I have fallen deeply in love with both the company and Web site of A. Goodman. The site offers some terrific newsletters, called Free Range Thinking, available for download, many of them on using story in organizations, especially discussing how to tell an organization's story, particularly nonprofits:

• Telling Tales to the Data-Driven
• The 10 Immutable Laws of Storytelling
• A Tall Story About Building Awareness
• Tales: You Win
• Once_upon_a_time.ppt
• How to Find Good Stories
• How to Listen Better
• Find Your Story, Find Your Voice
• Fact, Fiction and Telling Your Truth
• When Good Stories Go Bad
• Seven Questions to Sharpen Your Stories
• Storytelling as Best Practice
• Call it Public Storytelling
• Taking Stories to the Bank
• What Are Your Inside Stories?
• Give the People What They Want: A Story

Goodman also offers the Storytelling iSchool, next being held in March 2008.

There are all kinds of other goodies on the site, including an awesome demo of Andy Goodman's speech, Storytelling as Best Practice, which you can find on this page.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Watch tomorrow as A Storied Career's Blog-within-a-Blog, Tell Me About Yourself, launches and serializes my book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers.

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

T-post offers stories on t-shirts. Subscribing to T-post is a lot like having a subscription to a magazine but instead of receiving magazines in your mailbox – you receive T-shirts. As a subscriber you receive a new t-shirt every six weeks based on a current news item. The topic is interpreted by select designers and the written story printed on the inside.

The t-short picture above is an open-to-interpretation (according to the artist) rendering of the story of two babies switched at birth.

See the T-post site as well as an article about T-post's story-driven fashion.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Pecha Kucha, which originated in Japan as a discipline to keep architects’ presentations from turning into “death by PowerPoint,” is a new way to present a story. The rules are

• No more than 20 slides
• No more than 20 seconds per slide

Therefore, a PowerPoint presentation - no matter how complex-will never last more than 6 minutes, 40 seconds. People are now using it as almost an art form, creating elaborate presentations that fit in the constraints of the format.

I created a pecha kucha presentation for a job interview and felt it was well-received (one slide is shown above). Because it is minimalist, the slides contain little if any type, so it’s difficult to interpret a pecha kucha presentation without narration. In some of my slides, I used comic-strip-like balloons to put words in the mouths of my illustrations as in the above example. Dan Pink’s often-cited pecha kucha presentation does contain narration, so it gives a good idea of the form (see below).

Stephanie West Allen has a text blog post that also cites Pink’s presentation, along with some other examples.

See Pink’s pecha kucha presentation

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Ford Harding wrote to me about a recent posting:

You adapted criteria for stories (as published in RainToday) to sell professional services to those to be told while job seeking. It works, too. You recommended that the hero of the story be the job seeker. I suggest a possible alternative. In some cases it might be wise to let the job-seeker’s former boss share the limelight; that’s someone the future boss will identify with. The job seeker in this version of the story works with the boss, adding to and executing something that started with the boss and the boss ends up a winner. An example of how a change in hero changes an anecdote can be found in [this] blog posting. If you search the site under anecdote you will find other postings on that subject.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Steve Denning continues his generous ways by sharing several articles of interest:

• Putting Narrative Into Practice:
  Tips, Tricks, Exercises and Templates
• Creating an Organization That Is Comfortable with Change
• The Morphology of Stories That Spark Organizational Renewal. This one is for the academic journal Organization, to which I'm also submitting an article on storytelling and change.

By the way, Eric Wolf offers a podcast and transcript of a Jan. 2008 interview with Denning on his blog, Storytelling with Children.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A couple of entries ago, I asked readers for suggestions for blogs and sites I could list on my sidebar.

Thanks to Stephanie West Allen, Tom Clifford, and "Tim E." for these suggestions:

Memory Writers Network about which, creator Jerry Waxler writes:

Memoir writing means different things to different people. Some want to leave a legacy. Others want to make money publishing their work. Some have found that by sharing their story, they increase their social network and reduce loneliness. As a therapist I’ve learned the healing power of sharing life stories. All these reasons interest me. The more carefully I look at the process of memoir writing, the more value I see in it, as a tool for change, for personal insight, for sharing, and for steering towards the future. Join me on this exploration of memoir writing. By learning to write about the past, together we can develop a more interesting future.

NASA's ASK (Academy Sharing Knowledge), the current issue of which always presents knowledge-sharing stories

I had previously considered listing StoryCorps, especially when the StoryCorps trailer was in Orlando – but the local site didn't seem to have much on it. The national site offers 5,000 conversations on all kinds of topics, plus the opportunity to record your own story.

Even though performance storytelling is the root of much of today's interest on storytelling, it has not been the focus of this blog. However, I am considering Tim E's suggestion to include Breaking the Eggs, Performance Storytelling in the 21st Century. Tim E also suggested Rachel Hedman's performance storytelling site, Voice: A Storyteller's Lifestyle. I know I've mentioned Rachel in A Storied Career a couple of times, if not Voice: A Storyteller's Lifestyle specifically.

More my speed is The Storyteller and the Listener, a site in transition as its editor and publisher Holly Stevens is living with cancer.

I will also be adding Tom Clifford's own site (mentioned in another post) to my sidebar.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

View my page on Worldwide Story Work

Worldwide Story Work is a global conversation on organizational story and an outgrowth of the Washington, DC-based Golden Fleece group.

This virtual collaborative space provides a venue where the community of practice of those working with story wherever they are located can come together and share, converse, argue, have fun while, together, exploring the use of story in our work.

Instructions on how to join.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

What a concept ... I actually found a cool new resource through the Google ads here on A Storied Career. It's Were You There? which is in beta. I'd consider this another convergence between social media.

Here's what the founder, Jonathan Hull, says about the site:

Our mission is simple: to create a comprehensive and easy-to-use archive where the memories that shape our lives – and history – can not only be preserved but shared, creating a conversation about the moments in life that mattered.

The concept grew out of my own passion for storytelling both as a former TIME magazine bureau chief in Jerusalem and Chicago and a bestselling novelist. Over the years I’ve received many letters from readers who were moved to share some of the unforgettable moments in their own lives, hopeful that someone might listen. Because what are stories without an audience? At heart, we are all storytellers, telling and retelling our stories to give structure and meaning to our lives. The more letters I read, the more I realized that we all have stories that deserve to be told and remembered. But when I looked online for a place where these memories might come together in a meaningful way, whether from years ago or something that happened last week, I couldn't find one.

So I created WereYouThere.

Hull invites "select a category and follow your memory back." He says that if you can't can’t find what you’re looking for (for example, I didn't see the Kent State shootings or the Challenger or Columbia tragedies), "simply add a new topic yourself."

Hull notes that you can also join a Community or start your own.

Hull's examples of things you can do at WereYouThere:

• Share stories, photos and videos of growing up in your hometown, your old hangouts, high school or college.


• Remember the March from Selma, Woodstock or what it was like to live through Katrina.


• Reunite with others who served in your combat unit at Omaha Beach, Chosin Reservoir, Da Nang or Takrit.


• Relive the sites and sounds of the Summer of Love, your favorite travel spot or the Whisky a Go Go when The Doors took stage.


• Share a passion for ‘56 Chevys, Elvis or Coltrane.


• Recall the everyday scenes of a time gone by, from the fads and fashion to the cars, the music and the dreams that defined your generation.

People really are starting to share stories in this venue.

Extended entry lists other categories on Were You There?







---


Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I'm excited about Terence Gargiulo's 2007 book, Once upon a Time: Using Story-Based Activities to Develop Breakthrough Communication Skills because it offers story-based activities that can be used in the classroom. You can download a sample from the book.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I'd like to add more links to my sidebar and could use reader recommendations. I'm especially interested in sites and blogs about blogging and about storytelling. I saw that Technorati lists more than 600 storytelling blogs. Before I start going through all those, I'd like to know which you think are the best of the best. And there have got to be tons of sites and blogs about blogging. Which do you like best?

I know this blog is not great for comments. Registration is required through Typekey to prevent spam. I'm working on an easier way, but in the meantime, if you don't want to comment, please e-mail me: kathy@astoriedcareer.com. Thanks!

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

An International Day for Sharing Life Stories has been set for May 16, 2008. The day will be an opportunity for people around the world to gather in community halls, classrooms, public parks, theaters, auditoriums, as well websites, email exchanges, and virtual environments to hear each other’s stories.

You can read more here and in the extended entry.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

For someone who blogs about storytelling, I don't tell enough stories. I'm reminded of that point by this posting.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here's the book that resulted from my dissertation research. It will be available as a free e-book in the first half of 2008. Two preview chapters are available, one at this link, and the other as a PDF that you can request from me via e-mail: kathy@astoriedcareer.com.

Starting in March, I will also be serializing the book in a blog-within-a-blog, a spinoff of A Storied Career called Tell Me About Yourself.

Here are the contents of the book:

INTRODUCTION: Why Use Story in the Job Search?

Part I: Career-Propelling Story Basics
CHAPTER 1: Telling Stories about Change
CHAPTER 2: The Quintessential You Story
CHAPTER 3: How to Develop Career-Propelling Stories

Part II: Storytelling Media in the Job Search
CHAPTER 4: Networking as Storytelling
CHAPTER 5: Resumes that Tell a Story
CHAPTER 6: Cover Letters that Tell a Story
CHAPTER 7: Portfolios that Tell a Story
CHAPTER 8: Interviews that Tell a Story
CHAPTER 9: Personal Branding as Storytelling

Part III: Continuous Career Storytelling
CHAPTER 10: Propel Your Career Through On-the-job Storytelling

EPILOGUE

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In his most recent book, The Secret Language of Leadership, Steve Denning offers a chapter on Narrative Intelligence, which he describes this way:

Narrative intelligence is the capacity to understand the world in narrative terms, to be familiar with the different components and dimensions of narratives, to know what are the different patterns of stories that exist and which are narrative patterns most likely to have what effect in which situation, and how to overcome the fundamental attribution error and understand the audience’s story, and to have the capacity to navigate the quicksilver world of interacting narratives and anticipate the dynamic factors that determine how the audience will react a new story and whether a new story is likely to be generated in the mind of any particular audience by any particular communication tool.

He also offers a downloadable PDF version of the quiz.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My storytelling colleague, Stephanie West Allen, wrote to tell me she is attending a digital storytelling session this weekend. "I cannot wait!" she said.

Her instructor is Bernajean Porter of DigiTales.

Thanks, Stephanie, for turning me on to the stash of story loot at Bernajean's visually lovely collection of sites. She offers all kinds of links, resources, and samples of digital storytelling on her main site, in addition to blogs, a story of the month, an awesome slideshow on Stories as Understanding, photoessays, podcasts, and info on digital storytelling camps.

Bernajean describes digital storytelling this way:

Digital Storytelling takes the ancient art of oral storytelling and engages a palette of technical tools to weave personal tales using images, graphics, music and sound mixed together with the author's own story voice. Digital storytelling is an emerging art form of personal, heartful expression that enables individuals and communities to reclaim their personal cultures while exploring their artistic creativity. While the heart and power of the digital story is shaping a personal digital story about self, family, ideas, or experiences, the technology tools also invite writers and artists to think and invent new types of communication outside the realm of traditional linear narratives.

Bernajean also offers a book, DigiTales, the Art of Digital Storytelling.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A one-day workshop, led by Australia's leading experts in story listening, teaches you to gather and make sense of stories so as to see revealing patterns and use them to gain traction on solving messy organisational problems or reaching complex goals.

Dates and locations:
Melbourne 27-Feb-08
Perth 11-Mar-08
Brisbane 27-Mar-08
Sydney 16-Jul-08
Canberra 16-Oct-08

Download brochure here.

Download a case study of results here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Svend-Erik Engh, who appeared at the 2007 Golden Fleece conference, offers guidelines (which I've adapted/edited below) for giving feedback when listening to stories:

There are four steps in "interactive response:"

After you hearing a story the listener should:

1. Tell about the clearest picture in the story. When the storyteller is rewarded with an clear answer, he/she feels: I heard you and you gave me something.
2. Tell about the theme of the story. What have you heard and understood from the story?

These two are closely connected, so start with 1 and 2 together and then go to:
3. Say something nice about the way the story was told
4. Ask if the response was useful

Engh says: "A task for us now is to link this experience to the world of organisations. How does this influence managers?"

In another exercise, Engh asked participants to:

Tell of a time where you heard a story that had influence on your life. That you can remember. Focus on what happened before the story was told and after. How can we make sure that our story is heard and remembered? Is there something in the preparation of the situation that reflects the impact of the story? Can you prepare the room? Is it how well you know the story? Is it remembered because it is personal ˆ that it deals with something that matters both for the listener and for the storyteller? In a business setting: Can you prepare by telling it to a colleague? Can you prepare your listener? Can you adjust the story, so it hits the listeners?

Engh is curious about finding stories in conversation. "A story connects the two sides of the brains (again: Interaction)," he says. Engh wonders whether a conversation does the same thing. "Of course a conversation is more interactive and therefore more useful than one way communication, but does it stimulate both heart and brain? And can you look at body of a person involved in a conversation and observe the translation, when the conversation changes into a story."

Similarly, Sandor Schuman offers a procedure for Listening and Giving Feedback to Stories adapted from "Toward a Process for Critical Response" by Liz Lerman here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

[ Disclaimer: Some of these books I've read and some I haven't. I announce books about storytelling that look interesting. ]

The Amazon description of this book, primarily about public speaking, says it "will show you how to express the full range of the magnificence within you as you learn to tell a better story – one that uplifts and changes the world, one life at a time-and step into your destiny as a transformational speaker."

Sometimes we just don't know how to get started in telling our stories. Here's a book that can help.

Last year when I was going through a difficult time in my life, I got a lot of help from Louise Hay's book, You Can Heal Your Life. I haven't yet read the book pictured above, but the publisher's description sounds promising:

The true experiences that are featured in this book, introduced by best-selling author Louise L. Hay, have been culled from the writings of some of the most renowned writers and teachers in the fields of self-help, transformation, social consciousness, and spirituality. These are stories reflecting metaphysical miracles; momentous milestones; heartwarming, humorous, and sometimes heartbreaking reminiscences; and extraordinarily poignant personal accounts.

Shari Caudron is the author of Who Are You People?: A Personal Journey into the Heart of Fanatical Passion in America, which present stories of "rabid devotion – from Barbie collecting to ice fishing" (Entertainment Weekly). She also blogs a bit at Storylines.

2007's Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins is not exactly hot off the presses, but is certainly worth noting, as is anything Annette Simmons touches. I bought but have not read this book; however, it is reminiscent of Simmons's composition book I wrote about in this blog's first year, and I suspect the composition book morphed into this volume.

Simmons has also developed a seminar for the American Management Association Storytelling: How to Lead and Inspire Through the Use of Stories being offered eight times in 2008 in various locations.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In a recent entry, I mused about whether pictures or words do a better job of telling a story. I'm seeing more and more in the storytelling realm about digital storytelling, and while I think that some aspects of digital narrative are a bit far afield from my interests in this blog, others – like the convergence of social media and storytelling as a way of constructing identity – are closely related to the topics I want to cover here, and I'll be delving more into these areas in the coming weeks.

But just as a stunning example of what's possible in the digital storytelling realm is the incredible series, The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris, who took photos at least every 5 minutes for the week of the tale, and then created what my grade-school bud Jeff Jarvis called "a stunning interface to display his 3,214 photos." Stunning is right. This is the kind of visual display that makes you feel old because you could never imagine technology that would make this kind of storytelling possible. Jarvis, of Buzz Machine, wrote that he was undecided about the form.

I'm in awe of it. It shows us in a breathtaking way the power of digital storytelling. (Though I admit I didn't go through all 3,214 photos).

Here's what creator Harris said his purpose was in creating the story:

First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Researcher Nicole Speer conducted an experiment to see if humans are physiologically disposed to break down activities into narratives.

Excerpts from an article describing the research:

As expected, activity in certain areas of the brain increased at the points that subjects had identified as the beginning or end of a segment... Consistent with previous research, such boundaries tended to occur during transitions in the narrative such as changes of location or a shift in the character's goals. Researchers have hypothesized that readers break down narrated activities into smaller chunks when they are reading stories. However, this is the first study to demonstrate that this process occurs naturally during reading, and to identify some of the brain regions that are involved in this process....The fact that these results occurred with narratives that described mundane events is particularly important to our understanding of how humans comprehend everyday activity. Speer writes that the findings "provide evidence not only that readers are able to identify the structure of narrated activities, but also that this process of segmenting continuous text into discrete events occurs during normal reading."

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The Transformative Language Arts (TLA) Network, focused on networking and right livelihood for those who use the written, spoken and sung word for social change and personal growth, holds a conference September 12-15, 2008, at Goddard College, Plainfield, VT.

The organization also offers a book called The Power of Words.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

• Storytelling ... is one of the most powerful tools for achieving astonishing results. For the leader, storyelling is action oriented – a force for turning dreams into goals and then into results.

  – Peter Guber in Harvard Business Review

• Storytelling is an amazing tool because it is holistic, engaging the whole person. It makes it possible for people to bring all their resources, head and heart, to bear on creating new solutions.
  – Seth Kahan, in an article by Sue Dancy

Words are how we think; stories are how we link."
– Christina Baldwin

Decision-makers look for the most compelling story from their persona library of possible solutions, comparing each to the current solution.
– Gary Klein, Sources of Power

• Leaders achieve effectiveness largely through the stories they relate ... Stories must in some way help audience members to think through who they are ... and frame future options.
  – Howard Grdner, Leading Minds
• The biggest stories anyone has ever told are all held in people’s live.
  – Prof Hamish Fyfe, University of Glamorgan
• There are more truths in twenty- four hours of a person’s life than in all the philosophies.
  – Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life
• A leader's job is to create stories that are worth believing."

– Austin Hill of Billions with Zero Knowledge

• It seems to me that every community has a memory of itself. Not a history, or an archive or an authoritative record…a living memory, an awareness of a collective identity which is woven from a thousand stories. The sum of these stories creates a meta-narrative that is far greater than the sum of its constituent parts.
  – Prof Hamish Fyfe, University of Glamorgan


• “We are made of stories. Stories contain power. People don’t just tell stories. Stories tell us who we are and how to live.”
  – James Ball, formerly with Fox TV and ABC and now with smartMemes
• "Unsung, the noblest deed will die." – Pindar, 500 BC
• "“Storytellers help us process our lives.” – Abbott Joseph
• "Stories are a powerful medium for creating and making meaning. Because leadership means, in part, making sense of the variety of often complex and ambiguous experiences, stories can help us. Stories communicate deeply held individual and organizational values. Listening to the stories.. is like reading the maps that guide our thoughts and behaviors. Stories reinforce culture. One important task is telling stories about our history. We learn from the mistakes of the past and better understand the present and where we want to go in the future. Stories promote the weaving together of leadership, spirit, and community, generating new energy and vitality." – Russ S Moxley
• "Looking at humans from an evolutionary psychology viewpoint may explain why telling and recording stories is becoming an important part of formal knowledge management and learning strategies within many organizations. Telling and listening to stories has been at the very core of human communication since the dawn of time. As technology has advanced, our stories are now more likely to come from books, television, film, and the Internet, rather than from fellow tribe members seated around a campfire. But, stories still remain central to human life." – Richard Nantel
• "The lessons we take from the stories become part of us." – Sandra J. Sucher
• “Storytellers will be the most valued workers in the 21st century. All professionals, including advertisers, teachers, entrepreneurs, politicians, athletes and religious leaders, will be valued for their ability to create stories that will captivate their audiences." – Futurist Rolf Jensen, Director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies
• "Without air, our cells die. Without stories, ourselves die. ... Because a story evokes both visual image and emotion, it is likely to be remembered." Sandra Morgan and Robert Dennehy
• "We are always telling stories; our lives are surrounded by our own stories and those of other people. We see everything that happens to us in terms of these stories, as we sometimes try to lead our lives as if we were recounting them." – Jean Paul Sartre
• For a huge collection of story quotes, see this article on Storyteller.net.
• "Stories are a natural stimulant. They are the antidote to boredom and indifference." – Lori Silverman, author of Wake Me When the Data Is Over

• "Stories are best shared, don't you think?" – Dandelife Web site
• "We create meaning by telling ourselves stories. Storytelling is the DNA of all communication and meaning." – Annette Simmons quoted on One Thousand and One Web site
• "If your goal is to educate, persuade, or simply connect in a meaningful way with a particular audience, storytelling is the single most powerful communications tool available to you." – a goodman Web site
• "Our Selves are nothing but cross-sections of stories. Our identities are created by a vast web of stories, as is out relationship with reality. We understand and identify things by placing them in stories we tell about them: just like selves, things do not really exist outside of stories." – Stefan Snaevarr in Philosophy Now magazine
• "What do people get from ... stories? Some pick up bits of wisdom they can apply to their own work—do’s and don’t’s of planning and design, maybe a technical insight that helps solve a problem. Some are inspired by stories of success. Most gain a greater sense of connection with the organization, because they hear about what colleagues have been doing, because the stories express values and aims that tellers and listeners share, and because they are participating in a communal experience. I believe building trust and relationships is a more important effect of organizational storytelling than knowledge transfer." – Don Cohen on Babsonknowledge.org
• "Telling our story, and sharing the meaning we find in our life, also helps to connect more to the human community. By sharing our story, we find that we have a lot more in common with others than we might have thought. This sharing of stories creates a bond between people who may not even have known each other before. After sharing, or listening to, a life story, a connection is established that remains even if we don’t see the other person again. ... We discover in the process of telling our life stories that we are more sacred beings than we are human beings. A life story is really a story of the soul of a person." – Robert Atkinson in The Gift of Stories: Practical and Spiritual Applications of Autobiography, Life Stories, and Personal Mythmaking

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The Department of History of Art and Architecture of University of Pittsburgh in collaboration with the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Film Studies Department announces the 2008 edition of its graduate student symposium.

The topic of the forthcoming event is "Storytelling: Playful Interactions and Spaces of Imagination in Contemporary Visual Culture." The symposium is scheduled for October 10-12, 2008 and it will tie in with some of the thematics of Life on Mars, the 55th Carnegie International (CI08), a world-renowned triennial exhibition organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art.

The symposium will feature prestigious keynote speakers. In conjunction with it, the Carnegie Museum of Art will organize University Night, a special event including vibrant gallery and social activities to which one of the artists in the 55th Carnegie International will be invited to give a talk. More information here and call for papers (due March 17) here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In a blog posting called Using Stories To Sell: What Makes A Good Anecdote? (free registration required), Ford Harding lists 10 guidelines for stories used to make sales. It's not too big a leap to see how these apply to the stories you can tell when you are selling yourself. My suggestions for using these in job-search situations follow each point:

1. Make It Relevant: Choose stories that relate to the specific job you're applying or interviewing for, and more specific to the interview, pick stories that help illustrate skills and experience the interviewer asks about.
2. Select An Anecdote With Which The Listener Can Relate: When stories convey moving content and are told with feeling, the listener feels an emotional bond with the storyteller. Often the listener can empathize or relate the story to an aspect of his or her own life. That bond instantly enables the listener to invest emotionally in your success.
3. Emphasize the Similarities: Be sure to draw clear parallels between your accomplishments in other jobs (or other aspects of your life) and what you would be doing in thisjob.
4. Every Good Story Has A Plot, Character, Action, and Outcome: In job-hunting, these stories are known by various acronyms, such as: P-A-R: Problem, Action, Result; S-A-R: Situation-Action-Result; and C-A-R: Challenge-Action-Result.
5. Use Only One Plot Per Anecdote: Keep it simple.
6. Use A Character With Whom Your Prospect Identifies: You, of course
7. Tailor Your Character To Your Listener: Pick up clues that enable you to tell your stories so that your actions sound like something the interviewer would do.
8. Describe Actions: Tell exactly what you did yo achieve results.
9. A Good Story Must Have A Clear Outcome: The outcome is your result, which will often sound even better if quantified.
10. Practice Your Stories: Along with other responses to interview questions, rehearse your stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

• Blogs about Storytelling/Branding ~ Storytelling/Marketing



Storytelling category of Servant of Chaos



Storytelling category of Brand Story



Partum Intelligendo



Brandtelling/a>



Narrative Assets



Storytelling Category of Marketing Interactions



Laurence Vincent



Narrative Marketing category of James Phelps



Let's Talk Story

• 
  

  
  Storytelling: Branding in Practice. Publisher's description:
  

  As a concept, storytelling has won a decisive foothold in the debate on how brands of the future will be shaped. Yet, companies are still confused as to how and why storytelling can make a difference to their business. What is the point of telling stories anyway? What makes a good story? And how do you go about telling it so that it supports the company brand? This book is written for practitioners by practitioners. Through real life examples, simple guidelines and practical tools, the book aims to inspire companies to use storytelling as a means of building their brand - internally as well as externally.

• A part of Hitachi's Web site is True Stories, in video form, like the one below:
• Trollbeads' current tagline is "Every story has a bead."


• citibank's current tagline is "What's your story?" ("Whatever your story is, your Citi card can help you write it.")


• Theme parks, especially Disney, are often associated with storytelling. Quote in Orlando Sentinel, 4-14-06: "Story telling has always been the hallmark of attractions at Disney and Universal Orlando, where pre-shows immerse people in the theme of the ride." Similarly, Sea World Orlando launched a new killer-whale show, Believe, in which trainers become storytellers, emerging from the water to tell their personal stories.


• JetBlue, which previously sponsored a Story Booth project, invites customers to share their stories.



• A company called The Fund runs a site called MyRealEstateStory.com in which real people tell real-estate horror stories to promote the idea of hiring a real-estate attorney.


• Glamour magazine runs a section called Real Stories.


• The makers of Gardasil, the cervical cancer vaccine, ran an ad with the headline: "Calling Gardasil a cervical cancer vaccine is only the beginning of the story."


• MoveOn.org produced a video of members' success stories for 2007.


• A site called MyFamousName.com invites people who share names with celebrities to share their stories.


• Moissanite jewel is running a contest that invites entrants to share their stories of their most important Milestone Moment (such as first date with future husband, holding a first baby, a first big promotion) and win a pendant. The site also offers Milestone Moment example stories.


• Headline for an ad promoting the Dr. Phil show: "The stories you care about as they happen."


• A site for London's Royal Festival Hall collects memories of the hall.
  


• Apple credits its FinalCutPro software for "empowering the storyteller," in this case photographer Lauren Greenfield who used Final Cut Pro to produce Thin, about young women in a treatment center for eating disorders.

  

• Apple's own story inspires Mitchell Harper of the software company Inspire, who writes about the importance of the corporate story in a blog posting.
• Business Week offers a podcast, "Sell It with a Story: Stories that Build Connections with Customers," in which Doug Stevenson, president of Story Theater International, offers Savvy Selling columnist and podcast host Michelle Nichols his strategies on using storytelling to make more sales.
• Gerry Lantz talks about Brand Stories that Work, including the Dove Real Beauty campaign.
• In a 9-minute video, Shell Oil tells a warm, human story of how the snake oil drill, said to be relatively environmentally friendly, was invented by an engineer watching his son drink a milkshake through a bendy straw.

• Thomas R. Clifford blogs about Harnessing the Power of Remarkable Corporate Video Stories to Ignite Conversations and Spark Action at Bringing Brands to Life.

  

• In What's Your story? Storytelling to Move Markets, Audiences, People, and Brands, authors Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker describe stories as the "most powerful, most underutilized tool for competitive advantage." You can read more about the book in a two-part article by George Anderson about the book in the journal, Retail Wire (free subscription required): Part 1: Telling Stories for Profit and Part 2: Telling Stories for Profit.

  

• Steve Denning offers insight on why narrative ads work better.
  
  

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

After two years of trying, I still have not achieved the level of success I'd like in using storytelling in teaching – although I've gotten incrementally better at it.

I came across a great resource, Narrative and Learning Environments, which offers a great bibliography, as well as examples and resources.

On a similar note, here's an interesting piece called What Storytellers Can Teach You About How to Learn Faster, in which author Scott Young writes:

... learning is very similar to storytelling. You need to give yourself vivid, memorable and emotionally descriptions of the information. When you learn with compelling metaphors, information seems to stick easily. Without metaphors, ideas are dry and slip through your ears without a second thought.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The Be the Change! Share the Story! school video contest invites student teams to choose and execute a social or environmental project of their choice and document their progress in a couple of short videos that will be uploaded on Quantum Shift TV between September 2007 and March 2008. An original, entertaining video puzzle game is woven into the contest to optimize the educational impact, allow for cross-pollination of ideas, encourage community involvement and increase visibility of the projects. Deadline is March 31, 2008.

As humans we continually story our experiences.
We construct our world through our personal, community, institutional and political narratives. The 2008 Narrative Matters conference theme aims to explore all of these narrative sites. Narrative continues to gain recognition as something people do, use and research. The Narrative Matters conference provides a meeting place for people interested in doing, using and researching narrative in diverse contexts and fields. The blurring and crossing of boundaries catalyzes discussion and inquiry at Narrative Matters conferences.

Conference Dates:
May 7-10, 2008

Venue and Location:
Courtyard Marriott Hotel
475 Yonge St. Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Information here.

The Narrative Practitioner Conference will be held in the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education Wrexham North Wales in the UK June 23-25, 2008. The Narrative Practitioner site also has some nice links to narrative and storytelling resources.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Reinhard Kuchenmuller and his wife, Dr. Marianne Stifel, work for corporate clients doing visual facilitation. In an interview on Projects@Work (may require log-in), Kuchenmiller states:

Information presented in visual language as a picture-word combination is understood better and more quickly than information that is solely text-based. This is because information that is established in the non-verbal sphere of intelligence arouses associations and thus, remains better anchored for a longer period. We make use of visual learning preferences to achieve this goal. ... It’s a simplification to say [that pictures work better than words alone in conveying information and making it stick in the mind], but we know that there are two sides of the brain, the creative and the logical. We’re all used to using the logic part at work, and saving the other part for our private lives, our hobbies, the cinema. I think the creative brain brings more deep insight to serious questions and it is connected to a universal treasure of pictures. After all, mankind started to draw pictures 40,000 years ago, and we only developed writing about 5,000 years ago. So, for 35,000 years, drawing was enough.

I recently did some research on learning styles for a book my partner and I are working on about study skills. I would venture to say the effectiveness of pictures over words or vice versa may depend largely on the type of learner you are – visual, auditory, etc. The debate reminds me a bit of the PowerPoint vs. story debate. Pecha Kucha, the Japanese-inspired minimailist slide-show style, leans toward the picture side, but requires spoken words to fully tell its story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A fascinating article in New Scientist by Helen Phillips focused on "confabluation," a tendency for folks in older age to "develop amnesia about recent happenings while retaining memory of their younger days." Wrote Phillips:

"Until fairly recently it was seen simply as a neurological deficiency - a sign of something gone wrong. Now, however, it has become apparent that healthy people confabulate too. ... we may all confabulate routinely as we try to rationalise decisions or justify opinions. Why do you love me? Why did you buy that outfit? Why did you choose that career? At the extreme, some experts argue that we can never be sure about what is actually real and so must confabulate all the time to try to make sense of the world around us."

Ah yes, there is no objective reality. Reality is socially constructed through language, through story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

During a trip to San Francisco, my husband and I were walking down a terraced hill near Coit Tower when a woman came up to us and said, "Have you seen the wild parrots?" This question had the flavor of a bit of spy code as though she had said, "The crow flies at midnight," and we were expected to confirm our identities with an appropriate response in spy-code.

We didn't think much more of the incident until a couple of weeks ago when we happened to see a trailer for the documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. We immediately knew that those were the parrots the woman had referred to, and of course, we had to rent the film.

What a treat it is! A wonderful, touching story – collection of stories, really – with a surprise twist at the end. You can get a bit of a flavor of it the Web site of Mark Bittner, the man who cared for the parrots for several years. See especially the Table of Contents of the book of the same name and Bittner's photos. And see the film. It's lovely.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

• Michael and Rebecca Kull told the story of a trip around the world in Tales from Low Orbit.



• In Story Tour: Storytelling Rabbi and his Adventures, Shana T. relates stories told by her father, Rabbi Tobesman, and reflects on them.
• Sharon Lippincott blogs about The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

  

• Ronni Barrett is encouraging folks over 50 to tell their stories at The Elder Storytelling Place.

  

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As an avid cyclist, I was delighted to learn of the site crazyguyonabike.com that enables touring cyclists to journal about their bike tours. These folks are much more ambitious than my partner and I have been so far; we biked in about 12 states last summer but traveled between them in an RV. I've noticed that many touring cyclists are quite mature, so I hope to have some good tales to tell on crazyguyonabike.com at some point in my life.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

• “Nothing changes until the story changes,” says Mette Norgaard, who puts on workshops and has written The Ugly Duckling Goes to Work, with workplace wisdom based on Hans Christian Andersen stories.
• The Circle Project:

  We provide innovative learning experiences in communities and organizations by creating surprise, energy, depth, and relationship around difficult issues like diversity and inclusive leadership. We do so using story, theatre and experiential processes, forming creative and safe spaces where people don’t have to be clever, but are free to truly learn and explore. We help individuals in organizations deepen their working relationships across difference, transforming how they work together in the process and enhancing their capacity for innovation. Our work is more oriented toward learning (a process that leaves us changed) than toward problem-solving (a process focused on changing our surroundings) because we believe that changing our surroundings can only come after we ourselves are changed in some way.

  
• Evelyn Clark, The Corporate Storyteller, has an article about organizational storytelling in Reader’s Digest Asia.
• Rachel Hedman teaches educators and others how to use story in the college classroom.
• Maggie Foster blogs about the Benefits of Storytelling Therapy.
• John Kotre author of eight books about lives, memories, and legacies, all of which take a narrative approach, is collecting stories of personal cosmologies, as well as stories of journeys get from one understanding of the cosmos to another at his Web site.
• David Drake, PhD, offers the Center for Narrative Coaching. I saw his excellent presentation at last year’s Golden Fleece conference.

• My friend and fellow Central Floridian Rick Stone is at i.d.e.a.s. with the title of Story Analytics Master.

• MovingPictures helps companies tell their story. Check out the cool video, The Essence of a Story, on the company’s site.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Want to know what a certain job is like? Listen to the story of someone who's in that job. Goldman Sachs makes that possible with videos of what various aspects of working for the organization are like. Text stories also are available.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I admit that American Idol is a guilty pleasure of mine. The Season 7 auditions are just about over; Hollywood week is up next at this writing, and I am willing to wager that those who will do well once viewers start voting will be the ones whose stories have been told.

Contestants voted off early often complain that they didn't get camera time during the audition period, that America didn't get to know their stories. They are right. Mere singing talent rarely results in success on AI; it's the story that America votes for.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A blog entry that captures the need for telling your story in the job search is Chris Pearson's The Only Thing on Your Resume that Matters to a Smart Person. Pearson writes:

Intelligent people really don’t care what’s on your resume. In fact, intelligent people don’t really give a damn about formal interviews, resumes, or anything of that sort. Sure, your portfolio matters, but even that’s secondary to the number one, be all, end all factor. It’s the one thing that matters above all else to any truly smart person with whom you’ll ever do business. What is it?

It’s you. It’s everything about your character. It’s every emotion you represent. It’s the reflection of your passions on your character. It’s how you represent yourself - verbally, physically, mentally, and socially.

It’s you.

Really good, really smart people actively seek out those with whom they share an intrinsic kinship. The capitalists among them are constantly on the lookout for those who stand head and shoulders above the crowd not only because of everything they represent now, but also because of everything that they could represent.

Just like Major League Baseball scouts judge talent on the basis of perceived potential, intelligent people rate others with the future in mind. They only basis they have for determining your future worth is your current character.

What really matters for YOU: No matter who you are or what you’re doing, people are going to try to classify you, to try and lump you into some kind of quantifiable group. While I think it sucks, the fact is, it’s human nature. We use devices like this to help us understand things; otherwise, we’d spend all our time running around, trying to catch up with all the anomalies and inconsistencies.

So, how can you get across you and your story in the job search? I am still in quest of a resume that tells the job seeker's story. The blog as a resume, as discussed in previous entries is one way to do it. Cover letters, I feel, can tell more of a story than resumes, and of course, you have an opportunity to tell your story in interviews – but you have to make it to the interview first. I see two opposite forces pulling at the recruitment and employment scene – technology's influence in standardization of information that employers use to select candidates, as opposed to the need for the human touch and connection that Pearson writes about. With more recruiters searching social-media sites for candidates, these venues seem well positioned as a place to convey YOU and tell your story through your profile. Tell it well and avoid digital dirt! Perhaps revealing, employer-appealing stories will be told in some as-yet-unknown form that these two forces converge.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I want to post more soon about the amazing treasures I stumbled upon at Smith Magazine, but in the meantime, this book of 6-word memoirs. Not Quite What I Was Planning, is being released today.

From the Smith Web site:

[The book] collects almost 1,000 six-word memoirs, including additions from many celebrities including Stephen Colbert, Jane Goodall, Dave Eggers, and more.

Surprisingly addictive, Not Quite is both a moving peek at the minutia of humanity and the most literary toilet reading you’ll ever find.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

STORI stands for STorytelling ORganization Institute, a provider of
workshops for consultants, their clients and researchers.

S T O R I I N S T I T U T E
TWO WORKSHOPS TO CHOOSE FROM in 2008

2008 STORY NOTICING WORKSHOP FOR RESEARCHERS - PLACE: Holiday Inn (Independence Mall) – Historic District in Philadelphia, PA. Conference cost: $110 for faculty, $75 for graduate students. Date: March 26th (Wed) Time: 9AM to 6PM (price includes breakfast and lunch). We invite scholars in the field of narrative and story to a workshop for Ph.D. students, faculty, and researchers. STORI Institute scholars, who have written books and journal articles on story noticing, living story, and differences among beginning, middle, end (BME) narratives and the more dynamic qualities of story complexity in living systems will present, provide you with qualitative research protocols, and examples. If asked, we will assist you in developing your research projects. You will develop networks with other scholars, getting input on your projects. You are encouraged to attend the Standing Conference for Management & Organization Inquiry* (sc'MOI) that runs from Thurs to Saturday (Mar 27 to 29th, 8Am to 6PM). Pricing for sc'MOI is an additional cost of $300 for faculty and $100 for Ph.D. students. Details on deadlines for registration and manuscript submission to proceedings.

STORY NOTICING WORKSHOP FOR CONSULTANTS AND THEIR CLIENTS - PLACE: Holiday Inn (Independence Mall) – Historic District in Philadelphia, PA.; Cost: $1,150 ($975 per person for groups of two or more from the same organization); Dates: March 30 and 31st (Sun & Mon, 9:30 AM to 6PM); In this highly interactive workshop consultants and their clients will collaborate with leading STORI scholars to take a deeper and broader look at story noticing in organizations. We will have workshop exercises and modules including:

• Story Listening - How really listening to the stories of others reveals layers of knowledge that normally pass us by, and how to work with them using what we call storymaker methodologies


• Story Aliveness - How to notice stories that are living in human systems, yet taken-for-granted in story complexity.


• Story Action - How story action can become the engine of creative integral-strategy development and performance improvement for your organization to make it more polyphonic (many-voiced)


• Story Attunement - How the stories that matter are often spontaneous, abbreviated, be the least polished, yet can have the most transformational impact once restorying processes are attuned


• Story Ethics - How to attest to the organization's story ethics and the story rights of its stakeholders (including the integral methods)

You will apply these story noticing ideas to your own organization and move you far beyond the customary approaches of using stories as just a stump speech or focus-group device. And you will have an opportunity to experience these story noticing concepts – drawn from research and practice, in our original workshop exercises, and work with us to apply them to your own setting.

During the consultants and their clients workshop participants will…
1. Work with consultants and their clients, in pre-workshop, in the weeks leading up to the event, to ascertain specific interests and needs in story noticing.
2. Identify current organizational challenges that will benefit from a story noticing approach during a pre-conference call with one of the STORI Institute consultants
3. Assess your story-based communication and story noticing competencies
4. Work with methods for noticing, gathering and eliciting stories in your organization
5. Practice analyzing stories noticed to better understand what people are experiencing in your organization
6. Develop a story action plan for your organization
7. Participate in a coaching session with STORI Institute consultants and their clients.

For more information on the next workshop and to reserve your place contact David Boje.
Phone: 575-532-1693 or SKYPE 'davidboje' - Let's talk instead of email; storytelling is an oral way

Home site







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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

JD Messinger interviewed storytelling guru Terrence Gargiulo on Global Evolution™ CNN Radio about the Art of Story Telling (links below).

Messinger's words:

If we pause and think about it, almost everyday and in every conversation, we tell stories. Why do we do that? What is it about a story that we find engaging or memorable? My guest this week is a master in communications and applies his essence in a very unique and powerful way – teaching organizational communications through the art of story telling. Terrence Gargiulo helps us understand the essence of communicating through stories – how we subconsciously select stories, the function of stories, and the steps to become a better story teller and more effective communicator.

• How do stories affect us?


• What is the meaning and magic behind stories?


• How does it relate to a conductor in an orchestra?


• How and why do they touch us?


• Finding meaning, finding insights – power of multiplicity of experiences coexisting in a moment.


• What is the DNA of effective communications?

Art of Story Making Pt 1

Art of Story Making Pt 2

Art of Story Making Pt 3

Art of Story Making Pt 4

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I won't be going to the Smithsonian storytelling weekend this year, but I'm sure it will be excellent as usual.

There will be a new Thursday evening session on May 8, "Organizational Storytelling 101." Svend-Erik Engh and Steve Denning will cover the basics of organizational storytelling.

The theme of the sessions on Friday (and Saturday) will be storytelling and innovation. Speakers will include Dorothy Leonard, emerita professor of Harvard Business School and author of "Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom"; Linda Coffman will discuss how storytelling has been used at Procter & Gamble. Claudia L'Amoreaux, Education Community Developer for Linden Lab, will share examples of organizations innovating in the new storyspace of Second Life. What if you discovered an entirely new world where you could tell stories in ways you've never done before? How might it change you? What stories would you tell?

The Saturday portion of the event is put on by the Golden Fleece group, and details are forthcoming.

To find out more go here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In a convergence between storytelling and career, Filcro Media Staffing offers case histories of successful search assignments.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The Story of Stuff tells the story of "the material economy." The story part is a bit overshadowed by preachiness, but the originator, Annie Leonard, delivers an important environmental message.

From The Story of Stuff Web site:

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Editor's note: This article is the second of two parts.
Part I discusses the pros and cons of using a blog as a resume.

If you've decided you'd like to experiment with using a blog as a resume, consider these tips:

Include elements you can't include in a traditional paper resume. Linked from his blog, The Bryper Blog, social media blogger Bryan Person offers what he has coined his Social Media Resume and notes that the resume include items not found in a conventional resume, such as:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Yeah, yeah, I know I've done this before ... a burst of blogging and then a long silence. This time I have fewer other distractions. No full-time job. I'm committed to being a full-time blogger and growing A Storied Career. Hope you'll come along for the ride.

For the first month or so, I'll be catching up on stuff I've wanted to post during my long absence, so dedicated story fans may see material they already know about – though I hope you'll find it presented in a fresh format.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.