Welcoming the New Year - Tidbits from the Arts

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I can't believe it's 2011. As I look back on 2010 I am gratified by all of the new content I created and offered with folks. Some wonderful collaborations - and some personal breakthroughs in terms of new idas and ways of apporaching my story work.

For a quick recap of the year and links to relevant artifacts of my bursts of creativity...

BE SURE TO CHECK OUT THIS LINK

I am planning and reflecting on what I will learn and try new this year. I am open to your thoughts and ideas. Last year I moved from lots of webinars to a few well timed and placed webinars usually with other major partners and collaborators to short videos. A colleague said he thought there were like Organizational Poetry. If you haven't seen too many of these yet please take a minute and go out to my Vimeo Channel.

These videos gave me an opportunity to play with digital forms of storytelling and they have become very popular with many of my clients. Now in addition to collecting and facilitating the collection and sense making of stories in an organization I'm being retained to pull stories together in short video collages to act as conversation starters, tacit knowledge transfer vehicles, and informal learning tools.

Before getting into new business content I wish to use this post to share three personal items:

1. Video of a performance of a chorus from the opera Tryillias I wrote with my father. This is the first performance of this chorus

2. Video of a recording of the famous Metropolitan Opera baritone singing my father's composition Ninna Nanna at his Golden Jubilee conference at Carnegie Hall Town Hall from the late 1940's

3. Video of pictures with the audio of 11 year old me (1979 - you can do the math :) singing the role of Amahl in Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Amahal an the Night Visitors

If you aren't on my mailing list please consider adding your name so I can be sure to send you announcement and links to all of the free white papers, videos, and webinars I offer.

PLEASE ADD MY NAME TO YOUR MAILING LIST

Please don't be a stranger - Let me hear from you and if there is a webinar or short video topic you would like to see or which might be helpful reach out to me by email - terrence@makingstories.net or phone - 415-948-8087.

Blessings to all for a richly deepening and storied year!

Organizational Engagement

HOW DO YOU ENGAGE YOUR EMPLOYEES?

I just returned from a wonderful conference in Singapore on Business Narrative. During one of the many rich dialogs with peers I stumbled upon a word I hadn't used in a long time. The word is "confer." Simple word but in the context of thinking about the nature of employee engagement and collaboration it brought to mind some new nuances. As an aside it's probably no coincidence that at a "confer-ence" I became more sensitized to the word "confer"

On the long plane ride back to California I captured the essence of the conversation in this stream of consciousness piece. I turned it into one of my short video conversation starters. Here it is:

Organizational Engagement from Terrence Gargiulo on Vimeo.

Are clowns and other corporate amusements in your line up of employee engagement activities? Maybe we opt for more serious stuff like corporate score cards and employee surveys to produce the data our organizations thrive on.

Let’s be honest: what are our real intentions for doing these things?

Are we trying to placate employees or can we find an effective way of inviting our employees to mix together their energies, talents and visions

Are we committed to conferring with our employees? Do we understand when collaboration makes sense and when it’s possible? Can we stay engaged with our employees?

It turns out putting the multifaceted natural capacity of stories to work leads to a whole host of new organizational engagement strategies and tactics you may have overlooked.

Organizational Change Management

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said…

“Everything flows and nothing stays fixed.”

In other words you can’t step twice into the same river. Habits are the ingrained patterns of behaviors and thoughts that we habituate. Change takes us outside our familiar zone of comfort.

There's a paradox here. Change is as natural to us as is habituation. Think about your body. Within seven years almost every cell in your body is replaced. There’s nothing permanent or stable about life. However, our perceptual system is designed to perceive the world as stable. If it weren't, we would have an awfully hard navigating the world.

For me change management is not about creating stability in the face of chaos; rather, it’s about giving people tools to imagine new possibilities.

What does a Greek philosopher, a raging river and the game of Fluxx have in common. Watch this two minute and see:

Organizational Change from Terrence Gargiulo on Vimeo.

Create organizational and communication processes that are structured but flexible. Then let the possibilities emerge and the game begin.

How have you managed organizational communication and learning in your organization to support change/ How have stories been a part of that process? Have you considered how you might work with story-based communication processes to stimulate engaging, healthy responses to the raging change we find in our organizations?

INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE GAME...