Tag: storytelling

The Importance of Wholeness
agility · mindset · wholeness

The Importance of Wholeness

Sumit Sethi3 Comments

It was 2008, and I had taken a train to Bournemouth, on the South coast of the UK. I had worked only in Reading before, so it was my first visit to Bournemouth. At the interview I had scheduled there, I met Robert. I loved the way he asked me questions – he was looking for what I knew, and I felt very comfortable explaining myself and my professional experience to him. I could be myself, because someone wanted to really know what I knew, whereas sadly, most of my interviews before that had focused a lot on what I didn’t know.

To be able to be yourself is something which might sound very simple, but in reality, not many people are able to do that. It’s almost like people wear this mask in front of others, and I’ve seen many colleagues of mine wear that mask for a very long time, feeling like the more fake they are, the better they look. In reality, the more you act against your true self, the more you need to work on it.

Sometimes I feel many organisations have this pressure to have people behave in a certain way. The employees don’t understand the need or the culture of the company, they just prefer wearing the mask, and behaving in a way which the company likes, and they become fine doing that for years and years. Some even feel as long as they are getting promoted gradually and get a good financial hike, they are fine with the mask.

I remember moving into a house back in Bournemouth with 2 amazing housemates to share with. It was a great place, but I was scared of being new to the place, and not knowing the culture of the place, so my first reaction to everything was defensive. The UK taught me to say thank you and sorry for anything and everything. Don’t get me wrong, I used to do that before too, but they do it for every small thing, and this habit made me apologise even if I wasn’t doing something wrong. Comparing this to a company, many people feel that being their true self is risky, they feel if they get their true self out, people might not like them, or people might feel they don’t need to respect them. I’ve heard this from many friends, that often they fear the real them coming out and spoiling the whole relationship status in office.

How often have you seen a meeting room with 8-10 people talking about emotions? You’ll see people talking about something good or bad from electronics to politics, but they don’t talk about emotions, because people feel scared of showing them to their office. I remember a guy once told me he wanted to cry, but can’t because people will think he’s a girl (kind of a sick convention that only girls cry – hate this), He was really upset with the way his manager behaved with him, but was reluctant to either tell him or go to HR. He finally quit the company after suffering for about 2 years. On his last day, I was shocked to see him say thanks to his boss, and when I asked him, he told it’s a small world and they could meet again.

Some people I worked with were very different, they would crack the odd joke, really feel their true self in office, speak what they want to – and really do what they believed in. I feel at times, these people really are very passionate about what they do, and often are very successful. Sometimes to be scared is good, but ensuring you bring your true self to the picture often helps.

It took me a long, long time to realise that we are not meant to be perfect; WE’RE MEANT TO BE WHOLE – Jane Fonda

I was in GE for 7 years, and often when leaders came to speak, I saw a lot of storytelling. Those stories were not only about ones about success and superheroes. They believed in sharing a lot of failures, and the way they told it, it really made you connect well to the story. Yes, they were very senior in their roles (VP, Director, CXO’s) – but even at that level, being your true self is a big thing. How often have you heard a VP come to a stage and say well I failed in xyz? You don’t, or it’s rare, and that’s what made me happy to hear stories in GE. I felt those people really had learnt the lesson of wholeness and were very vulnerable in front of people. It was not always failure stories, there were good/great ones too, but sometimes we all need to face the big fact of life – we all learn the most when we fail.

In a similar manner, I also saw people bringing personal items to their workspaces. Some people having family photos at their desk makes them feel good and ensures they don’t have to keep that mask on. I was big Friends fan, so I had a photo with my friends in a coffee shop, and often people talking about it made me open and happy.

I think this whole thing also ties to the psychological safety of a team. If people don’t feel safe, they can never speak up or be open or true to themselves. It’s the duty of team members to ensure everyone feels safe to speak up and point out anything and everything.

Another aspect which ties in is being vulnerable when speaking to your team. I’ve always seen that we as leaders are often telling success stories where we were amazing, but fewer people like to accept and share their failures in public. They might have learned the most during those failures in life, but they don’t take pride in speaking about them. Being vulnerable for a leader is a very important attribute where people start seeing them as normal human beings, and not superheroes, and then the team feels safe to speak up and share their own opinions, even if they are the wrong ideas. Often the wrong ideas lead to the right ones, and every thought should be taken as an opportunity to learn and grow from there.

I will end this by telling people to think how easy it would be for you to work if you have the real you out front, and you realise you might have strength and also some weakness, but you learn to live with it, but always make sure you don’t wear a mask, and get your true self to your workplace. Because at the end of the day, YOU ARE SPECIAL.

The Power of Improv and Story Telling
agility · kids

The Power of Improv and Story Telling

Sumit SethiLeave a comment

While we do a lot of things in our lives daily, the interesting fact is that our life is nothing but a combination of various stories. Some might be good, some might be bad. Some we realize later, some sooner and while all the stories revolve around us, we tend to keep moving on. On a reflection these stories are important to connect the dots. If you heard the famous speech by Steve Jobs, it tells how connect the dots backwards it all makes sense, and how important that it.

Story telling started in my life early in various forms, but with improv from m3.0 it was another flavor. I’ve tried the m3.0 improv cards with teams for retrospective, and then with leaders for their views, and lately with kids to take their feedback.

Let me start with the most common way I’ve done this which is in the sprint retrospective. Like any other retrospective, the main purpose is to collect what went well and what could be improved. Only that this time I lay down a pack of cards. In one variation I hide the images, so that it can be a random image which the person gets whereas sometimes I just lay down all the cards (like you see in image) and seeing the image the person tells 1 thing which he/she thinks went well or can be improved.

One Interesting aspect is where I feel that each image has a different perception amongst everyone, and so I never let them help each other. I just tell them to use their own imagination and think what it is. Because the image is not that important, as the story linked to the image. While some people have a story in mind and just link the image to the story, others create the story with the image (which is the interesting one).

Often when you do storytelling, you remove the persona’s out of the picture, and you just narrate the whole incident as a story, which makes it valuable, non-offensive and very open like a fact. The facilitator often notes the output of the story, and then we discuss on the story if needed.

The images are cool, so you see people smiling and thinking at times. Other times, they complain that they don’t understand the image, but again I tell them to use their creative minds.

While we go along the room, we suddenly see people being more energetic and active. The improv cards have that effect on people who start realizing that they can tell a story with the good/bad without it looking like a blame or a cry which is brilliant. It’s like a superpower at times which is funny but true.

So, we go across the room and the facilitator takes public notes, hence discussing actions.

Another way I did once was the team to lead the activity, and they themselves making the notes, hence self-organizing on what was important.

Another variation I tried was “A day in the sprint” way, where I tell people to tell a story of a day in the sprint where 1 thing good or 1 thing bad or a combination happened. It could 1 good from one day and 1 bad from one day, but it should be 1 story.

I tell them at times to pick multiple cards too, if it helps them. Again, the power lies in the story.

With the leadership team, when I use the cards, it’s mainly for their views/feedback/observation, like let’s discuss about this team, and while people like to keep silent, the improv gives them voice and suddenly we see stories.

A small number of people have problem seeing the cards and telling stories, but I give them time. I feel a kid inside a person always lives who knows how to stich a story which is so important.

Leaders often are vocal, but the story again makes it more factual, and it’s to draw points from stories in my experience.

Another variation I did recently was with bunch of kids. Here is how I went about with them:

I distributed six improv cards to each kid. All of them were wondering what the heck was this? They were thoroughly amused looking at the strange images. The idea was for them to use the images and tell things about their life looking at what has happened.

I emphasized on the fact that sometimes in life, we need to seriously reflect on what all we are doing, what is done and where are we headed. The emotions and facts that surface during self-reflection is a powerful thing. I’ve sat with people talking about this and seen them sometimes ending in tears, but always emerging with a clearer sense of where they may want to go from there. So, we started the activity with instruction to use a minimum of three out of six cards and narrate a story from their lives. In parallel we created a word cloud from what came as stories (you can see in the images).

With something as simple as this, the topics which emerged like gender, society, aspirations, dreams, parents were quite powerful, and I felt the session went way beyond what I had initially thought of. While some reflections were tough for me as a person to digest, others were good to hear. We don’t realize in life that when we keep the problem or state the problem, we are in a way seeing the problem in absolute starkness. We see it from a different perspective, and again this is necessary. The word cloud was simply illuminating compared to some of the other sessions I’ve done before.

Lastly, I’ve also done improv using Story Cubes. You can read about them here.

Again, for me all the 3 set of people (Scrum Teams/Leaders/Kids) had unique experiences with Improv, but I can always see the kid stitching the story and I feel very good when I listen to through insightful stories. I think this art of storytelling makes this practice of m3.0 very powerful.

If you want to learn more about improv cards, you can look at the management 3.0 page here on the same.

Retrospective using Rory’s Story Cubes and management 3.0 practices
agility

Retrospective using Rory’s Story Cubes and management 3.0 practices

Sumit Sethi1 Comment

While we do a lot of Retro’s, often a thought which comes to my mind is that “does everyone really speak?”, or “does everyone wonder how they were spending their days inside the sprint?”.

I had recently done an amazing workshop on management 3.0 with Sarika , and that has a practice called as improv cards where using improv cards we tell stories.

She also said a similar thing could be done with Rory’s story cubes, and while seeing them on amazon made me so excited that I couldn’t help ordering the standard set that moment itself. Although I really didn’t know what to do with it back then, I did have a faint idea that like improv cards, they had images, but then how to play it in a retro was not very clear.

So, we recently had a retro, and I created a game. The rules were that each person steps on the stage and rolls four normal dices. If they get a six on any of the four dices, they are lucky to roll the Rory’s story cubes, else we continue to next person. The moment you get a six, you roll the Rory’s story cubes, and then using the images you rolled, you take minimum of 5 cubes or a max of 9, to make a story of your life inside the sprint, the story could be a happy thing, the story could have a thing which needs improvement or both. Once you tell the story we see possible actions.

I started this by giving an example with all 9 cubes. And post this it was fun, initially some people didn’t get a six, but once they did, I saw people pumped up to get to the stage.

Not only people were telling stories, I felt they were connecting their story to their empathy, and how they felt on some actions, which was so good to hear. Some people stretched which no one knew but came out through this, some minor things which we ignore came out, and the participants had fun linking the images to the stories. Sometimes they would ask me what’s this image, and I would say use your wild imagination, because an image might mean something to someone. The funny one was that one took an image of magnifying glass; another guy took same image for a bat. So, the different perspectives of individuals came in.

Not to forget the essence of the whole activity was the story telling. The Stories shed more light on the seriousness of the issue, or the happiness on the delight, and it made people connect. I was super impressed how everyone participated, and even the people who are generally shy to speak had a story to tell.

The whole activity took an hour, and everyone did roll the cubes. The entire activity for me was such a good one, made me so happy that people were able to connect their life inside the sprint to a story.

End of the day a great Retro is where you get the reality out, and you as a team see the need to improve.

Continuous Improvement is like oxygen to a Team, as it motivates the team constantly to do better.