Fieldnote #9 Be kind to your knees

Fieldnote #9 Be kind to your knees – You’ll miss them when they are gone

This fieldnote takes the form of an unedited conversation with ChatGPT. My parts are in italics.

Me: Hey Chatty, when I started my Narrative work in English Nature I decided I had to be seen to follow the the guidance of the cynefin complex domain and try some safe to fail experiments. For one such experiment I asked all staff by way of an all staff in email (which was frowned upon at the time) in which I asked, just like the hit record ‘Sunscreen by Baz Lehrman a few years earlier (“look after your knees, you’ll miss them when they are gone”), If you could go back and meet yourself arriving at the door of English Nature for the very first time what one line of advice would you have liked to have been told?

I called this piece of work SunscreEN (EN geddit?) and the entire 253 responses can be found at the end of this fieldnote.

ChatGPT:

That is a remarkably revealing origin story for your Narrative work, Ron.

The interesting thing is that you didn’t begin by asking people to tell stories. You created a very simple counterfactual doorway into their own experience:

If I could meet myself on my first day, what would I tell myself now that I know what I know?

And the reference to Sunscreen gives the question an additional cultural resonance: looking backwards from accumulated experience and wisdom, rather than asking people for an institutional “lesson learned.” There is something particularly powerful about the “one line” constraint. It forces people to distil years of tacit knowledge into something memorable. In effect, you were asking staff to surface the organisation’s unwritten knowledge, and the fact that the all-staff email was frowned upon is actually part of the story. You were, perhaps unwittingly at the time, already doing something quite characteristic of your later approach:

You bypassed the formal knowledge architecture to discover what the people actually knew.

That could be a very important moment in the genealogy of your Narrative Ecologist approach:

Experience → reflection → story → pattern → shared organisational knowledge.

It also explains why your later work seems to have moved beyond conventional “knowledge management”. You weren’t primarily interested in capturing information. You were interested in what experience had taught people that the organisation itself didn’t necessarily know it knew.

There is also an intriguing inversion in the question: “What advice would you give your younger self?” becomes

“What does that answer tell us about the organisation you have become part of?”

That second question is where the narrative ecology really starts to emerge.

If you still have the responses to that original email, they could be extraordinarily valuable. They would constitute something like a baseline archaeological layer of English Nature’s organisational culture at the moment you began the Narrative work.

The individual answers could potentially be analysed for recurring metaphors, tensions, surprises, informal rules, sources of pride, frustrations and “things nobody tells you when you join.” In other words, you may have accidentally created a cultural time capsule.

And I suspect the most interesting question now isn’t simply what did they say?

It is:

What did those answers reveal about English Nature that English Nature didn’t know about itself?

Me: So I uploaded the entire list of replies and this was ChatGPTs response…

So what came back to you Ron was not a collection of induction advice. It was an organisation talking to itself. The resulting list was remarkably heterogeneous: advice, jokes, warnings, observations, grievances, folk wisdom, institutional mythology, affectionate cynicism and, occasionally, genuine wisdom. The contributors came from “all corners of the Organisation, young and old, novice to expert, optimist to pessimist”, and the responses were deliberately left unedited and complete.

That lack of editing is important. The list is therefore not simply what English Nature officially believed about itself. It is what people experienced English Nature to be.

The first discovery: the organisation had a parallel knowledge system

One of the most revealing observations is that much of the advice concerns things which appear not to have been formally documented anywhere.

“Do not worry about what you write in your ASR [Annual Review] – nobody reads them.”

“Make a decision then write a case which supports it.”

“Certain senior managers will not even acknowledge your presence. They still value you.”

“The same people who want things yesterday make you wait a month.”

“Never ask for permission to do something. It is always easier to apologise for it afterwards.”

“The canteen is a better source of knowledge than any meeting room.”

“The pub is a better source of knowledge than the canteen.”

These are not procedural instructions. They are tacit knowledge describing how the organisation actually works rather than how its formal systems say that it works.

In other words, English Nature had an unofficial operating manual. It just wasn’t written down. Except that, for a brief moment, you got people to write it down.

The second discovery: there were two English Natures

The most striking pattern is the distance between the organisation’s declared values and the lived experience described by its staff.

“We are a risk taking organisation – but don’t take any risks.”

“We have a no blame culture – but don’t make any mistakes.”

“We are a learning organisation – make the most of it.”

“Don’t use Corporate Jargon (unless you are a senior manager).”

“Use Plain English in all documents (unless you are a senior manager).”

“There are rules. Some are applied stringently; others are ignored or forgotten.”

“There are rules for ‘them’ and rules for ‘us’.”

This is perhaps the most important finding in the entire exercise. The problem wasn’t necessarily that English Nature had the wrong values. It was that the organisation’s espoused values and its experienced values could be different things.

The formal organisation said: We value people. The informal organisation said:

“‘Staff are our most valued asset – This statement is false. Believe it at your peril.”

The formal organisation said: We are a learning organisation. The informal organisation replied: “Go on training courses, you might learn something.”

The formal organisation said: We are empowered. The informal organisation observed:

“ENpower spelt with an ‘N’ doesn’t mean anything at all.”

This is organisational sensemaking in miniature.

The third discovery: humour was carrying serious knowledge

It would be easy to read the list as simply cynical workplace humour. That would miss something important. Humour is doing work here.

“Stress, what Stress ! AAAAAAaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHH!!!!”

“The light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off.”

“If all else fails, CTRL ALT DEL.”

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, manage.”

“Resistance is futile.”

“Money isn’t everything (that’s what the people with money say).”

The joke makes the observation safe to say. It also makes it memorable. A 20-page management report saying “there may be a perceived disconnect between organisational rhetoric and employee experience” would probably have disappeared into a filing system.

“We are a risk taking organisation – but don’t take any risks” is almost impossible to forget.

The staff had developed their own vocabulary for describing complexity. The jokes were compressed organisational intelligence.

The fourth discovery: the real organisation was located between the boxes

The formal structure appears repeatedly in the responses: pay bands, JEGS, performance pay, promotion, ASRs, T&S forms, time recording, PRINCE, corporate software, corporate jargon, business processes, management structures and Head Office.

But alongside this sits another geography:

the canteen,

the pub,

the car park,

the local team,

the NNR,

the corridor,

the informal conversation,

the person who “really knows”,

the colleague who can make something happen,

and the Union Rep who apparently knows “what’s really going on around here.”

This suggests that knowledge in English Nature did not primarily travel through the organisational chart. It travelled through relationships. The formal organisation had departments, teams, managers, systems and procedures. The lived organisation had informal networks and these networks may have been doing considerably more of the work than the organisation realised.

The fifth discovery: people were not necessarily asking for less work — they were asking for meaning. There is a recurring complaint about effort and recognition:

“Don’t over achieve.”

“Doing your job well won’t get you far.”

“Be prepared to work long hours for little reward.”

“Consider yourself thanked.”

“It makes no difference if you show willing or not, people will still expect you to do things.”

But alongside this cynicism is something much more positive:

“Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.”

“Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.”

“Follow yourself.”

“Involve others.”

“The little you do, you do very well.”

“Work hard,but remember it’s only a job.”

The staff clearly hadn’t stopped caring. Quite the opposite. The bitterness appears to come partly from the fact that they cared more than the systems appeared capable of recognising. That is a very different diagnosis from “disengaged staff”.

What English Nature didn’t know about itself

If I had to reduce the whole exercise to a handful of discoveries, I would suggest these.

1. English Nature possessed a vast body of tacit knowledge

People knew how things really happened. They knew which rules mattered, which didn’t, who to ask, where information lived, how decisions were actually made and how to navigate the system. Much of this knowledge was invisible to the formal organisation.

2. Its employees were sophisticated observers of the organisation

The list demonstrates an extraordinary level of organisational literacy.

People were watching.

They noticed contradictions.

They noticed incentives.

They noticed behaviour.

They noticed where decisions came from.

They noticed what happened to people who challenged the system.

In a sense, English Nature had hundreds of organisational ethnographers already working for it. It simply wasn’t asking them what they could see.

3. Cynicism was sometimes a form of organisational intelligence

The cynicism shouldn’t simply be dismissed as negativity. Some of it was probably defensive humour. Some was frustration. But some was pattern recognition.

People had seen enough repetitions to infer the rules beneath the rules.

4. The organisation’s culture was being transmitted peer-to-peer

A new employee could learn more about “how English Nature works” from an experienced colleague over lunch or in the pub than from an induction document.

The organisation therefore had an informal curriculum.

5. Contradiction was normalised

Risk-taking without risk.

No blame without mistakes.

Learning without necessarily learning.

Empowerment without empowerment.

Plain English with corporate jargon.

Valuing people without necessarily rewarding them.

These contradictions were sufficiently familiar that they had become jokes. That is a powerful warning sign. When an organisational contradiction becomes a joke, the organisation may have stopped noticing it.

6. The organisation had an enormous reservoir of affection

This may be the easiest thing to miss. The list is funny because people knew the place intimately. You don’t develop this kind of humour about something you have no relationship with. Behind the complaints is considerable attachment. People cared enough to develop elaborate ways of explaining the organisation to themselves.

And some of the advice is simply beautiful:

“Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.”

“Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.”

“When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.”

“Read between the lines.”

“Be gentle with the earth.”

“Remember that the best sixth sense to have is that of perspective.”

Those statements belong in the same dataset. They are part of the culture too.

The unexpected methodological lesson

Looking back, the most interesting thing about SunscreEN may not be what people said. It may be how you managed to make them say it.

You didn’t ask: “What are the cultural problems within English Nature?”

You didn’t ask: “What could senior management improve?”

You didn’t ask: “What lessons have we learned?”

You asked people to travel backwards in time and talk to themselves.

That small change in framing removed much of the institutional defensiveness. Nobody had to criticise English Nature. They were simply giving advice to a younger version of themselves and suddenly the organisation’s collective memory became available. That is very close to what you subsequently came to call Narrative work.

You weren’t extracting information from people. You were creating a circumstance in which people could make sense of their own experience. The stories then became organisational knowledge.

Field note conclusion

Perhaps the most important thing English Nature didn’t know about itself was this:

It already knew an enormous amount about itself. The knowledge was distributed among its people. It was embedded in stories, jokes, warnings, friendships, frustrations, workarounds, memories and local experience.

The formal organisation possessed one version of itself. Its people possessed another and the space between the two was where much of the interesting knowledge lived. The SunscreEN exercise briefly connected those two worlds.

The result was not a staff survey. It was a collective organisational field note. And perhaps that is the real significance of the exercise in retrospect. You had discovered a way of asking an organisation to become its own ethnographer.

English Nature didn’t need somebody to tell it what its culture was. It needed somebody to ask.

The most intriguing thing about the 253 responses may therefore not be what people said, but where their answers travelled. They entered through the front door of the organisation talking about employment. They moved through its corridors talking about colleagues, humour and the informal ways of getting things done and some eventually walked right out the other side, carrying something much less organisational with them:

advice about how to live.

That suggests that the exercise uncovered something that English Nature’s formal knowledge systems were unlikely to have recorded: the organisation existed simultaneously as an institution, a community and a chapter in people’s lives.

Pperhaps that is the first glimpse in this material of what you would later call narrative ecology—the recognition that the most important knowledge about a system may not reside within its formal structures, but in the relationships, stories, memories and meanings that circulate between the people who inhabit it.

So, if you are still here, I present the complete set of responses, totally unedited.

SunScreEN

Nothing is more quiet than the sound of hair going grey.

Meet people halfway, you need the exercise.

Smile.

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

Remember the three R’s: Respect for self; Respect for others; Responsibility for all your actions.

Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

Don’t spend time trying to get into the right pay band, in twenty years time you’ll look back and realise how much time you wasted, it was never going to happen.

You will be told that “staff are our most valued asset”. This statement is false. Believe it at your peril.

Don’t transfer to another job which has a higher JEGS score if it is within the same pay band that you are currently in. You’ll get nothing for it.

Expect pay rises below the national average.

Rewarding staff. It’s something that other organisations do.

Performance pay is a joke, not a motivation.

Don’t over achieve. You won’t get a pat on the back or money in your pocket for your effort.

Doing your job well won’t get you far. Toeing the Corporate line and saying the right things will.

The Dilbert Principle applies.

Get what you can in experience and training ‑ then leave.

The grass is definitely greener on the other side.

Don’t get involved in the car park pass debate.

Be prepared to work long hours for little reward.

Your dedication to the job is what the organisation relies on to keep you here.

Promotion gets harder each year /or as time goes by.

EN encourages cycling to work, because they got a great lease deal on an office in the middle of town with a postage stamp car park.

Bring your own radiator, because EN got a great lease deal on an office in the middle of town with a **** heating system.

Try not to be upset at the sight of dead birds, because EN got a great lease deal on an office in the middle of town with reflective glass to fool birds into thinking that they’re flying into an open space.

Do not worry about what you write in your ASR [Annual Appraisal] – nobody reads them

You may have to resign to get promoted internally

I used to think that EN had direction, now I know its all just fluke that things happen the way they do !

Prospects and promotion = Dead men shoes

Stress, what Stress ! AAAAAAaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHH!!!!

So my payrise is performance related ‑ did I do so Badly ?

SO If I don’t like it, I can leave ‑? Quality management style !

Use an acronym W.H.E.R.E.V.E.R P.O.S.S.I.B.L.E

Fleet cars are white, NNR’s are muddy.

Get a good nights sleep before tackling a T & S form.

A sound knowledge of 80’s computer technology is essential.

You get the opportunity to get your corporate views across ‑ well once every five years.

Bring an umbrella on fire alarm test day.

The same people who want things yesterday make you wait a month.

We employ people on FTA contracts so they can leave 3 months early with a job half done

The car park will be half empty. Head Office are happy.

Never ask for permission to do something. It is always easier to apologise for it afterwards.

Certain senior managers will not even acknowledge your presence. They still value you. Resistance is futile.

Decisions should be taken solely in the public interest. You are the public.

Get used to the ride, the destination is a long way off!

Work in a local team first then move to Peterborough, this way you’ll be able to afford a nicer home.

Leave Peterborough for a local team before its too late and get an even nicer home in a nicer area to retire in.

Alternatively, move to nice place in the country and then relocate your team nearer to your home.

Use corporate software.

The canteen is a better source of knowledge than any meeting room. The pub is a better source of knowledge than the canteen.

Use flexi time as you would a free overdraft from your bank. What’s the benefit of being in credit!

Make a decision then write a case which supports it.

You will find instructions on how to use the WC.

You must teach yourself how to use your PC.

Tell your manager how well you are doing, no-one else does so it is all they have to assess you by.

Eat doughnuts, they’ll make you happy.

Senior Management are your friends.

“Stress” doesn’t exist in English Nature ‑ we have a secret word for it instead

Senior Management are like the BORG ‑ they ignore you unless you are a threat and resistance is futile.

Fried Breakfast is available in the Canteen on a Friday.

Do as you are told, not as others do.

We are a risk taking organisation ‑ but don’t take any risks.

We have a no blame culture ‑ but don’t make any mistakes.

We are a learning organisation ‑ make the most of it.

Drink in Bogarts / Charters / Brewery Tap

Don’t use Corporate Jargon (unless you are a senior manager)

Use Plain English in all documents (unless you are a senior manager)

It will take you 40 years to get from the bottom to the top of a pay Band.

Time recording is dubious.

It helps if you are mad.

In the interest of economy, the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ has been switched off.

Always use the speelchicker.

Wield the thesaurus to fabricate yourself envisaged excessive intelligence.

Empower spelt with an ‘m’ means to entrust, warrant or commission. ENpower spelt with an ‘N’ doesn’t mean anything at all.

Never book the last working day before Christmas as annual leave. The office usually closes at 2:00 and it counts as a full working day.

If your face doesn’t fit try another part of your anatomy.

“be pedantic, no matter how much it costs”

There are rules. Some are applied stringently; others are ignored or forgotten.

There are rules for ‘them’ and rules for ‘us’.

The challenge of open plan office space is easily resolved with the strategic positioning of large items of furniture.

“Warning ‑ The hot water is VERY HOT” ‑ Try not to get into it!

Nobody will ever love TENIS. [TENIS was The English Nature Information System]

In TENNIS love means nothing.

Never save your personal details in the Team Word Proc Template.

Replace printer cartridges regularly before the ink runs o

Money isn’t everything, it isn’t even enough

All staff must go open plan except for those staff who do not want to.

A Business Process is not what it’s name suggests

PC means personal computer not politically correct

ENSIS [English Nature Sites Information System – which I helped to develop] was designed to divert the auditors attention from the many weaker systems in English Nature.

In an effort to encourage the use of the Groupwise scheduler all Team Managers have been issued with a Psion organiser.

Floss your keyboard

Arrive early and leave early, rather than arriving later and leaving later. This is considered to be more healthy and wholesome and has no impact at all on the volume of work expected of you.

You might get a pay rise, you might not.

You might become disillusioned, you might not.

Money isn’t everything (that’s what the people with money say)

Keep your pride but throw away any hopes of a pay rise.

The cost of the Paybill Model is met from the Pay Budget.

Work in Head Office once but leave before you become too technophobic.

Work in IST once but leave before you become too sad.

Work with Mark Felton once but stop before you become too confused.

Regularly back up your documents.

If the Pay claim is 6% and you get 4% work 2% less.

If the Pay Claim is 6% and you get 7% work 1% more.

If all else fails, CTRL ALT DEL.

Buy cakes on your Birthday.

The Team Server and Support Project intends to go much further than supporting Team Servers.

English Nature uses the PRINCE methodology as standard. Try and find where it is used.

You may see your General Manager, you may not.

If English Nature values knowledge so highly we should sell it back at £1 per thought.

Always accept work given too you then you will be too busy to have time for anything important

If you can’t learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.

Consider yourself thanked.

Learn to type.

When all else fails, eat.

You don’t understand them, they don’t understand you. You have got something in common.

Our crap systems are as good as anyone else’s crap systems.

Good leaders are scarce, so follow yourself.

One possible reason that things are not going to plan is that there never was a plan.

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and, whatever you hit, call it the target.

The little you do, you do very well.

Don’t do what you shouldn’t unless there is a good reason why you should.

Visit the Intranet regularly.

Those who can, do. Those who can’t , manage.

Involve others.

In 2005, IDG will be manned by a Team Manager and a dog. The TM’s job will be to feed the dog and the dog’s job will be to bite the TM if he/she touches anything.

Back it up.

Look after your Technical Support. You’ll miss them when they are gone.

Close down. Switch off. Clock out.

Do not read Computer Weekly. It will give you a false sense of technical competence.

Bring your own milk.

If your name is Stuart, don’t shake your milk without the top on.

Eliminate bureaucracy.

You can lead a bull to waters but you cannot make it think.

Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

Memorise your favourite poem.

Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have, or sleep all you want.

When you say, “I love you”, mean it.

When you say, “I’m sorry”, look the person in the eye.

Be engaged at least six months before you get

married.

Believe in love at first sight.

Never laugh at anyone’s dreams.

Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it’s the only way to live life completely.

In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

Don’t judge people by their relatives.

Talk slowly but think quickly.

When someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer, smile and ask, “Why do you want to know?”

Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

Call your mom.

Say “bless you” when you hear someone sneeze.

When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice.

Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.

Spend some time alone.

Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Fieldnote #9 Be kind to your knees

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Fieldnote #9 Be kind to your knees

Fieldnote #8 In the spotlight

Fieldnote #7 Dominic and the prisoners