Sensemaking in a changing world

Redirecting personal and organizational narratives

People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change. Seth Godin

As I mentioned in story editing techniques for behavior change, story editing is a set of techniques for redirecting people’s narratives about themselves, others, and the social world in a positive way that leads to lasting behavioral change. How does this apply in an organizational context?

“I don’t take time to play with it because I don’t figure it will be here that long.”

“This company has a history of jumping into something like this with new technology and at the beginning really being cheerleaders. But then there seems to be a fallout after the train leaves the station. Some passengers still standing there wondering if there’s another train. A culture problem the company has to deal with.”

“No one wants to spend a lot of time on effort on something that’s ‘oh, now we’re doing this.’ Until you find out it’s staying.”

Reflect on these stories for a minute. What do they illustrate about the organizational mindset?

The narrative these people had formed about technology change initiatives was that they always fail. There may very well have been successful initiatives, but the stories remembered and spread were of failure. And based on the remembered stories of failure, they act. Or in this case, fail to act.

Like individuals, organizations can suffer from a fixed mindset.

How can we edit these personal or shared narratives? In Redirect, Timothy Wilson discusses three story editing techniques .

Story editing techniques

Pennebaker’s writing technique

Pennebaker’s writing technique helps people make a story out of a problem or a difficult experience. You step back from the experience and watch it unfold from the perspective of neutral observer. Instead of reliving the experience and feelings, you focus on why you feel the way you do. Focusing on the why allows you to find meaning, which makes the experience more manageable.

Story prompting  for best possible selves

Imagine you’re struggling to eat healthy and lose weight. One day, you really blow it. What story do you tell yourself? Possibly something along the lines of “I blew it. I’m never going to be able to stick with this. I might as well just keep eating…” Then you avoid the scale for weeks. It turns out, people who are successful in keeping weight off have learned to tell themselves a different story, something along the lines of “I overindulged yesterday, but today I’ll get back to my regular healthy eating habits.”

Story prompting uses subtle prompts to change how people interpret events in ways that make it easier for them to act in beneficial ways. Wilson shares two methods for story prompting:

• Give people information that allows them to reframe their experiences. For example, talking to first year university students to let them know that many people struggle first year, but end up doing well.
• Assign a writing exercise. “Think about your life in the future. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals. Think of this as the realization of all of your life dreams. Now, write about what you imagined. Do this for 20 minutes per day three days in a row. Don’t just think about what you have achieved, but also how you got there.”  Through the process of imagining how well things turn out in future, we focus on ways of achieving those goals and think about what we need to do to get there.

Do good, be good: changing behavior first

[People acquire virtues] by first having them put into action.. we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlling by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage. Aristotle

Our behavior shapes the personal narratives we develop. If we act kind, we see ourselves as being a kind person. If we see ourselves as a kind person, we’re more likely to help others. And once we help others, we strengthen this new narrative of ourselves as a kind person.

This is the technique I used to learn how to present. I was terrified the first time but I did it anyway. Once I made it through my first presentation, I was able to start seeing myself as a presenter. “Hey, that went pretty well. I can do presentations after all.” Each presentation I’ve done since then has helped build and reinforce my perception of myself as a presenter.

To use the do good, be good technique, think about who you want to be. A kind person. Presenter. Adventurer. Collaborator. Healthy eater. Then identify the behaviors practiced by that type of person. Choose one of the behaviors and start practicing it, repeating regularly until it becomes a habit. Then choose another behavior.

Implications for organizational change

The stories circulating in your organization will have a significant impact on the success (or failure) of your change effort. If your organization has a fixed mindset, filled with stories of all the reasons why it can’t possibly succeed, then your initiative will fail unless you can design interventions aimed at editing these stories. And traditional communications and training approaches to change usually fail to do this. Ask yourself:

• What stories are people telling themselves about the change you’re trying to introduce? What do stories reveal about the assumptions and mental models driving people’s current behavior? Have you listened, done your emotional due diligence to uncover these stories?
• Have you identified the specific behaviors that, if broken down to a micro level, could be used for the “do good, be good” technique?
• What stories are you telling yourself about the change, people’s reaction to the change, and how do these stories affect your approach to change? I’ll blog more about why this is important in a future post.

Once you’ve identified stories that reveal fixed mindsets or counterproductive mental models, you can intervene using story editing techniques that allow people to make sense of the change, create a strong understanding of why, edit existing stories counterproductive to the change, and develop new stories supportive of the change.

Reflecting back on the stories I shared at the beginning of this post, how could story editing help shift the fixed organizational mindset they hint at? Here are a couple of possibilities:

• Use story prompting to highlight successful projects. Share the fact that people may have initially struggled early on to learn the new technology and incorporate it into the way they work, but that after an initial adjustment period they successfully made the change and it’s now the way things are done. I can also imagine using story prompting for specific behaviors. For example, converting negative stories sparked by having to tag content when uploading from “it’s too slow to add documents” or “it takes too many clicks” to “it take a couple of extra clicks to tag a document, but it sure saves a lot of time from that point on whenever anyone needs to find it.”
• Do good, be good. Using collaborative document repositories requires significant behavior change. Instead of keeping paper documents in file cabinets,  storing electronic documents on a personal computer where only they have access, or keeping copies of documents on a disorganized shared drive only accessible to a team, people are expected to use a shared corporate repository. Many may fit the persona of “keepers” or “hoarders” who see documents as “mine” versus “sharers” who see documents as “ours.” What behavior might start a shift in mindset from “mine” to “ours?” Perhaps getting them adding documents to the repository by sponsoring a competition for the biggest uploader or having a team upload party?
• Writing technique. At first I was going to dismiss this technique as problematic in an organizational context. But interactive workshops and gamestorming sessions could be used in a similar way as a platform for social sensemaking  similar to the writing technique for personal sensemaking. Interactive social sensemaking techniques  lead to shared stories, shared views, and shared mental models.

Story editing leads to behavior change

Not only do we need to view a problem through other people’s eyes, we can also change the way they view it with relatively simple interventions. Even if self-views are often embedded in years of family dynamics, personal relationships, and cultural forces.  Kurt Lewin

Though it was more than 20 years ago, I still recall when Claude Jutra, a well-known Quebec film director, drowned himself after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. This weekend I finally read Still Alice a powerful novel about a woman diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.

My grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s. Fortunately for future generations it wasn’t early onset, which I learned from the novel children have a 50% chance of inheriting. If it had been early onset, would I have wanted to be tested? Initially, I would have said no. But then in Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change I came across this reference: “People who were 100% sure that they would get [Huntington’s] disease and die prematurely were happier and less depressed than people who were 50% sure that they were healthy & disease free.”

Why? And what does this have to do with story editing and behaviour change?

People create meaning to overcome uncertainty

A possible answer is found in recent research on happiness. Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness suggests that regardless of whether something really good or really bad happens, we quickly adjust to our earlier level of happiness. He shares stories of people who, within a year of winning a lottery or suffering a spinal injury leading to paralysis, are just as happy as they were beforehand. People are remarkably adaptable.

The certainty of knowing you have the gene, that you will get Huntington’s or Alzheimer’s, allows you to adapt by making sense or meaning out of the diagnosis.

The uncertain person doesn’t know what to make sense of, whereas the certain one can begin the process of meaning-making and understanding and explanation for even the bleakest of outcomes. And by so doing, that person adapts and recovers – because once we reach an understanding of what something means and why it occurred, we dwell on it less and its impact wanes. Timothy Wilson

Although adaptation happens naturally, recent research on story editing suggests you can speed up the process, redirect a negative personal narrative, and change your behavior in order to increase your happiness.

People edit the scenes that make up their personal narrative

When we think back to our past or when daydream about our future we mold our memories or shape our dreams into an archplot to give them vivid shape.  Robert McKee

The job of a film editor is an art of storytelling. “A film editor must creatively work with the layers of images, story, dialogue, music, pacing, as well as the actors’ performances to effectively “re-imagine” and even rewrite the film to craft a cohesive whole.” From a huge pool of raw footage, they weave together scenes into a compelling story that connects emotionally. Powerful editing can make or break a movie.

Like film editors, we edit together snippets of experience (real, borrowed, and imagined) to form the scenes that make up our life stories. Most often, we do this unconsciously, not realizing we have editorial control over the remembered stories that help us make sense of who we are. And yet these stories are tremendously important as they influence our happiness and guide our current and future behavior.

Our experience of the world is shaped by our interpretations of it, the stories we tell ourselves, and these stories can often become so distorted and destructive that they completely hinder our ability to live balanced, purposeful, happy lives, so the key to personal transformation is story transformation. Timothy Wilson

Think you don’t edit your memories? That all of them conform directly to actual events? When you tell the story of where you were when you first heard about 9/11, the story you tell today may not match the story you told right after it occurred. What percent of people’s stories have been edited? Jonah Lehrer shares the results of an ongoing study of 9/11 memories in Wired.

Stories we tell ourselves can be positive or negative

Laid off? Didn’t get an expected promotion? Failed a test? Just heard about the latest and greatest corporate initiative? Met your daughter’s new boyfriend, decorated with a scorpion tattoo and a ring through his eyebrow? On encountering something new, our brain automatically weaves a story, fitting the experience into our worldview. The shape and tone of these stories (and resulting behavior they spark) is influenced our mindset.

Carol Dweck, author of the book Mindset,  distinguishes between people with growth versus fixed mindsets.

If you have a growth mindset, the stories you weave put you in the driver’s seat.  “I determine my world.  I am responsible for me. I can choose.” The focus is on your awareness and ability to choose. ” For example, let’s say you just failed a test. Maybe the story you tell yourself is something along the lines of “I failed the test. I didn’t do much studying. I just need to focus and apply myself, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be doing well in this subject.”

Only the other hand, if you have a fixed mindset, the stories you weave portray you as a helpless victim. “The world happens to me. They are responsible for…  They prevent me from…” They statements assume power is in them. The focus is outside yourself and they increase your dependence. People with a fixed mindset might tell themselves a story such as “I failed the test. I’m a girl. Girls are no good at math. There’s no point in applying myself any harder because no matter what I do, I’ll fail.”

Story editing is a set of techniques for redirecting people’s narratives about themselves, others, and the social world in a positive way that leads to lasting behavioral change.

In my next post, I’ll briefly describe three different story editing techniques and discuss possible applications to organizational change.

 

 

 

Technology is rational, predictable, controllable. People aren’t.

This situation reminds me of those old movies we’ve all seen of people trying to fly in machines before the airplane was invented: machines that had flapping wings; machines that had big, circular, umbrella-like contraptions that moved up and down; machines that had four sets of wings, none of which was large enough to generate sufficient life… It didn’t matter how hard the pilots tried. It didn’t matter how imaginative or clever they were. It didn’t matter how good they were as people or how noble their aspirations were. There was nothing these pilots were going to do to make these inventions fly – because they were structurally incapable of flight. – Peter Senge

You flip a switch or program a piece of technology to do something, and it does it.

Technology is rational, predictable, controllable.

Technology doesn’t argue back.

Technology doesn’t need to be motivated.

You hand people a piece of technology and tell them to use it to do something, and more often than not they argue back. Or they say “sure” and then quietly continue doing things the way they’ve always done them and hope if they ignore it long enough it’ll eventually go away. Or they complain that they have no time, that it’s too hard, that it’s stupid, that it’s too much work, that it’s too slow, that it’s too <infinite variety of complaints here>. 

People are irrational, unpredictable, not receptive to being controlled.

People argue back.

People need to be motivated.

When you flip the switch to deploy a new technology within your organization, you’ve only turned on the technology. You can’t flip a switch to turn on people. People are creatures of habit. They need to be motivated. They need to be seduced. They need to believe what you believe.

Achieving user adoption is the process of seducing people into discarding old behaviors and adopting new behaviors. Of nudging people away from their current way of feeling, thinking, and doing to a new way of feeling, thinking, and doing. Of converting them from an old system to a new one.

Deploying technology is a complex business change effort. And user adoption is the biggest challenge you’ll face in your change effort. Yet we’ve traditionally focused our efforts on the technology side of the deployment equation, spending 80% of our time and money on the technology.

Continuing to pour the bulk of our efforts into the technology is like continuing to look to for new ways to flap our wings faster. Instead, with 75-80% of the business value driven by invisible, so-called soft factors – use by people (Global CIO Report – Harnessing Information Value), isn’t it time to flip our focus from the technology to the people? After all, “the value of IT is not in ‘deploying it’ at all but in ‘using it’ and taking full advantage of it. IT brings value only when employees, clients and partners are able to use technology efficiently and improve their own performance. IT functions have the opportunity to create enhanced business value through improving the usage of these technologies, and most of all to get a strong return on their information assets.”

 Interested in learning more about approaches to flipping focus? Sign up for one of the full day workshops I’m facilitating at OpenText Content World:

• Seducing Users: The Psychology of Adoption
• Design Thinking for ECM Champions

 

Do you have an [enterprise] app for that?

Gartner predicts that by 2013, 40% of enterprise knowledge workers will have removed their desk phone, as illustrated in this great infographic on this history of the knowledge worker.

I’m one of those 40%. I participate in online meetings while soaking up the sun on my deck. I’m drafting this blog post from the Sleepless Goat, a funky little cooperative café in Kingston Ontario where I spend one morning each week writing. I participate in meetings and discussions using my smartphone.

We’ve finally reached the tipping point for mobile, crossing the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. While this is happening faster in the consumer world than within the enterprise, the enterprise mobile revolution has begun. And that means we need to rethink how we enable knowledge workers to share information, learn, and connect with each other in their day-to-day work.

In The New Edge in Knowledge Carla O’Dell urges knowledge managers to ask the question “is there an app for that?” Although we’re creatures of habit, we’re more willing to embrace change when it helps us achieve our goals, fits the way we work, and helps us more effectively achieve the outcomes we’re responsible for.

Hey, I’m mobile! Meet Gary, road warrior

The evolution of the knowledge worker infographic got me thinking about Gary, a mobile road warrior persona I created earlier this year.

A persona is a tool for capturing insights and behaviors of a group of people. Instead of an abstract user, it allows you to design content, products, services, or experiences for a “real” person. It creates empathy, focus, and serves as a social object in a way that’s impossible with the elastic concept of user. While the job reflected in Gary’s persona is sales, his road warrior characteristics and behaviors apply equally to executives and consultants.

Stories surround us

The world we see today is the legacy of people noticing the world and commenting on it in forms that have been preserved. Art & Fear

Story is how we make sense of the world. Each piece of art we create tells a story. Each story we share contributes to the meaning that shapes our world.

Story was the theme of PAB 2011, a gathering of artists who spent the weekend exploring storytelling across all forms of new media. 

After struggling to summarize my experience, I decided adding a constraint would be the perfect way to push through my writer’s block. I’ve captured my reflections in 4 sets of 5.

Five takeaways from PAB

• Stories surround you. Listen for them. Capture them. Share them. Risks if we don’t? Voices lost from history. Explosions from people whose stories aren’t heard (great JOLT @RobinBrowne!).
• Be naked. Reveal yourself. Take risks. @scarboroughdude was the most naked presenter, lounging in an armchair sharing his stories in the spirit of the original PAB as if participating in a fireside chat. Although @JohnMeadows vied for the title in a different way, pushing his limits with his photography.
• Just hit publish. It’s hard to hit publish if you’re forever worrying about whether you have anything interesting to say or whether it’s good enough. If you don’t hit publish, you’ll never know what your audience finds interesting or valuable. I admire the mindset of my son who created and published his first 3 tutorial videos in 3 hours, sharing his learnings with each video published.
• See the moments. Why use a film or view camera for photography when digital is available? Because it forces you to focus in on the moment. On the story you want to capture. This resonated with me as I’d just finished the book Zen of Seeing by Frederick Franck, who describes seeing this way: “Open your eyes and focus on whatever you observed before – that plant or leaf or dandelion. Look it in the eye, until you feel it looking back at you. Feel that you are alone with it on Earth! That it is the most important thing in the universe, that it contains all the riddle of life and death. It does! You are no longer looking, you are SEEING…” By learning to see the moments, you’ll discover stories everywhere.
• Treat a conference as a conversation. Intimate. Safe to be naked. Open space for conversation and forming new friendships. @markblevis and @bobgoyetche did a phenomenal job curating and facilitating PAB. It was forged seven years ago with a campfire in mind and they’ve stuck with that format, the current fireside being Stage 4 of the National Arts Centre. There was far more conversation than at other conferences I’ve attended, and it was during those conversations that meaning was shared and new relationships were begun.

Five things I learned by presenting at PAB

We learn by creating, sharing our creations, and then listening to the feedback shared by our audience. Here are a few things I learned about how I can improve future presentations, thanks to the opportunity to present at PAB.

• Cut. Cut. Then cut even more. Even though stories resonate more powerfully than facts, I still have a tendency to sprinkle too many supporting facts (references to studies) into a presentation. Too many facts distract the audience and dilute your core message.
• Ground yourself to reassure your lizard brain. Presenting triggers the flight, fright, flee response of the lizard brain for most of us. Someone shared with me a centering technique from yoga I’ll use in the future to reassure my lizard brain that it’s safe. Stand with your legs shoulder width apart. Lift your toes, spread them out, then anchor them to the floor. Imagine yourself as a tree, sending roots deep into the soil. Take a deep, yogic breath (inflating your belly). Exhale forcefully through an open mouth (making sure your mike is off).
• Slow down. Give people time to absorb each slide. Each visual, each slide, is part of the story you’re telling. Hurrying through slides leaves people wondering what they’ve missed.
• Invite your audience in. This was one of the tips @acedtect shared in his top 5 ways to engage the audience. How could I have done this better at PAB? Kept my presentation shorter. Then I could have facilitated an autobiography exercise, asking a few people to stand up and share. Then if there was time, followed that with an Inciting Incident exercise, again asking people to stand up and share. Story brings the audience in. Leaving space gives more opportunities for their stories to emerge.
• Reveal the meaning. It’s not what something is about (the facts). It’s about what it means to you (the story). This is related to presenting naked. Someone mentioned their surprise at how interested people seemed in some of the books I mentioned. He reflected that maybe this was because I referred to what the books meant to me, how they changed my thinking, rather than simply saying what they were about (his usual approach). In his wrap @markblevis said the creators aren’t the people who decide what the benefit is of their creation to others. Rather, it’s about what it means to your audience. I was surprised by the variety of conversations I had with people about what my presentation meant to them. The meaning and what resonated varied widely (from finding personal meaning to organizational applications). That’s the power of story. It provides space for conversation. It provides space for meaning to emerge.

I’ll be uploading my presentation, It’s All Invented, to slideshare next week.

Five things I’m going to do as result of attending PAB

The best conferences spark ideas and inspire action. As a result of my experience at PAB 2011, I’m going to do the following five things:

• Capture stories with video and audio. I confess my lizard brain has hindered me from reaching out to people and asking them whether I can record conversations. And yet unless I get over this fear I can’t share their stories. I’m going to bring my video camera and audio recorder to Content World 2011 and ask people to share their stories, featuring them in the Adoption Community.  
• Write a book on life lessons I’ve learned through gardening.  During my talk, I teased the audience with a few slides featuring my garden. Gardening has taught me so much about design, experimentation, persistence, emergence, serendipity… the list could go on. The number of stories it holds is huge. I started Ktown Gardener in January to capture thoughts and images of my garden, but didn’t stick with it. Thanks to PAB I’m reviving Ktown Gardener. I’ll post several times a week, using the blog as a garden journal to capture stories and images that resonate with me along with mistakes, successes, and learnings. I’ll also use it as a vehicle to help me develop my skills in drawing, photography, and video. And Ktown Gardener will become the  shitty first draft of the book.
• Seek out Kingston creatives. Artists (creators, designers) need other artists for inspiration and support. PAB has a wonderfully supportive atmosphere. While it’s awesome to travel to an event like PAB (and I plan on attending again next year) I’d like to connect with artists in the Kingston area. If you’re interested, send me an email or a tweet.
• Capture family stories. @zedcaster shared the story of Ada, his great grandmother, mother of 15 and lifelong swimmer. A cassette of her stories was almost lost. Someone discovered it at a garage sale, recognized its value, and tracked down her family so they could return it. Much to my regret, I have no stories of my great grandmother. But I still have the opportunity to capture the stories of my parents for future generations.
• Haul one or both of my kids off on an adventure. One of our family highlights is the month we spent exploring China when the kids were 12 and 14. We took Mandarin lessons together, then set off on our adventure. Since then I’ve assumed the kids are too old to head out with us again (they’re 17 and 19 now). But inspired by @scarboroughdude’s story of his cross Canada bonding trips with each of his sons and Christopher Griffin‘s tale of his family’s trip to India and his experience casting bronze elephants, I’ll be seeking out an adventure to share with my kids.

Five phrases from PAB that captured my imagination

• Fruitful incompletion
• Story showers
• Dead time between mistakes gives space for better ideas to emerge
• We’re not channels, we’re tubes
• Shiver moment

What images do these phrases evoke for you?

Interviewing as listening

Listening is the root of collaboration, root-cause analysis, and effective teamwork. It is also the single greatest source of establishing unity from top to bottom and bottom to top. – David Shaner, The Seven Arts of Change

With deep listening.

Adopting a beginner’s mind.

And a design attitude.

Too often, we allow our preconceptions, mental models, and perceptions of the other person to run interference. Instead of listening, we’re silently arguing, editing what the other person is saying to fit our own mental models, or worrying about our next question.

Consider what the joke about the designer and the light bulb reveals about a design attitude.

How many designers does it take to change a light bulb?

Why a light bulb?  

Turn off your ego

Approach each interview with that why foremost in your mind.

Who is this person? What do they care about? Why? Why do they see the world that way? What does it mean? What hypotheses can I test?

Listening is not an automatic pilot. It is a conscious decision… STOP EVERYTHING YOU’RE THINKING and listen. Suspend your own frame of reference. Focus externally. Turn off your ego. Quit thinking everything revolves around your opinion. Give the stage in your head to someone else! – Sunni Brown

You don’t have to be a designer to have a design attitude or a buddist to have a beginner’s mind. Test your attitude by asking yourself:

• Am I putting aside my assumptions?
• Am I trying to understand how this person sees themselves and their world?
• Do I allow myself to ask stupid questions?
• Am I suspending judgment, holding my analytical mind in check?
• Am I digging below surface-level facts, explanations, or generalizations to uncover the underlying story?
• Can I look past the words themselves to the meaning or story hidden in the spaces between the words?

The process of listening so others will talk,  developed by  Carl Rogers, is called reflective listening. Reflective listening involves shifting your mindset from “how do I see this person?” to “How does this person see themselves and their situation?” Your goal when interviewing is to see the world from the other person’s point of view. Using reflective listening techniques  (which I’ll dig into in more detail in a future post) you’ll reduce defensiveness, build trust, make a person feel understood, and increase insight. 

Probe for meaning

If you’ve familiar with the analogy of the Elephant and the Rider, adopting a design attitude when interviewing allows you to probe beneath the interviewee’s Rider, the portion of their brain that excels at generalizations, rationalizations, and explanations (expressed knowledge) and dig for the rich meaning held by the Elephant, the portion of the brain operating outside our conscious awareness that holds a goldmine of tacit and fertile knowledge.

You’re in discovery mode. Not just discovery of facts, but more importantly discovery of the context or story which weaves together those facts to infuse a particular meaning into how that person views the organization and their work. For it’s the story or meaning they assign to facts that determines their behavior and drives their decisions.   

Shift yourself into the right mindset by approaching each interview with deep curiosity, imagining each person as the keeper of a mystery to uncover. As Malcolm Gladwell said: “Everyone has a story. When people are talking about something they know well and do well, they’re almost always interesting. And if they’re not, it’s generally your fault because you’re not asking the right questions and you haven’t made them comfortable.”

There is so much power in this small act [of listening] because it can immediately establish trust and diffuse the negative energy exuding from individuals at the outset of change. No speech, act, or intervention can accomplish such a deep measure of trust in such as short time. And trust is what you’re after. – David Shaner, The Seven Arts of Change

Interviewing as emotional due diligence

The important thing is not to stop questioning. – Albert Einstein

During a recent interview, the executive sponsor of an ECM deployment said “We expected 100% user adoption. But we’re not seeing that.” Like many organizations which implement enterprise software, this organization deployed the software, sent out some communications, did some classroom training, and then waited for people to adopt the software along with new information management behaviors. But instead of the 100% adoption they expected, they ended up with spotty adoption and unhappy users.

What went wrong?

No one was responsible for talking to the people expected to change their behaviours and adopt the software. No one was responsible for listening for their stories. No one was responsbile for performing emotional due diligence.

• Interviewed department heads or managers to uncover their use cases, objectives, and constraints
• Interviewed the knowledge workers expected to use the software to understand their work, the pressures they worked under, and what was important to them

 After deploying, no one:

• Checked back with department heads or managers to see whether the deployed solution was helping them achieve their business objectives
• Checked back with knowledge workers to see whether they were using it, how they were using it, whether they understood what was expected of them, and whether they perceived any value

The unintentional story told by this approach was “you aren’t important.” They fell into this trap because the dominant mentality of today’s corporate culture is telling, not asking.

Because they neglected their emotional due diligence, they failed to deploy in a way that took into account the way people worked. It’s likely the project was initially declared a success if it delivered against documented requirements on time and on budget. But, because adoption is the real measure of success, the project failed in delivering the expected value.

Here be dragons

I stumbled on the phrase emotional due diligence in Tell to Win, where Peter Gruber shares the story of how Tom Werner succeeded as chairman of the Boston Red Sox after  failing as owner of the San Diego Padres. When he arrived in Boston, he was pressured to tear down the Fenway Park. But the fans said that if he destroyed Fenway Park, he would destroy their story. He did his emotional due diligence, getting to know the fans and their story. After getting to know the emotional landscape of Fenway Park, he concluded that the proposition wasn’t “Build it and they will come, but rather Tear it down and they won’t come.” He decided Fenway Park was the most valuable element of the Red Sox story and that his job was to protect and refuel the flame of Fenway to ensure core story was neverending. By 2008 Fenway sold out 388 consecutive home games, the second longest streak in baseball history. And they reversed the Curse of the Bambino to win the World Series after an 86 year drought.

You can perform your own emotional due diligence when introducing change (any enterprise software deployment will introduce significant change) by reaching out to people to discover their stories, motivations and passions – mapping the emotional landscape of your organization.

Each time you conduct an interview, run a survey, or facilitate a workshop, think of yourself as an explorer charting unfamiliar territories in your organization’s emotional landscape. For in unfamiliar territories here be dragons that can either capsize your change effort or surface opportunities you can leverage to accelerate change.

As we shift from command and control organizations to adaptive organizations, we need to get better at navigating the emotional landscapes of our organizations.  And that means we need to become experts at interviewing as a technique for performing emotional due diligence.

In future posts, I’ll dig deeper into the art and science of interviewing for emotional due diligence.

Designing experiences with content

What’s the worst customer experience you’ve ever had?

In this presentation from Content World, I (partially) chronicle my own worst ever customer experience using a simplified customer experience journey map. While it wasn’t the worst in terms of any one interaction, the overall experience as it unfolded over time, across multiple interactions, and through multiple touchpoints made it the winner.

Too often, when an organization looks at interaction design, process design, touchpoint design, or content design, they do it in the context of a single interaction, a single process, a single touchpoint, or a single piece of content. They don’t look at the way the interactions weave together over time and across touchpoints. They don’t look at the interconnections between the employee experience and the backend systems they work with and the customer experience. They don’t think in terms of a holistic customer experience. As a result, while they may deliver a great experience at one touchpoint, the overall experience may still suck.  

Content has a significant role to play when we approach the design of the customer experience holistically. And yet content has long been neglected. It’s time to change that. Content strategy, by designing experiences with content, can have a significant impact on an organization’s bottom line.

By the way, the tale of my worst experience continues. As I was editing this presentation, the phone range. For some reason, I picked it up even though I usually ignore phone calls during the day (assuming they’re spam). Sure enough, it was spam. But in a twisted kind of way I was glad I answered because it supplied me with yet another thread in the narrative of my most worst ever customer experience.

On the line was a call center representative. They were phoning to offer me the opportunity to purchase an extended warranty on my dishwasher (“oh” the woman on the phone says, “you own two dishwashers?”).

“Actually no.” I respond. “I have one dishwasher. It’s the replacement for the other one that caused me no end of frustration with multiple service calls and a damaged floor.”

 “I’ll correct your record” she offers. Then she starts back into her pitch. Having only so much patience, I confess that I hung up before she could finish.

Applying the Switch framework to two change efforts

In  to succeed with change, tap into the power of the mind I summarized my takeaways from Switch. In this post, I’ll try applying the Switch framework to two very different types of change efforts. The first is a personal change effort many of us struggle with. The second is an organizational change effort.

Losing weight

Direct the rider: When it comes to losing weight, convincing the rider isn’t usually a problem. Rationally, we know being overweight affects our health. Most of us want to eat healthier and exercise more. So how can we find ways to direct the rider and stay on course? Find bright spots (family, friends, colleagues, or bloggers who succeeded) and discover how they did it. Think back to times you’ve followed healthier behaviours and see if you can figure out why and how to duplicate that success more consistently. Create simple rules (if it contains high fructose corn syrup, you can’t pronounce some of the ingredients, or it’s made with white flour don’t eat it). Plan ahead with simple easy to prepare menus. Teach the rider distraction techniques (when craving something sweet, eat a carrot, take a walk, talk to someone in your support network, or read something motivational).

Motivate the elephant: Instead of viewing it as a problem (stop being overweight), reframe it as a positive goal, a new state of being (be healthy). Visualize how you look and feel as a healthy person. Set micro goals (15 minute daily walk, a healthy breakfast) and celebrate each success. Plan ahead for falling off the wagon (“I blew it today, but that’s ok because I’m a healthy person so tomorrow I’ll just return to my healthy habits” rather than “I blew it today, I’m a failure, I might as well just give up”). And if you’re trying to motivate the elephant to act, watch Jamie Oliver’s excellent TED talk teach every child about food.

Shape the path: Set action triggers (put on running shoes every morning and go outside, drink a glass of water before every meal) to help build habits (daily exercise, drinking 8 glasses of water a day). Tweak the environment (don’t keep ice cream in the house, use smaller plates, purchase home exercise equipment, weigh yourself every morning). Rally the herd by sharing your goals with family and friends and reporting publicly on your progress. Weight gain is contagious, so build a social network of people with similar heath goals. 

Using less paper

Direct the rider: Paint the vision of a future with less paper. Connect that future to a meaningful strategic goal or purpose that resonates (such as becoming a more sustainable organization or one which consistently delights customers). Demonstrate the impact of the current state (amount of paper created or stored yearly, amount of time wasted digging through file cabinets or requesting boxes from storage, poor customer service caused by the lack of a consolidated electronic view of previous customer interactions). Find the bright spots (employees, departments, or teams who have found new ways of working that involve less paper) and share their stories. Script critical moves. Scan, file electronically, and then throw away incoming paper immediately. Instead of emailing and printing to edit, store documents in a document repository and use track changes and electronic versioning to edit. Instead of using printed manuals for policies and procedures, use wikis.

Motivate the elephant: Create visuals (images of file cabinets and piles of paper cluttering offices and hallways) of all the paper the current behaviours are generating. Circulate before and after video clips or stories of people frustrated and exchanging multiple emails trying to chase down answers before making the change and their success when using the new paperless option after the change. Figure out how many trees are cut down annually because of the reliance on paper and share that number. Set targets to reduce that number then visually show how the number changes over time as people change their behaviours (could even break this down departmentally to leverage social influence). Host fun events such as a bulk loading party to migrate documents into the electronic library.

Shape the path: Introduce structural elements that constrain the use of paper. Provide an electronic library or repository that replaces physical alternatives. Ensure people can easily file and find documents  electronically. Review processes and reshape them so they naturally lead people towards working electronically otherwise they’ll continue to follow old habits. Introduce digital workflows. Replace paper forms with electronic ones and physical signatures with electronic ones. Make printers scarce – if a printer is difficult to get to, people are less likely to print. Provide dual monitors – the easier content is to work with online, the less likely people are to print. Make scanners convenient and provide checklists to make it easy to scan incoming or source content into the library.

Personally, one of the biggest factors in changing my own behavior to use less paper was structural. Like many people, I would often print to read, edit, or review documents. At the office, I had easy access to fast printers. Then I moved to a home office. While I do have access to a printer at home, I didn’t know how to connect to it over the network using an IP address. Although I could have easily figured it out by doing a web search, I didn’t bother for almost a year (procrastination in action). As a result, because I couldn’t easily print, I adjusted to reading, reviewing, and editing electronically. And even though I finally set up the connection so that I am able to print at home, my new habits are ingrained and I’ve become a long term convert to using less paper.

To succeed with change, tap into the power of the mind

Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: can you get people to start behaving in a new way? For individual’s behavior to change, you’ve got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds. – Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip & Dan Heath

In the past couple of years I’ve read widely in the area of behavioral economics.  Insights from this field can be applied to a wide range of challenges from the design of software, policy, communications, services, organizations, and change. And so I was delighted when reading Dan and Chip Heath’s book on change, Switch, to see them apply the new theories of the brain to the challenge of change.

Whether it’s trying to change our own habits, the habits of a team, or the habits of an organization the people who succeed in effecting change, whether through design, intuition, or by accident, tap into the power of how the mind actually works. And much of that power resides in understanding the tension between the Elephant and the Rider.

The analogy of the Elephant and the Rider used in Switch reveals the power emotion exerts over our behavior and captures the tension between the emotional and rational sides of our brains.

Motivate the Elephant – our emotional brain

The conscious part of our mind (the rider) is like the tip of an iceberg, dwarfed by the remainder (the elephant) that operates outside our conscious awareness. Both because we’ve been seduced by the illusion of homo economicus and because the elephant is hard to measure and study, we’ve neglected the importance of the elephant when designing for lasting change. And yet, for change that sticks, we need to engage the elephant.

According to John Kotter, “people change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.” In other words, rather than analyze-think-change (targeting the rider) we need a see-feel-change approach (targeting the elephant). The heart of change is emotion.

So what exactly is the elephant? The elephant:

• Consists of gut feelings, emotions, and intuitions.
• Is the source of our energy & passion.
• Gets things done.
• Has ingrained habits that are tough to change.
• Really, really hates to fail.
• Needs motivation to act.
• Is easily demoralized, spooked, and derailed.
• Hungers for instant gratification.

In a change effort, because we want to harness the elephant’s energy and power for action, we need strategies to motivate the elephant, give it confidence, and keep it moving forward along the path set out by the rider. You can do this either by shrinking the change or growing people:

• Forget facts and figures, they’ll never convince the elephant. Instead, make it visceral, make it emotional. Use anecdotes, stories, direct experiences, or imagery.
• Provide a compelling, clear, and concrete vision of the desired end stage.
• Don’t get caught up analyzing the source of the problem. To the elephant, root causes are true but useless.
• Get them started on the path by asking for something small.
• Provide reassurance, even for the very first step.
• Set micro milestones. With each milestone, the elephant feels less scared and less reluctant because they’re succeeding.
• Elephants wander. Watch for triggers that cause it to wander, then lead it back.
• Although elephants hate to fail, if you create the expectation of failure as part of learning and growth, you reassure the elephant.
• Elephants have a herd mindset. Cultivate a sense of identity –  a tribe and cause the elephant can believe in.  

Direct the Rider – our rational brain

The rider is the conscious part of our brain. Perched on top of the elephant, the rider holds the reigns and seems to be in control. But when it comes to a  disagreement, the tiny rider is no match for the massive elephant. And the bigger the change, the harder it is for the rider to steer the elephant. 

When the elephant rambles off course, the rider explains away the behavior of the elephant by spinning a story about why the elephant behaved the way it did – a confabulation which may bear little resemblance to what actually happened.

So what exactly is the rider? The rider:

• Is a thinker and a planner that looks into the future.
• Advises the elephant and helps it to make better choices. But when push comes to shove, caves to the elephant’s greater strength unless it’s able to distract the elephant.
• Creates stories to justify and rationalize the actions (decisions) of the elephant.
• Loves to contemplate, obsess, and overanalyze.
• Focuses on problems rather than bright spots.
• Often thinks about what’s easy to think about, rather than what’s right to think about.
• Spins its wheels, so tends to lead elephant in circles.
• Needs to remain vigilant to keep the elephant on course until new habits replace the old.
• Tires easily (only works optimally about four hours a day).

In a change effort, because the rider is so easily lead around by the elephant, we need strategies to keep it steering in the right direction and to arm the rider for its ongoing struggles with the elephant:

• Point the rider to its destination (this is where a compelling vision and BHAGs are so powerful).
• Don’t overwhelm the rider, it has limited resources and is easily exhausted in its struggles with the elephant. Carefully focus it on what’s most important.
• Script critical moves (clear policies & guidelines, stop doing/start doing scripts, quick references).
• Be on the lookout for the rider spinning tales and making excuses for what the elephant has done (“I don’t have time…” “it’s too slow…” “I need it at my fingertips…”).
• Teach the rider strategies to recognize when the elephant is getting the upper hand by developing emotional intelligence. Think of emotional intelligence is a skillful rider who is able to distract the elephant.
• Develop social intelligence. Think of social intelligence is a skillful rider who is able to reach the elephants of those around them.

Shape the path – modify the environment

Everything has underlying structure.  Structure can be physical (an office, an interface, an online community, a city). Or nonphysical  (plot of a novel, flow of a process, culture of an organization, measures and incentives).

We make different choices in a cafeteria based on how the food is displayed, the order it’s displayed in, the choice of food offered, price, and the ambience of the seating area. We behave differently on Facebook than when using Outlook at work. Yet due to the fundamental attribution error we often ignore the structural forces that shape behavior, attributing behavior to the way people are rather than to the situation they’re in. What may look like a people problem is often a situation problem.

So what exactly is the path? The path:

• Consists of the structural forces surrounding the changes we’re trying to effect.
• Exerts pull to attract or push to compel.
• Is shaped by social networks.
• Is subject to three degrees of influence.
• Influences choices and actions.
• Reinforces or deters habits.

The challenge is to shape the path of least resistance to be the one that leads to the change you want to effect:

• Tweak the environment to make the right behaviors easier and the wrong behaviors harder.
• Provide physical or virtual spaces (communities, meeting rooms, project spaces, coffee corners) that attract.
• Provide checklists to show the way and help build habits.
• Set triggers to create instant habits (do x when y happens). For example, share a story about great customer service at the beginning of every team meeting. Blog action items or key learnings immediately following a meeting.
• Apply principles of social influence. For example, make progress visible using gauges, thermometers, or other visualizations.
• Rally the support of champions who could in turn influence others. 
• Craft language to build tribes and shape culture such as the core values Netflix rallies around or the design principles that guide decision making such as the ten principles that contribute to a Googley user experience.
• Build momentum by structuring a series of smaller successes on the way to a larger goal.

In my next post, I’ll apply the framework from Switch to two different types of change efforts – one personal and one organizational.

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