TaleCatcher

Fact plus meaning does not equal truth

One more thing on stories and facts - it is when you add meaning to 'the facts' that you get story.

This is not enough however to make your facts 'true.' The truth is much bigger than one story. Truth is the meaning of all the stories around you, what their collective weight all add up to. If they make a big and clear and strong enough truth, then mere 'facts' anyone tries to tell against it will not stand, because no one will believe them. 

Truth more important than facts

My work at the moment is to understand the brand we are building, and to influence our company and its suppliers to live it.

We will know what this brand amounts to by looking at our behaviours. And with 15,000 people in just our part of the business, nevermind the 5,000 supplier staff, there are plenty of good and bad examples out there.

I was sounding this out with Simon the other day. He wrote the book on brand for me (no literally, it's coming soon) and I repeated a story to him about an indiscretion on the part of one of my colleagues.

He answered: 'Well in the absence of the facts, we have the story.'

Ah. Beautiful words, and true: the story is often true without the facts.

Several years ago a young woman came to one of my workshops. She told a story of how she'd gone out with a guy a couple of times, and then had broken her neck in a terrible car accident. She spent some time in a coma, but when she woke she found that this young man was sitting with her, and had been to visit her every day in hospital. She didn't even remember him, but at the time of telling they were still seeing each other, and talking about getting engaged.

Now I don't remember the facts of that story, but the spirit of it is true. A young woman, a young man, an accident, faithfulness over a period of time, surprise at his dedication, a deepening and growing relationship: all these elements make the story true, even if I got the injury, the accident, the current state of the relationship wrong.

Truth can lie more deeply than fact, and it affects us more deeply. Whether or not my colleague misbehaved, the story is around him, and the question becomes whether it is believable, whether all his other behaviours give evidence in his favour, or show that for him, the facts are irrelevant, because the truth speaks for itself.

Immeasurable impact

I am excited. When we workshop in Manchester next week, Alan will be coming along to tell his story - and hopefully lots more. 

It must have been five years ago. Graham told Charles Garfield's Tollboth Story from Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Alan responded by reflecting on his own experience. I was just putting together the old TaleCatcher, and Graham brought me his story.

I didn't know it was Graham until a few weeks back when I picked up the phone to see if he was still around. It turns out Alan didn't remember having told of his experience all that time ago. But the story had moved me, and I and my colleagues had used it dozens of times in people engagement, in discussions about how we own our own attitudes. Alan had told how he'd been redeployed to another part of the company, and had a terrible attitude, he didn't want to learn, he was a poor performer, disruptive, and was just plain unhappy - and made everyone around him unhappy as well.

So he went to his manager and told her how the job was making him feel. She was a very wise woman - but Alan was pretty switched on as well. Alan knew he had three options: he could leave, he could carry on as he was, or he could try to change his attitude. His boss sent him on three weeks' leave with immediate effect, telling him to sort himself out before he came back.

He changed his attitude. Nothing about the job changed, but he became productive. He contributed. He became pleasant to be around, he learned, and was eventually even promoted.

I got him on the phone and I asked him what happened next. For the rest of the story.

Alan still believes in 'glass half full'. And he's used his story several times, himself, to influence people around him who were in the same place he'd been. One young lady was argumentative and had anger issues. She was even drinking on the job, and he was having to try to get her fired. But he was honest with her, all the way along, and asked her to listen to recordings of her phone calls. He explained to her about her personal impact on the people around her. And she changed. Little by little, she changed, to the point that she was even influencing people around her who were having problems with their customers - asking them to think about whether the problem could start with themselves.

This isn't just an interesting advantage - it's an illustration of how culture changes. People respond to the expectations of their peers more than they listen to what bosses or head office or policies tell them to do. 'The way we do it around here' is a message reinforced by colleagues every minute of every day, and it's the most difficult part to shift. Alan shifted their culture by investing in this young lady - and they got extra support in to help them get everyone listening to their own calls, reflecting on their personal impact.

But let's look at before that again: Alan felt confident that he could speak to his manager, that she wouldn't ridicule him or dismiss his feelings. She built the culture by demonstrating a history of listening and being interested in seeing her people grow.

But they weren't isolated cases. The boss was only able to send him on leave because her managers had invested enough trust in her that she was able to make such a decision.

Everybody knows that our corporate cultures need to change, but few are willing to take it on a case by case basis, to make the investment in the few that will reap benefits for the many. Look at how Alan's story brought so much change, at how Graham's telling the Tollbooth brought it to us. The effects of these stories are immeasurable, and they go much further than we can trace. A culture is the same. It is worth setting up a place in which people can take time to invest in each other. The impact on each other (and the customers) will be immeasurable.

(PS The lady who was angry and was drinking at work - she's left now - she stays at home with her new baby. Alan tells me she was a changed woman from the one who joined his team. What good news for that little baby, to have such a learning mum.)

Taming the wild things

I made this story once to try to describe part of what I do.

In the creation story, God created the animals, and they were wild. Adam lived with the animals, and after he got to know them a bit, he named them. Instead of just being surrounded by fur and teeth and feathers and tails, it was elephants and kangaroos and tigers and mice. They weren't any less wild for having names. But they were contained in his imagination. He knew what he was dealing with. Language made some sense of them.

Ideas sometimes run so fast around us they leave us spinning. I spend time with people and their ideas and help find the words to make some sense of them. It doesn't make them any less wild either. It just settles them in our minds.

Not just me

I have learnt in recent weeks that the success of a meeting or a conversation is not just down to me. I want every encounter I have with people to be successful, but they have to be present and willing to respond. If they are not, then my job shifts, and it becomes additional work, just to get them to switch on. A successful workshop is something we create together.

We were a really good group in Stretford. This is cumulative learning.

Meaning what?

Mags went on a workshop at the Women's Enterprise agency and was coached in how to make her experience as a homemaker sound like the language that employers would want to hear. 'You've not spent five years negotiating the gas bill, you've been liaising with service providers,' they told her.

Good old Mags. 'Why do I have to talk this language? Why can't I just call it what it is?'

I think it's something about a shorthand, how if you can use certain phrases, then 'business' people assume you are familiar with all the context and culture that comes in that context. It's what language is meant to do, isn't it: it is how a particular culture communicates. The words are the surface stuff. The meaning is below that surface.

Of course this is the first lesson in basic Linguistics, and you get that in any first look at Plato ('The Cave'). Want a more modern example? Look up wug on wikipedia.

Now my girls seem to be operating in that space, that wug-space of what we're trying to communicate as opposed to what we say, the place behind the screen in the cave. Their meanings are completely separate from the words. Elena calls Adele a 'yoghurt pot' and she wails. It's complete nonsense, but the implied insult is very real to both of them. Elena shrieks with delight at Adele's hurt feelings.

What completely perplexes me then is when they start singing 'I'm a little woman, I'm a little woman' along with one of their musical toys. And then when Adele, not quite two, comes to me to announce proudly, 'I'm a little woman.'

These are the children who persist in only playing with the ladies in their little people sets. The men usually don't even come out of the box.

And so I can't leave it. I have to know if it's a loaded comment, or just neutral words they're throwing around. What does a little woman do? Is it good to be a little woman? A bad thing? What models are they seeing, how are they interpreting the female figures around them? They just go dancing away, singing it into the distance, leaving me confused. What are they trying to say? And is the word so loaded with connotations and meanings for me that I can't just treat it as non-language, same as 'chicken bomb'?

'I'm a little chicken bomb' - I'd feel a lot more comfortable with them singing that.

In common

When stories are contagious, when someone hears a story and picks up with another, it is often not about the same surface topic, but about offering an account of another situation which made the listener feel the same way. 'Next stories' are rapport builders. We feel the same way, we have something in common.

Before the workshop I did this week, I was chatting with someone from facilities who was helping me with last-minute preparations. I was telling him how I'd had a fright the day before, because when I'd rung up to confirm my catering for the room, I'd been told that actually I didn't have the room booked at all. 'My heart stopped,' I told him. Fortunately it turned out I'd just asked about the wrong room, and all was okay.

He picked up on the 'heart stopping' feeling. 'I had one of those yesterday too,' he said. 'I was wandering around John Lewis at lunchtime and thought maybe I ought to start looking for a present for Claire, as her birthday is coming up pretty soon. And then I realised it was today, and she hadn't said anything at all.'

'Oh no!' I said, feeling his pain. Building great rapport here. We have loads in common, right? 'What did you do?' I was looking for the happy ending in his story, like in mine.

But it all fell apart. 'Nothing,' he said. 'I've been looking for a way to get out of it. This way she'll ditch me, and I won't have to do the dirty work.'

Whoa. See what I mean when I carry on about our stories revealing our values? And this one broke the feelings of commonality I'd had with him. Of course we kept chatting, stayed friendly, but for me something had shifted. His story wasn't about what I'd thought it was about. We'd been going in the same direction, and he took it to a place I didn't want to go to.

People feel great when they're swapping stories because it's the feelings they have in common that build the bridges between each one. Finding stories that don't quite resound is uncomfortable, but it is revealing and useful, even if it doesn't build affinity.

Because

I'm going to stop you there. Yes, already.

Go back to the title. Did it move you, even a tiny bit?

When I see 'because', I feel like I'm likely to be shown a moment of honesty. Getting to the truth. Like something deep is coming.

We don't use 'because' enough. We rely on 'authority' instead.

Our company has decided not to permit children in the premises while the H1N1 virus is a problem. They don't want to expose vulnerable people unnecessarily. Whether their motives are pure (they are an insurance company, after all, and would be aware of their potential liability) or not isn't my concern. The reason is a sound one. I understand and accept it.

What I don't accept is that they aren't explaining it to  people. So on a day off I stand in front of reception with Elena who's doing a little dance because she needs the toilet so badly, and the female security guard literally stands up to face me off, to tell me to take her away because children aren't permitted in the building. Company policy.

People effacing themselves in the shadow of policy gets my goat faster than anything. They are not thinking, they are not connecting with me, they are even removing themselves from the situation so much that they are not even present, nevermind sorry. There's no person left there to be sorry.

Tell me why it's company policy, say it's because they don't want to put children at risk, and I will understand. I am eager to have a relationship with the person opposite me. Put it in your own words, tell me that you understand and this is how you see it, and I will be led by you to understand as well.

I had another one this morning. Adele's on antibiotics. I won't blog about the ridiculous user and customer experience I had just trying to get her seen by our new 'improved' doctors' process. Anyway I arrived at her nursery school this morning with her medicine, filled in the forms - one for each day, the same one won't do for tomorrow - and was told by the manager that she wouldn't be permitted to stay because she'd been on her medication for less than 24 hours. Company policy. It's my career on the line, she said.

Reading between the lines and catching a fragment of the word 'contagious,' I realised that my sense that I wasn't getting the straight story was on the mark. I made some phone calls: I called the other nurseries in the area. They have no such policies. I called Environmental Health. And I even called Ofsted. There's no official recommendation of such a policy.

K turned Adele away because she was concerned the rash was contagious. And that's fine. But telling me it's for to make sure Adele didn't have a reaction - that just makes me angry, because it doesn't ring true. Company policy. No discussion. If she'd said because, it would have made sense. Because in her experience that type of rash is contagious, and she has to protect the other children. That I'd have understood. I respect K's experience. That she didn't expect me to be big enough to defer to her opinion, but rather to shrink with her in the might of policy, well that's a snub against the rapport I thought we'd built.

You now, I'm not against policy and I'm not against process. I put both into place, myself, where I am a leader. I am however fiercly against anything that rips the soul out of the people that make it happen. The trick is in building policies and processes that are broad enough that people can stay alive within them, in showing them that policies can be boundaries to move safely within, and that processes are an assurance that things will go smoothly. People seem not to see either one as support, but as forces that they must submit to.

Because the process and policy will be more robust and personal when I am alive, I will not just submit to it. I will talk to K and see if the policy can be improved. She has listened to me before on a similar point. Let's just hope she's not become a philosophical vegetarian :-)

Tasty elephants

Elephants again.

There's the expression 'You can't eat an elephant all in one go. You have to eat a lot of elephant burgers.'

I get that. Slow down. Pace myself. Be patient, I'll get there in the end.

Being positive and constructive, I am using the inverse of this analogy to console myself. You see, I tried having the conversation about having something to say with my colleague.

I am going to have to start feeding her elephant burgers. Ho hum.

Making meaning

I have various meetings where people want to know some stories. They invariably ask me how many I have. And they think I'm dodging the question when i say it's impossible to count.

I could give you a dozen stories. Or four dozen. How many do you want?

But within each of those I tell you there are countless others, and their backgrounds provide potential for another set, and then the varying infinite meanings we take out of them, and the various applications we find for them, make that set of say 12 stories an impossible number to count.

But that's with only choosing stories. The fact is, the stories don't turn up until we have something to say.

So you need to talk to your team about the importance of building an atmosphere of trust, before it's put to the test? All of a sudden your knowledge and experience from another situation, in which the learning is the same as what you would have your team to learn, that learning you've been carrying around with you can become a story, when you tell it as narrative, for the purpose of making meaning.

I have seen people in many workshops tell a story that they never knew was a story. But given the opportunity to be meaningful, what was previously just an experience becomes a story. And with their own reflection and telling, their listeners found it invaluable in learning how to handle similar situations of their own.

And so I go into these meetings where people expect me to just tell them stories with an uncomfortable and unusual heavy air. They want me to give them significance. If I knew what they wanted to say, what they were intersested in, what impact they were hoping to have, then we could work together to find the stories I've colected - or even better, in them - to really bring home the point. But until somebody has something to say, the communications will be flat, and the stories will be novelties. An anecdote has to have meaning to become a story. I cannot give these certain colleagues meaning, if they are not open to finding it in themselves.