Story quote of the week

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Sorry seems to be the hardest word

Why do airlines find it so hard to say sorry?
I have been doing a lot of travel lately, and today is no exception, with flying from my home in Melbourne to Brisbane to run a session on teaching leaders in an IT department to tell their strategic story.
Last night in Melbourne was pretty rough weather wise – massive downpours (the wettest September day in 56 years), lightening and thunder. This obviously caused significant travel disruption, with Melbourne airport being severely impacted with a number of postponed and cancelled flights. This meant that a large number of planes, and crew, were not in the right place for their departures this morning.
So for me, this meant a delay of 2 hours to my flight this morning. This has meant I have had to contact my client and move the session back, and for a number of the attendees this has meant that can only come to the first hour of the session. You don’t want to incur extra costs by staying the night before, and I thought that by getting a flight which gave me an extra 2 1/2 hours of ‘contingency’ I would be fine. It was very stressful when this was not the case.
So when we finally get onboard the flight this morning, the announcement welcoming us started off quite well with the cabin crew member explaining the reasons for the delay (see my blog post on the importance of this). It then quickly went downhill.
Comments like; “so you should all feel lucky we are only two hours late”, and “I am sure this short delay will not impact anyone“, didn’t lighten my mood.
However the thing that got me the most – not once did he apologise. The word “sorry” did not cross his lips. Even an insincere, ‘you can tell he didn’t mean it’ kind of apology. Nothing.
I just don’t understand why, on two counts. Why did he not say it, and why does it bother me so much?
I know it’s not his fault. I know the reasons for the delay. But there is something about the acknowledgement of the impact on me and my day that needed to be said, whether he meant it or not.
This is not a solely Australian airline behaviour. After flying on the 6:20 a.m. London Gatwick to Edinburgh flight every week for nearly two years, and it being delayed more often than on time, not once did I hear an apology. Maybe it’s just an airline thing?
I would love to hear people’s views on those two questions I posed for myself: Why do airlines not say sorry?, and why does it seem to matter to me so much?
I might have to do some research myself on the power that comes from an apology. I am flying to Newcastle tomorrow morning, I might very well have some time on my hands…

 

Infographic: Storytelling Vs. Corporate Speak

Came across this wonderful infographic on the differences between business storytelling versus corporate speak. Anyone have anything to add?

 

All Blacks and knitting yarns

I love short stories that say so much.
Being a Kiwi, this is an incredibly exciting time for me with the Rugby World Cup currently underway in New Zealand. As part of keeping up to date with all the current news about the cup, the teams and the players, I came across this blog on the BBC website from British journalist, Ben Dir.
Ben spent some time in the small (population 750) Canterbury town of Southbridge with a gentlemen named Neville Carter. Now for those of you who aren’t aware of who Neville Carter is, he is the father for the current All Black Number 10, Dan Carter, one of the greatest players currently playing in world rugby.
Ben was trying to understand some more of where Dan Carter came from, what values helped shape him and what kind of person he really was by talking to his father, sister and people he grew up with. Neville Carter told this very short, and simple story that for me tells so much about Dan Carter and who he is as a person.
It was just after the devastating Christchurch earthquake of the 22nd of February, 2011;

“Daniel was staying with us for a few nights and he told us he had an appointment in town, but we found out he spent the day going round three retirement villages. He called in to see how they were, had a cup of coffee, found out how their knitting was going. We only knew about it because one of the old guys who used to play rugby out here rang me to say Daniel had just dropped in.
“Those old people had been through a horrific experience, so for an All Black to drop in and say g’day and have a yarn with them, it put a smile back on their faces. We’re probably more proud of the things he does behind the scenes than what he does on the rugby field.”

I just love the fact that very short, very simple stories can say so much.

 

The tough side of business storytelling

Steve Jobs introduced iCloud at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference in June 2011 . iCloud is Apple’s ‘next big thing’. After explaining the iCloud concept, Steve says, “Now, you might ask ‘why should I believe them – they’re the ones that brought me MobileMe?’” The audience laughs uproariously. Everyone in the audience knows that MobileMe is pretty much the opposite of Apple’s reputation for user-friendliness. It just doesn’t work. Steve continues. “It wasn’t our finest hour. Let me just say that. But we’ve learned a lot.”

Acknowledging an uncomfortable truth goes a long way to removing its power. If everyone knows the story, ignoring it increases it power. Tackling these anti-stories (the stories in your organisation that work against your strategy) is vital.

But there is a downside of ‘running down’ MobileMe. There are many people in apple who have invested a lot of their energy and enthusiasm into MobileMe and hearing this public admission is probably uncomfortable or even painful for them. For this reason, most organisational communication overlooks the negatives and avoids risking upsetting anyone. The resultant messages have a ‘pollyanna’ feel to them that undermine their credibility.

We are working with many organisations to develop their strategic stories and find one of our key roles is helping them find and maintain the courage to say the tough things. Kevin and I are writing a paper on this at the moment reflecting on the lessons of our projects in the past few years. We’ll blog about it when we finish.

 

Story quote of the week

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Four story-based practices to foster insight

You can download the pdf version of this article.

Shawn and Mark wrote this article for the Storytelling for Insight workshop that that was held in Singapore in 2011 with Gary Klein and Patrick Lambe and featured in Gary Klein’s book, Seeing What Others Don’t.

Nick was standing in front of a wall of stories. Each A4 sheet of paper sported a single anonymous anecdote illustrating either a good or bad management behaviour, collected from Nick’s company. One story had captured Nick’s attention and made him agitated: “I can’t believe this guy. Imagine answering a phone in an interview. My God, he even stepped out of his office to chat with someone who was just passing by.”

His complaints caused others in the workshop to wander over to see what was going on. As Nick was spluttering his displeasure, Paul, one of his colleagues, jumped in: “That was my anecdote, Nick, and it was about you.” Nick’s faced turned red and before he could say anything, another colleague added: “It totally nails you Nick. It’s spot on. You do it all the time.” By now, everyone in the workshop was watching. It seemed the next few seconds would reveal Nick’s true character.

Nick’s face was ashen as he looked around the room. He gathered himself and then apologised to his colleagues, adding: “I can’t promise you it won’t happen again – I wasn’t even aware I did this. But I can promise you that I’m going to make every effort to change my behaviour.” And to Nick’s credit, he did. At the time of the workshop, Nick was the head of sales and marketing at the company; he’s now the CEO.

There was a big difference between what Nick thought he was doing and what he was actually doing. It took a story, and the willingness of his trusted colleagues to speak up, to make him aware of his poor behaviour. As a result, Nick’s insight was both cognitive and emotional: cognitive in that he could rationally understand what he was doing wrong, and emotional in that he felt intense embarrassment at having discovered that the bad behaviour he had ridiculed only moments before was his own. This combination of insight and emotion created a powerful impetus in Nick to take action.

Nick is not alone in being blind to his own behaviour. We’ve conducted this type of story-based workshop about 50 times. First, we ask everyone to put a green dot on the most positive stories, then to put a red dot on the stand-out negative stories. The third instruction is to put a blue dot on the stories that remind the attendees of the things they do themselves. The results are always clear-cut: at a ratio of three to one, each person says they do mostly positive things, leaving the negative behaviours to those other people in the organisation. This ratio stands even when there is an overwhelming proportion of negative stories on the wall. We just don’t see ourselves as doing bad things.

The same can be said of behavioural change – sometimes we start doing things differently without being fully aware of it. During one of Shawn’s family’s many Christmas visits to his parents, who live near the beach at Jervis Bay to the south of Sydney, Shawn’s father described how he had recently had some car problems due to a bad batch of petrol. He had had to drain his little Datsun truck of all its fuel. When Shawn asked him where he had gotten the bad gas, his father said: “This service station was being refuelled by a tanker and it was probably churning up all the sediment in the underground tanks. I happened to fill up when all that muck was floating around.” Then he said: “I will never again fill up at a service station if I see a tanker parked there.”

Shawn was pretty sure his dad wasn’t explicitly aware of the insight he had just had. It’s an example of how insights can be cognitively invisible but still result in behavioural change, and helps explain why it can be so difficult to determine why we do what we do.

Practice 1: Collect a set of anecdotes on a topic of interest. Bring together your organisation’s decision makers to seek out the patterns in the stories – the behaviours. You will be surprised by the insights that emerge.

Now, it’s most likely that the egg story is a 15th-century urban myth with as much veracity as the story of the apple that fell on Isaac Newton’s head. The lesson, however, is clear: once an insight has been gained, it can seem rather obvious. One person’s insight is another’s common knowledge. But there is something else to learn from this story. Rather than tell the judges straight out that he had concerns about sharing his design, and so risk their denial, Brunelleschi created a situation, the egg test, that allowed the judges to work this out for themselves. In effect, Brunelleschi triggered a new story that solved his problem.

We saw the power of people working things out for themselves in Nick’s story above. People rarely like to be told what or how to think. There is even a psychological predisposition that partly explains this response. The confirmation bias has it that if a person has a strong view on a topic and you attempt to argue for an alternative viewpoint, the person merely strengthens their view; they dig their heels in. To become open to changing their mind, they need to experience your new way of thinking either first-hand or vicariously through a story.

Robert Kegan, a Harvard professor and psychologist, explains in his book Immunity to Change that we need new stories to see the world differently, and that these stories come from new experiences.

This idea was made clear to Shawn while he was conducting a workshop with 80 professors at Melbourne University on ways to improve collaboration. He began to make the point that two important behaviours for good collaboration were to make and keep promises, and to speak your mind to anyone on the team with respect and good intent. But as he spoke, he noticed a woman at the back of the room who was sitting with her arms crossed, shaking her head, clearly very unhappy with what Shawn was saying. So he stopped his presentation and asked the woman if she would like to share what she was thinking with the rest of the group. Practically before Shawn had finished his request, she said, “There is no way in the world you can be open and honest with a senior professor around here.” Before Shawn could comment, she went on to tell a mini story: “I once did what you are suggesting and I had to move departments.”

Now, no amount of clever argument or telling of familiar stories would have changed that person’s mind. She had obviously had an incredibly bad experience. The only way to help her gain a new insight would be to create an experience with a different result to what she was expecting. She would then have a new story that would in turn guide her future behaviour.

Practice 2: Create new experiences for your team where they come to understand and feel a totally new way of thinking. Importantly, give them an opportunity to gain the insight for themselves. Simply telling them about it is often insufficient. It is much better for them to act their way into a new form of thinking.

A couple of years ago, a university library was preparing to move to a new, purpose-built, ultra-modern building. The move required a huge number of things to change, including the library’s culture, and we were invited to help it with this aspect. The first thing we did was to collect stories from the library’s employees which illustrated the current culture and values. Then we gathered everyone together for a workshop to identify the patterns in those stories.

At one point in the sense-making workshop, 10 librarians were looking at a set of anecdotes about their value of ‘excellence’. After reviewing their cluster of post-it notes, they concluded that the key issue was that they needed more training. They refused to change this view despite Mark’s gentle prompting that there might be something going on at a deeper level. Then Mark suggested they use a story spine to tell the story of ‘training’ in the library.

A story spine is just a simple story structure. Here is the one we suggested the librarians use:

In the past …
Every day …
But one day …
Because of that … (repeat three times or as often as necessary)
Until finally …
Ever since then …
And the moral of the story is … (optional)

The librarians then set about creating a story that explained what was happening in the organisation around training. The story they produced was about a woman named Sue (not an actual person but a character representative of a type of person in the library) who had a bad habit of talking behind people’s backs. Sue was always bitching about people on the one hand, but always said the right things to the right people on the other hand. Then, after Sue was promoted, people realised she couldn’t do the job and they started bitching about her. One day, one of the staff, who had left because Sue was mean to him, ran over her in his BMW at some traffic lights. Many people danced and were happy.

The librarians were shocked at this story. They looked at each other and, almost in unison, said: “We don’t have a training problem in our library. We have a bitching problem.” And right there and then they committed themselves to tackling bitching, which they ultimately did.

Sometimes an insight is sitting just under the surface of people’s awareness, waiting to be named – as soon as it is, everyone knows it to be true. The story structure creates a safe way to talk about these types of sensitive issues because the authors of the story are illustrating the behaviours without personalising the actions.

You just haven’t made sense of something until you can tell a story about it.

Practice 3: Whenever your team gets stuck and thinks there is something just under the surface of everyday practice that’s creating the problems, pull out the story spine and get them to create some stories to explain what’s happening.

One day an expert photocopier technician goes to help a new team member with a problem he’s been trying to solve for a while but without any luck. The devices in question are not ordinary photocopiers but monster machines designed for high throughput. The new technician starts by telling the expert the story of what has happened so far, then they try a few things. When the machines display an E053 error, the expert groans and says, “I remember the first one of these I ever had … if it is what I think it is. I got an E053 and immediately started replacing the dead shorted dicrotrons. They were blowing the circuit breaker. But as soon as I did this I created a 24-volt interlock problem and you can chase that one for ever and NEVER find out what it is. I happened to pull up the dC20 log and I could see I was getting hits on the XER board. It was an XER failure. So I replaced it, then the dicrotrons, and stress-tested the bugger and the real error code displayed. You can’t believe what the machine tells you.”

This story is an adaptation of one of the marvellous anecdotes Julian Orr recorded while conducting his ethnographic study of Xerox photocopier technicians for his book Talking about Machines. The stories that the two technicians tell each other establish the common ground that allows them to understand what is happening when they start diagnosing the problem. It’s impossible to notice anomalies unless you have a story that represents what is normal. Then, when something happens that doesn’t meet set expectations, a new story is needed to make sense of the new facts. In this example, a single story is told that holds the answer. More typically, many stories are told, each one compared and contrasted with the situation at hand. Each story subtly rearranges the facts until an insight emerges.

We can systematically create insights with stories by taking scenarios from other industries or companies and applying them to the problem at hand. The IT research firm Gartner has noticed that some of the best-performing organisations actively seek out business models – fundamentally, stories of how businesses create value – from industries that are different to them yet have similar business characteristics. For example, an airport examined Disneyland’s amusement parks for insights because the objective of both businesses is to get lots of people who are milling in a confined area to eventually line up: in one case to board a flight, and in the other to board a ride. Insights emerged for the airport when it viewed itself as an amusement park.

Practice 4: When diagnosing a problem (strategy development is a good example), encourage everyone to share stories that shed light on what’s happening. Then systematically seek out stories from other industries that are structurally similar to yours. Get used to finding and telling these stories.

The stories we tell ourselves form the foundation for how we perceive and receive new data. Inputs either accord with our story, pull at its edges or turn it upside down. A somersault is usually an indicator of real insight. The question then becomes: Do we bury it or do we actively try and create a new story to explain it?

Stories are also fundamental in creating common ground among groups, and as we saw with the Xerox technicians, they act as a thinking device to help us reorder and arrange the facts we are receiving. Stories are essential for diagnosing and making sense of what we notice.

Stories also hold up a mirror to our own behaviours. Not only do they help us to see something new, they also generate the emotion that motivates us to take action as a result of such insights.

Lastly, we can take stories further and apply them systematically by seeking out analogies from other industries. These foreign stories are the equivalent of putting on a new pair of glasses that help us interpret the familiar in a totally new light. As a result, insight occurs.

 

Story quote of the week