Does size count?

In answer to the perennial management question about the best size for a team, the answer from the academic frontline is . . . wait for it . . . 'it depends'.

This is an undoubtedly too-flip summary of a more sophisticated discussion by professors at Wharton business school, who suggest that while optimum size can be an important consideration and depends partly on the team's role, it's not the most important feature in putting a team together. The team's tasks and the mix of skills required are likely to be primary.

By the way: if your team has more than five people in it... oh-oh!

Technorati: teams management organizational development

Will dialogue build trust?

If lack of trust is an issue in your organisation, would dialogue be a helpful way through it? In this short excerpt from his book on conflict, Mark Gerzon makes a case for using dialogue in organisations, and usefully summarises some of what distinguishes dialogue from debate.

I can't see that Gerzon provides much evidence in this excerpt for his assertion that dialogue fosters trust (though I'm biased to believe this). And if it isn't obvious, I would add that I think the assumptions and attitudes inherent in dialogue can also represent a frame of mind with which you can approach any conversation: it doesn't have to be a facilitated process for groups as a whole to follow.

Technorati: dialogue organization trust

Storytelling - ownership and meaning

Last week I went to the international conference of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) in Vancouver. One of the recurring themes (fads, some might say) running through some of the presentations was that of story telling, or narrative.

The most important insight, for me, on this topic was not found at the conference, however. I found it on a card at Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology, in front of a display of Native American totem poles:

"Only those who know and have the right to the stories can tell the meaning of the totem poles."

This raises questions in my mind about story telling in an organisational context. Who owns the stories? What totems acknowledge that ownership? Who can tell the meaning of the stories?

The idea that different stories might be owned by different groups, that we might create artifacts to remind a community (or organisation) of different stories, and that ownership and meaning are somehow integral to each other, suggest a highly developed social and conceptual framework for narrative that both intrigued and delighted me. I wonder to what extent business communicators' relatively recent enthusiasm for storytelling rises to the sophistication of the communities that carved these poles.

Telling stories to elicit training needs

At Anecdote Shawn Callahan suggests a simple but compelling method of eliciting training needs by asking groups of people to share stories of times when they have not had all the skills they might have needed. I can imagine variations on this to include about examples of where a training course helped them perform better, or about skills they already have and value, and which ones they believe they could train others in and which - if any - they could not.

Training in organisations is useless

David Maister writes persuasively about how many organisations fail to understand and make good use of training:

I now believe that the overwhelming majority of all business training, by me and by everyone else, is a complete waste of money and time, because only a microscopic fraction of any training is ever actually put into practice and yield the hoped-for benefits.

The main reason is that companies keep trying to bring about changes in behavior by training their people in new things, and then sending them back to their operating groups subject to the same measures and management approaches as before. Not surprisingly, little, if any of the training ever gets implemented.

What companies don’t seem to understand is that training is a wonderful LAST step in bringing about changed behavior, but a pathetically useless first step.

The rest of his comments are well worth reading.

[via Anecdote]

The language of knowing

I'm a near-convert to the view which holds that our language creates the worlds we live in. So when it comes to the language of 'knowledge management', I believe the words we use to talk about it and the way we talk about it determine what we know about knowing.

Knowledge managment researcher and consultant Larry Prusak touches very briefly on this in his comments on four Greek terms for knowledge - episteme, techne, phronesis and metis. While this may seen arcane to some, he implies that in the absence of such a sophisticated knowledge about knowing, some businesses have wasted tens of billions of dollars on 'knowledge systems'.

I'm sure he's right, and I also think we could look even further at the way our language in this field presupposes certain assumptions. In particular, talking about the subtle implications and possible illusions of reifying a process of knowing into a substance we call 'knowledge', might be another interesting and useful path.