Customers are talking: is a customer-service dialogue a story?

Some of my work recently has been applying narrative-sensemaking techniques to customer service dialogues (typically recorded phone calls), which is a fancy way of saying helping companies find patterns in what customers are saying about their products and services, and to use these patterns to drive changes that will help them sell more products and/or make their existing customers more satisfied.

This is a little different from the more traditional approach of eliciting stories via interviews, anecdote circles or web forms. In those circumstances, carefully-crafted questions help generate stories ("this happened, then this, and then this"). Customer-service calls are not elicited--they are spontaneous expressions--and don't follow the story format. They are simply two people talking.

So a question is, I guess, can you get useful stories out of mere dialogue?

In thinking about this question, I've been reflecting on the novels of William Gaddis, an American writer who published only a handful of books from the 1950's to the 1990's. I've read two of them, "JR" and "A Frolic of His Own," and both have barely any exposition at all. 90+% of the text is dialogue, barely puncutated, overlapping, and often confusing.

"JR" is a very forward-looking book about a junior-high-school student who speculates his way into a multi-million dollar fortune (on paper). Given that it takes place in the mid-70's, JR does his trading via the payphone in the school hallway. Today, he'd be on TD Ameritrade.

"A Frolic of His Own," written in the 1990's, takes issue with the (again very present-day) issues of litigiousness and intellectual property. In addition to dialogue, hilariously-deadpan legal briefs help move the story along.

Reading Gaddis' books is a lot like listening to those customer service calls. A bit disorienting or hard to understand, often touching, sometimes funny. Always humanizing. And always stories.

Customers are talking: turning points in telephone sales calls

I'm working on a project to listen to telephone sales calls and help the client find patterns explaining why some calls end up in a sale and others don't. Each call is a story, complete with emotion, conflict, and turning points. Listening to dozens of these, pictures begin to emerge of how people buy, and how, even when they like the product and may want to buy, don't. And it has nothing to do with logic.

One turning point I've experienced is the moment when a call turns from being headed to a close, to not. On the calls, it's very subtle: a pause, a change of subject, perhaps an additional question from the prospect. But afterward, a call that seemed to be heading toward a sale instead is, at best, a promise to call back.

The best way to explain it is to relate a personal story.

I've been a customer of Verizon Wireless for more than five years. I got a telemarketing call from them today, offering inducements to renew my service contract early. I've been evaluating this for a while now (this is a subtext of my posts on the Blackberry Storm), and after discussing it at some length with my wife, we're headed toward renewal.

This call, then, could have been Verizon's way of closing the deal. I was pretty ready, although I was thinking of doing this in March. If the deal was good enough, perhaps I would pull the trigger today. The call went something like this:

"Mr. Caddell," the rep said, "we are offering some extras today if you want to renew your contract early. You might be able to get a discount on a new phone."

"When does my contract expire?"

"The end of July."

"I thought it was the end of March."

(turning point 1) "That's the time when you are eligible for an early equipment upgrade. Your contract expires in July."

"OK, what are you offering?"

(turning point 2) "100 extra minutes per month." (This wasn't attractive to me at all. We don't use the minutes we have now.)

"How much off the phone?"

(turning point 3) "Well, you'll be eligible for that at the end of March."

"Earlier you said I could get a discount off a phone." (I didn't tell her that Verizon had already sent me two mailings offering me phone discounts for renewing now.)

"I said you might be."

There was no way was I going to renew then. At each turning point, in fact, I became farther from renewing than I had been before the call. Instead of feeling happy, encouraged, eager to get a new phone, I felt frustrated, annoyed, and that I had wasted time even picking up the phone.

It wasn't the rep's fault. She was given a difficult product to sell (competing, in fact, with the company's own mailings). When I began to ask pointed questions, the pitch fell apart. There was probably no rep on earth who could have closed me with that offer.

Which is a significant learning from this project for me. Selecting and training reps is only a part of the formula for success in telesales. The product must be useful, and the offer must be made attractive. And that work happens far outside the call center.

Customers are talking: the Blackberry Storm/Twitter project

Like a lot of people, I've been trying to get a handle on what Twitter means for businesses. My professional interest is in finding unsolicited customer stories and making sense of them--wherever they are. In this, Twitter has a lot of promise. It's easy to use, brief and spontaneous. So are customers using this forum to talk about products? I decided to find out.

My test case was the Blackberry Storm. It received an absolutely terrible review from David Pogue, the New York Times' consumer-electronics columnist. It also had very good early sales numbers--500,000 units the first month of its release, according to the Wall Street Journal. The combination of these made it an irresistible subject to study: would the Twittersphere be flooded with posts from enraged buyers?

The project was made more interesting today, when the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, "Bumpy Start for Blackberry Storm," which referred to complaints of early Storm users (but not Pogue's review), including this vibrant quote: "I found myself wanting to throw it in the ocean due to my frustration with its overall usability." The article also referred to a release of firmware soon after launch intended to address some of the early complaints, particularly response time.

I used Twitter Search to look for messages containing "Blackberry Storm" and a happy or sad emoticon (there's a button on the advanced search page that enables you to restrict searches this way). I looked at 88 English-language tweets going back to December 27. Here's what I found:



The biggest surprise to me was: where were the complaints from users? While half the Tweets were from Storm users, as opposed to people commenting on the Storm, or thinking about it, only 4 out of 44 (9%) of the users' tweets were negative, while 23 (52%) were positive.

(If you want to check out the searches I created for this project, they are here: happy search, sad search. Twitter Search has been acting funny the past few days--I'm only able to get one page of recent results, and can't search farther back. I used an RSS feed of the search over a period of weeks to gather the entire list of 88,)

From a customers are talking perspective, this isn't a terrible outcome at all for the Storm. Whether the firmware change made that much difference, or the Blackberry brand loyalists are immune to hardware glitches, or simply that devices like this aren't perfect and users expect that--they are not saying this is a terrible device. Many are saying that they like it. If I'm Blackberry and Verizon, I'm not discouraged by the Storm's initial reception.

By the way, the WSJ has already started to backtrack. On the web site, the article is now entitled, "Blackberry Storm Is Off To A Bit of a Bumpy Start."

(Disclosure, I am a Verizon customer and a Blackberry 8830 user. If you think I am a shill for Verizon, please don't make up your mind until you read this post, or this one.)

"Underground" as an example of narrative sensemaking

Over the last couple of years, I've gotten more involved with collecting and sorting through multiple narratives to help businesses understand and deal with difficult problems. (Difficult, meaning the normal tools such as numerical analysis, process mapping, etc., are insufficient to understanding the issue.) This has become a cornerstone of my professional life, and it's been a rewarding and at times thrilling undertaking.

Shawn Callahan at Anecdote introduced me to this area, and then I learned about the work of Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge. I met Cynthia Kurtz, who was an early collaborator with Dave Snowden, and have learned a lot from her as well. To the extent that the work I do is valuable to my clients, these folks deserve much credit.

Yet one of the best teachers I have had here (and I'm still a rank beginner) is the book "Underground" by Haruki Murakami. He's one of my favorite novelists, and this is one of his few nonfiction books. I read it years ago, long before I'd learned the terms "story listening," "mass narrative capture," or "sensemaking." But when I began learning from Shawn, Dave, Cynthia and others, it immediately came to mind.

In "Underground" Murakami seeks to understand and to help readers understand one of the most terrifying episodes in recent history--the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo movement in 1995.

Except for a brief author's preface, the book consists of the stories of survivors of the attack. Murakami interviewed everyone he could find from the list of victims, and presented their stories, unadorned, one after the other. He then interviewed a number of members of Aum Shinrikyo, and presented their stories, as well (a decision that is aligned with goals of narrative learning to take in multiple perspectives of a situation).

The result is a chilling, relentless book, that nonetheless does what no news report, CNN story or even historical chronicle could do--shows the impact of the attack and its aftermath on the real people who were caught up in it; and illuminates the puzzling (to outsiders) behavior of the Aum Shinrikyo members. It's a fully-realized, three-dimensional picture of a disaster, and goes a long way to explaining the unexplainable. In this way it's like an extended version of John Hersey's great "Hiroshima," though shorn of the authorial voice.

When you read this book, the stories layer and layer; you see the event from a deeper and deeper perspective, till you almost feel like you're there, inside the attack, experiencing it with the victims. And then you read the Aum Shinrikyo stories, and somehow you see that their world has its own internal logic. You finish the book, and you're exhausted, but you know deeply about this terrible event, how it happened and what it did to people. Your brain is working hard throughout--you're sensemaking.

If you're interested in narrative sensemaking, or you just want to learn the full story of a human disaster, you must read "Underground."

(Here's a much earlier reference to "Underground" and the subject of story-listening.)

Customers are talking: using reverse logistics to improve products

As part of our regular Tuesday series on finding and acting on customer use stories, let's talk about reverse logistics. This is the process by which retailers and manufacturers deal with customer returns.

This article (hat tip Colin Shaw) discusses how companies can examine and make changes to their reverse logistics procedures to reduce costs and streamline the process. This is good advice as far as it goes.

But like many "customers are talking" topics, companies need to take an additional step in order to really utilize the reverse logistics process to its utmost.

Each customer return is a story. Capturing and collecting those stories, and regularly examining them for patterns, can yield important information about how the product is designed, communicated and supported. For example, consumer electronics are notorious for their returns frequency, and the reason for these returns often is that the product is difficult to use or its documentation is poorly written or inadequate (multi-language manuals introduce another set of obstacles for customers).

A company can work with its retailers, as part of the overall design of the reverse logistics process, to capture important information about why the product was returned. Ideally, the verbatim customer story is captured--which is easy to do with online returns.

The collection, of course, is the simple part of the equation. The more complex task is the sensemaking of the numerous narratives captured. This sensemaking, more of a collaborative thinking process than an analytical one, can be accomplished with training and skilled mentoring.

The potential payoff is large: marketing managers who are made of aware of why returns happen can make (often simple) changes to packaging, design, channel strategy or documentation to improve initial customer satisfaction. Not only does this reduce returns, it also increases the likelihood that more people buy the product in the first place.

A friend owns a company that manages reverse logistics for name-brand consumer electronics manufacturers. I asked him if he knew why a certain product was often returned and he said, "Yes, always." I asked him if he had a way of letting the marketing folks at his client know these reasons. And he shook his head.

Given that many companies are outsourcing their reverse logistics operations to third parties, they need to take care that they keep the channel of communication open to learn why items are returned, and what can be changed about the product, its support documentation or its point of sale in order to make more initial purchases successful ones.

Sometimes crowds aren't wise

I like Surowiecki's book, a lot, and I have experienced many instances where the collective judgment of a group was far better than even an informed individual. But the "wisdom of crowds" catchphrase is dangerous--oftentimes crowds are not wise at all.

We are experiencing right now an era in which crowds are really dumb. I'm referring to the financial markets and the related economic recession. The financial markets and news affecting the financial markets have merged into a massive echo chamber, wherein bad news begets pessimism which keeps prices down which begets another cycle of bad news.

We've seen this in reverse, of course. Do you remember 1998-1999, during which time everyone was watching CNBC or checking Yahoo Finance all day long, in real time assessing the value of their stock portfolios? Oversubscribed IPOs begat good news, which kept prices high, which begat more buying, etc., until it all came crashing down.

I thought it was clear to everyone that market groupthink, which afflicts us in good times and bad, obscured the true value of securities, and therefore paying close attention to news items in order to make sense of the markets and our economy was, at best, a waste of time.

But no. Felix Salmon, in his Portfolio Market Movers blog, points to a Financial Times article introducing us to a service from Reuters that collects news items and alerts traders when news trends indicate potential market movements.

In other words, lean into the echo chamber, and listen real hard for signals you can use to make decisions. Um, it's only January, but I will bet there's not a stupider product idea introduced for the rest of 2009.

Is 2009 "the end of analytic science"?

Getting my head around the ideas of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is more difficult even than spelling his name correctly, but I think that this statement has real ramifications for the work I and others are doing in applying mass customer narrative to marketing and business issues (from edge.org via TEDBlog):

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi predicts:

The End of Analytic Science: The idea that will change the game of knowledge is the realization that it is more important to understand events, objects, and processes in their relationship with each other than in their singular structure. Western science has achieved wonders with its analytic focus, but it is now time to take synthesis seriously.

DARPA seeks algorithms to create stories from info fragments

One of the nicest aspects of blogging is when a reader points you to an interesting article you hadn't seen. I'd like to thank reader S.E. August for this reference.

Wired's Danger Zone blog reported last week that DARPA is looking to sensemake various forms of data by combining them into stories.

The Cognitive Edge training I took last week discussed (among many other topics) gathering narrative fragments into composite stories as a way to make sense of a situation and convey that information to others. Similar thus far. A possibly reality-defying assumption follows, though. According the Danger Zone post:

The author of this tale, however, would be a series of intelligent algorithms that can pull all of this information together, tease out its underlying meanings, and put it in a narrative that's easy to follow.

In the Cog Edge method the sensemaking is done by a group of humans, not a computer. The assumption is that distributed cognition of a group of people can elicit meaning where a single person, or a computer, cannot. I'm not up on the latest in artificial intelligence, but I'm doubtful that an entirely computerized approach can yield anything of use.

Perhaps a partially-computerized method, where fragments were gathered (sampled?) by machine and sensemade by humans, would work better. Or if the fragments could be human-coded as they were captured the significant or related ones might be easier to isolate. I don't know. Can any readers weigh in who are more optimistic that a totally-computerized approach might work?

A link to the DARPA RFI is here.

(Photo by cote via Flickr creative commons)

sensemaking, narrative, stories, DARPA, communication

Example of a blog attracting user stories

Sorry for this somewhat awkward syntax of this post. I am composing it on my Blackberry 8830. This is significant because the post concerns David Pogue's eviscerating review of the new touchscreen Blackberry Storm mobile phone.

In response to the review, Pogue received more than 100 stories of people who also hated their newly-bought Storm. There were also dozens of defenses of the Storm and RIM, its maker. And many more comments in response to the post.

Pogue's post served as an attractor, stimulating all sorts of vibrant customer feedback. As a product manager and someone interested in innovation, this example is fascinating and illustrative of how social computing is revolutionizing market & customer intelligence.

What does all the feedback mean? Probably lots of things: the Storm has serious issues; RIM has committed, passionate users; Apple is a hard act to follow, etc.

Whatever it means, let's hope that RIM is listening, sensemaking, and acting. If they want some guidance, tell them to shoot me an email.

By the way, composing this post on the 8830's thumb keyboard & tiny screen has been agonizing. I was hoping the Storm might be my next step. Now I'm not so sure.

market research, narrative, product management, sensemaking, wireless, social media

Your voices needed to help a worthy project

Can the sharing of stories bring a community together?

It worked in the olden days, but has become a lost art in the age of television, internet, and videogames. Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone" described a society where isolation reigns and communities are frayed.

My friend and colleague Cynthia Kurtz has applied for a Knight News Challenge grant to develop web2.0 software precisely to facilitate the gathering, sharing and passing on of stories that used to go on around the campfire or village square. The Knight folks want the public (that means you) to review and comment on the applications. It would be doing a great service if you would visit the site here and weigh in on Cynthia's application.

Here's how she describes the project:

Long ago, story caretakers tended the diverse stories of the community: eliciting, understanding, maintaining. But those traditions have declined as commercial storytelling rose and community coherence fell. The physical-digital split means that today older people tell stories in community centers while younger people tell them on Facebook. People still tell stories, but no one is bringing all of the stories together into community-wide patterns, making sense of those patterns, and helping the stories get to where they need to be in times of need. We are building a free and open source software package called Rakontu ("tell a story" in Esperanto) that will help communities share and work with raw stories of personal experience for mutual understanding, conflict resolution and decision support. By supporting and bridging online and offline storytelling, Rakontu will help communities regenerate the sustaining functions of story caretakers so that they can take better care of their stories again.

An important part of the project is how this would bring benefit to communities. Cynthia explains it this way:

Rakontu will help communities tell, annotate and connect stories; discover insight-creating patterns in them; and use stories to resolve conflicts and make decisions together. This degree of support is only available today through the help of experienced narrative practitioners. Rakontu will embody understandings about narrative in communities so that people will not have to know anything about narrative to benefit from its use. Some possible outcomes are better understandings of opposing perspectives, a greater diversity of voices being heard, better consensus on tough choices, more problems dealt with before they get worse, safer streets, fewer footholds for extremism and paranoia, and greater common strength in times of crisis.

I've written in this blog, over and over, about the use of stories for knowledge sharing, learning, and creating insight. You're probably tired of reading about it. But think about this: we should be using every tool at our disposal to help bring our communities together, to combat the "bowling alone" syndrome, and make our neighborhoods a better place to live. That's what Rakontu can do, and I hope you'll visit the Knight News Challenge site and support Cynthia's application.

(Disclosure: I have worked with Cynthia on this grant and will be conducting community trials of the software if the grant is awarded. Therefore I have a vested interest in getting the grant approved.)

Tags:
community, narrative, virtual communities, sensemaking, storytelling

AG Lafley on P&G's innovation culture: "The consumer is boss"

In the newest issue of Booz & Co's "Strategy + Business," A.G. Lafley describes the innovation culture at his company, Procter & Gamble.

Hearing insights from Lafley and P&G about innovation is becoming a cliche, but this quote struck me as apt:

So we expanded our mission to in­clude the idea that “the consumer is boss.” In other words, the people who buy and use P&G products are valued not just for their money, but as a rich source of in­formation and direction. If we can develop better ways of learning from them — by listening to them, observing them in their daily lives, and even living with them — then our mission is more likely to succeed.

This what I'm thinking about much of the time now. How to help companies listen to, and learn from, "the bosses."

narrative, sensemaking, innovation, product management

Gathering customer product insight using Twitter

Gathering and sorting through customer feedback is an overlooked part of the product manager's toolbox. Currently-used methods are inadequate to the task: surveys are limiting and misleading (one man's 4 is another man's 3, and so forth). Focus groups are biased and prone to takeover by assertive voices.

Fine-grained, freeform feedback, such as is gathered in customer service calls (or, as I'm doing with one client, in open-ended interviews), provides a wide range of opinions from a diverse group, relatively untainted by outside influences, measurement bias and company hypotheses.

The new social applications offer a new and promising way to gather feedback cheaply and in real time. Twitter is one such application being put to use.

Dell and Comcast, for instance, troll Twitter looking for references to their products and services. If people are struggling, their Twitter users will reach out and try to solve the problem, or point them in the right direction to get help. It's as if a call to tech support was being worked on in public. It's highly responsive, and the users who get this kind of attention appreciate it, usually announcing their satisfaction in a Tweet.

Other times, Dell in particular responds quickly to critiques of their products (see an earlier post and a Dell comment). It's done well--not pushing back on the commenters, but certainly getting the company message out in that forum. In other words, comments on Dell products are always responded to.

Both the above examples have obvious PR benefits and bring the Comcast and Dell folks who engage in these conversations closer to the real customer experience. All good.

What I'm talking about, in addition to that, is collecting dozens or hundreds of tweets on a particular product and looking at them all together. What do they say about the product? Are these issues that seem to crop up continually? Are people using the product in unexpected ways? Is something about the product really, really annoying people?

Note that gathering the data is easy. Sorting it out is the hard part, but using narrative analysis techniques can separate the wheat from the chaff and give you real, useable insights.

(Here's an example of the Twitter conversation around the new Ford Flex. I hope Ford's product marketers are listening! Here's another conversation on the Flip video camera)

There are other ways to gather freeform customer feedback. Customer reviews on Amazon, for example. Blog posts. Companies should use all of them. Particularly as these technologies become more embedded, and more people start talking in these forums, the stories customers tell will be more and more vital to innovation and the product creation process.

(If you'd like a comprehensive look at how businesses can use social technologies to engage with the outside, read Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff)

Related posts:
Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off
Is Google listening to the stories around Knol?
On "Groundswell"

Tags:
narrative, sensemaking, innovation, product management

Is Google listening to the stories around Knol?

I talk a lot in this blog about how listening to stories can help companies take the pulse of users. When a new product is released, people try it out, and provide all sorts of information that's critical to the future evolution of the product. They don't provide this information in statistics, but in stories. If you can make sense of the stories, it can give you insight that you can use to make adjustments in functionality, customer service, technical support, pricing, and strategy (as discussed in the section on emergent strategy in "The Innovator's Guide to Growth").

Here's an example of what I mean. On July 23rd, Google released Knol, a product that collects and organizes "authoritative article[s] about a specific topic," according to the company.

Here are some blog stories that emerged after the launch:

knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation
...We're quite a few months into the Knol experiment. What I find particularly fascinating is that most of the knols that they promote on their front page are health-related, primarily by people who claim to have health-related expertise (doctors, nurses, professors) who appear to be copying/pasting from other places. Why health? What's motivating these people to contribute? (And why are they too lazy to fix the formatting when they copy/paste from elsewhere?)

Frankly, from my POV, Knol looks like an abysmal failure. There's no life to the content. Already articles are being forgotten and left to rot, along with a lot of other web content. There's no common format or standards and there's a lot more crap than gems. The incentives are all wrong and what content is emerging is limited. The expert-centric elitism is intimidating to knowledgeable folks without letters after their names and there is little reason for those of us with letters to contribute. While I don't believe in the wisdom of a crowd of idiots, I do believe that collective creations tend to result in much better content than that which is created by an individual hermit. (Case in point: my *$#! dissertation vs. any article I've co-authored.)

What makes me most annoyed about Knol though is that it feels a bit icky. Wikipedia is a non-profit focused on creating a public good. Google is a for-profit entity with a lot of power in controlling where on the web people go. Knol content is produced by volunteers who contribute content for free so that Google can make money directly from ads and indirectly from search traffic. In return for ?... (full post here)

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Knol for Google: It Is Not Evil, It Is Business
Google is a smart company - smart enough for many people to be surprised after they witness this or that move or an acquisition, surprised enough to say "Why has not anyone thought of that move earlier?" And now it seems that Google has finally realized that it sends way too much traffic from its search results pages to websites that do not contribute to Google's business. What would be the correct move for a business when faced by such a discovery? Find a way to make money by sending traffic to your own properties.

And this is exactly what Google needs Knol for: Google must be tired of being the major source of traffic for Wikipedia and many other independent publishers and now it looks for new ways to further monetize its own business. And for that it simply needed to have a platform of its own to be able to bring tons of content to internet users easily - and displace competitors from the search results. In this particular case Google serves as a full-cycle company: it provides the platform (Knol itself), the revenue (AdSense) and, finally, the distribution (search).

Sure, we hear lots of complaints about Knol already. It is quite obvious that from the day 1 of Knol launch we should have expected voices pointing at spam on Knol created in order to get revenue by building a page on a popular term. It was so obvious that it is almost ridiculous to complain about it now. The explanation here is that no matter what service people use they invariably are motivated by something. And often the motivation offered by the service determines exactly what type of users it will attract eventually... (full post here)

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Knol – from Google blog
There is a debate about whether Knol is an attempt at competing with Wikipedia. In academic use, its unclear where exacly it fits - for example, much of what you would think of writing a "knol" about seems better placed in a standard journal article review or scholarly dictionary. Does this offer a replacement for those? Scholarpedia is another potential candidate for competing with standard academic review formats. At the moment, there is not much incentive for individual academics to produce these types of documents but is it, more generally, a more logical way of reviewing fields that are very fast-moving?... (full post here)

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A Unit of What?
A knol, Knol says, is a “unit of knowledge”. I don’t think so. But I do think Knol is already becoming a den of spam.

My cursory research, at that link, suggests that the answer is yes. “Anemia“? No results. “Hair“? 12, including several (supposedly) by the top guy at the Beauty Network. “Cancer“? 38, so far, inncluding three in the first page of results for the biggest spam giveaway, Mesothelioma. Search for anything. Watch the results.

If this is about a fight with Wikipedia, I’d say it’s no contest. But it’s not. It’s about the corrupting influence of pure scammy ambition. Even if Google doesn’t have that, it plays host to plenty. And Knol (born on 23 July) was barely out of the womb before it got infected with it. (full post here)

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The Invidious Knol
My third post on the subject and potentially the most worrying. This blog suggests that Google are tipping the search balance so that knols come above the Wikipedia on search. Its also got a good quote from Nick Carr I'm guessing that serving as the front door for a vast ad-less info-moshpit outfitted with open source search tools is not exactly the future that Google has in mind for itself. Enter Knol.

Now the evidence here is anecdotal, but it will be interesting to see if others carry out more scientific and controlled tests. If it is true then Google's famous Do Good, already tarnished for its willing to compromise its principles in China would be finally shot. It would be an interesting new form of monopoly and a major issue of trust. Any other evidence out there? (full post here)

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Twitter is also a neat place for Knol micro-stories. Here are some:

I would suggest Google Knol. It is a combination of Squidoo and Wikipedia. Plus, it is SEO-ready.

admiring my knol, and blogging about Intranet Week and my new gig at J&J

the geekosphere hating knol out of gate only makes me that much more bullish on it longer term...

I love that the wikipedia article for Knol ranks above Knol itself. I wonder how long that will last?

google knol has boobies. Goodbye wikipedia!

Ready to pronounce knol a failure already? I think we'll see over time. Life is not *all* wisdom of crowds.

it's pretty cool that Google can afford to have full on projects that are pointless - and it doesn't really hurt - Knol, I'm looking at you

If I am Google, I am collecting every story I can find like this, and reading them all (including, and perhaps especially, the ones that are critical). There will be some randomness and noise, but with enough volume there will also be themes that emerge. Some that came out of my reading were:

- there's a feeling that Google will favor Knols in its search rankings, and that's a risk not only to the success of Knol, but also to AdSense, one of Google's cash cows.

- the commercial model for Knol, and the perception of can encourage spammers and risk degrading the content available via Knols, tarnishing all of them.

- the perception that Google is taking on Wikipedia (or "commercializing" it) is clashing with Google's "do no evil" mantra.

The Google team may find different patterns. Or they may not care to do anything about them. But they should at minimum understand them. Hopefully they're doing so. The changes that come in Knol over the next few months should provide some insight.

(To see the links for thirty-five stories found on the web about Knol, both blogs and tweets, click here.)

Related post:
Review of "The Innovator's Guide to Growth"
What in hell do stories have to do with innovation?

Tags:
narrative, sensemaking, innovation, Google, product management

What in hell do stories have to do with innovation?

Regular readers may be tiring of the constant barrage of story-related posts, or at minimum be trying to figure out how they relate to the title of this blog. Here are some words that I hope tie it together.

More and more products are launched and evolve in an iterative fashion. Version 1 does this, version 2 does that, and version 3 finally hits the mark and becomes the standard (exhibit A: Windows). Those iteration windows are becoming tighter, so good information as a basis of planning product changes is invaluable. Google in particular has turned this approach into an art form.

There are more and more ways to get feedback directly from users. Forums, call centers, social networks, Twitter, etc., etc., allow users to communicate their likes and dislikes about a product.

Now, to storytelling. Most business applications of storytelling focus on communicating outward--developing a story that helps communicate the essence or benefits of your product or company. Steve Denning, in his recent book "The Secret Language of Leadership" calls these indirect stories--stories that inspire stories in the mind of the reader or listener. Indirect stories are necessarily incomplete--they are not meant to immerse the listener in an experience (like, say, Harry Potter does). They are meant to create empathy and consensus.

What I'm talking about (as are Shawn Callahan & Mark Schenck of Anecdote, Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge and others) is inverting that model.

In addition to crafting stories and sending them out toward customers, staff, etc., what if we listen to the indirect stories coming from them? They are also necessarily incomplete--mere anecdotes--but if you gather a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand, common themes and threads will become evident. To invert Denning's language, there's the possibility of inspiring stories in the mind of the company.

These stories might say things like:

• People find our product really hard to use.
• Feature X of our product is proving more valuable than we expected.
• A group of people are using our product in an interesting way that we didn't anticipate.

As a product manager, the above stories are very important to me. They help orient me toward things I should do to improve product packaging, add or delete features, alter its marketing message or improve its customer service or technical support. Also, the user stories are pre-hypothesis, meaning that they are free of bias that can come via hypothesis-based approaches such as surveys. They are not adulterated by groupthink, as can happen with focus groups. They are the voice of the customer.

None of the individual anecdotes may send clear messages about where innovation is working and where it isn't. But the accrual of them can do so.

Companies don't use this resource to improve innovation. They should.

And that's what I'm talking about.

(For a powerful example of the accrual of "indirect" stories to create a compelling, nuanced, overall story, please refer to this earlier post on Haruki Murakami's "Underground.")

Related Post:
Stories that people tell about products are invaluable

Tags:
complexity, narrative, product management, sensemaking, innovation, what in hell is, storytelling

Stories that people tell about products are invaluable

I was listening to a Dave Snowden talk today, and this bit jumped out:

We're capturing 150,000 stories a week from people as they consume a product. Because the stories that people tell as they have an experience are far more significant than customer satisfaction surveys.

Also this:

What people love... is numbers backed up by stories--numbers on their own, stories on their own have deficiencies. But numbers backed up by stories is quite powerful.

This idea--capturing & sorting stories from users to see how products are doing and how they can be improved--is something I've been messing with a bit, and it's good to hear that this isn't brand-new.

complexity, narrative, product management, sensemaking

An important definition of sensemaking

In trying to talk to companies about using narrative techniques and other ways to mine the non-quantitative data they have but never make use of, especially for strategy and innovation, this post from Dave Snowden will be a significant asset.

Sensemaking is the alchemical step where the mess is sorted through and the themes, threads and weak signals are detected and clarified. From there, people can make decisions and act.

In other words, it's the most important step.

Related post:
HBR article demonstrates that leaders need to manage complexity

Tags:
complexity, decisionmaking, leadership, narrative, innovation, strategy, sensemaking

Everyday stories hold great insight

If you've visited this space at all before, you'll know that I believe the stories we tell of our lives hold vast riches of information--and that information can be used to inform decisions on strategy, management & leadership, among other areas.

Today, the invaluable Harvard Business School Working Knowledge website features an article by Julia Hanna discussing creativity in the workplace and its place in innovation. The whole article is wonderful and worth reading in full. But I was fascinated by this passage regarding the research of Harvard professor Theresa Amabile:

As a way to delve deeper into the link between motivation and creativity, Amabile and her husband, psychologist Steven J. Kramer, conducted a three-year study of 238 professionals from seven companies in the high-tech, consumer products, and chemicals industries. Without revealing the focus of their study, they asked the subjects (all of whom were working on projects requiring creative effort) to fill out a daily electronic diary form that required numerical answers to questions about their work that day, as well as their emotions, motivation, and work environment. They were also asked to describe what they'd done that day and to include a brief description of one event at work that stood out in their minds [emphasis mine]. (Participants were asked to refrain from discussing the diary content with colleagues.) By the end of the study, Amabile and Kramer had collected nearly 12,000 entries, what she describes as a “wonderful treasure trove of data.”

"We have a window into how concrete events affected knowledge workers' thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and motivations," Amabile says. "We call this 'inner work life,' and we found that it directly influences creativity and other aspects of performance."

The mundane, quotidian stories (the events the subjects documented) were an integral part of the study data. By leveraging these, Amabile and Kramer were able to evaluate a trait--creativity--far more deeply than could have been done by numerical analysis alone. I'm convinced that capturing and sorting through stories can add incalculable wisdom to the business world. We've only begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities.

On a side note, I've been thinking about how Twitter and like tools will be involved in this arena. What are all those tweets telling us about ourselves?

But that's a topic for another post.

(Photo: "Old Diary" by Race_Eend via stock.xchng)

Tags:
narrative, storytelling, sensemaking, assessment, evaluation, creativity, HBS Working Knowledge