Here’s an interesting story Bob Sutton recently received from a US Marine in relation to his excellent book, The No Asshole Rule. It’s a terrific sensemaking story because I can imagine people will have strong opinions about what the Marine did and so the story will easily start a conversation that will help the participants […]

Imagine if you could get people to talk on camera about their achievements and mistakes. The result could be a powerful, especially if you use these stories to get people talking. Here’s a tiny example on a topic dear to my heart: how to convey complex information simply. In this clip Massimo Vignelli talks about […]

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m reading Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. It’s a terrific book. This story struck my funny bone so I thought I’d share it with you. Each day an elderly man endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds as they passed his house on their way […]

This morning (Happy Easter!) I started writing a paper on a narrative approach to lessons learning. I’m at the point of gathering my thoughts and had the idea of sharing some of them as they occur to me. I hope it’s not too ill-informed but if that’s the case I’m hoping you’ll help me correct […]

Occasionally, anecdote circles don’t work. Sometimes, people don’t get a lot out of them. In the feedback session for the leadership program mentioned on Wednesday one of the participants had this to say: I attended one of the anecdote circles and, no offense meant Mark, but I thought it was a bit of a waste […]

I am in a plane to Brisbane reflecting on the second delivery of a 2.5 day leadership program we have helped develop for the Australian arm of an international company. A large part of the program used anecdotes collected from within the organisation on leadership behaviours and their impact. The feedback from the participants was […]

In 2001 Shell collected a bunch of stories and put them together in a booklet now know as the Blue Book, but with the official title of Stories from the Edge: Managing Knowledge through New Ways of Working within Shell’s Exploration and Production Business. It’s a landmark publication because it shows that a company in a […]

This description of sensemaking makes the most sense to me. Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. (Weick et. al 2005) I’ll tell you why. When I run lessons learning sessions I’ll often start the session by asking, “So, what did […]

I’m just in the process of building up some reflections for my workshop in Boston (you’re most welcome to register and attend) in a couple of weeks and thought I would share some snippets as I progress. You will notice some of the following text is directly from previous blog posts and some is new. Annette Simmons […]

Whenever someone asks me this question I tell them this story. One of our first narrative projects was to help a government department assess their occupational health and safety practices to see whether their policy and procedures were being following and to determine their training needs. We formed two teams to collect our data, one […]