It has been a great few days at the IABC World Conference, and I’ll be writing up highlights for the blog shortly.
Until then, here is the resource page for my session on Transmedia Storytelling for corporate communicators.
The slides are available on Slideshare.
The subject sparked some great conversations, and I want to keep that going. Leave a comment or get in touch with your thoughts about how you can tell your corporate story in a different way.
Media as an industry has an ability to cannibalise itself. Journalists are by nature inquirers and investigators. They look for the story and have a need to present it. It is not surprising then that a mountain has been written about the NYT internal Innovation Report. The leak of report, along with the executive departure drove a lot of speculation, commentary, opinion, and tweetage.
That a major media organisation would prepare a strategic thought-paper on the future impacts of their market should not be surprising. The Innovation report is a significant thought piece with real lessons for industries well beyond its implications for the paper itself, media and publishing.
Nieman Lab does an excellent job of examining the implications from the media industry perspective.
There is also some excellent analysis of the content of the report from other commentators, looking at it as a call to action for an organisation needing to reinvent in a changing market.
David Armano’s perspective is a standout, categorising the insights into the four topics of agility, culture, talent and customer-centricity.
David Armano’s dissection of the strategic elements of the NYT Innovation Report
Ezra Klein at Vox highlights the report’s excellent explanation of distruption. This diagram explains the three modes of disruption in the clear style you would expect from NYT writers.
NYT Innovation report’s explanation of disruption, via Vox.
Australian workplace and digital analyst Paul Wallbank extracts three lessons for businesses: being digital first, breaking down the silos, and ensuring your business is discoverable.
The full report is worth the investment of time to read by any communicator, change agent or strategist.
There are a number of change studies that demonstrate that effective context-setting is an important part of enabling employees to sense-make during change. By providing clear background to the market your organisation operates in, you are preparing the field for proactive or reactive initiatives in the future. The NYT Innovation report is an interesting and important model of what that contexualised call to action can be.
There are six themes outlined in the NYT Innovation Report that provide a very simple compass for internal communicators considering how to reach employees who are time poor, information-laden and who have different needs.
1. Discovery
“We need to think more about…packaging our work in more useful ways” With the volume of information growing, reduction and control become limited-success strategies. How do you ensure your content is discoverable, at the right time?
2. Promotion
Ensuring information is promoted means not just ‘publishing’ but by sharing, by amplifying, and by use of peers. There is a fine balance between push and spam. Segmentation becomes critical, as does understanding the needs of the employee to target promotion of relevant, useful content.
3. Connection
Seeking ways to ensure audiences – employees – can participate, comment, create and contribute is an essential component of communication, engagement and change. Whether though user generated content, internal ‘crowdsourcing’, communities, and networks, connection is the the key to relevance and ultimately the path to engagement.
4. Experimentation
Promoting active experimentation, the capacity to fail fast, iterate and learn is a core skill and critical to building the agility of any communication function. Experimentation and connection can work in partnership, through the use of pilot groups, advisory communities and user experience (UX) work.
5. Influencers
In complex environments, the role of the subject matter expert, the thought leader or the process lead extends to filtering and amplifying key information, themes and messages relevant to their specialisation. Collaborative platforms and enterprise social networks enable this.
6. Market context
The competitor cheat sheets in the report are succinct and frank. Do you provide employees with concise information about the others in your market? Is this information purely product and service comparison, or does it go deeper into comparative strengths and weaknesses.
Your view
I’m interested in communicators views on all aspects of the report – the content, the format, the debate and analysis surrounding its leak. Join the conversation by leaving a comment.
What lesson does Disney’s Frozen have for internal communicators?
In the lead up to the IABC World Conference, this came up in the conversation with Natasha Nicholson, Executive Editor of IABC’s CW Magazine about how transmedia storytelling is changing the game for internal communication.
We discuss the difference between stories and story worlds, seeing the corporate story from multiple perspectives and the idea that sometimes, communicators need to ‘let it go’ when it comes to trying to control the message.
A good story is still a good story, but the ways in telling it are now very different and the ways of sharing it are a lot more open.
Release Control of the Corporate Narrative—and Reap the Rewards | IABC World Conference.
The full interview runs 14 minutes and is available here.
IABC World Conference Banner
Internal communication is a Frankenstein’s monster of practices, disciplines and theories. Part corporate communication, part change, part behavioural science, part craft. Increasingly it seems that the smartest thinking in internal communication is coming from fields outside of the traditional communication space. Cognitive studies, data, technology, knowledge management, UX, design and anthropology are providing new ways of sense-making.
A great case in point is the intersection of design thinking, user experience (UX) and progress in neuroscience. Dave Snowden is the founder of Cognitive Edge, and in this talk at LEANUX14 provides a potted introduction to complexity theory. He does a pretty solid job of demolishing the traditional approaches to communication and change through establishing a change vision and defining the future state, arguing that humans – and organisations – are far too human and complex for that to work.
Keynote: It’s the Process, Jim, But Not As We Know It – Dave Snowden at LEANUX14.
There are many notable things here, but I love these quotes about how we sense make through story.
You manage what you can manage, and you don’t waste time and energy pretending you can manage things in an ordered and structured way when the world is more complicated than that.
Stories are unique to human beings. People remember a story, whereas they don’t remember a document or a best practice tear sheet.
The stories that profoundly influence us though are not the stories told in highly facilitiated workshops by new age fluffy bunny consultants who really get their rocks off by getting more profound stories than anybody else. They are actually the day to day micro fragmented narratives of the water cooler, the school gate, the checkout queue, the beer after work. It’s those small micro fragments which fundamentally influence who and what we are…we recall those stories as if from nowhere in contextual need.
All human storytelling traditions (until Disney got hold of them) are deeply negative dark stories because we learn from failure, we don’t learn from success.
Snowden’s explanations of how organisations as complex systems naturally resist and defy the attempt to change them in a linear way is thought provoking stuff and points to why so many communication efforts fail abjectly. He provides some cautions in terms of how designers, Lean and UX practitioners approach change.
There is much here that applies directly to internal and change communication and (at the risk of falling into the trap of the second point). It’s worth spending the time to explore this disruptive view which is a challenge to the traditional approaches adopted by many communication practitioners and a way of seeing organisations as they are, rather than how we want them to be.
A big HT to @semanticwill for RT:
This talk from #LeanUX14 by @snowded is definitely worth 50 minutes of your time – http://t.co/S2UatMsez2
— Ketil Jensen (@ketilj) May 13, 2014
Meaning Business 