Approaching Change One Story At a Time: 20 Stories and Insights for Coaches, Facilitators, Trainers and Change Leaders. Bob Dick
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discovery, Tim Dalmau and I were doing some cultural change work in a couple of organisations. We found that, often, when people described organisational culture analytically, somehow it fell short of the reality.
I decided that assessing culture must be like night vision. Suppose you’re outdoors in the dark, on a moonless night. At first you can see nothing. Eventually, though, your eyes adapt to the very low light. Even though colour and clarity are missing you can see again.
If you want to inspect something you are likely to use your daytime practice of looking directly at it. But if you do that, it disappears. There are no night-time receptors at your focus of vision in the retina, the “fovea”. There are only daytime receptors there, insensitive to low levels of illumination. To see something on a dark night you don’t look directly at it. You have to look past it.
That’s how it is with organisational culture. If you look directly at it, it tends to disappear. It’s best to approach it indirectly.
Again, stories provide a solution. Stories, at least in the way people apprehend them, are layered. Below the story line there are themes that carry the deeper meanings. Stories can imply meanings without explicitly voicing them. That’s valuable in cultural work.
There’s a growing literature on telling stories to support the leadership of cultural change. I do a little of that, in a way. That’s part of the purpose served by the stories I tell at the beginning of a workshop session.
For me, though, stories achieve their greatest value when I use them for diagnosis.
For cultural diagnosis Tim and I would encourage people to tell us stories about the organisation. “Tell me about ...”. Later, working with others, it seemed to work most effectively when we collected the stories in small groups of people. One person’s story would trigger recollections of other stories. When we had people talking, the stories would flow quickly and easily.
I now have as a text file on my smartphone a list of story titles to jog my memory. At last count there were about 275 of them. I extend the effectiveness of my change facilitation by looking for opportunities to build storytelling — and even more importantly, story elicitation — into the consulting and facilitation work that I do.
Where now? I often like to begin with what you might call a “first person” story, one that I’ve experienced myself.
I have several reasons.
First, I know the story (or stories) behind the story. I can easily give more weight to those aspects of the story that are relevant to the current task. Also, I have some awareness of the motives of at least one character, and can often arrive at an informed guess about the motives of those other people I know well.
Second, first person stories can be more impelling. It’s easier for the emotion in them to be genuine. Listeners can sense this and become more engaged. Read my account later of Dee Hock stories and then read his own account in his book. I think you’ll find the story more engaging when you get it directly from him. Yes, he’s also a better storyteller than I am. But I think there’s more to it than that.
Third, to oversimplify, there are two major categories of story that serve different purposes. As Sheila Otto says in the title of her book, “All stories are true ... some actually happened”. All stories can be “true” in the sense that they can say something meaningful, directly or indirectly, about human existence. However, if I have two stories that seem equally appropriate for the current purpose, in most situations I’ll favour an “actually happened” story.
For these reasons I was going to start with the first-person story of “Caire”. But then I decided that it made a better final story to round out the collection. So instead, the next story isn’t first person. It’s third person, sort of: John’s story about Joan, told by me.
But I think it says something that’s useful to say at this point. And I can insert something of myself into it and provide enough detail that people recognise it as “actually happened”. I often use it to begin my regular Foundations of facilitation workshops.
Actually, it’s not root rot
When I first joined the staff at Queensland University, my closest colleague was John Damm. He used to tell the story about another staff member, Joan, of the agriculture faculty. Both interested in change, he and Joan were friends.
Joan was known internationally for her reputation as an academic. She was also well regarded as a practitioner. Her field was agricultural extension: how innovations spread through rural communities.
This is a story I heard from John, about meeting Joan on campus one day. Being friends, they stopped to talk. In the course of conversation Joan mentioned that on the following Wednesday she planned to facilitate a field day with banana growers at Gympie, about 170 km north of Brisbane. That’s one of the approaches agricultural extension people use. One farmer offers to host the day and invites other local farmers to attend.
John had an interest in the field of agricultural extension, as I have. It has some theories and processes that are relevant to our field of community and organisational change. So John evinced some interest in what Joan was planning. She suggested that, if he were free, he would be welcome to attend. They could drive together to the farm where the field day was to be held. It would give them a good chance to talk. So they did.
As they drove, John asked Joan what she planned to do. She explained that she intended to start the field day with a “problem census”. She would ask those present to make a list of the most important problems that they faced in growing bananas. They would then decide the problems most deserving of attention.
She said that she expected “root rot” to be mentioned early. She also expected, with some confidence, that “root rot” would be the highest priority problem.
She explained that many growers lost fruit because the banana trees fell over in wet weather. Their roots were not strong enough to hold them in the soil. The roots, when inspected, appeared damaged. Understandably, the farmers assumed that the banana roots rotted in the moist soil.
“Actually”, Joan said, “it’s not root rot. It’s nematodes — roundworms that eat the banana roots.” Nematodes breed in wet weather and feed on banana roots. Unknown to the farmers, the roots were damaged by nematodes rather than by moisture-induced rot.
Arriving at the field day, Joan greeted the farmer hosting the activity. She introduced John, and thumbtacked up a couple of sheets of butcher paper to the side of a suitable barn. When the other farmers arrived she conducted the problem census as planned.
“Root rot” was the first problem contributed. Joan used a multi-voting technique — allowing each farmer a number of votes to spread over their choice of topics — to determine priorities. It was as Joan had predicted. “Root rot” was the growers’ highest priority.
At this point John expected Joan to say that it was nematodes, not root rot. Instead she asked, “How much do you know about root rot?” She facilitated a discussion.
Did she consider the possibility of informing them about nematodes? John didn’t say. Perhaps he didn’t know. I don’t either, though my guess is that she did consider it. She was effective at what she did, so my guess is that she made a judgment. She decided that on this occasion it was better for the farmers to find out for themselves.
After some discussion it became evident that the farmers didn’t know enough to solve the problem.
“Now”, John thought, “she’ll say that it’s nematodes”.
She didn’t. She asked: “How might you find out more?” She facilitated a further discussion. The farmers decided it would be useful to do some research by examining the roots of fallen banana trees more closely.
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