the power of the tale

Before starting, the team members were invited to read a number of books and articles:

The fourth book on the reading list that Mike gave the team at the outset was The Power of the Tale. The authors demonstrate pretty convincingly how story telling in business can build honesty and trust, promote learning, develop new skills, break new ground (or paths) and create scenarios that you can use in planning for the future.

For me, story telling is essentially a sales technique. It’s a way of talking to, and winning over, the heart when the mind ain’t listening. It’s what Javier urged the team to do a lot more of, and something they focused on when creating an ‘elevator pitch’ and other justifications for their ideas. It’s also part of the process of convincing yourself so you can convince others. Put like that, it sounds a tad mechanical. But then, what aspect of a relationship isn’t, when you deconstruct it?

This business of story telling as a way of winning over others also reminds me of Georges Dumézil’s assertion in Mitra-Varuna that sovereignty has two poles: the magician-king, who uses capture, bonds, knots, webs and nets, and the jurist-priest who governs by treaties, laws, pacts and contracts. The former, if I understand right, has more to do with feelings and intuition, the latter has more to do with analysis and logic. Officially, business is done on the basis of analysis and logic and run by jurist-priests; in practice, it is often run by magician-kings operating by capture and ensnarement. Story telling is a practice of ensnarement. And ensnarement and manipulation have managed to get themselves a bad name.

Julie Allan, one of the co-authors of The Power of the Tale is, I discover, currently working on, and researching, wisdom and its emergence in organisations. Interestingly, she quotes Walter Benjamin (who appears in Drifting, Angst and Pan-ic) thus:

“Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom,” writes author Walter
Benjamin, reflecting on storytelling in Illuminations (1970). And, “. . .
counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the
continuation of a story which is just unfolding.”

‘Wisdom’ seems to me a bold word to use. Sitting on top of the Systems Thinking hierarchy of data, information, knowledge, understanding, wisdom, it’s a topic we’ve tended to leave to Solomon and the enlightened and I find it slightly shocking to see it discussed in day-to-day organisational terms.

Editing the English translation of Alain de Vulpian’s Towards the Third Modernity recently, I wanted to keep ‘informed’ as the translation of ‘avisé’. The author wanted ‘wise’ and we compromised on ‘wiser’ because ‘a wise organisation’ seemed to me such an improbable creature. So wisdom seems like a fascinating object of study.

Dilemmas:

Story telling - in business as elsewhere - can build honesty and trust, but it is a practice of ensnarement and manipulation (or vocipulation). Why doesn’t the word exist?

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Credits:

Systems Thinking Hierarchy: Kathy Sierra's Passionate blog

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equifinality

Frederick Taylor (right), the father of scientific management and a modernist to the core, believed that there was 'one best way' to do anything. (This was the underlying principle of the ideology of technocracy.) He was a closed systems man.

The ineffably named Ludwig von Bertalanffy (left), one of the founding fathers of what we now call Systems Thinking, was an open systems man. He looks jollier to me. (Perhaps it's because he looks as if he's a one-buttock player, to use Benjamin Zander's term.)





Bertalanffy proposed that:

Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter...

He maintained that, in an open system, 'the same final state may be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways'. Which theory is called equifinality - different paths to the same destination.

So there's the science.

Actually there's more. It's called the neo-Schumpeterian theory of complexity and innovation. Most of it is stultifyingly boring. I only mention it because, said right, I believe it can have the same effect as Kevin Kline saying, 'Le due cupole grandi della cattedrale di Milano'.

But there's some interesting stuff in there. Joseph Schumpeter (below, left) devoted more effort to the study of innovation than any other economist in the first half of the twentieth century. He coined the term unternehmergeist to describe the spirit of entrepreneurship that drives technological innovation (which was, of course, a different sort of becoming-animal in the 1940s from what it is now). He argued that innovation was driven by entrepreneurial individuals and, as economies developed and expanded, by large corporations.

Accordingly, he developed a bias in favour of explanations of innovation that were based on the character and determination of outstanding individuals and defined innovations as 'Acts of Will'.

This idea that an act of will is more important than an act of knowledge or intelligence is an interesting one. It's also old fashioned. But, though unfashionable, it's still relevant: put six other people in that room on the Marylebone Road for six months and something utterly different would have happened - though they might, using the theory of equifinality, have arrived at the same destination. It's why I've talked at length in other sections about motivation and incentives and other prerequisites of an act of will (which Fichte says is the primary impulse of Pure Ego, the purpose of which is the fulfilment of a duty or obligation).

Post- and neo-Schumpterians take a different view. Keith Pavitt talks, for example, of:

Three broad, overlapping sub-processes of innovation... the production of knowledge; the transformation of knowledge into products, systems, processes and services; and the continuous matching of the latter to market needs and demands.

Red Stripe clearly wasn't really in the business of producing or generating new knowledge. The team were overtly looking to see what they could do with what was already out there (which is largely what all Web 2.0 and 3.0 stuff is about) and which is another way of saying 'the transformation of knowledge into products, systems, processes and services'. Where they became inspired, or confused, or changed direction seemed to me when they started matching these putative products, processes and services to market needs and demands (in still in beta, I've talked about what might have happened if they'd explored market needs first and only looked at products, processes and services later.)

In any case, and in conclusion, my suggestion is that the three processes of innovation identified by Pavitt and the neo-Schumpeterians offer a fruitful way of considering innovation.

Mike Seery, incidentally, refers to IBM's four types of innovation in his final report, which he describes as 'not a white paper in the traditional sense':

Eureka! - true, out-of-the-box innovation
Exemplar - pursuing innovation to build reputation and possibly value
Best of breed - apply proven concepts across the organisation systematically
New to me - apply or adopt changes of value without claiming novelty.

An equally useful framework.

Dilemmas:

Innovation can be driven by individuals with ideas, commitment and determination and it can be driven by an organisation that puts in place the culture and infrastructure to facilitate creative endeavour. Or both. The dilemma can revolve around whether to focus resources on personal development or organisational change.

Starting with the customer and the needs of the market, or starting with existing products and knowledge and capabilities, may lead to very different innovative outcomes. (Or it may not). It will certainly generate a very different innovative process. Neither way is obviously right, though 'experts' these days tend to prefer the former (market driven) approach.

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Credits:

The images of Taylor, Bertalanffy and Schumpeter are widely available on the Internet and I have not found anyone claiming to own the copyright. Please tell me if I'm wrong and I'll credit them or remove them.

The Benjamin Zander talk is courtesy of TED.

The extract from A Fish Called Wanda (MGM, 1988) is, as you can see, taken from YouTube. A lot of lawyers are arguing about whether it's OK for it to be there in the first place.
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the last fart of the ferret

In Creativity Under the Gun, Amabile, Hadley and Kramer describe how time pressure has a negative effect on creativity unless the pressure is felt to be meaningful and is delivered in a form where individuals can work largely on their own and in a focused way. Where it's unproductive is when there's just too much going on, too many competing demands and pressures, too many distractions.

Creativity under time pressure, the authors maintain, is most likely to happen when people feel 'as if they are on a mission'. In the absence of any time pressure, they argue that people in an innovation team need to 'feel as if they are on an expedition', which comes closer to the idea of drifting or wandering around, which I explored in drifting, angst and pan-ic. This sense of being on a mission or expedition also reminds me of Tom's euphoria at the outset and occasionally later on.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

What Amabile et al. are talking about is motivation, of course. And, specifically, they're talking about what they call intrinsic motivation, which Professor Amabile elsewhere defines as 'authentic', as opposed to the extrinsic motivation produced by promises of a bonus or threats of redundancy. I'm not at all sure about this distinction. What about the motivation to look cool, to get a better job after completing the project successfully, to become famous as a result of delivering a triumphant new business to The Economist? Where's the boundary between intrinsic and extrinsic? Why should we try to create a boundary at all? (I'm afraid the answer to that is simply that 'blur' makes less good copy - and sells less well - than 'black and white'.)

The team members were equally unclear about this motivation thing. At different times, several of the team members explicitly said (see motivations) that they would have worked harder or longer hours if they had been offered a share in the eventual business. I don't know how true this was. They all seemed to work hardest when they sensed that their mission was possible and less hard when they felt it was going nowhere. They also worked hardest when presentations and other key deadlines were looming. Though we need to distinguish between working hard to complete a defined process - like preparing a business plan or a presentation - and working hard to be creative - which is a much more elusive skill, as noted by every writer or artist who endlessly defers creative work, choosing, instead, to do the washing up or a thousand other humdrum tasks.

Returning to intrinsic motivation, the factors that Amabile says enhance intrinsic motivation include: challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement and organisational support.

Challenge is about getting a good fit, but not too good a fit, between the employee's skills and the task. (This relates to my discussion of who was chosen to do what job.)

Freedom relates to freedom over means but not ends. Specifically, Amabile says that 'creativity thrives when managers let people decide how to climb a mountain; they needn't, however, let employees choose which one.' Project Red Stripe could hardly have been given a broader brief than 'creating an innovative and web-based product, service or business model'. (Tom, one day recalled the cry attributed to many, including David Ogilvy and Pontus Nyström, of 'give me the freedom of a tight brief'.) It's possible to see the first couple of months for the Red Stripe team as having been spent deciding which mountain to climb. But then again, would the Group Management Committee have been well placed to tell them which mountain to climb?



Taiichi Ohno

The important thing seems to be, as Amabile et al. say, that the time constraints appear reasonable and that, as far as possible, they be imposed by the team itself, rather than from on high. This is at odds with one of my favourite ideas about creativity, which was developed by Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System and an inspiration to many Systems Thinkers. In an interview with an Economist journalist (and which I have never been able to trace), he reportedly likened creativity in a survival culture to the last fart of the ferret. When a ferret is cornered it emits a powerful stench like a skunk, and employees, he said, when facing closure of the company, would come up with some of their most creative ideas. [Incidentally, if you search for 'last fart of the ferret', Google will rather coyly ask you if you meant 'last fruit of the ferret' - a delightful possibility which, sadly, produces no results if you accept the suggestion.]

But, to come back to the business of creativity itself, Amabile et al. suggest that creative thinking results from the formation of a large number of associations in the mind, followed by the selection of associations that may be particularly interesting or useful. This process of juggling ideas like balls is a playful process and it was noticeable that the team quickly abandoned some of its more playful activities under the pressure of time constraints. As Mike Seery notes in his report on the project:

However, as early as February, team dinners and outings were delayed or
rescheduled, because we were so concerned at using the time to work on concrete
ideas. In doing this we unwittingly removed a key element of what allowed us to
recharge our batteries and remain fresh and excited about the project.

Incidentally, though they didn't reinstate team dinners, they did in late March, at the instigation of Javier the team coach, begin to go out for lunch in twos and threes to build better relationships between them. Funny that, having sat round a table together all week, people should need to get up and go and sit round a different table to build better relationships. But that's context for you. And movement.

Dilemmas:

Set deadlines and create a sense of urgency or give people the time and space they need to explore in a relaxed environment without unnecessary pressure?

Offer financial incentives to participants or deliberately avoid them?

Give the team the freedom of a tight brief or the freedom of a wide one?

Continue to encourage 'unproductive' play, even as the team approaches the end of the project, or use it only at the outset to foster creativity and team cohesion?

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Credits:

Ferreteria: Dipfan
Wordle: www.wordle.net
Professor Amabile: Harvard News Office
Pontus Nyström clip: sixtysecondview
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