Sparknow blog

'Do you feel me?'
Victoria Ward, Saturday, October 18, 2008

Someone mentioned to me on Friday that the Sparknow website conveys to a passing stranger without an axe to grind a kind of impression (to some at least) that we do something or another with emotions in organisational setting, but of a rather obscure and fuzzy kind.

Naturally my first reaction was emotional, and not altogether warm. It reminds me rather of the way in which, in my olden banking days, I was labelled ‘creative’ with the unmistakeable message conveyed that this was not altogether desirable.

But second thoughts lead me to say yes, that’s just what we do.

I thought I’d assemble various experiences of this week – ranging from marking knowledge management dissertations, to attending the Craft Council Award ceremony to sitting in on a comms planning meeting at a client, thinking for various personal reasons about senile dementia – to recalibrate a bit and see if I can make working with emotional sound less emotional and more pertinent.

Lets start with the dissertation marking. This is part of a commitment to myself to keep myself professionally refreshed in the sphere of all things knowledge transfer. In a roundabout way I suppose you could say that I’ve outsourced my reading to MBA students. In any case, I’ve been pretty impressed by their literature reviews, and have in particular come across Suzlanski’s work on stickiness and knowledge transfer. The effectiveness or otherwise of the transfer of knowledge is, according to Szulanski down to

• causal ambiguity – which I take to be that the context for the original knowledge gets misplaced in it’s translation into a new context, thus rendering the knowledge less effective

• absorptive or retentive capacity – lack of room or hooks in the recipient to catch the knowledge coming their way and have at least some frames for reference for making sense of them

• sender/receiver relationship – depending on your assumptions about the credibility of your source, and the ability of the source to convey something accurately and appropriately to you, you’ll react to the knowledge thing accordingly.

I think this a useful conversation space about knowledge transfer, and binds it inextricably to storiedness to my mind. Storiedness makes for good sender/receiver relationships. It stretches frames of reference and absorptive capacity. It provides the context which can cut through ambiguity and allow for better judgement about what knowledge transfers well to a new setting.

And that’s where feeling steps in. Note, not emotion, feeling. Stories are all about feeling. Not in a namby pamby fluffy-bunny-bollocks way (thanks Johnny Harben). But in way that pushes you to the uncomfortable edge. Mostly in organisations we’ll shove ourselves away from that edge with great vervour. Who wants a board meeting where the CEO has tears running down his face? Or maybe we should want a teary CEO from time to time, or at least one whose choked and lost his presentation voice for a moment while he struggles to regain his composure, because something’s broken through the crust of leadership? I’ve certainly seen grown men pause and struggle for a moment when you point out to them the personal emotional risks they’re taking on behalf of the organisation which they themselves are too manly to acknowledge. Let me detour via the tug of memory.

It seems that some of the research into senile dementia and Alzheimers suggests that those memories that linger, long after the rest has crumbled, are the ones with a strong emotional tug. This is why Age Exchange, in their reminiscence projects, work with objects, dresses, postcards, tea dances. They work with ways to trigger an echo of a sensory or feeling memory that will help those whose memories are fading out of the prison of an absent past and an inconceivable present into a momentary sense of feeling locating in a memory with meaning.

I don’t make this reference lightly. I’m not borrowing the fragile old to make a marketing point here.

And the Craft Council awards had me thinking too. The two words that stuck with me from the speeches were joy – the making embedded in the object made is joyful – and discernment – quality of the made needs to express the discernment of the maker. Both these things imply a full bodied full, blooded engagement, not just a cerebral or verbal one.

The point I’m making is that in all our work we’ve found that there’s little meaning or insight without feeling (physical, emotional, kinetic, tactile, imagery, colour, smell, taste – again emotions are a tiny part of what I mean by feeling).

So when designing the workshop series for the client, for example, we’re examining how to construct spaces where feeling, coupled with fact, create a generative discussion about how it’s possible to involve front line staff with the changes they’re facing. Sometimes this might mean finding ways to acknowledge fear, anger and hostility. In other clients we’ve done this by inviting fiction and black humour. This is feeling too. Someone (Aidan Halligan I think) once said to me that a good pun is like a knotted handkerchief in the memory – it makes a little tug of feeling which lands that pun somewhere meaningful. I think, carefully handled, some pretty wicked naughty stories, given permission to unfold on organisational turf, can have the same kind of effect. (If you look in the publications, you’ll see, in Listen or thy tongue will make the deaf, part of a case study about black humour and it’s role in creating understanding.)

So I think Sparknow is primarily about knowledge transfer. From the past to the future, in multidisciplinary teams, across geographies and cultures, creating the conditions for a moment or inspiration, or reworking a governance framework so that it actually sticks from one setting to another where it can do surprising work.

And I think understanding knowledge transfer means engaging with understanding the role of feeling, as well as that of fact.

Actually, I’d go further. If you you’re not willing to engage with feelings (yours and others), what chance do you have of acting from a sound moral compass in a work setting? But I’ll tackle how global capitalism has lost its way another time.

Now I want to end by telling you how far I’ve come in this respect and recommend to you Nick Eves who Sandra Higgison put me onto. He runs quite the best facilitation training I’ve ever come across. And it was he who talk me that you can choose not to handle emotions as emotions but as useful information. Which is what I did when I got the feedback about the reaction to the Sparknow website. After a slightly defensive shiver and a short grump, I decided that the point was a good one, well made, and that I’d try and do something useful with it. Thanks, Nick.

The title is a catchphrase from The Wire, by the way. I think it’s a pretty good one. Instead of saying ‘have you heard me, do you understand, do you get it’ we’d all do well to ask ‘do you feel me’ a bit more.