Natalie Shell, whose considers her life’s work “a dialogue project [in which] conversations and stories are key themes,” writes about “future vision,” which she compares to strategic planning:

You will still see that most people spend a lot of time and money paying for a strategic plan. A plan that plots out a set of things that addresses the current state of thinking and projects that and the past forward. … if we are looking at a strategy of what we want to grow towards, what we want to become, then perhaps it is wise to have inkling of what we are trying to grow towards? … pick a future point, a vision of where what (and why) you want to be/become. Then imagine/put yourself there. Now work backwards in time and space at the steps you have to take…. What is a future outcome I would like to be part of?” instead of asking “what is the problem I would like to solve” or “what is the change I want to make”, “what do I want to change in the world” , present and past-centred questions, perhaps we need to reflect more what, who and how we want to be? What is the future vision we are growing/climbing towards? … Choose a point in the future, focus on it, look at what steps/rungs you have to take to get there from there to where you are, describe that vision, share it in story…and become it!

Again, career can certainly play a major role in “the future outcome I would like to be part of.”

Shell also notes similarities between her process and Dave Snowden’s The Future Backwards technique, of which he writes:

You create stories going forwards in time to cover possibilities. Now if you have strong opinions about what should happen, then it is easy to influence the evolution of a scenario that will support your proposed actions. Its also easy to describe how the past led to the present in such a way as to vindicate your view of history. We found that by getting people to construct history in reverse that they explored more possibilities and were more open to novel discovery.

Greater detail about The Future Backwards in this download.

Finally, in the blog Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios, Dale Hunscher describes Future Scenario Planning as it applies to healthcare, quoting from his own white paper:

Scenario planning is the art of storytelling applied to the future instead of the past or present. In this way it is not unlike science fiction — it’s about “remembering the future.”

Hunscher notes 6 steps to the Future Scenario Planning method:

1. Framing the question
2. Researching the facts
3. Identifying local forces
4. Finding the driving forces
5. Developing the matrix

How could you apply these to planning your career?

Lots more on the technique in this section of his blog.

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Another one of the areas of storytelling that I don’t really deal with in A Storied Career is storytelling within movies and TV. But Apple’s Set to Screen series of podcasts tells the story of the movie-making process.

The context for the series is Baz Luhrman’s upcoming film Australia. (For the record, I hated Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, but I’m interested in the history of Oz, so I will likely give him another chance).

Says the Set-to-Screen site:

Every few weeks through October, a new podcast episode from Baz and his production team will introduce you to another aspect of moviemaking, starting with on-set still photography, then moving on to costume design, cinematography, scoring, and more. You’ll get insights from the artists at work on Australia, watch them in action, view footage the rest of the world hasn’t seen yet, and follow along as the movie comes together.

Some of the podcasts also contain challenges for young filmmakers, who can win prizes for rising to the challenges.

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In her blog, my Facebook friend Lindsey Pollak cites the case of her own (brand new) husband Evan, who got a job through LinkedIn and was featured in this article by Alison Doyle.

Pollak also cites other articles by Doyle that offer tips on networking and job-searching through social-media venues like Facebook and LinkedIn. A couple of these that can relate to the “stories” job-seekers tell in social media are:

• Be sure to include keywords in your profile that are related to the jobs you want to find. Not sure what words will pop? Grab words and phrases directly from job listings that appeal to you.

• Post content that is professional and relevant to your career, such as links to articles you’ve written and testimonials about your professional skills and experience.

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With the exception of a period in junior high, I’ve never really kept a journal (I think I may have anticipated the Internet because I wrote my journal back then as though it would be read by the public.)

But beginning in early March 1993 when we first got on the Internet, my cousin/best friend and I have maintained an intensive e-mail correspondence that is tantamount to journaling. We’ve shared our stories and told each other just about everything over these 15+ years. We used to share this stuff by phone; I can now recall only two phone conversations we’ve had in 15 years. She just told me a poignant story about failing to connect with her husband at the airport.

We’ve tapered off some in recent years. The novelty has worn off, and we’re both busy.

But I’ve noticed a new phenomenon recently. We’re both fairly avid Twitter users, and we now seem to be letting the micro-blogging of Twitter stand in for the intensive e-mail journaling of old. If we forget to to tell each other something, we’ll often catch up through Twitter Tweets. She’ll often ask me to elaborate on something I’ve posted on Twitter.

After she returned from the same trip where she feared her husband hadn’t arrived at the airport to pick her up, she detailed her travels to me, as we usually do.

But I found myself lazily responding: “Anything that’s new in my life, you can probably find on Twitter.”

I think I’m sad about losing my journaling outlet even though I like the shorthand of Twitter.

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I’ve been really into “attending” webinars recently.

I never did teleseminars because I’m phone-phobic. Even if I was not expected to speak, I wanted nothing to do with any learning opportunity that involved the phone.

But now that learning options are available that just require my laptop, the Web, and a headset, I’m all over it. Especially if it’s free or cheap. I can even do teleseminars and conference calls now as long as I use Skype, my computer, and my headset. Yes, I am a very quirky person.

I participated on June 25 in an excellent webinar put on by organizational story guru Terrence Gargiulo. Here’s what made it so great:

• He used the wonderful GotoMeeting platform that enables participants to see the presenter’s desktop and use interactivity tools.
• He opened with two fun trivia questions (both of which I answered correctly I might add).
• I had heard Terrence is an excellent presenter — and it’s true.
• He’s also a great storyteller.
• He had great visuals with cool highlighter and mouseover effects.
• He respected his audience’s time. In contrast, I attended a webinar the night before that went way over time.
• He wasn’t trying to sell anything. Again in contrast to the weak webinar the night before.
• He gave a shoutout to A Storied Career. Woo-hoo!
• He provided copious handouts.
• He gave a prize. Random drawing. I didn’t win.

The only slight downside was some audio funkiness resulting from unclear instructions about muting and unmuting. Pretty minor.

I was amazed when Terrence said this was the first webinar he’d done because he did a great job with it. He says he hopes to do more, and I hope he does. He’s looking for topic suggestions. E-mail him here if you have any thoughts.

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As I attempt to categorize my storytelling interests (and the focus of A Storied Career) in my brain, I have a bit of trouble with digital storytelling. This branch of applied storytelling is huge in the education world, and while I’m interested in storytelling and learning, the blog could easily get bogged down in a ton of material about educational digital storytelling. Plenty of other blogs offer this kind of information, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here.

But digital storytelling is an emerging area of applied storytelling in many other fields, so it’s appropriate to mention a great resource for those who are interested in creating digital stories.

It’s Katie Christo’s Wiki, which offers a wonderful collection of how-to’s for digital storytellers.

Late-breaking addition: Just came across another set of digital-storytelling resources here, and I’m almost as fascinated by the Zoho Notebooks format in which these resources appear as the resources themselves.

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Marketing Interactions is offering a very cool, free e-book called Why Marketing Stories Have Catch. It’s full of excellent descriptions of how and why stories are so effective for marketing. Author Ardath Albee aptly refers to stories as “stealth marketing.”

Much of the principles in the e-book also relate to marketing oneself in the job search. This set of questions delving into how a company could define its essence can easily apply to job-seekers:

Albee says stories provide movement, momentum that “pull buyers forward.” In the same way they can pull employers forward:

Albee writes:

If you’re presenting your leads with bulleted lists of why your product is the best one,  they have to work too hard to apply the facts to their specific situation. By putting those  facts into a relatable context (story), you transform the reception and follow‐on  interactions taken by your buyers in relation to your marketing programs.   customers can change the story they tell themselves.  

Same goes for employers. They can change the story they tell themselves by relating to the context of you the job-seeker meeting their needs and solving their problems.

Albee cites Seth Godin for the following:

The challenge for marketers is to figure out how to change the story they are living so that their customers can change the story they tell themselves.

Albee adds:

If they can see themselves in the story, they are more inclined to want to participate. 

Just as customers are inclined to participate when they can see themselves in marketing stories, employers are inclined to participate (by hiring the candidate) when they see themselves in the job-seeker’s story.

Most of the “catch” factors that Albee says appeal to buyer attention also apply to the job search:

• Urgency:

  Every story you develop must play to urgent priorities to gain attention. The more  personally invested with your story the buyer gets, the more attention you generate.  Urgency means aligning the story’s ”plot” (topic/problem) with a priority for the buyer. 

What is the employer’s priority? Tell stories that show your ability to meet the employer’s urgent needs.

• Impact:

  What will happen for the buyer if they choose to interact with you Buyers are looking for vendors who will educate them on areas beyond their core company expertise. They want trusted partners who work with them instead of just sell them products. 

• Will the expertise included in your story have a direct bearing on the buyers’ success  in accomplishing their objective? 

• How is the value you provide unique in comparison to alternatives?  What stories could you tell that show your expertise and how that expertise will contribute to the employer’s success? What stories can you tell that demonstrate your Unique Selling Proposition — the attributes that set you apart from other candidates for the same job?

• Reputation 

  This Catch Factor is about how credible you are with the buyer. 

Reputation in the job search is closely tied to personal branding. What is your brand, your reputation, your promise to employers? What stories can you tell to enhance your credibility with the employer?

Finally, Albee writes:

By incorporating marketing stories into your content strategy, you enable your buyers to envision exactly that experience. You want them to live and breathe the successes of your current customers and picture just how much competitive advantage they can gain by adding your expertise to the company roster. You need them to see themselves succeeding.

 

The exact same principle applies to the job search. Let’s just plug a few different words into the above quote:

By incorporating stories into your job-search strategy, you enable employers to
envision exactly that experience. You want them to live and breathe the successes of your current and past employers and picture just how much competitive advantage they can gain by adding your expertise to the company roster. You need them to see themselves succeeding.

The e-book closes with a “Quick Guide to Writing a Marketing Story Article” and accompanying worksheet that could be adapted for developing career and personal-branding stories for the job search.

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The photo-sharing site Shutterfly has a section (essentially a blog) called Shutterfly Storytelling that offers lots of nice ideas for creating digital photo books that tell a story. The accompanying blog says: “At Shutterfly, we all have a real passion for telling our stories so we thought that this blog would be a great way to share our thoughts, ideas and inspiration about storytelling with you, and, of course, get your input, feedback and ideas.”

The blog contains a Stories We Like section, as well as a Storyteller Spotlight, in which folks share their philosophies and techniques for telling stories in photos.

Story ideas include stories of wedding showers, baby’s first year, a child’s year at school, vacation-rental guest book, wedding stories, tribute to a coach.

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I’ve written about Jonathan Harris’s amazing Whale Hunt. In the above video, he talks about The Whale Hunt as storytelling platform, as well as other storytelling platforms, including the very talk he’s giving as a storytelling platform.

Pop!Tech, which describes itself as “a one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas” was the venue for Harris’s fascinating talk. Pop!Tech introduces the video with these words:

Jonathan Harris is redefining the idea of what it means to tell a story. Take a ride through an arctic whale hunt and plunge headfirst into the feelings Harris finds running rampant in cyberspace as he describes what he calls “storytelling platforms.”

In addition to talking about the Whale Hunt, Harris discusses his We Feel Fine project, which:

… harvest[s] human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices…

If you haven’t seen either of Harris’s projects or the video discussing them, you must. The video does fall apart a bit at the end with Harris’s experiment in turning the talk into a storytelling platform for the audience because participants weren’t miked and could barely be heard.

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What autobiographical story might this body position evoke?

Katinka Dijkstra, Michael P. Kaschak, and Rolf A. Zwaan have conducted research that shows that people can recall their autobiographical stories faster by getting into body positions “similar to the body positions in the original events” than they can when in different positions. Here’s the abstract of their research:

We assessed potential facilitation of congruent body posture on access to and retention of autobiographical memories in younger and older adults. Response times were shorter when body positions during prompted retrieval of autobiographical events were similar to the body positions in the original events than when body position was incongruent. Free recall of the autobiographical events two weeks later was also better for congruent-posture than for incongruent-posture memories. The findings were similar for younger and older adults, except for the finding that free recall was more accurate in younger adults than in older adults in the congruent condition. We discuss these findings in the context of theories of embodied cognition.

[ Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for turning me on to this study. ]

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I’ve been having a really fun time over the past month or so collecting and editing the stories of the careers of a variety of workers and job-seekers.

Everyone has such a fascinating career and interesting perspective.

The stories are for one of the sister sites of A Storied Career, 10CareerStories.com.

You can find the stories here, and here is the list of subjects:

• College Student Career Story
• New College Grad Job-Seeker Story
• Twenty-Something Worker Career Story
• MBA Job-Seeker Story
• Career-Changer Career Story
• Boomer With Millennial Mindset Career Story
• Baby-Boomer Recareering Story
• Downsized Older Worker Story
• Homemaker Returning to Work Story
• European Worker Career Story
• Entrepreneur Considering an MBA Story

One of our subjects has smartly included a link to her career story on her LinkedIn profile.

We have exceeded our initial goal of 10 stories for the site (11 currently), have one more in the works, and would love to keep adding to the collection.

Want to tell your career story? Visit our questionnaire.

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My new friend Sharon Lippincott of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing has joined with Jerry Waxler to start a Yahoo-based discussion group for those interested in lifestory writing. Although my interest in that area is embryonic at best, I've joined the group and am impressed with the warm and generous spirit its founders and members convey.

You can join here, and in the extended portion of this entry, I have also borrowed (stolen) QUITE liberally from Sharon's site to further explain the group. Here's the first part of Sharon's invitation:

Calling All Life Writers
There is good news for anyone who would like to hang out with other people who write life stories, memoir, journals, personal essays, or other forms of recording their lives in writing. Whatever your reason for writing about your life, the newly formed Life Writers Forum is a great place to ask questions, share thoughts, post short stories or excerpts from longer works, and generally shoot the breeze about writing.

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In an article in KMWorld Magazine, Dave Snowden writes that “everything is fragmented.” Further, he writes of a shift (in the world of knowledge management) to:

… the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. … In the world of fragmented knowledge, the individual must gather at the point of need knowledge fragments from a variety of informal sources (e.g., colleagues, blogs, wikis, etc.) and then blend that information on the fly to reach conclusions and take action.

Snowden talks about how the standard practice of knowledge management has been to structure knowledge and place in hierarchical taxonomies. But that approach doesn’t allow knowledge to be adapted well to change, Snowden asserts. Instead:

… In the world of fragmented knowledge, the individual must gather at the point of need knowledge fragments from a variety of informal sources (e.g., colleagues, blogs, wikis, etc.) and then blend that information on the fly to reach conclusions and take action.

To skeptics, Snowden asks:

Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories? With the odd exception … everyone goes for the stories.

I think of A Storied Career as a knowledge-management system, primarily for myself, but also for anyone else whose storytelling interests are similar to mine. It’s a repository for all the bits of fragmented information. I don’t really attempt to organize and structure the fragmented bits much beyond placing entries in categories (with “Storytelling — Other” probably the predominating category). It’s not structured, but I know it’s all here as a repository of the expanding body of knowledge of aspects of applied storytelling that interest me. (I also like how blogger “Dr. Pew” describes blogging as “a means to process things.”) Apparently, according to Snowden, I am engaging in a naturalistic form of knowledge management:

It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction.

And apparently, my style and that of millions of bloggers like me aligns with the way Snowden believes organizations need to move away from old, entrenched modes of non-ambiguity, whereas:

Narrative, social computing, the open source movement are all comfortable with ambiguity, embrace it and use it. Organizations need to do the same, but the old patterns of control persist beyond their natural utility.

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Tara Holahan, the marketing coordinator at Trusera, about which I blogged here, wrote to me about the story-driven origin of Trusera:

I see that we share a belief in the power of sharing firsthand experience, or stories, to benefit others. At Trusera, our goal is to create the largest repository of health stories to benefit those looking for guidance in taking the next step. This comes directly from our founder, Keith Schorsch’s, experience with Lyme disease, which took eleven doctors and finally one phone call from a friend to diagnose. Keith has a powerful entrepreneurial story [also here] that you might find interesting. Our hope is that by creating a platform to share experiences, we can make the process of connecting to people and useful experience easier, help others take control of their health and support sound health (and life) decision making.

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In her company’s blog, Creating Tomorrow (which is also the name of her company), Trina Roach relates this story she once heard:

When I first started out in advertising, I was told the story of the agency’s successful launch campaign for a major client’s new product. When the agency introduced the idea for the campaign to the client, the client was livid. It wasn’t what they expected, and it certainly wasn’t what they thought they needed for their product to be a success. The agency believed in their concept and stood behind their innovative idea 100 percent. Their middle ground? They agreed to develop a parallel campaign more in line with client expectations and to pay to put both campaigns into market research. The client agreed to abide by the research results, and launch the winning campaign. In the end, the agency version got the highest-ever research scores. It gave the client’s product a massive push into the market, became talk-of-the-town, and went on to win a creative prize in New York. Oh yea, in the end the client agreed to pick up the research costs.

Roach goes on to enumerate several types of stories used in leadership, some of which I was familiar with, some not. They include the “Who am I?” story, the “Why Am I here?” story, the “What do you want to know?” story, the “What are our core values?” story, and the crux of the story above, the “Where is out middle ground?” story. Here’s how Roach describes that kind of story:

Where is our middle ground? — As a leader you are sometimes called upon to bargain even when you strongly believe you are in the right. The challenge here is to let the other party see that you truly understand their perspective, while challenging them to give your method a try.

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The site Divine Caroline tells readers:

We thought you might like a place to share a Story, get inspired, make a connection or figure things out.

Lots of great stories here, mostly by women, about relationships, parenting, home/food, body and soul, travel, style, career/money, play, neighborhood and world.

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When I read the following quote by Peter Guber in an article called “Four Truths of the Storyteller” in Harvard Business Review, I immediately thought of my mother:

… many people assume that storytelling is somehow in conflict with authenticity. The great storyteller, in this view, is a spinner of yarns that amuse without being rooted in truth.

Similarly, Casey Quinlan of Mighty Casey Media Mighty Mouth Blog writes here:

The word “story” and the word “lie” — or, less in-your-face, “prevaricate” — are often thought to be synonymous. They often ARE synonymous.

These thoughts reminded me of trying to explain my dissertation topic to my mother. “Storytelling in the job search” was the shorthand I used to describe the complex document. “What do you mean, storytelling — you mean making things up, telling fibs?” She could not grasp that storytelling could be anything but inauthentic. Clearly my mother is the kind of story skeptic to which Guber refers.

How odd a worldview when story can so beautifully convey a person’s authenticity.

Wally Lamb writes in an article in O magazine (about teaching women in prison to write autobiographically): “Your uniqueness- - your authenticity — is your strength.”

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In a reprint from her book The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, Sharon Lippincott (who blogs at The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing) ponders whether there’s any difference among the terms autobiography, memoir, and lifestory. (She later uncovers a number of other terms for similar genres of writing - “faction” [fact-based fiction], docudrama, nonfiction novels, personal journalism, dramatic nonfiction, literature of fact, creative nonfiction, autobiographical novels, nonfiction narrative, personal essay, literary memoir). Her initial thoughts were these:

… autobiography was primarily linear in nature, covering the full space of a life up to the time of writing, and was largely documentary. Memoir was a more artistically developed literary form that could address limited periods of time and specific experiences. It left more room for creativity, interpretation and emotion. Lifestory writing seemed to me to be the most spontaneous, natural, cozy form, informally written from the heart, like a letter to a friend.

After taking the reader through some very interesting research on the subject, including the history of autobiography in Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story and the Web site and audio/podcast files of Creative Nonfiction, Lippincott concludes:

I realize that the attempt to define terms is meaningless. I’ve come to understand that writing stories from our experience, from our lives, is far too personal a matter and too complex a challenge to be bound by form. Our form will be as personal as the stories we write, and our reasons for writing them. The forms we evolve will be perfect for our unique stories. … No beginner should let ignorance of form or style delay the writing of a single word. Go beyond the confusion and simply write the story that is in your heart. Call it what you like and let it grow as it will. Learn as you go, and it will become your own perfect story.

[ A tip of the hat to Stephanie West Allen for alerting me to this essay. ]

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Final bit from the nice outline (by “gwennis48” at the Luther I. Replogle Foundation) of key points from the presentation that Andy Goodman delivered. I’ve blogged previously about my fondness for Goodman’s Web site and company…

Goodman suggests that the ideal word length for a verbally told story is 750 words; less if it appears on the web; more if it appears in print elsewhere.

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I’ve posted some new events in my Story Events section several coming up coming up very soon in June.

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“Stories are the essence of a culture” is one of the tenets of the group behind Living Cultural Databases. Starkly, the group notes that “once the stories are no longer re-told, the culture is dead.”

On oral heritage and the importance of storytelling, the group writes:

Stories are the essence of a culture. For indigenous peoples they inspire, offer analogies, teach practical skills and an understanding of how to live in fragile or hostile environments. Furthermore, the recounting of myths and narratives are vital for maintaining ethnic identity and group solidarity. Stories have social functions, representing the collective memory of the people, combining the past with the present and attaching meaning to space and time. They encapsulate the deeper beliefs and values of a culture, promoting role models, ways of living, behaving and believing. In summary, storytelling is at the heart of social life, personal and cultural identity. Once the stories are no longer re-told, the culture is indeed dead. … Narrative can be the tool to guide a group’s development and the cultural choices they face. In other words, the reinterpretation of folklore is important for shaping the cultures of the future.

The group’s goal is to to create Living Cultural Storybases for the communities themselves. The author of the blog, The Written One, echoes the concept of storytelling as culture and storytelling as the means to express culture:

The ideal of a storytelling culture is one where individuals are not blocked from self expression, where the ideas emerging from that situation are shared in an organic (for want of a better word) and democratic way. For it is these ideas that make up the tapestry of that culture overall, just as each bird in flight makes up the beautiful tapestry of a soaring flock. As such, this tapestry can truly claim to represent the ideas and beliefs of the people involved. This allows for a rich storytelling culture overall.

(Thanks once again to Stephanie West Allen for making me aware of this site).

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Another bit from the nice outline (by “gwennis48” at the Luther I. Replogle Foundation) of key points from the presentation that Andy Goodman delivered. I’ve blogged previously about my fondness for Goodman’s Web site and company…

To build a lasting storytelling culture in your organization, identify the organization’s core stories, Goodman advises:

To build a storytelling culture, these are the stories that you need:

1. the “Nature of our Challenge” story
2. the “How we Started” story
3. the emblematic success stories
4. stories about your people; performance stories
5. the “Striving-to-Improve” story
6. the “Where We Are Going” story (the future)

Also on the subject of nonprofit storytelling, Kivi Leroux Miller posts on the blog Nonprofit Communications Five Questions Nonprofits Should Answer with Stories, as well as a terrific collection of great nonprofit storytelling sources.

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Having seen a couple of bloggers note that they were telling their breast-cancer stories at a site called Trusera, I thought the site was devoted to stories about breast cancer.

I discovered, however, that it’s for stories of all kinds of health issues. Here’s how a press release on the site describes Trusera:

… a free invitation-only network of people who care about health. The site connects people who’ve “been there” to people seeking credible, relevant health information. [Trusera’s approach is to] first, invite a group of people with experience in health and wellness. Encourage them to share their experience and invite others. Second, provide the community with the tools to personalize the health information they create and receive. Enable them to control their experience through filtering, privacy controls and personalization.

When you search for stories on the site, you can enter a search topic. Popular topics seem to be: Female, Male, Autism, nutrition, cancer, fitness, parenting, yoga, diabetes, depression, research, allergies, breast cancer, and running.

In the section for telling one’s story, the prompt is: “Please tell us about one of your health passions, interests, or experiences.”

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Continuing my series of bits from the nice outline (by “gwennis48” at the Luther I. Replogle Foundation) of key points from the presentation that Andy Goodman delivered. I’ve blogged previously about my fondness for Goodman’s Web site and company…

To illustrate the effectiveness of stories for memory and learning, Goodman noted that when told to remember pairs of words, a group of 5-year-olds can remember one pair out of 21; if they make a sentence out of the pairs, they remember 8 of 21; if they make a question about the pairs, they remember 16 of 21. If the pair is “soap” and “shoe,” the question might be “Who put the soap in my shoe?” The research subjects remember when they ask a question because the question helps them make a story.

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Can’t test this product out as it’s for Windows, and I’m a Mac gal, but it did inspire me to start a new section of Story Tools (which I haven’t done yet, but it’s coming).

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I wrote a while back about how much I love the Web site and company, a goodman.

A blogger named “gwennis48” has blogged at Luther I. Replogle Foundation about a presentation that Andy Goodman delivered sponsored by the Washington Grantmakers and Nonprofit Roundtable. The blog posting is a really nice little outline of Goodman’s key points. I thought I’d post and comment on several of them individually.

First up, Goodman talked about storytelling to form identity.

He suggested this exercise:
When you go home tonight, list the top 10 stories that you like to tell about yourself. What do they say about you? (Are they the right ones?)

The exercise is inspired by Robert B. Reich’s book Tales of a New America in which (quoting gwennis48 here):

Reich described the four stories (he calls them parables) that have formed American life for the past 400 years. Names change over time, but the stories remain the same.

Here are Reich’s four stories:

1. Mob At the Gate (guard against outsiders)
2. Triumphant Individual (Horatio Alger story/American Idol story; also all the redemption stories)
3. Benevolent Community (we will uplift the poor, heal the sick; witness the anger felt during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina)
4. Rot at the Top (guard against corporate and political corruption)

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Master Resume Writer/Career Strategist Jacqui D. Barrett notes that job-seekers who do not begin telling their stories in their resumes may not get the opportunity to do so in an interview because the employer will feel no enticement from the resume.

From Barrett’s article entitled “Career Branding - What Does This Mean to Me?: The Branded Resume as an Essential Tool,” published in the E-Bridge newsletter of The Career Management Alliance:

Most resumes possess the essential elements as touted by resume-builder tipsters to construct an intro (Summary/Profile), middle (Experience), and end (Education/Development), and some include the appropriate measurements (%, $, #), but in a majority of cases, these resumes do not compel the (right) reader to call. The reader initially is interested and hopeful to digest the rest of the story, but s/he often drifts off the page, uninspired or unclear as to how this person’s message resonates with his/her specific needs.

Avoiding Me-too Resumes/Creating the Emotional Hook

In other words, one resume mimics the content, results, and “buzz” language of the next resume and the next resume … and next resume … and so on. An objection I often hear from individuals whose resumes I review, when I urge them to try my resume writing ideas, is that they don’t want to say “too much” on their resume - that they want to wait to ‘save this information to tell’ during the interview. Unfortunately, when they do not create a hook or emotional appeal with their resume, they will not secure the opportunity to tell more of their story later. I am confident, through observing my clients’ profound results with the resumes we develop, that they can successfully build muscular content into the resume and still leave more of their story for the telling at the interview. (Trust me: most people’s stories could fill a 300-page book, so a 2-3 page resume will not threaten to exhaust their career archives.)

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I must have deleted it since it was in the past, but at some point, I had posted about a session at the Skoll World Forum called Storytelling in the Modern World .

A couple of venues are available for those who’d like to learn what was said in the session.

There is apparently video, though I was unable to see it (Real Media Player rarely works on my Mac).

And Nick Temple has blogged about the session here, in kind of a bare-bones, outline form.

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Erin Hoover Barnett recently reported in The Oregonian on how stories of change are healing neighborhoods through the Restorative Listening Project.

Some snippets of the article that show how these stories of change can heal:

The city of Portland is using a deceptively simple technique — storytelling — to confront the complicated issue of gentrification. And it’s bringing surprisingly powerful results. The Restorative Listening Project, run by the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, invites blacks to tell whites how it has felt to see them move into and remake inner North and Northeast Portland — for decades, the heart of Oregon’s African American community. Some question how storytelling can make a difference after housing prices already have forced out so many. Yet similar projects that grappled with much weightier issues — the horrors of apartheid, the Holocaust and World War II — show how the fundamental acts of telling and listening can heal… The Portland project is rooted in the principle of restorative justice: that healing starts when the sufferer can describe the harm and the listener can acknowledge it.

Barnett also quotes documentary filmmaker Ken Burns on how “stories reveal our shared humanity. Seeing what you have in common opens the door to becoming allies.” Burns says that hearing about someone with whom the listener can identify is “what storytelling is.”

Other links about this project:
City of Portland’s Restorative Gentrification Listening Project
Radio story on the project

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Stephanie West Allen blogged about (and turned me onto) an article by John Darling about to keep our brains fit as we advance in years. One of Darling’s suggestions (quoting “Brain Fitness” teacher Lorraine Jarvi) is to write your memoirs:

If reading is stimulating, writing is stimulation tenfold. Jarvi says keep a journal, challenging yourself to explore complex topics or current events. Also, write your memoirs, which stimulates the vital part of your brain used for memory — and it’s guaranteed to have interested readers at some point down the road.

I was reminded of the recent excellent HBO series on John Adams, who lived past 90 and seemed sharp to the end (at least in the mini-series). Bored after retirement, Adams wrote his memoirs.

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Jobs in Pods is a blog/podcast/social-media recruiting tool that features phone interviews with employers. Employers pay for the privilege of recording a Jobcast, the story of what jobs are like in the organization and what it’s like to work there.

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This wonderful video is an 18-minute talk by novelist Isabel Allende, in which — with humor, poignancy, and power — she tells stories of passion — women with passion — and how feminine energy can change the world.

The talk was part of “TED,” Technology, Entertainment, Design, which “started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

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Ever feel frustrated at a conference because so many sessions were concurrent, and you couldn’t attend them all?

Laura Fitton had some good advice on the subject in the blog of Pistachio Consulting.

She noted that it’s almost as good to hear stories about missed sessions, socially mediated though those stories may be, as to attend them yourself.

“By seeking out what my friends noticed and took away from the experience,” Fitton writes, “I’m extending the depth and breadth of being there… make it a priority to engage and exchange stories with others…”

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Jon Greer’s reflections (in his blog, Catching Flack) on a recent media-relations summit emphasize the pervasiveness of the summit’s message that public-relations practitioners need to be doing more storytelling:

Time and again during the conference, the need for becoming better and more agile storytellers came up as the essential tool for PR professionals.

Greer offers these tips for creating better stories:

• The element of time: stories need a beginning, middle and end, and that usually involves the element of time.
• Challenges overcome: we all want to know how each other is faring in the world, so good stories include trials and tribulations. Victory laps aren’t nearly as interesting.
• Detail, detail, detail: this can be a double-edged sword, because often we issue news chock-full of detail, but it’s the wrong kind. Product specs, for instance, aren’t interesting details that tell a story. Details that support storytelling elements such as risks taken (how much money is at stake) and people involved (team members, not spokespeople or top execs) are examples of interesting details
• Novelty: good stories tell us something we didn’t already know or thought we knew. So again, your new product may be a big deal to you, but new products are released everyday. Dig a little deeper to find something truly novel about your product (how or why it was developed, risks taken, challenges overcome) and I guarantee you’ll get more coverage and interest.

The cool thing about focusing on storytelling is that it is platform-neutral, meaning you can tell stories in any setting, whether it’s print media, podcasts, speeches or anything in between

Greer also noted that conference attendees weren’t very interested in sessions presented by the mainstream media but were quite attracted to sessions about new media and social media.

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What is locative storytelling? asks the FAQ at LoJoConnect. And the response:

Using the bouquet of emerging mobile and location-based technologies (from GPS-enabled mobile phones to interactive online maps), locative storytelling provides multi-media content that enhances a user’s connection to a given place. At its best, this kind of interactive media gives users increased entry points, and more control over, any given story, thereby enabling deeper and more vibrant experiences. Shorthand for locative journalism, LoJo is the name of a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies. Through this project, we hope to create interactive and informative mobile experiences that push innovation in journalism. What are some examples? If you’ve ever been on an audio tour of a museum or a city neighborhood, you’ve experienced locative storytelling. Other examples include Google mash-ups (user-enhanced Google maps that layer location-specific information over area maps) and GPS-based mobile games.

Locative Storytelling has garnered considerable attention in the blogosphere because of Penguin Books’ We Tell Stories project, particularly the story, “The 21 Steps,” which “is told by following the story as it unfolds across a [Google] map of the world. [Readers] follow the trail by clicking on the link at the bottom of each bubble.”

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