Gena Haskett, writing on blogher, thinks so:

From identity politics to Twitter tweets this has certainly been the year of the personal narrative. It is the search for your story told by another being that shares or reflects your thoughts, feelings and, at times, pain.

It is the need for connection. If we can’t find someone standing next to us then we search for them in magazines, books, music or online.

My opinion? It has been perhaps the year when personal narratives took off. The “Journaling and Personal Storytelling” category is one of the deepest on my sidebar. In 2008, I’ve blogged about and/or listed on the sidebar these personal storytelling sites, venues, and tools. Many pre-date 2008, but I only discovered them this year. Others emerged for the first time this year (I’m lazy and not including links, but you can find links to all these on my sidebar): Dandelife.com, The Circle Project, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, ThisDayInTheLife.com, This American Life, This I Believe, The Story, Your Unique Story, StoryCorps, Smith Magazine, British Library: National Life Stories, Life Story Telling, The Remembering Site, Memory Writers Network blog, Tera’s Wish, Fray, Story Circle Network, PNN (Personal News Network), About Personal Growth Stories Section, The Experience Project, Telling Our Stories, The Moth (not new in 2008, but started a highly successful podcast this year), The Monti, Story Salon, First Person Arts, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), Boomer Cafe, Tintota, Association of Personal Historians, Storytlr, Great Life Stories, Tokoni, Always Stories, The Timeslips Project, We Are Storytellers, The Timeslips Project, The Legacy Project, Flokka: Share Your Stories.

Yikes! Just realized I don’t have Heekya on my sidebar, and I know that site was new in 2008.

This was also the year Sharon Lippincott and Jerry Waxler founded Lifewriters Forum, a Yahoo discussion group.

And then there is the massive, exploding realm of social media, which many would contend is all about personal narratives — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, blogs, ad infinitum. And the narratives off the 2008 election. And the emerging world of digital storytelling, which often involves personal narratives. This is the world that Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine call “Storytelling 2.0.”

I contend this year has only scratched the surface. I predict that as more and tools and venues become available for telling and disseminating personal narratives, Storytelling 2.0 will continue to experience tremendous growth.

If you thought 2008 was the Year of Personal Narratives, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

By the way, Haskett has several nice examples of touching personal narratives in her post.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Story site Tokoni is soliciting stories about New Year’s resolutions:

Share your New Year’s Resolutions—both this year and stories from years past. What are your goals this year? Has the economy impacted your intentions? What unique or funny vows have you made in years past? What’s one resolution you’ve actually kept?

[Photo take from http://davita.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/new-years-resolution.jpg]

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve always felt a strong affinity for Ron Howard. I literally grew up with him; he was born the same year I was — in fact the same month. I’ve always felt that if I passed him on the street, we could strike up a conversation like old buddies. I imagine millions of Americans feel the same way about him, having watched him grow up as Opie and Richie Cunningham. Watched a nice documentary about him last night on Turner Classic Movies. The tagline of the piece was “50 years in film.” Can you imagine being 54 and having been in the movie biz for 50 of those years?

Ron talked repeatedly in the piece about seeing his directorial role primarily as a storyteller. The headline of this entry is a pretty close paraphrase of what he said about his early education on “The Andy Griffith Show.” He noted that that gig was serious show business. No one phoned it in. Ron learned about the hard work that goes into telling a good story.

Having seen most of Ron’s films, I’m convinced that his hard work has made him an excellent storyteller.

I’m not sure if this documentary will be shown again, but if it is, I recommend it.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I blogged the other day about a group writing project in which bloggers identified their best blog entry of the last year and explained why they felt it was the best.

Project initiator Joanna Young has published the results today — 38 entries. I enjoyed seeing some fascinating blog posts, including one from my pal Tom Clifford, and I even spotted a storytelling aficionado, Barbara Rozgonyi, I was previously unfamiliar with.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

That’s what We Media and Ashoka’s Changemakers are asking in a Power of Us contest that has a Jan. 21 deadline. The sponsors describe the competition as …

… the search to find the best new ideas for inspiring a better world through media and technology. We are looking for business and non-profit venture ideas and will award $50,000 in seed funding to the innovators who can bring the best ideas to life. Submit your entries by January 21, 2009 6 pm EST

You can also read the 46 entries, many of them story-driven, that have been submitted as of this writing.

Changemakers.net also offers a section of stories. (I wish the site gave more context for these stories).

Changemakers, its web site says, “is building the world’s first global online ‘open source’ community that competes to surface the best social solutions, and then collaborates to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions.”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Karen Smith apparently conducts a poll through her blog, DIGITAL STORYTELLING — The home of e-folklore (the blog’s purpose is to “link together useful digital storytelling resources”), in which she discovered a 120 percent gain in the number of digital storytellers from last year to this year. Smith also reports a 200+ percent gain in digital-storytelling awareness. Smith notes that most of those polled who describe themselves as digital story “viewers” expressed interest in creating their own digital stories. I was especially interested in — and perhaps a bit surprised by — the reasons for creating digital stories that Smith gleaned from her blog’s readers (I’m not sure if the order of these has any significance):

1. family memories
2. extraordinary events
3. deep sorrow (e.g., death of a loved one)
4. deep love (e.g., first kiss)
5. business improvement (e.g., organizational conference focus)
6. personal improvement through digital portfolio (e.g., the story of my career)
7. love of pets
8. personal expression (e.g., poetry)
9. professional writing in multi-media for business
10. news release (e.g., family news and events)

Most of the references to digital storytelling I see are in the context of either education or journalism. I guess that’s why the above list surprises me; most of the listed reasons for creating digital stories don’t fall into either category.

Smith’s poll affirms my belief that digital storytelling will continue to grow and will become increasingly important in the world of applied storytelling. It will also play a key role in the transformation of newspaper journalism and will continue to make inroads in the classroom.

I have a number of theories about the reasons behind the growth of digital storytelling — and applied storytelling in general, but one of them is simply that we have increasing numbers and types of technological tools to help tell these stories.

I still think of digital storytelling as slightly peripheral to my direct storytelling interests — or perhaps as a topical stream that runs parallel to applied storytelling. Digital storytelling isn’t so much a genre or form of applied storytelling as it is a medium for rendering storytelling. What do others think?

[Above illustration taken from http://dc-mrg.english.ucsb.edu/gradconf.html]

Addendum [added 12-29]: For those interested in getting into digital storytelling, the KQED Digital Storytelling Initiative offers a no-cost manual for download, The Art, Skill, Craft, and Magic of Digital Storytelling: A How-Come, How-To Guide, 2008 Edition, broken into chapters to download separately.

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Another Addendum [added 01-16]: Another resource is an article in PDF from EduCause, 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling, 2008 Edition.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I stumbled upon a group writing project at ConfidentWriting.com in which bloggers are asked to choose their best entry of 2008 and, in 30 words or fewer, finish the sentence, “This post is simply the best because ….”

I chose my post about an article in The American Scholar titled “The End of the Black American Narrative.” This post is simply the best because it was intellectually challenging, thought-provoking, and reinforced by the election outcome. I stepped out of my comfort zone as a white woman writing about the black American narrative.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I was interested in learning more about Boxing Day, traditionally celebrated the day after Christmas in the UK and Commonwealth nations.

Wikipedia says Boxing Day “is based on the tradition of giving gifts to the less fortunate members of society.” Thus, it’s a good day to read stories of Random Acts of Kindness at — where else? — The Random Acts of Kindness Home Page.

The site’s own story is intriguing. Site owner Duen Hsi Yen explains:

This site is dedicated to recognizing those beautiful, faceless, nameless people out there that do things that help out someone they don’t know, and never will.

Originally, this page was started in July of 1997 by Douglas W. Hull, when he was having a last walk with a dear friend of his. They were walking along the Portage river that divides Houghton from Hancock in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. While walking there together saying their goodbyes before he left her to seek his fame and fortune in Oulu, Finland, they came upon a small bottle, it just looked like a salt shaker, but they picked it up anyway. Upon closer inspection, they discovered that there was a message in the bottle. Just a little missive sent from one person to another, randomly.

Doug thought that he might like to tell people about the wonderful message that he had found. The Web seemed the perfect place for such a story. He had hoped that somebody had already created a Random Acts of Kindness home page. He searched but found none. His philosophy about the Web has been that if you are trying to find a page on a certain subject and you can not find one, it is somehow your duty to create one. Well, that’s how it got started!

Now Doug is very busy and so he indicated on his website that he did not have the time to maintain it and would someone out there please adopt the site. Then, in May 1999, while doing a search on “kindness,” I stumbled onto his website. It was love at first sight, and so I did my own Random Act of Kindness, sending him a note via email that I wished to adopt his site. He wrote back, indicating he didn’t want to give the site to just anyone, and had a whole list of questions to ask of me. Fortunately, practically all his questions were already answered by webpages that I had previously posted on my Malama website. So folks, that is how it got here.

The stories on the site are categorized by topic, and they seem to represent acts performed by the writer, acts performed to benefit the writer, and acts that the writer has observed. Most stories seem to appear anonymously. Once you are reading a story, you can continue reading the next story in the queue by simply clicking a “next story” button. Here’s one that I found both touching and seasonal:

While living in New York some years ago I found out that there were thousands of letters addressed to Santa Claus North Pole at the Main Post Office in Manhattan. I was curious so I went and looked at some. Most of them were lists of toys that children wanted. But among the letters, I came upon a number that were so sad they made me cry. So I sent each child a telegram “Will be at your house. Wait for me. Santa”.

My wife made me a costume and I showed up. It was so wonderful that I did it for the next twelve years. I then moved to California. Some years ago I wrote the story for friends, I just called it “A Christmas Story” and somehow, the story had its own wings and went everywhere. Although I can’t make children happy any more I find that my story makes people feel good. How lucky can you get?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Happy Boxing Day. Here’s this week’s word cloud/tag cloud Wordle (from Wordle.net) based on the content of A Storied Career.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As I count my blessings this Christmas, I am grateful to the readers of A Storied Career that have made the blog’s renaissance so worthwhile. While A Storied Career is well on its way to completing its fourth year, it really has been only since Feb. 1 of this year that it came to life. Before making the commitment to daily blogging this year, I blogged in spurts.

This year, I have faithfully blogged daily, built a small but loyal audience of readers, added significantly to the blog, and started a satisfying series of Q&As with some of the legends of the storytelling movement.

The story of this blog’s resurgence gives me great joy this Christmas.

I hope all my readers and visitors are also experiencing joy, peace, and love at this time of year, whether you celebrate Christmas, another holiday, or no holiday.

Finally, I can’t help noticing that the animation that accompanies this entry tells a little story.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I was starting to read an article by Robin Good entitled, “How To Be Happy Without Becoming A Monk — 10 Things I Have Changed To Live A More Self-Directed Life,” but got no further than the first item:

Stop Being Dependent-Addicted To Old Media: Drop all time-wasting devices that you do not need anymore to realize your goals: phone, television, newspapers.

I suppose I could go back and read Good’s rationale, but I should end my addiction to these media just because they’re old? OK, phones I could happily do without (except for texting). TV would be harder; I’m less addicted than I used to be, but I still enjoy some viewing.

But regular readers will know that I am a newspaper reader, and my morning newspaper ritual is one of the few non-negotiables of my existence. Does this relaxing ritual of eating my breakfast while reading the newspaper help me realize my goals? I don’t know, but does everything we do have to help us realize our goals? Can’t we sometimes just relax, or vege out in front of the TV?

Things continue to get grimmer and grimmer every day for the newspaper industry. Seems like every day, we read of a new cutback (like the Detroit Free Press cutting home delivery to 3 days a week) or the death of a paper.

The difficult and changing state of newspapers also affects training grounds for journalists. One of the best experiences of my life was the time I spent as a staffer on The Independent Florida Alligator, the paper that serves the University of Florida and Gainesville communities. I felt a wonderful sense of belonging there, learned a ton, met my husband, and brought my infant daughter to work with me in the newsroom. I recently learned that The Alligator is in crisis. No one applied to be its next editor, the first time in the paper’s history that that happened. I wrote an encouraging note to the staff urging them to hang in there, and recalling my great experience. I cannot tell you how many terrific careers in journalism I have seen launched at The Alligator.

It seemed at first blush that the Alligator staffers and would-be editors were discouraged by very low wages, but the current editor sent a note out to all the alumni like me who had sent cheery notes. Seems money’s not the issue; the problem is the Alligator’s inability to launch journalism careers anymore because of antiquated equipment and insufficient training for the increasingly video- and Web-driven world of newspaper journalism. The Alligator apparently no longer provides the kind of technical training that today’s journalists need. The editor told us that in addition to the no-new-editor-applicants dilemma, the paper is down to just five staffers.

Just as an aside, when I was at The Alligator in the 1980s, we wrote stories — not just on typewriters — but manual typewriters. You would think we would have faced some of the same issues — were we technologically savvy enough to type stories on computers given our training on manual typewriters? I never recall that being an issue. Typing is typing, I guess, while today’s Web and video technologies require more hands-on training.

Sometimes I think the best I can hope for is that newspapers will at least last through the rest of my lifetime. But I’d like them to last longer — or at least morph into a form people like me are comfortable with.

And I want The Alligator to last — to remain the wonderful and valuable experience I had. I want journalism students to see the paper as the top-notch career launchpad it was in “my day.” I don’t think Santa has anything in his bag to solve the paper’s problems this Christmas, but I would like to see what I and other Alligator alumni can do to play Santa to this venerable student-produced paper in 2009.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Since I’m trying to do holiday-themed entries this week, let’s file this one under “Possible gifts that I’m not sure I support.”

iTales appears to be a relatively new story site that is slick in appearance. Unlike most (if not all) the story sites I’ve cited in A STORIED CAREER, iTales sells stories.

At first glance, the stories appear to be more along the lines of performance storytelling (as opposed to personal narratives), and in fact, iTales offers a commission to performance storytellers who sell their tales on iTales.

I’m confused about the the audience for iTales. The page title on the site says: “Short Stories For Kids : Audio Stories : Children’s Activities : Travel With Kids : Children’s Bedtime Stories,” but nothing else on the main page indicates the site is targeted at children (or, more realistically, their parents).

In fact a press release about the site says (emphasis added):

iTales.com is a newly launched, global storytelling community dedicated to giving a 21st-century voice to generations of life experiences. With the help of MP3 technology and worldwide accessibility, iTales.com offers a user-generated platform for the ancient art of storytelling, giving it new life for a new millennium. iTales.com is now available as a user-friendly tool for professional and amateur storytellers to market their audio stories, as well as a rich resource for story enthusiasts of all ages and backgrounds.

And when you go to the site’s Hear a Story section, you see all kinds of categories beyond kids’ stories, including personal narratives.

Given the widespread availability of stories on the Internet, I wonder if people will pay for stories. Granted, the stories at iTales have low, iTunes-like prices (generally less than $2). I do like the fact that these are oral stories; those are much harder to find on the Web than written stories. But I also wonder whether it’s a good idea for, say, parents, to buy stories for their children instead of telling or reading stories to them.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve written the last couple of days about various ways of sharing stories (especially family stories) during the holidays. Saturday’s was about eschewing consumerism and instead sharing family stories; yesterday’s was about “digi-scrapping,” which my sister and I have apparently been inadvertently doing with some recent Christmas projects.

In the midst of all this, I received an e-mail from storytelling author (Storycatching) Christina Baldwin about a unique holiday tradition she observes:

For two weeks, in the heart of winter, my family and I go completely off-line. This tradition is a local phenomenon that many friends and colleagues use in part to add reflection to their holidays.

Completely off-line? Could I do that? I don’t think so. Since I went online 15 years ago, the Internet has been my lifeline, my social life. My husband can tell you how anxious I become when our Internet connection is down or when we’re on the road and encounter a spot without Wi-Fi. The online world is the refuge for this uber-shy, utterly phone-phobic gal who is much more comfortable communicating in writing.

Wouldn’t my story life suffer if I took two weeks off from being online? Would it be awful if I didn’t blog for two weeks? Would the world stop spinning if people didn’t know my Twitter or Facebook status? Even as I contemplate this notion of sharing family stories during the holidays, the Internet seems an integral part of researching, sharing, and visually presenting stories.

And yet … what Christina Baldwin describes sounds lovely — and tempting — too:

… this is exactly the holiday/holy day gift my partner and I give each other: two weeks of retreat, rest, reading, wandering, letting go of the never-ending-list of things to do. We’ve been doing this for years, ever since her children got on the plane to visit their father at Christmas…and after they were grown, we discovered it’s the only time the business really lets us stop. So, we do.

The Holy Nights, from Winter Solstice to Epiphany, are a magical time to reflect at the hearth. I turn off the wi-fi in my laptop, write bounce-back messages for the email programs, dictate “we are closed… we are resting…” voicemail messages for the business and private phone lines. And then it’s up to me to have the discipline to truly turn aside from distraction and business and commitments and projects in progress and BE WITH… myself, my story, my life, my spirituality, my sense of mystery and ceremony. Inside, and outside-to follow intuition and instinct rather than obligation and task. Shhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhh. The song of snow, the whisper of waves.

We spend long hours sitting by the fire, enjoying the Christmas tree, writing in my journal, reading novels. We walk in the woods and on the beach and don’t care when we get home. We develop little ceremonies within the days that rise spontaneously out of slowing down and noticing more. I try out new recipes and we linger at the table in long conversation.

Reading, writing, recipe-ing, conversing, following intuition? Being with my own story? Yummmm. One of my greatest laments of late has been lack of time to read. In fact, my New Year’s resolution is to carve out an hour a day to really read — beyond my non-negotiable ritual of reading the newspaper and the incalculable time spent reading from computer screens.

If I were to follow Christina’s lead, I think I’d need more time to mentally prepare. Maybe next year….

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I never cease to come upon new forms of and uses for storytelling. Just discovered a site and blog called We Are Storytellers, which focuses on “digital scrapbooking” or “digi-scrapping,” which I’d never heard of. The illustrations of digi-scrapping pages look as though they are photos of paper scrapbook pages, but apparently they’re not — they’re all digitally generated. I’m curious about the use of digital scrapbooks. Do people print them out? The fact that pages seem to be the same standard 8” x 8” as paper scrapbook pages suggest that perhaps they are meant to be printed out.

The discovery was timely for me. I’ve dabbled a bit in paper scrapbooking. And as I look at the digi-scrap pages at We Are Storytellers, I realize the photo-montage I made for my husband for Christmas (don’t worry, I don’t think he reads A STORIED CAREER) resembles digi-scrapping. I also just got an online family-history calendar from my sister Robin, who has been immersed in researching family history most of this year.

I’m intrigued to learn more about the software tools digi-scrappers use because I had a heck of a time finding the best tool for my photo montage. I ended up with ComicLife, a very nifty program that came bundled with my desktop Mac. Might seem like an odd choice, but it did nearly everything I needed it to do with drag-and-drop ease.

I’m also intrigued that We Are Storytellers sells products — borders and bits of artwork and so forth for digi-scrapping. I’m kind of tempted by some of these as they’re pretty cheap. I might use them for future photo-montage-type projects or for Web design. Or maybe right here in A Storied Career. The site also sells classes, such as a self-paced journaling class.

I’m surreptitiously sharing the photo montage with you as a pop-up (View image) because it’s kind of big and personal to impose on you right here in the blog. It commemorates 2008, a superb year for us. Probably the best year of our marriage.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In a column in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley newspaper, the Statesman-Journal, Jeanine Stice rails against consumerism at the expense of sharing family stories at Christmastime. She notes that she’s met people who …

… don’t measure their soul with statistics but instead with real-life stories.

So instead of reading statistics and scurrying around shopping with money you don’t have for things you don’t need, find time at home this week to listen and tell your family stories.

Anyone who’s been around people who’ve been through war, or experienced poverty, knows there’s immeasurable wealth gained through storytelling.

While I would have supported Stice’s view under any circumstances, her words particularly resonated with me because my husband and I had just been discussing a recent horoscope of his that said he should be sharing family stories that had been passed down through generations. Randall lamented that he didn’t really know any of this kind of family story, which is especially regrettable because both his parents were the children of first-generation immigrants to the US. He would have liked stories of the “old countries.”

I don’t have all that many family stories that span generations, but I can think of a couple — both winter/Christmas-related.

The winter story is my grandfather’s claim to have seen the cloven hoofprints of the Jersey Devil in the snow on the roof of his house.

In the Christmas story, two brothers (I’ve lost their exact relationship to me, but I believe they are from my grandfather’s generation, and the story takes place around the turn of the last century) exchange gifts, one of which is a brass cannon. Turns out the one brother got the cannon for his sibling because it was something he wanted for himself. From then on, any gift that has ever been given in our family that seems to be something the giver wanted for himself or herself has been known as a “brass cannon.” We use it as a figure of speech, as though everyone knows what a brass cannon is.

Why not take a moment (Freudian slip — I just typed “money” instead of “moment”) to see if you can recall any legacy family stories you can pass down this Christmas?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Scott Schwertly of ethos3, the company that promotes storytelling in presentations, says he’s “captivated” by Sears’ holiday “Wishstory” campaign. The campaign tells stories (in a very truncated fashion) of how gifts given by parents to children (who, in this campaign, grew up to be celebrities) shaped the celebrated lives of the recipients.

I mostly agree with Schwertly. I don’t care for the song in the commercials’ background, and the ads leave me wanting to learn more of the story.

But as seasonal, story-based ads go, these are pretty darned good. Below is the long version that encompasses all the stories. As Schwertly notes, Sears’ Web site also has a strong story flavor, but Sears seems to have confused the message with one about making wishes come true for military families. And when you click the button that says “See their stories,” no obvious stories are apparent.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Bryan Alexander, whose work on “Storytelling 2.0” I greatly admire and want to blog about soon, commented on how these Wordle word clouds/tag clouds might be used:

I’m wondering about tag clouds for storytelling. They seem like assistive tools.

• visualizing a story, to rethink and interpret

• writing prompt

What else can we do with these?

Great question! I guess that’s why I run them every week. They seem valuable for something. If nothing else, I like the idea of some sort of visual representation of the weekly content of A Storied Career. Here’s this week’s:

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Cynthia’s bio, photo, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

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Q&A with Cynthia Kurtz (Question 4):

Q: What future aspirations do you personally have for your own story work? What would you like to do in the story world that you haven’t yet done?

A: I came to story work after spending six years writing free educational simulations and participating in the great knowledge democratization and gift economy that is the internet. When that endeavor ended (not a monetary success, but we often joke that we got the internet in return) I was excited to have the chance to work with a group researching stories and storytelling in organizations at IBM Research. One of the things that struck me right away on taking up this work was that the wonderful ideas and techniques we were developing were bottled up and available only to giant corporations, government agencies, and academic institutions with money and knowledge and power. While being grateful that those powerful bodies were willing to pay me to do this work, I could see right away that the people most in need of story techniques were Margaret Mead’s small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens trying to change the world. I was very happy this spring to finally have enough time and knowledge to be able to write Working with Stories, which is my first return to participation in the gift economy. My aspiration for my own story work, and for that of others (if I may be so bold), is that lots and lots of people will find a way to balance putting food on the table and helping make working with stories something accessible to everyone on earth.

More specifically, one thing that I’d dearly love to do is write an open source suite of free software tools that can help small groups support community storytelling for local conflict resolution and decision support, with all that entails (seeing things from new perspectives, reconciling the past, envisioning the future, building bridges of understanding, discovering transforming insights, etc). I’ve looked some on the web and found nothing remotely like what I want to build. For example, generally when I search for “tell us your story” or “share your story” I find mostly just lists of stories, not dynamic exchanges. In the same way that people who want to discuss something can install any of dozens of free forum packages, I’d like people to have easy access to software that supports community storytelling and group sensemaking in a way forum software cannot. I’m looking into various sources of grant funding for such a project, for example the Knight News Challenge is one possibility. I’m also looking for collaborators so if you are interested please contact me!

Update since Cynthia’s response above: Since I wrote this last part, I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on a new project called Rakontu. Rakontu’s goal is to create a set of free and open-source software tools that communities can use to share and work with stories. Here is one of our shorter blurbs:

Long ago, community stories were tended by griots or shamans or bards or just older people. These story caretakers watched as stories formed patterns through time and space. They helped communities use their old and new stories to settle disputes and make decisions together. In many of today’s communities, increased segregation of age groups, increased mobility, and increased consumption of packaged media have reduced the story caretaker role. As a result, critical connections are not being tended and cannot be called upon in times of need. Communities need stories because they help people probe sensitive topics safely, experience events through the eyes of others, and get past knee-jerk reactions to contentious issues.

Rakontu will help communities share and connect stories into webs of resonant collective meaning, discover insight-creating patterns in collected stories, and work with stories during group sensemaking about decisions, conflicts and plans. Outcomes may include better consensus on tough choices, greater emotional engagement and resolve for action, and greater common strength in times of crisis.

So far we have a 100-page “Vision+Plan” document that lays out our goals and ideas, a great group of “well-wishers” and a grant application. As of this writing we are waiting to hear from the Knight Foundation as to whether we have advanced to the third round of consideration. But we are not sitting on our hands waiting for Prince Charming! We are moving forward with “bootstrap” plans that can work whether we have lots of time to work on it or just bits and pieces. Either way, it will be a fully open-source project, in ideas as well as code, and open to all. If anyone is interested in participating, the best thing to do is to skim over the Vision+Plan document since it will serve as the starting point in our design discussions.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Cynthia’s bio, photo, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

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Q&A with Cynthia Kurtz (Question 3):

Q: Are there any current uses of storytelling that repel you or that you feel are inappropriate?

A: I’m sad about how much packaged entertainment and crafted messages have changed our world. Sheet music and novels were met with wide condemnation when they came out because it was said people would no longer come up with their own music and stories. The people condemning those media would hardly recognize the world of today, where it seems people have barely a thought to themselves but spend their time listening to other people sing, watching other people play games, and hearing what other people think. With kids it’s even worse. It’s a difficult task to keep our children from being inundated by media-generated images, which erode their innate abilities to create their own stories and worlds.

When I found the excellent book, Where There Is No Doctor, the paragraph that surprised me the most was this one:

Today in over-developed as well as under-developed countries, existing health care systems are in a state of crisis. Often, human needs are not being well met. There is too little fairness. Too much is in the hands of too few.

In the same way that people in the “over-developed” countries have given doctors too much control over their health and reduced their ability to heal themselves, people (mostly in those same countries) have given commercial imaginers too much control over their imagination and reduced their ability to make up their own stories.

The other day I came across an review in Parenting magazine of story cards that solve the problem “we all face” of having a child ask for a story and “coming up blank.” What? Why should any healthy adult be incapable of making up a story? Isn’t there something wrong there? I don’t think people have lost the ability to tell stories as much as they have lost the expectation that it is their place to tell stories. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people balk at being asked to tell stories because they don’t think their stories are good enough to be “real stories.” Would that have been true a hundred years ago? A thousand? Of course there have been storytellers since the beginning of time, but I don’t think there has ever been a time when ordinary people were so removed from ordinary storytelling. I would like to see people get back to telling more of their own stories, singing more of their own songs, and playing more of their own games.

Having said all that, I do believe that crafted stories have their place in the world, as they always have. Long ago, when to tell crafted stories you had to memorize long epics and travel from town to town to tell them in person, it was difficult for crafted storytelling to get out of balance; but things are far out of balance now. I’m not sure how to set that balance right again, but I do have two suggestions. The first is that people who find they tell stories well and want to do so professionally should do the hard work to get it right. They should respect stories, make them their own, and work with integrity, passion and care.

Second, professional storytellers (and others working with narrative in other ways) should never allow themselves to believe that any crafted story is better or more entitled to be a “real story” than anyone’s raw personal story. Storytellers should radiate respect for raw stories of personal experience. It would be wonderful if all the professional storytellers out there could think about making it part of their responsibility to find more ways to help people tell their own stories. I applaud everyone who gives adult education classes about writing memoirs or putting together family stories, and I’m excited when I see people sharing personal stories online, and I am encouraged by projects like StoryCorps and books like Gig: Americans Talk about Their Jobs (of which there are far too few) that help raw stories of personal experience get to where they need to go. I hope more people will get involved in such things in the future; maybe then the balance can be restored.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Back in September, I blogged about Daniel Pink’s manga-style quintessential convergence of story and career, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.

As I noted back then, Pink was running a contest at the Johnny Bunko Web site. The premise of the book is that protagonist Johnny Bunko learns the six career lessons nobody bothers to tell us.

Pink discusses the contest and outcomes:

A few months ago, some of you began wondering: What’s the seventh lesson?

So we decided to ask.

This fall, we launched the Great Johnny Bunko Challenge, an unprecedented contest in which we invited readers to continue the story by telling us what Lesson 7 should be. Hundreds upon hundreds of entries poured in.

And we’ve selected these three finalists:

Do it now. — Dil-Dominé Leonares, Los Angeles, CA

Say “Thanks” every day. — Ed Brenegar, Hendersonville, NC

Stay hungry. — Becky Blanton, Danville, VA

Pink invites readers to vote for your favorite on the Great Johnny Bunko Challenge Official Ballot. Voting runs until Jan. 15, 2009.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Cynthia’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

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Q&A with Cynthia Kurtz (Question 2):

Q: In the book, you write “I and others have seen from experience that this approach is superior to approaches that don’t respect the integrity of the raw story and end up (whatever their good intentions) injecting the biased interpretations of people outside the community.” Can you talk a bit about your observations of approaches that have disrespected the integrity of the raw story? What are the consequences when biased outsider interpretations are injected?

A: There are two positions embedded in that statement — raw stories and self-interpretation — and I can tell a story from my own experience describing how I came to my current understanding of each position. The first position is that raw stories of personal experience are far superior to crafted stories for the things I care about when working with stories. For the purposes of advertising products and services, delivering specific purposeful messages, and entertaining people, crafted stories are often (but not always) best. But for the purposes of helping people learn, think, make decisions, get new ideas, grow, and get along, I’ve found that there is nothing better than a raw story.

I started out in this field in the same way many people do — I got excited about all the advice on “how to tell a great story” and assumed that only the best, most compelling stories could “get things done,” whatever it was you wanted to do. My second year at IBM Research was spent on a project researching how storytelling could improve e-learning. Our group tried out different ways to help instructors write stories that would help people learn how to use software or do any number of things more quickly and easily. We had some little success with this, but things didn’t really pick up until we started holding workshops where we asked people to talk about their experiences. Our original intention was to take the raw stories we collected and “make something out of them” while developing methods to help other people make similar resources; but we kept failing. The crafted stories were always less compelling, less memorable, and less educational than the raw stories, even though we were “improving” them using all the wonderful advice we could find. Somehow every time we improved the stories by crafting them, an essential spark was lost.

One day we had this sort of metaphorical realization that we were trying to grow trees in a forest. Stories better than any we could come up with were all around us, and we were discounting them because we had a narrow idea of what a useful story was. We began to see that a raw story of personal experience is a priceless gem that cannot be taken apart and put back together without removing its powerful qualities. So we changed the project. Once we abandoned our original ideas about how writing “good” stories would improve e-learning and instead concentrated on figuring out the best ways of “getting the stories to where they needed to be” the e-learning resources we were creating, and our ability to help other people create such resources, improved tremendously.

The second part of that “respect the integrity of the raw story” statement is my position on expert interpretation. I believe that interpretation by outside experts jeopardizes the goals I care most about when working with stories, for two reasons: it cannot help getting essential things wrong (through not understanding subtle nuances of context which only insiders can know); and it is incapable of making useful insights fully resonate and changes really happen inside a community, because it is not “of us.”

The dangers-of-expert-interpretation story took place soon after I started working with a group that was doing story projects with IBM clients. Now this group had started out just as I had, writing crafted stories to help clients achieve goals, and they had made a similar transition to collecting and valuing raw stories. However, at the time I joined the group, they still believed, as I did, that expert interpretation of stories was essential. The turning point came on a project in which we collected videotapes of something like a hundred retiring employees describing their long careers. In our enthusiasm we had allowed too many people to generate too many hours of videotape, and we realized that we could never get through them all in time. After a flurry of discussion and debate, we decided to hold a workshop and ask the employees themselves to watch the videotapes (distributing the videos so that everyone saw a few and every interview was seen by a few people), and have them interpret the results and come up with their own conclusions. We were worried that we would have a lot of work to do after these uninitiated non-experts had finished their exercise, but we decided to go ahead anyway, thinking that at least our task would be reduced.

Imagine our astonishment when we found that the quality of the results exceeded our previous finely tuned expert interpretations, and that the results resonated better with the client as well. This was another awakening. As we had before been trying to grow stories in a forest of stories, we had been trying to grow interpretations in a forest of interpretations. In both cases the stories or interpretations surrounding us were of superior utility and authenticity — in the context in which we needed to work with them — than the stories or interpretations we were trying to build.

Those experiences, combined with some others that reinforced the same overall patterns, convinced us that these two principles — raw stories and self-interpretation — were key to effective story projects. In the dozens of projects I’ve worked on since then I’ve seen those lessons repeated many times. In fact I’ve come to realize that people who work with stories in organizations and communities (and here I am not talking about professional storytellers) seem to go through three phases, which roughly match the three aspects of stories I like to think about — story form, function and phenomenon. People seem to start out, as I did, infatuated with story form: they memorize McKee and try to turn every story into a “great” story. Once they get past that they start thinking about how they can “use” story function to change situations, inject learning, propel messages, and so on (all of which is fairly mechanical thinking). And finally they arrive at the phenomenon stage where they begin to see stories as elements in a complex ecology and start thinking about ways to tend stories, herd them, take care of them, and get them where they need to go. That final stage, in my opinion, is the best place to end up when you want to work with stories in communities and organizations.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Another new and wonderful story acquaintance is Cynthia Kurtz, who is linked with the previous subject of this Q&A series Ron Donaldson, because they have both worked with Dave Snowden. I learned about Cynthia when I stumbled across her terrific free book on working with stories. Her Q&A will appear over the next four days.

Bio of Cynthia Kurtz: Cynthia Kurtz offers support services to consultants who help organizations and communities conduct projects in which they collect diverse perspectives and experiences, discover patterns, make sense of the patterns they see, make decisions, and plan for the future. She also does original research and writes on topics related to narrative inquiry, decision support, and complexity. Cynthia has been working as an independent researcher and consultant in the field of organizational narrative since 1999, working with a series of groups (IBM Research, IBM’s Global Services consultancy practice, IBM’s Institute of Knowledge Management, IBM’s Cynefin Centre, and Cognitive Edge). You can see representative projects and research topics on her web site. Her free online book Working with Stories can be found here. Her original background is in evolutionary biology and software design, and her older educational simulations can be found here.

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Q&A with Cynthia Kurtz (Question 1):

Q: You note in the introduction to your no-cost online book, Working with Stories, that you’ve helped plan and execute several dozen story projects globally. Can you cite one that was particularly effective, rewarding, or satisfying?

A: Actually, the projects I’ve found most effective, rewarding, and satisfying are also the projects I feel the least able to talk about. Most of my favorite projects have dealt with sensitive issues; most have revealed insights about “the way we are” and “the way we do things” that have been difficult or painful for clients to confront; and most have been about issues clients don’t want widely discussed. So I find I can’t pull out one project to describe in full. I could, however, mention two aspects of what I’ve done to help with story projects that I find particularly rewarding and use that to answer the question in a hopefully useful way.

One satisfying aspect of the work has been helping clients get past their own barriers to success. At the start of story projects, a common obstacle is that clients want to find out about something but are hesitant to ask people to talk about it: it makes them or the storytellers look bad, or it’s just a very sensitive topic. Sometimes it is necessary to push clients a little bit out of their comfort zone in order to make the project succeed for them. I’ve seen projects that had high ambitions but kept to the “safe” questions and ended up not finding out very much that was useful. Sometimes I help to carefully word questions so that they ask the things the client wants to know without revealing to the storytellers that the client wants to know about those things. For example, in one project the client had heard a rumor that some customers thought their attention to customer needs varied by socioeconomic group. The client was uncomfortable asking people about the rumor but at the same time they did want to explore it. So we worked at the questions until we found a way to address the issue indirectly; and it turned out there was a pattern around the issue that gave the client something useful to think about.

The other aspect I’ve found rewarding is providing catalysis for story projects. I like to call what I do catalysis instead of analysis, because a catalyst speeds up chemical reactions and catabolic processes break up large molecules and release energy. I help people speed up sensemaking, break down previous solidifications of thought and belief, and release energy to consider new ideas. So I do this catalysis by looking at hundreds or thousands of collected stories (and self-intepretive answers to questions about them) and finding catalyzing patterns for the client to look at, play with, and react to. Because I come to the stories as a deliberately naïve outsider, I often find things people would have never thought to consider. Also for some reason (ecology background?) I seem to be comfortable finding these patterns and so have found a sort of niche where I fit well into the process.

To give an example of how the catalyzing patterns are used, I’ll tell you what my colleagues Michael Cheveldave and Dave Snowden did with them in a recent client workshop. They first asked the workshop participants to seek patterns in the stories and answers that were collected without any intervention. Then after some time they showed them the patterns I had highlighted, with the graphical visualizations blown up to poster size so people could walk around and see several at once. The workshop participants used those patterns to stimulate new discussions and debates that led to the discovery of new patterns (reinforcing, contradicting, related, reacting, reminding). Finally the participants integrated all of their observations and interpretations into general insights (this is the analysis or solidifying part, which you will note was done by the client, not the “analyst” or “expert”) based on the stories and interpretations collected.

If I were to choose some patterns I’ve often seen repeated, speaking broadly, these are some that come to mind.

Several times now I have seen people viewing their clients or customers or employees or constituents with contempt, for example equating weakness, confusion or ignorance with insignificance, low status/value/worth or even wrongdoing. This is a fascinating pattern — in most cases people are biting the hands that feed them — and I wonder what it says about our society, besides the obvious connection between familiarity and contempt.

I’ve often seen an interesting mixture of wariness toward large institutions and authority figures and high expectations for the solutions they bring. These two patterns taken together seem to say that people are conflicted about the utility of power structures in society.

I often see attitudes and beliefs changing as people age, often passing from inexperienced idealism to frustrated struggle to practical resignation and/or self-righteous entitlement. I’ve seen similar generational patterns in several projects now and in fact always recommend making sure a diversity of ages are included in storytelling because of it.

I am constantly amazed at the human ability to hold and express complex and contradictory beliefs — about nearly everything!

Overall I think the projects I’ve been most proud of are those that had the biggest potential to bring out the voices of people who otherwise had little power to change their conditions. When I’ve had a hand in this I’ve been grateful to have the chance to contribute.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

From time to time, I’ve commented on “About Us” sections of Web sites as storytelling examples.

Red Canary is a Canadian social-networking software “talent hub” that doesn’t have an About Us section. Instead, it has an “About You” section.

Makes sense. A social-networking site should be user-generated, and users may be more interested in seeing a profile of themselves than a profile of the site.

Here are the two About You stories from Red Canary:

A) You’re a software professional who wants to hear from your peers and stay informed about your industry. You’ll use Red Canary to connect with people, companies and advice that can accelerate your career.

B) You’re a software executive or Human Resource/Public Relations employee who wants to put your company in front of top industry talent. You’ll use Red Canary to showcase your technology, talk about company opportunities and present ideas through interviews, personal contributions, and more.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A few weeks ago, “YogaGirl” blogged at As a mantra of fact … about ceasing to tell stories about oneself that function as barriers to what you truly want to do. Here’s part of what she said:

One of the themes of my retreat last weekend was “Stop Telling Your Story”. Not those wonderful yarns you can spin about childhood or momumental events in your past that provide the makeup of who you are..but those stories you use as excuses, defenses, walls to put up between yourself, other people, relationships, the outside world, etc. I’ve got a particularly annoying volume of them. My classic one as of late is:

I miss teaching yoga. I used to teach *so* much yoga when I lived in Texas. After moving home to Oregon I found that everywhere I went, I was asked to teach everything but yoga. Now I hardly teach any yoga, especially after having to give up my 2 long standing studio classes in order to take on some cycling classes at the local gym where I coordinate. ((( WHINE ))) I’m only able to rotate on the weekends or have the occasional sub opportunity. Maybe I’ll just use this time to be more of a yoga student than a yoga teacher for now. Blah, blah, blah, blah, BLAH!

The upshot was that YogaGirl took the initiative to find a yoga class to teach.

I would contend, however, that what she did was not to stop telling her story but to change her story — from the story of someone who feels that she really misses teaching yoga to the story of someone who is teaching yoga. That change-your-story/change-your-life philosophy has become my mantra.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Ron’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A and Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

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Q&A with Ron Donaldson (Question 5):

Q: What future trends or directions do you foresee for story/storytelling/narrative? What’s next for the discipline?

A: Up until recently I thought the most powerful use of story was that of sharing knowledge and building community, I just couldn’t get excited about systems that hold and allow analysis of stories. In the last few months however I have been working with SenseMaker which developed out of Dave Snowden’s original concept of a narrative database.

The SenseMaker approach is a revolution in the making. The system is initially populated with narrative fragments in the form of stories, blog entries, papers, video, podcasts — whatever. The context and intended meaning of each is captured by person creating the item (“signified”) so that these fragments can be patterned according to theme, archetypal character, intended audience or numerous other filters.

Original narrative, unbiased by the interpretation of “experts,” which can then be sifted for patterns so that anyone can derive their own meaning from the original stories will revolutionise the importance and our approach to story-work.

The possibilities of using such a system for monitoring and making sense of self-signified current narrative material ranges from scenario planning, customer satisfaction, and all forms of “management, leadership and change.” It also seriously questions whether we currently make appropriate use of our experts when they would be much better used “signifying” original source material than writing biased, quickly out of date reports.

I think we are on the brink of a phase change in our understanding of the importance of story and storytelling and the implications of the emerging realisation that we live in an uncertain world, the sheer complexity of the numbers of people, communities, and economies now interconnected means that old approaches are becoming just that, old and outdated.

It is often quoted that storytelling emerged as a means of making sense of our relationship between ourselves and the environment. There is already a great disconnect between youngsters and their environment; my hope is that stories about nature and our relationship with the land can somehow re-connect and inspire a new generation of naturalists, environmental workers and,who knows, maybe some knowledge ecologists.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

… seeing the film Man on Wire last night, in which French wirewalker Philippe Petit did his eight crossings — on a tightrope wire — of the space between the late World Trade Center towers in 1974. The cloud part comes in because it looked like Petit was walking on the clouds. This film tells Petit’s story and underscores what an astonishing act it was for him to wirewalk between those towers. Anyway, here’s this week’s word cloud/tag cloud based on A STORIED CAREER and created at Wordle.net.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Family history has been on my mind of late. My sister Robin has been doing quite a bit of genealogical research, as well as scanning old photos and artifacts. We have fragments of family-history Web sites online, but I’m getting ready for a major revamp, re-design, and consolidation.

The author of the blog Shades of the Departed (I think the author is KIM O’NEILL) has provided some great tips on ways to use photos to convey family history. O’Neill uses these techniques in making custom heirloom books. Here’s a brief summary of ideas from her excellent and beautifully illustrated blog post:

1. Repeating photos: “Take photos from the same event or time period at regular intervals, and simply put them next to each other.” The example O’Neill uses is a series of photos of her brother and her sitting on Santa’s lap through the years. I could create a similar montage with the first-day-of-school photos I took of my two children each year — posed in the same place on our front porch. Another example is this series, below, of my best friend, Liz, and her hairstyles through the years.

2. Photo In A Photo: O’Neill shows a couple of examples of this concept. In one, the subject in a daguerreotype holds a daguerreotype of someone else. In the other, a grandmother holds a portrait of herself when she was younger. My example could come from any one of the photos shot of family gatherings in my grandparents’ dining room. The background in any of these shots is a large gallery of black and white family photos (see red circle in the photo below).

3. Photos with Words. Captions are the obvious way, O’Neill says, but she has created numerous images such as the one of “Anna” in which the “photo her husband James carried in his pocket of Anna while he served in World War II.” O’Neill says she “overlaid a beautiful love letter James wrote to Anna, and included a caption at the bottom of the page explaining James had carried this photo in his pocket.” I’m sure I have a few letters I could do something similar with. O’Neill also uses call-out text. “I take a sentence or two of the text,” she says, “enlarge it, and place it on top of, or alongside, a photo. This is a great way to connect the story and the photo, and also provides a quick visual first-read when there is lots of text on a page.”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Ron’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A and Part 2, and Part 3.

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Q&A with Ron Donaldson (Question 4):

Q. If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: We all make sense of our world by telling stories. But we experience the world through a lens or filter of what makes sense to us at the time, what John Bowker in his interesting book The Sacred Neuron calls a “Circle of Coherence.” Such circles of coherence are integral to our understanding of how religions have developed and communities and identities are formed.

Stories of the past, i.e., history, are subconsciously and sometimes malevolently biased to paint a picture of what teller assumes the audience want to hear. In short, stories can often tell us more about the person who wrote, re-told, or even translated the story than the experience which the story explains.

The subconscious has its own feedback mechanisms to tell the conscious when it is straying from the ‘norm’ and this emerges as nightmares, dreams and creative thoughts. In early times these would have been giants, dragons and monsters, now they are paedophiles, despots and corrupt politicians.

Christopher Booker in his fantastic book The Seven Basic Plots (Why We Tell Stories) postulates that this is mankind’s way of saying to itself “beware of the emerging ego in yourself.” Great writers and film producers have known this for years from Tolkien to Spielberg but for me it is summed up by my favourite quote of all time from the great GK Chesterton “dragons tell us not that dragons once existed, only that they can be beaten.”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

For the third consecutive year, US Airways invites travelers to share their favorite holiday travel memories with the rest of the world. The winning submission will take home a $500 US Airways Gift Card to be used anywhere US Airways flies, and two runners-up will take home a $250 and $100 US Airways Gift Card. Last year, entries ranged from humorous (folks trapped in their cars by their Christmas trees tied to their roof) to poignant (family members getting together for what they knew would be their last holiday) to one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments (the late Luciano Pavarotti performing impromptu outside New York’s LaGuardia Airport.) Last year’s winner came from Cheltenham, Pa., and provided a heartwarming account of Christmas spirit where one pilot’s announcement made a memorable Christmas Eve for all of the children (and grownups too) on his plane.

More here, including entry instructions (deadline is Jan. 2)

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Ron’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A and Part 2.

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Q&A with Ron Donaldson (Question 3):

Q: What people or entities (such as Web sites, blogs, books, organizations, conferences, etc.) have been most influential to you in your story work and why?

A: My top ten in no particular order (to avoid offence):

[Editor’s note: Book and DVD links go to Amazon UK; the same items can presumably be found on Amazon’s US site.]

1. The Seven Basic Plots (Why We Tell Stories) — Christopher Booker (2004): This is a massive book, but I just could not put it down. Detailing the plotlines of almost all famous stories it builds and builds a theory of how writers externalise their internal thoughts, worries and concerns into basic archetypal themes and why we must keep our egos in check. This book really did change my life and made me look at all movies and stories in a different light.
2. Dave Snowden and Cognitive Edge web site: By far the biggest influence in my approach and understanding, as detailed above. Dave’s approach has always been to share everything, so this site contains all his published materials, links to podcasts and videos and his blog is well worth a regular visit as it contains some of the most thought-provoking ideas, and probably the best example of blogging on the web.
3. Soil and Soul — Alastair McIntosh (2001): I met Alastair at a recent “Vine” Environmental Conference and was so taken by his tales of using stories to take on (and win against) corporate power that I bought his book. His intelligent writing, threading in cultural, ecological and some of the best understandings of community I have ever read, are hugely readable, but his explanation of taking on “the dominion system” (“an emergent property of ordinary human failings and commonplace darkness”) is breathtaking, and resonates with every monster, giant and wolf archetypal story you have ever encountered.
4. The Workingstories listserv: I registered on this a few years ago, and I get regular emails from other individuals interested in storytelling from across the world on new articles, interesting blog posts or websites and other resources.
5. Stephen Denning and Springboard story: I attended one of Steve’s Ark storytelling master classes several years ago, bought the Springboard book (2001) and tried out his advice on a number of projects and presentations, carefully crafting a story, and it worked every time. The real strength for me is how it really cranks up the level of engagement of the audience and does inspire involvement and further action on the part of the listener. Last month I had the surreal pleasure of watching a football match with Steve while eating fish and chips in an English pub.
6. The Uses of Enchantment - Bruno Bettelheim (1976): Probably my favourite book (despite the warnings about over-analysis) this details the importance of fairy tales in our lives and the possible psychoanalytical meaning within some of the most well known. Packed full of the how and whys of symbolism, phases of growth and of course the development and control of the ego. I am particularly taken by the idea that fairytales develop the paths for problem solving and making sense of the world in later life.
7. The Worldwide Story Work group (on Ning): Very recently set up by a fellow Cognitive Edge practitioner — Shawn Callahan, this is a useful web community, again of worldwide “story workers,” this is a great place to pose questions, connect with people of a similar interests and share ideas, resources etc.
8. Surlalune website: Time flies by whenever I visit this amazing website, a huge resource of annotated fairytales detailing history, variants, symbolisms and psychological meaning.
9. Sands of Time book — edited by Claire Weaver (2000) — currently being re-printed: This was an English Nature publication that commissioned Joan Barr, a storyteller from Leicestershire, to collect the stories of everyone connected to or who lived near the Satfleetby National Nature Reserve on the Lincolnshire coast. The result was a loosely themed collection of anecdotes that give a real understanding of the reserve and its important to the local population as you read through its amazing tales about smugglers, unexploded bombs, and conservation work. This is an exemplary example of narrative work as a consultation exercise with the use of storytelling sessions in the local pub becoming a constant (and very well received) theme of my storytelling talks.
10. Planet of the Apes and its associated commentary on DVD: I first saw this film with my dad when first released at the cinema in 1968 when I was 11, and we sat in awe as the ship flew across the mountains and eventually crash-landed and it has been a constant happy memory and family conversation piece ever since. I was fascinated recently to listen to the DVD commentary that Taylor (Heston) is in almost every scene, and the audience is asked to identify with him, see what he sees and feel what he feels. I have read a lot of the recent research on mirror neurons, which I think give us an insight into part of the reasons why stories and storytelling like this are so effective.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Ron’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

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Q&A with Ron Donaldson (Question 2):

Q: Can you explain your term Knowledge Ecology? To what extent does this discipline relate to storytelling? In line with Dave Snowden, you describe storytelling as a natural or naturalistic way to share knowledge. You could undoubtedly write volumes on this subject, but if it’s possible to sum up briefly …

A: I was constantly rebuked by proper ecologists while working at English Nature because I was abusing and misusing a term (“ecology”) that meant so much to them. I graduated in geology and ecology, but that mattered little to them. The term “knowledge ecologist” arose as a joke to attract interest at a knowledge management conference to which I was invited whereby I would explain that “ideas, knowledge, and communities can be seeded, then their condition monitored and where necessary they should be nurtured or pruned just like the wildlife interest on our Nature Reserves.”

“Knowledge ecologists” already existed as early as 1998 and can be found by googling the term, and Dave Snowden himself was using “ecology” as an alternative to “management” but as I read the books and literature on complexity theory they all kept repeating that the best way to understand a complex system is as an ecology.

More recently I discovered that Victor Shelford, the American zoologist and ecologist, defined “ecology” as “the science of communities,” which I think hits the nail on the head for my use of the term

.

As for the storytelling connection, in the natural ecology of our pre-history, it is my belief that three things emerged in humans at a similar time. These were language, storytelling, and the ability of the brain to store and retrieve knowledge in the form of what we now term “a story.” Storytelling is therefore the “natural” way to share knowledge, it is the way our brains process our knowledge, not in the form of expert case studies, bullet-pointed presentations, or lists, but as stories.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It’s so much fun to get to know story practitioners through this Q&A series, of which this is the 18th entry. This one is with Ron Donaldson, with whom I became familiar through the Golden Fleece group. See his bio and photo below. His Q&A will appear over the next five days.

Bio of Ron Donaldson: Ron has spent the last 28 years working for various government departments in England, including Customs and Excise, Nature Conservancy Council and English Nature. Starting off in IT/IS, he has spent the last 10 years as a “cognitive edge” practitioner on an internal-consultant basis, facilitating story-based workshops and giving advice, guidance and training, in “all things narrative,” to a wide variety of projects and initiatives.

Ron calls his particular role that of a knowledge ecologist (see Q&A for more on this) and last month he became a self employed consultant. He is currently developing and actively looking for a portfolio of interesting projects/work.

His new blog and website is “the ecology of knowledge”. Here he regularly explores his interests in story, community and complexity.

He is one of the first practitioners in the UK to work with and be able to demonstrate SenseMaker, the new Cognitive Edge narrative software tool.

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Q&A with Ron Donaldson (Question 1):

Q. How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

Q: Back in 1998 Dave Snowden introduced us to his newly developed approach to gathering and making sense of knowledge. As he trained us in the principles and methods of what would become Cognitive Edge, he told us hugely engaging and highly memorable stories about water engineers, taxi drivers and children’s parties.

A: I became fascinated both by the metaphorical meaning and the power of such stories and thought, “I wonder if I could do that for stories related to nature conservation.” I found myself avidly reading books and scouring the web for everything remotely connected to story, community and complexity theory.

I guess it took some courage at first to try out these new methods as serious business tools, but every time I did I came back more and more enthused, as I realised this was so much more productive than my previous approaches of systems analysis and process modelling, but it was the engagement side that surprised me most. People would visibly become friendlier with each other; hardened pessimists would join in and never complain; each time I talked about the approach it would trigger another storytelling initiative or invite for me to get involved.

I loved the fact that using narrative was/is seen as a quirky and alternative approach yet it is based on the most tried, tested and simple to carry out methods available. Nothing excites me more than facilitating a group to tell their stories and watching their different perspectives merge and re-emerge as they make sense of the material as a group.

I now keep a regular watching eye on a wide range of blogs in order to learn that extra nugget about how the mind works and which synapses or hormones are responsible for that feeling of community, or how to structure the perfect story with its archetypal themes and characters. But I am also mindful of the fact that stories like communities are much greater than the sum of their parts, and I might spend my time better reading, listening, and watching good stories than following such a reductionist path in a constant search for each and every component part.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It’s great when other career gurus tout storytelling in the job search. I feel like I’m not the only voice crying out in the wilderness. This one is from my colleague Barb Safani via Ezine Articles. Barb and I both serve on the executive board of the Career Management Alliance, and she’s written for Quint Careers.

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During a job search, several tools and strategies can be used to weave together a compelling story of your value to an employer. Resumes, interviews, and networking meetings should be rich with memorable information about you and the problems you have solved for organizations. Your story should be so good that the interviewer can’t wait to repeat it to the next person in the hiring chain. Here are some tips for making that happen.

1. Create an exciting resume that the reader just can’t put down.

Don’t just write about job tasks and don’t just list statistics. Build a story around your accomplishments that succinctly communicates the impact you had on an initiative or an organization as a whole.

2. Tell your story with pictures.

Try adding some charts or graphs to your resume to create a visual representation of your impact. For example, if you increased sales 500% over a 5 year period, create a bar graph to show the year over year growth.

3. Add your online stories as well.

LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Facebook profiles are a great way to let other people see who you are both professionally and personally. If used properly, they can help build your credibility, authenticate your passion, and show your human side. Blogging software (try WordPress or Typepad) and microblogging (I like Twitter) can be leveraged quite effectively to create an online presence and voice and establish yourself as an expert in a given area and an engaging storyteller.

4. Showcase samples of your work.

Bring examples of the types of reports, business communications, or design work you do to the interview. Consider including links to websites, photographs, videos, or project prototypes to your resume or portfolio when appropriate.

5. Answer interview questions using the Challenge-Action-Result story format.

Employers are interested in learning about your past successes because they feel that past successes are a good indicator of future success. By describing the challenges you faced, the actions you took to address those challenges, and the corresponding results for the organization, you are more likely to create interest and excitement about your candidacy.

6. Ask questions that invite the interviewer to tell their story.

In order to build a strong rapport with the hiring authority, you need to share information. Asking the interviewer to also share information helps deepen this relationship. Ask what issues the department is struggling with and what types of strategies they have tried in the past to address these issues. Asking questions shows your interest and concern for the company’s problems and also positions you as the right person to address them.

Barbara Safani, owner of Career Solvers, has over 12 years of experience in career management, recruiting, and executive coaching. Ms. Safani partners with both Fortune 100 companies and individuals to deliver targeted programs focusing on resume development, job search strategies, networking, interviewing, salary negotiation skills, and online identity management.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Barbara_Safani

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Tom Daschle, President-elect Obama’s point man on the healthcare issue, is discussing the new administration’s early strategy for reforming the healthcare system.

The strategy begins with giving people the chance to highlight their concerns and experiences. Daschle invited people around the U.S. to hold what amounts to house parties from Dec. 15-31. Obama’s transition team will gather the information from those meetings and post the material on its Website. (It appears there is not yet a mechanism to share stories on the site).

By asking anybody and everybody to share their health-care experiences, Daschle is confronting one of the major criticisms of 15 years ago: that the effort to craft former President Bill Clinton’s plan for universal coverage was too secretive.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

… that I forgot the weekly Wordle tag cloud/word cloud last Friday? Here’s this week’s:

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Carol’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

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Q&A with Carol Mon (Question 5):

Q: Your clients seem to be primarily organizations, but much of what you have to teach about communication skills seems as though it would work on an individual level, too. Can you talk briefly about using some of your principles and techniques for people who want to, say, network, find a job, advance their careers, or improve communication skills?

A: Listed on my Web site are numerous organizations I have worked with on the development and delivery of story. Recently my business has grown significantly in the one-on-one coaching piece. Listing individuals as clients is problematic because many are looking for anonymity. I find working with individuals very rewarding because it is much easier to target one’s specific needs. In workshops some participants are good at delivery but struggle to find meaning, others are good at finding meaning but cannot easily find stories. Working one-on-one, the help I give is focused and feels more like co-creating. Workshops can feel a bit more one-sided, too much lecture. 

My work with individuals has included working with speakers on stories for their keynotes, small business owners and their elevator speeches for networking, un-employed for interview stories and small business owners who are developing stories for brochures, or web content. It has been a wide variety of work which is fascinating and rewarding in the sense that I get to hear a lot of great stories.  

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Tokoni is a story-sharing site that’s about a year old and has ties to eBay (investments, plus its founders were eBay execs). I like Tokoni as it offers features that could easily keep one absorbed for hours. The full “about us” description of Tokoni appears below, but here are my likes and dislikes:

1. I love the ticker that runs across the bottom of the screen. If you see a story title crawl by that catches your fancy, you can click on it. Of course, doing so led to one of my dislikes — I had to register on the site before I was permitted to “engage” with a chosen story. I supposer that is the way of the social-media world, however.
2. I like the story prompts or “requests” that users post. A few samples:
• Just wondering if anyone else on tokoni is into Crocheting?
• stories from caregivers of elderly parents
• I would like to see stories about how people overcame their own bad parenting to go on and become good parents themselves.
• Me gustaría ver historias en Español
• I would like to see personal stories from other quilters.
• I would like to see stories about what we as women can do beyond voting to change our world for the better
3. Tokoni also has a featured story prompt, one presumably suggested by the staff. The current one: “Does your family have a tradition of giving back during the holiday season? What will you do? Share your story.”
4. I like that the site has both story collections and story hubs, though it’s not easy to discern the difference. I believe collections are stories on a single topic by a single person, while hubs are interest groups in which multiple people tell stories on a single topic.

5. I like the fact that Tokoni features “must-read” stories on its opening page. I also like the Tokoni promotes a spirit of helping through stories — providing lessons, comfort, inspiration, etc.
6. I’m fascinated by, but don’t totally understand, Tokoni’s Bubble Browser. I think it shows connections among Tokoni users and/or their stories. See illustration at left (you can barely see the faint blue lines connecting these avatars).

Tokoni’s “About Us:”

At Tokoni, we believe everyone has a story to tell.

Whether it’s a family vacation you enjoyed thoroughly, a headline news event you witnessed personally, a health issue you overcame, or your journeys through the everyday trials of child rearing, you have a first-hand experience that’s worth sharing with others.

Why? Because stories help people. Your mother’s insight, teacher’s point of view, friend’s joke, or grandfather’s recollection — just think how these voices of experience have been a source of comfort, guidance, entertainment, and education in your life.

Now, imagine these meaningful stories of first-hand perspectives, recollections and knowledge shared with a global community, one based on honesty and respect. Consider how valuable it would be to post your own accounts for the benefit of others. Think how worthwhile it would be to read personal points of view from people all around the world who’ve “been there, done that.”

Welcome to Tokoni.

The Tokoni Story

We launched Tokoni in late 2007 to enable people to share stories and experiences within a vibrant and open community, where individual wisdom is celebrated and collective knowledge is valued.

At Tokoni:

The authentic act of shared storytelling is powerful. Life’s diverse stories are intrinsically entertaining, informative, influential and inspiring. Beyond just the facts, Tokoni stories allow people to explore places, events, issues and points of view with greater understanding and appreciation.

Stories are as rich and diverse as the lives people live. There is breadth to the subjects and depth to the content on Tokoni, giving people one-stop access to various communities of diverse interests. Collectively, the power and passion of individual voices of experience make for a complete resource, minimizing the need to participate in numerous online blogs, groups, and forums.

People want to connect with each other online in a more meaningful way. Unlike fragmented blogs and message boards where mostly one-way, narrow conversations are taking place or online social networks where people interact superficially with friends and acquaintances, Tokoni is an open community that helps people connect over shared experiences that matter most to them.

Everyone has a voice that should be heard. Tokoni members cultivate an inclusive and vibrant community where honesty and respect are honored and stories are shared, recognized and valued.

We welcome you to be a part of Tokoni where members can:

post personal stories and experiences on the site — be they compelling, cathartic, funny, helpful, inspiring or even absurd — that can inform, entertain and help others in a way that only first-hand, human-interest stories can do

browse or search the site by category, hub, member or story to access the voices of experience to many of life’s diverse happenings

create a “collection” of stories, like a personal “play list,” to group favorite stories or accounts from the same “life episode” (i.e., wedding stories, family stories, travel stories, etc.)

connect with other members over shared stories of interest and experiences of others

post comments and reward tokens to liked stories and authors

link stories to hubs where groups of people can share stories and join discussions

follow other users’ stories of interest

enhance personal posts by uploading videos and photos for an even more comprehensive story

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Carol’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

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Q&A with Carol Mon (Question 4):

Q: One of the seminars you present is Tell Tales, Make Sales. How did you come to discover that storytelling is effective in sales? Do you have a story of a client that improved sales through storytelling?

A: Sadly, I stumbled upon this class. I belong to a Toastmasters group, and at the time there were several sales people also in the group. Knowing that I was a storyteller, one of them casually mentioned that he uses stories all the time in his sales process but that he didn’t feel he got all he could from the delivery. That got me thinking that maybe I had learned some techniques that sales people could benefit from. For one of the projects in the Toastmasters curriculum I put together a workshop for sales people. After receiving some good critique and glowing feedback for the presentation I developed it a bit more for the general sales population and started shopping it around. 

I had one client who actually told stories fairly well but tended to go on too long and include far too much detail. After we spoke he trimmed the story to the essentials and noticed more people seemed to listen far more intently. We also talked about the need to listen to the customer’s story first so that the sales story chosen fits the need. I don’t have any figures of improved sales, but the sales person is far more confident when he tells his sales story. 

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

At this point, I am no longer amazed neither by the things that people are asked to tell stories about nor by their ability to tell stories about the most obscure topics.

Still, the last topic I would have thought about as story fodder is the concept of people saving up lots of coins and then taking them to one of those green CoinStar machines to sort them and get paper money (and apparently, now you can turn them in for gift cards, in which case, the counting is free).

But as I learned through Peter Shankman of Help a Reporter Out (HARO), the CoinStar folks are soliciting exactly these kinds of stories on their site:

Tell us your story for a chance to see your face on our big green machines in your hometown.

How much of your stash did you cash in? Did your change help you buy a new bike?

Perhaps you splurged on a cool gadget for your car, or maybe an afternoon at the spa -- away from it all.

You can read submitted stories here and submit your own here.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Carol’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A and Part 2.

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Q&A with Carol Mon (Question 3):

Q: How important is it to you and your work to function within the framework of a particular definition of “story?” (i.e., What is a story?) What definition do you espouse?

A: When I first got involved with storytelling I wrote “Storytelling in its simplest form is merely a relaying of events; in its art form, it is a mystical journey the teller and listener take together.” Both parts of storytelling have a place in our world. I still like the statement for how I believe it covers the different types of tales and would like to build on it by saying that I do not espouse one definition of story; one size does not fit all. Professional storytellers do not put much stock in anecdotes as stories and yet in the business world, anecdotes are powerful, easy ways to communicate. There are a few commonalities between all forms of story and those probably are what should be used to define story. Whether it is a one-liner, epic, ballad, poem, movie, anecdote, or fairy tale, all good stories evoke some kind of emotion and cause a connection between the teller and listener. Let’s not complicate it with pedantic definitions of opening, conflicts, resolutions, and character development. Many non-professional storytellers feel they should not use stories in their communications because their “stories” do not follow a strict form. A looser definition encourages more people to consciously use stories strengthening their messages. 

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I wrote the other day about a couple of ideas for visual storytelling, I had a nagging feeling there was another one I had wanted to mention.

Nina Katchadourian has undertaken the Sorted Books project, as she describes below. She groups the books so that the titles on their spines make some sort of statement. Dare we say we could create a story with the spiny titles?

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library’s focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library’s holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See Carol’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

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Q&A with Carol Mon (Question 2):

Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now? What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now? 

A: Humans have always used story to communicate, even when it was not recognized as “storytelling.” Before the explosion of the written word there was the oral tradition. History, culture, ethics, morals and traditions were all passed along through stories. It feels like we got lazy when books became so readily available and then music, movies and TV all conveying stories in different formats. As we got busier we lost patience to sit and listen and yet we humans all crave to have our story heard. Since the explosion of digital media people are finding it easy to write or record their stories for their descendants and by all accounts many are taking advantage of the technology. 

Digital technology might be one answer as to why an explosion of storytelling now but I believe there are several contributing factors to the renaissance. I don’t believe we humans ever stopped telling stories; we just didn’t always call it that. Marketers are now calling it storytelling and demonstrating how powerful a story is to making a message memorable. Since so many people don’t feel heard the venues extended by companies to let customers tell their stories are growing in popularity. Customers feel a bit of celebrity and mostly they feel heard. 

The development of technologies like PowerPoint also has inadvertently pushed the effort to bring back more stories. What seemed like a great communication tool has been overused and abused. Audiences are lulled to sleep with dull slide after slide or dazzled with the technology and miss the point of the presentation. Experienced presenters are finding that the good old story is still the best way to get the message out. 

Families are spread across the country; we communicate via email, text messaging, and quick hellos as we pass in halls, shops or even the home because of busy schedules. All very impersonal, yet as humans we crave and according to some studies, thrive on contact and interaction with others. Stories connect us and ground us. As we grow apart with over-scheduling and technology choices we also seek out ways to connect resulting in the explosion of the storytelling movement.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

What a delight to present the 17th in my Q&A series with story practitioners. This one is with Carol Mon, with whom I became familiar through the Golden Fleece group. See her bio below. Her Q&A will appear over the next five days.

Bio of Carol Mon from her Web site:

Bio: Carol spent 13 years in human resources and payroll and another five in radio and TV before finding her passion for storytelling. She draws on these experiences to help others create and tell the right story. Since beginning her career as a professional storyteller/speaker in January 2000 she has told a wide variety of stories to a wide variety of audiences and has delivered dozens of workshops on the power of story in communications.

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Q&A with Carol Mon (Question 1):

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: A big mistake that I see many novices make is to write out their story and then try to tell it by reading. For the most part, the way we are taught to write is very different from the way we speak; therefore, the stories don’t flow. Complex sentence structure, multi-syllabic vocabulary, in-depth descriptions, and emotive words are all part of what we might include in a written story that may not be necessary in an oral presentation. 

When listening, people don’t have the luxury of going back to re-read a complex sentence or to savor the beauty of the sentence as they would if they were reading it. Yes, using elegant sentence structure can make the story come alive but too much in an oral presentation may tax the listener. The same is true with “big words” in an oral presentation. This is more from the presenter’s standpoint; too many multi-syllabic words in a row will slow the pace of the story and won’t always roll off the tongue easily. Some less commonly used words will add sophistication to the story — used sparingly is best. An oral presentation filled with many unusual vocabulary words will leave the listener translating definitions in his head, leaving little time for the imagination to develop pictures of the story. In written form, the reader is able to slow down when necessary, but in the oral form, the listener is forced along at the speed of the teller or risks being lost.

Part of the beauty of oral storytelling is the listener participates in the building of the story by using her imagination to fill in the full picture based on the description given by the teller. And part of the beauty of the written story is full descriptive scenes. Emotive words also are used very differently in the written form and in then oral form. When speaking, gestures, facial expressions and vocal changes all demonstrate emotions and different speakers. These must be translated into words to express what is going on in text form. Many of us are probably aware of the old saw, it’s not what you say but how you say it. Taking a dialog and copying it on paper can be flat; words might be needed to communicate the true meaning of what is being said. i.e., “Look! a fire” can be followed with, “how beautiful; let’s sit around it and toast marshmallows, or quick call 911. 

And finally, for the storyteller who may not be a talented writer, telling the story orally can help in the writing process. Numerous tellings can be compared to several written drafts without the labor of writing and editing. Telling a story over and over will help get the emotion and feel for the story so that when you attempt to write it many of the bugs will be worked out and can make the conversion to a written form much easier. Writing stories and telling stories are both satisfying experiences but take slightly different talents.  

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.