TaleCatcher - Tracy Kenny's blog

Read me, for real

Last year I had occasion to look up from my quiet life and ask in horror, 'Am I a princess?!'

I blogged about it. Like Morrie suggested, I have for several years built myself a life of the things that support me, grow me, and encourage me. Why drag yourself down with the stuff other people find popular just because it's popular?

I'm not insular, I just prefer to put my energy into meaningful connections. The mass media tends to drain me of energy and leaves me with little left to give.

But if I stay 'inside', I will miss out on the community, and I won't know what I can give back, either.  So I was exploring Mashable this morning, and found out about the next technological advancement in an area that really grates with me: automatic readers.

Apparently 'Topicmarks' is able to read through reams of paper and give a personalised top-five account of what it's all about. Roland Siebelink's presentation used a word cloud (infinitely useful as tool and metaphor, but old news), and had a few clever tricks in linking it back to indexes and quotes, but it didn't demonstrate anything that would convince me that a machine, however sophisticated, can understand what text is about. Everyone else seemed excited about its technological ability. I'll have to trust their judgement on that point.

But is it the point?

I agree, there are way too many words. And the problem runs the gamut from letting the idiot savant loose with a pen, to the expert who's showing off their cleverness. But they're a symptom of a deeper problem, and an auto-reader won't solve it.

In every case, if anyone is using too many words, for whatever reason, then the only real problem is a failure of the writer/speaker and their audience to connect. 

And the fault could belong to either of them.

Here's why it won't work, however good the technology is.

1.    Language is about creation. Language is for people to communicate with each other. When we all show up for that, and it speaks from the heart and to the heart, it is a new experience for both. A machine can't do that on my behalf.  Otherwise it's like the prayer machines in The Handmaid's Tale. We don't want to go there do we?

2.    It's rude.If you ask me to read a document, you expect that I will give it a certain level of respect. After all, it's your thoughts and ideas. If your document is not meaningful and important enough for my full attention, should you be wasting anyone's time on it?

3.    I'm not your audience. If I can't be bothered to read it and understand it, then maybe we should both accept that either you've not thought it through, or I'm not your audience. Maybe we should set a new best practice of giving a high-level summary - or a clearer briefing before you do all that work.

4.    It doesn't build relationship. The best documents or presentations (there are no paper presentations, but the two words are used interchangably) carry the reader to a new place on a level below the words themselves. The particular combination of vocabulary, nuances, voice, and  ability of the narrator to listen to her audience adds up to a feeling that grows along with the idea in the reader.

5.     It loses its impact. A meaningful, connected communication becomes an experience. It's not just novels that do this. Hans Rosling's talks are famous for emotionally gripping and memorable data (of all things!)  A high-level summary would completely miss out that impact. And if you're going to skip the impact, what's the point in turning up at all?

6.     What about all those  other words? Each of us is excited and stimulated by different things. The joy of meeting other people is in discovering their experiences and point of view; the thrill of curiosity is in finding out what new and interesting directions we can pursue. Leave a machine to cull everything but the facts, and you'll lose another opportunity to be human alongside each other.

7.    Lots of little words can bring big understanding. If it's stories you're glossing over, then allowing something or someone else to capture them for you will strip them of their power to move and change you. And if you are good at what you do, and if you do add fresh insight, then only you will be able to take those learnings from the content. Nobody else.

(And a sidenote on the idiot savant: Nobody thinks they're an idiot. Nobody puts rubbish work forward on purpose. Their words are important to them, and acknowledging them is important to their development.)

At the end of the video in this article, one of the judges is interested. He says he has 1400 news items to look at every day, and that every day it seems 75 of them are about the Verizon iphone (by the way, ironically, this is the only story in the article or in the video presentation. It seems they're missing more than one point.) He says it would be wonderful if something could distill down to a smaller group of articles he could learn from.

That's a fair point. But it sounds to me like he's seeking recognition, connection. What a shame our worlds have got so big we're looking to a subscription solution to help us cut out the noise.

I've got a better solution, one I've been using for a long time: I accept that I can't know everything, I get enough to be up to date, and then I switch stuff off. 

And that works for communications as well. If a presentation or document or email thread or whatever isn't working, be brave, and be present, and get to the point. Go have a heart to heart and tell the person creating avalanches of words that it's just not working for you. You'll both learn, you'll cut out some noise, and best of all, you'll have a conversation.

 

A nod

I'm a big fan of the behavioural economist Dan Ariely, though so far I tend to read his blog more than his books. I aim to put that right, an intention I was reminded of when I was trawling through some old entries from another blog I enjoy, Anecdote, when I came across one about Dan's research which I'd missed. 

Have a look - the simple act of an acknowledging nod makes a great difference in the contribution people are willing to make. It's not a bad place to start when trying to improve engagement and connection with people.

Thanks is good business

 

Long, and why

Last week was Ray's birthday. We went for a walk on the beach, and then sat in the cafe and had cups of tea and a plate of chips, watching the seagulls and the waves.

A couple of men sat in the booth beside us. They were wearing ties; I thought they were having a business meeting, but it never got started. Their meal came. Their plates went away. Their mannerisms were similar. We thought they were brothers. But still they said nothing.

After a few minutes of sitting over the empty table, one of them said, 'Well it doesn't feel like a year since my last visit, does it?' They said their goodbyes shortly after.

He was right about one thing: time sure does fly.

This week  got the latest email newsletter from Lindsay at Activity Village. I've never really read it before - even though I've been on the developing end of newsletters enough times, I'm not terrific at reading everybody else's news.

For some reason the title 'A (long) letter from Lindsay' got my attention. It sounded like it had something to say.

It was a much  more personal email than I'd ever had from an organisation. Lindsay wanted to explain her own absence from communicating, which had taken her a while to identify: she was working out her relationship with the site, now that her original reason for leaving it, her son, had grown up and was leaving home - going all the way to Australia. On top of that, she'd had to face that the internet world had changed, and the free resources she'd created out of a desire to share are being stolen repeatedly in their hundreds. She's having to decide what to do next.

Her email struck me on a number of levels. For a start it opened up the new question for me of when personal becomes too intimate. I think most people usually have a good sense of where to draw the line, but the problem with connecting in a deep way comes when we draw that line too early and don't open up at all - like the brothers in the cafe. I encourage people to tell those stories that they think people don't want to hear, because they will deliver the 'headline' message in a more meaningful, memorable way. But when we're taking a risk already with getting personal, how do we know when we've taken 'personal' too far?

I guess this blog entry is a bit of an experiment in that for me.

See the next thing I realised is that being able to admit vulnerability makes a person more whole. I often tell about myself the cannabis muffin story and the St Helens Presentation Disaster story, both to deliberately show my failures. There's an underlying motive in choosing those stories as well, though, to deliberately spell out my strengths and values, and to illustrate how great ideas can come from the worst situations. Both stories do their jobs well. But they leave no room for the kind of innocent open creativeness that Sacha Chua comes up with in every blog. The girl seems to know everything, but in each entry (which can be up to three a day), she admits there is something she needs to improve on, something to explore, something to learn. It makes her seem much more authentic, like Lindsay from Activity Village was in her email.

Silence communicates a great deal - but it leaves readers/listeners to fill in the blanks, and that's not a great strategy. Would being open about my situation and my plans have been more authentic? It certainly might have connected better.

So here goes. Like Lindsay, I've lost the circumstances my blog was born in. Nearly four years ago when I started the TaleCatcher blog, my TaleCatcher name was already old within Aviva, a first attempt to formalise storytelling in a big company (which in years to come has invested probably hundreds of thousands in it). I took seriously the words of Wise Man Darren, that if one doesn't exist in cyberspace, one doesn't exist in the modern world, and I took the plunge and started this blog, using the old name. 

Back then, April 2007, I was new in a new role, and over the following three-and-a-bit years I did a lot of knocking around in the big company, mostly without a natural home. As I went I gained skills and strength (and independence), and I found a lot of stuff that I brought home as blog material - stuff that helped me see the best way of connecting with people.

Choose your metaphor: Did I travel to the innermost circle? Did I get to the  top of the mountain? Eventually I found myself working with the team that (to their best) controlled communication for the UK. And it wasn't a natural home for me.  I learned there, though, that if the best communications capture the very essence of the thing they're trying to represent, then Aviva's communications are the very best they can be. There are a lot of talented people there working  very hard to make that happen, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to work with them before I formally left. 

Now a few months on, I've got used to the idea that my circumstances are so very different than they were in the blog's early days. And I can see that it isn't really doing for me what I want it to. It has been part of a journey, and I am grateful for it and for the readers who have talked to me privately about it.

And to remain authentic, it will continue to be by the real me, and attempt to illustrate my values. But it's time to sharpen up. 'Existing in cyberspace' isn't a  good enough brief for a blog. So things will start to change.

It's been a good journey. Stick with me. 

The email I sent out when I left Aviva applies to my readers as well: 

'What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.' - TS Eliot

When I found this quote, I looked Eliot up. I didn't remember enough from university poetry courses to know if it was appropriate to use him for the occasion.

Eliot thought a lot about origins, and about the impact the places he'd been had on where he went.

'I'm glad I did it in this order,' is roughly what he said.

I'm going to use those words, and the sentiment as well. I'm glad I've already had my Aviva(TaleCatcher) experience, that I can look back on the good times and the learning times, and take them with me wherever I go, rather than having it waiting in my future to discover.

I'm glad I've been part of what Aviva(TaleCatcher) 's become, and it's been part of what I've become.

Aviva (TaleCatcher) and all of you - have taught me a fair bit, not least about playing to strengths, and following dreams: that it is a choice.

I'm off to follow some dreams - first to write, and to build better stories in the people around me.

Thanks guys for being part of my ending. It's a good place to start.

Tracy