“He started from scratch, worked nights and weekends, did thousands of cold calls to build up his book of business.  And you’ve seen him now.  His efforts were so successful that now he’s driving a BMW, and takes every Wednesday off to play golf.”

Bob’s story didn’t include selling the new policies or making big changes when the company’s management decided to change direction: it was a story about arriving.  Bob’s story was invisible because it was never told as such: it only existed in snippets, as an unspoken but potent reference point in people’s minds that shaped career expectations and choices.  It came into explicit existence when the ethnographers from the Institute for Research on Learning constructed it as part of a massive ethnographic project in the 1990′s and presented it to the company’s management.

I recommended it to a rather bookish consultant friend who wrote back that he couldn’t see what was actionable or practical about it.  I’ve been wondering about that comment for a while, even as the book continues to influence how I think about storytelling in organizations and communities.  Why, exactly, do I think this book is so practical and relevant?

At this particular point in history, if you doubt that it’s important to understand what’s on the minds of people who sell financial instruments, why sales agents sell (or don’t sell) something, I would suspect you’ve been living a very sheltered life. Misreading or misunderstanding organizational culture brings systemic risks.

One reason this book is not hugely popular with the storytelling or organization development communities is suggested by the fact that the story about Bob is not in the index under “Bob.”  You can find it under “discourse unit, paradigmatic narratives as, 148-49″.  So the book is a long hard slog unless you like that kind of stuff.   For better or worse I read it twice.   After I finished it the first time, I left it on a plane.  When I started over, with the idea of skimming it to re-construct my notes, I found that it was worth reading slowly a second time.  The book is chock full of big and small insights.

A fundamental point is that “remembering” is a human activity that’s situated in time and space.  Talking about “memory” as a disembodied and abstract entity is problematic and misleading. Remembering (most frequently through storytelling) is something we can observe and therefore influence if we understand what’s happening:

“A story not having a proper occasion on which it can or must be told exists in an archive if it exists at all…. If there is any place where the process of institutional remembering can be deliberately altered, it is the creation, maintenance, or abandonment of narrative occasions.” p. 222.

You have to be listening at the right time and place.  In fact Linde has a scheme for classifying narrative occasions on p 47:

Whether this is the frame you want to use or not (where exactly would you place my story of reading Linde’s book twice?), it seems to me that having some frame or other is really useful.  The situation matters: where a story is told, when, with what purpose, to whom, and how it is varied to fit the situation are fundamental to making sense of it.  A frame like hers does a lot of work, like helping you detect repeated stories, commonplace stories that anybody can tell (e.g., you can tell it in some situations even its about events you yourself did not witness), or even detect stories that are not told (I think detecting meaningful silence is a big deal: “Just listen for it” says Linde).

Linde’s emphasis on the situated nature of storytelling connects with another fundamental with practical implications: stories are social, jointly produced by teller and listener.   Telling stories that make sense is a social obligation:

“This creation [of narrative coherence] is not a light matter; it is in fact a social obligation which must be fulfilled in order for the participants to appear as competent members of their culture.” p 4.

If we live in times of change, then this should be a good time for telling stories and for understanding what we’re doing when we’re telling them:

“Times of change are rich in occasions when the past is invoked.  The past is used to reaffirm a sense of identity, to provide a ground form which to assess the effect and meaning of changes, and to provide a basis for critique of changes.  It is at times of change that a particular way of being is constructed as the past.” p. 43

When you think about how many books on storytelling come down to endless bullet lists and instructional bromides, it makes you appreciate what a huge accomplishment it is that Linde’s Working the Past is actually a good yarn about storytelling.

I’ve been on the “leadership team” of the Portland ODN more or less continuously for the last 10 years. I’ve found ODN to be a nice face-to-face home professionally, even though my work is very different from what most OD professionals do. But I thought that being on the leadership team would be fun and give me a view of how a professional community organizes itself over time. It’s been a great opportunity to observe the ups and downs of a community without having to take on an inordinate amount of work.

ODN has been a meeting-oriented community in that it mainly existed on the 2nd Wednesday of the month for a stand-up presentation (with some schmoozing before and afterwards). Moving beyond a flip-chart was a significant shift. The battle to spend money on a website which now serves as a professional directory is now a distant memory. All along, the presentations have been interesting but ad hoc, depending on what people wanted to present more than on an articulated learning agenda. For a while I tried to get people to participate in a note-taking practice so that the questions, answers, and general discussion could be published afterwards. OD folks in general are not early or enthusiastic adopters of technology: often they are the ones who will see technology as getting in the way — between people.

For many years Miriam Lange kept pushing the “Community Consulting Project” (CCP) idea. She just wouldn’t let it die, although many people on the leadership team (including me) didn’t quite get it. The idea was to provide OD consulting services to non-profits who could not pay. It was somewhat independent of the community’s main activities, but with the leadership of Dan Vetter chugged along year after year, giving people new to the field a chance to work with more seasoned professionals and it provided an important kind of public service.

A little more than a year ago the ODN leadership team decided that it needed some support from “outsiders” and asked the CCP folks to pull together a team to help ODN itself. The CCP team, led by Ed Warnock, met with the Leadership Team and did a survey of ODN members and the members of “adjacent” professional communities. The CCP then led the leadership team through a standard kind of “in search of excellence” process, inspired by Jim Collins: focus on what you can uniquely do, disregard the irrelevant activities, identify those middle areas that can be done minimally.

There were two major meetings that I recall. One was a large, four-hour-long carefully scripted meeting with PowerPoint slides that looked at the survey data results and set some priorities. It turned out that the CCP idea was the core on which ODN wanted to build its future, its key differentiator.  The bottom line: ODN would become the best place for interactive learning about the practice of OD. Later there was a much smaller leadership team meeting that took those priorities and tried to put it all in practice.

Based on the program announcements and the sessions I have attended since then, Jerry Zygmuntowicz, as the program chair, has done an amazing job of implementing the change and orientation, making ODN a much more practice-oriented professional association.  That’s really hard to do.  It’s really impressive that the ODN community has pulled this off.  Here are a few characteristics of the process that were outstanding:

• Recognizing that a change was needed: it is far too easy for a community to just drift into irrelevance.
• Gathering information from the community’s environment in a disciplined fashion.
• Focusing the leadership group’s attention on the challenges that the community needed to face. The leadership team more or less put itself in the hands of some good consultants.
• Lack of conflict in the leadership team, so that nobody stood in the way of moving along “the way forward” that emerged in the process.

But here’s another community development principle: one thing leads to another. I just got invited to meet with a group that’s working on extending ODN’s CCP model to provide some support to for-profit organizations!

We start by talking about how, in writing the book, we tried to not “just” be experts, but to also get at our experience and the more intimate level at which communities live. At the very end I remember to tell him that his interaction with the community that formed on his wiki was one of the first instances where I glimpsed what the role of a technology steward might be about.  It has taken a lot of work to write about “less technical” people might take on the role, but I’m convinced that you don’t have to be a Ward Cunningham to serve your community with respect to its technology needs.

Before walking the dog, at 6:15 am, I went through the previous night’s email on Outlook, looked at my schedule and made some plans:

• A workshop payment mix-up (money going to a personal Paypal account rather than the CPsquare account) has been fixed. Still 2 transactions to resolve.
• Got the draft of a contract with a government agency. Need to print and send back.
• Ward agreed to write a blurb for the book! Yay! Sent him the 4 MB file right away.
• Got the glossary edits from Peter + Trudy — they look great! Need to respond to their extensive annotations.
• Got plenty of SPAM.
• Jotted a short-to-do list on my composition notebook: send “thank-yous” to the several people who helped during the talk I gave last night at ODN, post the slides on slideshare.

After walking the dog, got to my office around 7:45 am.

• The alert that daughter Liza had logged on to Yahoo IM shows up. I didn’t ping her because I was so busy. When she was with Peace Brigades International in Colombia I always tried to wave, but now that she’s back in the US I don’t bother her as much.
• Had a Skype call with Patricia and Beverly who are spending the day together in Hamburg! At the last minute, we use a Skype chat to move our meeting time forward an hour. Because they were in the same room, we met with Skype Video and took a few snapshots for fun. We talked shop, about books we’re reading, strategies for marketing and survival. We eventually get focused on writing and the deadline. We decide that in alignment with the autoethnographic approach in our paper, the literature review should also be “personal,” focusing on our experience of the literature rather than arguing that we’ve read everything that’s relevant. We decided that June 12 was the “snapshot day” for our autoethnographic vignettes. (Hence, this post, a departure from my habit of reticence.) After the call I find that we had two chat windows going (one with Patricia alone which had most of our notes and another with both Patricia and Beverly, which had some notes from early on) so I pasted them together, interleaving lines using the time stamps. I got the chat transcript in the mail by mid-afternoon.
• Got a phone call from Doug. Thanked him for taking care of the dog while I gave the talk at ODN last night. We talked about sending an email messages to the Portland Shambhala sangha about the building purchase. He needed a phone number, so I mailed him an out-of-date phone list for the community.
• Had a scheduled half hour phone meeting with Rebecka. Send text. Worked on the 2nd draft in Writeboard of a 3-day session for next fall.
• Got an email anticipating Trudy’s surgery.
• Scanned the emails about an effort by the Yi-Tan Guild to document our own teleconference set-up, facilitation, and follow-up procedures. We’ve been using Iotum’s Calliflower tool on Facebook, but it still needs a wiki page to remind ourselves how to do things.
• Exchanged several emails with Naava’s assistant to schedule a meeting with Naava the next day.
• Exchanged IMs with Lauren re: lost password on CPsquare that I’d forgotten to send her, method for avoiding a lost password, scheduling a conference call with 3 community leaders from her company about scope and leadership strategies.
• IMs with wife Nancy who was bragging about her new 22″ monintor. Compared lunch plans, discussed the after-work schedule, grocery pick-up items, and a little blister on her foot. Finished just in time for my noon meeting.
• Had an hour-long teleconference with Debra and four others on her staff (who were together on a speakerphone) about the evaluation report we had just written on the experience of community members in a face-to-face meeting they’d organized. They asked for an overview of the report, although I’d sent it to them a week before. I talked at length — ended up giving a mini-lecture! Recorded it for Louis (partner for this project in DC), but forgot to turn the recording off, so will have to edit!
• At lunch I continue reading Grant McCracken’s “Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture” on the kitchen counter over some warmed-up leftovers. The book has a lot to do with culture and identity construction. I wonder, am I in the business of helping people create new homes for new identities? Today’s snippet gave me some insight into sports and American males that I’d never quite understood (having grown up in Puerto Rico) on p 283:
  

  “As overmighty subjects, they have their own performative powers. A preteen on a basketball court takes possession of the voice-over that belongs to the sports announcer and the color commentator. He uses this to take possession of the pretext, the script, the accomplishment, and the admiration that belong to a celebrity athlete. This is what, in basketball, they call a steal. The preteen has intercepted powers that belong to the meaning makers. It is endemic hubris, a matter-of-fact appropriation of superordinate powers by a subordinate party. The twelve-year-old makes Larry Bird a god and himself Larry Bird. Such subjects are overmighty and increasingly common.”

• Retrieved and formatted the chat transcript for yesterday’s Winter 2008 workshop group “reunion” meeting from Web Crossing. Retrieved the audio recording from the phone bridge, saved it, and put a link to it together with the chat room notes in an email to the whole group.
• The postman dropped off a copy of Groundswell, a book that Shirley read and recommended and that has an amazing publicity machine behind it.
• Finally made some progress with my idea of using screen captures to create a diagram about platform integration and compatibility for our book on Technology Stewardship for Communities. Put five different screen-shots into one diagram with enough room for a lot of annotations and sent it to Etienne. This has been the most troubling diagram in the book.
• Ended the day editing a summary of Marc’s book. His ideas are great and now are starting to emerge from a murky translation.

Sources:

• Outlook – various folders [Inbox, sent messages, project folder]
• Skype history
• Paper notebook (log)
• Trillian history function
• RescueTime

Notice that RescueTime misses the hour-long conversation with Debra et al.

• I was a stock room clerk for a summer at Ryder Memorial Hospital central stores, at the time a 35 bed missionary hospital where my father was the medical director. Central stores was a one man operation in the late 50′s, so my job was to be the assistant to don Juan Santos, a very religious man. We received and filled orders for the whole hospital, including the kitchen (with familiar things like onions, breadfruit and plantain) and the operating room (with things made by exotic-sounding companies like Merck or Johnson & Johnson, etc.). I did get paid something, but it was definitely a political appointment.
• I got a paper route, delivering the San Juan Star and El Mundo. At that time newspapers were mostly sold on the streets by urchins calling out the headlines, and home delivery was an innovation. Also it was a bit subversive for a doctor’s son to have a job like that because status boundaries in Puerto Rico were very rigid. I was probably in junior high, so carrying papers from home on the Ryder Hospital grounds to the other end of town was the 3rd round trip walk each day (my brothers and I always walked home for lunch). On the way back I’d sometimes see my father driving to the US Post Office at the far end of Humacao after completing his morning rounds.
• I attempted to launch a lawn-mowing business, as front lawns were starting to appear in middle-class houses. I made arrangements with the owner of a new house about a mile down Calle Font Martelo and trundled the lawn mower down to her house. The lawn had never been mowed and was very bumpy, so the first mowing was a bit rough. Still, I figured the money was going to be good. Unfortunately, my father saw me and scolded me for using it because the lawn mower was “hospital property.” The fact that he mowed the large lawn around our house even though there was a gardener was just another example of how he behaved according to the customs in his home town of Westerville, Ohio. The failure to launch was vivid.
• Just before I went off to the states, I got a summer job through some connections that my girl-friend’s father had. It was working in the shipping department of a factory that we’d now call a maquiladora. It involved commuting to Naguabo, which was really far away (10 miles?) for that time in Puerto Rico, and “the connections” also provided access to a transportation pool where one worker would drive and 5 of us would all chip in to ride with him. It was interesting to notice that the walkie talkies that we were shipping were all going to exotic places like Saudi Arabia, the Congo, and Viet Nam. A glimpse of a much larger world, full of conflict.
• During a break in my college years, I was living at home in Puerto Rico and got a job in a car repair shop about a block from the Escuela Ana Roque elementary school I’d gone to, working for a father / son operation (Pedro and Papito Matojo). Matojo was not their real name, but they went by that, suggesting that their business was set up in the underbrush. I once did a painting of the view from the work area where we patched cars with “bondo.” (We used all kinds of products from the US, with their names fully naturalized into Spanish. Only now do I realize that “bone-dough” was based on the English word for “bond.”) Across the Humacao River was a housing development created after a horrible flood in the 1956.
  

I’m not really sure I want to keep this meme alive, but I would be interested in knowing more about John G�tze, Martin Roulleaux-Dugage, Jerry Michalski, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Steve Dale. I may not have been reading their blogs carefully enough — they may have been tagged already!

Shawn: Hi John
Shawn: When I call the Skype conf call number there are people talking in another language. Is this a timeshare arrangement?
John: yikes!

Somehow, I imagine the worst! We have vandals taking over our telephone bridge! Is the new bridge defective, mixing up different conversations? I quickly call in and find Shawn on the bridge, chatting happily with Susanne Nyrop and her guest (they were also there early because they were a little anxious to make sure the technology was working; since they had thought they were the only ones on the bridge, naturally they were speaking Danish.) It turned out that Shawn and Susanne were both playing a leadership role and had met and done some coordination via chat, but Shawn didn’t recognize Susanne’s voice until after he’d left me that scarry instant message

I think there are several interesting points about this annecdote:

• Communities depend on the passion and generosity of people who are willing to get up out of bed at outrageous times so as to be ready to facilitate a call that’s convient for others in the community! And on people who are willing to deal with new infrastructure and are willing to show up with their friends to make sure they’re able to connect. Wow.

• It’s really important for someone to show up early for community calls. There are enough glitches that turn up at the last minute, so having someone there to help can make a big difference. So leaders need to be more than punctual: they need to be there before anybody else arrives! I guess 18 minutes is a bit extreme, unless it’s a really important meeting.

• It’s really important to have a back-channel, so that when something seems wrong, people who are producing the event can communicate easily and instantaneously. There’s no time for looking up someone’s IM handle at the last minute.

• None of the technologies that we use to interact in a community give us a complete image of each other: we can become familiar with someone’s style in a chat and then respond to them as if they were a stranger