TaleCatcher

Working with

You cannot work with men who won’t work with you.

-John Harvey Kellogg, American businessman

Is this a positive statement or a negative? Is it about surrounding yourself with open-minded people, expecting respect, being realistic? Or setting boundaries?

Collaboration, give and take, learning and growing together - that's not  expecting too much.

Re Substance: Credit where it's due

I must say, well done to the Russian Air Defence people for listening to Petrov.

Will my company listen to me?

Substance

Neil and I have been discussing bravery. And he sent me this, the story of Stanislav Petrov, a Russian Soviet Air Defence lieutenant colonel who challenged the process, saying that they should not retaliate against what their defence system called an attack from the United States. Think about it. 1983, the Cold War was still going, Russia thinks there are missiles on the way. Their fingers were hovering above the buttons. He said, wait. He was administrative staff. He used his noggin, put his head above the parapet, made himself a target, but made a difference - to us all, and to history.

Is this a system thing? A power thing? A language thing? I know little about systems and power, but I play at knowing about language. And I reckon the thing that made Petrov and Natalyia move bravely is the same thing that got them heard. It doesn't always happen: black boxes taken from crashed planes have shown that co-pilots have tried to challenge pilots, but without the assertive language, their words weren't taken seriously. Similar mistakes have been made in operating theatres - all resulting in loss of life.

I firmly believe that language changes what people think, what they feel, what they believe. But it also drives the language we use in the first place, and language is only powerful or meaningful when we have strength and substance within us, in the first place.

It has to do with belief in yourself, in your message, in the cause, making it worth the risk of putting the message forward. I'm certain that if you talked to Petrov or Nataliya, you'd find they have strong values. And values are built into our language. You won't get this from people who don't have the self-confidence and assurance that they are right, if they don't have a good grasp on their own understanding, firm enough convictions. Susan Scott said if you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. What comes out (language) is only a product of what's inside.

My company is striving away to get people to communicate in a different voice. I am dismayed to see they are trying to do this by describing it rather than immersing staff in it. We should have trained up a population whose voices would get into heads, delivering the messages, creating momentum, carrying staff with them, and then started a second string of training, on how to speak this language, on how to be one of them, once the appetite was there. If we want something different to come out, we need to start with where people are, change what's inside, and create the circumstances for it to grow in.

Petrov

Brave woman

I want to be brave like this.

Nataliya Dmytruk was a sign language interpreter on Ukranian television. She was asked to report that Yanukovych had won the presidential election. Whilst the voiced report continued, with the orange ribbon of protest showing under he sleeve, she broke into her own report saying 'I am addressing everybody who is deaf in the Ukraine. Our president is Victor Yushchenko. Do not trust the results of the central election committee. They are all lies... And I am very ashamed to translate such lies to you. Maybe you will see me again.' 

Standing up for what she believes in. Using the power of communication - which was powerful because it was from the heart and gut and mattered. Setting her immediate security aside for the sake of what is right.

One woman. Forty-six words. And then 250 of her newsroom colleagues stopped work, and challenged the television station's owners. The tone of the media across the Ukraine shifted to being more balanced. Protests grew until a new election was held, and the rightful president, Yushchenko, was voted into office.

I want to be brave like this - and I want all my forty-six words to mean something, too.

Washington Post

Wikipedia

A girl thing

I'm reading Margaret Atwood again. I revisit her periodically. Depending which work you start with (you should start with TRB, by the way), you might think that she writes feminist manifestos. Or that she's just man-bashing. But over time I've come to think that she feels sorry for men, after all, they're up against these formidable women who crush and destroy each other. Men are caught in the crossfire of women who are hurting each other. It's almost anti-feminist. Men are okay. Women are dangerous.

In the seventies, in Tennessee, 'woman power' wasn't really a movement we saw much of. Maybe it was the unusual circumstances of growing up around an artifically-created community that made me assume my rights as a girl. I recall there were a few enlightened people around me who would try to help me see.

'You know, Tracy, you can be anything you want to be, even though you're a girl.' 

I remember sitting on the floor in the big kindergarten room at Claxton School, thinking this person was very strange. Of course I could. How could they ever even question that I would be limited? If anything being a girl would make it better. 

'Astronaut, firefighter, doctor...' they would say. 

It wasn't even worth talking about. 'What are we playing next?' 

At home we played with our tiny Fisher-Price 'Little People' toys for hours. Between us my brother and sisters probably spent years of our lives crouched on the floor, digging through the various cardboard boxes that served as our toybox. We called the game 'peoples.'

As in, 'Do you want to play peoples?' and 'He messed up my people!'

We had favourites: the lady in the blue dress, the man in the green suit, the girl in the yellow dress. The boy with the red saucepan on his head we called Chuck. All in all we learned to share the population we had, and be happy with it.

Thirty years on, thoughts about gender have evolved, and FP has refreshed the figures too. In our house now we have loads of them. Elena calls the game 'ladies.'  From 13 months old, she has only played with the female figures. We occasionally have debates about whether some of the figures are ladies or men, but she's generous and is usually happy to let the androgynous have the dignity of being ladies, and joining the game. The men get bit parts - they stand outside of the complicated rings she forms, or fill in numbers, only after she's used up all the girls.

I'm very lucky I've had few of Margaret Atwood's vicious ladies in my life, and loads of strong, sound, beautiful women who it's a pleasure to know. Life's worked out more like when we played on the red shag-pile carpet, with lots of happy people of both genders, sometimes more funny looking than others, but always good to have around.

Okay, there's one regret

I have written before about how which story you tell, when you tell them, the order you tell them in is important.

Yesterday I was feeling good. I wrote about going to the cinema to hear stories. And that was a really good event, better than I thought they could pull off. I made lots of notes. But that's not what was really on my mind.

A few hours before, I had been brave. My boss has decided that he can only have full time people in his team. I weighed it all up, and realised that if I worked more than four days, not only would I not thrive, I would not survive. I also feel that because I have had my work-life balance right, I have had more to offer when I went in to work.

I went to talk to him. We sat down. He asked if I've reflected any more on our previous conversation. I said I had, and that, same as if he was asking me to speak Swahili as part of the job requirements, I'd have to be honest and say I couldn't do it, well, I just plain can't do this. It's not fair to the team, to my family, to me for me to try. He said he'd been worried I would say that. But he didn't budge. By two minutes past 3:00, it was all decided.

We're both disappointed. It was an exciting job, and it was going to be a lot of work, but it would have changed everything. I hate to leave my work, my team, the team I have so believed in, worked so much for, learnt so much from. The people I respect and admire and with whom I would happily spend the rest of my career. Yet I am absolutely confident that I made the right decision. I will never look back and wish I had spent more time at the office, and less time with my very young children. But I will almost certainly look back and wonder, 'what if?'

I'm letting myself pause, to reflect on this. I know there will be excitement in the opportunity, in the change. But it's a good thing going, and I want to give it the respect it's due.

Can't wait

Tomorrow I'm going to the cinema for work. Yes you read that right.

Okay it's not entirely true. For a start we're not seeing a movie. And then it's not actually being held in a cinema, but rather in a theatre, the Norwich Playhouse.

It's all part of my employer's plan to recreate the company. To pitch it as a different place, not just the same place with a new name. To get staff to understand exactly what the new company is about - in an inspired, but inexact sort of way, they are holding - wait for it - storytelling events in cinemas all over the country. 3500 people will attend, and be told the company story. The organisers know that good storytelling creates a story in the listener's mind, and so staff are being sent away with a book about 'my (company) story.' It looks like a pretty full booklet that we work through, creating our own understanding and forming our own story, and then in a few weeks' time we'll be brought back together to share our stories, for the facilators to collect our tales, and then, I'm guessing, communicate our new emerging consciousness, our identity, our new corporate culture and history.

I think it's a stroke of genius.

And I will be honest: it was not my idea. And they didn't ask me. In fact I wasn't the first to use the phrase 'storytelling' in my company. (I think I was the third!)

But I did embrace it, when the others walked away from it. I kept it alive. I did storytelling workshops, transformed the intranet into a place where we could tell tales, and went round advocating and demonstrating a different way.

Steve Denning says that there's no greater success for a story than when the listeners buy it enough they think it's their idea.

And so I sit back and am pleased.

We have changed, we are strong enough and ready to become the new company. I take a quiet pride in that. I helped change the place, the individuals who make it up.

That - that is my story.

And I can't wait to see how it fits in to everyone else's.

 

Sticks

A few Sundays ago a speaker at our church brought out a stick and asked for a volunteer to break it. RC got volunteered, and broke it easily.

Then the speaker brought out a big bundle of sticks tied tightly together on either end. He handed this bundle to RC, and asked him to break these. RC didn't break them. Of course the speaker hadn't expected him to.

He asked the group, 'Does this remind you of anything?'

I said to myself, 'Everything.'

He said to the group, 'That's right. We will break individually, but united together, nothing will break us.'

I laughed at myself. I'd got that wrong, I thought.

But on reflection, I knew that the speaker had got it wrong. There's a perspective problem here. Are we do-ers, or victims? My initial response had been because I want to do so much, and I know that I can't do it all at the same time, that I have to untie things, unbundle them, and pick them off one at a time. I live by the line I will have it all, I just can't have it at the same time. But do I see myself as vulnerable, as waiting for something to happen to me, as cowering and hiding up with others who are equally intimidated?

No way. There's too much to do, to read, to discover, to explore. Let me at it. One stick at a time.