The Secret Language of Leadership
Stephen Denning
Reinforce with reasons
The Secret Language of Leadership
Reinforce with reasons
1. First, give the beast what it needs
2. Tell The Story of “How It Will Work”
3. Tell The Story of “Why It Works”
4.Use an image where one is available
5. Support the Stories with “Gee whiz! Facts”
6. Turn Any abstract Argument Into a Story
7. Communicate the argument through someone’s eyes:
8. Support arguments with more springboard stories,
9. Turn arguments into “common memory” stories
Conclusion
Sidebar #1: The Basics: What Is a Story?
Sidebar #2: Why convert the reason into a story?
Table: Utility of the various communication devices
In making the case for sustained change, it is necessary to elicit desire for a different future. But desire by itself is not sufficient. Desire by itself is fickle. Desire may wane, evaporate, lapse unless it is bolstered, supported and reinforced by reasons – good, strong, compelling reasons why the change idea makes sense and should be sustained. In the absence of such reasons, the listeners may awake from the dream of a different future, come back to their senses, back to mundane reality and decide – not to change.
Thus I am not abolishing reason from the persuasion game: instead, we are putting it in a different position in the flow. It comes at the end, rather than as the Western intellectual tradition suggests, at the beginning.
How does one go about reinforcing the idea with reason?
1. First, give the beast what it needs
In the late 1990s, when I was program director for knowledge management at the World Bank, I would attend meetings to discuss some issue concerning implementation of the the program, and at some point I would often be asked, “Where are your metrics?” I would generally be ready for this request and be able to give the questioner a document full of statistics about various aspects of the implementation of the knowledge sharing program. What was striking to was that there was generally little discussion of those statistics. It was as if I was being asked some kind of macho request, “Say, fella, you got metrics?” and I would reply, “Sure thing, fella, I got metrics,” and then the substantive discussion could be proceed. The availability of relevant metrics was a kind of entry card to a serious discussion.
For a time, I thought that this might be a peculiarity of the World Bank culture. Around 1999, however, I attended a meeting that showed me that the World Bank wasn’t peculiar at all. It was a meeting with other large organizations in the Washington DC area and each organization shared its experience with assembling metrics of knowledge management programs. It had the usual Washington DC public sector organizations as well as outfits like the Marriott group and the Mitre Corporation. We listened a number of presentations of different approaches to measuring the status and progress of knowledge management programs, some of which were truly impressive in their scope and sophistication. Then towards the end of the session, somebody asked the fateful question: in any organization, had these sophisticated metrics had ever been effective in, say, winning a battle over budgets in a time of crisis? The universal answer from all participants was: no. In a time of crisis, the metrics were there as “background music” to the discussion, but decisions were never based directly on them. In the time of crisis, when the question was usually which of several valuable programs were going to be cut and by how much, the decisions were based on a gut feeling of what was important for the organization at that time. One reason for this was that every competing program had a set of statistics showing why it was highly valuable to the organization. Hence the statistics didn’t provide any clear guidance as to what to do. It would always come down to what made sense, what felt right, what did the statistics mean, which in turn boils down to: into what story do the statistics fit?
So giving organizations doesn’t win you the battle, but it is an important entry card into the discussion. What form does the entry card take? It depends on the particular organization. Each organization has its own preferences and fetishes and, once established, these preferences are hard to change. In any kind of debate or discussion, the culture will expect certain kinds of material to be presented in certain ways. And if it doesn’t get them, the organization may go into a spasm.
In some organizations, it will be a knee-jerk call for the ROI – the rate of return on investment. In other cultures, it will be insistence a detailed implementation schedule, with costs for every step spelled out in microscopic detail. In other organizations, the discussion cannot proceed in the absence of a PERT chart.[1] In other firms, the requirement will be the calculation of net present value, based on multiple interest rate predictions.
Often these expectations will be absurd in the presumed ability to predict and quantify the future. But whatever the requirement of the particular organization, it doesn’t make sense to argue, or to point out that it doesn’t make sense. Meet the expectation! Give them their ROI, their PERT chart, their NPV, whether it makes sense or not. Give the beast what it needs.
But don’t waste precious presentation time dwelling on such statistics, or giving lengthy PowerPoint presentations explaining them. Make sure that the metrics are available, for instance in handouts, and make sure that the audience knows that they are available. Instead, you want to get on to talking about reasons that will really resonate with your audience, that will show them what makes sense, particularly how it works and why it works.
2. Tell The Story of “How It Works”
Example #1: How the universe was formed
Here’s an example of an explanatory story from the physical sciences.
“The universe started out as cold and essentially infinite in spatial extent. Then an instability kicked in, driving every point in the universe to rush rapidly away from every other. This caused space to become increasingly curved and resulted in a dramatic increase of temperature and energy density. After some time, a millimiter-sized three-dimensional region within this vast expanse created a superhot and dense patch. The expansion of this patch can account for the whole of the universe with which we are now familiar.”[2]
Although there is no human actor on the scene, we have a clear sequence of events linked together by a causal connection, in other words, a story. In this instance, we are looking at a story set in the past. In many presentations aimed at persuading people to change, the story of how it works will be set in the future.
Example #2: How knowledge sharing will function
I am sometimes asked whether it is plausible that a big, change-resistant organization like the World Bank fell over backwards, simply l because I told the 29-word Zambia story. The answer is, of course, that it didn’t.
As I explained in my book, The Springboard [3], the Zambia story was the centerpiece of my initial presentations, and that began to elicit for a different future, but it also contained elements to catch people’s attention, such as the problems we were having in managing information and knowledge, and it also sketched the story of how knowledge sharing might work in future.
After telling the Zambia story, I would say:
And what will knowledge sharing look like in the World Bank. What would the professional desktop of the future look like? It would have just-in-time and just-enough material, available within reach, everything one needs to get the job done.
Thus when it comes to best practice — our teams will want, not every best practice under the sun, but just the lessons of experience that are relevant to the particular work they are doing. Similarly with the bibliography: our teams will want not the whole Library of Congress, just the references and citations that are relevant to the particular project. With policies and guidelines, our teams don’t need the whole massive operational manual and all the other policy guidelines that have accumulated over decades — just the sections that are relevant to the job under way. Again, with country information, our teams don’t want everything we know about the countries, just the people and correspondence that lead up to the work now ongoing — in effect, the story so far. Also, they don’t want all the previous reports — just the reports that had been done in the same field as the task at hand. And in signaling who are the experts, the team wants to know, not who are the gurus generally, but rather who can answer questions on key issues relevant to the particular area of work. Equally, in analytical tools, the team wants spreadsheets showing previous economic, financial and technical analyses of earlier work in the same area, not everything that has been done.
These are the elements that a task team needs to get its work completed. These are the materials that task teams now spend weeks endeavoring to assemble, and chasing around the organization to find in paper format, often with limited success, until time runs out and they have to get on with the job without always having the proper inputs.
But there’s more. If we can get this far, and assemble all these elements for our own task teams, why stop there? Why not provide the same materials for our clients, who need exactly the same information and know-how for their own purposes. If we are able to assemble it for ourselves, why not share it with them? In this way, the clients can undertake more of the preparation effort — something devoutly wished by both our organization and our clients — and we can thus confine ourselves to guidance, as and when needed. In the past, this would have been technically difficult and exorbitantly expensive. Now the plunging costs of computing and the advent of the Web mean that the constraints are no longer technical or economic. It is a question of imagination and management and willpower to make it happen.
And there’s no need to confine the service to current clients. Thus suppose our professional staff share their know-how and expertise with each other and with their clients and partners and stakeholders around the world, by way of the World Wide Web. In the process, the broader audience that has no access to our expertise will suddenly be able to draw on our know-how in the same way as those immediately involved in financial transactions. In this way, the organization can be useful not merely to our current financial partners, but to anyone in the entire world who is interested in economic development. Thus the problem of coping with a vastly expanded array of clients and partners and stakeholders can be solved. As the material is assembled electronically for staff, the relevant portions can be made available for external clients at the same time.
If we can put all these elements in place, a whole group of stakeholders around the world who currently lack access to the intellectual resources of the organization will suddenly be in the picture. It will enable a different relationship with a wider group of clients and partners and stakeholders around the world. It adds up to a new organizational strategy.
The story of “how it will work” helps stimulate the imagination of the listener to dream what knowledge sharing could deliver. It has several elements:
- It is a story set in the future, although it is not clear precisely when or where.
- Its protagonists are people the audience can easily identify with: in this case, initially a typical World Bank staff member, and then a typical client of the World Bank.
- It is told evocatively, without much detail, rather than with a lot of specifics and contextual detail.
- It is positive in tone, looking optimistically to the success of the change idea under discussion.
- Its effectiveness is dependent in part on the prior springboard story, the Zambia story, that started the audience to imagine a different world.
characteristics of the story of how it works
The story of “how it will work” helps stimulate the imagination of the listener to dream what knowledge sharing could deliver. It has several elements:
- It is a story set in the future, although it is not clear precisely when or where.
- Its protagonists are people the audience can easily identify with: in this case, initially a typical World Bank staff member, and then a typical client of the World Bank.
- It is told evocatively, without much detail, rather than with a lot of specifics and contextual detail.
- It is positive in tone, looking optimistically to the success of the change idea under discussion.
- Its effectiveness is dependent in part on the prior springboard story, the Zambia story, that started the audience to imagine a different world.
Another Example: Business Models
A business model is a story that explains how an organization will operate. It explains “the theory of the business”. It’s a story set in the present or near future. The narrative is tied to numbers as the elements in the business model are quantified. The business model answers questions like: who is the customer? And what does the customer value? How do we make money in this business? What is the underlying economic logic that shows how we can deliver value to customers at an appropriate cost? Its validity depends both on its narrative logic – does the story hang together? – and its quantitative dimension – do the numbers add up?[4]
Caveat: Don’t over-rely on future stories
The story of how it will work are in essence future stories – stories telling how the future will unfold. The advantage is that the scope of future narratives is only limited by the what the imagination can dream up. The disadvantage is that because the future is inherently unpredictable, future stories are inherently hard to believe. Listeners suspect instinctively that the future is unlikely to turn out this way. So one one shouldn’t put all one’s eggs in this basket.[5]
3. Tell The Story of “Why It Works”
The story of “how it works” and the story of “why it works” are, not surprisingly, related. The big difference between them is that the story of how it works tends to be a story set in actual time and space, whereas the story of “why it works” tends to be a story set in imaginary time and space, some kind of timeless, generic, Platonic world where the basic causal mechanism of reality is (seemingly) revealed.
Example #1: Why bears eat honey
The explanatory of why it works is not set in time and space like a story in the form, “The bear ate the honey because it was hungry.” The explanatory story takes place in a timeless imaginary universe, as follows:
Bears eat honey because their DNA causes both their taste buds to have a predilection for sweet things, and their olfactory nerves to be particularly sensitive to the smell of honey. The DNA of bears is the result of biological selection, honey being highly nutritious and suitable to the digestive tract of bears.
We are dealing with a sequence of events, not about any particular bear, but a story about “bears in general”. Most scientific knowledge consists primarily of such explanations. Some scientists would be horrified to think that their knowledge consists of stories, albeit stories. Other, more perspicacious scientists recognize that this is the case.[6]
Example #2: why a springboard stories must be positive in tone
An example comes from my own presentations about why the springboard story needs to be positive in tone:
And most important, Hollywood is right. It's got to have a happy ending. I have had no success in telling a story: “Let me tell you about an organization that didn’t implement knowledge management and it went bankrupt.” No success at all with this kind of story.
And there is actually some neuro-scientific evidence explaining why this is so. Over the last four hundred years or so, most of the attention on the brain has been focused on the cortex, that is to say, the human brain. But in the last 20 years or so, a lot of the attention has been on other parts of the brain that hadn’t been accessible in the past. In particular, we have been looking at the mammal brain and the limbic system, which sits just under the human brain, and the reptile brain, that we all have and which sits just under the mammal brain. These mammal and reptile brains are not very smart, but they are very quick and they make a lot of noise.
And so if I tell you a story with an unhappy ending, that company that bankrupt because it didn’t implement knowledge management, what seems to be happening is that these ancient parts of the brain, the limbic system kicks in and the message is: “Fight! Flight! Get out of here! Trouble! Something bad is happening!” and so on. Now the human brain, the cortex, can intervene and override this and say something like, “Now calm down, calm down, let’s analyze this, we may be able to learn something from this experience,” but by the time the commotion is over, the opportunity to invent a new future is past. Learning may take place, but no rapid action ensues. There is no springboard effect.