One of the projects I have been working on recently, with my excellent colleague Jan Allon-Smith, has been resolving and long-standing, ingrained and toxic conflict in a large organisation. We did a lot of preparatory work (interviews, report-writing etc) to understand the issues, and then to present (as Peter Block recommends in the excellent Flawless Consulting) a clear and simple picture of what is happening, and develop a possible way forward; and in particular to earn th

In Current Psychotherapies, Raymond Corsini recounts what he calls 'the most successful and elegant psychotherapy I have ever done.' It also strikes me as the most elegant example of Shifting a Story that I have ever encountered. At the time, he was working as a psychologist in a prison in New York, and a prisoner who was being released on parole made an appointment to see him. The prisoner said: I did not want to leave until I thanked you for what you had done for me. When I

On my main blog (here) I have written about my recent experiments with the Visual Explorer images/cards which I bought recently. In particular I mentioned how an image could serve as a way of capturing a whole set of thoughts and feelings, and later provide a way of quickly referring back to, and re-visiting a whole section of conversation. It was my insightful wife, Jane, who pointed out that this is very similar to the naming of stories in the ManyStory approach. As I note

One of my unhelpful stories about myself is that I am lazy. It is not a story without some foundation, as well. However, it is unhelpful, as it can both make me feel guilty, and give me an excuse not to do things... So it is one that I am working on. And one way I have found really helpful, in terms of loosening the grip, is to track how I actually spend my days. I am using Toggl to do this: it is easy and it generates nice summary reports, as well as retaining all the deta

Today, Professor Mark Reed publishes his latest book, The Productive Researcher. It's a good book: he has interviewed many successful researchers, reflected on his own experience, and drawn together many different strands of thought to create a guide, or tool-kit for academic researchers, who are under increasing pressure to be more 'productive.' The first half of the book is focussed on fundamental principles, and the second on practical applications. I mention it here beca

Last Friday I ran a workshop on the ManyStory Approach to coaching, as outlined in Shifting Stories, for members of Cumbria Coaching Network. As ever, it was fascinating to work with peers, using the ManyStory approach outlined in the book. Participants were particularly interested in the way I ran the practice session, in which they worked in pairs as a coach and a coachee, seeking to change an unhelpful story. I gave them a very clear structure: 15 minutes on each of the th

It has been an eventful summer. After years of trouble-free driving, Mike, our son had two accidents in two days. In the first, he simply scraped the car of someone staying at the holiday cottage next door. In the second, he wrote our car off (but nobody was hurt). Not very long after that, I took a fairly nasty fall when rock climbing, and sprained and bruised my ankle quite badly, which put paid to a number of walks on the high fells over the summer. I was conscious of mana

Yesterday we had our monthly meeting of the Cumbria Coaching Network. I had missed the previous meeting as I had been out of the country, so it was a couple of months since I had seen everyone; and in that couple of months a number of them had got around to reading Shifting Stories and trying stuff out. Four people, quite independently, sought me out at the breaks to tell me that they'd had a go at the Many Story approach, and found it really useful. In fact, that has been th

Just over a week ago, I was out for a walk with Jane, my wife, Annie, my daughter, and James, my grandson. We needed to get back for a particular time, and had a decision to make about whether to take a shorter or longer route home. So I got out my phone to check how far we had already walked, what the time was, and so on. And at that moment, as I looked at the phone, I slipped off the edge of the path and fell as my foot slid down a bank. I flung out my hands and broke my fa

Last week, I was due to pick up my son, Michael, from Newcastle at the end of his University term (He is studying Graphic Design at Northumbria - and did all the design for Shifting Stories). However, he went to the RVI A&E department with stomach pains, and the next day, they took his appendix out. He remained in hospital for a week, for observation (the operation was not as straightforward as they had hoped), and came home yesterday. I am aware of a couple of stories availa

I was reflecting on sales of Shifting Stories this week. The graph of relative sales position on Amazon looks like this: Combined with the direct sales (via this website and person-to-person) and the data from the publisher (which has a slight time-delay built in) the story is one of slow and steady. I tweeted: ‘Two obvious stories available to me about book sales: they haven't slowed down; they haven't speeded up. Guess which is more helpful…’ Of course, that is a slightly

Some time ago, on my general blog, I told the story of a friend of mine, that illustrates another aspect of working with story. He had suffered from adult-onset epilepsy. The medication he was given had an unfortunate side-effect. He started to suffer from troubling flashbacks/daydreams. These were all of a similar nature. He would remember some past encounter, of a trivial nature, with someone whom he had only met once, when the encounter had ended unsatisfactorily from his

A while back, I started initial conversations as I began to do some work for a large organisation, and in my discussions with various senior leaders, I heard some very different stories about what turned out to be the same incident. A Regional Director told me of a meeting he and some colleagues had had with the CEO and the Head of Corporate Services. The idea was to sort out some of the problems that the Regions had with Head Office – which, they said, were impeding much nee

I am somewhat ambivalent about how much one can learn from books. On the one hand, I have myself learned a great deal from books over the years. And clearly i believe in the possibility, or I should not have troubled to write a book myself. On the other hand, I am aware that there are many more books I have read from which I have learned little or nothing - indeed completely forgotten. Part of that is my responsibility, of course. If I have not taken the trouble to reflect on

This is an exercise I use on my Stories for Change Workshop, to give people an experience of the ManyStory Approach in practice. It normally works extremely well. It is in three 15 minute phases. You will need to work with a colleague, who is willing to share an unhelpful story that has caused, or is causing, problems for him or her. How to Loosen the Grip You have 15 minutes for this phase. Use that time to: 1 Ask questions of your colleague to explore his or her unhelpful

In this blog post, I want to broaden the focus from the exploration of stories in an organisational context, to consider their use in society as a whole. I will explore how people use stories to offer interpretations of current affairs that accord with their existing philosophy. I will point out that people sometimes use stories in that way explicitly and deliberately; and sometimes they do so implicitly and without realising that they are doing so. I also note that there ar

The application of a ManyStory Approach to learning and development is very fruitful, as I hope many of the chapters in the book (eg on coaching, change, and teams) have already made clear. The very process of helping people enrich their understanding and appreciate more, different perspectives, is by its nature educative. The ManyStory Approach has also informed some of my training programmes very directly, and I think there is huge scope for more work of this type. At the e

In the book, the chapter on teams focuses on working with teams that already exist. In this post, we will consider newly formed teams. These teams face a number of challenges, in terms of working effectively together. They need a common understanding of: ◆ their task, project or mission ◆ how they are going to work together to accomplish that ◆ the different individuals within the team, and ◆ what it means to be a team. The ManyStory approach can help with all of those needs.