The Stories We Tell: Understanding and Creating Organisational Pasts, Presents & Futures (With David Crowe) - Lean Agile London 24 TalkInTen

Our first conference of the season is the fantastic Lean Agile London 2024!

As we round off our TalksInTen from Lean Agile London 2024, we have a special episode featuring David Crowe, an expert in organisational storytelling with a rich agile background. Join us as David delves into the art and science of narratives and stories within organisations, drawing on Boje’s model to enhance our understanding of change and transformation.

David on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/3XnlFXk 

Here is the synopsis of David's Talk:

Stories and narratives are essential to sensemaking about the pasts, the presents, and the futures of organisations. Drawing on Boje’s model of the dynamics of narrative and story sensemaking, I show how we can talk about time and space in organisations, the role of scale, and the incorporation of diverse and opposing perspectives in how we understand and shape change.

At the end of the session, you'll be able to:

• Distinguish between narratives and stories.
• Describe different forms of narrative and story, and how they can be used when storying to retrospectively to understand pasts, prospectively to understand possible futures, and in the now to understand emergence in the present.
• Define and identify the roles of dialogisms and dialectics in permitting, exploring, and transcending diverse perspectives.

Apply these ways of storytelling to the challenges we face in facilitating change.

Boje's model - https://bit.ly/4cnbuWU

Episode Highlights:

• Narratives vs. Stories: Understand the critical differences between narratives and stories, and how each can be used to shape organisational change.
• Dynamic Sensemaking: Learn about Boje’s model and how it helps in discussing time, space, and scale in organisations.
• Practical Applications: Gain insights into applying these storytelling techniques to real-world challenges in facilitating change.

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!

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Aha Slides - https://bit.ly/3UXJO42

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Transcript

0:00

Each year the Product Agility Podcast goes on tour. We get to go to some of the best conferences and interview some of the most influential speakers out there, and this year is no different. We kick off our Talks in 10 initiative for 2024 by visiting Lean Agile London. Leonardo. London is a fantastic community event which has a lot of soul and a lot of energy to it. They've also attracted some of the best speakers I've seen on a line up for a long time. Over the next few days we are going to be bringing you as many of these speakers Talks in 10 as we possibly can do. Each of his episodes will be recorded on the ground in the moment, so you may hear some background noise, I hope, but that adds to the ambience and makes you feel like you're there with us. This episode of the Product Agility Podcast is sponsored by our Hard Slides, your solution for more engaging and productive team meetings. Transform your teams learning experience with our Hard Slides AI powered tools designed to quickly generate quizzes and interactive content. Boost engagement and efficiency in one go. Well, what more can you ask for? Visit ahaslides.com and use the exclusive discount code Prod Agility 2024 to get 50% off of all yearly plans. Now shall we get on to our talk in 10? Hello, welcome to the Prod Agility podcast. I'm Ben Maynard and I am a liar because I said that we were done with the talks in 10 and that simply isn't true. Because I was looking through my diary and was surprised to find that I'd forgotten about a couple of people. Actually. Nothing personal, I just have really piss poor diary management. And so we are joined by someone that I knew before I even embarked upon a relationship with Lee Nagile London. And his name is David Crowe and David is someone who is a. What's the word I'm looking for is an authority on many things, incredibly intelligent, very charming and generally quite a nice chap. And he's talk was at the same time as my talk, so I didn't get to see it. So David, thank you very much for giving up some of your time to come and do this talk in 10 with us. No problem at all. It's good to be here and it's always good to see you. Ben. Ah, sweetheart, right. It'll be, it'll be nice to you. Now that's always going to be nice. Now your talk, let me make sure I get this right. Was that the stories we tell, understanding and creating organizational pasts, presents and presents and futures, which is quite an intriguing talk. I say David, talk title even. David, if you may, could you please give our listeners a little overview of what your talk was about, please? Yeah. So I'm interested in narratives in organisations. That's what I'm doing my PhD on. And so I'm interested in how people use those narratives in order to tell stories in organisations. People have heard of different ways of doing this. So there's Vike, who in the 1970s was writing about a doomed firefighting team who could not make sense of their context and needed to use narratives in order to understand that. And because the narrative wasn't effectively communicated by their leadership, people ended up dying. It was quite the tragedy. Sense making has been picked up by other people as a key thing. I mean, most notably probably David Snowden, who is kind of known for that. But there are other theories out there, and one of the ones that I find quite compelling is David Bogey. Who has been writing about storytelling within organisations since about the 1970s in various forms, but in 2008 wrote a book called Storytelling Organisations in which he identifies ways in which organisations are telling stories in order to make sense of pasts, presents and futures. And the reason they're not singular terms, IE there is an A the past, there is an A the present, there is an A future. It's because of course the stories that are being told are all going to be different depending on the perspective that people are telling them from. And he also divides that into narratives and stories. And he says that although people think of those as being synonyms, they're actually more like homonyms. They sort of sound like they're the same, but actually there should be some distinguishing between them. Not everybody agrees on this, but I think it's a useful distinction to make, right? So for him, narratives are things that are fixed, they're sort of well understood, they're coherent, and they normally consist of a single voice which has a single logic to it and which has a single centre of control around it. So narratives are generally controlling and the examples that we would give of this would be in the past mainly. And there's two major types of story here. There's the BME story or the beginning, middle, end story. You know that one, if you've watched Star Wars or Star Trek or any of those other type of shows, it's a classic narrative which has a beginning, it has a middle, it has an end, and, and it's quite satisfying. And of course, what an organization's doing with that is it's telling its story. This is who we are as an organization. This is where we came from. And these are the bits about our history that we will talk about, right? So there is this element of not merely controlling how people talk about it, but controlling what people talk about. And the other bit that sort of looks retrospectively at the organization is the concept of a terse fragment. Now, a terse fragment is when somebody goes, I don't know, let's say you're working for a shoe company, let's call them Nike for one of a better name. And you say to somebody else, well, we don't want another sweatshop incident, OK. And what you haven't done there is told a whole narrative. And yet, if that person's sort of in the same group as you, they will understand exactly what that message means. Like, let's not repeat something in the past. For those of you who do like Star Trek, I refer to Darmak and Jalad Tanaka when I talk about this. It encapsulates the entire fragment in a single story. The other time when we will tend to use narratives is when we're looking to the future, and Boji calls these anti narratives anti ANTE. So that has a dual meaning. It's both before, as in anti, but it's also placing a bet on what the future is going to look like. So you've got a double meaning of anti, not anti. And the point of a narrative is that you're being prospective and you're saying this is something that is going to be important to the organization at some point in the future. So for example, and I don't want to make assumptions about the tech industry, but I think a lot of people are having conversations that go, oh, let's put AI in it at the moment, however appropriate that may or may not be. So those are anti narratives, Yeah, we need AI in this because it's going to appeal to our market. How can we work that into it? And I think we know from looking at the market at the moment that some of those anti narratives are pretty far out there bets that are being pledged by people. So that that narratives. So how like in your talk, though, were you giving people tips and guidance on how to best employ this in their, in their agile context? So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with a narrative, right? However, they are quite controlling in the sense that they're trying to be the centrifugal, which is to say they're sort of bringing them into the centre of the circle. I think I actually mean centripetal, not centrifugal. But you know, let's run with this. That's fine. Central Peter, towards the middle, right? So what you then have is something that is quite controlling. Now in some ways that's useful, right? Classic example here. We are going to use Scrum to run our teams. That means they're four. Our pattern is going to be we're going to follow a set pattern. You know this is a an anti narrative. And we're also using terse fragments. Oh, we'll cover that in the retrospective, right? There's, there's no whole narrative there, but it enables communication within the team. The problem with narratives is because they are single voice, single logic, single centre. It's very much project oriented, right? It's this entire one person has said that this is how it's going to be, and this is how we're going to deliver it. So narratives are useful, but as agile practitioners, we need to be aware that they can actually be problematic. Yeah. But a phrase that springs to mind is controlling the narrative. Absolutely. That's exactly what people are trying to do. It's not just controlling the narrative in the sense that this is how we tell the story. It's also sort of saying we don't mention that part of the story. Yeah, yeah. So we're saying that we are going to do. I don't know. Let's take two examples here. We will always have user researchers separate from the team because we where I used to work fast, what worked and it will work here. And no one can publicly dissent to that because that is narrative and we can't talk around it. Nothing would be the classic, we're going to use Scrum and it's going to go like this. Everyone, we're thinking of this stuff, but that's going to be very private dissent because a narrative is being controlled around a a single point of control. Yeah. And, and the thing about those narratives is they can give rise to what I call pseudo dialogue. So dialogue's what we're doing right now, right? There's a bit of give and take. We're talking about things. It's very human interaction. Pseudo dialogue is when it sounds like dialogue, but when you sort of drill down, it's one voice speaking. So I don't know if you've had that experience of being in a management meeting like the town hall meeting. And a manager makes a statement or the company is doing incredibly well, and then somebody asks a question and a different manager answers, but it's effectively the same answer, right? There's no variation. They've practised what they're saying. This pseudo dialogue happens all the time in organisations where people think that it's interactive and that it's a dialogue, but it's actually it's just one person speaking or it's a bunch of people doing improv around what they think the hippo in the room wants to say, right? You know, it's, it's a little bit of, oh, we think Fred will like this. So of course this sets us up with a problem as agilists. Controlling the narrative is sort of not really what we do, right? We are more interested in stories and stories are incomplete. Stories have lots of voices so that they're polyvocal. They have many centres to them. There's lots of people who have got an interest in them and they're also polylogical. So you do get input from developers, you get input from testers, you get input from UX designers, etcetera, etcetera. All of this is going on within a story and stories don't have this beginning, middle end structure. There's no defined meaning to them. They're not coherent. They're not even finished right. Like they're, they're just a thing that people are going to then play with to see if it's got next. Will it become a narrative? And there are three sorts of stories that we can talk about simultaneities. This is a little bit difficult to explain, so I'm going to talk about a play. There's a play called Tamara in Los Angeles. I think it's the longest running play if, assuming it's still running in Los Angeles and it is based on 12 characters and it's in a physical house which has 12 rooms in it, and you as an observer choose which rooms you go to at which stage during the play. So you could be following a particular character to another room, you could just stay in one room. You could just be a bit more random than that. Now of course, what that means is you've got no way of knowing the whole story, because it's happening simultaneously in all the rooms the entire time. And with that number of characters, there's some ridiculously high number, I want to say something like 127 million possible combinations that you could watch, if not play, right. That's just 12 rooms and 12 characters. How many employees do you have in your company and how many meetings are they having a day? So how many stories are emerging from that in a way which is essentially uncontrollable by management? So that's the same alternating. There's the embodied things. You know, this is sort of related to that tacit knowledge side of things. It's the entire, I'm sure you've done this as an agonist where you've gone into a meeting and about halfway through you recognise the patterns of some of the dysfunctions that are happening there and you're like, oh, OK, I'm going to need to do intervention A or intervention B. Or perhaps I will ask powerful question X at some point during this to see what the reply is. That's very embodied. I talk about when I worked on ambulances and you sort of got the feeling of like you would see somebody and know what was wrong with them, despite the fact that you didn't have any of the data yet, you'd just seen the pattern before, so. And then finally, there's the emotive ethical. If you've ever watched daytime TV then you'll be familiar with little Sheila the donkey who has to walk 10,000 miles every day just to get a bucket of water. And if you give just £5 a month, you can save Sheila. That's an emotive ethical story, right? Because Sheila's clearly not a real character. I mean, she's a donkey for starters, but it's also made to get you to make an ethical decision based on a moment of emotionality. And this happens in organisations as well, right? It's an opportunity for a company to do some good. So those little stories are where we do all our work as agilists in my book. We are listening to those simultaneous stories. We're getting a gut feel with the teams about what's going on, and in order to do that we need to listen to tensions, what we might call in fancy language dialectics, for example. Are there changes happening in the team which aren't being reflected in the conversation? Is there a difference between who they were and who they are and they're trying to match the two up? I mean, the example there would be McDonald's, of course. I'll say it, of course. But you know, Ronald McDonald lost quite a lot of weight in 2004 just after Super Size Me came out. And yet you've got an organization that's trying to present it as the same Ronald McDonald, right? So you've got an identity there where you've got sameness. It's still Ronald McDonald, but there's also clearly different. He has become a children's fitness coach in the last year. Pretty impressive. That's impressive. I suppose it's a big turn around. Big turn, considering that Super size me. Turns out he was an alcoholic, wasn't he? Yeah, absolutely. He, in fact, he just died. Yeah, he just died. Yeah. Rest his soul. They're they're not speaking I'll ever dead. But yeah, it turned out that super size me. Yeah, it wasn't. No one could recreate the same results as he had because he was he was boozing at the same time. But a well defined narrative and a counter narrative, of course, from McDonald's. I mean, there's a whole bunch of yeah, interesting. And the other thing that we can listen for is where we have dialogisms, which is literally are we hearing multiple voices in our conversations or are we stuck with pseudo dialogue? So those different voices might be, have we got style happening as well as voice as well as text? So when you're giving a presentation, is what you're hearing matching up with what you're seeing and the way the person's acting? Those are important combinations. Or if we're thinking about agile teams, is there a difference in cadences between teams or even between team members? Are they expecting different things that difference in cadence and locale can really effectiveness. Oh, mate, do you know what? I find this really interesting. And I I'm also enabled with running at a time and it's really, I was worried we would yeah. And I just I what I've been thinking if we had a great episode, actually one of our best performing episodes ever by Tara Wellington and Tara was talking about storytelling as a product manager. And now I'm not going to make any promises. Tara is coming back on. We are just being rubbish. We're playing LinkedIn ping pong at the moment. But what I'm wondering is, David, you do have a fancy listen to that episode and you think and you piqued your interest. I'm wondering if maybe we could explore the opportunity to do something a bit more in depth for storytelling from from the some of the product angle as well, because I think that. You know, one of the great things I learnt from Valedine Vatica Duck, you know, was a great product vision. They shouldn't shouldn't mean that everyone has to tell the same story. Everyone should be able to articulate what it means to them from their perspective. But you're still working towards the same thing because actually it's created so much emotional resonance with them. They see how they're in their own words. And with a, with a product vision or organizational vision, it doesn't matter if you're all explaining it in different ways, as long as it's all heading towards the same place. And I think that's a really. And I would love to explore some of that with you. But we are, we are over time. David, I'm sorry, my friend, but yeah, thank you so much for coming on. And let's, let's obviously we'll stay in touch and we can explore some of our opportunities. I'm wondering if people want to find out more about this or anything else from you. They can check you out on LinkedIn. Absolutely. Check me out on LinkedIn. Drop me a message with the same particular and I believe the the videos are going to be up for the talk soon. So yes, fingers crossed. So yeah, but what we'll do is we'll put Davids LinkedIn link into the description. Also in the description is a link to Boje sense making registries of narrative and stories. So you can get to see a graphic for some what David explained and then when the videos are released, we will be making our listeners and followers on LinkedIn aware of this. So make sure you do follow us on LinkedIn so you can be made aware when the videos from Lee Nigel London are released. So you can see David's talk. You can see some other great people's talks as well, such as Shelby and Henriette as as Elaine Titan Negro Cohera, who have better one of our best performing episodes raters. Well, if you really wanted to see one, you could even watch mine, but, you know, well, I need to watch that 'cause I didn't get there. You go. Yeah, I need to watch yours. We're both winning, David. Thank you very much, my friend. And thank you, everyone for listening. Who knows, there may be at least one more talk in 10 for me. Now to London popping up. Well, maybe not. I'm not going to make any promises either way. But be sure, stay tuned, because we're back with more episodes. Of this quality at least very soon. So thank you very much for listening. And David, thank you for coming on. Thanks, Ben. Have a great day.