotes and stories in the organisational setting. Sometimes the resistance is direct, "We don't get paid to tell stories!".

Somewhere in our history as people who have sold our souls to business, we have lost track of our natural ability to a) tell a story, and b) recognise when we are in fact relating a story to someone. Prof Dave Snowden has accounted for some of this change in a recent blog entry where he said this:

In the western tradition by allowing Andersen and the Brothers Grim to formalise our stories we froze them at a point in time and terminated their evolution.

I'm convinced that people have not lost the ability to tell stories in organisations, but that rather people have developed an ability to shroud their stories in opinion and analysis. Instead of telling a story, we now offer up opinions and analysis on the basis of the experience we've had.

And so, our naysayers are right, you don't get paid to tell stories in business. Instead, we are incentivised to turn stories into general opinions and sterile analyses.

Dave will be running a Cognitive Edge accreditation course in SA from 3rd - 5th March 2008 where we'll explore the phenomenon of stories and explore how to use them. Would be great to see you there.

Click here for more information.