Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By way of a few stories, I hope to illustrate the power of working with others’
stories - and our own - in unblocking difficulties and winning hearts and
minds. I include one disaster story, as we often learn as much from our fail-
ures as our successes. Here are the starts of some stories which we will re-
visit later in this article.
Of course, it became clear that the coffee cup was only the last straw in a
long-running feud between the Clare and Annie, who had managed to get
most of the department to side with one or other of them. Regular councils of
war were held by each party in the staff restaurant, where the latest news of
the hostility of the other was told and re-told.
The question was, how was it possible to sort this mess out? The hostilities
actually went back almost two years and were deeply embedded. Annie and
Clare could each tell a terrible story of the other: of provocation, rudeness,
unreasonableness, and so on. And in that word story lay the start of a solu-
tion.
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Mike had recently been promoted to team leader and was doing a great job.
The one concern his boss had was that he seemed to lack confidence in his
own abilities as a leader. However, all the indicators were positive: productiv-
ity was high, morale was high, absenteeism and sickness were low. But Mike
believed he was a fraud, and that in accepting the leader’s job, and salary, he
was cheating the organisation. His boss needed to break through this but was
not sure it would be possible.
We all know that people often hold different views of the same reality: ‘the
map is not the territory’ has become something of a mantra in some circles.
We are also familiar with the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy: that believing
in something may make it come true. Indeed this wisdom goes back a long
way: it is the stuff of Greek tragedy. Oedipus’ parents, fearing the prophecies
made about him at his birth, seek to prevent their coming true, and in so do-
ing create the very circumstances which cause Oedipus to fulfil them.
What I, the Blind Hog, discovered is a powerful way of using these insights
and the whole concept of story, to dissolve conflicts, remove stumbling
blocks, and enable great performance.
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However, I did find that in many ways I was re-creating in an organisational
context, approaches used in therapeutic settings. Moreover, once I started to
look at that literature, I was able to enrich my approach with some of their
techniques; however I am always aware that I am not a therapist, and my ap-
proach is a pragmatic one which leaders in any organisation could adopt and
adapt.
When Clare (in the Story of the Coffee Cup) started work at her first job, she
was young, and inexperienced in the world of work. However, she was outgo-
ing and apparently confident. When embarrassed, she had the habit of laugh-
ing as a nervous release. Annie had worked in the department for years. She
had a heart of gold, but a slightly dour manner which often concealed that.
She understood how important precision was in the department’s work, as
their output was often used in court cases, and could be torn apart by hostile
lawyers unless it was perfect.
Clare did not report to Annie, but Annie noticed a couple of errors in Clare’s
work and pointed them out. Clare was upset by this, and gave her nervous
laugh. And from that small interaction, each built a huge edifice of meaning.
Clare saw Annie as bullying and interfering; Annie saw Clare as insubordinate,
unconcerned about her work and cheeky.
From that moment, without realising it, each had started to construct a story
about the other, and collected evidence to prove that her story was real. From
then, all interactions which confirmed, or seemed to confirm, the dominant
narrative were noticed, collected and believed. Any interactions which
seemed to contradict the story were either discounted as atypical, or not no-
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ticed at all. Neutral interactions were interpreted according to the story; and
all of this outside the conscious awareness of either party.
From there it was a short step to recruiting allies and briefing them; and in that
process, stories were re-told, often with extra colour, and their truth became
unassailable; they were really dominant. And from there it was only a matter
of time till the whole department went to war with itself.
But what was interesting to discover, and proved the salvation of this team,
was that these dominant narratives were not the only stories that each pro-
tagonist told herself. Buried quite deep under the surface were others. When
asked (and after being allowed sufficient time to tell her dominant narrative)
Clare was able to tell of another Annie; an Annie who had been demonstrably
kind to her on a number of occasions. “That’s what’s so maddening!” she
said, “Sometimes she can be really nice - I just don’t know where I am with
her.”
The same was true for Mike (the hero of the Story of the Reluctant Leader).
His dominant story, that he was a sham as a leader, concealed another, that
he was helping the team to perform well. Mike’s stories also helped me to
recognise the link between these narratives and people’s underlying value sys-
tems. The reason this was such a big issue for Mike was that he felt a genuine
commitment to the work of the organisation which employed him, and had a
strong personal ethic around a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Helping
Mike to re-engage with his story about himself as having a real commitment
to the organisation, and being essentially an honest person was part of the
process we went through.
It is worth pointing out, at this stage, that my accounts of the people and sto-
ries in this article are themselves stories: narratives constructed to convey
meaning. The real people are far more subtle and complex than I can capture
in a few lines, and their stories more varied.
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Annie and Clare (The Story of the Coffee Cup) were helped to rebuild their re-
lationship by rebuilding their stories about each other and their relationship.
This was not done through some quick trick like ‘re-framing,’ but by a rigorous
exploration of their perceptions and interpretations.
The first step was to build sufficient trust with each of them individually to be
able to help them. A key part of that was, in a confidential one-to-one set-
ting, to listen to their stories in their entirety - and to respect them. That in-
volved resisting the urge to challenge or correct either of them when she
made a leap of logic which was clearly fallacious. At the conclusion, each
heard a sympathetic summary of her story, designed to demonstrate that she
had been truly heard, and that she was not being challenged on the story.
That is an important step, as the stories were dear to them and any attack
might cause them to cling more tightly to them: but my agenda was to get
them to loosen their grip just a little bit.
The next step in the process was to talk a little about stories, how we con-
struct them and collect evidence and so on. I did this by talking about my
mother-in-law and my wife: a classic tale of love and misunderstanding....;
something each was able to relate to and recognise - and laugh at. Somehow
when we look at others’ stories, it is much easier for us to see that stories
have an existence of their own, separate from the protagonists. This distanc-
ing, or externalising, of the story is the prelude to starting to question it.
Now that her grip on the story was a little loosened and her curiosity about it
as a story was engaged, I posed a different type of question: ‘If you had to
give this story a name, like a fairy tale, what would you call it?’ After the bar-
est moment’s reflection she replied: “The Princess and the Ogre!”
That created all sorts of possibilities. Some we pursued were asking whether
Annie really got out of bed each day with an ogre-ish desire to make the prin-
cess’s life hell; and what Annie’s story might be called. We debated various
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options for that, in a fairly light-hearted way. This whole segment of the con-
versation was designed to continue the loosening of Clare’s grip on her story,
by creating some distance between her and it (by the explicit naming of it as a
story ‘out there’ as it were), by recognising the hyperbole implicit in the des-
ignation of Annie as an ‘ogre,’ and by starting to imagine how it might look
from Annie’s perspective (by considering her name for it).
Having had a parallel conversation with Annie, and also with all the other
members of the team, we finally got to a stage where the whole team came
together to look for a way forward. The one thing on which the whole team
strongly agreed was that things could not go on the way they had been.
Whilst neither protagonist was fully open to the idea that she might have mis-
read the other, each was each pretty clear that that other had misread her!
So we had a day of story telling: each of the protagonists telling her story,
(with clear ground rules preventing interruption or correction), and other
members of the team invited to comment in turn. We then set about seeking
a story which all could agree covered more of the evidence we had started to
assemble, and that was when we got to the story of the dour, experienced,
committed professional, and the new, slightly nervous, extravert team mem-
ber.
We then started to ‘thicken the plot’: that is we went back over the two years
to see what evidence there was that the emerging story was a better fit than
their previous personal stories: and we found lots of it.
Somewhere along the way, there was a wonderful dawning revelation: not
only is it possible for us to have a future together that works, but our past isn’t
half as awful as we thought it was. Annie and Clare experienced, among other
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things, huge relief, at no longer feeling so dreadfully misunderstood and also
no longer feeling so hated by the other.
The final stage was to look at what evidence everybody would need to see
from now onwards, to starve the old stories of evidence, and provide plenty
of evidence for the new story. That became the action plan for the team.
The power of this lay in part in the fact that everyone was convinced that the
new story was a better account of what had been going on than the previous
stories. It was not a result of positive (wishful) thinking or ‘re-framing’ but of
seriously engaging with the evidence each had collected - and the evidence
each had overlooked. So the better future was grounded in a more positive -
and also a more credible - understanding of the past. We were not trying to
make up stories or simply put a positive frame around the past, but really in-
terrogate our understanding of it, to find a richer picture that we could all be-
lieve in - and typically where no party is so evil and malicious as their antago-
nist had imagined.
Towards a Framework
I am reluctant to produce a final route map for this process, as I undertake it
in a fairly intuitive way, and the sequence I used with Annie and Clare was
what seemed appropriate on that particular occasion; indeed it is only with
hindsight that I have pulled it into such a coherent narrative.
However, there are certain key processes that are helpful along the way, and
the overall effect is often very powerful indeed.
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✤ Thicken the plot, both historically, and from now on
Naming the story is a relatively recent addition to my approach, but it has real
power. Is it that naming forces an exaggeration? Or does it make explicit the
exaggeration that’s already happening? Either way, it does seem to help ex-
ternalise the story, creating a distance between the individual and the story.
Also, it gets to the heart of the issue: why is this so important to me? Moreo-
ver, it raises the possibility of asking: ‘What do you think the other person’s
dominant story is?’ Often people seem to imagine: ‘she comes into work to
make my life hell.’ One can then ask “Is that really her story, do you think?”
Probably not...
Mike, (The Story of the Reluctant Leader) was an example of someone where
the name of the story was actually the heart of the issue. His problem essen-
tially was his belief that he was not a good leader. I did all I could to help him
loosen his grip on that story: all the evidence was against him, but that didn’t
seem to count. His idea of leadership was either heroic (Gandhi, etc) or ty-
rannical (his experience at work) and he was clear that he was neither. So we
eventually re-named his job as team coach. The minute we did so, a weight
was lifted from his shoulders: this was a role in which he could excel: indeed
he was already doing well in it. To strengthen this new story, we did two
things. One was to look back at the past for evidence of Mike as a good team
coach - and we found plenty, including from before his promotion. Suddenly
he was able to believe that he had earned his promotion and was worthy of it!
The other was that Mike checked with his boss that she was happy with his
role being team coach: she readily agreed, and Mike’s problems with team
leadership have evaporated.
Thickening the plot is a concept I learned from the field of Narrative Therapy,
though the way I go about it is not the way therapists might. I tend to do it
firstly historically, by re-visiting the past through the lens of the new positive
narrative and seeing how well it accounts for all the evidence we have col-
lected, and also seeing what new evidence we can collect that this narrative is
preferable. Then I invite people to look forward, and agree how we will con-
tinue to nourish the new story (what evidence we will go out of our way to
provide in support of it) and also what evidence we may need to starve the
old story of, to prevent its resurgence (that is, are there any particular behav-
iours, or interpretations of others’ behaviours, which we will need to stop do-
ing....)
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This was particularly powerful with the protagonists in the Story of the Un-
promotable Managers. While many of them were convinced the assessment
centre had not been fair, we looked at the story they needed to be able to tell
back into the organisation, to get their careers moving forward again. Part of
that story clearly had to be how they had worked to overcome the shortfalls
identified by the centre. We did not need to debate how accurate the as-
sessment was: we simply had to recognise the need to collect evidence to
prove that the perceived weakness was a weakness no longer.
That led to each participant working to prove that he or she was capable of
demonstrating strengths in those areas; and over the course of several
months, they supported each other in developing that evidence using real
work projects, and meeting as action learning sets to drive them forward and
check that the learning was both applied and captured. By the end of the se-
ries of workshops, all had a good story to tell - and the organisation heard
them, so that many are now promoted.
I managed to get all three individuals to the stage where I - and they - be-
lieved that it might be valuable to sit down in the same room and explore their
stories. However, the manager, who had shown some signs of movement and
willingness to discuss by the end of our one-to-one conversation, now dug
her heels in and refused to listen or to share. I later learned that her friend
and old office-mate had spent some time with her advising her not to give an
inch, as the boss and the practitioner would both take a mile if she did. Had I
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realised earlier the degree to which this off-stage character was actively in-
volved in the dispute, I should have included her in the process. In the event,
we got nowhere, and the two people who had been prepared to move a little
felt very bruised and abused. The manager was eventually re-assigned to an-
other area: most organisations’ default response to difficult relationship is-
sues.
NLP (Neuro Lingusitc Programming: see Frogs into Princes or The Structure of
Magic, Bandler and Grinder ) is also interested in how we make sense of the
world, and is, I understand, the origin of the mantra ‘the map is not the terri-
tory.’ However, NLP seems to me to focus on techniques such as re-framing
which essentially involve putting on rose-tinted glasses.
Eric Berne’s work on Transactional Analysis (Games People Play) has long in-
terested me, and there are resonances in my approach with his understanding
of life scripts. However, I believe that what I am working with, though it may
emanate in part from such deep sources, is closer to the surface and a lot
easier to help people change.
The closest link I have found, and for this I am grateful to Liz Todd at Newcas-
tle University who drew my attention to it, is narrative therapy and narrative
mediation. This is a field pioneered by the late Michael White (see, for exam-
ple, Maps of Narrative Practice). Reading texts in that context (eg Narrative
Mediation, Winslade & Monk; What is Narrative Therapy?, Alice Morgan)
made me wonder if I had discovered anything new at all - and eventually dis-
pelled the illusion that I had.
However, what I had done was rediscover, from experience, what others were
discovering in a very different field, and it is the application of that to the or-
ganisational context which is perhaps my original contribution (though even
here my story may be wildly inaccurate: and this article is, in part, designed to
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provoke a response to that assertion so that I can enrich my story). I have
certainly learned from that work, particularly with regard to ‘thickening the
plot.’ I was heartened to read of the importance which practitioners of narra-
tive approaches place on the re-kindling of hope. For some years, I have be-
lieved that one of my key skills is to help people re-discover hope in times of
adversity.
Where I part company with the published work on narrative mediation and
narrative therapy which I have read so far, is in the belief (or their story) that
this pre-supposes a post-modern view of reality, and the absence of any ob-
jective truth. I happen to believe in objective truth - but also recognise it is a
very hard thing to verify, and a risky one to claim sole insight to. Indeed it is
because of my belief in, and respect for, objective reality, that I am so quick to
recognise the multiple subjectivities to which I and everyone else lend tempo-
rary credence.
At this stage of the article, only one question remains which I can answer:
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