TaleCatcher - Tracy Kenny's blog

Don't say anything

Last week we collected Adele's glasses. She's only 3 1/2. We'd not even noticed that she had a vision problem, and I suspected that the highly-distracted consultant at the hospital had given her the benefit of her experience (think 'Blink') rather than the focus of her attention on the day we were there. I was skeptical.

Then I looked through the lenses as I was cleaning them (the first of many hundreds of times. Small children have sticky fingers and poor aim when eating ice cream cones, spaghetti bolognese, etc.)

I say I looked through - I tried, but I couldn't see a thing. It was like looking into a cloudy soupy mess. She, meanwhile, sits quietly looking through them, occasionally commenting 'I can see a bird' or 'I can see a book,' fascinated by discovering a world she never knew was there. 

So I was wrong. I had no idea she'd not been seeing what we could. So grateful thanks to the process (and to the government for sticking with it) that booked her an appointment literally upon her birth to have her eyes examined 3 years later, based on the family history of wearing glasses.

It's thrown up lots of learning for me about service and empathy. I took her to the locally-owned opticians in our little town to get the glasses made, so it was a familiar environment and not the factory atmosphere of Specsavers. Now I got to Specsavers myself, but partly out of fascination, because they stay so busy, and yet despite the expectations my prejudices against big business set me up with, every single one of them seems happy and helpful and genuinely knowledgable. I'd love to get into their recruitment and training to see how they do it.

In our little town, we had the same lady looking after her every time, but their processes were really poor, and I ended up getting cross with them, which is disappointing when I'd actually been trying to  go somewhere where we could have a relationship. They also assumed we'd want the NHS free glasses, rather than paying a measlly £13 for prettier frames, and they never offered scratch-resistant or reduced glare. I'm used to buying glasses. They're not used to 3 year-olds, or they'd have tried to talk me into this.

But the best was at her nursery this morning. I'd prepared for the  rush of encouragement and compliments they'd have for her, but they are soooo switched on about  little kids.

They never said  a word. They asked her about the toy duck she'd brought, asked if she was already wearing sun cream, and if she wanted Weetabix or toast for breakfast.

I took their cue, gave her a hug and kiss, and left - a little wiser.

Through the week I saw a lot of examples of failing to anticipate the customer's need, but the nursery's silence moves empathy into the space of positive action - by saying and doing nothing. Adele wants to be the same as the other kids. She doesn't want attention called to her difference, even in the shape of praise.

And so through Adele's glasses, now I see something much  more clearly than I ever had before: acceptance is so much better than reassurance, and it gets us so close to what customers or audiences we communicate with need. It's just the right place to start.

Even

I've learned something today. I can't tell the stories to go with it, I'm afraid, but I feel I need to capture the learning.

It started several weeks ago. I was feeling a bit neglected. People were asking a lot of me, but not really noticing me. These are people who I know care about me, but they were very busy checking in and getting things done. Over a quiet coffee that afternoon I reflected on it, and realised that they assume I'm okay. If they thought I wasn't, they'd have stopped in their tracks and listened.

So that's one lesson: maybe it's not such a good idea to put on a brave face, because people might believe it. It deprives us of the opportunity to be honest together and grow together.

Today that lesson expanded for me. I learned that three people I have been critical of have serious problems of their own. I realised that I respond generously and with compassion when I know there is weakness, but if I think the person's okay, I have higher expectations... and then I criticise when they fall short.

Does this mean I am trying to knock them down?

The lesson for me: Assume everyone has a good reason for behaving the way they do. And if they seem completely okay, then care still, in case there is a problem they are hiding, just waiting for someone to give them time to bring it out.

There is another part to this: having problems doesn't relieve people of accountability for their behaviour. Being their friend means holding onto the friendship, yet expecting them to live up to responsibilities and face their problems, because I am their friend and I want to see them grow. This is much harder than just criticising, and much better for all of us.

I am okay, by the way: I am learning, and that always makes me happy. And things are happening, and going well, too.

Who'd want to know it all?

The other night I met a vivacious and strong-minded woman who will fight her opinion to the end. The trouble is, she doesn't think before she decides what her opinion is.

I found it more fascinating than irritating. I studied the situation on the way home, and realised that a point one of the group was trying to make hit the nail on the head: the most arrogant people are often also the least confident. Confidence with humility is a tough balance to achieve.

With people like this in the past I have challenged them about a basic truth, to momentarily take the pressure off the contended belief: I say 'Stick with me for a minute,' and then I try to pick a little fight about with them about how they got to our meeting.

'You didn't drive here. I saw you get off the back of a motorbike.' Of course they didn't. They tell me I'm wrong.

I persist. 'You did. I saw you. You were wearing a red helmet with a flame on it, and the driver gave you a kiss before you went.'

I don't take it much further than that. Their response at this point will show a lot about them and their interest in communciating and connecting. The point is to show that if you really, truly do believe something with full confidence and faith, then you have the luxury of choosing how you respond to it. I reckon we have three choices:

1 - You can argue the point. You can get dragged down into it and try to persuade me that you really did drive, that your family car is parked just outside the window, etc, and you'll get pretty annoyed if not angry with me. Because I'm so ignorant you won't actually ever persuade me though, so you'll be getting upset over nothing.

2 - You can dismiss me as the idiot I'm acting like.

3 - You can be interested in me. If you're properly confident that I am wrong, then actually having the humility to wonder why I might think you were on the back of a bike might help you learn something.

Assuming y0u know everything just shows how little one knows. Curiosity and openness to learn more and learn together paves the path for real intelligence - it's more verb than noun, you know. Intelligence is a process. When it stops moving, it's over.

 

Value or money

When I was doing the brand workshops for Aviva and their suppliers, one of the things that struck me the most was the discomfort many felt when they saw their own companies' values emerge through the exercises. The suppliers, who usually work toward directly resolving the customers' problems, tended toward values of response and urgency, regardless of their their industry. Aviva, however, which is clearly a financial services provider, spoke of 'Profit. ROI. Cost.'

(I was misplaced in that company you know - whenever anyone wanted to talk about value, I got excited, til I remembered they meant the pounds and pence kind.)

Aviva staff always seemed disappointed, but not surprised, that it was the concentration on money that came through most clearly. In one sense this is exactly how it should be,  because their customers trust them to be stable, profitable, and solvent for when they're needed.It's what they do. They should pay attention to it.

But money's a funny thing. Maybe it comes down to what it means for us.

In the marvellous Book of Silence, Sara Maitland describes the 5th century St Mary of Egypt. As all the best saints do, she spent the first part of her life in decadent  sin, before spending the rest in abject penance. Her sin was prostitution, which she began at the age of 12 - but the hagiographers tell it that she refused money for her services, as she was just doing it out of lust. The suggestion is that working in the sex trade for money would be more forgivable than for sheer pleasure. (Do we feel the opposite today?)

The two anecdotes make even clearer for me my suspicion that we all (including our organisations) operate on a primary value scale, and each of us has to define the upper and lower terms for it. For Mary's 5th century critics, a holy life vs an unholy life were the values to aim for or fail to reach, and the money issue was more of a means to an end. I suppose money was more of a means of survival for them.

So this morning Elena and Adele played one of their favourite games of making tents in the living room. They had all the kitchen chairs through, and all the throws and sheets off their beds. I heard a crash from the other room. In improving the tent, a picture got knocked off the wall, and the glass was in pieces.

Ray soon came down for his breakfast. Now, Elena's expecting a visit from the tooth fairy tonight, so his instant comment 'That'll be your pocket money spent then' felt very harsh. Especially given that at six, Elena doesn't really know what money is or does. She's pretty good at counting it, but it doesn't mean anything to her. If she gets a pound, she shows off because she has learnt that pounds are of value to us grown ups, but what it could mean to her has yet to sink in.

What she does value though is time. In an adult way. If I take her tent down before she's ready, she despairs because I've wasted the time she put into it.

So I explained that we get money when we work for it, and that she would have to spend time working for the broken glass. She spent a couple of hours helping me clean up all the baby and toddler things we're about to sell, and as I expected, she enjoyed sitting in the sun and wiping things clean.

The important thing was to make the loss meaningful. The fair exchange became one picture frame = two hours of not playing Barbies etc.

I wonder what the Aviva staff are thinking, then, that the company's focus on money means. Because it's not just a profit/loss scale, it's money vs something else, in their minds. Is it generosity? Is it a kind of behaviour or attitude? Are they reflecting on themselves, and noticing that they fail as individuals to live up to an expectation they would have? What is the exchange, and what does it mean?

Don't blame communications

A flash of insight last night:

When we complain of broken communications, we are often missing the point.

Communications are the usual and most obvious means of  demonstrating our relationships.

When we say communications need fixing, it is usually that something about the relationship itself  needs attention.

I don't need a communcations strategy to talk to those I care about. I do it because they are on my mind, I enjoy their company, and I want to share with them the things in my life.

Can I extend this to myself? Absolutely. One could argue I went quiet for a while because I'm reconsidering my relationship with this blog.

To mend fundamental communications problems, look first at whether the hearts and attitudes involved are in the right place, and being looked after. It's harder work speaking openly and sorting things out. It's a bigger investment in time and emotion than creating a spreadsheet around audiences and intended outcomes -  and you can't delegate it. There's a place for both.

But if you want your communications to make people feel cared about, you'd better start with actually caring.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

It in't about the stories

Something I've learned along the way, and particularly in the last month or so of my relative silence: TaleCatcher started out being about stories. But it, and the work I do, absolutely isn't about the stories. It's about connecting. 'Communicating' is the best word we have, even if it is well past its use-by date, to describe the process of using words to connect. Usually we fail, because we get stuck on the words. Stories are the best means of communicating to sweep us over and past the words and all the injuries and damage they can cause. Stories get straight to the heart. They are the means. Not the end.

Dance with me

Here are some phrases about communicating that I learned in my nine years in big business:

Reports get to the point using bullets

We fire off emails

It's better to target messages than to use a scattergun approach

Sometimes it's good to be blunt, to shoot from the hip

We coordinate our messages into a strategic campaign

It's all very slick. Then we wonder why people aren't responding. We despair that they aren't connecting with the things we tell them.

They just seem to be so difficult to get through to. Defensive, almost.

This could have something to do with the sheer number of demands on their attention, from all angles.

But look as well at the language around business communications.

point bullets fire target scattergun blunt shoot strategy campaign

It's no wonder they're defensive. They're getting not just an offense of messages, the messages are contrived from a truly offensive place.  Even if the messengers want to achieve rapport, collaboration, and relationship, it will not happen if their minds are wired in this way. 

It's like sending roses out of the barrel of a tank. They'd still blast, still stink of the metal, and would still carry the history and circumstances that got the tank there in the first place.

I noticed this pattern in communications a few years back and have been collecting examples ever since. To my absolute delight, it is almost the first 'system' George Lakoff uses in Metaphors We Live By to illustrate that the words we use to think about stuff, change our feelings and behaviours toward those things.

He and Mark Johnson point out how different communications would be if we were to treat them as a dance. Communications would be born from a place of partnership, giving, listening, instinct, expression, emotion, discipline, practice, perfection. Art wouldn't be a nice-to-have add-on when there's a bit of budget or time leftover. It would be intrinsically part of it.

Imagine a company where the directors wanted their communications with their people to be a dance, to be a truly reciprocal and deeply pleasurable, even physical, experience. As with all systems we communicate by, it would transform the relationships between all other aspects of the organisation. Collaboration and consultation would grow. 'Fat' would be driven out, and all would become lean and focussed. Sharing would grow, and all would delight in each others' success.

Maybe you're wary of seeing your words in tights. But isn't the image of seeing all your people up and giving it their all, throwing themselves into the choreography of business, preferable to the image of your people holding each other at gunpoint to get things done?

You are here

A few weeks back I went to Birmingham with Paul L. It felt like a big journey to me - it should take about 3 1/2 hours, but there are plenty of weather and traffic and other things that can go wrong over those 200 miles. And we did see some of them (interestingly from the RAC Centre) - fortunately for us, they were heading away from Norwich.

It's terribly old-fashioned of me, but it was the first time I'd travelled by sat nav. Paul set our destination and followed its instructions beautifully. But I never got used to not having a map, to know where I was and get a general sense of where we were going, and what would happen next.

Maybe it's something to do with the uncertainty of the last 20 months, but I've recently grown really fond of a good, clear 'you are here' sign. See even though we were fine in the car, I couldn't get my bearings. With any journey, once you know your position in relation to what's around you, you begin to see paths. It gives you a moment of pause to recall where you might want to go, and imagine the possibilities for getting there.

That's what a journey is about. Getting from here to there. Usually with a reason for bothering.

I think it's in this space of aspirations that we've extended the language of travels into our personal lives. We speak easily of life (and business) being a journey.

'Keep an eye that one - he's going places.'

'The merger wasn't easy. We've come a long way.'

'Once you go to that party, you've arrived.'

'He's got so much passion. His ideas will lead us into the future.'

Notice that all of these imply improvement. Going seems to go along with growing.

But how do you map that kind of journey, the kind you don't take in a car?

It starts with understanding your own position - what we tend to call presence (another journey metaphor). It's about being aware, connecting with the people around you, and giving your emotional as well as your intellectual energy. Where it's absolutely clear to you and those around you, that  'You are here,' and nowhere else.

When you're present, and focussed on the person you're with and investing yourself into them, you both become clearer. You get your bearings... 'you can begin to know your position in relation to what's around you, to begin to see paths. '

I've been present. I understand where I am...

'It gives you a moment of pause to recall where you might want to go, and imagine the possibilities for getting there.'

Now I've got my bearings. And I can see my way forward. It's to a place that isn't here.

Everyone present around me has helped me get a sense of direction, of clarity about where I am, and where I am going. Together we've formed my map. I'd like to think I've been a point in theirs. For being part of mine, and the opportunity to be part of theirs, I thank them.

Now we're all clear, that the only way there, is from here. It's a good place to start a journey from. I intend to enjoy it every step of the way.

The best communications

This is what I mean by 'design' in the best communications. (I've deleted the embedded film - it never loaded properly and just intermittently gurgled wherever you were trying to read in the blog. Very distracting.)

Read it here

This art 'installation' does not use words to make its point. But I contend it's writing all the same, of the most sublime kind.

It all ties together. How many of our own communications achieve this?

The story - one man building a representation of all of us, to improve one corner of the sea

The problem - our coral reefs are disappearing

The solution - begin replacing them

The form - life casts of the local village people, who are most immediately affected

The shape - the shape of a human eye, which we need to see the problem, the future, and our alternatives

The solution - build a coral reef and plant it with life to multiply

His intent - to show that new life can spring from us, not just to build a replacement reef

The materials - a special concrete which will encourage growth and corrode much more slowly than usual concrete

The meaning -  take your pick: the statues represent all of us, we will all be under the sea if we don't do something about it, sea life springs back from human forms - a gift from us