One reason that people need to meet face-to-face is that asking for advice is an implicit admission of ignorance. In low-trust organizations, public admissions of ignorance may lead to career setbacks or worse. Hence, before people will be willing to show ignorance and ask for advice, they need to have a sense of who's listening when they expose their ignorance. Once people have met, exchanged stories, and established the minimum level of trust, they can disperse around the world and exchange views openly.
Encourage the Group to Develop and Tell Its Own Story
Human beings see meaning in being part of a larger story. So to create high-performance teams or communities, it is important to link individuals to the story of the group and link the story of the group to the larger organizational story.
In much of life, we are uncertain what story our life fits into, and hence our experience is somewhat murky. Deep meaning is generated by narratives that show how our actions relate to broader objectives. When we see that our work is part of a larger activity whose goal is worthwhile, then our own smaller activity also seems more valuable. When group members themselves formulate the story, they see that they are making a contribution. Their own story becomes interwoven with the larger story of the group.43
This phenomenon can be catalyzed by encouraging the team or community to develop and tell its story. The following actions can help group members see themselves as part of the larger story and link their own individual identities with the story of the group:
Give the group a name. Even an unimaginative name may be better than none. If the group is allowed to determine its own name and is given the opportunity to exercise its imagination a little, that can help instill a sense of ownership among group members.
Allow the group to create its own work space. This will let members feel some ownership with the space. It might be a physical space—a kind of clubhouse where members can hang out informally. It might also be a virtual space—a Web site—where team members have something to say about the layout and how the content is presented. If these spaces—physical or virtual—are totally controlled by the hierarchy to ensure a consistent corporate “look and feel,” the chance that the group will feel ownership is lower than if they have a voice in the matter. Some minimum standards are needed, since users may find it difficult to navigate among sites with extremely heterogeneous layouts. Nevertheless, if corporate consistency is taken too far, it will stifle group spirit and kill passion.
Adopt some common objects to foster teamwork. Some groups have a common uniform—sports teams, airline crews, branches of the military—but this may be impractical or inappropriate for most other teams. However, other physical objects may help strengthen the group identity—hats, T-shirts, satchels, whatever—and generate a proprietary sense of playfulness that contributes to identity.
Consider encouraging the group to socialize together or participate in sporting events together. Shared social activity can create opportunities for sharing stories and so help build group identity. Unfortunately, work hours may already be so long that active encouragement of socializing after work can appear as intrusive into private lives and upsetting work-life balance. In each case, the context should be examined to determine what makes sense.
Create occasions for a successful team or vibrant community to tell its story to other teams and communities. External storytelling is an important way for the group to strengthen its sense of identity and let other teams or communities learn of the success.
Keep a successful team together. Many organizations pay little attention to keeping successful teams together, even though powerful evidence indicates that—except in R&D teams, where infusions of new blood may be needed—good teams get better over time.44 The members of a team that has been together for an extended period not only get to know each other well, they develop the story of the team. Having an opportunity to tell that story and celebrate their success can strengthen their ownership of the group and hence nurture the passion that leads to more success in the future.
In all of these steps, be careful to ensure that strengthening the identity of the team isn't a substitute for meaningful work. If the task isn't worth caring about or if organizational incentives aren't aligned with group performance, then these gestures will be seen as sugarcoating a bad situation and will be counterproductive.45
Get Extraordinary Results from Ordinary People
Management theorists put a lot of emphasis on getting the membership of the team right. For example, Jim Collins in From Good to Great cites getting the right people on the leadership team as the first step in building a great organization. Similarly Richard Hackman in Leading Teams stresses that getting the right team membership is among the most important ways that managers can help strong teams develop.46
In practice, however, there are limited degrees of freedom in selecting people. Often you inherit the group assembled by your predecessors or the management. Initially you live in a WYSIWYG world—what you see is what you get. Practical considerations prevent a leader from always having first-round draft choices for every position. There is competition for the best people, who in any event may have other plans.
What to do with the set of imperfect individuals you have to work with as members of the group? The conventional management approach is to figure out what needs to be done, decide on a division of work, make an allocation among existing team members (perhaps even allowing them to choose assignments), and then get on with the job. This often gets reasonable results: people usually pitch in and do the best they can with the job they are assigned even if it's not what really inspires them. But such assignments often leave them waiting until work finishes each day or until the team's work finally gets done, so they can get back to what they really enjoy doing.
If you want extraordinary performance from a group, you need a more interactive approach to draw on the members' resources of emotion and caring. By finding out the story of the individual members—who they are, what drives them, where they have come from—you can adjust the work of the group so that their assignments can reflect their deeper feelings. Any complex task offers more than one route to success. If you can find a route that draws on the passions of team members, then what looks like an ordinary team can become extraordinary.47
In 1997, almost a year after my five-member knowledge team began working together at the World Bank, I discovered that one of my staff was a professional storyteller. At once I encouraged him to see how we could use this in the work. Eventually his expertise and contacts contributed powerfully to our capability to persuade the organization to change.
Another staff member was skilled at team building, training, and groupware. In due course, she became an expert in organizing knowledge fairs. Holding a knowledge fair was not part of our game plan, and when she suggested it, it seemed to me an unlikely possibility for the overly solemn World Bank. But she was passionate about it, and she made it succeed. Thus, these two areas—storytelling and knowledge fairs—became central features of the successful World Bank program, in part because the team members were able to weave their own stories into the work, and their work became their passion. Members of this group still look back on this period as an extraordinary time in their lives.
One can also create the space to let people express their individuality and have some fun.
Southwest Airlines has done this brilliantly by encouraging individual team members to weave their own story into the company's story of a fun airline. I was on a Southwest flight recently, and the flight steward introduced himself as follows: “Hello. This is Bingo, and I'll be your flight steward on today's flight from Baltimore to Orlando. Some of you might be wondering why I'm called Bingo. Simple! You see that's the name my parents gave me. Why? Well, I was the fifth child in my family. My parents desperately wanted to have a boy and their first four children were girls. So when I showed up after four girls, it was quite natural for them to shout, “Bingo!” So that's what my name is.”
&n
bsp; That simple but unforgettable explanation makes the flight steward's story part of Southwest's story and becomes part of my story about Southwest Airlines.
Contribute to Group Learning Through the Exchange of Stories
The learning of high-performance teams or communities is very different from conventional approaches to coaching, which typically involve identifying problems and getting agreement on what to do about them. Here the thrust is on inspiring improved performance—in a situation where no one may know what better performance would look like.
Participants must not only look at objective measures of how the work is proceeding but also listen carefully to each other's stories—finding out what they think is going on—while at the same time formulating their own story about what has happened so far and what could happen next. The objective is to see how the stories mesh so as to determine which story offers the most promising way forward.48
Learning can take place before, during, and after the work of the group:
Before the work begins, the group can invite others who have undertaken similar efforts to come together to share stories and so devise the best approach for undertaking the new task. This is sometimes called a “peer assist.”49
While the work is ongoing, pausing at milestones and other key incidents to discuss what has gone well and what could be improved can clarify the group's story so far and lay the basis for future learning. This is sometimes called an “after-action review.”50
When the work is over, a more thorough review can enable the group to piece together the story of what happened and why and secure lessons learned for the benefit of future groups. This is sometimes called a “retrospect.”51
The effectiveness of such measures can be seen from a comparative Harvard Business School study of teams of surgeons as they introduced a new technique of minimally invasive cardiac surgery. All teams came from highly respected institutions and received the same training, but there were major differences in results. Some teams were able to halve their operating time, while others failed to improve at all. In Complications, Atul Gawande describes the differences between the best and worst teams as follows:
Richard Bohmer, the one physician among the Harvard researchers, made several visits to observe one of the quickest-learning teams and one of the slowest, and he was startled by the contrast.
The surgeon on the fast-learning team was actually quite inexperienced compared with the one on the slow-learning team—he was only a couple of years out of training. But he made sure to pick team members with whom he had worked well before and to keep them together through the first fifteen cases before allowing any new members. He had the team go through a dry run before the first case, then deliberately scheduled six operations in the first week, so little would be forgotten in between. He convened the team before each case to discuss it in detail and afterward to debrief. He made sure results were tracked carefully. And as a person, Bohmer noted, the surgeon was not the stereotypical Napoleon with a knife. Unbidden, he told Bohmer, “The surgeon needs to be willing to allow himself to become a partner [with the rest of the team] so he can accept input.”
At the other hospital, the surgeon chose his operating team almost randomly and did not keep it together. In his first seven cases, the team had different members every time, which is to say that it was no team at all. And he had no prebriefings, no debriefings, no tracking of ongoing results.52
Whereas the poorly performing team was the cocksure type who is “sometimes wrong but never in doubt,” the team that did well benefited from a leader who was willing to admit the possibility of doing better and who encouraged the team to learn. The study dramatically illustrates one of the great strengths of working together effectively. Collaboration establishes the basis for learning from experience and sharing knowledge. And it is to this issue that I turn in the next chapter.
Template for Nurturing Collaboration
One way to help get people working together is to spark a series of stories among the group that enables the group to see that they have common problems, common goals, and a common perspective on how to address the. This is a story aimed at beginning a story chain to boost collaboration.
A key is for the initial story to be one that moves the audience, who begin to think: This is interesting. I want to hear more stories like that. And I would like to share my story about the same subject.
1. Have someone tell a moving story about something that happened to the group: for example, a turning point in the group's story, a time when the group ran into a difficult problem, a time when things went terrifically well for the group, or a time when the group faced a real challenge.
2. Who was the single protagonist of the story?
3. Is the single protagonist typical of your specific audience? If not, can the story be told from the point of view of such a protagonist?
4. When and where did it happen?
5. Has the story been stripped of any unnecessary detail?
6. What happened after the incident? Did things get better or worse?
7. How did the protagonist feel about the incident?
8. What was the significance of what happened for the group?
9. After the story has been told, ask if anyone else has had a similar experience.
8
Share Knowledge
Using Narrative to Transmit Knowledge and Understanding
“We value stories because they are like reports of research projects, only easier to understand, remember, and use.”
Gary Klein1
Contrary to conventional wisdom, much of what we know is composed of stories. We have a certain amount of abstract understanding of the world—theories, principles, processes, and heuristics useful for dealing with recurring, repetitive tasks: thus, airplane pilots follow checklists to make sure they don't forget a crucial step on takeoff. We also have a certain amount of tacit understanding, which we acquire through experience and may be able to articulate explicitly: thus, we may be able to ride a bicycle or perform a complicated surgical operation even if we cannot explain exactly what we do.2 But a substantial part of our expertise also lies in narratives that describe how unusual situations have been handled in the past. Cognitive scientists have discovered that we turn experiences—both our own and those of others—into stories to help us remember them and communicate effectively.3
The phenomenon of sharing knowledge through stories is astonishingly pervasive and mundane. Take this example from Julian Orr's Talking About Machines about the repair of Xerox copiers. It's about a routine service call of a technician, who insists on hearing directly from the users who actually had the problem with the machine so that he gets the most accurate possible description. He knows that second-hand or third-hand descriptions can distort things, so he finds the users, and they tell him their story:
First user: I was having the problem with the feeder. Uh, I didn't bring my originals with me, but I was telling Richie [the manager] that they were flat, new originals, never had staples in ‘em or anything. ‘I would feed ‘em through [opens machine cover] and one would get caught right in here.
Second user: That's where mine got caught.
First user: And then I would have two layin' on the glass.
Technician: Two on the glass? … Thanks. That's big input.
Second user: She was having problems with double-sided the other day.
Technician: Two-sided original? …
First user: Yeah. It would make it through. It would go through on the first side, but then on the second time it would catch right in here. On top …
Technician: As soon as you hear that extra noise, where it's clunkety-clunk, clunkety-clunk, as it's turning over …
Users: Uh-huh. Yeah….
Technician: Okay, thanks. You told us a lot.4
When the repair technician hears the users' story, he knows immediately what it means: there's too much play in the reversing roll—the roll that turns the paper over to copy the
other side in double-sided copying. He confirms the diagnosis by wiggling the roll. After doing other routine maintenance, he can see which parts he needs to complete the repairs. His experience has provided him with a set of narratives from which he can diagnose the problem and find the solution. These narratives may concern surface features, such as sights and sounds or touch, or thematic features such as goals, plans, or types of surprises. In this case, it's a sound: when the paper catches, there is the distinctive sound—“clunkety-clunk, clunkety-clunk”—and a touch—the wiggle in the reversing roll. Through the users' story, the technician is able to get a fix on the symptoms of the malfunctioning machine, thereby enabling him to diagnose the cause of the problem and repair it.
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 20