stories in business – fingerprint on a smartphone

Please click the link to download a slide. When you open the file, there is a single powerpoint slide. You can click on the phone screen to play the movie.

1. conducting pain-and-pleasure conversations to flush out the experiences of people external to a company who wish our clients would be more agile, more innovative, more consistent, more truthful; and
2. making movies for business audiences, where we story-find and then revisit “how” and “why” when it comes to storyboarding, so that we’re using the best the craft offers (within the constraints of our clients’ budgets) to make a memorable, compelling artefact that catalyses conversations and/or leaves an indelible imprint.

This work takes a different starting point then Anecdote’s (whose focus seems to be intra-organizational). So maybe that’s why my view and their’s differ. Maybe also because the intra-organizational dimension is one that I (with Indy Neogy and Gregg Fraley) am now tackling with a whole new approach: The Kiln System, a conversational framework to drive internal innovation process fuelled by trend (in other words, outside) intelligence. Kiln is a long way from communicators’ typical approach to engagement-for-innovation-or-improvement.

I was feeling hungry for some touchstones to support Throughline’s approach to stories (which we see as intrinsically connected both to conversations in business and to culture, by which we understand both professional/department tribes, company cultures and national/regional cultures). Thank goodness for Cynthia Kurtz’s piece on context. You can read it in full here.

The three things that most impacted on me were:

1. The pace and poignancy in her capture of her own reception of two advertisements.
2. The persuasive illustration of just how much power context exerts on our interpretation
3. The depth to which she mined the tools used in the construction of the advertisement (in this case Photoshop or a predecessor) to explain its construction.

I ended up feeling reassured that we are not alone in our preoccupation with “how” and “why” and that as soon as one moves from conversation to other forms of media — the hip phrase these days is “transmedia storytelling” — how and why whip back with a vengeance.

For Anecdote’s story-spotting test, click here. For Dave Snowden’s thoughts on its limitations, click here.

My takeaway from the evening is that the factors that influence engagement can be put in a few groups – and they all matter. A lot of attention on the night was paid to the first 3 groups:

1) A large number of the factors which dictate engagement exist at the level of individuals.
Questions like:
a) Does their immediate boss work to engage the team? Does the boss have all the skills to engage the team?
b) Does the employee fit well with the work they need to do?
c) Is there an appropriate team atmosphere?

HR policies set the context for these issues, but they can still go wrong, even with good policies in place. This is the realm of good people management and the quality and actions of the direct manager are critical.

2) HR policies that set the above context:
a) Pay and rewards
b) Performance management
c) Training and career development

These need to be fair in themselves and not radically behind those at other equivalent companies. The quality of the implementation of these policies has a lot of influence on the factors in Group 1.

3) Empowerment. Many people referenced Daniel Pink’s Drive and the need to give people a feeling of autonomy. John Smythe also emphasised that he believes democracy in the workplace is the way of the future. In his view people need to see and feel that they are involved in the decision of the company.

These 3 groups of factors were juxtaposed with the classic corporate comms angle on engagement – communicating the strategy:

If people don’t know what the strategy is, they can believe the company is going nowhere, with similar results to (a) – or they can believe the strategy is X when it is Y, resulting in confusion and conflict when they act according to X and others according to Y. Being repeatedly wrong is disengaging, we all know that. This is the classic communications angle on engagement.

My own area is Strategy and Culture – so I have some things to add:

a) If the company strategy isn’t working – and there isn’t a plan to make things better, people will disengage.
One panellist, Sean Trainor, talked persuasively about his experiences maintaining engagement through a period of redundancies – it can be done, for a while, but persistent uncertainty and feelings of company underperformance will eat at even the best team.

b) If the Strategy doesn’t fit the Culture, then people will experience the dissonance, the mixed signals between the formal and informal instructions and switch off.

c) If the People don’t fit the Culture, then they are likely to feel out of place and unlikely to be engaged. This is an HR or Talent Management responsibility, but few companies have a good understanding of their own culture – and so mismatches are common.

Other blogs on this event:

Sean Trainor
CIPR Inside – Event Video Trailer
Doug Shaw