The Secret Language of Leadership

"The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling” Selected by Innovation Book Club

Bakersfield, CA 11/28/2005 –  A group of senior innovation leaders has selected twelve books from a field of over ninety candidates for the first, global book club focused on innovation.  Books were chosen for their power to stimulate thought and practical application for innovators.  The book club is sponsored by the InnovationNetwork, a global community of innovation practitioners and additional information is available at http://thinksmart.com

Stephen Denning’s “The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative”  was selected because of its emphasis on the critical skill of using stories to promote and support change.  It is a comprehensive look at the role of storytelling in meeting the most important leadership challenges in today’s world.

Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation, states, "Storytellers play a pivotal role in the 21st century enterprise, and Denning has provided us with a handy field guide to the narrative craft. After making a compelling argument for the power of storytelling, he gives us the details on how to deliver the right story at the right time. Read this useful book-and then tell your friends about it!" 

Larry Prusak, co-author of Working Knowledge says this is “the one book every manager should read before giving up their lifeless PowerPoint presentations. The book is creative, eclectic, passionate and useful--a rare and winning combination for a business book."
    

The full roster for the book club year includes the following:

Month  Book & Author(s)

Jan       The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, IDEO

Feb      How Breakthroughs Happen, the Surprising Truth about How Companies Innovate by Andrew Hargadon, Associate Professor of Management, University of California, Davis

Mar     Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

Apr       The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative by Stephen Denning

May      The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Jun       Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard, CEO Patagonia

Jul            Punished by Rewards, the Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn

Aug      The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts & Cultures by Frans Johansson

Sep      The Art of Possibility by Benjamin and Rosemund Zander

Oct       Making Innovation Work - How to Mange It, Measure It, and Profit from It by Davila, Epstein, Shelton

Nov       How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci by Michael Gelb

Dec            Creativity at Work, Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen by Jeff DeGraff and Katherine Lawrence

InnovationNetwork helps individuals and organizations develop a greater competency of innovation through conferences, events and training programs.

CONTACT: 
Contact Person:  Joyce Wycoff
Company Name:  InnovationNetwork
Voice Phone Number:  1-760-920-2853
Email Address:  jwycoff@thinksmart.com
Website URL:  http://thinksmart.com

Virtual Chautauqua

Just to let you know that there is a Virtual Chautauqua* under way on The Leader's Guide to Storytelling at http://www.virtualchautauqua.com/. Participation is free, though you do need to go through a simple signup process. The discussion continues through November.

So if you have a question on organizational storytelling or want to follow the discussion, or would like to listen to a 30 minute interview that I gave on the subject (to be posted shortly), check it out here:

Among the topics currently under discussion are:

• The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: what's it about?
• What progress is occurring in organizational storytelling?
• Can you misunderstand your own story?
• Can a story be an invitation?
• What constitutes a story?
• How does one learn to tell a story?
• Can story be a conversation starter?
• What is the value of a story?

*What's a chautauqua? Good question. Well, before Monday Night Football, before talk radio, before web surfing and chat rooms, there was Chautauqua. At the turn of the century, there were more than 10,000 Chautauqua venues in small towns and rural areas across the United States. People gathered to enjoy the famous authors of the day, the best musical ensembles, and art exhibits usually available only in major cities. After a stimulating presentation, participants wandered back to their porches and living rooms to discuss, debate, and reflect on what they had experienced together. The Chautauqua movement was all about learning in community.

Today, there are only a handful of Chautauqua sites left to provide this unique opportunity to share a rich menu of cultural and educational activities We can never replace the pleasure of sitting together on the grass and talking long into a summer night. But we can make a time and place for learning in community - even in lives lived on Internet time. The Virtual Chautauqua aims to bring this learning tradition online.

Why storytelling is important

A colleague recently asked me for a quote about why storytelling is important. I came up with the following list of possibilities, that might be of wider interest:

• Storytelling is a key leadership technique because it’s quick, powerful, free, natural, refreshing, energizing, collaborative, persuasive, holistic, entertaining, moving, memorable and authentic. Stories help us make sense of organizations.
• Storytelling is more than an essential set of tools to get things done: it’s a way for leaders – wherever they may sit – to embody the change they seek. Rather than merely advocating and counter-advocating propositional arguments, which lead to more arguments, leaders establish credibility and authenticity through telling the stories that they are living. When they believe deeply in them, their stories resonate, generating creativity, interaction and transformation.

• Storytelling is often the best way for leaders to communicate with people they are leading. Why? It is inherently well adapted to handling the most intractable leadership challenges of today – sparking change, communicating who you are, enhancing the brand, transmitting values, creating high-performance teams, sharing knowledge, taming the grapevine, leading people in to the future.

• Storytelling translates dry and abstract numbers into compelling pictures of a leader’s goals. Although good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story—that is, a narrative that links a set of events in some kind of causal sequence.

• Storytelling is a crucial tool for management and leadership, because often, nothing else works. Charts leave listeners bemused. Prose remains unread. Dialogue is just too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group of managers or front-line staff in a large organization to get enthusiastic about a major change, storytelling is the only thing that works.

• Storytelling can inspire people to act in unfamiliar, and often unwelcome, ways. Mind-numbing cascades of numbers or daze-inducing PowerPoint slides won’t achieve this goal. Even logical arguments for making the needed changes usually won’t do the trick. But effective storytelling often does.

• Storytelling works better than the “Just tell ‘em” approach in most leadership situations. Management fads may come and go, but storytelling is a phenomenon that is fundamental to all nations, societies and cultures, and has been so since time immemorial.

• Narrative is the instrument of continuing creativity, a power that inexorably propels us forward into the future, the unknown, building new worlds and structures.

• Storytelling is part of the creative struggle to generate a new future, as opposed to conventional management approaches that search for virtual certainties anchored in the illusive security of yesterday.

• Narrative can help transform even gargantuan organizations through the unanticipated power of the imagination. It has the capacity to change tangible, hard realities through no more than airy nothings, mere gauzy thoughts.

• Narrative champions freedom, interaction, and organic growth. It operates beyond the scope of simple, linear logic. It is as interested in the unknown as in the known.

• Narrative is a key tool for leadership, because it helps us deal with organizations as living organisms that need to be tended, nurtured and encouraged to grow. It thrives on inspiration rather than administration, fostering change rather than stasis.

• Storytelling liberates innovation, by generating the energy needed to change.

• Narrative helps us make sense of a world that is rapidly mutating, as compared to conventional management, which is more suited to a activities that are stable, linear and predictable.

• Narrative is interested in the next generation of change, not just an extrapolation of the present. It copes with swirling, new, emergent phenomena and phase changes that by definition escape the predictable frame of yesterday’s conceptions.

• Narrative helps us cope with a future that is evolving unpredictably. Conventional management techniques miss the fact that we cannot measure tomorrow when we don’t know what it will involve.

• Narrative is the natural instrument of change, because it draws on the active, living participation of individuals. It dwells in the experience of the people who act, think, talk, discuss, chat, joke, complain, dream, agonize and exult together, and collectively make up the organization. By contrast, conventional management focuses on lifeless elements  – mission statements, formal strategies, programs, procedures, processes, systems, budgets, assets – the dead artifacts of the organization.

• Narrative is a tool that gives privileged access to the living part of an organization, and so can be used to elicit decisions to create organizational artifacts and generate support for them.

• Narrative is a tool for the instigators of change, who aim at continuing transformation and the creation of a fruitful tomorrow. Those whose goal is merely that of control will find that storytelling is not a very useful or important tool. For them, the important thing is accommodation to the preoccupations of a well-behaved yesterday.

• Storytelling is more than just a tool. It is beyond any implement–almost a requirement of being alive. Insofar as it has anything to offer, it generates fresh depth and breadth of perception. It enables us to surmount a humdrum world where everything makes sense and is logical, and get to that realm where deeper meaning is revealed.

• When we hear a story that touches us profoundly, our lives are suffused with meaning. As listeners, we have transmitted to us that which matters. Once we make this connection, once a sense of wonder has come upon us, it does not last long, and we inevitably fall back into our daze of everyday living, but with the difference that a radical shift in understanding may have taken place.

• A story is something that comes from outside. But the meaning is something that emerges from within. When a story reaches our hearts with deep meaning, it takes hold of us. Once it does so, we can let it go, and yet it remains with us. We do not weary of this experience.

• Once we have had one story, we are already hungry for another. We want more, in case it too can transmit the magic of connectedness between the self and the universe.

• Through narrative, we can let go the urge to control, and the fear that goes with it, learning that the world has the capacity to organize itself, recognizing that managing includes catalyzing this capacity, as well as sparking, creating, energizing, unifying, generating emergent truths, celebrating the complexity, the fuzziness and the messiness of living.

For more, go to The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

And my website http://www.stevedenning.com/

Review of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

To captivate staff, executives must be master storytellers

By HARVEY SCHACHTER Wednesday, September 14, 2005 in the Globe & Mail (Canada)

The Leader's Guide To Storytelling By Stephen Denning Jossey-Bass, 360 pages, $31.99

Executives hear much these days about storytelling. In addition to all their other skills, they are expected to be master storytellers, pushing their agenda by reaching beyond fact-based argument to touch the emotions and captivate staff through narrative. But many are no doubt puzzled and therefore paralyzed.

What exactly is a story? How do you prepare it, and just as importantly, tell it in a powerful manner? Traditionally, a story involves a hero or heroine, a plot, a turning point, and a resolution.

But Stephen Denning, a former World Bank official who became enchanted with the power of storytelling and now helps organizations take advantage of it, says different narrative patterns are useful for different purposes of leadership, and they need not be as elaborate as the classic formula.

Indeed, his favourite -- the springboard story -- is quite spare, lacking a plot and turning point. But it's vital for leaders, communicating the complexities of change in a way that motivates others to action. A springboard story tells how one person typical of the audience carried out some recent change that improved the organization. It explains what would have happened without the change. The story has a happy ending, and the teller closes with a link to the purpose he or she hopes to achieve: how this example can springboard the audience and organization to a better future.

Mr. Denning outlines seven other types of storytelling you can use:

Communicating who you are: This is a colourful, well-told story, usually based on an incident in your life, which reveals some strength or vulnerability and helps others to understand you better. In some cases, the story may be from somebody else's life -- a hero of yours, for example -- but because you consider it significant it shows others what you value.

Communicating who the company is: These are the stories told about the company and its products, to develop trust and establish a brand.

Transmitting values: These parables describe an incident that exemplifies the values you want listeners to follow -- perhaps how one employee went beyond the call of duty to serve a customer. You don't begin by specifically naming the value or end by telling listeners to abide by that value, but instead reflect on what the story means to you.

Fostering collaboration: There are a variety of approaches possible here to help people work together, from tales about the past highlighting collaboration, to stories about the glorious future that will occur through the work of a task force, to the personal stories members of a new team share at their first meeting to build bonds.

Taming the grapevine: If dangerous rumours are escalating, you use a story -- often humorous -- to defuse the gossip. But Mr. Denning warns you can't be mean-spirited and can't ridicule a rumour or bad news that is true.

Sharing knowledge: These stories explain something that has gone wrong and how it was -- or wasn't -- fixed.

Leading people into the future: These share your vision of the future in a compelling way. While the springboard story tells about something in the past that can be extrapolated into the future, this is an invented, often quite vague, but evocative story of the future, like Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. It requires a high degree of verbal skill that not all leaders possess. Mr. Denning explains in detail how to craft each story, and provides a template for building your own stories in each category. If you're confused but intrigued about storytelling, the book can certainly point you in the right direction.

Also reviewed in the notice: Seth Godin's "All Marketers Are Liars" and Don Watson's "Death Sentences."

Read the entire review

The Iraq war has lost its narrative

An interesting article by Mark Danner in the New York Times today suggests that the Iraq war has "lost its narrative."

"Sold a war made urgent by the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dangerous dictator, Americans now see their sons and daughters fighting and dying in a war whose rationale has been lost even as its ending has receded into the indefinite future. A war promised to bring forth the Iraqi people bearing flowers and sweets in exchange for the beneficent gift of democracy has brought instead a kind of relentless terror that seems inexplicable and unending. A war that had a clear purpose and a certain end has now lost its reason and its finish. Americans find themselves fighting and dying in a kind of existential desert of the present. For Americans, the war has lost its narrative.

"Of the many reasons that American leaders chose to invade and occupy Iraq - to democratize the Middle East; to remove an unpredictable dictator from a region vital to America's oil supply; to remove a threat from Israel, America's ally; to restore the prestige sullied on 9/11 with a tank-led procession of triumph down the avenues of a conquered capital; to seize the chance to overthrow a regime capable of building an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons - of all of these, it is remarkable that the Bush administration chose to persuade Americans and the world by offering the one reason that could be proved to be false. The failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, and the collapse of the rationale for the war, left terribly exposed precisely what bin Laden had targeted as the critical American vulnerability: the will to fight."

Read the full article

Narrative and business risk management

In June 2005, Harvard Business Review identified one of the links between business risk management and narrative:

"Most companies are already navigating the choppy waters of globalization, and none, presumably, are sailing blind. But corporate leaders may lack the sophisticated understanding this very complex subject requires. Political risk analysis is more subjective than its economic counterpart and demands that leaders grapple not just with broad, easily observable trends but also with nuances of society and even quirks of personality. And those hard-to-quantify factors must constantly be pieced into an ongoing narrative within historical and regional contexts."

The article is entitled “Managing Risk in an Unstable World” by Ian Bremmer. It argues that As emerging markets generate greater shares of global supply and demand, companies need better methods to weigh political risk against financial reward. One of those methods is … narrative.

Harvard Business Review: June 2005, page 51.

Other narrative dimensions of business risk management will be examined a forthcoming article of mine, including:

• fighting risk aversion
• finding the upside to business risk management
• winning support for business risk management programs.

Advance versions of the article will be made available to subscribers to my newsletter, to which you can sign up at: http://www.stevedenning.com

The Age of Bullshit

First, there was the Age of Faith – soaring cathedrals, a belief in a supreme deity, courageous saints containing the spread of evil. Then there was the Age of Reason – the era of the Enlightenment, the guidance of science and a belief that the mind could unravel all the mysteries of the universe.

Today, however, according to a number of learned books and a recent New Yorker article, we live in the Age of Bullshit. “We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production… Presidents, priests, politicians, laywers, reporters, corporate executives and countless others have taken to saying not what they actually believe, but what they want others to believe – not what is, but what works.” Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit, by Laura Penny (Crown Publishers, NY)

Bullshit, we learn, is different from lying. A liar knows what he is saying to be false. A bullshitter, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care whether what he is saying is true or not – it’s what he can get away with. 

According to Harry Frankfurt in On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005), the quintessential example of bullshit occurred when Ludwig Wittgenstein visited a friend in hospital and asked her how she felt. She said she felt like a run-over dog. Wittgenstein was disgusted. “You don’t know a dog that has been run over feels like.” Wittgenstein’s friend wasn’t lying. She was bullshitting. According to Frankfurt, bullshitting has become “one of the most salient features of our culture.”

Chronic truth decay

The proliferation of bullshit is one of the principal reasons I put so much emphasis in my books and workshops on telling the truth, the truth as best you can tell it, the authentic truth. Becoming identified as a bullshitter will devastatingly reduce your chances of being an effective leader of change.

Why is there so much bullshit today? The books have difficulty in putting their finger on any single reason. Frankfurt suggests diplomatically and optimistically that since there is so much more communication generally, perhaps the proportion that is bullshit hasn’t increased. Penny says that “our era is unique by virtue of its sheer scale, its massive budget, its seemingly unlimited capability to send bullshit hurtling rapidly over the globe.”

Politicians and advertisers are cited as champions of bullshit, addictively "painting the lawn green." Their slogans wash over us: "You deserve a break today." "I'd like to teach the world to sing." "Mission accomplished." "We are fighting a war on poverty." The US emerges as the champion nation of bullshitting because ours is “much more ubiquitous, well-funded, and outrageous” than any other nation’s.

Frankfurt suggests that bullshitting is also encouraged by the perceived responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything. This leads inevitably to “the lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality.”

Post-modernist attacks on truth have also, it is said, had a hand in encouraging bullshit. If we cannot ever really know for sure what is true, then at least we can be sincere. As Blackburn however points out, knowledge about ourselves is “elusively insubstantial.” Hence a claim to be speaking the truth about ourselves is in great danger of being itself a prize example of bullshit.

For instance, distinguished literary critics, including the super-subtle Lionel Trilling in his otherwise brilliant book, Sincerity and Authenticity, have cited with approval Polonius’s advice to his son in Shakespeare's Hamlet: “This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” This advice is, to be sure, persuasively phrased, but we should get a hint about its veracity from the fact that Shakespeare puts the words in the mouth of a doddering old fool. In fact, when you think about it for more than a second, you realize that it cannot possibly be true. So whether or not Polonius believes his advice, he is bullshitting!

How to avoid bullshitting

Is there a way out? Can we be sincere and tell the truth about ourselves? Is it possible to tell the truth? What I advise in my workshops, and what I say in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, is to proceed as though it is possible to think disinterestedly and to do one's best to present one's conclusions without significant distortion.

These assumptions may be hard to justify to a philosopher, but they contribute to a form of communication that is immensely useful. The assumptions constitute in effect a set of enabling conventions. Whether or not you believe in the enabling conventions – for example that truth can be known – telling a story in this way requires no life-long philosophical commitment to the belief, only a willingness to adopt this position for a limited time and purpose.

Similarly, playing the game of tennis doesn’t necessitate adopting the position that our lifelong aim is to defeat our opponent. But if we want to play a good game of tennis on a particular day, it does require that we adopt the conventions of tennis and try to defeat our opponent on that particular day. We cannot play an excellent game of tennis if we are all the time questioning the conventions of the game, or commenting on the evolution of the game, or wondering whether we should be trying to defeat our opponent. After the game is over, we may sit back and have philosophical discussions about whether the conventions of tennis make sense, or whether other conventions would be preferable, or whether we really enjoy trying to defeat our best friend at tennis, but for the duration of the game, these questions have to be set aside in order to play an excellent game of tennis. Then the game can proceed.

So it is with storytelling. The performance of storytelling requires the storyteller to accept the conventions of storytelling at least for the duration of the performance. In performance, the storyteller is certain, fearless and relentless in presenting things “as they really are.” While the role can be useful and even thrilling, it can hardly be permanent. For better or worse, human beings cannot remain in a permanent state of certainty, fearlessness and relentlessness. There is no reliable evidence to support the storyteller’s claim to the disinterested expression of truth. The insouciance required to ignore what everyone knows and to carry the listeners along cannot be maintained for very long, and master storytellers know the limits. The storytelling performance is thus a sprint, not a marathon.

This is not to say that the leader as storyteller cannot acknowledge human inadequacies. We know that much of the time we are unreliable, inconsistent or uncertain. We are victims of our ambitions. We may deceive ourselves for reasons of sentimentality or friendship or vanity or self-interest. We remain a morass of unsatisfied appetites. These inadequacies can however be seen as a regrettable layer of imperfection over fundamental soundness. We never despair. We’re not impotent, merely weak. We can grow stronger. We can not only aspire to what is true and worthwhile: we can even succeed in our dreams. We can recognize a new experience or new possibilities through a story. By communicating that experience or those possibilities, we can ratchet up our own, and our audience’s, understanding.

Above all, one must make a determined effort to tell the authentic truth, even though everyone around is bullshitting. This isn't easy. In fact it’s terrifying to think how many things can go wrong in an effort to present something clearly and accurately. Perhaps our memory is playing tricks on us. Maybe we have difficulty expressing what we see. Our insights may lack edge. We may have been misled. Even if we have none of these fears, the situation is hardly any better, since the listeners may have the same fears about us. How can we deal with doubts that we cannot even in principle know?

Presenting the truth as we see it is a capability that is available to everyone. Such competence is no more problematic than being able to see what we see with our own eyes. The storyteller does not have to be omniscient. It is the everyday form of competence of knowing what we need to know for this particular talk.

So why not join us in committing to authentic storytelling, and help fight bullshit?

Read more about The Leader's Guide to Storytelling.

Corporate histories

I got a question today about how to write an organizational history.

The organization will celebrate its centennial in 2008 and my correspondent had been asked to compile a history of the institution to commemorate the event. He wanted to to find an attractive and palatable literary vehicle/style/genre to communicate what is of itself an interesting history. He was toying with the possibility of organizing the history of the university as a story or as many stories. He asked whether I saw possibilities in using this approach?

My reply:

Organizational histories can be a tricky challenge. Often there are so many interests bearing down on the writing that it's tough to produce something that's both true and interesting. There's a passage in my co-authored book, Storytelling in Organizations (Butterworth Heinemann), where Larry Prusak had a few blunt words to say about the subject:

• "People sometimes ask me how to approach writing an oral history of an organization. What should they do and what shouldn’t they do? Sometimes I tell them what Voltaire said about history. “It’s a pack of tricks played on the dead.” If you can find people still alive who were around when the organization was created and who can really talk about it, my advice is to interview these people and tape the conversations on video. Talk to people who have stories to tell, and let the viewers make their own decision as to what this means. I usually advise them not to write it. There are firms that write histories for other firms. But almost no-one reads them, because we know they are not true. It doesn’t accord with our own sense of how an organization would work. Country histories are different. Professional historians often write really well and honestly, and readers agree that, yes, that must have been the way it was. But corporate histories are different. I’ve read a number of them. They’re mostly public relations, that is to say, bunk, and people know it. So I’d recommend interviewing people and letting them talk. Then others can watch the tapes and make up their own minds as to what they mean."

That's one approach, which may or may not suit the need. If there is a requirement to actually write a volume, then telling it as a story is certainly the way to go. If one can find a coherent point of view for the story, something that reveals the true spirit and soul of the university, this would help to give it focus.

It may also be useful to have a frank discussion up front with the authorities about the issue of truth. If the book is to be simply a PR job, then it may leave your sponsors very happy but will likely result in a book that is never read. If on the other hand the book is to be frank account of both the joys and woes of the story of the organization, with some lively writing about the impact of the lives on specific individuals, including the setbacks, then it may offend some people but it just might end up being worthwhile.

And of course, there’s more on telling your organization’s story in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

CHICAGO STORYTELLING MASTERCLASS

I will be giving a full-day storytelling masterclass in Chicago on September 29, 2005, sponsored by the ARK Group.

In this masterclass, participants will learn how to use stories to handle the main challenges of transformational leadership, communicate complex ideas so as to be easily understood, spark action even from skeptical audiences, build trust by communicating who you are, enhance your brand authentically from within the organization, understand values and how to transmit them authentically, create high performance teams and communities of practice, transmit knowledge, both explicit and tacit, tame the grapevine, and lead people into the future.

In this masterclass, participants will learn how to use stories to handle the main challenges of transformational leadership, communicate complex ideas so as to be easily understood, spark action even from skeptical audiences, build trust by communicating who you are, enhance your brand authentically from within the organization, understand values and how to transmit them authentically, create high performance teams and communities of practice, transmit knowledge, both explicit and tacit, tame the grapevine, and lead people into the future.

Participants will receive a signed copy of my new book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (Jossey-Bass, 2005) as part of the masterclass.

This is the first publicly-accessible masterclass that the ARK Group is putting on in the US, and it is shaping up with some great innovations. For once, we have a whole day, compared to the half-day that I’ve been doing in the European masterclasses. And my recent whirlwind tour through Australia and NZ (21 workshops/presentations in less than three weeks) has given me the chance to refine some modules and develop new ones.

• The workshop will feature a case study: Participants will get to practice the full array of narrative techniques on a brand new case study developed specially for this masterclass. In this fascinating story of a firm in transition, participants will get to see what’s involved in getting change in a difficult situation, including not only springboard stories but also all the other narrative patterns described in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

• It will include 12 ways to create high-performance teams: the conventional wisdom (e.g. Richard Hackman’s Leading Teams) is that management can’t do any more than create the conditions for teams, not actually generate high-performance teams. In this module, you’ll learn not only why this is wrong but also: twelve things that you actually can do to generate high-performance teams.

• Three narrative dimensions of brands: The idea that brands have something to do with narrative is now becoming quite commonplace. But did you know that there are three different narrative dimensions of brands? Participants will explore these three different dimensions in the case study.

• Innovation: my workshops in the past have focused on communicating a change idea that you already have. In this module, we’ll work on the prior question: how do you come up with change idea? You’ll learn how narrative techniques can help in this area too.

• Seven crucial steps to perform the story: Telling the right story is important, but just as important is how you perform it. In this module, you’ll learn

• The HR dimension of storytelling: smart organizations are realizing that narrative is a core competence of an organization, and are incorporating this into recruitment and staffing policies.

• PowerPoint: In this module, you’ll learn to stop complaining about PowerPoint and start using its awesome capacity to reinforce your narrative.

It will take place at the Chicago Marriott Downtown.

The price is US$995. 

To get more details on the masterclass, click here.

To book your place, click here: 

If you have a question, send me an email at steve@stevedenning.com 

Anthropologists find the customer’s story

As pointed out in the branding chapter of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, the Financial Times has an article today by Kim Thomas pointing out the value of finding the customer’s story, this time, through the use of anthropologists.

The idea of using social scientists was pioneered at Xerox PARC and reflected in Julian Orr’s book, Talking About Machines.

The idea has resurfaced as big technology companies believe anthropologists can discover the story that remains undiscovered by traditional quantitative research methods. Xerox researchers today use a technique known as ethnomethodology, which involves visiting workplaces and observing working practices without preconceptions.

Peter Tolmie, the area manager of Xerox’s work practice technology group in France, says: “Standard marketing research and statistical data is often frustratingly shallow when you want to move towards designing technology.”

The advantage of using anthropologists is that they can uncover the customer's story. Says Intel researcher, Ms Bell: “I’m always looking for the ethnographic story that totally turns your world on its ear, the thing that challenges some really basic core assumption you have made.”

According to Thomas, Microsoft is another company trying hard to understand the customer perspective. Shannon Banks, a UK-based product planner who heads a global team looking at the needs of information workers, says that initial “broad exploratory research” may uncover “pain points and unarticulated customer needs that they do not even recognise”.

The results of the Chinese research by Intel?

- findings about Chinese parents’ concern that computers might distract their children from learning Mandarin led Intel designers to launch this year a PC that has a touch-sensitive screen that allows users to write in Mandarin.

- the significance in China of locks and keys as manifestations of authority meant installing physical locking mechanisms, visible from elsewhere in the room, rather than software locks were popular with parents.

Read the full Financial Times article

http://www.stevedenning.com/LeadersGuide.html