category archive: Strategic Communication

May 4, 2016

If You Want to Generate Strategies for Future Success, Start with Narratives and Metaphors

By . Filed Under: Conferences, Decision making, Innovation, National Security, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership, War and Violent Conflict.

Terms like metaphor, myth, story and narrative are not necessarily the first that come to mind when considering how to develop a future-facing national strategy. But they should be. This point was made in brilliant ways by the participants at the Atlantic Council’s second annual Global Strategy Forum in Washington DC earlier this week.

Metaphors Shape how We Understand Reality

Our collective understanding of reality is shaped in profound ways by metaphors. A metaphor is a statement suggesting that something with which we are unfamiliar is like something with which we are familiar. New technologies often produce new metaphors for how we understand society writ large. The idea of the “networked organization,” for example, grows out of a comparison with computer networks. Being able to generate metaphors about the future can help strategists pave the way to creating the systems or processes that will be required for success in it.

I had the honor of sharing the opening session stage with DARPA Director Dr. Arathi Prabhakar and Rhodes College political scientist Jennifer Sciubba and our moderator Toffler Associates CEO Deborah Westphal to discuss Strategic Foresight.

Arathi talked about DARPA’s investments in artificial intelligence, Jennifer explored some of our myths about global demography, and I addressed our need for anticipatory metaphors (beginning at 44:21).

When Conditions Change, so Must Our Strategic Narratives

Despite our 3 different topics, we all stressed that changes in our global condition means that we must think in new ways about how to be successful. As the conditions of the industrial age fade away, so will our ability to define success in the terms of that era.

When global trends portend dramatic change, as ours do now, we must assess how we think about success, and rewrite the stories and myths that guide us in our quest to compete successfully. A hundred years ago, technological conditions privileged size—big tanks, and sizable armies could take territory and resources. Our guiding principle for success became: lets get big and control large spaces.

The rise of computer networks changed our social metaphors. We think in terms of networks now: social networks, networking, and everything from human bodies to neighborhoods as networks. We didn’t simply discover that all of these phenomena are arranged as networks, we applied a guiding metaphor to discover ways in which they are like networks.

My question is: what’s next? What will be the guiding metaphor of 25 years from now? The organization that can begin to frame an anticipatory metaphor-the future of our own imaginations- is preparing itself conceptually for the future. After that, structures, processes and systems will follow.

And while our conversation at the Atlantic Council was about the American role in the world, the basic takeaways for how to generate strong strategy apply to organizations everywhere.

To see the entire day’s sessions, go: here.

 

Posted in: Conferences, Decision making, Innovation, National Security, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership, War and Violent Conflict Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
April 19, 2016

Creating an Innovative Workforce in a Large Bureaucracy: Lessons from the U.S. Air Force

By . Filed Under: Decision making, Innovation, National Security, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership, Workforce strategy.
Strategic Narratives for innovationIn 1963, Air Force pilots were awarded NASA’s Project Mercury astronauts the Collier Trophy by President Kennedy for their pioneering work in spaceflight. Today, the Air Force seeks to innovate anew

The idea that bureaucracy inhibits innovation is far from new: Political scientists in the early 1960s were already making the charge that, “There is a growing feeling that modern organizations and particularly the large, bureaucratic business and government organizations, need to increase their capacity to innovate” (Victor Thompson, Administrative Science Quarterly, June 1965).

Fifty years later, this ‘feeling’ continues to grow, often in bureaucracies that have also grown in the interim. The US Air Force is one such institution. Yet, there are creative ways to advance, as my opportunity to spend a day earlier this month with the Air Force Chief of Staff and an advisory group of my peers made abundantly clear. A diverse group of us were gathered-technology entrepreneurs, corporate CEOs, government executives, futurists and Air Force officials—to share ideas and offer our recommendations.

Although we talked extensively about practical fixes that could begin to create new pockets of innovation across the Air Force, we all agreed that ultimately the United States government as a whole will need a new way of thinking about innovation and failure. This new strategic narrative will tell a story about the US government as innovative, respectful of necessary failures, and open to true diversity of thought.

The Challenges to Innovation Facing Large Bureaucracies are Formidable
The challenges opposing innovation are formidable.

Like other large bureaucracies, the Air Force has:

  • A globally distributed workforce-in this case it is over 300,000
  • Mission critical areas in which failure is not an option
  • Decision-making that lies beyond its ability to control: Congress and the White House have a strong say in how the Air Force allocates its resources and defines incentives for performance
  • A deeply embedded structure for performance and advancement
  • A budget that is static and set by others

The lack of control over much of their own destiny, coupled with a stringently defined mission, makes it difficult to incentivize innovation. As the Air Force officials explained to us, the Service can best reward new problem solving approaches only at the tactical level, over which it has authority. Strategic innovation is more complicated.

Yet, doing nothing is not an option, in the view of the Air Force. The need to innovate is pressing. While the United States Air Force once had a clear advantage among other nations, global power shifts and the democratization of technology have made it much simpler for states and non-state actors to advance. Like other elements of the United States government, there is palpable concern these days that without establishing the conditions for innovation, the United States will fall behind, with consequences that have not yet been contemplated by national leaders.

When Mission Failure is Not an Option, Incentivizing Failure as Part of Innovation is also Difficult

One of the key recommendations for organizations seeking to innovate is to permit, even encourage failure. At the Pentagon, we discussed corporate leaders in the technology sphere who encourage failure, knowing that it is a necessary part of successful innovation.

Yet unlike a private corporation, the Air Force must explain itself to Congress, which does not look kindly on resources or programs are anything but highly successful. Neither the mindset nor the way in which budgets and programs are evaluated currently support useful failure. Other government agency or corporate managers seeking to drive innovation from below may recognize this problem as well.

How to Introduce a Culture of Innovation

The ideas that my colleagues and I came up with over the course of an afternoon, although designed to serve the Air Fove, may hold value for the leaders of similarly large, bureaucratic or networked organizations.

  • Public private collaborations are essential to accelerate innovation. Opportunities to work on a project with colleagues from other institutions could be a reward for innovation as well
  • Develop an expectation that a certain amount of failure is not only tolerable, but productive. Identifying a threshold of expected failure (20%, for example) can be a useful metric to show that innovative ideas are being developed and tried. This kind of mindset can be introduced to those who hold the purse strings, like Congress.
  • Create rewards and incentives that are not financial when the budget is fixed. Millennials (and even non-millennials!) may appreciate a shorter workweek or the opportunity to work on projects of their choosing more than money.
  • Ensure better teamwork by “translating” different fields to one another. In order to accelerate productive collaborative work, interdisciplinary team members need to understand the values, norms and vocabularies of their colleagues. This kind of understanding can be encouraged organically by embedding team members with their counterparts, so they can absorb how others talk and work. It can also be productive to surface this need and hold workshops or other guided discussions in which teammates explicitly translate their work to others.
  • Develop teams in which diversity of thought is encouraged and nurtured. In many cases, external signs of diversity (race, ethnicity, gender) are markers of diversity of thought because different people experience the world differently, but sometimes there are no external markers. Seek people who think and create differently from one another, and encourage the conditions in which those differences are valued.

These are practical steps by which a large bureaucracy can begin to establish a collective narrative of innovation that resonates throughout the organization.

If you would like to discuss developing an innovation narrative in your organization, I’d be pleased to hear from you at [email protected]

Posted in: Decision making, Innovation, National Security, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership, Workforce strategy Tags: , , , , , , , ,
March 22, 2016

Craft Your Past in Order to Shape your Future: the Power of Legacy Stories in Strategic Communications

By . Filed Under: Intercultural Communication, Marketing & Branding, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership, Uncategorized.

History belongs to the victors, it is said. But victors also arise because they have asserted interpretive control over their own history. Unlike most inheritances, the narrative that we inherit about who we are and what we are like is one that we have the ability to shape.

Powerful communicators understand that they have a meaningful degree of control over the way they interpret their legacy.

Legacy narratives are the stories that we have inherited that tell us who we are and our place in the world. No one is born without one — we are all born into something, a context, a country, into wealth or poverty, into a family that feels it once was great and has now fallen, or one that feels it is on the ascendent.

Institutions function the same way. The individuals who make them up enter them or lead them learn those narratives when they arrive on the scene. In fact, one of the ways that we become attached to institutions is by absorbing and championing their legacy identities. Companies, schools and universities, and national governments work hard to instill a sense of their legacy in their stakeholders.

When the conditions for success change, the legacy story may no longer be effective

Library of Congress Family

You can interpret your legacy-the story into which you were born-in ways that productively guide your future story.

Legacy stories serve as a touchpoint that helps us explain our current conditions and why we are successful (or failures).

When conditions change, however, the story may suddenly lose its explanatory power, pushing other institutional practices out of alignment.

Case Study: Structural Changes can displace a strong sense of legacy

In in the mid-2000s, I began work at a Fortune 500 company that had just gone from employee-owned to publicly owned. The shift from an employee owned company was a topic of big discussion. Some people had gotten wealthy in the shift, others not so much, but the more salient story was about the disappearance of a shared identity when employee ownership disappeared. People’s sense of who they were had disappeared.

The narrative that people had shared for many years about the firm was that it was a place where independent ideas and attitudes were valued, and where great ideas could find a home. This identity was wrapped up in employee ownership. And when that disappeared so did many people’s sense of loyalty and identification with the firm. In the ensuing years, while I was there, the transition was rocky. We went through several CEOs and multiple internal organization changes.

With greater attention to the symbolic narrative around employee ownership, the firm’s leadership could probably have smoothed that transition considerably. They could have communicated more effectively to employees how important values like independence of thought among employees would continue to be valued.

Case Study: Strong legacies can inhibit necessary changes

A strong sense of legacy can make it very difficult to initiate necessary changes. I saw this firsthand as the CEO of a global membership organization. It was fifty years old, was bleeding members and badly needed to change its ways and modernize. But it had a very powerful legacy story about ‘how things were done’ and ‘who we are’ that was maintained both internally by employees and externally through many of its members. They had helped to build the organization.

This legacy became a barrier, and it became my job to stitch the organization’s existing story to its potential future in a new way. I was fortunate to have advisors around me who helped me to communicate with those who were most afraid of change with more grace than I might have otherwise, and with respect for the important legacy of the organization.

Take Control of Your Legacy Story

The distinct quality of legacy stories is that they can seem static and unchangeable. You know that a legacy story is in operation when someone tells you “that is just the way we are” or that “this is how we have always done things.” The value of the legacy seems to grow as time goes on.

Legacy stories are like magnets that attract and repel— eventually everything that happens can seem to be either because of the central story or in spite of it. They get heavier. They get harder to move. They get harder to change. The story itself takes on the power of immovable fact.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Legacies are rewritten successfully when organizations or members of them start telling the story differently. This may be a grassroots effort or a conscious decision on the part of leaders.

A Quick Note about Ethics

One small but important note about ethics and integrity. Making up pasts out of whole cloth or lying about the past is not the route to lasting power and not what I am talking about here. Ethics and strength go hand-in-hand. People know when legacy stories are being stretched or when they are being told without integrity or respect for their basic facts. Within that ethical band, though, we have room to create from the ingredients of our inherited stories, those that will guide our intentions and communicate our values going forward.

What is Your Legacy Story? Is it Hurting or Helping your Ambitions?
Do you have a legacy story that is holding you or your organization back? Here are a few questions to ask to help clarify:

  • What are our legacy stories?
  • How do we use our legacy story? Do we use it to perpetuate the status quo or to mobilize change?
  • What are the forgotten parts of our legacy? Are any of those usefully revived in order for us to reinvent ourselves?
  • Are there values or activities that we are interested in pursuing in the future? How can we link our legacy to new initiatives in ways that fortify and support our new directions, and that help explain to outsiders what we are doing?
  • What are the key moments or events that seem to illuminate the theme of the legacy story? Are there other moments, or events or even representative figures who should be brought in in order to begin shifting the story?
  • Legacy stories are often told in legacy syntax, using habitual turns of phrase. What happens if you retell the story in a different way and what does it illuminate?

If you have comments about legacy stories or questions, I’d welcome hearing from you. You can reach me at [email protected] or via the contact form here.

Posted in: Intercultural Communication, Marketing & Branding, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership, Uncategorized Tags: ,
April 30, 2013

Let’s Celebrate the 2nd Anniversary of “A National Strategic Narrative”

By . Filed Under: Books & Films, Decision making, Intercultural Communication, International Politics, National Security, Politics and Policy, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership.

This has been a tough spring for national cohesion in the United States. Automatic federal spending cuts called sequestration kicked in after Congress failed to agree on how to manage the federal budget. The Senate voted down a bill that would expand background checks for gun purchasers, despite strong support around the country. And bombings at the Boston Marathon committed by young men hovering between foreign identity and American citizenship confused any clear idea of American identity.

This makes it a good time to mark the two year anniversary of A National Strategic Narrative, published in April 2011 by aNational Strategic Narrativeuthors Captain Wayne Porter, USN and Col Mark Mykleby, USMC under the pseudonym Mr. Y.

The document grabbed the attention of politicians and pundits here in the United States, and foreign ministers in Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps most important, it garnered attention from everyday citizens for proposing a reinvigorated American identity and role in the world. Continue reading

Posted in: Books & Films, Decision making, Intercultural Communication, International Politics, National Security, Politics and Policy, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
January 23, 2013

Resilience Narratives Key to Resilient Systems

By . Filed Under: Conferences, Crisis Management, Decision making, Intercultural Communication, International Politics, Politics and Policy, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership.

The 2013 World Economic Forum Conference that began today in Davos is dedicated this year to resilient dynamism. As Arianna Huffington noted earlier in the day, the key concept that gives rise to the need for resilience is our global interconnectedness. Quoting Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin, she cites five attributes that resilient systems characteristically share:

  • Spare capacity
  • Flexibility — the ability to change, evolve, and adapt in the face of disaster.
  • Limited or “safe” failure, which prevents failures from rippling across systems.
  • Rapid rebound — the capacity to reestablish function and avoid long-term disruptions.
  • Constant learning, with robust feedback loops.

Huffington adds a sixth, “the will to want to be resilient.”

To that list, I feel we must add a seventh requirement for the present and future, Resilience Narratives: stories that will help disparate and potentially adversarial players see themselves as active participants in collaborative futures. Continue reading

Posted in: Conferences, Crisis Management, Decision making, Intercultural Communication, International Politics, Politics and Policy, Strategic Communication, Strategic Leadership Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
December 1, 2012

Intertextuality for Strategic Communication

By . Filed Under: Books & Films, Intercultural Communication, Marketing & Branding, Narrative forms, Popular Culture, Public Relations, Strategic Communication.

The Power of Reference, Allusion and Quotation in Communication

Two recent films, Skyfall and Anna Karenina, are made more intensely meaningful by their intentional intertextuality-their incorporation of previous iterations and interpretations of the story they are themselves telling. Both offer insights into the ways communicators can benefit from the same kind of internal referentiality.

The Concept of Intertextuality

Literary and linguistic theorists began to work with the concept of intertextuality in the mid-1960s, when theorist Julia Kristeva coined the term. Scholarly definitions have proliferated and grown increasingly technical in the intervening half century. For our purposes, the following definition works just fine: Intertextuality means that texts – novels, paintings, films, but also tax codes and thank you letters –gain meaning not through their reference to an external reality, but by their reference to pre-existing other texts. Intertextuality is not a choice, but rather an inevitable by- product of creating, because we are always creating into already existing histories, discourses and ways of interpreting. These existing frames have already partly shaped what we will produce and how it will be recieved. An author or an artist may intend to give us something original, but they can’t, fully. We readers, in turn, never have direct access to a work, but can only get at it by making our way through its prior iterations and interpretations.

James Bond and Anna Karenina are among the most iconic popular texts in modern Western culture. The James Bond series, which is the longest-running film series in history, has given us the rules by which we define spy thrillers. Anna Karenina is no longer only the Leo Tolstoy novel, but also the dozens of derivative films, ballets, operas and musicals that have been created since the late 19th century.

Both are completely enmeshed in our everyday language — we think things about ourselves through the mesh of their expressions:“Bond, James Bond,” and “Shaken, not stirred,”are shorthand invocations of suave masculinity. “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” has become a catch-all syntax for describing the singularity of just about anything, including in statistics, where the “Anna Karenina principle” is applied to ecological and economic puzzles.

Semiotics professor Daniel Chandler explains the implications of intertextuality: Continue reading

Posted in: Books & Films, Intercultural Communication, Marketing & Branding, Narrative forms, Popular Culture, Public Relations, Strategic Communication Tags: , , , , , , ,