Approaching Change One Story At a Time: 20 Stories and Insights for Coaches, Facilitators, Trainers and Change Leaders. Bob Dick
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Approaching Change
one story at a time
20 stories and insights for
coaches, facilitators, trainers
and change leaders
Stories by: Bob Dick
Edited by: Andrew Rixon
Illustrations: Simon Kneebone
Copyright 2014 Bob Dick,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2167-4
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Why read this book?
On first glance – you might think this is just a collection of stories. And of course – being a busy professional you have no time to read just any collection of stories.
Firstly, anyone who knows Bob Dick, will also know that this collection of stories will be exceptional, and won’t be just any collection of stories.
Secondly, change has become a billion dollar industry for coaches, change management consultants, leadership development facilitators and strategy professionals.
You might think that with such an established industry and the many, many books and articles available on Amazon and the internet, what space is there for another one?
Well the good news is that this book is very different.
It represents a unique selection of change-related stories from a man who has spent four decades involved with organisations working as a consultant, academic and action researcher.
Many may know Bob Dick as the inveterate action researcher. One of the grandfathers of facilitation in Australia and a prominent international figure in the field of Action Learning and Action Research.
And – following the model of action learning – this book does not profess a 6 step guide to successful change. What it proposes is much richer. This book invites you to step into the shoes and worlds of the characters featured in upcoming pages and discover for yourself.
This e-book innovatively explores:
•Stories that every change leader needs to read
•The often unexamined role of the “ordinary” person in change
•How stories can help you be a more engaging coach, facilitator, trainer, leader, ...
•The power of story as a tool for influence
•How archetypes provide a way of interpreting stories
•The different meaning of first, second and third-person stories
•The deeper meanings behind “All stories are true but some actually happened”
•Ways of effective story listening and interpreting
•Understanding that “What’s not said” is as important, or more so, than what is said
•How story helps us work more intuitively with organisational systems
Andrew’s fault
It’s Andrew Rixon’s fault. Not “fault” in the sense of fault, but rather that Andrew was the catalyst. He started it.
By “it” I mean this collection of stories. We were talking by telephone, in the initial planning phase of a webinar on tools for change. Andrew said that we could put together a booklet of relevant stories.
Andrew is like that. He has good intuitions that seem to come from nowhere. They tend to be unexpected, and off on a bit of a tangent. You’d think they would have the potential to provoke a reaction of “Where on earth did that come from!”. And indeed, occasionally they do.
Mostly, though, the reaction they trigger is: “That’s a great idea”. And that’s what happened this time.
Of course, before the booklet and its catalysis by Andrew, there were the stories. I’ve been collecting them for some time. Before that was the motivation to collect the stories. And before that was the discovery of the virtues of story as intervention and story for diagnosis.
That’s where I’ll begin — the story of how I discovered story and its virtues.
Why stories? — a story
What do you do when you can’t get consulting work in the well-paying corporate sector? You work in the underfunded community sector. At least, that was what I did.
It was about 40 years ago that I began to do consulting work. As a newcomer to this endeavour, I hadn’t yet built networks in corporate or public sectors. For this and other reasons, much of my consulting work was in small non-government organisations: NGOs.
They seemed to like what I had to offer. I had a large repertoire of useful techniques, at least in theory. Above all, I wasn’t expensive. Often, and particularly if I could also involve some of the people enrolled in my university classes, I was free. With a university salary I didn’t need the money from consulting. In any event, the university placed tight limits on how much I could earn from outside work.
What I had yet to learn was that many small NGOs attract people who are different. Partly it’s the NGOs themselves. They aren’t like the corporate and public sectors. Sometimes the same people will behave differently in that setting to how they would act in corporate settings.
Partly it’s the people. In particular, NGOs attract people who have an attitude to timekeeping that near enough is good enough. Facilitating workshops for such participants, I found that breaks for morning and afternoon tea and lunch were extended breaks. Sometimes e-x-t-e-n-d-e-d breaks.
I really didn’t want to have to round up participants. It seemed to me that if I did, they would get the message that starting on time was my responsibility, not theirs. I didn’t want them to think that they had to wait for me to tell them what to do.
I also reasoned that if they did something because I told them to, they would stop doing it when I was no longer there to tell them. If they decided what to do they could take themselves with them when the workshop was over. That seemed like a better strategy.
So I tried negotiating times with them. “How long do you want for this break? ... OK, when you are back here at that time, we’ll start.”
Mostly, that didn’t work either.
I don’t think they were being resistant. Mostly, I suspect they were good at losing themselves in conversation and not very effective at keeping track of time. Finally, I developed the practice of negotiating a time to restart and beginning at that time with whoever had returned. There were still stragglers, so I’d begin with something that was relevant but not essential.
Stories served that purpose well.
As a consequence I discovered something practical and useful. Participants liked the stories. They began to make an effort to return from breaks on time so that they didn’t miss them.
Also, they seemed to remember the stories. They would use the stories as examples in their discussion. When I chose stories that were relevant to the following session, it seemed to enhance the learning. The stories provided an anchor for the learning. In final evaluations, insights from stories were often identified as highlights of the workshops.
Stories