Interview with Jay Cross on 21st Century Leadership & Stories

During Jay Cross's trip to Monterey I had a chance to catch up and learn about his new work on 21st Century Leadership Skills. Of course we had to talk about a stories.


Jay posted this blog with a few impressions from our lunch.


READ JAY'S SUMMARY OF OUR CONVERSATION


Below are two videos from a second conversation...



Here's another video with some more sound bites from our conversation...

 For more complimentary resources - white papers, tips, techniques, tools

CLICK HERE

IMAGINATION IN ORGANIZATIONS

What role do you think imagination plays in our organizations?

My family’s recent trip to Disneyland tickled my imagination

It’s a small world is stilling vivid for me. So many beautiful countries, customs, symbols, joined in a chorus of diverse kinship

All of this made me pause to think about the role imagination plays in our lives and what place does imagination have in our organizations? Can such a child like capacity have any relationship to bottom line imperatives?

WATCH THIS TWO MINUTE
VIDEO CONVERSATION STARTER

Imagination in Organizations from Terrence Gargiulo on Vimeo.

There are the obvious ways that imagination can be put to work in our organizations by driving problem solving, stimulating innovation and guiding creativity but these are not enough for me… I want to see how imagination touches our capacity for awe and wonder and how these deeply human expressions are operating even within the walls of our organizations

I am enamored with patterns – must be why I am such an afficiando of stories and narrative. I gaze at these animations of fractals and I begin to intuit a fascinating connection between how we are mini pattern generating contributors in a large ecosystem propped up by some structure

Could it be that imagination allows me to extend myself into a set of repeating possibilities? If I cannot directly apprehend or manipulate all the bytes of sensory and cognitive stimulus shaping my world maybe I can use my imagination to propel myself into a wider orbit …there I can be guided by the gravitational potential of bodies…ways of being and experiencing the world that are different than my own

Imagining who and how we are is vital to sense making and it never stops – whether we are in the private space of our own reverie or influencing organizational decision makers. Our capacity to encounter others…and to imagine frames of references other than our cherished set of values and beliefs is a creative act of monumental importance. The future speed of business is unlikely to accommodate anything less. What can you do to rev up your capabilities. Our performance depends upon it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts...

Organizational Awareness

"AS IT IS ABOVE SO IT IS BELOW"

What can we learn about organizations from a 25,000 year old cave carving? The Venus of Lausells is a backdrop for this week's video blog reflection.

What is the intersection of all the little events popping like hot kernels of corn around us and the large macro forces in play in our organizations?

I'm advocating for better organizational awareness. Let my two minute video be a conversation starter...

Organizational Awareness from Terrence Gargiulo on Vimeo.

Here are a couple of thoughts on how we can put stories to work to help us develop greater organizational awareness of the small and large things:

1. We use stories to explain other people's behavior and develop strategies for how to interact with them.
   
   
2. We are also capable of considering alternative behaviors that go against our ingrained ones by being aware of what stories describe our nature and by imagining alternative ones.
   
   
3. Stories are the templates upon which new behaviors can be projected onto and actualized. We use stories to gain an understanding of who we are. Collectively our stories paint an accurate picture of who we are. If we can access this information, we give ourselves freedom. In other words we can break out of an old story and temporarily adopt a new one.

What can you add to this list?

Be sure to check out my awarding winning assessment tool. Story-based observational skills are at the heart of the model.

There are also a book of self-development exercises you can use to strengthen these skills in your self and others.

And for the final shameless product plug for a guy who loves to share but also does need to make a living I have a wonderful book of group process activities that can be used to help people experience these critical skills.

Thanks!

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...

Strategic Communications & Chess

What might chess teach us about the nature of strategic communications in an organization? And what's the connection with stories?

Join me for another 2 minute video as I explore these questions and offer two, "P's" of strategic communications.

Strategic Communications & Chess from Terrence Gargiulo on Vimeo.

These two ideas are hardly the beginning of a conversation. Can't say it all in two minutes and neither can one person.

Take a moment and reflect on the game of chess and then share your thoughts of the other ways chess informs our ideas of strategic organizational communication. And for crying out loud...if you've got a story about chess start divulging!

Waves & Organizational Stories

"We are connected through meaning. Stories manifest our being. Fluctuating variations pierce placid surfaces of possibilities."

The waves of the Asilomar Coastline in Monterey, California act as a backdrop for some thoughts about the nature of stories in organizations.

Waves & Organizational Stories from Terrence Gargiulo on Vimeo.

How are you working with stories in your organization? What metaphors best describe your work and expectations?

Stories & Fire

Fire is a wonderful metaphor for understanding some of the subtleties of stories. Spend two minutes with me and reflect on what light fire can cast on our understanding of stories...

Terrence Gargiulo - Stories & Fire from Terrence Gargiulo on Vimeo.

In what ways are fire and stories related to you?

Leadership & Storytelling Part 13 of Many...

The Process Ring deals with how we work with information in our minds and store it. The Process Ring is composed of three competencies Indexing, Synthesizing, and Reflecting. All three competencies taken together capture the interplay of internal processes that result in learning. Stories are used as a way of codifying experiences. For example, the Indexing competency stresses the importance of consciously developing a robust array of descriptors for our experiences so that they can be easily reused in various settings. The bigger our indexing scheme the more we have learned from our experiences. A good index increases our capacity to learn in new situations by drawing upon past ones and integrating the news ones into a fabric of knowledge. Our capacity to communicate with others is also improved. Once our experiences have been transformed into easily retrievable stories that have been well indexed, and cross-indexed then we can be sensitive to other people’s experiences and converse with a greater range of nuances and understanding.


INDEXING COMPETENCY


Indexing is how we classify our experiences. The better the index the easier it is find information. The problem with an index is deciding what descriptors to use to classify our experiences. Indexes are further complicated by the fact everyone will chose different “key words,” or descriptors to classify their experiences. If we cannot access our experiences due to an inadequate index or one that does not match someone else’s, our experiences become dormant. They are left in the proverbial warehouse of our mind available to our unconscious but collecting dust. Effective communicators and learners naturally develop extensive indexing schemes. They draw upon lots of different experiences and can recall these experiences in the form of stories.

Triggers activate indexes. Triggers are any kind of stimuli that results in a search of our experiences and in a recounting of it. An item in our index can be stimulated by a variety of triggers. Therefore we need to be vigilant in creating a vast index and become more aware of potential triggers. If we think in advance about what kinds of themes, ideas, perceptions, learning, or emotions, are contained in our experience we will be able to leverage this awareness by becoming sensitive to a multitude of triggers. For example, take a conversation. Thoughts and ideas are expressed one after another. Given the flow of a conversation we can be swept along without ever consciously drawing upon our experiences. We are using them in the background in order to understand what is being communicated but we are not bringing them to the forefront of our minds. This in turn limits our ability to infuse the conversation with greater depth and energy. Our experiences left running in the background by our minds generates a base level of understanding but will cause us to miss vital opportunities to increase our learning and communicate with greater depth. From our previous discussions we have established the complex nature of our experiences stored and recounted to others in the form of stories.

In order to be an effective communicator and learner you need to have a wealth of stories. You are mistaken if you think you do not know or have a lot of stories. Our lives are rich with experiences. The trick is we need to make ourselves aware of these experiences by focusing our attention on them. The Personal History exercise is a sample of how you can recapture dusty memories and shake them off.
Let’s step back for a moment and realize that this process of experiences becoming stored as stories, indexed for retrieval, and our use of them in conversations and learning settings happens all the time. Why not invoke this mental process? We can strengthen this natural phenomenon by increasing its frequency on a conscious level. To do this we must have a solid foundation built. A big well-organized toolbox of personal stories will get the job done.


The first step in building an index and developing an awareness of triggers is to reconstruct as many of our experiences. This will result in an active collection of stories, which we can then index and associate with some potential triggers. The next exercise presents a method for building a collection of stories, identifying some major themes, and anticipating potential triggers.

Exercise: Indexing – Personal History

In this exercise you will create a timeline of your life. One end of the timeline should be marked with “birth,” and the other should be marked as “present.” Think back upon the years of your life and start scanning them for memories that stick out. As you create your timeline use the following list of seven historical triggers to help you jog your memory.


1. Major Event
Were there any significant things that happened?

2. Influence
What things had a formative effect in shaping your ideas, beliefs, values, or attitudes?

3. Decision
Did you make any decisions that had an impact on your life or the lives of others?

4. Change
What changes occurred?

5. Success
What were your major accomplishments?

6. Failures
Did you make any big mistakes or experience any failures?

7. Disappointments
Were there any

8. Significant People
How did certain key people affect you?

Be sure you find the stories behind each of these triggers. If your memory surfaces more as a fact, then spend a moment with the memory and try to reconstitute all of the details surrounding it. This will transform your memory into a story. The richness of a story is what lends itself to indexing. Facts get lost.

Some people find it useful to do this year by year while others will start randomly filling in their timeline with memories as they occur.

Once you have your timeline filled in with stories develop a two columned list for each story that includes story triggers and themes. Your triggers will be any situation or time where you believe your story could have applicability. At the same time, examine your stories for themes. These are in essence things that you have learned and insights you have gained from your experiences. If you are aware of what themes can be found in your experiences it will help you index them based upon potential triggers.


All of these skills can be measured with the only assessment in the world that measured story-based communication skills (recognized in 2008 with an HR Leadership Award from the Asia Pacific HRM Congress).

Story-based Communication Assessment: Click Here...


I also have a book of self-development exercises to work on these skills with yourself or others. All of these exercises that map to the nine skills of the competency model


Book of Self-Development Exercises: Click Here...


I also recommend my book, Once Upon a Time: Using Story-Based Activities to Develop Breakthrough Communication Skills. It contains a collection of group process activities aligned with these story-based communication skills.

Leadership & Storytelling Part 10 of Many...

We start our detailed look at story-based communication model for leaders by looking at the Interaction Ring.

The Interaction Ring with its three skills describes how we use stories to connect with others and communicate. The three skills are:

1. Selecting
2. Telling
3. Modeling

This is the tip of the iceberg. When people think of storytelling skills these are the ones that come rushing to mind.


The Interaction Ring contains the competencies that are most noticeable by outside observers. Selecting, Telling and Modeling describe how we use stories to communicate. In actuality, these are the least important competencies. They demonstrate mastery of the competencies found in the Core and Process Ring without which the competencies in the Interaction Ring amount too little more than showmanship. The Interaction Ring is the icing on the cake. All the other competencies have to be working in concert in order for us to be effective communicators and learners regardless of how clever we are in selecting stories, how theatrically we tell them, what behaviors we model or analogies we leverage to explain ourselves.


SELECTING COMPETENCY

One of the questions I get asked the most is, “how do you know what story to tell?” It’s an excellent question. Of course the setting of where a story is to be told has a lot to do with it. Stepping back to do an audience analysis will be instrumental in guiding you. For example, it is more straightforward when you are giving a presentation at a conference in front of a large audience than if you are attempting to select a story on the fly in an informal conversation. When you have advance information about who the people are, why they are coming, and a sense of what you think they want to get out of your talk than it is easy to use your preparation time to scan a wide assortment of story options. However, when we do not have the luxury of planning, selecting a story becomes more challenging. In these extemporaneous settings you must rely on the “listening” competencies of the Core, and the Indexing competency from the Process Ring. How to select a story is a function of our index.

Here's a complimentary copy of a tool I developed to help leaders select stories.

Complimentary Tool for Selecting Stories: Click Here...


We'll be continuing our exploration of the Interaction Ring and the two other skills in the next two blog entries.


All of these skills can be measured with the only assessment in the world that measured story-based communication skills (recognized in 2008 with an HR Leadership Award from the Asia Pacific HRM Congress).

Story-based Communication Assessment: Click Here...


I also have a book of self-development exercises to work on these skills with yourself or others. All of these exercises that map to the nine skills of the competency model


Book of Self-Development Exercises: Click Here...


I also recommend my book, Once Upon a Time: Using Story-Based Activities to Develop Breakthrough Communication Skills. It contains a collection of group process activities aligned with these story-based communication skills.

Leadership & Storytelling Part 1 of Many

August and September are going to be exciting months for our complimentary webinar series. We'll be focusing on leadership and storytelling. First up will be Shawn Callahan of Anecdote who will be joining me and all of you for an engaging interactive discussion. He and his colleagues at Anecdote have one of the best narrative practices in the world. More info about the complimentary webinar (dates, times, etc...) can be found at the end of this posting).

In preparation I thought I would spend the next fifteen or so blog posts talking about leadership and storytelling. Before getting into the storytelling side of things I want to share with you eight behaviors of leadership. Following each behavior I will outline some ideas of how these behaviors can be practiced and cultivated.


1. Cultivate Trust

An organization is bankrupt without trust. In order to leverage all forms of capital (monetary and social) leaders must cultivate trust. People need to believe in one another and be willing to engage in intricate and intimate exchanges of knowledge, idea generation, and team effort. Likewise, people need to believe in their leader. Maintaining a positive reputation and exhibiting integrity are core parts of any leader’s work, as is accepting responsibility for people. All of this ensures the organization’s success along with the ongoing personal growth of its members and their satisfaction, resulting in a perpetual loop of renewable, sustainable energy and innovation.

Model trust and it will be reciprocated. Our ability to be agile depends upon it. In an environment besieged with rapid changes, maintaining tight reins of managerial control, whether hierarchical or lateral, interferes with our ability to be responsive. People need to know we trust them to act, even if they make a mistake.

It’s the only way to maximize the intelligence and experience of our team. In a supportive environment full of trust, any mistakes made by members of our team accelerate learning and seldom become stumbling blocks. When people know it’s OK to fail, because they are trusted, they are likely to perform better.

The trust we show each other will also send a signal to our partners. How can we expect our partners to trust us if they see we do not trust members of our own team? People pick up on negative dynamics very quickly. We will not be able to hide any dysfunction in our team from outside observers, therefore we cannot afford to undermine each other. Breaches of trust are inevitable, but they are not an excuse for us to withhold trust. Even when the culture of the organization at large is tainted by a degree of distrust, we can create a corner of the organization where trust reigns supreme. Our work succeeds or fails on the basis of relationships; and no relationship can thrive without trust.


Practice

• List the people you interact with in your organization. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 = little trust and 7 =lots of trust, rank the level of trust you perceive you have with each person.

• For any person with a rating of 4 or less, write down two to three things you believe you could do to begin to improve that level of trust.

• Identify any people on your list with whom it is unlikely you will cultivate greater trust (hint: look at anyone with a rating of 5 or higher). It’s simply not possible to have the same degree of trust with everyone we work with. Some people may not be interested in or capable of high levels of trust, or we may have knowingly or unknowingly done something in the past to severely restrict a relationship.

• Before beginning a new relationship with anyone in your organization think about specific things you can do with this person to begin cultivating trust.

• The next time you have an opportunity to negotiate deliverables and a timeline for a project be realistic but modest in what you commit to doing—then surprise the recipient by giving more than he or she asked for and before the agreed-on deadline.

Here's a little teaser about our upcoming webinar with registration links:

Three Questions We Usually Get from Leaders About Storytelling: Reflections, Discussion & Tools

Are your leaders great storytellers?

The word “storytelling” itself is misleading - more on that during the webinar. After fits and starts and with over forty years of combined experience, two of the world’s leading narrative consultants divulge some of what they have learned. Join Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Terrence Gargiulo of MAKINGSTORIES.net for a rousing interactive discussion rich with examples and practical tools.

I wonder…

Will you be as surprised as we were when we discovered the “Triple Threat,” of storytelling for leaders?

Find out the answers to the three questions we get asked the most. Prior to the event we'll share a white paper on leadership and storytelling. Following the webinar we'll send you a job aid that we use in our work. So give us the pleasure of your company and interact with your peers to take a nuanced but deep dive into the art and science of leadership through narrative.

Registration Times (Click on Link to Register for Comp. Webinar)...

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 9:00 AM - 9:45 AM GMT (Greenich Mean Time)

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM PDT (Pacific Stanrard Time)

Initial Thoughts on Stories

Here are some thoughts that give shape to some of the ways I have come to think about stories...

Stories are fundamental to how we communicate, learn and think.

The shortest distance between two people is a story.

Stories are less about telling and more about listening and eliciting.

The only reason to tell is a story is to trigger more stories and insights from within ourselves or draw out (elicit) the stories of thers.

We have all the story equipment to connect with yourself and others in rich ways. How often are we using it? Do we use it in conscious and purposeful ways? Do we create environments that encourage others to share their stories?

Stories go beyond the obvious ways that we use them to encode information.

Play with the counter-intuitive notions that stories are implicit in nature; encoding messages clear cut messages to move learning, emotions, ideas or values is only the tip of the iceberg and perhaps the least important capacity of stories.

To be called a story - a story does not need to have a clear beginning, middle and end or recognizable story trajectory. By accepting this we are neither negating story in its obvious forms or diluting the notion of stories.

Stories create spaces of trust and relationships. They are living entities made real and present by the reflecting, remembering, and imagining of people engaged with each other.

Stories achieve their greatest power in concert with each other.

Stories are emergent in nature.

Through stories we enact versus announce our intentions.

Our actions impregnate the moment with new stories creating possibilities and ripples of sense making and future sense giving of others.