Storytelling

Recently, a former colleague re-joined the company for a special project. His nickname "Van Z" and past exploits were soon revived by long-time veterans, and to his amazement a lot of people he never met before knew of him and talents. This kind of company lore is great, it binds colleagues together in a shared understanding of what the company is all about in a much more fundamental way than the mission statement.

Babur & Companions
sharing tales around the campfire

The stories of past projects, remarkable customers and colleagues, and memorable moments are a living legacy of where we have been as people, as colleagues and as a company. These stories are repeated, embellished and woven together to reinforce what matters most.

The coffee corner in a great company culture is the campfire of its tribal identity, where colleagues confirm each others value and identity. Conversely, if the coffee corner where you work is the place to bitch about bosses and do some casual backstabbing you're well advised to work elsewhere, because the culture is showing severe symptoms of incurable decay.

My phone is keeping a track record of where I've been and what I've done, which is really useful for time writing and billing. More than that, it tells me my own story, helping me to remember and feel satisfied about the work I've done and the places I have been. It goes beyond the statistics of location and time to establish a narrative based on my comments and place names, and this is hugely satisfying.

Right now I'm working to lift our team reporting, daily standups and weekly review meetings to that next level of usefulness. As a project manager I need these reports and meetings to keep a firm grasp on our work. As a leader, I need them to reinforce what we are all about, which means that I need them to keep the narrative of our story as a project team alive.  Just like the phone app delivers more than bare stats, I want my project management to be about more than control.

What I find challenging is allowing the right amount of personalization and storytelling without fostering the kind of loose banter and improductive blah that clogs up far too many meetings already. In theory, meetings already work like this, which the confirmation of last time's minutes, the regular agenda items and a recap. In practice they're either really short and businesslike or really long and tedious, depending on the leader and the group.

My current approach is to frame each talking point in a narrative way, connecting it explicitly to what happened recently and what is about to happen. I also try to draw parables using existing company lore. Meanwhile the subjects under discussion are determined by the meeting agenda, and errant lines of conversation are pruned back with a meaningful glance at my watch. So far so good.

Raising a digital native

My son, with a mere 18 months to his name, is scarily good at handling his mom's iPad and my Lumia. My conundrum is whether to encourage him stacking wooden blocks over playing with the iPad and take the shiny gadgets away from him, or let him play Baby DJ as much as he wants.

My hopes for his future certainly include more mental than physical labor, which implies that being a digital native is more useful than being a very good stacker of blocks. Character development, however, certainly requires that he gets his hands dirty with all kinds of physical things to learn about the power and limitations of being a man.

I wrote my first story 1991 on a Kaypro II with an eight inch green-on-black screen, technology from my birth year 1984. It was about a talking pen who helped an old writer overcome his writer's block. It led me to a lot of experimentation with the various bits of software and files in my dad's library of 5,25 inch soft 'floppies' and started a lifelong passion for all things digital.

My parents, bless them, made a visionary decision a year or so later: They got a modern IBM personal computer and a dial-up modem, and they let me and my siblings access the internet for a short time every day. Back then that meant hours of Microsoft Encarta and minutes of using AltaVista. When I was ten the son of a family friend introduced me to Turbo Pascal. It was the start of my career in IT to this day, and the best thing to happen to my young mind since learning to read in English.

My son is growing up in a world where computers and internet access are taken for granted,  his understanding of the technological underpinnings of his universe will be more conceptual than technical.
The way he deals with devices, apps and content he likes even before he knows how to speak leads me to believe he will be as much more fluent with the use of this technology than I ever was. His understanding is not about how the technology works, but how to use it in order to satisfy his needs.

So where do I step in and set the boundaries on his digital adventures? There is so much literature on parenting that arguments can be found for or against any policy. My goal is to raise a boy into a man, and these days that means he needs to be proficient in the use of software and services to get where he wants to go.

Character is more important than ability for life's tough moments and choices, and I find it hard to asses how that aspect of parenting is changed by living in a partly digital world. Right now I believe that I should always give him as much access to technology and connectivity as he can manage responsibly. Of course what that means in the day to day toddling about with my phone remains to be seen. I don't have all the answers, no parent does. Perhaps our kids will be able to Google it some day, although I suspect that Google will mean as much as AltaVista by then.

Such is the way of things, including, regrettably, the skill set that allows me to determine what my son can and cannot do. The odds are good he'll be blogging some day about  how his decrepit father gets lost in the world of sensory immersion feeds.