Garr Reynolds celebrates learning via narrative

You don't have to read this blog very often to learn that I love the work of Garr Reynolds on developing and delivering excellent presentations. I've bought his book and plan to read and review it in the next few weeks. In the meantime, however, Garr continues to give away his knowledge and learning via the Presentation Zen blog and today he touches on (among several other items) one of my favorite topics: learning via narrative.

In reviewing a Google Talk of Cornell economist Robert Frank, he highlighted some of Frank's thinking about learning, and in particular two remarkable quotes:

At its core, the narrative perspective holds that human beings have a universal predisposition to "story" their experience; that is, to impose a narrative interpretation on information and experience.

Walter Doyle and Kathy Carter, University of Arizona

and

[children] turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection.... If they don't catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn't get remembered very well, and it's not very accessible for further kinds of mulling over.

Jerome Bruner, "Narrative and Paradigmatic Modes of Thought"

Exactly right. This is about the most straightforward and commonsense explanation for the value of narrative in the businessplace that I can imagine. Given that, everyone involved in business leadership should work on understanding and using these concepts to teach their staff--and to learn from them.

It starts now.

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The full Robert Frank speech is below:

Find out what the "followers" think using story-gathering

I shied away from the upcoming book called "Followership" by Barbara Kellerman because I recoiled from the title, I think. I picture numbed souls trooping behind some charismatic leader, pointing the way to a promised land of market leadership. Which never arrives.

I've felt like those followers from time to time. And one of those leaders, as well.

But as described in today's Wall Street Journal, in an article by George Anders, I'm more intrigued by the book. I agree, for one thing, that big companies grow static because the rank-and-file (a better term than followers? I don't know) have lost heart. They come for the paycheck, try to stay under the radar so when job cuts happen, they get overlooked. Etc.

So, from that perspective, energizing the rank-and-file has a lot of potential to improve companies. It can't replace true leadership (see previous post), but combining a good strategy, competent leadership and an engaged and motivated workforce can create a world-beating company.

But how to engage the workforce? The Journal article summarizes one big problem:

"Look at why big companies die," says Shari Ballard, Best Buy's executive vice president, retail channel. "They implode on themselves. They create all these systems and processes -- and then end up with a very small percentage of people who are supposed to solve complex problems, while the other 98% of people just execute.

Bingo. In trying to get more production from their staffs, companies simply deploy another system. Systems aren't going to get it done. Even conducting and acting on surveys (a favorite tool discussed in the article) are hopelessly reductive. HP is on the right track, holding one-on-one interviews with employees to get their candid feedback.

How about using storytelling? Gathering groups of people into anecdote circles, collecting their stories, looking at all of them and drawing out the major themes--that will allow the deep understanding and wisdom of the rank-and-file to emerge.

Then you can do something to improve the employees' ability to make a difference. And when they realize they've actually been listened to--well, that's motivating.

narrative, management, leadership, followership, storytelling, organizational development, Wall Street Journal

On Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management" part 2 - Why do we need a new management model?

What's wrong with today's style of management, anyway? It's earned trillions of dollars of profits. It's slimmed-down, delayered and re-engineered thousands of companies. It supports hundreds of graduate schools emitting newly-minted MBAs every year (including your author).

It's also led countless companies into turnaround hell.

Hamel discusses this at length in "The Future of Management." He writes:

Nearly all accounts of deep change...are stories of turnarounds.... Sadly, [deep change] is rarely opportunity-led, continuous, and a product of the organization's intrinsic capability to adapt. (p.42)

A turnaround is a transformation tragically delayed. (p.43)

It seems that after two-and-a-half thousand years, we are still unable to follow this simple advice from the Tao te Ching:

Act before there is a problem.
Bring order before there is disorder.

Countless management books recommend creating a crisis environment to push through needed changes. Hamel asks, why is this necessary? Why isn't it possible to create a corporate environment that taps the ability to change that we all have inside us?

Our management model prevents us from doing that. The words "command and control" encapsulate what's so limiting about the way we've organized ourselves. In an organization of any size, commands from the top have a limited effect on what people do every day at the bottom. And the ability to "control" employees only seems possible when it's what you've been taught as a manager to try to do. (The only thing that's controlled at most companies is information, and that's a very very important problem with management today, an issue that Hamel takes up later in his book.)

I coach six- and seven-year-olds at soccer. Practice, unless it's fun and engaging, quickly deteriorates into chaos--spitting competitions, staring at the sky, a pig-pile. I can no more control my kids than I can control the weather. The best approach is to keep the games coming, and from time to time to ask them what they want to do. And mostly just let them play.

But when I managed lots of people, I did try to exert control. That's what I'd been taught, and what was valued in the organizations I worked for. (I enjoyed it, too.) It worked better than with my soccer team--these were professionals, after all. But how much fun was it, for me or them?

What would have happened if I had tried to organize the work to be more fun and engaging? What if I had asked the team what they wanted to do, or how they wanted to meet our objectives?

I think that's what Gary Hamel is trying to say here.

Other posts in this series:
Part 1
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Note: you can find excerpts of the book here.

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On Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management" part 1 - Management Innovation

When we think of innovation, we think of products. The Segway, the iPod, the Roomba, the hot cellphone of the quarter. It's not surprising: they make good copy, and they can be photographed.

But, according to Gary Hamel, in his new book "The Future of Management," product innovations are a short-lived form of competitive advantage. A highly-successful new product gives you only a few years of excess profits before imitators and, yes, more innovative products commoditize it. (Doesn't it seem that the RAZR's heyday was a thousand years ago?)

What about business model innovations? Examples cited by Hamel include Zara ("chic but cheap couture") and Southwest's low-fare airline model. While more sustainable than product innovations, global consulting firms and the ever-growing practice of outsourcing allow new business models to spread rapidly across industries.

Finally, for companies desiring long-term advantage, Hamel points to management innovation. These are entire new ways of organizing, orienting, incenting and acculturating staff and leadership. Significant management innovations are rare, but they can provide decades of value. Hamel cites historical examples such as DuPont's development and utilization of return on investment, Procter & Gamble's brand-management approach, and Toyota's use of each employee's ability (see how Toyota describes its approach here). In each case, the companies achieved advantages that lasted decades.

Why are management innovations so sustainable? Here's Hamel's explanation:

Amazingly, it took nearly 20 years for America's carmakers to decipher Toyota's advantage. Unlike its Western rivals, Toyota believed that first-line employees could be more than cogs in a soulless manufacturing machine [JC note: ironically, the result of a much earlier management innovation--Frederick Taylor's division-of-labor model]. If given the right tools and training, they could be problem-solvers, innovators, and change agents. Toyota saw within its workforce the necessary genius for never-ending, fast-paced operational improvement. In contrast, US car companies tended to discount the contributions that could be made by first-line employees, and relied instead on staff experts for improvements in quality and efficiency. (p. 29)

In other words, management innovation is hard to imitate because it goes against the training, experience and culture that a company has developed over its recent history. It means rewriting tacit rules that have gone unquestioned and that in most cases have led to the company's success in the past.

This, of course, means that establishing management innovation is terribly hard work, full of complexity and requiring learning and development on the part of all staff. But most importantly it requires unflagging commitment of the leadership, since they have the most invested in the status quo.

More tomorrow on "The Future of Management."

Note: you can find excerpts of the book here.

Other posts on this topic:

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

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Blame it on the I-Team

Last night I was reading a new book, "X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate and Succeed" and I got this weird lightness in my stomach, a small vacant feeling just beneath the rib cage. The authors, Deborah Ancona of MIT's Sloan School and Henrik Bresman of INSEAD, were describing a common phenomenon: teams that worked hard to improve their performance had more fun, became happier but often failed miserably at their missions.

The feeling in the pit of my stomach was deja vu. I've been on one of those teams. Back in my EDS days, I worked for a sales VP who studied a lot of Peter Senge's Learning Organization principles and took them to heart. He applied them to our team and to its relationships. We had periodic offsite sessions to create strategy, we "checked in" to meetings, and we built close bonds both inside and outside of work.

Yet we didn't succeed, ultimately. The team was broken up within a year or so. Many of us left the company soon thereafter (me included). What happened? It's something I wondered about for years, and until this book lacked an explanation that made sense to me.

The paradox of great teams, according to Ancona and Bresman, is that they frequently focus internally, on their relationships with teammates and on their assignments, and lose perspective and context. They lose sight of other groups in the company and, most dangerously, of customers' evolving needs. The team begins to work better together, and the problem is compounded--other teams are seen as ineffective, "us vs. them" develops, and at some point external support for the team dissipates. You're left with a high-powered vehicle that can't go anywhere. Call it the "I" (for internal) Team.

And that's what happened to our team. We are still in touch ten years after the breakup. We have good feelings about that year. But in the pit of my stomach, at least, is a twinge of regret about what we could have done.

(Cover photo courtesy of Harvard Business School Press)

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Collecting and organizing narratives makes sense of complex problems

When I discuss my latest project, improving organizational performance via collecting and making sense of the narratives that employees carry with them, most people are initially skeptical. And organizational development professionals are often the quickest to dismiss the approach as "more of the same."

So why am I convinced that narrative collection, selection, and sensemaking will work better than existing methods of gathering and acting on metrics, surveys and executive intuition?

It's all about complexity. By now, we've ERPed, Six-Sigma'ed, Re-engineered, Rightsized, Business-Intelligenced and Job Sculpted our companies. Basic problems, such as systematizing processes, ensuring consistency of actions, enforcing policies and procedures, have largely been solved.

The problems that remain are messier, stickier, and more ambiguous, because they are more about people and their innate complexity. Difficulties in communicating, understanding each other, managing egos. Problems of company strategy, culture, management of change and managerial decisionmaking. Identifying and making use of organizational wisdom. These problems don't have rote solutions. They don't even have optimal solutions. In fact, there may be many outcomes that work well and equally many that are undesirable.

So, back to narrative. Creating stories about ourselves and our surroundings has been used since the beginning of history to make sense of and help us deal with our messiest, most daunting problems (check out this bestselling book for some examples).

One example I know of perfectly demonstrates the narrative technique. Underground, by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, intends to make sense of the senseless--the Aum Shinrikyo cult's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

It does so by collecting and presenting stories. Thirty-four victims of the attack describe the day and its aftermath, in moment-to-moment detail. Eight cult members talk about their involvement and their feelings while perpetrating the atrocity.

The author is invisible, except for a brief prologue and small essay midway through. His task was to interview the survivors and cult members, select and edit the stories, and lay them out.

Reading this book is as close to being there that day as you could imagine. And the series of narratives, one laid on top of another, greatly illuminates the surprise and panic, the lingering fear and dread and perseverence, that being part of such an event brings on.

It's indescribable, unsummarizable, this book. And that's the point. A carefully-collected, organized collection of stories can bring an understanding of the most complex situations in a way that can't be summarized by a consultant, or a graphic, or a PowerPoint presentation.

Enter that in your SAP system.

(Photo by fuzzcat via flickr)

narrative, organizational development, organizational behavior, complexity, books