narrative

James Geary gives a great TED talk on Metaphor.  It's definitely worth watching.  We've been convinced of the power of metaphors, especially base metaphors in human systems and the way they govern behavior. 

As Geary says, a metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words.  They live a secret life all around us, according to him we utter 6 metaphors per minute.  It's therefore not surprising that they have a tremendous impact on how we see and behave in the world.

We're often asked what the difference is between a focus groups and surveys and our approach to research.  I think this cartoon by Tom Fishburne illustrates the problem with most focus groups perfectly.  They are influenced by the facilitator (whether consciously or not) who is usually trying to prove a pre-existing hypothesis.  Our pre-hypothesis approach aims to obtain true insight into the perceptions of staff, customers etc, by mitigating against facilitator bias, and asking indirect questions aimed at eliciting narrative with no pre-existing hypothesis. 

Aristotle said: “The greatest thing by far is to have mastered the metaphor.” And the Spanish philosopher and writer Jose Ortega y Gasset added, “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.”

Sonja and I are in Cape Town tomorrow for the Unashamedly Ethical conference on Friday and Saturday. Since the release of the King 3 report on corporate governance earlier this month, there is increased pressure for Board's and Directors to report on and manage the ethical performace of their companies.

Managing ethics?

The reality is that the realm of ethics is a profoundly complex problem, a problem that escapes direct management ... added to this complexity is the problem of human nature i.e. an unethical person is unlikely to admit to being unethical if asked. For organisations to effectively manage and report on ethics performance, a different approach is required – an approach that understands the complex nature of human behaviour, beliefs and values. To this end, we are exploring an offering that adoptis a complexity-based narrative methodology:

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? ....

The 2009 Cognitive Edge Accreditation kicked off in Johannesburg today. We're running the accreditation in conjunction with Cognitive Edge and Steve Bealing (CEO) is here from Singapore running the session.

It's Steve's first visit to South African, and Africa for that fact. He's on a whirlwind learning curve on South African culture and traffic ... 

We'll be live-tweeting the event over the next few days at http://twitter.com/narrativelab. Follow us there for course updates, thoughts and nuggets of wisdom on narrative and complexity.

People often ask why "appreciative enquiry" is not our methodology of choice, and why so many negative stories, archetypes and values surface in our processes.  One of the key arguments is that humans don't tend to learn from other people's success as it is very difficult to replicate, we can however learn much from other's mistakes as it tells us what to avoid. 

This great post by Shawn from Anecdote about the "non-crime hotline" serves to illustrate.

Our mining safety research collaboration with Deloitte has been profiled on Mining Weekly. Feel free to read/comment/distribute it. Read it here.

In our mine safety research one of the key issues is determining the actual root causes of unsafe behavior.  These are usually deeply rooted in entrenched belief systems and metaphors. 

This story, that I found on Bob Sutton's blog, illustrates how determining what is actually driving behaviour (in this case workplace theft), can lead to astoundingly simple (and cheap) solutions.  In fact, as you'll see in the story, the more expensive solutions (installing cameras) made the situation worse ...