R. Ronald Shepps is a former student of Fred Herzberg's graduate program in workplace change, originally at Case Western Reserve University. He works nationwide in the survey, organization diagnosis, and organizational recovery areas of planned change.

Several years ago, I had a unique opportunity to combine purely quantitative approaches to helping organizations learn about themselves - surveys - with purely qualitative approach, based on story telling, the so-called learning history.

What we did - and what we learned - has important implications for many organizations - particularly as rapid, e-surveying methodology has appeared.

Purely Survey Base, Quantitative Approaches Run Into Lots of N.I.H.

My Client was ready to address its 'Not Invented Here' (NIH) internal barriers.

A further challenge as how to help this organization measure success quantitatively and successfully pass along stories of successful change?

NIH is common in most slow-to-change organizations, not just in the food industry. How to overcome this visible reluctance to try to learn about or apply "strange (NIH)" Best Practices, even from elsewhere in their own organization?

Such resistance was particularly troubling with our carefully collected, quantitative data. Typically we saw all kinds of 'Yes, but...' objections, or else other types of change-resistant foot dragging - too little 'learning from ourserlves'.

The Solution: Blending Story-telling and Survey Measurement

At the end of a search fo an approach that would work, we found that we could most easily use what some call a 'learning history' to meet the needs for successful knowledge transfer.

What we adopted - our tool for spreading learning about success to other organizational areas - came out of M.I.T. It is a blend of qualitative and quantitative post-action review. Our interest and purpose was to use their 'Learning History' to smoothly and successfully transfer knowledge to others.

Like a survey, the Learning History is a polling of 'stakeholders' of a project (frequently sponsors, management, customers, suppliers, employees, observers, even the community). Objective, fact-based information yields a wide range of views - about how and how well - a significant initiative or project went forward.

Unlike a survey, the bulk of the information shared is in the form of narrative comments, essentially asking those contacted to tell, in the form of specific form of comments and narrative history, how they got involved and how they evolved their views, both positive and negative.

Because we shared both hard data and 'personal stories', we found we could be convincing. We used each participant's own words, described false starts and rough spots, as well as the success.

We had found a high credibility vehicle, one we needed for overcoming 'N.I.H.' Such a set of stores is ideally relayed to other parts of the organization not only in writing, but by a sample of the participants and stakeholders themselves in group dialog format. It worked for us.

As one of those involved in the project subsequently commented, the learning history "...represents the organization talking to itself, in safe and carefully structured way, about the things it needs to hear but hasn;t yet listened to."

The short account of applying learning history techniques to post-action type survey review that I was able to give here cannot do justice to this sophisticated - and unusual - approach: Learning histories actually combine research and models from ethnography, survey and action research, organizational development, anthropology and oral history methodology.

So far, I know of no books written about the process that describe food industry settings. However, those interested in learning more about the technique might look at a book about it in a manufacturing setting.

Editor's Note:
The above may seem merely academic, but I recently heard a food plant manager describe his "Barrel Meetings" (as in shooting fish in a barrel), where he has his supervisors take turns telling their success stories. The group then anlyzes the story for the problems, solutions and measured results. He says his supervisors are very proud to get up and tell their story. Another version of Dr. Shepps' idea.

Those interested in supplementing your traditional survey approach to post-project review with story-telling, so as to obtain better within-organization knowledge transfer are more than welcome to contact the author at 913-685-4553 or by email at sheppsron@yahoo.com.