Designing for Civil Society

Storytelling for change: another collaboration thingy

If you want to help people understand each other and collaborate for change you may need some "thingies" as I wrote the other day - social events, games and simulations, online spaces, co-ordinators. Somehow I left off the role of stories, perhaps because I didn't have in mind how they could lead to action.
Then last Friday I met up with Louise Harris and Christine Wilson, at a conference organised by Community Housing Cymru. Before going along to their workshop I tried one other thingy - posting a video of development manager Sioned Hughes, asking people to send ideas on using social media in organisations to the conference blog. That was a great success, as you can see here if you browse the comments. Thanks to Lloyd, Paul, Michele, Beth, DK, Paul, Simon, David, Jeremy, Menka, Nick, Paul, Tim, Ian.
Anyway, back to storytelling, of the digital kind. Louise Harris runs the Big Learning Company, and Christine Wilson works at the Centre for Research and Innovation in Care Services, University of Glamorgan. They recently contributed to the first Public Sector Narrative Conference: Storytelling for Change, which was a collaboration between Public Service Management Wales, ENLA and the Wales Centre for Health.

Click to play or view here

The essence of their workshop was that by videoing, picturing, podcasting or otherwise recording the experiences of service users and managers you can, with their agreement, use stories to promote change.
One story we heard was that of a nurse who was interrupted while dispensing drugs to a patient. She gave the wrong thing to the patient, and was so mortified she couldn't sleep that night. In the morning she offered to hand in her resignation: even though the patient was OK she felt it was a terrible lapse in professional practice. Fortunately her manager turned the incident to advantage, and encouraged the nurse to share her experience with the rest of the team on the ward. As a result they came up with a solution - a sash nurses could wear saying "do not disturb, dispensing".
Several things emerge from this story, for me. First, the ward manager recognised how it was possible to start off with a story and end up with a new procedure, re-assuring those involved along the way. Second, the manager is prepared to allow that story to be retold digitally - we saw the manager's story at the conference - and show others how change can happen. Thirdly, I could remember it. When was the last time you could recite a Powerpoint slide without notes?
I interviewed Louise and Christine at the end of the conference, and as I was doing so it occurred to me that storytelling techniques could be really useful for the Innovation Exchange in their quest to get nonprofit service providers, commissioners and investors working together. That where I was thinking about collaboration thingies the other day. I've dropped that possible connection into the interview and will post the idea across to John Craig and colleagues. Hah! - there's another collaboration thingy: blogging as brokerage.

While Louise was emphasising the Welsh talent for storytelling I remembered that my friend Lloyd Davis had been doing something last year with a Surrey Healthcare blog. There are some great videos with professionals, patients, and anyone else Lloyd and the team could engage. I'll pop along to the Social Media Cafe he organises every Friday in Soho over the Coach and Horses. If you want to come too, sign up here. Should be good stories and conversation, and I'm sure action will follow. It's up to you to provide the ending.
Update: over at content to be different Paul Caplan describes how he does a Conversation audit to provide "an in-depth qualitative analysis of how a business, product, service or brand is being talked about on the Live Web". I guess that's the way you can find where your story ends up.

Now libraries are lending people

Librarians have been working hard to keep ahead in the Internet age, but it was only yesterday I learned that some will now help you borrow a person as well as a book or other information container. It turns out this is a smart way of re-introducing those ancient forms of knowledge transfer: conversation and storytelling.
My chum Kevin Harris passed on news of the Living Library seminar, on October 24. It's being held at the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, so it is serious stuff. The flyer says:

‘Living Library’ gives direct access to someone else’s experience, by allowing people to ‘borrow’ someone who is an expert in their field, has significant experience to share, or is passionate about a hobby.
‘Loans’ take the form of a conversation, and can last for half an hour, a morning or an afternoon. The Living Library has been developed in a  number of countries and this seminar has been organised to share experiences from Australia and Belgium, which clearly illustrate the contribution that library, museum and archive services can make to community cohesion

Among the questions to be explored are:

• What ways can be found to link the topic ‘borrowed’ with existing, more permanent, resources?
• Should Living Library be mainstreamed?
• Is the MLA (Museum, Libraries Archives Council) sector the appropriate place for such initiatives?

Ah, not on offer in your local library yet, then. A little Googling leads me to a report in the Australian Daily Telegraph about a Living Library pilot in Lismore, which illuminates the reference to community cohesion:

Another living book is Aboriginal artist Albert "Digby" Moran who took part because he wanted to break down the barriers between "white and black". As he is a storyteller through his art, the 59-year-old finds it easy to tell people about his life including what it was like to grow up as an Aboriginal in a white school.
"Everyone has a story to tell, people just need to take more time to listen," Mr Moran said.

One of my favourite blogs is by the Australian consultancy Anecdote, who apply storytelling techniques to knowledge management and much else. They also favour mud maps, as I reported here. My friend Larry Stillman is over here from Melbourne in December, so I hope to learn more of innovations down under. Apparently colleagues have been adapting some of our games for information and knowledge management.
Meanwhile I commend Kevin's closer-to-home blog on neighbourhoods and community, where he manages his own blend of policy analysis and chat. I particularly like the frog sheltering from climate change.

Dreams and nightmares for Demos consultants in Glasgow jargon wars

Unless following Scottish news on the BBC - Think Tank attacks city's rebirth - those of us south of the border are likely to have missed out on a wonderful jargon-laden spat between Demos and the civic leaders of Glasgow.  The BBC plays it fairly straight:

Poorer parts of Scotland's largest city have been left behind by major regeneration projects, according to a new report.
Think-tank Demos found that high-profile regeneration programmes were failing to improve many people's quality of life.
The survey also found that many UK city leaders were running out of ideas to "deepen the urban renaissance".
Glasgow City Council dismissed the report as "an insult to Glaswegians".
The report - The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the power of mass imagination - called for "mass-imagination" programmes to "capture the aspirations and creativity of citizens".
It warned that without this, regeneration efforts which rely on iconic architecture, leisure and tourism would increase social division and erode trust and civic pride.

However, you really need to read Tom Shields a few days later in the Sunday Herald - Can we really soup up our city with acronyms, jargon and gobbledygook? Probably not - to get the full flavour. He picks up on quotes from Melissa Mean, head of Demos' Self Build Cities Programme, who co-authored the report with Gerry Hassan and Charlie Tims.

How galling it was for Glasgow's civic leaders to spend perfectly good council taxpayers' money on a report about the future of the city and last week be told conclusions they do not want to hear.
Melissa Mean, of Demos, the think tank which carried out the survey, said: "In terms of new ideas to sustain the urban renaissance, our cities are running on empty. The cultural arms race of mainstream regeneration policy has become formulaic and is delivering diminishing returns for people and places. When every city has commissioned a celebrity architect and pedestrianised a cultural quarter, our cities are at risk of all becoming the same."
Ms Mean referred to "the growing imagination deficit holding back UK cities". She was not talking just about our dear green place. But the remarks were made in the context of a report called The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the power of mass imagination. (There may have been a wee hint in the title of what the city fathers could have expected.) Ms Mean claimed city officialdom had a blinkered vision constructed of buzz phrases such as "step change and transformation", "world-class city", "opportunity and choice", "one voice, one vision", which were alien to the population at large.
What Ms Mean said was: "Told in jargon-laden language by a spidery organogram of organisations in a web of strategy documents and conference speeches, the official future is a set of implicit assumptions which constrain a city's parameters for innovation and decision-making." Which is niftily jargonesque in its own right.
The Demos people's first language appears to be a new age, touchy-feely version of consultancy speak. In their report, Demos speak of "the importance of story in imagining the future". They asked Glaswegians to make a wish for Glasgow. Freepost wish cards were bound into a wishbook - "an indestructible totem that will live for centuries".
Demos recommended "assemblies of hope", networks of individuals who could get together to help shape the city's future and find space for everyone from "alchemists to imagineers".
The use of such language and fanciful concepts enabled Glasgow City Council spokespersons to rubbish the report. It was condemned as "nothing less than an insult to the many Glaswegians who gave up their time to take part. Bizarre would be a charitable way to describe some of the report's conclusions". The Demos terminology was dismissed as "meaningless nonsense".
What we have here are consultants and council officials divided by a common language.

Tom says that there is no shortage of jargon at the City Chambers, and goes on to quote some ripe examples.
I'm definitely not taking sides here. I've spent some happy times working and socialising in Glasgow, and enjoy the hospitality of Demos at their various report launches. They've always seemed pretty sane to me - and I'm certainly with the idea of encouraging people's imaginings about their city as a counterpoint to consultancy reports.
I don't know what the inside story is here. It all started well, as Charlie Tims ruefully reflects on the Demos site in dreams and nightmares:

Interpretations of press releases and quotes etc have left Glasgow City Council's nose slightly out of joint which is a shame, as they have supported a risky and innovative project from the outset - the first attempt to imagine the future of a city through stories and storytelling anywhere in the world.  The book highlights an imagination deficit in urban policy making that sits across all cities, not just Glasgow, and far from being an "insult to the people" who gave their time up to be a part of this project, the book is a tribute to them. On this last point the book concludes with a manifesto for "The Open City", the prime focus of which is light touch interventions that give people the tools and freedom to improve their own city. The book itself is quite a tome combining a policy narrative, with stories produced during the project. You will be able to download a copy of the report here.

Perhaps the city council leaders took personally some points that Melissa meant to be more general.
I wonder if the lesson here is that, if you start off with an approach that focusses on people's stories and imaginations, and aims to create a narrative from that, it is a mistake to switch back into the polemic of press release and SocietyGuardian.
Anne Johnstone makes this point in The Herald:

Where it turns nasty is in the way that, having invited negative comments, it then sweeps them up and recycles them into slingshots to pitch at Glasgow City Council. En route it makes some truly monstrous generalisations about the way "high profile regeneration programmes are failing to improve the day-to-day quality of life of people living in Britain's major cities". This, one suspects, is the canoe it is really paddling. The city fathers are accused of "running on empty in terms of ideas" and producing a "formulaic" version of regeneration. It is true that some parts of Glasgow are lagging behind the city's new prosperity. It is also true that in Glasgow, as in every other corner of Britain, there is less social mobility in 2007 than there was in 1957. But that has more to do with the nature of globalised capitalism than the council.
The report boasts of its "innovative public participation methodology" - no tedious consultation exercises here. This turns out to have included sending teams on to trains to "capture" ideas from weary commuters on the hoof. Groups were invited to participate in what were termed "Socratic" dialogues. A colleague who attended some of these reports that, far from the intelligent intellectual sparring exercise implied by this term, it quickly degenerated into a low-grade caricature in which an upbeat interpretation of the city's history was immediately shouted down by those on the unreconstructed doom-and-gloom side of the argument.
Some participants gave their all and some of these events were worthwhile per se, but as a piece of policy research, it is self-serving. It lambasts rightly the corporate-style mission statements adopted by councils such as Glasgow but merely replaces them with its own platitudes. Demos attacks the civic jargon of "step-changes" and "social inclusion", then proceeds to substitute its own arcane gobbledygook: "alchemy", "assemblies of hope", "disruptive spaces". In the final report, the voice of the people it puts such store by is drowned out by such think-tank claptrap. Rather than empowering the people of Glasgow, it becomes merely a platform for those gifted the task of interpreting this mass vox pop.

Anyway, do take a look for yourself at the links below. Apart from Charlie's brief item I couldn't find any more commentary from the Demos team. Maybe they are keeping their heads down.  I would, of course, welcome comments here on the project or the more general challenges of taking a new approach to regeneration.
Glasgow 2020 - project site including project overview,  stories,  events image gallery,  del.icio.us bookmarks,
The Dreaming City - download of the report
Glasgow2020 video -  stories from hairdressers
Running on empty - Melissa Mean in the Guardian
'Formulaic' regeneration projects failing to improve quality of city life, argues Demos - press release
Think-tank attacks city's rebirth - BBC news online
Row breaks out over think tank’s 2020 vision of Glasgow - Glasgow Herald
A dear green place divided by the benefits of regeneration - The Scotsman article
Glasgow 2020: tale of seven cities - Glasgow Herald article
Glasgow is not short of 'mass imagination' - letter in The Herald
When dreams cross over into the real of fantasy - Glasgow Herald article
Can we really soup up our city with acronyms, jargon and gobbledygook? Probably not - Sunday Herald article
dreams and nightmares - blog item by report co-author Charlie Tims

Technorati Tags: engagement, Demos, Glasgow, regeneration, storytelling

Asking the wrong questions about collaboration

The RSA invited me to write a conversation-starter about collaboration for their Fellow2Fellow feature  as you can see here, and below. It's part of their programme to promote more discussions on key social topics online and face-to-face. It's all making this 250-year-old think tank really buzz.
Anyway, I duly wrote something  ... then as soon as I saw it realised I had asked the wrong questions. This thought was prompted by reading a piece at the ever-excellent Anecdote. Shawn recounts how a team that had lost all its old staff plans to invite them back to a working re-union for a question and storytelling session. He then goes on to give some general tips about good questions to ask, including this:

One of the things we said is, “use 'when' and 'where' questions and avoid 'how' and 'what' questions.” Questions like “When have you been inspired at work?” tend to elicit stories. While questions like, “What do you think about your work?” tends to elicit abstract opinions.

Oh dear, my RSA piece is full of woolly how and why questions. Maybe I should have asked: when did you have really good (or bad) experiences of collaboration  ... and then maybe followed up with the why you think that was the case.
The RSA forum is closed to non-members, but any reflections welcome in comments below.
My thoughts: collaborations have worked well for me with people I know and trust ... with new people when there's been a chance to meet face-to-face ... or when I've been following their blog for some time. Collaborations haven't worked when it's been unclear what we are trying to achieve (or people have different undeclared aims), or what are the benefits above doing things separately.
Here's the piece on the RSA site:

The RSA Coffeehouse Challenge is a model for making things happen by getting people talking, finding some shared interests, and then thinking what to do. Engage, collaborate, act. The think tank Demos proposes in The Collaborative State that working together can transform public services. In their book Wikinomics Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams argue that mass collaboration - made possible on the Internet - will transform the way that we do business. Wikipedia demonstrates how thousands of people can work together on complex topics to develop a knowledge resource ... and the RSA is trying the same approach with its own programme wiki.
As a consultant working on collaboration and engagement programmes, online and face-to-face, I would like to explore with other Fellows their experience of what it takes to make collaboration work.
It is people, not organisations, that collaborate - so their personalities and preferences are hugely important.
How do we better understand that, online as well as off?
Organisations create the cultures which may or may not encourage sharing.
Will blogs and other social media really help change that, when senior managers are often reluctant to use new tools?
Conversations and stories work better than bullet points to get people talking.
So why are many meeting rooms still dominated by immovable Board tables, and conferences by Powerpoint?
Effective collaboration requires trust, relationships and understanding that take time to develop.
Why are so many online systems still developed on the basis of "build it and they will come and work together" ... ending up with empty Forums and a lot of money wasted?
Collaboration isn't easy - but I believe that new media is starting to make a big difference, not just in providing new tools, but new ways of thinking. The collaborative development of free and open source software inspires us to explore how that approach can work elsewhere.
Instead of thinking enviously "I wish I had done that" we may be able to respond more creatively with "that's something I don't have to do, now I can build on it".

Previously: 250-year-old think tank ripe for relaunch

Technorati Tags: collaboration, storytelling

Apprentice joiners turn story-tellers to tackle skills shortages

The power of  story telling is a theme that comes up a lot in engagement, marketing, knowledge management ... but I didn't expect it to emerge as a way of tackling skills shortages in the construction industry. My mistake.
The occasion was a roundtable discussion organised by the Edge Foundation before their annual awards ceremony. The foundation is dedicated to raising the status of vocational learning, which means helping young people develop practical skills through apprenticeships or other means. Government and the education industry is more inclined towards university degrees.
The roundtable I was facilitating was discussing how to deal with the predicted problem that 348,000 more employees will be needed in the construction industry by 2010. Will the 87,000 new recruits each year be home grown, or come from Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria for example?
Participants from the Foundation, and firms that had already won regional awards, could tell plenty of stories that brought reality to the figures. Young people didn't see engineering and construction as sexy, cool places to work and learn on the job. Graduates coming into the industries often lacked practical skills.
Any new mechanisms Government and colleges put in place to address this wouldn't work if young people and their parents weren't convinced. So who could solve that problem? At that stage I tried a little pro-active facilitation, and suggested that maybe those young people already in the industry might have something to contribute. They will be the experts on what appeals and what doesn't to other young people.
At this point Scott Sharkey really lit up. Scott had earlier explained that he had come up via "the gladiatorial route" from joiner to CEO of the Edinburgh-based  firm bearing his name. When Margaret Thatcher urged everyone to go self-employed, and companies shed their apprenticeship schemes, Scott went the other way and set up the Sharkey Academy, where more than 40 young people learn the trade and gain qualifications.
As you can hear in the interview, Scott's plans for expansion have been cramped by recruitmernt problems - and he thinks the industry is facing a disaster unless something can be done. After our discussion he's going to ask his apprentices what they think.

Never mind us clever dicks trying to think of it - the reality is that the young guys and gals have got the soluition. I'm  going to go back, get all the solutions from them and implement it. They can tell the stories to the wider audience, and young people, and tell them it is a sexy industry, a place to be ... and they can replicate what I have done from young apprentice joiner to company CEO.

At which point I could suggest workshops to think it through, blogs to tell the stories ... but somehow I think that Scott and his colleagues will work out some new directions pretty quickly. If they need a wider audience, the Edge is shortly launching a social networking site called The Horses Mouth. It will offer peer mentoring, features, articles, reports and reference materials. Good stories too, I hope.

Business isn't doing too well with tech either

It's not just nonprofits who are struggling with technology - as I was writing yesterday. The South West of England Regional Development Agency has just published research that shows businesses aren't doing too well either:

It appears on the surface that the region is embracing the digital age. Sixty five per cent of the region's companies use ICT - fifty seven per cent with a broadband internet connection. However, the new research highlights that although the region's businesses are adopting new technologies they are not adapting their practices to get the greatest benefit from it. Business benefits of ICT can be seen in increased efficiency, reduced costs and simplified process for companies. However, most organisations in South West England have no clear direction of how to develop their practices to optimise these resources. A staggering eighty nine per cent of companies have no strategic overview of how to use and develop their ICT. And this is matched by eighty six per cent of companies who have no dedicated ICT budget.

The Agency uses the findings to promote its ConnectingSW programme to encourage small and medium-sized businesses to realise the benefits of using broadband and ICT. In particular the programme is promoting business growth through better use of ICT; skills and e-learning; flexible working and E-government.
Via xPRESS Digest:

Storytelling explains tech tools to nonprofits

The ICT Foresight blog is looking at ways to help nonprofits understand the possible benefits of new technologies, which in my experience can be quite tough. In A new way of campaigning - a story Megan Griffith highlights an article by Tom Steinberg in which Tom shows how a typical, medium sized charity could move from its current way of doing business to something more innovative. Tom writes:

Currently the role of the internet for most established charities falls pretty neatly into three activities:
* Providing a donations box through which money can be given
* Providing information on a charity’s activities
* Building and maintaining as large as possible an email list to encourage supporters to use 1 and 2
These activities are not to be scorned: they’re tried and tested and in cases such as the 2005 Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina appeals have been enormously effective.
However, many charities are starting to feel that there must be more that can be done to use the internet in more effective and powerful ways. Meanwhile some members of the public are starting to feel more and more like cattle being ever more efficiently farmed for money by increasingly impersonal, professionalised and automated charity engines.
Outside the voluntary sector use of the network is heading in a different direction. Instead of people feeling increasingly like tiny cogs in big machines, personalisation is the order of the day, making each person’s experience of the internet more tailored to their interests and needs.

Tom then goes on to explain how new tools - some provided by his own charity mySociety - could make more impact on several fronts for a charity launching a policy campaign:

• Signing up online to meet locally for a meeting
• Collaborating online
• Peer review by voting online
• Recruiting fund-raisers
• Mobilising volunteers

The ideas are very practical, and the storytelling format makes it really easy to show how new tools would bring benefits. The article links back to the blog for comments.... which is another neat demonstration in itself

Storytelling proves more engaging than a survey

Sometimes challenging the brief provided by a client pays off for all concerned - and so it proved yesterday when Drew Mackie and I were invited back to Pendle for a conference on community cohesion.
The event featuring work we had done aiming to help different communities - white, Asian, rural, urban, young, old - understand each other better following riots in north west England a few years ago.
The brief put out to tender by Pendle council last year was fairly conventional - carry out a study of local attitudes that could be used as a baseline to see how far new programmes to promote cohesion increased neighbourliness and trust.
We've never been ones for clipboards on the doorstep, and prefer doing projects that lead to action and not just another report on the shelf... so we suggested something entirely different. As I've written before, we proposed that we run workshops at which residents invented fictional characters and told their life stories, so we could analyse the issues that surfaced. To our surprise, we got the job - and pressed ahead with a storytelling kit developed by Drew that we could use and also hand on to local groups to use. It's the sort of thing that could fall flat, lead to pieces in the paper about wasting money on tale-spinning focus groups, or at best a polite thank you for the report but no follow-through.
In fact it all turned out really well, thanks to the enthusiasm of those taking part, support of the council and Pendle Partnership and some excellent local voluntary groups like the multi-faith organisation Building Bridges. You can download our report here (4M pdf).
Yesterday Pendle council proudly invited groups from around East Lancashire to hear what had been going on. We did a presentation along with others, but the most interesting parts were the reports from groups who had developed stories using the kit - without our help - and the discussion among participants of what other techniques were working well. Roy Prenton, editor of the Nelson Leader, talked about the "myth busting" cartoon strip they were now running as a result of our work, and there plenty more new ideas bubbling up around the tables.

I think the whole exercise was successful because of two things: first that there were some individuals and organisations in Pendle ready to try something different and carry it through. Second, the technique that we used was designed to stimulate the sort of stories and conversations that are part of people's day-to-day lives.

Drew and colleagues are now using similar storytelling techniques in Blackburn and Bolton. Clearly it's something that appeals to Lancashire culture.
Programmes for social inclusion, community cohesion, civil renewal and regeneration operate at two levels: that of the official policies, targets and consultancy speak; and that of the people living in communities being studied, renewed and evaluated. The easy option for public bodies is to stay in the comfortable setting of the first levels - but more is likely to happen if they support ways of doing things that are part of the second.
You can hear first hand what the council thought of it in this Quicktime movie from Sarah Gaskill (right), our main contact during the work. I'm editing more videos to post in a day or so.
Previously published at Partnerships Online
Update: more movies

Brian Astin, Pendle council corporate strategy and partnership manager, says that storytelling provides a useful complement to harder edged policy and legislation. Both carrot and stick are needed.
Rauf Bashir, from Building Bridges, explains how they used the storytelling approach in primary schools.
Marcia Allass, developing the Pendlelife portal, explains how the Internet can help with community cohesion.

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation, storytelling