Earlier this week, I blogged about visual storytelling, including a bullet point about unusual media used to tell stories — Lego-like blocks and Viewmaster-like reels.
Our scars tell stories. Sometimes they’re stark tales of life-threatening catastrophes, but more often they’re just footnotes to the ordinary but bloody detours that befall us on the roadways of life.
I realized that was true. My most storied scar is on the index finger of my left hand. It’s not very visible, but I can feel it.
I garnered this scar by placing my hand on a glass pane on our back door of the home of my teenage years (I was about 16) and slamming the door too hard — in anger because my mother refused to take me to see an R-rated movie. The movie, I recall, was Diary of a Mad Housewife, which I still have not seen to this day.
The pane broke, and my left hand went through it, slicing up my left thumb and index finger. The scar on my thumb is interesting, too, because the doctors grafted a piece of skin from my hip onto the wound. Thus I have occasionally told people I was touching my hip when my hands were nowhere near my hip.
But the one on my index finger had a more lasting legacy because from the time my finger healed, I have always used the scar to discern my left hand from my right hand. Yes, I’m one of those people who has trouble with left and right. Whenever my brain has to make a decision involving left or right, I engage in a split-second cheat — using my left thumb to feel for the scar on my index finger.
My husband has a legendary scar on his chin attained when, as a boy, he and his brother were racing home on bikes, and Randall hit a new, unexpected patch of gravel. His bike skidded, and Randall flipped over his bike, landing on his chin. Ouch.
People in my generation also often have large vaccination scars from smallpox vaccinations, as well as scars from chicken pox. Younger generations probably don’t have those.
Jennings concludes: “I relish the stories [scars] tell. Then again, I’ve always believed in the power of stories, and I certainly believe in the power of scars.”
Q: What’s your favorite story about a transformation that came about through a story or storytelling act?
A: I have so many, but one of my favorites is when I was doing a stage show with seven women and we were performing for 200 nuns. I was really nervous because my piece was very personal and provocative. I had gone to catholic school as a kid and I had this idea that either the nuns or God were going to judge me! I was really scared. But after the performance, the nuns came rushing up to me. They sat me down and fed me lunch while they asked me a million questions about my work including how they could do what I did. That was a very sweet and touching moment in my life in which I found that I could inspire some of the people that used to scare me.
Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?
A: Everyone has a story to tell and the world needs to hear it.
Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues are storytelling media?
A: Well this question gives me the biggest laugh of all. I am a former technophobe and I thought Twitter was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard of. But then through a personal transformation, in which I forced myself to get up to speed on technology, I’ve become a social media queen! One of my mentors recently said to me, “You’re on fire as a web presence!” He couldn’t believe how I have been using blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn to make my work known in the world.
Now I’m having so much fun using blogging and social media that I’m even teaching it to others! What a riot. A lot of people of my generation have a fear and a distaste of social media. I try to hold their hands while they learn and I make it fun for them. I use a lot of social media now. It’s one of the mainstays of my business. By the way, blogging is the most fantastic medium for storytelling!
Q: What future trends or directions do you foresee for story/storytelling/narrative? What’s next for the discipline? 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 foresee an explosion of the use of story for marketing purposes. It has already begun. Years ago you couldn’t find much written on the use of story in business, just a few books. But a few weeks ago I was at the bookstore and I found at least four popular books on marketing that mentioned storytelling. Storytelling is finally becoming known for the force that it is and I am thrilled about that.
What do I aspire to personally? Well like my website says, I want to change the world through story. I want to continue using the power of story to inspire collaboration, innovation and change in business and training. I want to inspire leaders to be more articulate and more able to grab people’s attention through storytelling skills. I like to add to their personal pizzazz.
There are too many boring presenters out there!
I have created a body of work called, “Stories From the Heart of the Cosmos.” It is story, performance, workshop experience with a cast of inspirational and wacky characters who really wake people up and show us how to love and live right on this planet. So I want to continue to expand that and take it out to bigger audiences. My story performances generate a lot of connection and community amongst audience members and that is the most fun of all. So I am intent on enlarging that as well, getting large groups of people to work well together.
And I’d like to go back to Europe and take some of my work there! I have a few stories in Italian that need to be told.
“MFK” describes herself as a “thirtysomething gal with a good old-fashioned writing degree and a bloated, shiny, sexy MBA.” She works for a Fortune 50 Company and blogs at Open-Source Career
Back in the spring, she wrote a guest blog entry for Blog@Work, a blog that unfortunately seems to be “suspended,” so I can’t provide the link to it.
The thrust of the entry was MFK’s formula for success: “The key to taking things to the next level … is to look back after a time. Do a post-mortem, a personal performance review, a personal brand assessment, storytelling — whatever you want to call it.
MFK suggests looking for patterns and consistent behaviors in your success story. Look for things you hated and things you failed at. Seek out consistent patterns of what people said about your work. Consider what got you excited and eager to go to work each day.
MFK particularly had to engage the storytelling method when she sought her first job after grad school because she had no traditional business experience before her MBA:
I took an objective look at the prior six years and started storytelling to myself, looking for patterns of behavior and experiences that were harmonious with the type of corporate work I was trying to do. … At each job, increasing leeway to act independently and be put in charge of work and of people — because I had demonstrated I could drive results.
She notes that “healthy … self-reflection will show you the hidden patterns … Can you repeat the patterns again? Can you use those patterns to help you take it to the next level?”
Yes. Use the successful, fulfilling parts of your past story to build your future story.
Q: You are neuro-linguistic programming trainer. I’ve always felt NLP had some relationship to storytelling. How do the two areas overlap, in your view?
A: NLP has a lot of relationship to story. One of the most important connections is through Milton Erickson, MD. He is one of the main people from whom they modeled NLP. Milton Erickson was a Master Hypnotherapist. He spoke in story to create change in the unconscious mind because the unconscious has a metaphorical orientation already. The stories made it easy for the solution to go right in and endure over time. There are many famous stories about Erickson; he was quite a character. One of my own NLP mentors studied with him directly. He said that when they would go to see Milton he would just sit there and tell stories the whole time and they would think that absolutely nothing was happening. Then three weeks later their lives would change!
Milton Erickson truly knew the therapeutic use of story and since I am trained specifically in his work as well, I tend to use a similar structure for most of my stories. That way the message goes in really easily and people have a lot of fun while listening to my stories. One example of this is of an older woman was attended one of my storytellings. She called me the next day to tell me excitedly that she’d had a dream about love. This might not sound unusual but she was in her 80s, and apparently she hadn’t thought about this in a long time. But through the story something wonderful woke up in her unconscious. I love using story in all my work with clients.
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: I am dedicated to spreading a new definition of storytelling that includes its deeper powers. My personal mission is to create a context in which story can be known and experienced as the force of change that it is. Stories change us individually, collectively and globally. Storytelling is no longer just a medium of entertainment but a context in which to live our lives and a tool for personal and global change. I want everyone to realize that our lives are built on story and that we can use stories to create a better world.
Periodically, I like to present a collection of visual materials with significant storytelling content.
This collection is especially rich.
Romantic visual storytelling: A storied wedding invitation that has made the rounds of the Internet is that of Jill and Matt. The invitation tells the story of the relationship up to the time of the planned wedding. What’s visually interesting is that the invitation uses type almost exclusively rather than any other images, but the graphic treatment is what lends the visual element. In another romantic visual story, photographer Adam Barker captures his sister being proposed to on waterskis
Storied objects and artifacts: Lizzie Skurnick of NPR.org describes Important Artifacts, a book by Leanne Shapton, this way:
Foregoing narrative entirely, Shapton tells the story of a couple’s relationship in the form of a staggeringly precise ersatz auction catalog that annotates the common detritus of a love affair — notes, CD mixes, e-mails, photos, books— and places the objects up for sale. … In choosing the conceit of an auction catalog, Shapton reminds us that the story of love can be told through the things we leave behind, but also by the condition in which we leave them.
The idea behind The Significant Objects Project is that “a talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!” How do they test the theory? “The project’s curators (Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn) purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales. Participating writers are paired with object about which they write a fictional story. “An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly becomes a ‘significant’ object’ that is then listed for sale on eBay. The significant object is pictured, but instead of a factual description the significant object’s newly written fictional story is used. The project is not out to hoax eBay buyers. The curators catalog what happens with the objects and may write a book.
Unusual media: Remember Viewmaster reels? “Vladmaster” makes a version called “Vladmasters.” You can see a good selection of these images here. What is described as “the world’s largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible is “The Brick Testament,” with more than 3,600 illustrations that retell more than 400 stories from the Bible — made with “bricks,” LEGO-like construction pieces. I’d love to show a sample here, but the site has very strict rules about not reproducing its material.
Photographic stories: The Photography Channel, the tagline of which is “Cinematic Storytelling for The Modern Media,” celebrates “the enduring power of still photography storytelling.” Vewd “is a documentary photography magazine continuing the tradition of storytelling through a visual medium.” (Pictured is “The Christmas Lights Fued” by Ross McDermott, which “tells the story of two neighbors in Charlottesville, Virginia, and their continual battle to out-do the other in building the greatest Christmas lights spectacle.”)
Fine art: The Delaware Art Museum, through its The Art of Storytelling site invites visitors to listen to stories, read and view pictures inspired by the museum’s collections created by other visitors; become storytellers by writing and recording stories inspired by works in the museum’s collection; and create their own works of art using objects and characters found in some of the museum’s most noteworthy paintings. At the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, as reported by Smithsonian.org, Catherine Walsh, a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware, is digging through 150-year-old works, diaries, and letters looking for examples of storytelling in art, specifically between 1830 and 1870 — a period, she says, when a flood of storytelling images appeared in popular works. … Walsh also believes that museum visitors create narratives when they view a painting.” (Pictured work is “The Story of Golden Locks.”)
Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?
A: My mother tells the story of how would take me out to the woods as a little girl and she would put me on a fallen tree stump and listen while I told her stories! This was my first form of theater. I had no idea that I was a storyteller; it was just a natural way of being for me.
Then years ago when I was applying for an apprenticeship in the expressive arts, my mentor told me that I was a storyteller. I had no idea what she was talking about. Later I realized that I thought and spoke in story, very much as indigenous people do. I chose storytelling as the focus for that training and I studied storytellers for a few years to learn about it. I had no idea that I was destined to be a storyteller or that I would end up using story in my career. For me storytelling is more of a worldview and a way of being than a form of speaking. It’s in the being and the bones, not just in the telling.
What do I LOVE about story? Everything! I live for stories. I love story’s power to express that, which is inexpressible. I love its ability to create deep and lasting change. I love seeing how people come alive through story and how it connects us and creates bridges across our human divide. But most of all I love the magic that story creates. When I tell stories I can almost see the magic happening in the room. Stories take us into other beautiful worlds and for a time we can forget about all our cares. I know of no other form of expression that moves us and hits our human bedrock as deeply as story does.
Storytelling is the greatest and oldest power in the world for transmitting wisdom and oral teachings. I am most fortunate that story is my medium for change.
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: The indigenous peoples from every tradition, had a prophecy that this would be a time of great change. They literally had that recorded in their stories and their calendars of this time. They are in agreement that this time has finally come and that it is up to us to create a new future. And how else do you create a new future but by using story? Stories create our cultural paradigms, the norms by which we live. If you think about it the world is built on stories. That is why I believe the time is now and that we need stories more than ever. We need a new story to live by.
It’s intriguing to me that storytelling is spreading like wildfire in the area of business, particularly for use in marketing. Storytellers have always known its power, but finally the rest of the world is catching on. Savvy media gurus have come to realize that storytelling is the quickest and most relevant way to share information. Its ability to cross cultures and to spread ideas and information is unparalleled. The time for story has truly come.
The last reason for storytelling being so relevant in today’s world is because everything is speeding up. Everything is quicker, especially communication. Just look at Twitter for example. It’s basically a medium for a 140-character story. In today’s faster paced time, storytelling is essential because captures the listener. It is the deepest and most lasting form of communication known to humankind.
I believe it was through Twitter that I learned of Annie Hart, and I was immediately intrigued by her “stories change the world” philosophy. She is likely one of the very last Q&A practitioners who will make it into my upcoming free e-book, Storied Careers: 40+ Story Practitioners Talk About Applied Storytelling. I’m also excited about her upcoming radio show. This Q&A will appear over the next five days.
Bio: [from her Web site, where she tells about herself with more storytelling verve than is presented here] Annie has brought her work to the fields of business, education, healthcare, non-profit, youth at risk, and community organizations.
Her training and certification includes NLP Trainer, Eriksonian Hypnotherapy Trainer, Expressive Arts Training, non-violent communication, ISVOR Dilts Leadership Training, where she was personally selected as one of the first 32 trainers from around the world and is one of only 50 Book Yourself Solid Certified Marketing Coaches.
Annie has developed several bodies of original work including a Heart-Centered Communication model; DreamBuilders, a group coaching model; Stories From the Heart of the Cosmos, a story performance workshop; and her current work Skills of Excellence, a compilation of skills of the masters.
She has also created several large-scale community events, including a world peace council of 90 indigenous elders from around the world and Artists for the World in which she organized a team to create and display the collective artwork of Philadelphia school children.
Annie’s personal ethic is to embody the principles of human kindness, generosity and collaboration as a basic business model. She believes that relationships are the most important factor of all.
Annie loves knitting, is passionate about yoga, enjoys drinking good tea and reading and studying from the mystics. She lives in beautiful Chestnut Hill, PA, with her little dog Miss Sweetie. Her goal is to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way and to be a kind, happy and loving person.
Annie is launching a radio show, “Inspiring Change Through Story,” the first week in September 2009, on Fridays at 12:30 PM. Check her Web site for how to find the show.
Q&A with Annie Hart:
Q: You have a section of your Web site called story performance and tell a fascinating story about how you got involved in story performance. In what kinds of contexts are you a story performer, and how does this work relate to the training/consulting work you do with story?
A: My main interest for using story is in the context of training and consulting. I love its power for effecting change quickly. I also enjoy performing for fun, and I use my storytelling around town to help promote local businesses and events. You can inspire people much more easily through carefully chosen stories and what is so much fun is that most of the time people don’t even realize that they are changing. The stories are so entertaining that people are enjoying themselves. They think they’re just having fun but something deeper is happening. It isn’t until later that all of this change surfaces. I receive a lot of great feedback from individuals, groups and businesses describing the many amazing changes that have come about.
Time once again for one of my favorite pastimes, looking at ways to apply material about storytelling to the job search.
Today’s target is a posting about Donnie Claudino, TechSoup Canada’s marketing manager, who spoke at a conference about teaching charities about using online technology to improve their fundraising and marketing about how to use storytelling in online media. The post was written by “Andrew” on TechSoup.org.
Claudino used storytelling to land a job when he, as an American, wanted to immigrate to Canada.
Key to his storytelling message was the exhortation to know your audience. In the job-search, you must know as much as possible about your audience, the employer. Claudino notes you must “determine what action you want these people to take;” in the job search, you want you audience to invite you to the next step in the hiring process — whether interview, next interview, or job offer.
The “questions to ask yourself about your story” that Claudino proposes can easily be applied to job-search stories:
Is the story transformative? Does your story have “heart-fire?” Does it have emotional pull? Is it believable and honest? [A story that shows your passion and enables the employer to become emotionally invested in you as a person and prospective employee will go a long way toward getting you the job.]
Does it make [the employer] want to do something? Is the story inspirational and [can it] move [the employer]? More importantly, is there a clear course of action? [Hire me!]
Can the story be repurposed? [In your cover letter, can you expand on a story you told in a clipped bullet point in your resume, and in your interview, can you expand on the same story even further? Can you re-purpose the story in networking situations, your career portfolio, and in a personal branding statement?]
Suggesting that stories can “live” online, Claudino says, “The best strategy is to have a connected and consistent message in as many places as possible but which ultimately drives visitors back to a site to take a specific action.”
That’s why it’s a great idea for job-seekers to tell their stories on a personal Web page with their name as the domain name (like my katharinehansenphd.com). The Web site can introduce an online portfolio, full of stories of accomplishments and results. In addition to — or instead of — his or her own Web site, the job-seeker can have story-rich profiles on sites like LinkedIn. Contact information should be readily available so the employer or recruiter can take the specific action of getting in touch.
“Twitter is a storytelling tool,” writes Tim Girvin. “Every person tells a micro-story in the 140 characters of text that are tied to the messaging output from many tiers of devices.”
Twitter is The Human Narrative in real time. And yes the Capitalisation is important. Twitter is not just a marketing tool, nor a place to get cool links to awesome videos and blog posts. It’s not even simply a place to organise a bbq or be introduced to a potential client. Its primary purpose is to tell the Human Story, in 140 character paragraphs.
She goes on to cite stories of breakups, car accidents, and deaths told through Twitter. She also cites Twistori, a site that presents ongoing feeds of tweets that begin, “I love…,” “I hate …,” “I think …,” “I believe …,” “I feel …,” and “I wish…” Papworth calls these “Automated stories from the web.” I’m not so sure. She then cites Twittilate, “one lady’s dirty monologue,” as storytelling. Again, not so sure. Finally, she mentions Twittories, “stories composed 140 characters at a time by a diverse group of collaborators using Twitter.” These, I think, are getting closer.
The blogger at The SocioSphere attempted to get a storytelling project going with Twitter. Can’t tell if it went anywhere; I don’t think so.
Twitterature: Penguin books will publish a book about literature, written in 140-character tweets, to be called Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less.
Twisters: As reported by WAToday.au @arjunbasu writes short (obviously) stories on Twitter. “I call them Twisters,” he says, “because everything on Twitter has a stupid name.” These kind of work for me in the same manner as six-word memoirs.
Storystreaming Platform: Framing this idea not so much as story telling, but storystreaming, Kevin Sablan proposes a “platform [that] could be used to make sense of the confusing flood of information coming out of social media streams” (see illustration below and here for a larger image). He would use it with venues other than Twitter, but Twitter is the first one for which he’s proposing the platform. To understand what Sablan’s trying to do, you need to grasp his concept of Storystreaming, which spins off of lifestreaming, which I’ve written about before. I like how Sablan distinguishes storystreaming from lifestreaming, particularly this point:
Story-centric: Current lifestream solutions, at least those I’m familiar with, document a person’s life, but every story includes multiple characters, events and plot. A storystream platform needs to document a the events of a story, not a person.
Storytellers, memoirists, journalers, bloggers — anyone who talks or writes about himself or herself in a public forum — is faced with the dilemma of how much to reveal about oneself.
She then goes on to reveal that she was in one of the towers of the World Trade Center when it fell, one of those who narrowly escaped the building. And then that her parents had physically and sexually abused her, though she has virtually no memory of the sexual abuse.
Trunk’s explanation for why she reveals so much of her personal story:
So what I’m telling you here is that I’m scared of secrets. I’m more scared of keeping things a secret than I am of letting people know that I’m having trouble. People can’t believe how I’m willing to write about my life here. But what I can’t believe is how much better my life could have been if it had not been full of secrets.
So today, when I have a natural instinct to keep something a secret, I think to myself, “Why? Why don’t I want people to know?” Because if I am living an honest life, and my eyes are open, and I’m trying my hardest to be good and kind, then anything I’m doing is fine to tell people.
That’s why I can write about what I write about on this blog.
And when you think you cannot tell someone something about yourself, ask yourself, “Really, why not?”
It could be argued — and one of Trunk’s commenters brought this up — that it is not that difficult to talk about this stuff when Penelope Trunk is not your real name. But Trunk has been transparent about why she uses the pseudonym and what her original name was.
About the list of traumatic and private things she’s written about, Trunk writes, “But each of you has a list of things in your life similar to that, it’s just a list you don’t want to talk about.”
She’s right. But I tend to be more like Trunk than like those who have trouble revealing the difficult stuff. At various times in my life, I’ve written publicly about my reproductive decisions, my alcoholism, relationships, family, and the fact that I was raped when I was of college age.
Why have I written about that stuff, and why do I sometimes talk about personal stuff in this blog? I agree about living an honest life.
There is probably also an element of catharsis — both for me and for my readers. When you open up about the difficult stuff, people know they are not alone. The 264 comments (so far) on Trunk’s blog entry that I skimmed seemed overwhelmingly positive and supportive; undoubtedly Trunk’s story was cathartic for some of them.
For me, there is probably also at least a small element of narcissism. One of the pleasures I get from blogging is the same as one of the highs I used to get from teaching — listening to myself talk — in this case, listening to the writing voice inside my head talk.
What I wish Trunk had talked more about is what happens to you professionally when you talk publicly about the difficult stuff — after all, her blog is Brazen Careerist and usually about career and job-search issues.
Can Trunk talk about this stuff publicly because she is secure and established in her career? I am no longer employed by any entity outside my family, but I still worry about what personal revelations would do to my career. I would still love to teach again someday and am not sure if talking about the difficult stuff would be an obstacle. I even worry when I write about more lightweight, frivolous, and personal things in this blog — like my love affair with a local steer.
I long to write about a traumatic period of my life, providing self-help suggestions along with the narrative to assist others who’ve gone through the same thing I did.
We hear — and I especially hear in the career-management circles I travel in — about “personal branding.” My best friend recently posed the excellent question: How do you strike a balance between establishing a personal brand and revealing too much about yourself?
What does it do to your “brand” to disclose the difficult stuff about your personal story? What does it do to your career?
I would like to believe I live an honest life like Trunk avows. Most of the time, I, like Trunk, ask myself, why not self-disclose? I put myself out there more than most people. But a little sliver of fear — for my career, for my “brand,” for what my readers might think of me — holds me back from full disclosure.
Video is everywhere these days … it’s more and more ubiquitous. Often I’ll see an interesting Twitter tweet or other storytelling reference that when I click on it, turns out to be a video.
Nothing wrong with that except that I have zero patience and often am too restless to sit through a video.
Back in the spring, my friend, video storyteller Thomas Clifford wrote a blog entry, “Is This The Future Of Video Storytelling For Organizations?” He was talking about a particular video series on the online Washington Post site, On Being, “video portraits that take you into the musings, passions and quirks of all sorts of people,” but perhaps Clifford’s characterization of these short videos should be used as criteria to evaluate any piece of video that claims to be storytelling:
Compelling
Inspiring
Radically simple
Clifford then asks these questions:
Can organizations use video narratives as a way to learn from one another?
Are video narratives an effective way to genuinely engage employees and its customers?
In a time of information saturation, should organizations integrate narratives into their communications efforts? If so, how?
Can our individual stories be part of a larger brand’s story?
All great questions that I would like to apply in a broader way to the videos I’m listing here. I’ll return to those presently.
A bit earlier than Clifford’s post, Amanda Hirsch quoted Tom Kennedy from 2002 (who built the award-winning multimedia unit at Washingtonpost.com): “I believe we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the Web ‘s potential as a story-telling device.” Hirsch’s followup: “Seven years later, I believe we’re still just scratching the surface.”
So, as you review the videos listed here, ask yourself if they demonstrate we are still just scratching the surface in Web-based storytelling, or have we gone beyond? Do these videos pass Clifford’s test of compelling, inspiring, and radically simple? And, now returning to a broader view of Clifford’s questions:
Can people use video narratives as a way to learn from one another?
Are video narratives an effective way to genuinely engage Web users?
In a time of information saturation, should organizations, individuals, and brands integrate narratives into their communications efforts? If so, how?
Can our individual stories be part of a larger brand’s story, the larger human story, the online content story?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, do these videos indeed represent storytelling?
In Passion for the Land, Ranchers and Cooperative Extension agents partner with media artists and UC-Davis university scholars to produce and present digital stories on current challenges to agricultural viability and rural community life in the Sierra Valley. The one I watched, “Is Sustainable Attainable?” was well-done and definitely a story, although I thought the narrator/protagonist was a bit sing-songy in his delivery.
Ohio State University has developed a reputation as a hub for digital storytelling, and among its impressive set of resources, OSU’s Web site has a section that describes the OSU Digital Storytelling Program’s mission this way: “to help the academic community communicate their passion for teaching, research, and outreach through personal, engaging storytelling.” A collection of “Academic Story Examples” is offered here. I enjoyed The Human Connection. The site also offers a nice set of resources.
My Facebook friend, Evelyn Van Til, who is also connected with Ohio State — she’s an academic and career coach there — just today sent me the video, “Happiness” (embedded at the bottom of this post), the story of her personal journey to discover that “happiness is created in the daily practice of choosing to see the positive.”
The storytelling philosophy of MediaStorm, writes Carrie Brown-Smith at The Changing Newsroom (quoting MediaStorm’s Brian Storm), “is to let the subjects speak in their own words. They use on-screen text to connect the dots and drive the narrative, but the audio is in their sources’ own words. They combine stills and video to great effect and always incorporate some kind of surprise for the audience.” This is pretty close to the style Clifford spoke of with the Washington Post’s On Being series. Defying my personal impatience with watching videos online, Brown-Smith reports that on MediaStorm, 65 percent of those that start watching stick with the site’s 21-minute videos to the end. In explaining why, Brown-Smith perhaps adds three more criteria to what we should be looking for in online storytelling: high quality, easily shareable on social media, and defiant of audience expectations for short-attention-span stuff. I watched Intended Consequences (pictured), about sexual violence during the Rwandan genocide, which was actually just under 15 minutes. I was not impatient.
Also rather long (just over 9 minutes) but absolutely stunning is a piece excepted from the TV show “Ukraine’s Got Talent.” Highly touted in the Twitterverse, the video features the show’s winner, Kseniya Simonova, creating a jaw-dropping sand animation that clearly makes a huge emotional impact of every member of the audience. As you watch the video, you can tell the artist is depicting wartime, but the reason for the audience’s outpouring of emotion is unclear until you learn the background, as I did on Associated Content. It is:
The Great Patriotic War, or as we call it in America, WWII. Ukraine was probably the area most devastated in the war, even more than Germany. It was a conflict that saw nearly one in four Ukrainians killed. A population of almost 42 million lost between 8 and 11 million people, depending on which estimate one references. Ukraine represented almost 20 percent of all the causalities suffered during WWII. And that was after Stalin had killed millions during the manufactured famines before the war. It to this day touches every Ukrainian.
Three entertaining and sometimes touching videos are commercials (all re-tweeted many times on Twitter): “Prized Possession” equating home insurance with “a worried dog search[ing] for and ultimately find[ing] the smartest way to protect his most prized-possession;” [Levi’s] “Watch pocket created 1873 … and abused ever since” in which a young man uses his jeans’ watch pocket to stow a condom; and Olympus [Camera]: The PEN Story, “A 50-year journey in stop-motion.”
In a bit of a different vein is “The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!”, which is animated. Even though the main character is not human, the story told is very human and tragic.
All the videos I saw passed Clifford’s basic tests of compelling, inspiring, and radically simple (some were more compelling than others, and some may not have been quite “radically” simple).
I’m not video-savvy enough to answer whether these demonstrate whether we are still just scratching the surface in Web-based storytelling, or whether we’ve broken new ground.
What do you think? What’s lacking in video storytelling? What’s the next step?
My 22-year-old son works as a produce specialist in a health-food store and has become quite an evangelist for natural foods. He has been campaigning to change his parents’ eating habits and urged me to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
So I’ve been reading it — or rather listening to the audiobook because I’m a super-slow reader, and listening to audiobooks is a productive thing to do as I work on outdoor chores on our Washington land.
Pollan talks about “storied food,” food presented in natural-foods stores with brochures about how the beef cattle “living in beautiful places” ranging from “plant-diverse high-mountain meadows to miles of Aspen groves and think sagebrush flats.” He notes that he, like many consumers are inclined to pay higher prices for such meat. Not only only do we perceive that the meat tastes better, but we also love a good story.
But previous chapters told a grim story of factory farms, a narrative that would never be told at a natural-food store or any other retailer. This is the story of cattle crammed into feedlots, mired in manure lagoons, cattle that are fed a mush of corn (which they were never meant to eat), supplements, chemicals, and antibiotics (in part because their unnatural corn diet renders them susceptible to disease).
I don’t eat a lot of red meat, but we do have a weekly tradition of a steak cooked on the grill. It’s yummy, and I look forward to it. Hearing the story of the factory farms does indeed have me seriously questioning this habit. Of course, I tell myself that my boycotting factory-farmed beef will do nothing to stop the practice.
But then I think of “storied food” that is close to home. A few miles from our home here is a farm with a couple of horses and the most fabulous specimen of bovine you’ve ever laid eyes on. We just call him Bovine because we were unsure of his gender at first. Pretty sure Bovine’s not a girl cow — no udder. And probably not a bull because — ahem — something seems to be missing down there. So he’s probably a steer.
We feed him apples, which he absolutely loves and gobbles up. And I worry about him. Is he destined to be steak dinner? Is he the family pet? Is he a child’s 4H project (which doesn’t mean he still couldn’t be steak dinner)? I’ve noticed steer manure is popular here; maybe his function is to produce manure.
As I think about changing my eating habits away from factory-farmed beef, I think of our Bovine, the protagonist of a potential food story. It would still be tragic for me — or anyone — to eat our magnificent Bovine. But if someone does, they could at least take comfort that he had a happy grass-fed and apple-chomping life while he was here — not a miserable life of suffering that the factory-farmed cattle lead.
I mean, just look at him … the hero of a pastoral story of the vanishing small American family farm (his farm is for sale, by the way).
Sometimes storytelling that teaches a lesson is inadvertent. It’s not intended as “business narrative” or one of Steve Denning’s springboard stories meant to spark change. It’s just good reporting and writing that tells a story that provides a lesson businesses can learn from.
Want to convey the lesson that you should be careful who acquires your business because it may lose everything that made it great and eventually go under? Then read the sad story of gardening-tool importer Smith & Hawken by Jim Welte at marinij.com. Current owner, Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., intended to sell Smith & Hawken but decided to liquidate it when it couldn’t sell the subsidiary. As Welte reports, original partner Dave Smith said, “When Scotts bought it and Smith & Hawken was owned by the largest pesticide seller in the U.S., I suggested people boycott it. It had completely lost its roots.” Further:
Both Smith and Hawken said the company that bears their name had long since veered away from being a gardening company and was unable to take advantage of the recent surge in interest in gardening because of that.
“How could you possibly have a gardening store in this economy and go wrong?” Hawken said. “I’ll tell you why. This wasn’t a gardening store anymore.”
Smith and Hawken had not originally sold their company to Scotts. It had gone though several owners before it ended up with Scotts. But perhaps the lesson of this well-written story is that when you sell your business, especially if it bears your name, you may have to be prepared for it to lose its character and even its very existence. Perhaps there are terms of sale that can keep your good name from getting sullied.
How about communicating the message that if you want to sell products, you should probably respond enthusiastically to those who buy those products?A column by Neal Rubin in The Detroit News makes one wonder if indifferent salespeople might be one reason GM is where it is today. Are they really all so demoralized they can’t sell anymore?
Rubin asked a salesperson at a Buick dealership about a redesigned model, the Buick LaCrosse, he’d seen on the highway. The response:
He said I’d probably seen a GM executive on a test drive. If I’d been on the other end of that call, I’d like to think I’d have sensed a potential sale. I probably would have asked for a name and phone number, and promised to get in touch the instant a LaCrosse graced the premises. But nope; that was pretty much the end of our relationship.
Later at another dealership, he asked three questions, including one about the LaCrosse. The response was even worse:
I’d come through his door. I’d asked questions about two vehicles. He didn’t introduce himself, he didn’t offer to show me a [name of the other model Rubin asked about], he didn’t ask if I’d ever driven one.
Keep in mind, this story takes place in Detroit. “We’ve learned in these last months that we’re all in the auto business,” Rubin writes, “and we need it to work better. And I’m tired of asking myself the same question: In our alleged service economy, where the heck is the service?”
Eventually Rubin finds a dealer — referred to him by the National Auto Dealers Association, who offers him encouragement.
Read any stories recently that offer valuable business lessons?
I don’t have a good moon-landing story. Forty years ago, I was 15. I watched the grainy, black-and-white video of the landing on a snowy, black-and-white TV. I always associate the moon landing — for some reason — with the Miracle Mets of 1969 and with my fervent participation that summer in a theater workshop for teens.
The space program and I grew up together. TV sets would be wheeled into my grade-school classrooms to watch the Mercury launches. I was as enthralled as any other kid back then. Then I went through as long period, as I suppose many baby boomers did, in which I was blase and apathetic about the space program.
As an adult, though, I consider myself a space geek and devour anything I can find about it, especially those Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo years.
One of my favorites was the wonderful Tom Hanks-produced HBO series, “From the Earth to the Moon.” I especially love the theme song, which I give you here to celebrate this great day in human history: 01 From The Earth To The Moon Main Theme.m4a
It’s probably pretty typical for authors to immediately second-guess what they’ve written in their books and be champing at the bit to revise as soon as the book is published.
For example, the standard story formula for job-interview stories has long been Situation —> Action —> Result (or Problem —> Action —> Result or Challenge —> Action —> Result), and that’s pretty much what I presented in the book.
Gerry Lantz was the first to open my eyes to the notion that the SAR/PAR/CAR structure might be a bit ho-hum, and perhaps something more compelling was possible. He suggested structuring the story around the question “What’s at stake?”
But it became clearer to me when I read a blog entry by James Shelley. In turn, it was Shelley’s citation of Robert McKee’s seminal Story that helped me see the light. McKee writes:
What is the risk? What does the protagonist stand to lose if he does not get what he wants? More specifically, what’s the worst thing that will happen to the protagonist if he does not achieve his desire? If this question cannot be answered in a compelling way, the story is misconceived at its core. For example, if the answer is: “Should the protagonist fail, life would go back to normal,” this story is not worth telling. What the protagonist wants is of no real value, and a story of someone pursuing something of little or no value is the definition of boredom.
McKee’s “What is the risk?” is pretty much the same as Lantz’s “What’s at stake?”
When applying this question to a job-interview story, it usually works better to ask the question, “What does the protagonist’s employer stand to lose if it does not get what it wants?” What would have happened to the employer if the protagonist had not increased sales or cut costs or solved some trenchant problem? What would have happened if the protagonist had not been there to act?
Shelley goes on to say, “True risk deals with issues of ‘life and death’ importance…” In a job-search story, the risk usually won’t be life-and-death (unless the job-seeker is, say, a medical professional, firefighter, police officer or the like). But the life or death of the job-seeker’s employer could be at stake.
Here’s an example from Tell Me About Yourself in which the employing company (which was the protagonist’s father’s firm) would probably have gone under had the protagonist not acted:
Two summers ago my father, who was the backbone of my family, had a massive stroke and was left partially paralyzed. This happened just a few short months before I was supposed to start attending college, and at the time I didn’t know if I ever would go to school. My dad put me in charge of his online business, which I had known very little about. I turned into the sole provider for my family overnight. I spent my days on the computer by my father’s hospital bed, very thankful that I could work and still stay by his side. My father kept getting better and better and eventually went back to work for himself. In a very short time, I realized that taking care of your family is the most important thing you can do, and to do so, you need to work hard and succeed so that you can provide them with everything they need.
Footnote: Shelley’s post also captures why storytelling is effective in the job search — because the audience for the story — the hiring decision-maker — becomes invested in the storyteller. The listener cares about the storyteller. “The stories you love the most are stories that literally seem to suck you in because you start caring for the things that the characters care about,” Shelley writes. He then quotes Jack Hodgins from Passion for Narrative:
We become involved in people’s lives when we care about them, and we begin to care about them when we understand what it is they hope for. Then we are put in the position of cheering them on, tensing on their behalf, getting impatient to discover whether they succeed.
Essentially, “storymapping” is a method of reclaiming the dialogue and character of individuals and a community. The presenters use modern, readily available technologies, to create a map of stories in cities around the world. Usually these cities or town have a dramatic, traumatic, or interesting story to tell, stories that speak to a forgotten time or place, stories that have been embellished or changed over time, or stories that are happening at the moment. Individuals who participate are asked to tell a story, any story of a place — they are not interviewed. The stories are recorded and/or videotaped, edited and uploaded, and then the people (encouraged by signs placed in the locations of each of the stories) call a phone number and hear the story. The program is supplemented by a website with video of some of the individuals telling their stories at the locations they are talking about. The Center of Digital Storytelling has worked with organizations and individuals in 16 cities, all over the world.
As an example of a phone number you can call to hear a story, the blog offers 504-256-1116. “When prompted, choose and dial any number between 01-20.”
He suggests scrambling “the major periods of history in a random cluster on the board or a handout:
“Medieval Period,” “Cold War,” “Roman Empire,” “Enlightenment,” “Age of Exploration,” “Classical Greece,” “Industrial Revolution,” “Greek Heroic Age/Trojan War,” “Renaissance,” “Sumer,” “Solomon Builds the Jewish Temple,” “Scientific Revolution,” “Alexander the Great,” “World War I and II,” “Mohammed and Islam,” “The Crusades,” “Egyptian Pharoahs,” “The Reformation,” “Buddha,” “The Romantic Era,” “The Catholic Church Begins,” “Confucius.”
The instruction, then, to students:
“Make a list in which you place these major historical events and periods in the correct chronological order. Then, write the approximate dates you think each one took place or began.”
Burrell says that in most cases, students (high-school seniors) fare poorly with this exercise. So then he says to them:
“You’re about to graduate and become adults. You won’t have many more chances to get your head around this story, which truly educated adults should know. If I promise that this 5,000 year old story is really pretty easy to learn and know — as a story — do you want to take this opportunity (possibly your last) to learn it?”
Burrell says that “telling the story of the last 5,000 years as a narrative, as the real Greatest Story Ever Told - full of gut laughter, wistful “what ifs,” amazing characters and events, philosophical wonder, and chains of cause and effect over centuries, over millennia, all liberally peppered with audience-participation requests for predictions, connections to earlier episodes, summaries of why Marx couldn’t have come earlier than the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment couldn’t have come before the Renaissance, on and on” is one of his strengths.
However:
… hearing the story, being mere audience, isn’t enough to learn it. Like the bards that kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive through several centuries of the Greek “Dark Age,” during which reading and writing disappeared, and the story lived through oral transmission from older to younger storytellers, the students need to rehearse what they’ve heard from teacher — and a simple, low-tech way for them to do that is simply to re-tell the story they’re hearing, episode by episode, as simple written narrative summaries.
Another twist on “history as story” is the History Engine project, which sounds like it gives students the opportunity to build narrative summaries similar to those Burrell talks about — using primary sources (but focusing on American history only):
The core of the [History Engine] project is student-written episodes — individual snippets of daily life throughout American history from the broadest national event to the simplest local occurrence. Students construct these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then post their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and fellow participants around the country the opportunity to read and engage with their work.
Whether we are storytellers, story practitioners, journalers, writers, bloggers, memoirists, or just folks seeking personal growth and self-actualization, we can always use good story prompts for inspiration. Here are three I liked that I came across recently:
Tell the story of the most inspiring, influential storyteller you’ve known. This one comes from the blog, The Sunlit Desk. The blogger, “Sharon,” also offers a List of prompts & exercises.
Write your life legacy in three lines of 14 characters each. This one, in the ilk of the six-word memoir or the Twitter story (if there really is such a thing), comes from Brickstorming, a PDF template at Creativity Portal (and introduced here). Here’s the actual prompt:
A world museum is creating an exhibit of “wisdom bricks” featuring unique quotes and bits of wisdom from 1,000 people from all over the world. You’ve been chosen as one of the people to participate in this legacy-making exhibit — you get to make your mark! What will you impart to future generations?
The brick engraving company has some parameters: Your message must be contained within 3 lines with 14 characters each (spaces and punctuation count).
Why did homo sapiens survive while Neanderthals didn’t? Thriller novelist Lee Child wrote not long ago that it was because homo sapiens developed language.
“But then something strange happened,” Child wrote. “We invented fiction. We started talking about things that hadn’t happened to people that didn’t exist.”
Speculating, based on various bits of evidence, that storytelling may be 100,000 years old, Child asked: “Why? Why tell stories?” Noting that “no new behavior could possibly become established unless, at least to some slight degree, it made it more likely that we would still be alive in the morning,” Child argued that storytelling kept homo sapiens alive “by managing our fear.” The thinking, Child posited, may have gone like this:
“Things happen to people like you, but they’re survivable. In other words — don’t worry. Things turn out OK.”
An ability to invent and absorb stories … would have helped early humans work out “what if” scenarios without risking their lives, pass along survival tips and build capacities for understanding other people around the campfire. The best storytellers and best listeners would have had slightly greater odds of survival, giving future generations a higher percentage of good storytellers and listeners, and so on.
Then storytelling bolstered human progess: “We started telling stories about clan members who ventured out of the valley and came back a week or a month or a year later with tales of what lies beyond the hill. We legitimized exploration, and adventure, and progress,” Child wrote.
Blogger’s Note: A Storied Career is participating in a project to publish the same blog entry — this one — across many blogs simultaneously today. An accompanying entry, Storytelling Edition: Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media, looks at ways to use storytelling in social media to support charity.
Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.
Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.
1. Write a Blog Post
Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.
You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.
2. Share Stories with Friends
Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.
You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.
3. Follow Charities on Social Networks
In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.
Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.
You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:
Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.
It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.
5. Find Volunteer Opportunities
Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.
For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.
6. Embed a Widget on Your Site
Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.
Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.
7. Organize a Tweetup
You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.
As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.
Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.
If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.
9. Sign or Start a Petition
There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.
Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.
10. Organize an Online Event
Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.
In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.
Bonus: Think Outside the Box
Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.
Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.
The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.
Special thanks to VPS.net
A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.
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About the “10 Ways” Series
The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.
This entry is in conjunction with the multi-blog campaign, 10 Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media, which A Storied Career is participating in. Some of the 10 Ways mentioned are already story-driven — such as sharing stories with others and supporting causes on “awareness hubs” (because one of the ways these hubs raise awareness is though stories), Here, I talk about more story-related ways to support charity through social media:
Garner support for your charity (or a charity you believe in) through storytelling. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseum in this space, Andy Goodman is the best-known evangelist for helping nonprofits gain support through stories. He and many others hammer home the point that data points and stats don’t work nearly as well to endear an audience to a cause as stories do. Learn more here.
Collect and share stories of those affected by your cause. Some recent discoveries that effectively share these stories: Fonografia Collective, which brings “local and international stories about human rights and social issues to a wider audience. By combining traditional approaches with multimedia storytelling, we focus on how important global issues like development, economic trends, health care, immigration, or poverty affect people’s everyday lives” (one of the collective’s stories is pictured at right); the StoryTelling & Organizing Project (STOP), a community project collecting and sharing stories about everyday people taking action to end interpersonal violence; the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the Global Fund for Children, which put on a “workshop … to give youth the tools to document best practices used by grassroots groups and to provide youth with a medium through which they are able to express and share their own perspectives” (the foregoing link takes visitors to the videos created in the workshop); and the Stories and Experiences section of Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids (link goes to “Joanne’s Story”), which prepares lunches for hungry children in Calgary’s schools.
Tell compelling stories with video. The 10 Ways entry lists video as one of the ways to support charity. While telling your charity’s story in video is effective, other compelling stories, like this one from the Peruvian Cancer Foundation get the message across, too.
In what other ways might we use story to support charity through social media?
It’s time for another one of my roundups of storytelling news and views that have been experiencing considerable buzz in the Twitterverse. My usual buzz test is that an item continues to be re-tweeted by multiple people (not that all re-tweeted items are buzz-worthy, in my opinion). If these much-re-tweeted items align with what I like to cover in A Storied Career, I list them here every month or so. Here’s the storytelling buzz from the Twitterverse since my last update:
“We Operate Best Together: Mapping the Stories of Social Change & Innovation Worldwide,” was a much-re-tweeted project, in part because its founder, Morgan Sully (pictured), was trying to reach a fundraising goal on site called Kickstarter, so he tweeted a great deal about the project and asked others to as well. He met the goal — $1,500 from 32 people. The project asks the question, “How is social change made in spaces where media, technology and creative people meet?” Sully asked backers to “help [him] tell the story this summer.”
Sometimes items don’t really get re-tweeted all that much, but I just think they’re cool, like this quote attributed to Gloria Steinem by @randomdeanna: “Humans have been storytelling for 100,000 years around the campfire; the media is now our campfire” or this thought by @Darrell_Nelson: “Storytelling and blogging [are] the ubiquitous wallpaper of the postmodern era.”
Storytelling-in-nonprofits evangelist Andy Goodman is quoted as saying, “Make your mission statement a story. People identify with other people. Storytelling helps us remember,” at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service. I would be really interested in seeing mission statements that could be considered a story. Anyone have any nominations?
An item in the Christian Post Reporter by Lillian Kwon, “Improving the Storytelling of the Gospel,” garnered attention. Kwon reported on Ben Arment, who is bringing together “six ‘master’ communicators of the Gospel to one stage for what he calls a ‘theatrical conference experience.’” Further,
The fall event, called “Story,” will feature music, drama, comedy and interactive exchanges with attendees. The goal is to create a place where Gospel communicators can be inspired to be better and more effective at what they do.
Arment apparently feels most preachers deliver the Gospel in a dry, academic manner.
Much re-tweeted was this article from Variety, “Transmedia storytelling is future of biz.” The article notes that transmedia storytelling is “a new tool [that] has emerged to help those who want to extend film and TV properties across multiple platforms” and defines the tool as “developing a piece of intellectual property in a consistent manner across multiple media platforms.”
Not exactly a new concept to many readers of this blog was the buzzed-about article on Forbes.com, “The CEO As Storyteller In Chief,” in which Sangeeth Varghese cites Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Bill Gates as CEOs who’ve told a good story and states: “A CEO who has a great story and tells it has a much easier time reaching out to people, connecting to them and creating a sustainable community of them, than anyone who relies entirely on data points and charts has.”
… we are all wired as storytellers. The amazing thing is we’re all born as storytellers and story-listeners and somehow we don’t venerate its value. It’s only later in our life that we … wonder why this [leadership strategy] is working or why it’s not working. My mission is to … empower [people] to be better storytellers [and better] story listeners for the purpose of realizing their own success….
There wasn’t enough to Chris Albrect’s blog entry, “For Online Storytelling, What Is “Participation,” Anyways?” for me to really grasp it, but it sure did get re-tweeted. The entry is a brief rumination based on Albrecht’s participation on a panel at a conference that discussed the “evolving nature of participation in online storytelling.”
Practically, empathy is created through storytelling, which is not only the most successful remote means of creating social empathy, but has actually been the engine of social/cultural liberalization and change. I will demonstrate both the positive and negative affects on empathy through the increasing reliance we have on transhuman media technologies and how I believe storytelling is the key to empathy creation.
How can you develop “dramatic” stories and how can you share them in a way that promotes trust and builds successful collaboration? As well, it is important to ask how to shift the organization’s narrative from the typical rehashing of problems to an inspiring, aspirational narrative representing the culture we want to create?
And … more than five weeks after my last report on storytelling buzz in the Twitterverse, at which time people were gushing en masse about the Pixar movie, Up, people are still gushing about the amazing storytelling in the film. A good interview with some of the key players is It’s Gotta Be the Storytelling: The Makers of Up Discuss the Secret of Pixar’s Success.
Finally, I spotted two more oft-re-tweeted items — real gems, in fact — but I’m saving them for my next video and/or visual storytelling roundup. Stay tuned.
Here I am, once again beating my drum about the “storytelling resume” that I am convinced must someday emerge — and that I believe many signs point to.
I’ve written here about a number of concepts, mostly suggested by recruiters, that signal a desire for the resume to evolve into a new form.
Now, this is not entirely a new idea. Newspapers have long carried a “Positions Wanted” section in their classified sections. Today, people advertise their cleaning, babysitting, and handyperson services in such ads.
Roberts, who doesn’t suggest that the job-wanted description replace the resume but rather supplement it, provides this description:
Anyone who reads your job wanted description should know immediately what your perfect job looks like. When they read this they should know what you do (and have done) well and how you will succeed in this job. There should be no ambiguity. In this case, you are going to be very specific about your expertise.
He suggests that the job-wanted description would include:
ideal job title — a role that you’ve done and done well.
a good summary of what you would like to do.
background information as to why you are in the market and looking.
A job-responsibilities section in which you get into specific details.
Roberts didn’t say what this description would look like. Although several comments had been posted, they seem to have disappeared. One comment asked how the job-wanted description would differ from a resume objective statement. I asked what the job-wanted description would look like.
A job-wanted description is counter to commonly dispensed job-search advice not to be self-serving — in other words, don’t tell what the employer (or position) can do for you, tell what you can do for the employer. But perhaps it’s part of the new perspective that social media has brought to recruiting and the job search.
In storytelling terms, a job-wanted description could be a “future story” that would enable an employer to picture you performing in exactly the kind of job in which you would most excel.
So let’s review some of the other story-related suggestions for resume replacements or components thereof that recruiters have hinted at and I’ve reported on:
Profiles, whether profiles on already existing social-media venues such as LinkedIn or Facebook, or specialized profiles on job and career sites.
Perhaps the elusive Storytelling Resume will incorporate elements from some or all of these concepts.
And one more sign on the horizon, a new site called BriteTab, which will have a beta release this month, claims to be “changing the face of resumes.” Its tagline is “Resumes with Personality.” Virtually no information is available on its Web site, but you can sign up to be informed of the beta release. I don’t know if this concept is related to storytelling, but it will be interesting to find out.
One of my favorite TV shows, especially in the summer (and I am so psyched that it will this year be shown in the fall as well), is “So You Think You Can Dance,” a dance competition along the lines of “American Idol,” but with much more heart. My lifelong secret ambition has been to be a dancer, though I ruled that out early on because I am the world’s worst kinesthetic learner.
Over the five seasons of the show, the judges have always seemed to give more positive critiques to the young dancers whose choreographers gave them a story to dance to. The show always presents a clip of the dancers working with the choreographer, who usually reveals the story behind the dance. Sometimes there is no story. Ballroom dance tends to be story-less, though not always. Some genres — Broadway, hop-hop, lyrical — almost always have a story.
I find it fascinating to speculate: Would I be able to see and interpret the story if I did not hear the choreographer describe it in the rehearsal clip? Now, there’s a great exercise: Mute the TV during the rehearsal clips, watch the dance performances, and see what story the dance tells you.
Can you guess the story the dancers pictured are portraying?
They are Brandon and Janine playing thieves in the midst of a caper choreographed by the brilliant Wade Robson.
Regular readers know I am spending the summer (and into October) in gorgeous Kettle Falls, WA. What I may not have mentioned is that we’re living in an RV while building our house here. The house will not be habitable until fall at the earliest.
As you might imagine, RV living can be rather cramped — even for two adults and a 40-lb. Staffordshire bull terrier — especially when we not only live here but run several Web-based business ventures out of the RV.
My workspace is about 4 inches from our bed when I’m sitting at my desk, so I don’t have a lot of space to spread out and consider materials for A Storied Career. I can spread them on the bed, but then I have to move them every night when we retire.
Today I set up an ancillary workspace inside the (very) unfinished house. This is where I will perform “triage” on materials I’m considering for A Storied Career. I love this setup — with the comfy chair (that even has little pockets for my favorite kinds of pens and stapler), the table to spread out the materials, sunlight streaming in, and cool breezes blowing in from the Columbia River.
As I began doing triage in there this morning, I already felt more passionate, fired up, and excited about future blog entries than I did while reviewing materials in the RV. My workspace and tools are exceedingly important to me.
Bloggers, writers, storytellers, practitioners — to what extent does your workspace influence your effectiveness and creativity? Is it uber important like mine is — or does it not really make a big difference to you where you work?
Q: To what extent do you feel the current economic crisis increases the need for financial storytelling? How might business be improved, assuming lessons learned from the current situation, by better storytelling?
A: The current economic crisis came about because the relevant stories were at best ignored and at worst deliberately covered up. The complexities of the financial instruments which started this cycle, such as sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, etc., are beyond the knowledge of most people. Yet in many cases it is these same people, who have had to take a pay cut, or lost their jobs and in too many cases their homes. Do they not deserve an explanation? Not highbrow, not technical jargon but a clear honest story? In this context, financial storytelling has never been more critical.
More positively, I believe the way out of the financial crisis will come though entrepreneurs — people who through changing circumstances have been forced to innovate. Not only will they produce innovative products but the way they do business will also be innovative. This can be truly inspirational and we should attempt to share this story as much as we can. Financial Storytelling can help communicate this message and also build trust. Inspiration will lead to confidence, which ultimately is what we all need for the future.
Since this week’s Q&A with Stewart Marshall focuses on “financial storytelling” and the stories behind numbers and data, I thought I’d look at another view on this topic.
Storytelling is receiving lots of much-needed attention these days in nonprofits. I’m constantly seeing blog entries and webinars on storytelling for nonprofits. One of my heroes, Andy Goodman, is a major evangelist on this topic. The bottom line is that data don’t do much toward getting people to support causes; stories do.
But as a couple of other recent writings point out, numbers still have a place, and they can even be woven into stories. An entry on Impactmax titled “Social math: Yes…data can tell stories too” talks about “social math” as “a way of presenting numbers in a real-life, familiar context that helps people see the story behind them.”
Without a story, your data can be misinterpreted in a way that counters the message you’re trying to get across.
Once a certain perspective is established in our minds, it will trump the data — even making us deaf and blind to new numbers. In other words, unless we tell a “sticky” story with our numbers, some other default story that might not fit our message will kick in.
Sightline institute then offers these three tips for making your numbers count:
Hitch numbers to a story — paint a vivid picture, then back it up
Illustrate solutions rather than focusing only on the size of a problem
Become a “social math” whiz — relate to what’s familiar and concrete
Here’s the example given for the first point:
On average, our food is traveling over 1500 miles before it gets to our plates - the distance from Seattle to Chicago. Long distance travel decreases food’s nutritional value, wastes valuable energy in shipping and storage, and undermines the economic strength of our local family farms.
Now, some might argue with Sightline’s contention that “there’s a complete story here.” Here’s how the institute supports that argument: “Our food is the main character, making a long journey across the country. The nutritional and environmental costs inherent in the food system are underlined while at the same time the importance of our community’s connection (or lack thereof) to local farms is reinforced.”
On the second piece, Sightline offers an example it describes as “not so good” and then gives a better version of the example. I agree, but I disagree with the rationale for why the better reason is better.
The not-so-good version: “Replace 3 frequently used light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs. Save 300 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $60 per year.”
The better version:
Lots of energy goes to waste in office buildings each night with computers and lights left on while the city sleeps. Lights Out San Francisco — an event organized to illustrate an easy cost-cutting climate solution — estimated that turning lights out in San Francisco for even one hour could save as much as 15 percent of the energy consumed on an average Saturday night. During a similar event in Sydney, Australia, 2.2 million people participated. One hour of lights out meant that the atmosphere was spared 24.86 tons of carbon dioxide — three times the amount an average American produces in an entire year (or 48,613 cars driving for one hour). Think of how much we could save if we turned out the lights more often — or better yet, if systems were in place to automatically shut off unnecessary lights in entire cities.
To me, the better version is better because it’s a story, while the not-so-good version really isn’t.
The “social math” piece “unifies the narrative and the numbers — bringing them down to earth … by blending them with compelling stories and by providing comparisons with familiar things. It works by analogy.”
Sightline gives several examples, of which my favorite is this one:
If every person in the U.S. were to change their page margins from 1.25 to .75, we would save a forest around the size of Rhode Island each year.
It drives me nuts that the Microsoft Word default margin is set at 1.25” and most people don’t think to reset it! (However, I’m not sure any of Sightline’s social-math examples are actually stories.)
Footnote: Sightline Institute is of particular interest to me because it focuses on the Pacific Northwest, my current place of residence. And I learned something new: “Cascadia” is a term for the Pacific Northwest.
Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these
venues are storytelling media?
A: I do participate in what is currently called social media, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. Of these I think some are more effective as storytelling media than others, but most of them have a role to play. Twitter for instance, is very interesting. It can give you insight into the stories of those you follow. It reminds me of a series of photographs. Each individual picture can speak a thousand words, but it is the stream of photographs that exposes the true story. It also works the other way around. What does the collection of people you follow say about your own story?
Blogs are another example, whose story has changed itself. Now I am seeing a lot longer entries than in previous years. Writers seem to be articulating in more details the thoughts and ideas they have. In many cases they really are exploring the story. Web-based tools like FriendFeed are also story aggregators, pulling large parts of the internet from multiple sources into one easily digestible place. Collectively the tweets, blog entries, shared items, photos, status updates, etc., provide you with an ongoing and live story where you can choose your level of involvement. If you do get involved (by commenting for instance) the story becomes interactive which is really exciting!
For a couple of years now, I’ve been interested in the concept of “change your story, change your life” — that if you are unhappy with the story you’re living, you may be able to envision a better story, change your life, and live that new story. Many practitioners work with a similar concept, including a new discovery, Lisa Bloom, The Story Coach, who writes on her site: “At Story Coach we look closely at the narrative, we examine the stories we choose to tell.” My take on this concept is still evolving, still a germ of an idea. A partner and I hope to develop the concept into workshops in the future.
But what if you love the story you are living, and something awful happens to change the story? What if it’s something completely out of your control?
On audiobook, I recently listened to Elizabeth Edwards book Resilience, which she herself recorded for the audio version. Here is someone who absolutely loved the story she was living. She had an idyllic life, until not one, but three, unspeakable things happened to shatter her story.
The first was the death of her son Wade in a car accident at age 16. Her reflections on his life and death occupy a large portion of the book.
The next was her diagnosis with breast cancer — not so devastating at first because she assumed she would not die of the disease — but later shattering because her cancer metastasized and was pronounced incurable. She now knew she would likely die from the disease and might never see her young children grow up or hold her grandchildren.
In between the first and second cancer shockers, she learned her husband John had had an affair. A year later, she learned the indiscretion had been far more than the one-night-stand he initially revealed to her.
In the book, Edwards repeatedly talks of longing for her old story while accepting that she is living in a new and diminished story.
With her husband’s infidelity alone, she might have had hope that she could return to her old story or that the two of them could weave a new story — possibly even a better story.
A few years ago, I experienced a crisis in my own marriage that was terribly painful and took a long time to recover from. But I would have to say that the story my husband and I are living now is far better than the story we were living before the crisis. I am not ready to say the crisis was a blessing in disguise — even though our story is superb now — because I still would have preferred that the rift had not occurred.
But with the death of a child or your own death sentence, there seems virtually no hope of a better story. Yes, there may be some acceptance, grace, lessons learned, and yes, resilience, but your story, it seems, will be different and not better.
Yes, we have a lot of choices about the stories we live. But I am wrestling with how to deal with the stories about which we have no choices and that offer virtually no hope of living a story that’s better — or even anywhere nearly as good — as we had. Bloom writes: “We CAN choose new stories, better stories!” Sadly, I think there may be some situations in which we can’t.
Q: What people or entities have been most influential to you in your story work and why?
A: My two favourite references are Steve Denning and Robert McKee. Steve has written extensively about springboard stories, storytelling in leadership, and many other applications. I use springboard stories a lot in my work, they become key components of any presentation or pitch. Steve’s writing has also targeted business specifically, something I find to be a rich source of ideas and inspiration. Robert McKee’s book Story had a huge impact on me. Whether it’s a formal presentation or a prepared speech, I simply love the metaphor of screenwriting. One example of this is about preparation. The amount of work required to research your subject fully and understand as much as you can about the context really helps you deliver an authentic story. In a movie, it might be learning how people spoke to each other in for instance, 1920s Paris. In my work it might be about understanding the daily routine of a salesperson. The movies are all about connecting with the audience on an emotional level. The discipline and insight offered by McKee is to my mind directly applicable to financial storytelling.
Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?
A: My background is as a Designated Management Accountant working in industry. Over the years I’ve sat through countless business presentations from all levels of management. The vast majority of these have been terrible! Typically, there are too many slides with too many words which the presenter reads to his/her audience, half of which are busy reading their email on their Blackberrys whilst pretending to listen. If the presentations include numbers they are usually far less engaging!
I looked at my own presentations, what I was reading and what I was starting to learn at Toastmasters. I realised how powerful a good story could be and how much I enjoyed using it. What’s more when I looked at my career I realised that a lot of what I’d been doing all these years was storytelling. I also realised some of my heroes were great storytellers. From Winston Churchill “We’ll fight them on the beaches …” to Sir Alistair Cooke (Letter from America) and more recently Stuart McLean (Vinyl Cafe). The more I read, be it Joseph Campbell, Annette Simmons, Robert McKee or Steve Denning the more storytelling resonated with me.
What I love about using storytelling is the emotional connection I can create with my audience. I love the fact that if I am successful they are sitting there making up their own personalised versions of my story in their heads. When numbers are involved I love being able to demystify the data and enable more people to understand and benefit from the stories within.
As I started reading it, I began to think about applying its principles to personal branding. But then, as I realized the publication in which the article was published and the intended audience, I clued into the fact that personal branding wasn’t just a peripheral application to which Michael’s article could be applied; it was the major thrust of the article.
The publication is Storytelling Magazine, published by the National Storytelling Network, which is dedicated “to advancing the art of storytelling — as a performing art, a literacy tool, a cultural transformation process, and more.” Since most storytellers and story practitioners are solopreneurs, the personal-branding message certainly applies, and by the second principle listed in the article, Michael had mentioned personal branding.
Now, I have a confession to make…. I’ve touted and written about personal branding, but I can’t totally wrap my head around it, possibly because so many books and articles advise how to develop one’s personal brand — and they all advise a different approach.
I started to see the light through Michael’s article. He writes:
When I think of specific images and words with regard to personal branding, I think of one’s job-search communications — resume, cover letter, and more — and not only the consistent, branded look that should tie them together and identify them with the job-seeker, but also the story the job-seeker should be telling with these and other documents. I also think of the words and images with which we project our brand in the vast array of social media out there.
And I think “representative story for engaging in a relationship with the world” is a incredibly helpful way to look at developing your brand. Ask yourself: “How do I engage in a relationship with the world?” “What is the story behind that relationship?”
Then Michael writes, “Brands become a shorthand for whom we trust and identify with” — and even more powerfully, “Your brand is only as strong as the stories people tell about you.” That’s where you can drive yourself to a very uptight or paranoid state wondering what kind of stories people do tell about you. Or maybe that’s just me…
But Michael’s words made me think of the kind and flattering honor my friend Thomas Clifford bestowed on me over the weekend: He included me on a list of 7 Interesting Storytellers To Follow On Twitter, describing me as a “Prolific blogger/author. Focuses on telling stories for career development. Unearths amazing sites on story.”
Well, if you want to split hairs, I’m not sure I’d brand myself as a storyteller. I’m more of a reporter/journalist/observer/student/fan when it comes to storytelling, but I suppose you could say I tell stories about storytelling.
But I do believe “prolific blogger/author” is integral to my brand. It was about 18 months ago that I underwent my most recent brand reinvention, and an important aspect was my rather grandiose notion of being a “world famous blogger.” I didn’t exactly think I’d get to that point, but it’s certainly gratifying to have Thomas Clifford tell my story as “prolific blogger/author.” (The author part is largely to support the blogger part since I make only pocket change on this blog; however, I’m not exactly getting rich as an author either!)
Michael goes on: “The value of the brand depends on how consciously you have thought about managing your brand’s story.” That is especially true in these days of social media. Managing the story can be overwhelming. Late last month, Chris Brogan published a list of 19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Every Day. Whew — the things you could to manage your brand on the Web can be overwhelming — and that’s just your online brand.
Michael ends with the real nugget, the real meat of defining one’s personal brand, exhorting his audience to “communicate your personal brand without compromising your authenticity,” and to construct a brand story that conveys “origins, ethos,and cultural contribution.”
For the origins piece, Michael advises asking yourself:
When, how, or why did you start your practice?
Why should anyone care about it?
Those questions lead me to conclude that of all the ways I’ve constructed my identity and built my brand, my profile on LinkedIn is perhaps the most authentic embodiment of who I am and what I offer. It also loosely tells a story — of how I try to educate through writing because I am no longer fortunate enough to teach in the college classroom and of how I write really good resumes and cover letters but got very burned out on that endeavor after five years of running a resume business.
I do think authenticity has to be the bottom line in personal branding. If you’re as confused as I have often been about how to develop your personal brand, keeping authenticity in mind as you do so may just give you the guidance you need.
I have to admit that when I first heard of Stewart Marshall’s personal brand as a “financial storyteller,” I thought the phrase to be a contradiction in terms. How could something as quantitative as finance serve as a basis for storytelling? Stewart has been gradually convincing me, as he does in this speech he did for Toastmasters. See how well he convinces you in this Q&A, which will run all this week.
Bio: Stewart Marshall is a financial storyteller. He helps organisations tell their story through numbers. Stewart brings out the financial stories and narrative of a business for senior executives and management to help them understand what they have, what their business needs and how it can thrive. As a Designated Management Accountant in Canada and the UK he has worked in organisations of all sizes, from CFO of a start-up to a Senior Finance Manager at Eastman Kodak. Currently he is working on building his own consultancy focused on Financial Storytelling.
Q: You wrote in an entry in your blog, “Personally I think in business we should be far more honest about what we are doing.” Can you cite an example — perhaps a company severely impacted by the current economic crisis — that should have been more honest and told a better story?
A: In business, both internally and externally we want our audience to believe our story. Yet storytelling is frequently looked at as “not serious.” Do we really need countless PowerPoint presentations, with countless numbers and diagrams with all manner of confusing arrows and boxes, just so we can do our email under the desk and ignore who is speaking?
Let’s look at Canadian Banks. Throughout the economic turmoil Canadian Banks seemed to have fared better than in most other countries. More prudent, they took less risks and consequently shielded the Canadian economy from the worst of the crisis. As a customer though, I feel their prudence and limited risk taking has translated into less lending and poorer customer service. The Banks’ assets may be protected but is this what the typical customer on the street cares about? These assets were once the customers assets and I’ve yet to see very much evidence that the Banks understand their role in encouraging economic stimulus.
Both businesses and their customers have a responsibility to each other. It needs to be transparent and honest. Making big assumptions about what customers want or what businesses can provide, especially without ever asking them, is dishonest on both sides!
W. L. Gore, famously cited in organizational-behavior literature as a prime example of a “learning organization,” recently earned praise for “finally telling its story” to prospective employees.
On ERE.net, Todd Raphael wrote of the company’s career hub, “Gore will be telling scientists, engineers, and other prospective employees its story by launching a new global branding campaign from Arizona to China with a modest little theme: Join Gore & Change Your Life.”
The stories give a great feel for what it’s like to work at Gore, and all employers should be telling their stories like this.
One caveat though: Don’t make visitors to your career hub drill too far down to get to your stories.
On the Gore career hub, you have a choice of reading stories about people who work with Gore’s musical products, medical devices, or high-performance fabrics (think Gore-tex).
I grew up about 9 miles from Philadelphia in South Jersey. I worked in Philly at various times in my life and even lived there, in Queen Village, briefly. Thus, I’ve always considered the City of Brotherly Love my city.
I’m happy, therefore, that my city’s Historic Philadelphia Web site — and the city itself — are so story oriented. That’s one thing I’m celebrating on this, our nation’s 233rd birthday. Here’s what the site says:
Give the story of American Independence a little more personality. Hear history from the lips of the founding fathers themselves. Sneak into Independence Hall after hours. Get the true stories from professional storytellers, right in the places where history happened. Historic Philadelphia. History that speaks to you.
One particularly cool aspect is the city’s 13 Storytelling Benches, described like this:
Hear riveting stories of American history even most adults have never heard at 13 charming Storytelling Benches scattered around the Historic Philadelphia area. Our Once Upon A Nation storytellers aren’t dressed in colonial garb, but they’ll effortlessly transport you back in time as you sit on spacious and comfortable teak benches, all an easy stroll from one another. Stories last just a few minutes each and are told continuously during operating hours. You can start at any of the benches, all clearly marked with a “Once Upon A Nation” sign. And it’s completely FREE!
Q: What do you feel is organizations’ greatest obstacle in trying to get their message across, and how can story help?
A: Well, I think the greatest obstacle organizations face in getting their message across is the reliance on PowerPoint. According to Presentations Magazine, 30 million are created every day! PowerPoint is basically designed to convey information. Based on my regular exposure to these kinds of presentations, most are terribly dull. Storytelling is about engaging the hearts and minds of people and in business, moving them to action. Imagine trying to tell your organization’s story, or your project’s story, or your team’s story effectively by only using PowerPoint. Imagine trying to squeeze complex concepts and inspiration into a PowerPoint page. Remember the last presentation you heard and they read facts, figures and information off the screen? Ugh! Storytelling is 100 times more powerful and engaging. Electronic presentations are not all bad, and stories can be used in those types of presentations. But it does take some training in how to meld storytelling and PowerPoint together to create a powerful program.
The other obstacle I see that many leaders face is not knowing the right story to tell at the right time. For example, I’ve heard leaders tell again and again and again the story about why the organization needs to change. But people have already gotten that message and are past that. They are ready to be inspired about how the change has already begun and the progress that’s being made.
To sum up my philosophy about storytelling is a quote from author Flannery O’Connor in Mystery and Manners: “There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.”
The SlideShare folks had identified three of their own favorites, only one of which, The Short Story of Drunkenomics, I felt was actually a story.
I’m pleased that the judges recognized the storytelling capacity of Drunkenomics and awarded the presentation the contest’s $5,000 grand prize.
Other prizes went to:
The comic-book-like Super Cool Dudes for Best Design. Cute story. I wondering in what context this presentation would be used.
The well-done The Story of H. won for Best Storytelling (embedded below). Compelling, visually excellent, and carrying an important message, this story may not have a beginning, middle, and end — especially an end.
Let’s Talk Poverty, which starts off well but then devolves into a typical fact-filled PowerPoint, for Most Popular. (What does that mean? Most popular with SlideShare visitors?). Really no story here, though the presentation supports a great cause.
Preview of a new graphic novel adventure, White Shaka, for best use of multimedia. Really? Good storytelling here, but incomplete, since as stated, this is a preview of a graphic novel. What made this such good use of multimedia — the distracting rap music in the background? The hard-to-read comic-book balloons?
I can’t say I am in love with any of these winners. I do think The Short Story of Drunkenomics was the best choice for the top prize based on what I’ve seen.
I wonder if the 30-slide limit is a problem for storytelling?
I’m thrilled to see this spotlight on storytelling in presentations, but I’m betting slideshows that tell good stories will evolve into even better examples than these contest winners.
Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?
A: When telling stories, ask yourself “What am I giving others?” and “What am I giving myself?” An answer to both questions provides volumes of information about how you hope to connect with the audience, and what meaning the stories have for you personally. Knowing both is essential to mastering storytelling, in my humble opinion.
As reported on Confessions of a Technophile, researchers from Japan’s prestigious Waseda University and the Shanghai Jiaotong University in China have jointly developed a robot capable of reading out stories from printed books.
Called Ninomiyakun, the aluminum-made robot is 1-meter tall and weighs 25kg. It comes with a built-in camera and a computer that can recognize 2,300 Japanese characters (Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji) commonly known to a Japanese elementary school student. A character recognition software is used to translated text into spoken words, which are produced by a voice synthesizer.
Kamada Seiitirou, the professor who co-developed the robot, told the Yomiuri Shimbun that in future, Ninomiyakun will be enhanced to tell stories with emotions.
I can’t help thinking of Sean Buvala and his definition of story, which includes the requirement for “an audience in front of the teller which can be one person or thousands.” OK, the audience needs to consist of people, but does the storyteller have to be a person (!!??).
Q: What future trends or directions do you foresee for
story/storytelling/narrative? What’s next for the discipline?
A: I think there are multiple events on the horizon for the discipline: a greater focus on ethics and quality; an improved skill base; and more knowledge sharing among story professionals. I also see organizational story work moving into becoming a core competence for organizations. Today it is seen too often as a mere tool, which is severely limiting and does not recognize storytelling as fundamental to an organization’s success. I would like to think that organizations are starting to realize that mastering stories and storytelling is a core competence to their business growth and operations. Personally, my passion is training leaders to become compelling storytellers as an essential leadership and influence skill. Coaching — workshops — I love it!
Kathy Hansen, PhD, is a leading proponent of deploying storytelling for career advancement. She is an author and instructor, in addition to being a career guru. More...
The New About Me: The Ultimate Course on Reinventing Your Bio Into A Story: A program for people in the business of relationships, who need a better bio for today's hyper-connected world.
The following are sections of A Storied Career where I maintain regularly updated running lists of various items of interest to followers of storytelling:
Links below are to Q&A interviews with story practitioners.
The pages below relate to learning from my PhD program focusing on a specific storytelling seminar in 2005. These are not updated but still may be of interest:
I realized that was true. My most storied scar is on the index finger of my left hand. It’s not very visible, but I can feel it.
Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created 
A special thanks to 
