See a photo of Megan, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

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Q&A with Megan Hicks, Question 5:

Q: On your Web site, you talk about achieving all three of your childhood 
ambitions, noting that you are “telling stories around the world, writing a
lot of the stories I tell and, when I’m not performing, making art that
 people want to play with.” How do you balance your story-performance and
 writing lives with your creative pursuits with origami and crafts with found
 objects? Is the craft side more of a hobby, or do you feel you give all
 three areas (performer, writer, toymaker) equal time? To what extent does
 your art contain elements of storytelling?

A: I don’t sell much art. Barely enough to cover studio rent. It doesn’t put groceries on the table, but it feeds me, and if I live too much in my head, if I spend too much time stringing words and ideas together, I start to feel out of kilter. The act of making — inventing, figuring out how to assemble something, composing with color, finding a creative re-use for commonplace objects — puts my soul at rest. Order out of chaos. I create faces and limbs and torsos — call them dolls, call them icons, call them ancestors — and they all have a story, whether I know what it is or not (see a piece pictured at right).

I don’t feel as though I am particularly creative with origami. I incorporate simple folds into some of my storytelling programs in order to illustrate short little stories I’ve learned and created expressly for this purpose (they don’t stand by themselves), and I teach origami workshops. I’d say my persona as Origami Swami is responsible for about a third of my income. I don’t invent new figures, I don’t add to the knowledge base or discover new ways to fold paper. But I am perpetually in awe over the endless possibilities latent in something as ubiquitous, as simple, as pedestrian as a square of paper.

Balance? I tend to binge on one activity or another. Lately I seem to be writing more than anything else.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

One of my occasional forays into my own story …

Twenty-eight years ago today I drank alcohol for the last time. It was a six-pack of 16-ounce cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer (not the puny 12-ouncers pictured), which I downed singlehandedly.

I had no particular plans to quit drinking as a New Year’s resolution. I had tried quitting once before in 1982, in the early fall, and then entered a phase where I wanted to see if I could drink in “moderation.” Of course, I could not. Like most alcoholics, once I had the first drink, I couldn’t stop. The trick is to not have that first drink.

I woke up on New Year’s Day, 1983, horribly hungover and lying in a pee-soaked bed. Both of these were all-too-common occurrences. So I said “enough.” I decided I never wanted to feel that way again, never want to be in that situation again.

I quit cold turkey that day. I never did a 12-step program or got any other kind of help. I don’t regret not doing AA, but I think I would have benefited and perhaps would still benefit, as I mentioned here, especially now that I understand the storytelling element of AA. I don’t give myself any special kind of credit for quitting on my own; I simply consider myself extremely fortunate that I was able to. I am also fortunate that I have very rarely been even remotely tempted to drink in the ensuing 28 years.

I like acknowledging my sobriety anniversary, but I’m not writing this to pat myself on the back. I’m writing it to share my story the way folks do in 12-step programs. Among the many benefits of this kind of storysharing, outlined in the wonderful book Spirituality of Imperfection, is this:

When newcomers to Alcoholics Anonymous become immersed in storytelling and storylistening, they begin to see the form and outline of a new map, which details where they are, and how they got there, and — most importantly — the way to get where they want to go. … Through the practice of hearing and telling stories, we discover and slowly learn to use a new “map,” a map that is more “right” because it is more useful for our purpose. … what happens in the remapping of storylistening and storytelling is that in telling our own story, we come to own the story that we tell.

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In the business of talk-show hosts and journalists (like Barbara Walters) whose stock-in-trade is interviews, a “get” is a famous person that everyone wants to interview but who is often elusive or reclusive. A “get”, for example, that Oprah never got was Jackie Onassis.

In the world of my little blog, Peter Guber is a “get.” He’s so famous and successful that I scarcely imagined he’d ever have time to participate in one of my Q&As. But he has, and it will appear as a special treat for the first week of the new year, starting Monday, Jan. 3.

Guber is founder and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, which encompasses movies, TV, sports, and new media. Prior to Mandalay, Guber was chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, chairman and CEO of Polygram Entertainment, co-founder of Casablanca Record & Filmworks and president of Columbia Pictures. Films he personally produced or executive produced, including Rain Man, Batman, The Color Purple, Midnight Express, Gorillas In The Mist, The Witches of Eastwick, Missing, and Flashdance, have earned more than $3 billion worldwide and garnered more than 50 Academy Award nominations.

Guber has an exciting new book coming out in 2011, Tell to Win, which he’ll be talking about in the Q&A. His staff was kind enough to send me galleys. I’m horrible at book reviews because of my slow-reading problem, and I also neither wanted to read the galleys on-screen nor print out 272 pages. So here’s just a small overview and a few thoughts on the book:

I have long felt that many books on organizational storytelling/business narrative are flawed because, while they contain stories, they are not told in stories. Not so for Tell to Win, which is just one story after another — yarn after yarn — with just enough didactic stuff to hold the material together and teach some lessons. The book is just so compelling and truly draws the reader in because you just want to keep reading those fascinating — and revealing — stories.

Occasionally people ask me about resources for learning to be better storytellers. A number of resources out there some of what an aspiring teller needs, but Tell to Win might just be the most comprehensive resource I’ve seen. The first half of the book is about finding and developing one’s stories; the second half is about how to tell them well.

Guber begins by giving away the end of his book in a wonderful one-page introduction. An excerpt:

There’’s treasure to be discovered, and it’’s inside you. Built into your DNA is humanity’’s ten-thousand-plus years of telling and listening to oral stories. This veneration of story is a force so powerful and enduring that it has shaped cultures, religions, whole civilizations. Now, through telling to win, you can harness this force to achieve your most cherished goals. …

For too long the business world has ignored or belittled the power of oral narrative, preferring soulless PowerPoint slides, facts, figures, and data. But as the noise level of modern life has become a cacophony, the ability to tell a purposeful story that can truly be heard is increasingly in demand. Moreover, in this age of acute economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, it’’s not the 0’’s and 1’’s of the digital revolution, but rather the oohs and aahs of telling to win that offer the best chance of overcoming fear or compelling listeners to act on behalf of a worthy goal.

Describing in the first chapter a business failure that Guber later realized resulted from his neglect of storytelling, the author writes:

After my loss in Vegas, it occurred to me that everybody in business shares one universal problem: To succeed, you have to persuade others to support your vision, dream, or cause. Whether you want to motivate your executives, organize your shareholders, shape your media, engage your customers, win over investors, or land a job, you have to deliver a clarion call that will get your listeners’’ attention, emotionalize your goal as theirs, and move them to act in your favor. You have to reach their hearts as well as their minds— — and this is just what story telling does!

A veritable panoply of luminaries from the entertainment, business, sports, literature, and several other sectors pepper the book with their stories and observations. (Guber calls them “Voices.”)

And I love the way Guber ends each chapter with a bulleted list/outline called “aHHa!” summarizing the main points of the chapter.

Do stop by next week to see what Guber has to say in his Q&A. And visit his Tell to Win site to learn more about the book and download a chapter.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Megan, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

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Q&A with Megan Hicks, Question 4:

Q: What’s your favorite story about a transformation 
that came about through a story or storytelling act?

A: Last spring I was hired for a ten-day residency to teach origami at a school in Southeast Washington, DC. The fourth graders I taught were a tossed salad of need, insecurity, hostility, hunger, fatigue. Each day I visited them, we had to begin all over at Square One. There was bickering, hitting, acting out, acting up. One child was repeating 4th grade for the third time, and you could see in his eyes that he had given up; another child started tearing things up whenever she didn’t get her way. More than once, the teacher called the office for a security guard to come remove a student. On my last day with them I asked if I might spend my hour telling stories instead of trying to teach them a new fold. The teacher, exhausted and burnt out, said, “Sure. Good luck keeping their attention.”

I told them a fairy tale. Within two minutes, three of the kids were sound asleep. The others were all right there with me. I told them about a slave boy who was punished for learning how to read, about how he escaped and became a drummer for the 29th Chicago Colored Regiment in the Civil War. The ones that were awake were riveted. I told them a fable about the stupidity of trusting a snake to keep its promise. I could see on their faces, they knew exactly what I was talking about.

For one hour their behavior was perfect. For one hour nobody yelled at them. For an hour they envisioned better worlds. They inhabited a safe place where there was no violence or disrespect. Safe enough to fall asleep if they needed to.

As I said goodbye I thought ten days of stories would have served them better than ten days of paperfolding … but origami came closer to meeting curriculum guidelines.


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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Megan, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

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Q&A with Megan Hicks, Question 3:

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.)?

A: I use Facebook to keep up with people whom I don’t want to lose touch with but to whom I don’t often have much to say. Whenever I do have a lot to say to anyone, I’ll call them or send them a personal, private message. I’m making a conscious effort to send more handwritten mail. Facebook is also handy for making new contacts and networking. I post clips on YouTube so that people can see me in action, live and un-retouched, for an accurate look at what I sound like and how I relate to audiences. I enjoy viewing other people’s videos, seeing how they work. I just joined LinkedIn, but I don’t know what to do with it yet. I do not Twitter — that pidgin english text patois sets my teeth on edge.

And I blog (pictured below).




Q: To what extent and in what ways do you feel these 
venues are storytelling media?

A: I think they’re all storytelling media. My Facebook status is a weensy little story about me in this particular instant. The amalgamation of comments on a photo or a status creates another sort of narrative. LinkedIn is more about resumes than life stories; if Facebook is a collection of stories, LinkedIn is a file full of resumes.

I’m using my blog to create new stories. Last week for the first time I performed a story that started as blog posts. I call it the writer’s equivalent of reality television. Sausage-making with words. I tend to be more willing to sit myself down and write today when I know people are reading what I wrote and posted yesterday.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Courtesy of Michael Margolis (I think) comes an item that should be added to my compendium of venues that tell stories of things.

Miska Draskoczy’s Here’s the Thing attempts to “do something intimate and revealing that switches gears from coming up with original narratives from inside myself, and instead uncovers the unique stories of people around me and how those stories connect us all together.” Further:

The avenue for telling these stories are people’s ‘things’, yet rather than being materialistic, the ‘things’ become vehicles for authentic personal portraits. Seemingly mundane objects often touch on deeply meaningful events in the lives of their owners. I love meeting new people and getting a chance to show off someone’s life and personality in all its facets. I am honored to be trusted with bringing to life other people’s histories and I love it when an interviewee says after seeing their episode — “wow, that is so ‘me.’”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Megan, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

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Q&A with Megan Hicks, Question 2:

Q: You note on your site that “‘storytelling’” is just talking to yourself 
until you’ve connected with your listeners and engaged their imaginations.”
How did you learn to connect with listeners and engage their imaginations?

A: On the day in 1986 when I realized that “storyteller” was the calling I had spent my adult life listening for, I also attended a lecture on storytelling given by Laura Simms. The one thing that struck me and stuck with me from that talk is this: Good stories are strong enough to do their work without the teller engaging in theatrics. Schtick and gimmickry are not required to put a story across. In fact, they tend to become distractions. A few years later, Doug Lipman conducted a storytelling workshop in Virginia at the public library where I was working, and the gem I took from that day was his admonition to visualize the scene, the characters, the action — to see it all clearly in my imagination before giving it voice. When I put this advice to work, I see results immediately: listeners’ faces show me that their imaginations are turning my words into pictures. A fourth grader said it best: “You made you feel like you were really there.”

And then … not long ago I read a book on public speaking, titled Be Heard Now, by Lee Glickstein, in which the author writes about really looking at and connecting with the people in the audience who are most intently tuned in. Resting your eyes and your attention on one person at a time. Somehow, that deliberate focus creates a connection that spreads like the ripple from a pebble tossed into a still pond, and people you might never look at directly feel as though you’re talking to specifically to them.

This sounds mechanical and formulaic. I guess it is. And it works. Audiences give themselves over to the story as soon as they see me giving myself to it, and it moves us all along as one. As soon as I am engaged with one person who’s having a good time, the people who seem distracted find themselves drawn in. That feeling of everyone being “in one accord,” like what I always thought church should feel like.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

There is really no ostensible reason for me to evaluate the storytelling quality in SlideShare’s World’s Best Presentation contest winners. Storytelling was not a criterion for winning the contest, and the winners are not professed to be good examples of presentation storytelling.

But I have two reasons to give my two cents about the storytelling quality of the winning presentations:

• I have done so for all past contests.
• I have a new rubric by which to evaluate them, Nancy Duarte’s new techniques as presented in her recent book Resonate, as summarized in my post based on a presentation she did not long ago.

Duarte presents a continuum in which reports are on one end, stories are on the opposite end, and presentations are in the middle. Unfortunately, all the winning (facts-and-statistics-laden) presentations in the SlideShare contest are much more on the report end than the story end. In my opinion, in most cases, there’s no reason for them to even be presentations; they might as well be documents.

And none of the winning presentations come anywhere close to achieving the structure Duarte has developed (below) for presentations that resonate:

It seems to me that while the production values in the contest entries continue to improve, the content declines because of the lack of storytelling. None of the contest entrants seems to understand the value of story as a persuasive form of communication compared with facts and figures. The winners:

First-prize winner, SMOKE — The Convenient Truth has great production values but is entirely facts and stats, not remotely storied. Even as someone who is adamantly anti-tobacco, I was completely disengaged and could barely sit through its 79 slides. Ho-hum.

YOU SUCK AT POWERPOINT!, the second-prize winner, is a didactic how-to showing five mistakes to avoid in presentations. It’s clever and has effective PowerPoint tips, but it’s not storied. I was slightly more engaged in this one than in the first-prize winner, but I think this one is what Duarte would characterize as a document, not a presentation.

Third-prize winner Social Media for Business is also a didactic how-to with no discernible reason to be a presentation rather than a document (maybe I’d feel differently if I saw the presentation delivered live). It does get credit for a few minor story elements, mini case studies of businesses who do social media well. Despite excellent production values, I lost interest toward the end of the 82 slides.

The SlideShare contest also offered category prizes:

In the Nonprofit Organization/Government category, we get more snooze-worthy facts and stats in Stopping The Bite, about malaria prevention, although a section about how mosquitos infect people with malaria was a bit of a story. Mercifully, this presentation was only 39 slides.

The contest’s About Me Category probably lends itself best to storytelling — you’d think the category would yield the stories of individuals. The winner here, Hi, I am Bo!, starts out promisingly and intriguingly. But it turns out that “Bo” is actually a dead language, and the 38-slide presentation devolves into facts and stats.

By the time I got to the Technology Category’s Qwerty Monsters, I was mighty bored with facts and stats, and this one, about teens and texting, offered no relief. Curiously, this 42-slide document, unlike all the other winners, did not even offer a call to action, so the viewer is left thinking: So what? What would you like me to do about the fact that teens are obsessed with texting?

Seriously? The excruciatingly dull Tips on How to Pitch won in the Business Category? This 43-slide, text-heavy didactic how-to was a complete bore.

The winner in the Education Category is also the first-prize-winning SMOKE — The Convenient Truth.

Finally, in the Creative/Offbeat Category, the winner, The Best Question in the World, isn’t storied in itself, but the question it refers to, “What would happen if…?” leads to stories, or as presentation creator Betsy Streeter says, to all kinds of art. Though this one could also be considered text-heavy, it’s cute, clever, and short (34 slides). It was the only one that wasn’t difficult to sit through, and hence, my favorite.

In a future post, I’ll look at the contest SlideShare held simultaneously with the World’s Best contest and in conjunction with 3M, a Presentation Horror Story contest. Let’s see if the winners really do depict stories.

The Best Question in the World

View more presentations from Betsy Streeter.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I became acquainted with Megan Hicks through social media and was intrigued with her lively Web site and her pursuits beyond storytelling. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: Megan is primarily a performance storyteller who also creates lovely things with her hands. You can click on tabs to see the various aspects of her career here. See her storytelling in action in the video at the bottom of this post

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Q&A with Megan Hicks, Question 1:

Q: How did you initially become involved with storytelling? 
What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: It was spring, 1986. I lived in Oklahoma City at the time and worked in a Montessori school library. My boss heard about a storytelling event called Winter Tales, co-sponsored by the public library, and he decided we needed some professional development. When we arrived, the public library conference room was all set up with chairs, but I was surprised to see no books.

A small woman was introduced — Gioia Timpanelli, who said a few words about storytelling and then launched into “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” one of my favorite childhood fairy tales. It’s a short story. But in three minutes she took me to a place of enchantment I hadn’t visited since I was a child. When she drew the story to a conclusion and set me back down in the Here and Now, I knew, finally (at 36 years old) and without doubt, what I would be when I grew up. And every decision I made from then on has brought me further along this path.

What I love about storytelling performance is that it is cheap, clean, and egalitarian. You need words, heart, and an imagination. You can create a performance that is as satisfying as an evening at theatre, for a miniscule fraction of theatre’s production costs. And as a storyteller, I get to be the whole cast — crone and ingenue, hero and villain, narrator and walk-on extra.

What I don’t like about it so much is that while the performance part of it is very, very public the preparation part is very, very solitary. No camaraderie with cast and crew. Usually, no post mortem over a beer after the show, especially when most of my work is solo concerts. The drive home gets long and lonely.


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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

The Obama administration’s Patrick A. Corvington, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, writes in The White House Blog that “Americans have always believed in the idea that we can change things, we can make things better, we can solve problems, when we join together.”

The organization is using storytelling for change and offering “My American Story,” a series of television PSAs that feature Americans who have stepped up to be a part of the solution.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Judy Rosemarin, one of the subjects of my Q&A series, suggests that folks (especially those in job-search mode) “may want to think seriously about next year and where your stories lie.”

She encourages folks to think about how they can find the right story for the right reasons at the right time.

Noting that employers are looking for many of the following qualities, she asks job-seekers:

Do you have a story* for each of the following?

1. Integrity and trustworthiness and holding fast to your values and ethics.
2. Dedication, to do what is necessary and dedication to your team.
3. Humility to inspire loyalty. If you don’t have the loyalty of the people who work for you, or with you, you have no cohesion.
4. Emotional Intelligence, which means possessing self-awareness, the ability to manage and monitor reactions and the ability to key into other’s feelings as well.
5. Openness and fairness to be receptive to new ideas and not think that your way is the only way to do things and to act non-discriminatingly.
6. Ability to listen to others in a receptive way.
7. Inspiring others to go beyond what is customary and usual.
8. Continual professional development where you are a continual learner.
9. Developing and mentoring others to build a more robust and resilient team.
10. Creativity, to foster new ideas, adaptation, flexibility.
11. Assertiveness as well as approachability which indicate your strength and receptivity.
12. Learning from mistakes, where you grew from a mishap, mistake, and miscommunication.
13. Customer dedication, where you honor the importance client/customer relationships.
14. Empowering others to sense mastery and meaning in their work.
15. Your MBAs = Your Many Business Accomplishments.

Judy uses the concept of the *Humaway™ Story in her workshops (for which folks can register here) in which “proof of a successful story [is] one that really sticks with your audience the way a catchy song leaves listeners humming away a tune.”

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Chances are you’ve seen this video in the last week as it has been making the social-media rounds. But given the unlikelihood that anyone is reading this on Christmas Day, I thought I’d run it. Really does show the capacity of social media to tell a story, even if a very familiar one.

From “ExcentricPT,” the Christmas story told through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Google Maps, GMail, Foursquare, and Amazon. (I found it incongruous that the secular “Jingle Bells” is the background music).

Since you have likely seen the above, let me leave you with a fresh thought for Christmas, courtesy of Sharon Lippincott, who reminded readers of Lifewriter’s Forum to

savor the Story of the season. I don’t specifically mean the Manger Scene. I mean the Story as you understand and live it. How the Season and its Story affects your life, now and all year.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

My colleague Steve Gallison, founder of the Professional Outplacement Assistance Center in the Baltimore area, wrote recently about two decision-making strategies that employers engage in the hiring process — information gleaned through materials candidates have submitted, along with intelligence gained from social media, followed by the “emotional” portion of the decision-making process — the interview.

“Achievement-Oriented Story Lines (AOSLs)” comprise a strategy for job-seekers to bridge these two decision-making approaches.

“You must be able to tell a good story,” Gallison writes, “one that illustrates your abilities, skills and knowledge as it applies to the position you are applying for.”

Like music to my ears, Gallison asserts: “Learning to be a story-oriented candidate will separate you from the pack.”

The most interesting part of Gallison’s article explains how both extroverts and introverts can deploy Achievement-Oriented Story Lines to build chemistry and rapport in the emotional job-interview portion of the decision-making process: “The AOSL process is specifically designed to level the playing field, and to help either the extrovert or the introvert Job Acquisition Specialist ace the interview,” Gallison writes.

Here’s what he says introverts and extroverts especially need to heed:

Introverts need to tell the full story when responding to the various questions from employers. Employers say that one of the most difficult things for introverts to do is disclose information. By establishing AOSL scripts in advance of the interview an introvert will have no trouble telling the illustrative story from beginning to end.

In the case of the extrovert the use of AOSL scripts, the method will help in keeping the story on point; the response won’t meander and will have a definite end. Extroverts tend to provide too many details and extended answers.

One caution from me: “Script” suggests something memorized, which is not what the job-seeker wants. “Script,” of course, comes from the Latin scribere, “to write,” and writing down Achievement-Oriented Storylines is the way to cement them in the job-seeker’s mind. Read them over and become comfortable with them, but don’t memorize or over-rehearse. Read more about the research my partner and I conducted on how writing these scripts prepares you for interviews.

Footnote: In choosing an image fror this post, I was dismayed to see that extroverts are often portrayed as delighted, while introverts look miserable (guess which one I am); hence, I chose one in which both look happy.

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I wanted to call readers’ attention to Limor Shiponi’s thoughtful response to my posts of Tuesday and Wednesday. The heart of her reaction is this:

I’m still looking for an answer to a very simple question — why insist on calling story applied work — storytelling? if at all, one could argue that storytelling is one of the many story applications that exists. I’m not sure I would agree with that either but it’s a more honest suggestion from a storyteller’s point of view.

I am more clearly coming to understand how strongly traditional storytellers (who often refer to themselves as simply tellers) feel about the telling aspect of the word storytelling.

I am also noticing that those who work in the applied story realm are gravitating toward terms like “story sharing,” rather than telling. I’m thinking of Thaler Pekar, among others.

I am not sure I have totally arrived at Limor’s perspective, but I am at least giving it more consideration. Perhaps it is careless to refer to the field of organizational storytelling or applied storytelling. What do you think?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Another in my ongoing series about my experience with Toastmasters (most recent entry here, first entry here)…

I’m beginning to hit my stride with Toastmasters a bit. I haven’t done my second speech yet; I signed up to do it, but realized I’d be going out of town for a week of training and wouldn’t have time to prepare. I’m now signed up to do my sophomore performance the first Tuesday in January. The speech will be story-rich. I’ve participated in a number of the impromptu Table Topics speeches and take on a few leadership roles. I’ve honed in on the speaking flaws I most need to work on — I use far too many “crutch” or “pause” words, such as ah, uh, um, so, but, and I tend to go over the prescribed time limits. It’s now much clearer to me that my overly long first speech could never have won the “best speech” designation on its night. Our club has now even voted to disqualify those who got way over (or under) the prescribed times.

Story continues to garner nice attention in the club. In evaluating another member’s speech at the last meeting, our president used an aphorism that’s probably well know to readers of this blog: “Facts tell, but stories sell.” I continue to prefer the speeches that are story-heavy as opposed to fact-heavy. I had initially envisioned that my second speech would be fact-oriented, but another member’s speech on the same topic I was planning became a blessing in disguise because I decided on a topic that is more story-driven.

Meanwhile, I got a detailed e-mail from my friend Stewart Marshall, a participant in my Q&A series, about his Toastmasters experiences. He gave me permission to share. I know he’s right about the value of videorecording oneself and watching the videos, but so far, I can’t bear watching myself:

I joined Toastmasters when I worked in my last corporate job at Kodak. I left in May 2009 and spend the previous 18 months part of the company Toastmasters club. I finished having achieved both Competent Leader and Competent Communicator states plus finishing my first Advanced Manual for speeches, which appropriately enough was the Storytelling manual.

I remember very well my first 10 speeches, I still have my notes! Lots and lots of opportunity for storytelling! my take is that toastmasters will draw your attention to many many things in those first 10 speeches which will help your storytelling. Everyone is different, but by the end my reputation for telling stories was well known and almost expected :-).

The Toastmasters structure is at times frustrating and overly prescriptive. However, the intentions are golden and the lessons it teaches very very helpful. I settled into my own style regardless of the speech topic or goal.

I also videoed all five speeches in the advanced storytelling manual which you are welcome to watch here; other Toastmasters-related videos of mine are here.

I thoroughly recommend recording yourself — it’s amazing how good a pocket digital camera is, if not a digital voice recorder. I could come up with endless bits of advice but you know what, I am just another guy.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I’ve been periodically running excerpts from the first part of storyteller Eric James Wolf’s interview with me, along with the second part of the Q&A (both published over the summer). In this excerpt, he asked me how applied storytelling is different then performance storytelling or traditional storytelling. My response:

I think storyteller Sean Buvala’s definition of storytelling provides a good starting point for answering this question. He writes:

“Storytelling is the intentional sharing of a narrative in words and actions for the benefit of both the listener and the teller.”… ‘intentional’ means that not everything we do is storytelling. Storytelling is a planned activity and process. ‘Narrative’ means what is being talked about has a beginning, middle, and end. ‘Sharing’ means that there is an audience in front of the teller which can be one person or thousands. ‘Benefit’ means both the listener and the teller leave the sharing of story as a changed person.”

So, in my mind, many types of storytelling that DO NOT fall into that definition can be classified as “applied storytelling.” (I should note that Sean would not agree; he feels that if a communication does not fall into his definition, it’s not storytelling. For example, he does not consider digital storytelling to be storytelling.) Storytelling that is missing one or more elements from Sean’s definition is still storytelling in my book, but it’s applied storytelling. Examples of applied storytelling include: organizational storytelling/business narrative, journaling/memoir writing, blogging, social media, digital/multimedia, transmedia storytelling, journalistic storytelling, visual storytelling, fictional storytelling, storytelling for movies and TV, comic-book storytelling, and more, including my personal crusade, storytelling in the job search. Not every bit of communication in these venues is storytelling, but storytelling is possible within these venues.

I once proposed that all storytelling can be broken down into just three purposes: storytelling for identity construction, storytelling for change, and storytelling for sense-making/learning. Even performance storytelling can fit into this rubric in that the audience changes from an un-entertained state to an entertained (or enlightened, moved, etc.,) state.

Storytelling for identity construction can range from storytelling in social media to storytelling to establish a brand identity for products and services. Storytelling for identity construction is also what I advise job-seekers to do to make themselves stand out memorably to employers.

Storytelling for change is often the impetus behind business narrative — using story to help workers cope with and buy into organizational change.

Storytelling for sensemaking is what we automatically turn to when we seek to make sense of unexpected, tragic, or confusing events. Similarly, storytelling is effective for learning because stories are so good at illustrating concepts and making them memorable (Annette Simmons notes that “Story helps the brain remember.”)

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I’ve been periodically running excerpts from the first part of storyteller Eric James Wolf’s interview with me, along with the second part of the Q&A (both published over the summer). In this excerpt, he asked me to break down the various schools of thought that exist currently in the business world relative to applied storytelling — and then to tell where my Q&A subjects fall within these fields. I felt I could have done a lot more with my response than I did, but it would have taken a lot of time to do so, and I didn’t want to keep Eric waiting for my answers:

This is a very big question, and I turned to the no-cost e-book I compiled, Storied Careers: 40+ Story Practitioners Talk About Applied Storytelling, looking for an an answer. Or, I should say, a partial answer, because I am not attempting to be comprehensive here; I’m sure I’m leaving practitioners and their schools of thought out. I hope they’ll forgive me and/or comment on this entry.

Gabrielle Dolan, co-founder and director of Australian consulting firm One Thousand & One, supports helping to embed storytelling into an organization’s culture: “We normally work with clients on two levels,” she says. “Firstly we normally skill the leaders in organisational storytelling through workshops and then help them embed this skill. What we mean by that is finding ways that they can continually find and share stories and apply their new skill of not only storytelling but story listening.”

Leadership consultant Susan Luke’s focus is corporate mythology, and she calls herself a corporate mythologist: “To my knowledge,” she notes, “I am the only ‘corporate mythologist’ using that title. I coined the descriptor in trying to put some definition around who I am and what I do. Corporate mythology has two aspects — the stories of/about the organization (history, philosophy, values, vision) and the stories of the individuals who make up the organization.

Author Cynthia Kurtz upholds the idea of respecting the integrity of the raw story: “Raw stories of personal experience are far superior to crafted stories for the things I care about when working with stories,” she says. “For the purposes of advertising products and services, delivering specific purposeful messages, and entertaining people, crafted stories are often (but not always) best. But for the purposes of helping people learn, think, make decisions, get new ideas, grow, and get along, I’ve found that there is nothing better than a raw story.”

Authors/speakers/consultants Lori Silverman and Karen Dietz evangelize the notion that storytelling is a critical skill that should be taught in business schools. Storyteller Sean Buvala agrees with this sentiment, saying, “Corporate folks must take this storytelling skill seriously. To really be an effective corporate storyteller, you need to be devoted to being the best storyteller you can be.”

Speaker and consultant Thaler Pekar emphasizes story sharing rather than storytelling.

Your question really got me thinking about developing a taxonomy of applied-storytelling schools of thought. I guess the foregoing is just a little taste of that.

How would you characterize applied storytelling’s schools of thought?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

For quite some time this year, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around QR technology that enables folks to attach stories to objects.

Meanwhile, an update from Q&A subject Linda Garbe inspired me to really try to grok all the story/object initiatives I’ve read about this year. And I suppose the Christmas season puts me in mind of things.

In my family, an object story has been passed down through the generations, the “brass cannon” story, which coincidentally I first wrote about in this space exactly two years ago today. Based on the story, if a gift is given that the giver really wants for himself or herself, it’s a “brass cannon.”

Anyway, Linda Garbe writes: “I believe an object without a story has a short lifespan.” Linda is a storyteller and story consultant, but she also designs jewelry and notes that “many jewelry pieces live for decades because they do have stories to tell.”

She designed pieces inspired by the seasons, each with a story, and she recorded videos showing here creating the jewelry and tell its story. Here, the spring story/necklace, Standing in the Center of Spring:

Here are the others:

• Summer — Flamenco Flats
• Fall — A Hedge Apple and an Artichoke
• Winter — Empress of the Night

But back to QR technology: Those little scannable QR tags that became big this year for things like showing movie trailers on mobile devices are also being touted for their ability to tell the stories of things.

Tales of Things, in beta, is according to a Mashable article on the site, all about “adding memories and stories to objects and places via the Internet of Things and read/write QR codes. … Once an object is labeled with a scannable QR code, its movements can be tracked, as well as any subsequent stories. Each object has the ability to tweet when its memories are scanned, as well.” Tales of Things is the public tagging arm of the Totem Project.

Similar efforts include Itizen (about “using the tag code for your item and share a story about it: Who made it, where it came from, how you got it, what made you want it, whatever you like”) and StickyBits, a site that doesn’t emphasize story and seems to offer some sort of rewards for scanning things (“Stickybits is a free app you use to scan barcodes on all the stuff you love, instantly turning it into even more stuff you love.”)

Meanwhile, Significant Objects, which I first wrote about here, is still going strong. The site embraces a theme similar to that of the others but doesn’t involve tagging, does involve selling, and most interestingly, involves telling fictional stories about objects. Early this year, the site parsed data from a period including some of 2009 and some of this year. The premise of Significant Objects is that stories increase the value of objects:

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!

If you’re into this sort of thing, Christmas could be a good time to start tagging objects with stories.

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Last spring, “Sustainable Storyteller” Park Howell shared a fantastic tool, a free, downloadable Sustainable Storytelling Worksheet (I came across it only recently while researching my posts about Donald Miller.)

In a blog post, Howell describes how to use what is essentially a branding worksheet to craft a great story.

With just a bit of tweaking, job-seekers can use this worksheet to craft their brand stories.

First, as Howell instructs, download the worksheet.

Here are the tweaks a job-seeker could make on the left side of the worksheet:

For the question, “What is your current market position?,” the job-seeker could ask, “What is my position in the job market?”

For the question, “What are your communication goals?,” the job-seeker should substitute, “What are my career goals?” or “What are my goals for this specific job search?”

For the directive, “Identify your target market(s),” the job-seeker could instead “identify your target employers.”

All other questions/directives on the worksheet translate nicely — without tweaking — to a job search.

Here, with a few job-seeker-oriented tweaks, are Howell’s instructions for turning the worksheet into a brand story:

1. Fold down the center of the page on the dotted line folding the right side of the page behind the left side.
2. Now on the left side of the page, write your answers in the margins below each thought.
3. Once completed, it’s recommended to go have a beer, glass of wine, or some other vice, and let your brain simmer for awhile.
4. Return, unfold the page, now write your story in the red lines on the right side of the page. You don’t have to worry about writing “War & Peace” because you don’t have that much room. Please use focused, active and descriptive words to bring your black-and-white thinking into color.

• Describe your “Hero” from your brand statement
• Tell us your “Back story.”
• Your challenges and opportunities create your “Inciting Incident” that has turned your world upside-down, for better or worse. Every great story has one. What’s yours?
• Your career/job-search goals are your “End game.” How do you want your story to end?
• Finger your antagonists. Identify the competition, people, economic and environmental forces, finances, doubters, you name it, that stand in your way.
• Now move into Act II, “The Love Story.” Write about the people/members of your network that you need to marshal to help you achieve your goals, what they care about, and how you help them achieve their goals.
• Now pen your finale; how your character will arch from Hero to Victor, despite all of the ugly nastiness of market dynamics in between.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Performance storyteller Ellouise Schoettler, with her daughter, is offering two workshops for storytellers on getting the most out of Facebook pages. I know of no reason their techniques should not work for those working in the applied-storytelling realm. Ellouise writes:

I’m on Facebook, and it works for me. Often, though, other storytellers tell me they’re on Facebook and it’s wasting their time.

My daughter Robin Fox is a certified Social Media Coach. Working with her has opened my eyes to the value of Facebook to me as both a storyteller and an event producer. Stories are timeless but filling seats? That’s getting harder, isn’t it? I’m convinced Facebook and other Social Media are critical tools for our industry. We just need training.

That’s why Robin and I are beginning to offer Social Media workshops, taught live but online. We’re starting with Facebook Strategies for Storytellers.

Details on the workshops:

Jumpstart Your Facebook Now & Save 20% on the Workshop
Register for Monday, December 20, 2010
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. E.S.T. - Live Workshop Taught Online

OR

Wait and take the January Workshop
Register for Workshop on Sunday, January 9, 2011
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. E.S.T. — Live Workstop Taught Online

All workshops are delivered live through your computer via the Internet at no additional cost to you, and includes audio, slides and downloadable PDF workbook (Internet access required).

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

OK, I know story purists reject the idea that six-word stories are really stories. And the theme of a new contest collaboration between SMITH Magazine and WNYC may not lend itself to storied responses. But I think it’s a neat idea, so I’m posting about it:

The Tea Party and the shellacking. Heathcare and the economy. The iPad and ebooks. The BP Gulf disaster and the Chilean miners. Tiger Woods and Lady Gaga. Quite a year. Can you sum it up in six words? That’s the challenge from SMITH and New York Public Radio’s WNYC. Submit your “six on 2010” on WNYC’s blog—we’ll read them all and invite some of you to share your six words (and more) live on The Leonard Lopate Show on Dec. 29.

Post your submission to WNYC by Monday, December 27th, at 3 pm to be considered for the show.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Well, I probably shouldn’t say “surprising.” Six years into my storytelling journey, I doubt any application of storytelling could really surprise me. But I definitely haven’t come across these four before now:

Mergers and Acquisitions: Helen Dunne compiled comments from a panel discussion on A Precise Exchange, in which Alistair Smith said, “Successful communication of M&A activity is rooted in having a clear, strategic story.”

Pitching venture capitalists: Chris Dixon advises those make a pitch to venture capitalists to Size markets using narratives, not numbers. “You should never rely on quantitative analysis to estimate market size,” Dixon writes. Instead, “The only way to understand and predict large new markets is through narratives. Some popular current narratives include…”

People are spending more and more time online and somehow brand advertisers will find a way to effectively influence them; social link sharing is becoming an increasingly significant source of website traffic and somehow will be monetized; mobile devices are becoming powerful enough to replace laptops for most tasks and will unleash a flood of new applications and business models.

Fashion shows: Adam Morgan, founder of Eat Big Fish, interviewed fashion designer Tom Ford, who last year directed his first film A Single Man (which, by the way, mesmerized me with its spot-on look and feel of the early ’60s). Ford told Morgan: “‘In a fashion show you have 13 minutes to convince a room of 200 people of your vision. … So you have to have an idea. And then you have to tell a story.”

Hospital safety: In The Journal of Patient Safety, article authors Dennis Quaid (!), Julie Thao, and Charles Denham look at story “as an untapped vehicle to inform, equip, and challenge leaders to drive change that can save lives, save money, and build value in communities.” They conclude: “Health care leaders have much to learn from storytelling practices from other industries, such as film and business, that they can apply to driving patient safety and improving the care they deliver.” (see an abstract of the article here). An initiative in Wales, 1000Lives, is also having success with patient safety through patient stories.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

While storytelling has been big on radio since the early days of serial dramas, it is perhaps experiencing a significant resurgence.

New storytelling shows and channels are emerging, joining NPR storytelling shows like This American Life, The Story, and A Prairie Home Companion.

Sirius XM launched Storytelling Radio, a limited-run channel featuring recordings compiled from the recent 38th annual National Storytelling Festival, that took place in October in Jonesborough, TN.

The Moth Radio Hour debuted in 2009 and is airing on more than 200 public radio stations around the country. (The Moth, about which I’ve written many times, is a not-for-profit storytelling organization).

I also read in my local Spokane newspaper about a new NPR storytelling station in that city, but I haven’t been able to re-track down that information.

What other radio storytelling efforts are you aware of?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

As an a complementary piece to their recent book, Storytelling for User Experience, Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks posted a comprehensive article not long ago, Juicy Stories Sell Ideas.

The authors describe three ways stories can be used:

• To explain pesky realities
• To set a context to sell an idea

and the one that especially caught my eye:

• To spark an idea.

While this kind of story reminds me a lot of Steve Denning’s Springboard Stories and the methods of Appreciative Inquiry, I had not seen this type of story described in quite the way Whitney and Kevin do. “To tell a story that helps your team collaboratively create a design idea,” they write, “you can start with a problem, tell a story that imagines what if, then let your design show how that story might become reality.” That suggestion prompts me to call this kind of story the What If Story.

Here’s their sample story that describes the problem:

Mary is always writing down notes — on slips of paper, on Post-its on her desktop, on the calendar by the front door, and on the organizer pad on her desk. She’s called her own home phone to leave a message for herself. She’s even written reminders on her hand. As a research scientist and mother, she’s gotten to be a first-class multitasker. But somehow, whenever she’s rushing through the grocery store on her way home, she can never remember whether she’s out of milk or has three cartons in the fridge. Or if today’s the day she’s picking up the kids from their soccer game or rushing home in time for a call from… Where is it this week? It’s not that she doesn’t have a calendar. She’s got three — or is it four? What Mary wants is a way to put everything together and keep track of it in one place — no matter where she is and no matter whether she’s wearing something with pockets or carrying a bag. From anywhere, anytime. If only she had…

Whitney and Kevin point out that the story has detail, but not too much. “Why?,” they write. “Because you want the people hearing the story to fill in the gaps for themselves, so they can start thinking about a solution that would finish the story, thinking about all the Marys out there with the same problem.”

Here’s the structure they suggest for a “What If…” story:

1. Set the context. Mary is an overloaded person who is trying to get organized. She is a mother with a professional job, who just doesn’t have enough time. Use details from your user research to keep these images grounded in real experience.
2. Describe the problem. Mary has too much going on in her life, and even though she has a lot of tools, they don’t all work together. Plus, she doesn’t always have access to them.
3. Close with an opening to explore. “What Mary wants is…” a different experience. The story doesn’t offer a solution. It just points in a general direction. This lets the team fill in the gaps by coming up with their own ideas for devising a solution to this problem.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Cindy Chastain, about whom I wrote last year, has posted a couple of new storytelling slideshows on SlideShare. (Chastain writes about storytelling as applied to user experience). Neither slideshow has audio narration, so they’re a little hard to follow, but the speaker notes help a bit. The slideshows are:

• The Importance of Story(thinking) in the Age of Service Ecosystems
• Thinking Like a Storyteller: Of the two, I found this one a little easier to follow without narration. It’s embedded below.

The other goodie: In a remarkable video, a father visually tells the story of his daughter Natalie through photos taken of her almost every day for her first 10 years. One interesting thing I noticed: She’s a bit less smiley as she gets older. When I look at my own baby pictures, I notice how happy and smiley I seem, but as I got older, the smile became much more subdued. My sister claims I have not smiled my “real” smile, the smile of early childhood, for years and years.

Thinking Like a Storyteller

View more presentations from Cindy Chastain.

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Amazing how quickly something can become “old news” on the social Web. I learned of Zahmoo, being launched by the folks at Anecdote, early last week but didn’t want to interrupt the Margaret Parkin Q&A to blog about Zahmoo.

So, chances are you’re already heard about this “story bank for family and business stories,” as Anecdote’s Shawn Callahan describes it.

Shawn notes that Zahmoo will have three pricing plans: $5/month for the Family Plan; $149/month for the Business Plan; and $249/month for the Premium Plan.

Shawn says: “The place to get the very latest information and be the first to be invited to use Zahmoo will be those good folk who are following @zahmoo on Twitter.”

The preview video (almost 5 minutes) below demonstrates “how you can store and manage your video, text, audio and picture stories, how to add people to collaborate on stories and the wide range of searching options available to find the stories you want when you need them.”

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A webinar last week, billed as the bonus 33rd session of The Reinvention Summit: Virtual Summit on the Future of Storytelling, became the launchpad for a story journey that will take place over the next five weeks or so. The journey takes the form of three more webinars for summit participants at the Producer’s Pass level. The journey will be to create a “Bio: Based on a True Story,” and will consist of mapping your plot points, finding the through-line arc, and, and packaging the story for social media.

If you are not already signed up to take this journey yourself, I invite you to follow my journey, which I’ll describe periodically in this space. I will also report on the journeys of others taking this trip.

As background, I’m experimenting with presenting highlights from last week’s launchpad webinar on a separate page of this blog. The summary consists of screenshots of most of the slides organizer Michael Margolis presented, along with my notes (which turn out to be kind of meager).

One thing I’ll report on in this space: At one point in the session, Michael asked the 50 or so participants to write in the chat box the things that really jazzed and excited them (“What do you get geeked out on?” was the question). The responses were a lot of fun; here’s a partial list of them:

Imagining characters/personalities for ordinary objects, like trashcans or doorsteps; moonstones and Celtic traditional music; following hashtags; science fiction and fantasy stories; iPad; World Cafe process; news junkie; gourmet cooking; trees; turtles; the relation of British history/culture to western North Carolina history and University of North Carolina basketball; being part of social change helping people improve their lives; groups with open communication; local clean energy; curves and angles of new perspective as sometimes captured in photographs; spirals; woodturning pens and bowls; meaningful conversation, especially late night over drinks; Maya Angelou, Margaret Mead; funny and creative people; deep and soulful people; empty books to write in; slow Sunday dinners with family and friends; wine, chocolate and a deep conversation; books and reading, web-surfing, architecture buildings and urban design; music that resonates with my soul, that gives me musicgasms; the evolution of new marketing; idea generation and starting things; music that is funky, regardless of genre; Jackson Browne — the poet of rock; Bob Dylan — the beatnik of rock; raising my daughter … as an active participant in the evolution of culture and economy.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Last month, after I wrote about audiobook narrators, I was delighted to hear from one of the narrators I mentioned in the article, Randye Kaye. Because I had huge curiosity about how the audiobook process works, I asked Randye if she’d be willing to participate in a Q&A. I’m thrilled that she agreed. If you, too, have wondered about the world of audiobook narration, I think you’ll really enjoy Randye’s responses:

Q: How do audiobook publishers choose narrators? Or perhaps from your perspective, a better question is, what do you do to get hired for audiobook gigs?

A: All voice talents need a demo of their work, and an audiobook demo is considered a “speciality” demo, as the cuts are usually longer than traditional narration or commercial demos. I have audiobook samples on my Website, on the demo page, and can send the link to any interested publishing houses, agents, and/or casting directors. For the big jobs (such as a new novel by an established best-selling author), there are agent submissions for audiobook work; for the many other jobs (reading textbooks, for instance), many talents market themselves to production houses. Usually, you audition for a specific job, to see if your delivery is a good match for the book.

Q: How do you prepare? How much, if any practicing do you do before you are recorded? Do you read the book first? Do you practice reading aloud? Do you work on accents and various character voices? Any other kinds of prep?

A: For fiction: absolutley. Read the entire book first (some read it twice) so you know where the story goes. List your characters, etc. Think about how you will “play” each one. For nonfiction, the “acting” is less obvious, but there still are acting choices to make: tone, tempo, intention. One of the best audiobook narrators, George Guidall [Editor’s note: Guidall was the subject of the NPR story that inspired my post about audiobook narrators], talks beautifully about the acting process in audiobooks on his Website. As for practicing out loud, cold reading skills are essential for all voiceover talents, in any genre. It’s part of our lives to stay prepared with focused practice.

Q: What is the recording process like? I envision many takes, because it’s hard to imagine the narration going totally smoothly without the narrator, say, coughing, sneezing, stumbling on words, etc.

A: Generally it takes about two hours of recording to produce a “finished hour” of audio. Any more, and you’re not really ready for this business. The editor then takes more hours to do the post-recording work. As for the voice talents, sometimes we’re “in the zone,” and can get through several pages without stops, totally focused and in character; other times we may stumble several times on a page. Breaks are necessry; the work is surprisingly tiring!

Q: How long does a typical audiobook take to record?

A: About double the number of finished hours.

Q: How did you get into audiobook narration? What aspects of your training and experience have been helpful with audiobooks?

A: I have years of experience in other voice-over genres, from commercials to medical narrations, to animation. I am also a trained stage and improv actress. All of this helps! As I said, even the non-fiction reads require acting; for fiction, though, the ability to create believable characters within your own sound is vital.

Q: According to your Web site, you’ve narrated three books. Do you have a favorite?

A: I entered the full-length audiobook field fairly recently, so have many more credits in the children’s genre and in narration/commercials. I’d have to say Walter the Farting Dog was the most usually-titled book I narrated! I hope my new favorite will be my forthcoming narration for the Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey from the Chaos of Schizophrenia to Hope, (to be published in 2011 by Rowman and Littlefield, audiobook producer to be announced soon; pictured below right) — I am also the author of the memoir, so it will be particilarly exciting for me to narrate it.

Q: How much do you enjoy audiobook narration compared to your other voiceover work and acting? What are the pros and cons?

A: All of it connects, really … many skills are the same. I love the total immersion into a full-length book; I love to imagine someone listening in their car, being either entertained or informed with the help of my skills. “Bringing words to life” is my favorite thing to do, either on stage, on the page, or at the microphone — so much so, that the phrase is on my business card. The variety inherent in this work delights me, as I’m easily distracted!

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Incidentally, I had mused in my post about audiobook narrators about whether I would be able to accept a different narrator for a more recent release by Susan Isaacs, one of my favorite authors; Randye to me really embodied Isaacs’ voice. It made sense for a different narrator to read Isaac’s latest, As Husbands Go, because the protagonist was a different character from the heroine of Past Perfect, which Randye narrated. While I still like Randye’s narration a little more, the narrator of As Husbands Go did a good job. While I avoid abridged audiobooks, I’m tempted to obtain the audio version of the Isaacs book I’m currently reading (in hard copy!), Long Time No See, because Isaacs herself narrates it.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Margaret, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

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Q&A with Margaret Parkin, Question 5:

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

A: When using storytelling in organisations, always put yourself in the listeners’ shoes and be clear on what the purpose is for using a particular story. For example, you might be wanting to help them deal with conflict or offer a different perspective on a difficult situation, handle change more positively or help to increase self esteem. Don’t be seduced into the ‘one story fits all’ approach that I see some people using; in other words don’t just tell a story because you like telling it! Always know your audience or group and think of what story, language, lesson etc. would be most appropriate for them to hear.

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See a photo of Margaret, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

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Q&A with Margaret Parkin, Question 4:

Q: What’s your favorite story about a transformation that came about through a story or storytelling act?

A: I ran a storytelling session with trainers from a large retail organisation in the UK. The participants paired up and used the circus metaphor as a coaching tool for change. One participant recalls the event below:

Alison still remembers “the circus” as one of the most powerful training experiences she has participated in. She recalls “Margaret asked everyone to imagine their current job like an act in a circus, and also, if they wanted to make changes, who they would like to be. My partner wanted to be the glamorous woman with sequins and feathers riding on the horses. But she described her current position as ‘the circus flea in a box.’ The impact of that image was immense. I could feel the sense of worthlessness she was expressing. I said to her, ‘What needs to happen for you to get out of the box?’ She suddenly grabbed hold of my hand and said, ‘I know exactly what I need to do.’”

Alison stayed in touch with her partner and saw her change her role within the company, eventually taking on much greater responsibilities. She obviously found her way out of the box!

I have since developed the idea of the circus metaphor into a personality tool, “Which Circus Act Are You?” which is available free on my website.

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See a photo of Margaret, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

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Q&A with Margaret Parkin, Question 3:

Q: Do you find that people in business resist the concept of storytelling? I’m particularly wondering about those who seek out your What’s Your Story? 1-on-1 coaching. Do clients tend to seek out this coaching because they are specifically seeking story-based coaching? Do your individual clients come to you of their own volition, or do supervisors suggest they get your coaching?

A: The culture of some organisations just wouldn’t support the notion of storytelling — particularly, as I mentioned before, if it is seen as child-ish. And so in those cases, I might not even mention the word, or I might refer to it as “business narrative” which is deemed more acceptable!

I don’t think the majority of people (certainly in the UK) would even be familiar with the concept of “story-based” training or coaching. They approach me (or their managers approach me) because they have a particular problem or issue that they need help with and they rely on me to choose the most appropriate method. And this is really where story comes into its own — it is a powerful, yet non-invasive way of encouraging people to “re-frame” and make positive changes. Stories don’t tell you what to do; they suggest that you might see things in a different way — and let you decide the rest!

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See a photo of Margaret, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

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Q&A with Margaret Parkin, Question 2:

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

A: I am always keen to point out to potential clients that I am a “business storyteller,” which by my definition, is where one helps individuals, teams and organisations to grow, develop and achieve success, using narrative and metaphor as a means to that end. This is a different role to that of a dramatic “performance storyteller,” who works more with children as a form of entertainment. I’m not saying one is better than the other at all, only that the functions and delivery are different. There is a huge difference between “child-like” and “child-ish” and the latter, in a business environment can be seen to be patronising. Care is needed when using storytelling in a business setting!

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I’ve followed the activities of Margaret Parkin, especially her masterclass workshops in business storytelling, for quite a while. I’ve been hoping for a long time that she would participate in the Q&A series, and I’m delighted that she has. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: UK-based Margaret Parkin is the author of four best-selling books on storytelling in organisations — Tales for Trainers, More Tales for Trainers (her newest), Tales for Coaching, and Tales for Change. The books have been translated into five different languages across the world. She also consults and coaches, offers training and development, and presents keynotes; see the Web site for her company, Success Stories. Margaret offers public masterclass workshops in business storytelling designed for HR managers, training managers, organizational-development managers, and coaches.

A good way to see what Margaret does is though this short video:

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Q&A with Margaret Parkin, Question 1:

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

A: I have been involved in organisational learning and development for a long time now. Even from the early days, my training style was always anecdotal; I have always, (initially unconsciously I think) used stories and metaphors to get a message or concept across. But then I found that I was telling and more stories and my participants were coming to expect them and look forward to them! One of the turning points for me I think was when I had been asked to address a rather large and boisterous group of MBA students at a university in Scotland, who had completed their weekend of practical assignments, completed their dissertations, and now just wanted to go home — and certainly didn’t want to listen to my talk on powerful communication skills. It was only towards the end of the hour long session (and possibly out of desperation), that I decided to tell them a story… and then something rather strange happened. One by one, the animated conversations on each of the dozen or so tables simply seemed to peter out and die, and I found, to my surprise, that my storytelling was greeted by complete and rapt attention. The change in atmosphere was so pronounced that, at the end of the session, rather than leaping out of their chairs like rockets as I thought they would have done, no-one moved. I actually had to tell them that they could go home! From that day, I began to realize that there was something special about storytelling. I discovered that stories do something that other forms of communication fail to do — they completely engage an audience — and they can actually change behaviour.

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Continuing yesterday’s wrapup of the Dec. 6 article about career and organizational storytelling in FORTUNE, for which writer Vickie Elmer’s editors had some final questions about the article…

Today: What’s the evidence that storytelling is effective in organizations? I knew that of the information offered in the responses I helped Vickie gather, FORTUNE would have space to include only a minimal amount in the article, so I’m summarizing the evidence here.

Lori Silverman in her article The Five Sides of Story, synopsizes research on storytelling’s effectiveness from her book, Wake Me When the Data’s Over. From the article:

In-depth interviews conducted with more than 170 business leaders in 80-plus organizations throughout the world suggest that stories have strategic impor- tance far beyond mere entertainment value. In the aggregate, the responses from these executives revealed five practices surrounding the use of stories that bring results: how to find stories, how to dig into them to uncover hidden patterns and themes, how to select those stories that need to be reinforced, how to craft memorable stories, and how to embody stories to positively affect attitudes, thoughts and behaviors.

Silverman notes in the article, “For the book Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over, 72 organizations provided examples of how they use stories, summarizing these results:

• 36 percent have experienced positive financial impact to the bottom line through increased growth, profitability, and/or increased funding.
• 18 percent have noted that story has moved them closer to furthering specific organizational goals.
• 17 percent have reported increased levels of engagement between people and the organization and/or higher levels of teamwork.
• 17 percent are able to show a positive impact on the amount and type of customer feedback, improved customer satisfaction and/or improved customer perceptions of the brand.
• 11 percent have experienced decreased workflow cycle time, improved speed of message delivery or time to market, and increased effi- ciencies.
• 10 percent reported an impact on training feedback and effectiveness, including transfer of skills and knowl- edge to the workplace.
• 8 percent noted positive cultural changes.

Suzanne Tesselaar pointed to the English version of her cite, Stories of Change, for examples of the effectiveness of organizational storytelling.

Casey Hibbard shared the information that surveys have been conducted about the effectiveness of using customer case studies/success stories in selling technology products, including a recent survey from Eccolo Media. “It’s about what marketing collateral is used in tech B2B purchases, and case studies are one of the areas they asked about,” Casey reported, citing one statistic in the study: Nearly 80 percent say case studies/success stories are influential in the buying process.

“Also,” Casey noted, “anecdotally I can tell you that the number of companies doing success stories on their customers has dramatically increased in the past 10 years that I’ve been doing this work, though I don’t have anything measurable. But companies from the largest in the world to small startups rely on stories to sell their products and services.”

The private LinkedIn group created for the recent Reinvention Summit on the future of storytelling has a lengthy discussion going on around this question: “Do you have an example of an organization or business that has effectively used storytelling to achieve results?” Since it’s a private group, I don’t feel right revealing everything that’s been said, but here’s an overview:

• Gabrielle Dolan of the Australian agency One Thousand and One pointed to a case study about her company.
• Peter Fruhmann described a positive experience with collecting stories from a big regional police corps of about 1,700 employees in the Netherlands.
• Shelly Alcorn noted from her perspective on the nonprofit trade and professional association world, that “stories are key to both mission and membership (or citizenship as I prefer to call it). I have seen the use of story coupled with appreciative inquiry transform nonprofit organizations.”
• Also using Appreciative Inquiry in its “Generative Journalism” is Axiom News, where Jennifer Neutel serves as Story Advocate, and reports, “We use the power of storytelling within organizations through providing strengths-based Stakeholder News programs. This means that organizations contract us to write stories and post their success stories on their website, every day.” Axiom’s Stories at Work section gives examples of the effectiveness of organizational storytelling. Axiom offers an e-book about the process and benefits of storytelling: How To Change Your World By Sharing Stakeholder Stories . I’m looking forward to learning more about Axiom’s work as Jennifer has agreed to participate in a Q&A.

Steve Denning discusses the effectiveness of storytelling on pages 20-24 of his book, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. Here are the studies he cites:

• LaClair and Rao, Helping Employees Embrace Change, McKinsey Quarterly, 2002
• Osborn and Ehninger, The Metaphor in Public Address, Speech Monograph, 1962
• Kouzes and Posner, Credibility: How Leaders Gain It and Lose It, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, p. 198
• Borgida and Nisbett, “The Differential Impact of Abstract vs. Concrete Information on Decisions,” Journal of Applied Technology, 1977
• Zemke, Storytelling: Back to Bacics, Training, March 1990
• Wilkens, Organizational Stories as Symbols Which Control the Organization, in the book Organizational Symbolism, 1983
• Conger, Inspiring Others: The Language of Leadership, Executive. 1991
• Martin and Power, Organizational Stories: More Vivid and Persuasive Than Quantitative Data, In the book Psychological Foundations of Organizational Behavior, 1982
• Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performance, Harvard Business School Press, 2004, pp. 236-237

In the private LinkedIn group from the Reinvention Summit, Denning said:

Asking for examples of companies that have effectively used storytelling to get results is similar to asking for examples of companies that have effectively used analysis to get results. All companies use storytelling, just as all human beings use storytelling. Examine any successful company or any successful leader or any successful organizational initiative and you will find examples of effective storytelling as well as effective analysis. Examine any organization or any initiative or any leader that ran into problems, and you will find ineffective storytelling or ineffective analysis, usually both.

Shawn Callahan of Australia’s Anecdote, cited this study: Chestek, K.D. 2010, Judging by the Numbers: An Empirical Study of the Power of Story, Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors, vol. 7, no. 1.

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As I wrote about the other day, I recently served as a source for writer Vickie Elmer in her quest to write an article about career and organizational storytelling for FORTUNE.

Her editors had some final questions about the article — what’s the evidence that storytelling is growing as a discipline and what research demonstrates the effectiveness of organizational storytelling?

I threw these questions out to my storytelling networks and got the usual comprehensive and generous responses. I knew that Vickie would be able to include only a small portion of these responses in her article, so I thought I’d provide lengthier evidence here.

First up, evidence that organizational storytelling is growing and becoming mainstream.

Katja Schleicher suggested that the growing number of public storytelling trainings is an indicator for the growing populartity of business steorytelling. “In Europe,” she noted, “we see more and more training companies putting that on their agenda — with different focus points: Storytelling for PR and Branding, .. for Entrepreneurs, … in the sales process, StorySelling, etc.”

Steve Denning wrote a blog entry around the time I was collecting data in which he touches on the storytelling’s growth and mainstream acceptance. He wrote:

Since 2005, the importance of storytelling as a leadership tool has become much more generally accepted, even in big organizations. The days are gone when I would be recruited by a nervous executive to hold a storytelling workshop for a major corporation with a euphemistic label like “strategic change management”. Now executives tell me, “Let’s call it what it is: storytelling!”

This in turn reflects the fact that storytelling has gained recognition as a core competence of leadership. It is now standard practice to include a section on storytelling in books on leadership and change management, such as A Whole New Mind (2006) by Dan Pink, The Leadership Challenge (2008) by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, Made to Stick (2008) by Chip and Dan Heath, and Getting Change Right (2010) by Seth Kahan.

Robbie Vorhaus noted that his proof that “organizational storytelling is becoming more popular is the growing number of large, worldwide companies, including defense contractors, that are booking our ‘Storytelling Boot Camp.’

Brian Moriarty, Adjunct Professor of Management Communications at the Darden School of Business, said he believes “storytelling is gaining being emphasized more in MBA programs. I teach Management Communications at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, a core required course for first year students, and we begin with storytelling as a way to get students to begin strategizing about how to communicate with intent to a variety of stakeholders. The second half of the course continues the storytelling theme by looking at the different methods of persuasion — what makes a story convincing, how do you tell a story that makes a difference?”

Mitch Joel suggests that marketing agencies of the future will include a storytelling department.

Steve Rubel cites storytelling as an essential skill, writing: “[O]rganizations need to do more than just unleash their subject-matter experts en masse. They need to activate them in multiple channels at once and equip them in how to create a compelling narrative - an emerging set of skills called Transmedia Storytelling.”

In a FORTUNE article titled, Why storytelling is essential for business leaders, Chris Grams declares that “one of the most important roles to fill when trying to build a passionate community is the storyteller.” He adds: “… organizations need people who can tell interesting stories in any medium at very low cost … Great storytellers are the catalysts in passionate, engaged communities.”

“Storyteller” as a job title is gaining ground, as in Steve Clayton blog post on his Storytller title. The FORTUNE article highlighted that fact that in 2010, 728 people identified themselves as corporate storytellers, up from 11 in 2001 (an estimate from Kendall Haven, story consultant and author.

Tomorrow: Effectiveness of storytelling in organizations.

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A little update on the world of emerging story platforms ….

I apparently signed up for Capzles in March 2008, but it must’ve been in beta then because I don’t believe I ever blogged about it. Capzles is one of those maddening sites with no “About” page (another site calls it a venue for “creat[ing] entertaining social photo story lines very easily”). Thus, when I recently rediscovered it, the only way I could figure out how the platform tells stories was to use it (maybe that’s the point of no “About” page.) I threw together a quick-and-dirty Capzle timeline of four photos of me taken in the same place (on a hill high above the Columbia River). Three of the photos were taken on the same day, Sept. 27, a day we celebrate because it’s the day our offer was accepted on our wonderful homestead in Kettle Falls, WA, in 2008, 2009, and 2010. The fourth photo was taken in the same place but in May of 2009.

So, Capzles does make a nice little timeline. You can upload various kinds of media, choose a pretty background (or create your own), and insert background music (after waiting an hour to upload my musical selection, I can’t get it to play). While my Capzle doesn’t tell that much of a story, I can see the potential to tell stories with this platform. But I couldn’t find a way to edit the names of the photos or change the dates on them (instead of carrying the dates they were taken, they carry the dates they were saved on my hard drive — although the date on the first one, Dec. 2007, makes no sense since we’d never even heard of Kettle Falls in 2007 let alone been here.) Finally, I could not get my Capzle to embed properly here, so below is a screenshot rather than the real thing. I could not see any way to get help or support for issues like these.

Qwiki, in an alpha phase as I write this, does have an “About” page, which says:

Qwiki’s goal is to forever improve the way people experience information. Whether you’re planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family AppleTV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human — via storytelling instead of search.

Qwiki offers “technology that transforms static information into interactive stories.”

Qwiki’s blog tells the story behind the concept (from Co-Founder and CEO Doug Imbruce):

About 18 months ago, I took a trip to Buenos Aires. Naturally, I searched the Web for information on the city, but what I found didn’t feel natural at all. There were lists of links; spammy, dense blocks of text; and a hodgepodge of videos and advertising. It took so long to assemble key facts about the city, I almost missed my flight. Amid this frustrating experience, however, I also had a moment I’ll never forget. I realized that what the Web needs isn’t another search engine. It needs story, a quintessentially human way to experience information.

The rest of Imbruce’s story is pretty interesting, too.

You can see the storytelling potential of Qwiki with the samples on the site, like this one about Claude Monet. I would describe a Qwiki as more than a slideshow but slightly less than a video. Unlike Storify and Capzles, the stories in Qwiki are not user-generated. Instead, the blog says, “Qwiki covers 2 million reference terms — including a wide variety of people, places, and things. You can type in any indexed term and Qwiki will generate an ‘information experience’ describing it.”

Storify continues to enjoy considerable buzz (I wrote about it here). As Nieman Storyboard reported in October, the site TBDCommunity used Storify to tell the story of the death of a man outside a District of Columbia nightclub (storified story here). The Storify story consists largely of tweets, with a few photos and a Scribd document. It’s a pretty fascinating way to see a crowdsourced story unfold. And, based on this interview with Storify’s founder, the nightclub-murder story epitomizes the use Storify was designed for.

And looming on the horizon … Projeqt, issuing beta invitations at this writing, and describing itself as providing “the tools and technology to tell your story. It provides a robust architecture, with unprecedented flexibility and possibilities. … Projeqt is about giving you the power to projeqt your story to the world.”

Also looming on the horizon is Intersect, currently in an invitation-only beta (I just got my requested invitation). Intersect brings together two major concepts — storylines and intersections. The founders hope this convergence makes “sharing on the Web more interesting, more enjoyable, and more powerful.” Here’s more about it:

When you post an Intersect story, your story lives on a storyline that evolves over time. Stories also have the potential to live at time and place intersections where they can be discovered by others and shared in new ways. You can make a story public or publish it just to the people you choose.

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An article for which I served as a source has come to fruition in the Dec. 6 issue of FORTUNE.

Titled “How Storytelling Spurs Success,” the article by Vickie Elmer notes that “storytelling isn’t just for old folks and kids. It can help you move forward in your career — both by showing what you’ve accomplished and by persuading employees to trust you.”

Elmer mixes management and job-seeker/careerist uses of storytelling in the article, kicking off with a tale from Ed Fuller who used storytelling at Marriott to teach new managers about the company’s priorities and has a book of workplace stories, You Can’t Lead with Your Feet on the Desk, coming out next year. Also due out next year, Elmer says, is movie executive Peter Guber’s Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story. Guber says in the FORTUNE article that “stories are the best way to reach your goals.”

My favorite part of the article (other than the sidebar for which I was the source; see below) comes from John Berisford, head of human resources at Pepsi Beverages. In job interviews, instead of asking the shopworn standard, “Tell me about yourself,” he asks, “Tell me your story,” noting, “It’s the best way to get to know the entire human being.”

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Raf Stevens’s worldview that Western innovation will be fueled by peer-to-peer stories is behind his new Linked Stories project:

Today, two centuries of domination of the US and Europe are coming to an end. To resist against the overwhelming emerging countries, the West needs real innovation. Easier said than done? Not anymore. I’ve discovered that the new trade is about linked peer-to-peer stories. Linking your stories to that of peers can help you convince other people, keeping the forefront in your business and helping you in realising finally the so much needed work-life balance.

You can download a free PDF of Raf’s manifesto on his worldview, The New Trade.

Raf’s intent is to create both a crowdsourced and crowdfunded book. In other words, he’d like folks to participate by sharing stories and supporting the project. He’s trying to raise 3,000 Euros for the book’s publication, and you can contribute here.

He discusses the project in the video below:

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