Читать книгу Approaching Change One Story At a Time: 20 Stories and Insights for Coaches, Facilitators, Trainers and Change Leaders - Bob Dick - Страница 5

What do you do when you can’t get consulting work in the well-paying corporate sector? You work in the underfunded community sector. At least, that was what I did.

It was about 40 years ago that I began to do consulting work. As a newcomer to this endeavour, I hadn’t yet built networks in corporate or public sectors. For this and other reasons, much of my consulting work was in small non-government organisations: NGOs.

They seemed to like what I had to offer. I had a large repertoire of useful techniques, at least in theory. Above all, I wasn’t expensive. Often, and particularly if I could also involve some of the people enrolled in my university classes, I was free. With a university salary I didn’t need the money from consulting. In any event, the university placed tight limits on how much I could earn from outside work.

What I had yet to learn was that many small NGOs attract people who are different. Partly it’s the NGOs themselves. They aren’t like the corporate and public sectors. Sometimes the same people will behave differently in that setting to how they would act in corporate settings.

Partly it’s the people. In particular, NGOs attract people who have an attitude to timekeeping that near enough is good enough. Facilitating workshops for such participants, I found that breaks for morning and afternoon tea and lunch were extended breaks. Sometimes e-x-t-e-n-d-e-d breaks.

I really didn’t want to have to round up participants. It seemed to me that if I did, they would get the message that starting on time was my responsibility, not theirs. I didn’t want them to think that they had to wait for me to tell them what to do.

I also reasoned that if they did something because I told them to, they would stop doing it when I was no longer there to tell them. If they decided what to do they could take themselves with them when the workshop was over. That seemed like a better strategy.

So I tried negotiating times with them. “How long do you want for this break? ... OK, when you are back here at that time, we’ll start.”

Mostly, that didn’t work either.

I don’t think they were being resistant. Mostly, I suspect they were good at losing themselves in conversation and not very effective at keeping track of time. Finally, I developed the practice of negotiating a time to restart and beginning at that time with whoever had returned. There were still stragglers, so I’d begin with something that was relevant but not essential.

Stories served that purpose well.

As a consequence I discovered something practical and useful. Participants liked the stories. They began to make an effort to return from breaks on time so that they didn’t miss them.

Also, they seemed to remember the stories. They would use the stories as examples in their discussion. When I chose stories that were relevant to the following session, it seemed to enhance the learning. The stories provided an anchor for the learning. In final evaluations, insights from stories were often identified as highlights of the workshops.

Stories became a regular part of my repertoire.

Shortly after this discovery, Tim Dalmau and I were doing some cultural change work in a couple of organisations. We found that, often, when people described organisational culture analytically, somehow it fell short of the reality.

I decided that assessing culture must be like night vision. Suppose you’re outdoors in the dark, on a moonless night. At first you can see nothing. Eventually, though, your eyes adapt to the very low light. Even though colour and clarity are missing you can see again.

If you want to inspect something you are likely to use your daytime practice of looking directly at it. But if you do that, it disappears. There are no night-time receptors at your focus of vision in the retina, the “fovea”. There are only daytime receptors there, insensitive to low levels of illumination. To see something on a dark night you don’t look directly at it. You have to look past it.

That’s how it is with organisational culture. If you look directly at it, it tends to disappear. It’s best to approach it indirectly.

Again, stories provide a solution. Stories, at least in the way people apprehend them, are layered. Below the story line there are themes that carry the deeper meanings. Stories can imply meanings without explicitly voicing them. That’s valuable in cultural work.

There’s a growing literature on telling stories to support the leadership of cultural change. I do a little of that, in a way. That’s part of the purpose served by the stories I tell at the beginning of a workshop session.

For me, though, stories achieve their greatest value when I use them for diagnosis.

For cultural diagnosis Tim and I would encourage people to tell us stories about the organisation. “Tell me about ...”. Later, working with others, it seemed to work most effectively when we collected the stories in small groups of people. One person’s story would trigger recollections of other stories. When we had people talking, the stories would flow quickly and easily.

I now have as a text file on my smartphone a list of story titles to jog my memory. At last count there were about 275 of them. I extend the effectiveness of my change facilitation by looking for opportunities to build storytelling — and even more importantly, story elicitation — into the consulting and facilitation work that I do.

Where now? I often like to begin with what you might call a “first person” story, one that I’ve experienced myself.

I have several reasons.

First, I know the story (or stories) behind the story. I can easily give more weight to those aspects of the story that are relevant to the current task. Also, I have some awareness of the motives of at least one character, and can often arrive at an informed guess about the motives of those other people I know well.

Second, first person stories can be more impelling. It’s easier for the emotion in them to be genuine. Listeners can sense this and become more engaged. Read my account later of Dee Hock stories and then read his own account in his book. I think you’ll find the story more engaging when you get it directly from him. Yes, he’s also a better storyteller than I am. But I think there’s more to it than that.

Third, to oversimplify, there are two major categories of story that serve different purposes. As Sheila Otto says in the title of her book, “All stories are true ... some actually happened”. All stories can be “true” in the sense that they can say something meaningful, directly or indirectly, about human existence. However, if I have two stories that seem equally appropriate for the current purpose, in most situations I’ll favour an “actually happened” story.

For these reasons I was going to start with the first-person story of “Caire”. But then I decided that it made a better final story to round out the collection. So instead, the next story isn’t first person. It’s third person, sort of: John’s story about Joan, told by me.

But I think it says something that’s useful to say at this point. And I can insert something of myself into it and provide enough detail that people recognise it as “actually happened”. I often use it to begin my regular Foundations of facilitation workshops.