There’s an incredibly strong urge that comes over us, right when we end an anecdote, to explain what the story means. This urge seems especially strong when we tell a story at work. We’ll finish it and then go on and say something like, ‘So, what this means is …’ You must resist this urge […]

Simple Slides I’m a big believer in simple, clear PowerPoint slides. If I’m going to talk about the 54% of people who have no idea about the company strategy, I’ll put up a slide with a big ‘54%’ in 155-point font on it, and only after I’ve spoken about it will I add any other […]

We were about 20 years too early. Back then, my group at IBM extolled the benefits of understanding organisations as complex systems – ones where it was impossible to predict how things were going to turn out; where technology and the speed of change fostered non-linear relationships; where a small thing could have a big […]

Perfect stories told perfectly are suspicious. This is especially true in organisations. Business people feel more comfortable with imperfect stories. They are better received. Here’s a small example. I recently heard a government employee tell a story about a work-related change he was experiencing. Mid-story he said, ‘… and then there were some big policy […]

I recently learned something of the utmost importance about stories from a world-class magician. On a trip into the city, I popped on a podcast to amuse me on the drive. This American Life is on high rotation on my iPhone and I was excited to see there was an episode called ‘The Magic Show’. […]

Four-star general Stanley McChrystal became the commander of US forces in Afghanistan in the mid-2000s. When he arrived in the country, he found the American military operating much as it always had, through command-and-control organisational structures. It didn’t take him long to figure out that wasn’t working against an enemy organised in flat networks that […]

It was exciting to visit Mexico again. I was totally blown away with the beauty of Monterrey. It’s like having a city the size of Melbourne nestled among the bluffs of Yosemite National Park. For some reason I was expecting a flat, desert landscape. It reminded me of Singapore somehow but without the tropical downpours. […]

As I have said before, if you want to change a work culture, you need to change the stories that are told about it. But I’ve never been a fan of the single-story approach to change. Personally, I can’t think of a time when just one amazing story transformed a company. (Some have even gone […]

Gerry Lynch is the general manager of Mars New Zealand, the food and retail business that gives us Mars bars, M&Ms, MasterFoods and Whiskas, to name just a few of their brands. The company, which employs a couple of hundred people, is also a regular finalist in, and winner of, New Zealand’s long-running IBM Kenexa […]

Last month, The New Yorker published an article called ‘Why facts don’t change our minds’, in which the author, Elizabeth Kolbert, reviews some research showing that even ‘reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational’. Kolbert’s popular article makes a good case for the idea that if you want to change someone’s mind about something, facts may […]