From the fairy tales of our earliest years to the soap operas, newspapers and box office hits of our maturity, we humans love stories. But it’s not just about adventure and a happy ending. Stories are a medium through which we communicate and mentally store information in a handy recall framework of associated items.

“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact”. Robert McKee, screenwriter.

It’s easy to dismiss storytelling as something for kids and I wouldn’t recommend starting your corporate presentation with ‘Once upon a time there was a brave little CEO…” but as a technique for engaging audiences and conveying information it’s as good today as it was thousands of years ago.

The fact stories follow a narrative, building up layers of information and associated items (first this happened, then as a result that happened) helps us create a linear mnemonic – one that photographic memory performers use to connect and remember huge lists of seemingly unconnected items.

Used as a communication tool, stories and storytelling allow us to lay out a message in a clearly accessible form that we’re all familiar with.

“Rapport is created between the storyteller and the audience. They feel that they are actively involved, rather than just passively listening”, Lindsey Warnes Carroll, comedian and story teller.

Our brains and basic cultures have changed little since the days of hearing the news, learning about the latest religion/King/invaders and keeping in touch with our community through stories. In fact, traditional storytelling is enjoying a renaissance with storytelling festivals like Beyond the Border, held in the grounds of a cliff-top Welsh castle, on the increase.  And now there are even companies like The Story Tellers who “help business leaders engage their people in strategy, vision, values and change”.

But you don’t have to be a pro who’s spent years learning the art – we tell stories all the time: “Have you heard? She was with HIM last night at the bar and then…”.  Engaging stakeholders, communicating the progress of a project, concepts for design or delivering an unpalatable message, we all engage with this medium without thinking – it’s how we’re taught as children, how we consume news and entertainment: it’s our common culture as a species.

Some principles:

• Beginning THEN middle THEN end. Build up to the ‘big issue’ from the beginnings so your audience can start with simple concepts and add the detail – like Lego.
• Make sure the end has a real end. A joke without a punchline doesn’t work. Make sure your story builds to the main point, deliver that point, then finish or move to a new and different thread. Unless you’re very good, don’t try to carry several threads at once – people will get lost.
• Use a narrative to plan your presentation material (yes, I do mean PowerPoint slides amongst other things).
• Make sure you include details if you’re introducing new ideas. Don’t be afraid to stop the narrative and explain. E.g. ‘for those of you who don’t know what social networking is…’, or, ‘And the sword he held was carved with sigils and signs of a dark and unnatural nature…’, depending on your subject matter and audience.
• Stories can be spoken, written, pictorial or use just about any medium for their production. The importance is in the structure, building narrative and communication of the message.
• Experiment with stories that don’t yet have an ending and allow or use the audience to discover and create as a collaborative exercise. Remember those ‘choose your own adventure’ books? On the internet, a user’s journey through a website doesn’t always follow a prescriptive path, but is … wait for it … hypertextual.
• Enjoy the telling of the story and your audience will enjoy the story too – no matter how potentially dry your subject – believe me, I’m delivered some stats stories in my time that could have bored people into an early grave, without improving the engagement through storytelling.

“And they all lived happily ever after. The End.”

The Long Dog.

Her wicked sense of humour doesn’t conceal her no-nonsense attitude and she’s a true digital professional, able to move between the often immiscible worlds of tech, comms and business strategy. She’s run intranets for some of the worlds best known brands, is a keen sportswoman and all round fun person to be with. Ok … that’s her ego massaged enough – here’s 60 seconds with one of best Intranet Managers I’ve met:

LD: How long have you spent working with intranets?
CS:Since about 2000. I’ve been an Intranet Manager since 2005.

LD: Do you have a technical, communications background or something else?
CS: Maths! I did Maths at University which then led onto HTML training. For anyone who knows me they’ll know my laugh wouldn’t really suit an accountancy environment.

LD: How many employees has the largest intranet you’ve worked on served?
CS:Reuters intranet served 25000 staff and had about 1.5 million pages. And as all things go, it was the smallest team I’ve had.

LD: Top three key things an intranet must do, to be a success?
CL: (1) Have a staff directory on it, (2) be consistently available (and by this I’m referring to serving all offices and avoiding outages), (3) have at least one tool the staff can brag about.

LD: Top three common points of failure for an intranet?
CS: (1) Intranet builds led by people who only care about technology and not what the user actually wants from it, (2) not getting investment into good servers and even more importantly backup servers, (3)
Wikis – That’s totally un-pc of me to say but I’m not a fan at all: Making it easier for users to add content doesn’t mean they’ll maintain it.

LD: Jakob Nieslen or Jacob’s Cream Crackers?
CS: Cream crackers – is that a description of me?

LD: If you weren’t managing intranets what would you rather be doing?
CS: Pro Tennis player

LD: Did you set out to be an intranet manager?
CS: No! I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. My second job was at Unisys and I was randomly picked within the team to go learn HTML and build the financial services marketing team a website. It was love… [I suspect 'love' to be an exaggeration of sorts - Long Dog]

LD: Top three challenges for running a good intranet?
CS: Buy-in, budget & lack of control. It probably all really comes back to buy-in. It really shows that in the current financial state of the world those senior managers who have seemed to be bought in still look straight to the Intranet team for cost cuts.

LD: What do your friends and family think you do for a job?
CS: It varies, I’m not sure anyone really gets it! I try and tailor my answer and obviously stop talking as soon as they glaze over. I have been known on occasions to say I’m a PA just to avoid further questioning! I have several friends who refer to me as their clever friend, very flattering. I think maybe it translates as we don’t understand what you’re saying so it must be clever.

LD: Who should manage an intranet: IT, Internal Comms, HR or someone else?
CS: I think if you’ve got a person leading it who has both IT knowledge and comms/strategy knowledge then you can run it from IT or Internal Comms. My advice to anyone though is never never run it out of HR. Ideally if you have a company strategy team the Intranet would sit within it.

LD: Top three survival skills for intranet managers?
CS: (1) I bake cakes and give them to IT – it’s definitely helped me get a few databases built faster or for free! (2)
The ability to stop, clear your mind and try to imagine how a certain user would deal with something or want something, (3) Patience …

LD: What do you look for in someone working for you, on an intranet?
CS: Drive and personality. You’ve got to be able to talk to anyone and everyone if you’re going to succeed in such a cross functional team. I think drive is key to delivering and keeping the customer happy. I want people in my team that I can send to a meeting on their own and know they will represent the team at the same level I would.

LD: Software or information architecture - which is more important?
CS: Ooh that’s a hard question! I guess if you’re IA is great you can kind of cover up for useless software but if your IA is bad it doesn’t matter how good your software is.

LD: Best or worse intranet story
CS: We were clearing old sites off the intranet by backing them up onto an external hard drive and then deleting them. Highly technical method obviously. We managed to deleted a site which turned out to contain a buried folder with the sales figures database in it. This was their daily reporting tool and held everything!!! I found out the next day it was missing, had that moment where your blood runs cold, re-uploaded the site and looked at the data. Only to find the data was miraculously up to date, to the minute … we never did figure it out …

LD: Finally, any tips for struggling intranet workers or managers?
CS: Go out and see as many intranets as you can. And don’t be afraid to say no to a senior manager

More about Claire on her Linked In profile.

The Long Dog

I saw recent a Tweet by one of my peers, along the lines of “Broken link on my intranet not my fault, but still getting complaints in droves”. My response was “Inform the owner of that content there’s a broken link, tell them the content will be removed if the link isn’t repaired or removed then follow through with your threat.”

I don’t know if she took my advice.

Having managed and designed intranets and websites for global brands, the last thoughts stakeholders have is often about ongoing maintenance and governance. Trouble is, with no robust ongoing support your beautiful new baby gets ugly pretty quickly.

Websites need to be thought of as rose gardens: careful design, expert creation, then managed by a professional who knows what they’re doing and who is empowered to make decisions about when to allow growth and when to prune back hard.

Also, like a rose garden, the downside of a lack of management is rambling and exponential organic growth, but the knock-on results of this for a website are measurably worse:

- Poor findability of content
- Duplicated or contradictory information
- Poor user experience reducing conversion rates and subsequently reducing turnover
- Lack of trust in reliability of content
- Lowered employee efficiency (intranets)
- Abandonment of tasks / journeys – for a commercial website, this means the visitor may be switching to your competitor.

For a while I ran a global intranet for about 20,000 employees and before I arrived content was rarely removed. After some polite but unambiguous refusals to publish new subsites and the removal of whole swathes of unmanaged or substandard content, people began to value the intranet more, respect its governance and as a result put in more effort or at least seek assistance with new content.

To manage this intranet Intranet Section Managers were created – employees deputised with metaphorical tin stars because of their existing accountability for sections, expertise, or willingness to take on a new challenge. Also the accreditation of intranet publishers was made mandatory and required attendance of a two day training course. In 12 months the benchmarking ranking for the intranet went from 36th out of 36 FTSE 100 / Fortune 100 to 8th.

You want practical advice?
- Work out the ‘how’ and ‘who’ of site management BEFORE you launch … that’s BEFORE you launch … afterwards is like herding cats
-Empower someone as the overall person in charge who can and WILL make decisions about the commissioning, editing and removal of content
- How you structure your governance, central / devolved etc, depends on what will work best in your organisation.
- Build the governance to fit the organisation, don’t try and bend a model that won’t work or it’s cat herding again.

Intranets: Encourage the development of a wider community of practice to support, inform and provide volunteer lookouts for problems and champion your intranet in your organisation. Get the support of heavyweight seniors – otherwise your Intranet Manager is a toothless watchdog.

Overall … while governance is often seen as consuming time and money, in the end it’ll save a load of both and produce a site of much higher quality.

Now … go bring law and order to the badlands.

The Long Dog

“If you’ve got the time to do it badly, why haven’t you got the time to do it well?”, Gerry McGovern

Intranets are great. Believe me, I’ve worked on a few, and I think they’re the unsung heroes of a company’s digital paraphernalia. Great for providing a portal to a company’s own online services; great for providing virtual spaces for collaboration; great for broadcasting news and announcements across the globe; great for internal branding; great for supporting employees’ day-to-day tasks.

But … and this might sound like heresy … they’re not that good for internal communication.

By now any comms professional worth their salt has realised ‘newsletter comms’ doesn’t cut it. Broadcasting static information, voluntarily digested by mute, time-starved audiences only answers a small proportion of issues (see where I’m going?). Trouble is a lot of managers (some comms pros) see the intranet as The Answer –whack up the content, email a link and voila, communications done. Sadly, they don’t see that being digital doesn’t make it any better than a printed newsletter. All the printing and global distribution costs are cut, sure, but if the comms isn’t working, why not save even more money and just not do it at all? Hey, you could even do the comms face-to-face – now there’s an idea.

While it’s true an increasing workforce of generation Y-ers expect digital tools and unbounded internet access there are an lot of clever and experienced people spending an lot of clever and experienced time and money making sure their digital services survive against their competitors and provide what people want. Plugging new technology into an intranet then waiting for objectives to be met and the ROI to roll is unlikely to work.

One of the reasons networks like Facebook and Twitter work is they mimic real-world social interactions and their rewards but also their risks. Not everyone wants to interact through a digital medium: I work with an experienced digital consultant who hates the very idea of social sites, let alone Luddites who object to IT in general. On top of this organisations are often nervous about letting their little darlings loose on tools of free speech and the employees are often nervous about speaking freely for fear of ridicule or retribution.

Yes, intranets are great, but lazy managers can sweep communications tasks under the proverbial carpet and employees are often too busy to read lengthy web pages or, worse, PDF announcements *shudder* which they might liked to have kicked back with and read in print at their desks with cup of something steamy.

Intranets are often the solution cart put before the communications horse. Think of them as one of many channels, use all the good stuff they can do (global reach, real time publishing, feedback, audience tracking etc), but don’t forget they’re just one tool in the professional’s toolbox.

Some ranty reminders…

- Tailor your communications to the needs of your audience as well as your business (horse THEN cart)
- Don’t try and make a social networking playground unless you want people to treat it like a playground: the ‘in crowd’, the bullies and those who lurk in corners and solitude
- Your intranet is only one channel in a suite that can provide effective internal communications

The Long Dog

C-3PO: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1!

Han Solo: Never tell me the odds!

How do the heroes of Star Wars succeed against impossible odds? Why does Mowgli make it to the man village without being munched, crushed or descending into beatnik monkey decadence? Leaving artistic licence and the need for a happy ending aside, one explanation is that it’s the mix of characters – of personalities.

In the workplace it’s just as important to understand the different personalities in a team, to be able to articulate the way people operate or for communicating the needs of others.

‘Insight profiling’ is a system of identifying different personality types, their behaviours and attitudes, so you can understand how you and others interact and avoid potential problems and personality clashes. I briefly covered Myers Briggs personality profiling in my post “We are all individuals … I’m not!” and while Insight Profiling can be as deep and subtle it can also be used in a quick-n-dirty way to reduce personalities to four broad types and their opposites.

I recently attended a client away day, hosted and facilitated by Colour Works, including some great Insight Profiling action. This post is unashamedly inspired by that day and is a VERY brief taste of Insight Profiling, by using Star Wars heroes and Jungle Book characters to illustrate how it works.

There are four main ‘colours’ of personality and traits peculiar to each. Choose which seems best to suit you, or predict which suit colleagues and friends:

Fiery Red	Sunshine Yellow	Earth Green	Cool Blue
Competitive Demanding Determined Strong-willed Purposeful Driver	Sociable Dynamic Demonstrative Enthusiastic Persuasive Expressive	Caring Encouraging Sharing Patient Relaxed Amiable	Cautious Precise Deliberate Questioning Formal Analytical

To better understand how these work and interact, it’s possible to have a full profile done to see how each colour is represented (e.g. 40% red, 35% green, 10%yellow, 15% blue), so we can understand where our strengths are, but also how we complement or contradict others.

As a snapshot, it’s also useful to understand opposite ‘colours’ where we’ll find clashes or where we may need to rethink our approach to people (e.g.whether someone will make a good or dreadful presenter or leader). The colour wheel image shows the colours with their traits and which colour is the opposite (reds / greens and blues/ yellows). To help understand this and for a bit of fun, I’ve allocated heroes from Star Wars and some of the major Jungle Book characters to the wheel.

For those of you who’ve already or are about to ask the questions, the answers are:

- Yes, King Louie is a Yellow
- Yes, Darth Vader would be a Red and Obi Wan Kenobi would be a Green, in direct opposition to each other
- No, being an Earth Green doesn’t stop you from raining down righteous Jedi lightsabre retribution

The Long Dog (a Sunshine Yellow, but not a Jedi)

If you build an interactive social service like a forum, wiki, network, Twitter account, blog (etc) there’s a good chance that it might not work as well as you’d hoped.

A recent conversation with a colleague was about the lack of engagement with some forums she’d launched. I sent her the following potential diagnoses and suggested cures and here they are again for public consumption.

Personal confidence
Problem – The fear of ‘doing it wrong’ or ’saying the wrong thing’ is very human and why most people conform in societies. For those not used to using social tools, it can like asking them to stand up in a crowded room and give their opinion. Some will love it – most will be scared.
Cure – Find or incentivise champions who are willing to spend time contributing, and selling the ideas to others. Keep topics open and encourage champions to support newbies (see my personal rant “Antisocial networking behaviour – a case study“).

Culture
Problem – Forums, intranets, social networks and a whole lot of other services are often perceived as non essential. If people believe they should be working, or that their leaders will be judging if they working or not, this might not be conducive to voluntary engagement.
Cure – Make it possible to Integrate the social tools in people’s day-to-day work and make their benefit easy to see and articulate to others. For internal channels get seniors or respected figures to post, but also to respond ‘as equals’ to people at all levels and lead the way.

Visibility
Problem – I saw a site once that had a social tool that was dead in the water and one of the reasons was that it wasn’t accessible from the home page and there was no way to see posts or responses, other than by taking time out to go and have a look.
Cure – Raise the visibility. Make it part of a wider service, put a ‘latest’ feed on the home page, feature interesting topics or responses in other channels or areas, don’t forget a link on the homepage.

Technofear
Problem – People simply don’t know how to make the system work. What do I have to do to make or reply to a post? Will it go wrong if I press this? Remember, a lot of people still think the web is all about IT
Cure: Make the system as easy to use as possible. Showcase the forums in road shows or big meetings, and demonstrate how they work. Find ways of presenting the forums familiar to your audience.

Relevance
Problem – Is the service or tool really interesting to the general audience? Finding the balance between weighty problems that are stratospherically distant or irritatingly mundane chatter is difficult.
Cure: Allow all topics to be posted (within the usual bounds of decency, privacy etc) but nurture your champions to post relevant topics that people can then feel confident in engaging with. Use your own professional skills to identify and craft interesting topics with a call to action, so people are encouraged to respond and not just read and move on.

Population density
Problem – Someone whose name I forget did some research into forums and communities of practice and found that something like out of the 100% of people who engage, 1% are people who post, 10% are people who frequently reply, another 10% occasionally reply and the rest are ‘lurkers’ – those who read, but almost never reply or engage.
Cure – While it’s a question of ‘how long is a piece of string?’, consider if you have a critical mass of audience who will provide a healthy, interactive community.

All this can be summed up in one simple principle – If it’s going to work, it needs to usable and useful.

Before launching a social tool, consider some of these ahead of time, but don’t forget to understand why you’re doing it in the first place. What’s the purpose? What do you want the outcome to be? What will be the process or vehicle for reaching those outcomes?

Have you seen a social tool that was either particularly good or bad in engaging you?

The Long Dog

“How long is a piece of string?” traditional riddle.

I cut my digital teeth on intranets and have worked on the little darlings for some well known brands – Rolls-Royce, B2B telecoms giant MCI WorldCom (or whatever they are this year) and The Economist to namedrop a few. The consistent factor is that they’re all different.

At an intranet conference (they’re as exciting as they sound), Australian intranet consultant James Robertson made a simple, but vital point – before you can design or redesign your intranet you need to know what it’s supposed to do. Following this logic means that before you try to measure how well your intranet is doing, you need to know what it’s supposed to be succeeding at: No good judging sprint times at a fly-fishing contest.

Remember, an intranet is just another business tool: It’s there to increase profit. Nothing more nothing less; it’s just that it can do it in some interesting ways through efficiency and engagement.

Paul Miller, MD and proprietor of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum once described an intranet as “the backbone of the company’s information systems” and he’s right, it’s where employees should start to find any online internal system instead of rummaging for shortcuts, links, passwords for a multitude of unconnected services.

I was once told by a client that they “had no intranet”. Odd … I’d have expected them to at least have a bad one. Guess what? I stopped counting at 22 intranet mini sites. My task was to work out what the intranet should ‘do’, so I could kill the weeds and create a garden befitting the organisation.

I gave this organisation the ‘comms platform’ they requested. But I also did the user-centred design and backed it up with answering the daily tasks their employees were desperate to do online. Not necessarily sexy (walk first, run later), but it meant they could do their jobs faster and more effectively: Finding someone in the organisation, search for a particular form, contact the IT help desk, post internal vacancies. If you can do the day-to-day stuff all the fancy-pants malarkey is the icing on the cake.

The intranet as a supermarket

Business thinks: Supply chains, human resources, visual merchandising, health and safety, stock rooms, marketing/advertising, facilities, customer parking, staff parking … ad nauseam.

Customer thinks: Where are the beans, I’m in a hurry?

There are plenty of technical solutions, social tools and all the other fairground attractions, but leave this until later. Fit the IT to the requirement, not the other way round. Many’s the time I’ve been brought into a project where the emphasis is all about IT:

Org : “We’re getting SharePoint!”
Long Dog: “Cool, what are you going to do with it?”
Org: “We haven’t decided yet, but we’re working all round the clock to get it installed”
Long Dog: “Oh, ok. What does the information architecture look like? What do your editors and users say about it? How are you going to run the new intranet and who ‘owns’ it?”
Org: “We’re going to sort that all out after it goes live”
Long Dog: “Live? Live with what?”
Org: “We’re going to migrate everything from the old one to begin with. But we HAVE got SharePoint and some new templates.”
Long Dog: “It’s just the same old intranet with different colours, rounded corners and a budget binge in the hundreds of thousands, isn’t it?”
Org: “Um … yes.”

Summary

- Do your audience research and articulate a convincing story to your stakeholders
- Don’t worry about IT until you know what you’re going to create (horse BEFORE cart)
- Get professionals in when you need help at the right time – I have very reasonable rates – a little more time and money spent up front will save a lot more time and money in the future: Engage the architect BEFORE the builders begin

The Long Dog