Poetry at Work.

Last week lone-sailing Seascape, my 12 foot, clinker-style dinghy; hushed breeze rushing, bow splashing and wake boiling, I slipped and sliced, suspended on chrome-smooth sky-tinted surfaces, ruffled, disturbed, even annoyed by mercurially agitated warm humid breezes. Mind in neutral, senses wired for sudden shifts, body and boat commune, response-merged pursuing purpose.

Then suddenly I plunge into turbid work-waters, seeking uncontrived rhyme, rhythm, and reunion. Instead jolted by proudly, profoundly prosaic hard harsh habits, I struggle to rescue the dream from resigned remembrance and to surface, to breathe.

Now thankfully buoyed by miraculously new-found and re-found relationships, carried by the tidal flows that touch and disturb even dammed work-waters, I find poetry resurgent enough for shade and sustenance.

Bullet points kill learning for change

Glowing, PowerPoint-projected in light-dimmed rooms, bullet-point-prompts cue presenters to elaborate with yet more bullet points. Bullet points dominate executive presentations and university lectures. Executives, managers, the managed and students insist on them, make decisions based on them, and demonstrate knowledge by repeating them.

Bullet points have come to represent knowledge laid bare: high impact: stripped of the flannel and waffle; complexity distilled; quick, no-nonsense, unequivocal, definitive; knowledge in a second; the preferred “learning style” of many managers and their managed.

But a bullet point is a summary: a skeletally brief abstract; often cliché or jargon; (wrongly) assumed to effectively represent (communicate) complex intellectual and emotional meaning forged in the messy dynamics of interactive conversation, discussion and debate.

There’s slim chance of those few words effectively communicating rich new meaning to anyone who wasn’t part of the formative interactive process; slim chance that those bullets will effectively communicate any more than trivial, mechanical or mundane meaning, even to the in-crowd.

There’s even less chance of achieving richly shared meaning if the meaning is new: outside or on the edges of the experience of the listener. Bullet points reinforce groupthink.

To a story teller, a bullet point is a symbol of the meaning of the process that conceived it: the candid discussion, debate, conversation and winnowing that produced a consensus. A consensus based on the shared understanding of what was left out and what was given prominence; of what’s behind the brief words: the story they represent.

That story must be told. Told well, with passion; capturing of the tension and relief, sadness and elation, conflict and reconciliation of its conception.

Without that story, the bullet point could mean almost anything. Like: “They don’t listen.” “My opinions don’t count.” “That’s simple.” “That’s right.” “I won.” “I lost.” “Yeah, right!” “I know.” “This is great.” “This is crap.” “This is so profound” “This is inane.” “Blah, blah.” “More slogans” “In a nutshell.”

Effective communication creates shared meaning. Bullet points are at least very unreliable at that especially if the meaning is new as it inevitably is in learning for organisational change.

It’s all about interpersonal and organisational communication

Have you read any of Steve Denning’s books? More particularly are you following his latest campaign towards his forthcoming book on High Performance Teams? I bought and read his previous most recent book The Secret Language of Leadership. I have to say the word “secret” in the title put me off, but it sells books. . . . . . .

I’m drawn to Denning because of his communication-based perspective on leadership and change. I don’t think he has all the answers though he perhaps pretends to because that’s what the Business book market wants.

To me it’s the communication angle that’s the key. Denning’s big thing is deliberate, designed story telling. I have coached clients in his basic story telling process and they almost always find that it’s very effective. I use it myself with success.

I like Denning’s confronting conventional Management wisdom such as when he states outright that Richard Hackman is wrong in asserting (in a May 2009 HBR interview) that leaders can’t guarantee to produce a high performance team. Denning admits that it’s hard and a radically different way of acting from the way most organizations are run today. Interactive communication is an essential ingredient and so is not-Management.

He sums up “[It’s about] creating exhilaration in the workplace, igniting lots of shining eyes and delight, and in the end inspiring people to reinvent themselves. Because of the results it is producing, a radical new way of managing work is emerging. It involves a different way of thinking about work, a different way of managing work, and a different way of participating in work. It isn’t a quick fix. It isn’t an incremental change or a shift at the periphery. When fully implemented, it affects everything in the organization. It entails fundamental change.”

Denning to me is one of the current applied versions of the seminal 1970s and following work of Chris Argyris, further developed by the likes of Peter Senge in the 1990s. It clearly takes a long while for a new good idea to get traction! Maybe GM’s bankruptcy will add weight the sea-change in Management thinking and practice. I hope so but I'm sceptical.

I’m re-reading Senge and Co’s “The Fifth Discipline Field Book” and subsequent “The Dance of Change” - good "how to" in there but not a pop read for the busy executive (the one who needs to change first).

For heavy-weight logic and argument I like Karl Weick. His latest book (2007) is Managing the Unexpected. I like the way Weick is comfortable with "un-organisation". That, to me, is real project life: real business life; especially small business life.

Lexicon? What’s that?

It’s our language that enables us to have and manipulate ideas; determines our capacity to conceptualise, think and change. In these times it is crucial for individuals and organisations to change – to transform even. Yet many are crippled; locked in by the language of Management.

This was once again highlighted for me in a recent discussion around the purpose of business-team coaching. I objected to the apparently widespread unquestioned assumption that business development coaching is to achieve “alignment”. I explained that “In my lexicon, “alignment” has strong associations with “staying in line”, compliance, groupthink: some of the least productive aspects of Managerial behaviour and expectation.”

On reflection that objection was potentially risky behaviour with the MD leading the discussion and several senior managers participating in the conversation: I was apparently questioning an almost unquestionable Managerial prerogative - compliance. On top of that I seemed to imply almost heretically that Management is wrong. As if that wasn’t enough I had the temerity to use strange language: “lexicon”.

“What’s lexicon?" the MD demanded. "A company name?” .

When I later explained that my lexicon is the language that I think with, he joked, “Well I guess lexicon’s not in my lexicon.” But of course, by that stage it was.

Particularly interesting to me was that that discussion was part of a process to reconceptualise; to find new language to express the concept and practice of business development coaching. Language was essential to the change process.

Working against that change was the spirit of Managerial control: arguably achieved in large part through control of language. Managers can require that ideas and argument are communicated in language that they readily understand, as they understand it, so reinforcing convention. Jargon becomes a means of exclusion and of enhancing knowledge-power.

How then can we introduce new language and with it new concepts, new ideas, new possibilities?

Reading is one way, but most popular writers use conventional language because it is readily understood and that’s what sells. Nobody except academics read academic literature.

In my experience, the best way to introduce new language is in context, in conversation. Then the initial difficulties and misunderstandings can be explored: illustrated by real, shared experience.

Unfettered brainstorming is an effective way to break the Managerial spell and let the language flow, unhindered by evaluation and qualification: formal, colloquial, slang, foreign, technical, expert, outrageous, boring, relevant, irrelevant, reverent, irreverent, dangerous, and tame language.

PS My closest colleagues in that organisation have affectionately given me a new nickname: “Prof”. I’m not sure if that’s helpful or not. But it is a mark of affection. That’s good.