A strategic narrative is central to employee engagement according to David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, and the Engage for Success movement they shaped. It provides a clear vision to help create common purpose, and a clear direction aids decision-making and prioritizing. The narrative should also explain why you have your vision – a theme emphasised by Dan Pink, the author of Drive, who highlights the importance of creating a sense of meaning for people.

However, developing a clear strategic narrative is difficult – perhaps the most difficult of the four enablers of engagement according to a straw poll conducted at a recent Engage for Success event.*

Here are 10 tips that may be helpful if developing a narrative for your business.

1. Answer the question of why you exist as an organisation; your “reason for being.” This provides a sense of meaning for people. It is rarely about money. Leadership should be wary, if they want to create an engaging climate, of framing their reason for being as purely financial. Involve a wider group in addressing this question asking how people think and feel about working for the business. Appreciative inquiry can be helpful as an approach exploring people’s high points at work, their wishes for the future and generating conversations about what motivates and inspires them about the business. Ask too how they think the business is different from others and what that means for them
2. Map the history and key milestones: the story so far; successes and challenges you have overcome. Within the history of the business are thousands of stories and moments that matter to the people who helped to make them happen, or who got through the tough times during which important relationships were formed. Old brand names, products and locations will still resonate and establish links with these to the current business. Avoid the temptation to write the past out of the story
3. Look at challenges and issues today that are outside your control. These could be technological, global, social, competitive or regulatory changes. Identify key forces that shape the environment within which the business operates and to which it needs to respond to survive and grow, or that create opportunities for new areas of growth
4. Do the same for internal forces for change whether they are positive or negative. The narrative can include both internal strengths (e.g. teamwork, pride, customer focus) and weaknesses (e.g. unchecked inter-departmental rivalry, resistance to change, fear of the unknown)
5. Rumfelt describes good strategy as the application of strength to promising opportunity. Di Fiore says it requires focusing on what to offer and what not to offer and being clear about your difference. Boil strategy down to ideas and phrases that are easy to understand, that build on strengths and that illustrate growth potential
6. Describe the key things that need to happen in the short-term. For example: how you will meet customer needs, what innovations you will launch or develop, what will have changed in a year? What the short-term future looks like (the things you need to do to execute your strategy)
7. What the longer-term future looks like (your vision; where you are headed and what that means for employees, customers and others). This is one of the toughest sets of questions to answer. Nevertheless it is worth pushing for answers and it helps to make the questions as tangible as possible. For example: how will a day in the life of a typical employee be different, how will customer meetings look different, what issues will the Board be discussing, who will be leading the company, what sort of people will have left and what sort of people will be working for the business now. Where will they work from, what will they spend their time doing, etc? In today’s disruptive times it is often impossible to be clear on answers to questions like these. Paradoxically, being specific on questions like this help leadership and others realise these questions cannot be answered with any certainty. While this creates anxiety it also helps all recognize that the future will emerge as a result of conversations internally and with customers and suppliers; and of course as a result of competitive or other external activities. The narrative now may contain alternative future possibilities and the process of debating these possibilities helps leadership define an umbrella vision that can cover all of them, some important “what if” questions to build into the story and some milestones that help people see the longer journey
8. Think about the consequences of not changing or not going down this journey and build this into the narrative. It becomes another reason why you need to change
9. Everyone in the organisaiton should be able to see themselves in the narrative, whether front line customer facing people, back office support, managers or leaders. This is an important test and if the narrative does not cover everyone new insertions may need to be made or “chapters” revised
10. Remember the narrative is a start point not an end. Use the narrative as a platform for engagement giving employees the chance to join conversations about their futures and to help shape it.

The narrative is there to develop “a clearly expressed story about what the purpose of the organisation is, why it has the broad vision it has and how an individual contributes to that purpose.” (Engaging for Success; MacLeod and Clarke; page 75).

View your organisation as a social construct and see the narrative as a tool to help people explore. The narrative can help this process prompting the kinds of questions that lead people to debate what needs changing and why, and it becomes a tool to help deliver that future.

*Engagement through a Neuroscience Lens; April 29, 2015; Telegraph Media Group

I’ve always found the discussion about Ground Rules in groups frustrating. I think they are important and/but I’ve shared that sense of “come on let’s get on with the real work” that I have seen in others. But I had a bit of an ah-ha moment today when I was re-reading the Skilled Facilitator by Roger Schwarz and thinking about some of the insights from Daniel Kahneman and Matt Lierberman around bias. I think they are connected. They help explain how important ground rules can be, why we don’t always recognise that, and what we can do about it.

Roger Schwarz makes a difference between behavioural and procedural ground rules that govern how groups can work. He suggests that there are specific behaviours that improve a group’s process. These behaviours turn an abstract set of core values (valid information; free and informed choice; internal commitment; compassion) into guidelines for how the group should work together. These “ground rules” are:

1. Test assumptions and inferences
2. Share all relevant information
3. Use specific examples and agree on what important words mean
4. Explain your reasoning and intent
5. Focus on interests, not positions
6. Combine advocacy and inquiry
7. Jointly design steps and ways to test disagreements
8. Discuss undiscussable issues
9. Use a decision-making rule that generates the level of commitment needed.

These rules may help mitigate our unconscious biases. Matt Lieberman, David Rock and Christine Cox suggested a model to categorize biases into COST:

• Corner-cutting: mental shortcuts that help us make quick decisions; like making decisions based on information that comes to mind most quickly, or only accepting data that confirms our preconceptions
• Objectivism: the belief that our perceptions, beliefs and understanding are true while others are wrong; like thinking that because they know less than us their perspective has less value, or thinking “I knew that all along” after the event (the 2015 election bias!?)
• Self-protection: our motivation to feel good about ourselves and our groups; like accepting or rejecting what’s being said on who is saying it not what they say or believing our success is based on character while others is based on luck
• Time and money: our tendency to value what is easy to reach, and place more emphasis on threats vs. rewards: like valuing smaller short-term rewards against longer-term more valuable rewards, or over valuing sunk costs

I can appreciate that some of the ground rules mitigate against some of the biases. Testing assumptions, sharing information and discussing the discussable helps reduce corner cutting; defining terms and inquiring properly reduces our tendency to lack objectivity, and so on.

The insight for me was that people in groups are biased whether we like it or not and ground rules are a choice we have as a group to increase our awareness of that risk and try to minimize it.

The Ground Rules then become a need not a nice to have and the challenge for the facilitator and the group is how to engage in this discussion in a way that elicits meaningful and helpful ground rules – especially if the group may not be aware of the need because bias is unconscious!

The lesson for me is to come up with approaches to generate more meaningful discussions around ground rules based not just on procedural stuff (keep to time, phones off, etc) but on those things that that can make an essential difference to the way the group works perhaps by providing input on bias and/or using more visual and imaginative ways to generate the list of rules (e.g. remember back to the group best at managing conflict or generating innovative approaches – what did they do?)

Sources: Roger Schwarz – The Skilled Facilitator Approach, Jossey-Bass, 2002; Matthew Lierberman, David Rock and Christine Cox – Breaking Bias, Neuroleadership Journal 2014

I’ve been doing some research* into the practical value of learning about how our brains work for leaders. We’ve involved different levels from Executive Directors of a global engineering business through to senior regional managers in one of the UK’s High Street Banks. One of the consistent themes in the feedback is the value of David Rock’s SCARF model to help managers plan future projects, mergers, processes and other challenges. It can also be a valuable tool for managers or facilitators planning one off sessions or a series of interventions.

The SCARF model provides a shorthand about stimuli that create toward or away responses in our brains. Toward responses make us more likely to be open to ideas, collaborative, positive, focused, creative and resilient. Away responses (“fight or flight”) make us more anxious, susceptible to distractions, and they reduce our capability to remember things and perform at our best. If we want good meetings we want people in Toward states.

SCARF stands for:

• Status: feeling important relative to others, improving oneself, responding to challenges, getting better
• Certainty: predicting the future, knowing what is going to happen
• Autonomy: controlling how things get done
• Relatedness: feeling connected, safe with others
• Fairness: fair exchanges, equal treatment.

Meetings often can put people into situations where many of these work in a negative direction (e.g. senior people holding court, unclear objectives and agendas, lack of control, mixed with people we do not know and some people getting disproportionate amounts of air space).

Using SCARF provides a scientific basis for planning how to establish a more productive working climate in the group quickly. We could:

• Invite people to share past successes and achievements (status)
• Provide extensive up front information about attendees and desired outcomes (certainty)
• Work together to confirm agendas and establish the decision making processes we will apply (autonomy)
• Provide extensive opportunities to connect, minimize input and maximize discussion (relatedness)
• Ensure equal air space and use techniques to draw out quieter participants in safe ways (anonymous voting, gradients of agreement, etc.) (fairness)

Some of this appears common sense and affirms what we may instinctively do anyway. Some provides useful ideas and challenge into the planning process. This really just scratches the surface into ways we can achieve full participation, mutual understanding, inclusive solutions and shared responsibility.

*Working with Hilary Scarlett we analyzed the impact of learning about Neuroscience in BAE Systems, Lloyds Banking Group, BIS and Orbit Housing Group. David Rock developed the SCARF model and Sam Kaner et al defined key facilitation goals in the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making.

I have been working with a client on a culture change process. We are using an appreciative inquiry approach in which the conversations all focus on what is going on when the business is performing well. By analyzing the content some conditions emerged that characterize what is going on when Quality is high. These things are:

Visible and aligned leadership

• Strong team working
• A strong appetite for learning and development
• High levels of personal commitment

Simon, one of the client team, asked a simple and difficult question: since we all know these things are conducive to a quality environment why don’t we do them all the time?

The discoveries from neuroscience may provide some answers. These are not based on motivation theories but on evidence about how our brains work.

Our brains have an organizing principle: minimize danger and maximize reward. It evolved over millions of years on the savannahs. A stimulus associated with positive emotions or rewards will lead to an approach response; a stimulus associated with negative emotions or punishments will be seen as a threat and will trigger an avoid response.

A threat response means that we find it more difficult to make decisions, solve problems and collaborate. A reward or toward response makes it more likely that we will be open to new suggestions, collaborate, trust others and accept change.

We constantly (5 times a second!) monitor the environment for threat and reward. So what stimulates either response? David Rock developed the SCARF model – a useful shorthand about stimuli that create toward or away responses. He calls them social domains that drive human behaviour:

Status: Feeling important relative to others, doing better than others, seniority, improving yourself, learning and developing, growing, self-esteem, respected by others, sense of achievement

• Certainty: being able to predict the future, knowing what is going to happen, clarity about what will happen when, clarity about responsibility
• Autonomy: feeling in control over events or environment, free to determine how things are done, influence on decisions, choice, not feeling constrained or micro-managed
• Relatedness: Feeling connected, feeling part of an ‘ingroup’, feeling safe with others, feeling someone has your interests at heart and is interested in you
• Fairness: Perceiving exchanges to be fair/transparency

While the threat and reward responses developed to protect us from danger or enemies and encourage us to move towards warmth, shelter and friends, they still operate and are stimulated by everyday events we face at work. The table below lists the kinds of things that can stimulate the responses:

So returning to Simon’s question: why don’t we do the things we know support a quality culture.

When you think about how our brains work, why would we? Although we are very much social animals we are not built to collaborate; indeed our interactions with each other can cause defensiveness, aggression and non-co-operation

• Our brains have not evolved to cope with twenty-first century corporate life. In fact we need to adjust the way we run organizations to make them more fit for people
• In particular we have to improve the way we run feedback mechanisms, meetings, communication and involvement to avoid generating negative responses that inhibit collaboration
• We all need to be more aware of how our brains work and the consequences of certain behaviours in order to create more toward responses
• Given the way our brains work it is not surprising that quality is not the de facto modus operandi
• We clearly are capable of achieving quality cultures but we need to put much more effort into, for example, providing more
  • Positive recognition
  • Information about plans, timetables, scenarios, contingencies, etc.
  • Choice over how people manage their work
  • Emphasis on building networks, contacts and friendships at work
  • Openness and transparency

This only touches the surface of some of the insights Neuroscience can bring to how we go about engaging people at work. There are, for example, many lessons to be learned around goal setting, managing bias, and emotional regulation that are also relevant to creating quality cultures.

Acknowledgements: David Rock for SCARF, Hilary Scarlett for inspiration and Simon Francis for asking great questions.