Kendall Haven is another one of those story practitioners that I can’t believe I didn’t know about till recently. His fascinating background is a study in contrasts. I’m excited to be learning about it in his responses. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: Story consultant Kendall Haven is a nationally recognized expert on the structure of stories and on the Eight Essential Elements that form the foundation of all successful narratives. Haven’s acclaimed book, STORY PROOF: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, presents the first-ever proof that “story structure” is an information-delivery-system powerhouse, evolutionarily hardwired into human brains.

For 100,000 years, humans have relied on story structure to archive and to communicate key history, knowledge, facts, beliefs, concepts, and attitudes. Evidence Haven gathered from 16 fields of scientific research (neural biology, developmental psychology, neural linguistics, clinical psychology, cognitive sciences, information theory, neural net modeling, education theory, knowledge management theory, anthropology, organization theory, narratology, medical science, narrative therapy, and, of course, storytelling and writing) has shown that this has evolutionarily rewired human brains to automatically think, understand, and remember through stories. Applying the science of story is the key to the art of effective communication for anyone who needs to inform, inspire, or educate.

A senior research scientist turned story-teller and story-engineer, Haven assists agencies, organizations, companies, and schools to master the use and power of story.

Haven has authored 30 books, performed for world-wide audiences of more than 4 million, and has led acclaimed writing workshops with 40,000+ teachers, 6,000+ professionals, and 270,000+ students.

Q&A with Kendall Haven, 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: My undergraduate schooling, graduate school, and early work were all science-based and engineering-based, and amounted to technical applied-science research. With a doctorate in oceanography, I led a small team assessing the “environmental implications of advanced oceanic energy technologies and future energy policies” at one of the chain of national research labs.

During that time I got married. My wife has a sister, a single mom of a (then) 4-year-old. My work schedule was flexible enough so that I developed the habit of taking that boy to the park two or three times a week to play during the middle of the day. He’d romp and race. I’d eventually grow tired and need to slow him down to give myself a break.

I found that the only way I could do that was to drop into the sprawling sandbox there at the park and offer to tell him a story. He would gladly flop down into the sand to listen. I just made these stories up as I went along. I never planned them or thought about them ahead of time. I just improvised rambling stories as a self-preservation scheme to keep him quiet and give my legs and lungs a break from the running.

I swear that, every time I started a story, other kids would materialize there in the sand to listen, demanding that I start over ‘cause they missed the beginning. (As if I could remember anything I had already said.) I’d start a story and literally dozens of kids would be sucked into the sandbox like iron filings unopposeably pulled to a magnet.

Soon, adults would drift over to see why their child was hunkered down in the sandbox with this strange man who wasn’t at work in the middle of the day when he ought to be. They’d march over with every intent of calling the cops, but would arrive and say, “Oh, he’s just telling stories.” More often than not, those adults would stay to listen. There were many days when I would glance up from these stories I was making up for my nephew and see rings of 60 to 80 people standing around the sandbox to listen. There was no guarantee that the story was going anywhere. There was nothing to indicate that this was worth their while. And they didn’t care. They “got” that it was a story and they were there to listen.

Then on one specific day, it hit me — one of those “Ah Ha!” epiphanies that, if you’re lucky, you get a couple of in a lifetime. I glanced up from that day’s story at a thick ring of almost 100 onlookers and it hit me: If I sat in that sandbox and read any of the reports that I was paid reasonably good money by the federal government to create, none of these people — and especially none of the kids — would linger and listen. They weren’t there because I spoke or because it was “me.” They were there because they somehow got that it was a story I was telling. And that made it worth their time and attention — whereas a report or a science lecture would not.

I instantly fell in awe of (and much later in love with) the form and structure of this wondrous thing called “story” that held such sway and power over the human mind. Within a month I quit my job at the lab and declared myself to be a storyteller — and then, of course, had to desperately scramble to figure out how a storyteller pays rent and buys food. But that’s a different story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I came across CatalogLiving.net last week, I figured I would include it in one of my compilations about visual storytelling, but I found it so funny — and I have a very high humor threshold — that I had to single it out.

On the site, Los Angeles-based actor, writer, and comedian Molly Erdman spins the ongoing story of Elaine and Gary in their lives within peculiar catalog photos. Actually, to someone flipping through the proliferation of lifestyle catalogs (from companies like Plow & Hearth, Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, and West Elm), the photos might not seem that odd. But when you see them in conjunction with Erdman’s hilarious captions, they are laugh-out-loud hysterical. They provide, as Erdman says “A look into the exciting lives of the people who live in your catalogs.”

As Reader’s Digest recently put it, “Ever notice that photos in home catalogs always include an overly twee prop or two? Molly Erdman decided they needed a backstory.”

For example, the caption for the photo below:

Elaine hoped that a nice bowl of fruit could lure Gary back from his magical journey into the Land of the Headboard.

Here’s how the Chicago Tribune described the origins of Erdman’s madness:

… late one Sunday night in June [2010], looking at a page in a West Elm catalog, it hit her: “This is so ridiculous,” she thought, trying to make sense of the outdoor furniture tableau that featured a plate of figs placed under a table.

“I showed my boyfriend,” she says. “I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I put these pictures up and made little captions for them?’” — essentially imagining the lives of the people who live in these oh-so-meticulously designed rooms.

Erdman decided to sleep on it and “see if it’s still funny in the morning.”

It was, and it has been ever since, CatalogLiving.net has evolved into the chronicle of a sort of Waspy couple, “Gary” and “Elaine,” who Erdman depicts as being a little hollow, a little fragile, a lot item-obsessed and, mostly, completely unaware of the occasional absurdities in their surroundings.

Seriously. You gotta check out the site if you’re in the mood for nonstop belly laughs.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Among recent items showing uses of storytelling in recruiting and job search are two from the employer side and two from the job-seeker side:

One way employers seek to engage and entice workers is by offering stories of what it’s like to work at the organization. These stories can be a terrific way for job-seekers to measure their “cultural fit” with the employer.

Employer stories: Pepsico has been cited as doing an especially good job with its stories of Pepsico People. Wherever it was that I first read of Pepsico People noted that the company offers tons of these stories. I could not, however, see a way to access any beyond the four currently shown on the Pepsico People page (one is pictured at right).

Storied job postings: My friend Lou Hoffman not long ago contrasted a typical dull job posting with one reflecting storytelling techniques. Lou was surprised that Facebook would have such a typically dry job posting (which you can see in his post). He compared that one to a job ad from Duarte, Nancy Duarte’s company, which tells the story of the kind of person the company would like to hire:

Are you equally visual and verbal? Do you jump to the whiteboard to show people what you’re saying? Do you pride yourself on being equal parts intellectual acrobat and lyrical heavy-lifter who can deliver idea after idea long past the point when everyone else has run dry? Are you a systems thinker who thrives on a deadline? Could you see yourself as a screenwriter? If you have experience in message development, positioning, and speech writing, this may be the position for you.

… and even more in the screenshot of the ad in Lou’s post.

From story to job offers: No job-seeker story has garnered more attention than that of Ted Williams, the golden-voiced homeless man who was showered with job offers after a video of him and his terrific radio voice went viral (on the off chance you missed this story, find a good summary here). Though controversy ensued (William’s prison record, his failure to support his children, the suspicion that the whole story was a fabrication), it’s worth asking why this story was so compelling, why it got so much attention, and why it resulted in fame and job offers for Williams.

In a small way, Williams kicked off the storytelling by noting on his cardboard sign, “I have a God given gift of voice. I am an ex-radio announcer who has fallen on hard times.” It was because a newspaper reporter asked Williams to demo his “God given gift of voice,” videotaped the demo, and posted it, that the story was promulgated. That, and the fact that Williams really does have a remarkable voice.

Would the same reaction have transpired if a well-groomed man in a suit held up a sign telling the story of his golden voice? Perhaps not. Williams’ homelessness and having fallen on hard times added weight to the story.

Storied personal branding: Finally, a piece on personal branding from an interview with Michael Margolis (yes, I know I write about his work a lot).

Asked about the value of creating a personal brand, Michael responded: Perception is reality. You already have a personal brand: it’s called the stories that people tell about you. So whether you’re thinking about it or not, people are forming an impression in their mind as who you are, what you stand for, and what they share in common with you. Personal branding from a story perspective is about inviting people into [the] relationship.

Of course, personal branding is not just for job-seekers; in fact, I suspect that Michael mostly thinks about entrepreneurs when he talks about the concept. But this notion of inviting people into the relationship is, I believe, especially valuable for job-seekers.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve long believed the US needs a Sputnik moment, a cause to rally around the way the nation did after the USSR launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. While that event sparked massive growth in the space program, tremendous innovation, and the eventual moon landing, a less talked about effect was the vast improvements in education the Russian threat engendered.

I often thought the AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s should have been that Sputnik moment. When I worked for the Florida commissioner of education, I imagined proposing a scientific summit that would address some urgent issue that would spark a meeting of the minds.

Our national dependence on foreign oil could have been — and could still be — the Sputnik moment, but our awareness of the problem for the last 40 years had failed to trigger a collaborative effort to solve it.

To an extent, we rallied and came together after 9-11, but that moment was triggered by fear, anger, and a desire for revenge and aggression.

I was excited when I learned President Obama would propose a new Sputnik moment in his State of the Union address, but as much as I admire his rhetoric, I felt the proposal fell flat.

A couple of blog posts this week have examined the narrative of the Sputnik-moment proposal.

For Steve Denning, the failure of the Sputnik moment was the failure to think big enough. In A genuine Sputnik moment means thinking bigger thoughts, Denning wrote “The sad truth is that the thoughts about what to do in response to our Sputnik moment need to be bigger if we are to have a genuine wave of innovation that creates millions of new jobs.” We could say that the president didn’t tell a big enough story.

For Denning, Sputnik-moment-inspired innovation must come from overhauling unproductive hierarchical bureaucracies in our nation’s largest corporations, as well as reinventing the government, education, and health sectors.

For George Lakoff, The New Obama Narrative is about economic competitiveness. Lakoff barely mentions the Sputnik moment, but does write: “The president’s ‘Sputnik moment’ imposed the Cold War metaphor — one in which we are temporarily losing a worldwide economic war, but can catch up with mobilization.”

In all likelihood, the president has lost the opportunity to inspire a Sputnik moment. It’s still worth asking, I believe, what would it take to inspire such a moment? What would the narrative need to be? What’s missing from the current narrative?

I have a sense that if and when the moment ever arrives, we won’t need to impose the Sputnik metaphor on it. We’ll know the moment is here, and it will tell its own story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve written here before about brain research that indicates a listener’s brain synchs itself to a storyteller’s when the latter tells a story — and the implications that research might have for storytelling in job interviews.

That’s the jumping-off point for a guest post I did for today’s Career Rocketeer, Brain Research Shows the Power of Storytelling in the Job Search.

In the guest post, though, I also get into material not seen here on A Storied Career — how the same accomplishment story can be told in different ways on a job-seeker’s resume, cover letter, and in an interview. Hope you’ll check it out.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A year after presenting a webinar on Telling a Story with Social Media, Ann Treacy writes, she found that story was all she was hearing about. Indeed, 2010 seems to have been the year of social-media storytelling. Treacy said she’d found that businesses “who can tell their story online — and better yet engage their customers/communities to help tell the story — are most successful online.” Today, a few choice tidbits on social-media storytelling:

It’s delightful to see storytelling as the holy-grail fifth stage in the “Five Stages of Humanization for a Social Business” in a guest post by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund excerpted from their book, The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter & More Social, which will be released next Tuesday (Feb. 1). The previous stages are ignoring, listening, responding, and participating. The storytelling stage, the authors write, “is when you start to become a documentarian, communicating in multiple formats about company history, people, and behind-the-scenes information.” The”paradox and genius of the storytelling stop on the highway,” the authors note, is that “you’re marketing your company, but so indirectly that it becomes ‘UnMarketing.’”

A couple of nice how-tos for social-media storytelling include Dr. Pamela Rutledge’s 5 Keys for Social Media Marketing Using Storytelling, who offers the steps (1) Find your story; (2) Build your story; (3) Plan the story arc; (4)Share your story; and (5) Give value. The other is 3 Storytelling Hacks | Curation Tools by Kevin Dugan, listing tools he uses to help tell stories online — ScoopIt, BlipSnips, and crowdsourced stories via. Flickr (the example he gives makes me question the story value).

I’ve written a number of times about various attempt to tell stories with Twitter. Not too long ago, Andrea Pitzer offered an interesting roundup of storied Twitter uses on Neiman Storyboard. Pitzer, who writes about story from a journalistic standpoint, concludes: “If Twitter continues to build its user base, journalists will have an expanding pool of millions of voices and characters on hand with individual stories authors can weave into a larger nonfiction narrative.”

Facebook is also cited for its story capabilities, such as in two recent examples — La Città di Asterix (the City of Asterix), a Facebook group (graphic shown at left); and A Facebook story: A mother’s joy and a family’s sorrow, as told by the Washington Post, which edited and annotated the Facebook page of Shana Greatman Swers to tell her story from date nights during her pregnancy “to a medical odyssey that turned the ecstasy of childbirth into a struggle for life.” Carlotta Mismetti Capua tells the backstory of La Città di Asterix, the Italian-language Facebook group that tells the story of four Afghan boys in Rome. Watching this video is also a good way to understand the backstory, though it doesn’t mention the Facebook group.

An interesting video by Jim Banister, The Nature of Social Narrative, examines whether social networks are storytelling media and looks at various story constructs, as shown in the screenshot below. He kind of loses me when he starts talking about programming and gaming, but the video provides food for thought.

One new twist — one I’m not totally sold on (pun intended) is the idea that, as Jesse Stanchak writes, “Commerce is a narrative art.” Stanchak’s jumping-off point is the trendy location-based social networks that “provide the bare bones of the narrative, but none of the details that make the story worth hearing.” He notes that “when we ask someone where they have been, what we really want to know is, ‘What happened to you once you got there?’” Stanchak then profiles seven “social-commerce” networks that “aren’t about the money you’re spending, they’re about experiences that tell stories.” These services are Social Currency, Blippy, Swipely, SCVNGR, Barcode Hero, Beerby, and Ravelry. Decide for yourself the extent to which they enable storytelling.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I didn’t expect to be writing about family stories so soon after last week’s post, but I’ve experienced a bit of a convergence of issues over secret, missing, or withheld family stories and their effect on descendants.

I just finished reading a new novel, The Lake of Dreams, by Kim Edwards, author of the popular The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. In the novel, a young woman stumbles upon information that prompts her to track down a hidden family story. A family member from three generations before is never spoken of and unknown in the family history, largely because she was a suffragette who went to jail several times.

The young woman protagonist is angry that this family story has been withheld. She particularly feels that knowing more about the secret ancestor would inform her own life.

I questioned the realism of the protagonist’s feelings. Would someone really be that upset over not knowing about a relative from three generations ago?

I could conduct my own reality test because I have two such stories from roughly the same era as the book’s missing ancestor. I linked to these stories in last week’s post; here they are in capsule form:

On September 11, 1913, a local justice of the peace in New Jersey disappeared, never to be seen again. The man, Walter Scott Fenimore, left a wife and four children behind. At the time he disappeared, he was in possession of $500 in bail money. The money was connected with a sensational case involving the shooting of a National Guardsman, allegedly by a chauffeur who cited the attentions of the Guardsman to the chauffeur’s wife. It was the chauffeur’s bail money that disappeared. Walter Scott Fenimore was my great-grandfather (my maternal grandfather’s father).

In 1922, a beloved New Jersey educator, Henry Neal, died suddenly at age 55. He had been a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent of schools in school districts in and around New Jersey. His wife, Grace, was so undone by his death that she lost her mind and spent the rest of her life in an insane asylum. The exact nature of her mental illness is unknown, but it seemed to have been some sort of catatonic state as she was not able to recognize her own children. Grace Neal was my great-grandmother (my maternal grandmother’s mother). [Pictured at left, my great-grandmother Grace Neal, right, holding my grandmother, Elizabeth Neal.]

In the case of my great-grandfather, no one withheld the story — subsequent generations knew about his disappearance — but Fenimore himself “withheld” his story by disappearing without a trace. His descendants can be annoyed, but only because we are driven crazy with curiosity over the tantalizing mystery of what became of him.

Grace Neal’s story, however, was withheld to a certain extent. My mother did not know until she was 18 that she had had a grandmother. She found out when she saw her grandmother’s grave in a cemetery. My mother’s mother — Grace’s daughter — apparently found her mother’s story too painful and perhaps too shameful to tell.

I have not been especially bothered by the missing history of Grace Neal, but my sister has. She has conducted significant research, trying to learn more about the nature of Grace’s mental illness and what her treatment was like in the insane asylum.

I still find the emotions of The Lake of Dreams protagonist a bit overblown, but I can relate to them to a small extent based on the shrouded stories in my own family history.

The other converging item about hidden family secrets was Oprah’s announcement Monday that she has a long-lost half-sister. Oprah, says her Web site, “received some news about her family that she says shook her to her core. ‘[It’s] a bombshell family secret that left me speechless.’” Oprah’s mother had never told her other children that she had given up a baby for adoption:

“I had no idea that my mother had given up a baby in 1963,” Oprah says. “I was 9 years old at the time, living with my father in Nashville, and didn’t even know my mother was pregnant … So imagine my shock just a few months ago. It was the end of October, right before Thanksgiving, [when] I found out that I have another sister living just 90 minutes away in Milwaukee.

Now, I would definitely be upset if the story of a sibling’s existence were hidden from me. This convergence of events may illustrate that the greater the generational distance, the easier it is to cope with the discovery of hidden family secrets.

What about you? Did you discover a family secret had been hidden from you? How did you feel?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A book by Linde Zingaro, Speaking Out: Storytelling for Social Change, provides a framework for how storytelling is employed in social-change efforts:

For some, the disclosure of their own stories of marginalization has become a tool for advocacy, for telling a larger truth; for others, self-disclosure is a more personal action, intended to assist those isolated in their suffering in developing trust and connection.

Here are some recent discoveries of venues and projects that focus on, as the book’s description calls it, the transformative potential of storytelling as significant social action. I’ve divided them into three categories, though considerable overlap exists in the categories:

1. Projects that tell stories of specific populations to encourage aid to those populations or recruit change agents.
2. Projects that, through stories, tell members of populations they are not alone and enable them to compare notes about their struggles.
3. Storytelling tools for social change.

Projects that tell stories of specific populations to encourage aid to those populations or recruit change agents

Changents enables change agents around the world to broadcast their amazing stories of creating change and mobilize help from friends everywhere. Changents could also be classified as a storytelling tool for social change. View the group’s video.

MiWorld bills itself as “the first global humanitarian Internet portal to feature engaging stories of real people in even the most remote parts of the developing world.”

Invisible People, is a vlog with the purpose of making the invisible — homeless people — visible. “I hope these people and their stories connect with you and don’t let go. I hope their conversations with me will start a conversation in your circle of friends,” says site founder Mark Horvath.

Projects that, through stories, tell members of populations they are not alone and enable them to compare notes about their struggles.

The Frontlines provides members of the armed forces, veterans, family and friends a platform to creatively share their stories from the frontlines.

Several sites in which women tell the stories of having abortions: First an article about a Twitter hashtag project, ‘I Had An Abortion,’ in 140 Characters or Less: An Exchange With Steph Herold and Aspen Baker, the hashtag project itself, #ihadanabortion, and these sites: I Had an Abortion. I’m Not Sorry, and 45 Million Voices.

The HIV Story Project is a non-profit, multi-platform story telling/media endeavor and short film compilation about living with HIV/AIDS at the beginning of the 21st Century. Says the site’s About page: “Almost 30 years into one of the world’s most substantial, long term health pandemics, this project brings together individuals living with HIV/AIDS, non-profit social service organizations addressing the disease, and top filmmakers to participate in one of the largest cross-agency and cross-disciplinary efforts around HIV/AIDS the world has ever seen.”

Storytelling tools for social change.

Youth Venture Stories of Change: 24-page downloadable ebook that aims to inspire social change.

Ingredients of Transition: The Role of Storytelling: A kind of a manifesto/how-to of Transition Initiative, which reads, in part:

Weave a thread of storytelling through the work of your Transition initiative. Look backwards as well as forwards, inviting older people to tell stories of how a more localised, lower energy world used to function, ideally by showing people around the actual physical places. Use storytelling in its widest sense, making films, raps, newspaper articles and small ads from the newspapers of the future, cartoons, animations. Hold ‘Future Cabaret’ events where people tell their stories of the future.

Collapsus, transmedia project from SubmarineChannel that combines interactivity, animation, fiction, and documentary. Collapsus looks into the near future and shows you how the imminent energy crisis affects a group of 10 young people, who appear to be caught up in an energy conspiracy. This project illustrates the potential for transmedia storytelling to be deployed for social change.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My friend Sean Buvala wrote a terrific post on his blog in response to my post yesterday, Not Everyone Thinks Applied Storytelling Is a Good Idea. He has given me permissions to re-post it here, beginning with a link to his article on Sean Tells, 10 Things Storytelling Won’t Do for Your Business.” Here’s his post:

Backlash is to be expected at the moment. Sadly, we have gobs of storybiz philosophers out there right now that can comment eloquently about the “why” of story but few comment well about the “how” of story. What we are left with is a pile of people who are energetic about the concept but have no way to really make it go. I’ve actually seen business people (who should know better) breathlessly say (or Twitter or Facebook) that we have to “believe in” the story for it to work. They’re using the word “believe” in the same way that Peter Pan tells the audience that clapping your hands and believing will bring Tinkerbell back to life. No, you don’t have to “believe” your story but it must be true, it must be honest and it must have relevance. Story is not cod-liver oil or any panacea.

Another issue is that folks are replacing facts with story. Story frames the facts, it does not replace them. Story carries Truth — not replaces it. For example, there is a reason that XYZ company lost money last year and they need to look at those figures. What story can do is frame the experiences of loss and recovery. As another example, if you have bullies in your elementary school, the simple act of storytelling alone will not solve the problem. Done wrong it will actually make it worse.

I am pre-reading yet another book on biz storytelling before it comes out this spring. It’s full of stories but has no content. Lots of people are going to pick it up and be very disappointed. Those folks will put the book down and abandon storytelling as fluffy cocktail-hour bragging — when it could have made a huge difference in their organizations done right and in context.

I’m pro-applied-story and its various deliveries, but I am deeply aware that the message often sounds like a 1970’ peace-and-love TV commercial to many folks. You’d like to buy the world a Coke? That’s great, and your vision inspires me. Now, how are we going to pay for it?

The official blog for K. Sean Buvala, storyteller and storytelling coach.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It’s pretty rare for me to come across an item that is anti-storytelling, and if I have, I’ve probably bypassed it because it doesn’t align with what I’m about. But some anti-storytelling rhetoric has been getting buzz recently, so I thought I’d explore some of the negative sentiment for its thought-provoking capacity:

Probably the first anti-storytelling argument I came across was via Stephane Dangel, who made me aware of the book Storytelling (subtitle: Bewitching the Modern Mind) by Christian Salmon. Stephane described Salmon as “a man who hates storytelling” and notes that Salmon’s message “is very raw: ‘storytelling = fiction = manipulation.’” The English version came out in May of last year, and by fall, I started to see some buzz about it in the English-language blogosphere.

Stephanie West Allen posted part of a review by Julie Wheelwright in The Independent. An excerpt from Stephanie’s excerpt:

“Storytelling management” has also seeped into daily working life, silencing the corporate employees who, quite literally, don’t buy the narrative. In organisations like the World Bank, Apple, Starbucks, Nokia and Google, traditional communication methods are ditched for the circulation of simple stories freighted with meaning. What’s lost is rational argument and critical analysis. Enron, according to Salmon, is a vivid example of this intellectual deterioration. Its CEOs made the narrative bluff that Washington politicians and Wall Street analysts would be unable to distinguish between fiction and reality.

Including Enron in this group, in my opinion, is comparing apples to oranges. I also cannot see how business narrative is tantamount to intellectual deterioration. As for “rational argument and critical analysis,” I need only look at the evidence I gathered to assist Vickie Elmer with her Fortune article on storytelling in December. I will say that more academic research into organizational storytelling couldn’t hurt; it’s an area that has not received enough attention. (I offer the disclaimers that a) I haven’t read Salmon’s book and b) I list it under the storytelling books on my sidebar because I like the cover design.)

Examining the storytelling vs. analysis (or more precisely, storytelling vs. statistics) argument is a nicely balanced piece, Statistics vs. storytelling: the grudge match?, by Andrea Pitzer on Nieman Storyboard. Pitzer looks at a number of recent pieces of writing on this subject, concluding in part that “the most important thing … may be that narrative appears to be the most efficient vehicle for getting people to understand, remember, or accept new information.” She also suggests that statistics can be effectively partnered with storytelling.

A similar argument to Salmon’s, the one my mother employs, is that storytelling is lying, mispresentation. Ray Schultz targets creative nonfiction and 1960s-style “new journalism” in his post Enough Storytelling — Let’s Tell the Truth. I will grant that some of these endeavors go too far when they put words into their subjects’ mouths and thoughts into their heads that the authors could not possibly know — but the literary and journalism worlds would be poorer without the work of, say, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson. (Pitzer’s piece is also germane to this concern about narrative journalism.)

A different kind of lying via storytelling is the subject of a blog post (no named author in evidence) in CBTish (about cognitive behavioural therapy — CBT), which asserts (citing author Robert Whitaker) that the rise of the neurobiological explanation of mental illness is the result of storytelling by the psychiatric establishment. “The false belief is the belief that mental illness is caused by chemical imbalance,” says the CBTish post. I have bought in to the chemical-imbalance belief to the extent that I’m not ready to give it up without more research.

In The Ethics of Whoring Your Storytelling by “James” (no last name given), the issue is manipulation:

Go ahead. Write a painful story, tack on a pitch for your product or services, and send it out. Watch the sympathy — and the dollars — pour in.

It’s disgusting.

While I can’t recall examples of marketing through the kind of painful story James refers to, I’d probably have to agree that some marketers are crossing an ethical line:

… while I’ll never talk about my personal hardships to make money, I see people marketing through stories every day. They pitch sales wth stories of their dying kitten, their broken washing machine, their sick child, their girlfriend’s birthday game tickets, their ailing car, and more.

Finally, a headline that garnered significant buzz last year, The Death of Storytelling?, referred to Fast Company founder Alan Webber’s presentation at Business Innovation Factory (BIF)’s Summit, which bills itself as “two days of unforgettable storytelling about what it takes to drive change.” Webber said storytelling is overrated, and we need to pull back from it.

My interpretation based on watching the presentation and reading a few of the pieces written in the aftermath is that Webber simply objects to journalists constantly interviewing each other in search of “the narrative” (resulting in fake themes) rather than actually reporting major stories (via investigative reporting) and providing the context that enables the audience to make sense of the news. News has become opinion, he said, instead of investigative journalism. When Webber uses the term “storytelling,” it’s this idea of the talking heads making up narrative themes that frequently have little to do with reality. These journalists are storytellers as “fluffmeisters,” Webber says. Ultimately, though, he admits that “storytelling is not the problem;” instead the problem is journalists failing to do their job. “Stories are how we learn,” he said.

By the way, I just noticed that entrepreneurs can share their stories on the BIF site via video or text.

The organization also has an “Eras of Entrepreneurship” project that traces the entrepreneurial narrative in the United States:

… how did we arrive at this particular narrative? To find out, we decided to look at the endeavor of enterprise in the U.S. from the time of the first colonies to the present day. Our objective was to identify distinct eras — eras based on the dominant characteristics of entrepreneurship — and to show changes and key differences in these characteristics over time.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Presenting some recent items about using stories in presentations:

• IGNITE: Like pecha kucha, the minimalist, Japanese form of presentation that inspired it, IGNITE presentations are not strictly related to storytelling. But given that both pecha kucha and IGNITE are kind of an anti-PowerPoint approach to presentations, and storytelling is an anti-PowerPoint approach, there’s a relationship. And when I say that IGNITE is anti-PowerPoint, I really mean anti-boring, deadly PowerPoint, because IGNITE still employs slides (as does pecha kucha). It’s just that “presenters get 20 slides and five minutes to make their point,” says the IGNITE site (and the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds). So, we can think of IGNITE as another way to tell a story. A stunning — albeit fictional — example of a story told in IGNITE fashion is Flash Mob Gone Wrong, told at Ignite London 2 by Tom Scott (who was interviewed about the project here). In an IGNITE presentation I learned of through my friend Stewart Marshall (see his blog post on how IGNITE and pecha kucha events can help improve one’s speaking skills), Scott Berkun asserts that storytelling is the way to go in an IGNITE talk. See his inspiring talk below:
• Storytelling, Not Facts: I’ve written a lot about Nancy Duarte and her new(ish) book Resonate in this space (as well as presented a Q&A with her), but a terrific article that provides an overview of the storytelling-in-presentations principles she developed for the book is Why we hate PowerPoints — and how to fix them, which appeared on the CNN site among other places. Here, Duarte said:

  Great presenters employ the basic narrative techniques used throughout history to connect with audiences and move them to action and new understanding. [UPDATE: Here’s a more recent Duarte piece — from the Wall Street Journal.]

• How to Tell a Story. My friend Sean Buvala, for whom telling a story is pretty much synonymous with giving a presentation, asserts that “one of the most searched-for communication skills on the Internet is ‘how to tell a story.’” I believe him, because that is certainly one of the questions I get asked most often. Sean, who offers a massive number of resources oh his Storyteller.net site, provides one very simple one as a starting place — a short article called How to Tell a Story.
• Finally … I am tempted to post one of the best storied presentations I’ve seen in a long time — by Park Howell. But Park has committed to a Q&A with me, so it’s best to wait and post it with his Q&A. If you just can’t wait, do a search for him on SlideShare.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I delivered my second Toastmasters speech a couple of weeks ago. It seemed to be well received, and I was pleased. I got the Best Speaker designation but only by default because the evening’s other speaker exceeded the time limit.

My topic was family stories/family history, although I did not reveal the topic until near the end. I told five brief stories about ancestors, hoping the audience would begin to guess what the stories had in common. In addition to family-history stories I wrote about here and here, I told these:

Very early in the 19th century, a boy of 13 enrolled at Yale; however, he did not graduate because he was expelled for playing pranks. The boy was James Fenimore Cooper, who became one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century, writing The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, and many other books.

Later in the 19th century, a United States senator from Massachusetts named Charles Sumner was a fierce leader of the anti-slavery movement. In 1856, he was famously and severely beaten with a cane on the floor of the United States Senate by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. The event that led to the beating was Senator Sumner’s scathing denunciation of the Kansas-Nebraska act, which allowed those states to decide whether they would allow slavery. One of the authors of the act was Andrew Butler, and Sumner’s attacker, Preston Brooks, was Butler’s nephew. Brooks addressed Sumner — who was sitting at a desk on the Senate floor — “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” As Sumner began to stand up, Brooks began beating Sumner severely on the head with a thick cane before he could reach his feet. After years of therapy, Sumner returned to the Senate. In the meantime, the beating helped escalate the tensions that led to the Civil War.

A boy born in England to a milkman father in 1951 would often assist his father with the early-morning milk-delivery rounds. The boy’s “best friend” was an old Spanish guitar with five rusty strings that had been left behind by an uncle who had emigrated to Canada. The boy’s name was Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner. As he grew up, he became a musician, performing wearing a striped black and yellow sweater. Because his bandleader thought that the sweater made Gordon look like a wasp, he acquired the nickname “Sting.” Sting of course became a very famous and successful performer.

I’m distantly related to james Fenimore Cooper and Sen. Charles Sumner. Sting? I call him “Cousin Sting,” but I don’t actually know if we’re related. My point in the speech was that through studying family history, I might someday learn of a familial connection.

I knew these stories were pretty good fodder for a speech, but had I come across Mary Beth Sammons’s The Story of Our Lives blog on the Psychology Today site, I would have understood even more benefits of reveling in these family stories. Sammons has several terrific posts on the blog, including one that reports on a new study that reveals that “remembering our ancestors boosts our performance on intelligence tests and actually makes us feel better as well.” (Unfortunately her link to the study no longer seems to be good; this link may or may not have been the one she included.) The study indicates that “thinking about our ancestors reminds us that as humans who are genetically similar to us we can successfully overcome a multitude of problems and adversities.”

In another post, Sammons writes about author Frank Delaney, who “says he writes to explain his own life and to take readers on a journey to discover common, universal stories and experiences, ones told through Irish eyes. Sammons goes on:

“We all belong to an ancient identity,” says Delaney. “Stories are the rivers that take us there.”

I find exploring family-history stories highly rewarding. How about you?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be reinventing my personal bio story, based on a series of webinars presented by Michael Margolis. Regular readers know the journey began here.

I’ve been talking about my own journey in blog posts in this space and summarizing the webinars on inside pages. I’m not sure I’ll keep summarizing; the summaries are time-consuming, I’m not sure anyone is reading them, and I’m not sure Michael wants me to give away his information.

The second webinar, “Synthesizing: Finding the Through-Line Arc,” excited me but raised a number of questions. The webinar closed with an assignment to attendees to prepare a draft of our personal bio stories before the final session on Feb. 3.

Michael noted that most bios are at the extremes of obnoxious self-importance or boring earnestness. I think mine probably has elements of both.

To avoid those extremes, the bio should tell a story that people can identify as their own. That concept scares me because I often feel like an oddball with a story no one can identify with. I would imagine I’m not the only one who feels that way.

He also pointed out that most bios lean too heavily on external validators and not enough on natural authority. In Michael’s vision of a five-component bio, one should lead with natural authority. That’s another concept I have a bit of trouble with. I have confidence in my natural authority in the self that is a career/job-search expert, and perhaps the self that is a writer. But the whole idea behind the bio-story webinar series is reinvention. The reinvented self I strive for is the one that makes a living based on my passion for applied storytelling. That’s the self for which I lack confidence in my natural authority.

Michael suggested that bios need to have a point of view (“We want characters. We want personality. We want point of view.”), offering as an example the fact that news consumers have gravitated to news that is blatantly biased to the right (FOX news) or left (MSNBC), and that outlets like CNN that try to remain objective are losing viewers. I was troubled by this analogy, as was another participant, who wrote in the chat box: “The news example is a chilling example of how storytelling point of view is misused in my opinion. Not something to be at all celebrated or emulated in this context.”

I instantly agreed with him, but then I thought about how I really behave. I find most news unwatchable these days. I do watch Jon Stewart, but as I said to the participant I quote above, I consider his show entertainment, not news. But then I realized that, as chagrined as I am to admit it, like many people, I do get some of my news from “The Daily Show.” I tried to watch the relatively objective “PBS News Hour” for a time, but it was deadly dull. Quite a rude awakening to realize I, too, seem to gravitate to news with a point of view. The problem there, is that I think our allegiance to biased news puts us in ideological ghettoes where we become closed off from perspectives not our own. Anyway, this issue may be tangential to creating a personal bio story. I think I would have preferred a different example for: “We want characters. We want personality. We want point of view.”

Another tangent: Michael spent some of the webinar talking about archetypal story structures, including the oft-cited Hero’s Journey. In a Q&A that I’ll be running in February, coach Lisa Rossetti refers to the maleness of the Hero’s Journey archetype. I hadn’t thought about that before and would like to ponder the degree to which the Hero’s Journey is an inclusive archetype.

As I mull over Michael’s ideal five-component bio story, I feel that my LinkedIn profile comes closest to this model. I felt terribly constrained by the character limit LinkedIn requires, but I used my LinkedIn bio as the basis for a profile on my personal site. I think that one is a good starting place for my reinvented bio story, and it also points to my reinvention away from career/job-search expert and toward applied-storytelling guru.

Another component that is challenging for me is No. 2 — Define Your Work. I can easily define my work in the career/job-search realm, but the definition is fuzzy in the applied-storytelling realm. I want to make a living at it. I haven’t yet determined how.

Michael gave us some terrific samples to review over the next couple of weeks as we’re crafting our bio stories:

• Mandy Leith
• Hugh Weber
• Chris Ronan
• Jon Thomas

Michael suggested that lists such as Julie Stuart’s 42 things you might not know about me are an excellent character-revealing add-on to a personal bio story. I have one of those, 45 Random Things About Me, which sprang from a Facebook meme and needs a bit of updating.

I’ll post my personal bio story draft when I complete it and submit it for your scrutiny.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here’s a synthesis of lots of terrific thought from the past several months on telling your business’s story:

1. Humanize your ownership story. In Turning Business Owners Into Stars of Their Own Stories in the New York Times, Jessica Bruder talks about Abe’s Market, an e-commerce hub that the owners believe “can offer customers something that eBay and Amazon cannot … stories about decent, hardworking people, like Abe,” the grandfather of one of the owners. Bruder notes that the Abe’s Web site “offers plenty of getting-to-know-you yarns, starting with the tale of Abe [pictured].” Bruder cites The Daily Grommet (slogan: “Fresh Finds, True Stories”) as another businesses that tells human stories and Etsy as a hub that encourages storytelling among its individual merchants. [Here’s another good one, by Gail Kent of The Buzz Factoree, which not only tells the story of the business, but also celebrates the idea of story.] In fact, “brands or companies without an interesting, compelling story are doomed to die,” writes Alan Siege in There’s value in storytelling.
2. Know your customers’ backstories, writes Trey Pennington in Life is a Backstory. To paraphrase Trey: Value the backstory by making a commitment to listen, explore, and discover your customers’ backstories — ask where were they before the discovered you, understand what fears, hopes, dreams, and goals are, discover what fuels their imaginations and actions. For, “storytelling reveals what your customers really think,” Siege writes. “Gathering customer stories tells you what is truly happening. No matter what organizational myth you might have, the real truth comes from your customers,” he says.
3. And once you know your customers’ story, make it your story, advises Ann Handley in What Does Storytelling Have to Do with Business?. “Find the stories of how your product lives in the world. And look to your customers for inspiration,” Handley writes. She quotes Cam Balzer, vice-president of marketing for Threadless* a community-driven T-shirt and apparel company: “Have their story be your story.” Example? Handley cites Benchmark Brands, which “incorporates customer stories of how its products help people into its marketing.” She quotes Trish Tobin, chief marketing officer: “If a shoe is meant to help someone with heel pain, we don’t just state that fact, but we tell the story of someone for whom it made a difference.” *Threadless is in itself an example of a storied business, which Maria Popova lauded in her blog Brain Pickings: “[Threadless] uses t-shirts as a vehicle to tell a wonderful and inspired story about art, design, creativity and community.”
4. Make the audience member the protagonist of your story. Taking this concept of making your customer’s story, “So closely pace the experience of the reader that they actually step into the story,” writes Jonathan Fields in Business, Branding and the Art of Storytelling, “they experience a sense of transference that goes beyond rapport.

   They become the protagonist. And, in pacing their current experience, you are telling their story, sharing their tale of woe, their pains, frustrations, emotions and deep need for resolution. You bring them to a place where they’re hanging on every word to find out just how the story resolves itself.

   Well-known blogger Chris Brogan offers an apt example of stepping into the story. Of this Levi’s video, Brogan says:

   This piece by Levi’s really moved me. It worked perfectly as a story. And that story got me interested in buying more Levi’s products, because I saw myself as part of the story. I loved what they were talking about in the story, and I was moved.

5. Help people connect more deeply with your story. Suzanne Gibbs Howard offers four tips for doing so in Good Stories Make Good Brands:
   • Share what you care about
   • Empower people to make it their own
   • Localize
   • Be discriminating
   See her elaboration on these tips — and perhaps even better — seven examples of businesses that do it well in her post
6. Story your business in a variety of situations. In Storytelling — A Powerful Tool When Branding Your Organization In Social Media, Marlene Friis lists these business uses of storytelling: breaking news, education, creating leadership, product launch, creating brand awareness, crisis management, being persistently present, creating community relations, and practice of CSR.
7. Don’t limit yourself to just one way of telling your brand’s story. Just as you should not limit yourself to any one business scenario in which to tell stories, consider various archetypal motifs or plots you might use. Although writing about presentations, the archetypes Mary Jaksch discusses in How to Prepare Public Presentations that Knock the Socks Off apply equally to business narrative:

   Climbing a mountain: how someone overcomes all difficulties to reach the summit.

   Finding the missing piece of a puzzle: how a search is finally rewarded with a new insight into how pieces fit together.

   Voyage into the unknown: how an adventurer set out into the unknown and finds a place hitherto unknown.

   The treasure hunt: how someone follows hidden clues and finally uncovers a treasure.

   The reluctant hero: how an ordinary person overcomes all odds and ends up a hero.

   Finding the source: how someone walked back in order to find the source or origin.

   The blockbuster story: you can use a story thread from popular culture. An example would be Star Wars.

8. Know how to tell a good story. In the same post referred to above, in which Chris Brogan praised the Levi’s video, Brogan offers these tips for telling a story (see his elaboration on each in his post, Storytelling for Business):
   • Start with a character and a point of view.
   • Have a point to the story.
   • Make the story useful.
   • End with a “next action.”

9. Consider improvisation and co-creation. “Good managers don’t try to control their brand’s narrative but, rather, to foster an environment in which it can be liberated, expanded and unleashed across networks,” writes Mike Bonifer. “The emphasis is not on following a script, but on improvisation,” he notes in Don’t Script, Improvise!, which is also a 14-page PDF publication. While I believe that scripted stories are often the best approach, I agree with Bonifer that businesses need to be open to improvisation in light of a constantly changing marketplace. Sometimes customer needs and opinions drive the story. Both consumers and employees are increasingly co-creating the story right along with the honchos. David Milliken of Blueline Simulations offers a thoughtful piece on this subject in Organizational Practitioners are Recognizing the Power of Story, in which he writes, “We don’t market ourselves actively as a ‘story company.’ But the ‘co-creation of narrative’ lives in everything we do.” He ends the post with this powerful question: “What is the new story of success and opportunity that you and your people might co-create together?”

10. Remember that if you don’t tell your story, your story will probably get told for you — in a way that may damage your business. Roger Dooley writes about a memorable pickle story in which a merchant would not replace a jar of pickles in which one pickle had a bite out of it. The customer vowed to tell of the merchant’s poor customer service far and wide and ensure that no one he ever encountered would patronize the merchant. (Dooley’s post also reinforces how memorable stories are, as Dooley heard this story many years ago as part of a keynote speech, and the tale is all he remembers of the speech.)

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of the story applications I follow regularly and report on periodically is the use of story for health and healing. Following are some items that caught my eye over the last several months:

• The Mayo Clinic maintains a blog, Sharing Mayo Clinic, the goal of which “is to provide a virtual place for this community to connect and share their experiences.” The stories here, in both print and video, are very well done.
• One of the blogs at Caring.com (a site for caregivers of the elderly) won the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Online Commentary/Blogging. The blog, Dad Has Dementia, is a chronicle by “Elizabeth Shean” (a pseudonym) of caring for her father with dementia. Of the blog, which seems to have ended in September 2010 some five weeks after her father’s death, she writes:

  Three months after being diagnosed with dementia, my father moved in with my husband and me. I’m a nurse by trade, a baby boomer by birth, and now, yet another overwhelmed home caregiver struggling to keep a loved one safe and happy — and keep my marriage and sanity intact. My name and a few family details have been changed to protect our privacy, but the stories and emotions of my Dad Has Dementia blog remain all too real.


• Columbia University offers a program in narrative medicine, a practice that “fortifies clinical practice with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness. Through narrative training, the Program in Narrative Medicine helps doctors, nurses, social workers, and therapists to improve the effectiveness of care by developing the capacity for attention, reflection, representation, and affiliation with patients and colleagues.”
• Shaun Perkins writes poignantly in Healing with Story: Healing the Storyteller about Bev Hart, a performance storyteller who felt she could not continue storytelling after her husband died. “What she feared,” Perkins writes, “was what it would be like to tell those stories and not be able to come home and relate that experience to her husband.”

  After her husband’s death, Hart said, “I put storytelling on a list of things that had changed and would never be the same, and I would simply not do it. It would hurt too much. Mentally, I knew I would rather stop telling stories than risk more hurt. Watching him for 8 weeks as he fought so valiantly was too much. I just would not take the risk.”

  Do read the story of how Hart did take the risk.

• A research project by the American Cancer Society “is showing the importance of cultural involvement in Native American cancer education. (The rate of cervical cancer in Northern Plains tribes is 200 to 300 percent higher than in the general population, reports the site Native Village). The project, which involves the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, shows that storytelling and visual arts are especially effective in educating Native Americans,” Native Village notes. art as a way to tell a story about cancer prevention. The piece of art, above right, created by Dr. Delf Schmidt-Grimminger and Chholing is about cervical cancer screening and HPV prevention.

  “There are 10 hands in the picture; four of them have circles, which represent the HPV virus,” Schmidt-Grimminger said. “The small dots around the virus represent anti-bodies that fight the virus, and promote good health.”

• While writing the novel Pictures of You (which will be released a week from today), Caroline Leavitt says she had a character — a 10-year-old boy with severe asthma — appear to her. Since Leavitt herself had grown up with terrible asthma, she didn’t want to write about the condition, but …

  … I found the more I wrote about this young boy with terrible asthma, the better I felt. I began taking less and less medication and then nearly none at all, until I was sure I had healed my asthma. I hadn’t, of course, but what I did heal, by giving my character compassion and love, was my own guilt, shame and grief about the disease. I started thinking more and more about how writing can heal us.

  The phenomenon inspired Leavitt to ask Henry Ehrlich, co-author of Asthma Allergies Children: a Parent’s Guide, to write a guest blog post “about how storytelling can help give a narrative to illness and make it seem more manageable.”
• George Mark Children’s House is a small clinical facility doing groundbreaking work in a new field: pediatric palliative care (which helps children and their families receive quality care that focuses on the unique physical, emotional, and spiritual needs during a life-threatening illness or condition). Although the case study by Berlin Communications is about how the facility came to be featured in People magazine, the piece illustrates how the story of an individual patient, Caitlin Dologhan (who eventually died of cancer) brought national attention to the pediatric palliative care field. See the People story.
• Hamutal Gouri has written a paper that is available for download: Once Upon a Time … And Fantasy Shall Set You Free… Can Fairy Tales Help Empower and Heal, in which she concludes, in part:

  Happiness is possible, even if life seem to have taken a wrong turn. This message is most powerfully conveyed by initiatory tales; those that celebrate a person’s painful yet vital and successful process of transformation. … These tales can be a source of inspiration, comfort and reassurance to people who are suffering, if only they let themselves believe in magic. Not in the kind of magic that is at the end of the tip of the fairy‟s wand, but in the magic inside them: their power, their faith in themselves, and their love of life.

  This section of Gouri’s Consult4Good Web site also offers wise words about story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I know I missed them — or at least missed reporting on them:

• Interview with Michael Margolis on whether storytelling can be turned into a business model: On his Rise to the Top site, David Siteman Garland asks Michael Margolis of Get Storied about storytelling as a full-fledged business and about:
  • Where the idea [of storytelling as a business] came from and how it got started.
  • How it started with a bang right out of the gates.
  • The revenue model and how it has evolved.
  • How he operates his business (Are there many employees? Partners?).
  • The keys to marketing and promoting the Get Storied content.

  Length: 33:24.

• Jonathan Fields interviews Story author Robert McKee in five parts on video.
  Part 1: Story Takes Flight
  • Part 2
  • Part 3: Persuasive Storytelling
  • Part 4: Storylogue
  • Part 5/Finale: Storytelling in Social Media
  • Articles by Dave Snowden: Even though Cognitive Edge founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dave Snowden once called me “stupid” on his blog, I recognize how well respected he is in the narrative/storytelling worlds and am thrilled with this rich trove of articles.
  • The Best Sites For Collaborative Storytelling: Educator Larry Ferlazzo offers a small collection of sites that are platforms for collaborative storytelling (and I’m now scurrying to add them to my Storytelling Platforms, Prompts, and Tools page.) UPDATE: Here’s another nice list, some items of which I’ve covered before, some I haven’t.
  • Steve Denning’s 25 Most Popular Posts: Story/management author/speaker Denning’s most-visited posts (some are on storytelling, some not), including Storytelling is a revolutionary force for change, a brief overview of the current organizational storytelling movement.
  • Nancy Duarte’s book suggestions: These books, presumably, have influenced Nancy’s brilliant ideas on delivering presentations. Storytelling books are in the minority here, but all the books can help folks give presentations that resonate.
  • David Lee’s Unleashing the Power of Storytelling audio recording: Lee, of Human Nature @ Work, offers this hour-long recording (which you can listen to on the site or download) on how to turn experiences from everyday life into powerful stories. You can also read Lee’s three-part blog series, The Mysterious Power of Stories (you can find links to the first two parts on Part 3.)

  Speaking of resources, I’ve just added a bunch of new links to my inside pages:

  • Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources
  • Links to Organizational Storytelling Resources
  • Links to Storytelling Platforms, Tools, and Prompts
  • Links about Memoir-Writing, Journaling, and Personal Storytelling
  • Links to Blogs that Relate to Storytelling

  I think my next project will be to divide the catch-all Interdisciplinary category into smaller categories.

  ---

  
  Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

   

  

I’ve been writing about my journey through reinventing my personal bio story, based on a series of webinars presented by Michael Margolis. The journey began here.

In the next part of the journey, which I described here, Michael described an exercise, which we are to have completed for tomorrow’s next part of the journey, “Synthesizing: Finding the Through-Line Arc.”

We were to create a graph in which the X axis represents our age, broken down in decades. On the Y axis, we were to plot five experiences in which we felt most connected and five in which we felt most disconnected with our values. Michael’s own graph appears at right.

My graph appears below. We weren’t asked to label our plot points, but I thought as long as I’m sharing, my graph might be more meaningful with labels, most of which are self-explanatory, and some of which I’ve written about in this space. “The Alligator” refers to The Independent Florida Alligator, the campus newspaper at the University of Florida. I worked at the Alligator for two years in my late 20s and treasure that time as one of the rare periods in my life in which I felt a sense of belonging. I also met my husband there, had my first child there (used to bring her into the newsroom when she was an infant). I realized after creating this graphic that the word “Falls” got cut off from the label “The Good Life in Kettle Falls.”

Did I find this exercise helpful? Yes and no. I found it a little difficult to limit the positive experiences, in which I felt connected to my values, to just five, while happily, I found it difficult to come up with five negative experiences in which I felt disconnected from my values. I also found it challenging to gauge on a 10-point scale exactly where each experience fell. The exercise also might have been more valuable had I not recently gone through a similar exercise of identifying good experiences through the Dependable Strengths training I underwent last fall.

Michael had asked us to think about the story that goes with each plot point. “What core value is being represented by each point?” he asked, and “Why was that moment so important?” We were then to connect the dots and look for themes and patterns. I think my graph is fairly consistent in showing that I value writing and teaching, and the experiences that disconnected me from my values were those in which I was unproductive and neither writing nor teaching (or doing so with a dark cloud over me). The good life in Kettle Falls (WA) nurtures my writing and the teaching I do through my writing.

In theory, Michael said, we would see a pattern showing “what we geek out on.” As I wrote after the last session, I already had a pretty good idea that what I geek out of — everything I love doing can be summarized as “sending content (a.k.a., information) out into the world.” That applies to teaching, blogging, book and article writing, presenting, emailing and social-media-ing with friends.

The plot-point exercise affirms that passion.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Last Friday, in his Zinsser on Friday column on the American Scholar Web site, the well-respected William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well and 17 other books, reminded me that, after 70 years, the stories of my beloved Brenda Starr, fictional role model of my childhood, would no longer be told in newspaper comic strips. (See her final strip.)

I followed Brenda’s story from the time I was 7 in The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, along with the serialized stories of several other characters and families. Like Brenda Starr (further distinguished because her creator and longtime artist/writer Dale Messick was one of a very few female comic-strip artists), some of these sagas, soap operas in comic-strip form, have ended; others continue but run in a much smaller number of newspapers than they once did. The precarious state of newspapers themselves has not helped these strips. My ability to follow Brenda Starr daily ended on January 29, 1982, when The Bulletin ceased publication. As I recall, The Philadelphia Inquirer took on some of The Bulletin’s comics, but not Brenda.

Another favorite was Winnie Winkle, the story of a fashion designer, which ended in 1996. Others I followed — Mary Worth and Gasoline Alley — and some I didn’t — like Judge Parker — are still running, but in my RV travels around the country, I’ve rarely seen them in any newspaper. Steve Roper and Kerry Drake, which I believe I sometimes followed, ended in 2004 and 1983 respectively. Gasoline Alley has the distinction of being one of the few strips in which characters age more or less in real time. Some characters have died, and some are now too old (110) to likely still be living.

While Zinsser kicked off his column with the sad news about Brenda Starr, he spent most of it talking about Blondie, “that ideal narrative, the amiable companion of my childhood and middle years,” Zinsser wrote. He had interviewed Blondie creator Chic Young.

Calling the comic strip “a textbook for any writer seeking the grail of simplicity,” Zinsser noted that “every day, in four tiny squares, it tells a story that also embodies a truth we recognize from our own lives.”

[As a tangential aside, my friend Sharon Lippincott recently wrote about using similar simple stories, employing stick figures and just a few panels or scenes as a tool for life-story writing.]

Young told Zinsser that the key to Blondie’s popularity was the strip’s simplicity:

[Young] pointed out that Blondie is built on only four elements. “Two are things that everybody does — eat and sleep. The third is sex, which I can’t use, so I substitute raising a family, and the fourth is trying to get money.”

Young described one of his favorite strips to Zinsser, noting that it told its tale in just 22 words.

It’s true that the Blondie strip usually tells stories on a small scale. But it’s perhaps surprising that the strips that told stories on a grander scale, often lasting weeks or more, have faded — at a time when storytelling is burgeoning and getting its due in so many other art forms. A relationship likely exists between the fact that televised soap operas are dwindling at the same time as soap-operatic comics are.

While Zinsser acknowledges that the Blondie strip continues to this day with Chic Young’s son Dean at the helm, he oddly declares that Dilbert is the “perfect successor” to Blondie:

Where in earlier decades the center of American life was the home, a closed universe with a familiar cast of characters facing familiar situations, today’s American home is the office, an equally closed domicile where both Dad and Mom work until 8 p.m. with a family of men and women whose capabilities and crotchets they intimately know.

I disagree that this workplace strip is the perfect successor to Blondie. First, Blondie doesn’t necessarily need a successor since it’s still going strong. Secondly, a much more logical successor is For Better or For Worse, especially in its current incarnation (the strip was for years a serialized family saga with characters who aged in real time, but as I wrote about here, creator Lynn Johnston in 2008 decided to cut back her workload and produce simpler stories in smaller arcs.)

Finally, Dilbert, in my opinion, is far less storied than Blondie ever has been, and far less storied than some currently popular strips such as Zits, and especially LuAnn, that present small story arcs.

Even if the last of the serialized comic strips survive, they will likely die when newspapers die. Already I grieve for this simple, four-panel story form that so enthralled me as long as I had access to the strips.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Came across a couple of unusual and creative ways to look at storytelling and tell stories:

On Inner Ear Ltd., Dougal Perman suggests storytelling with playlists. Noting that playlisting is “an interactive, nonlinear approach to storytelling,” Perman cites “great potential to explore this style of storytelling further using social media services and playlists.” He gives the following “example plan for telling a story with crowd sourced content:”

• Choose a theme for a playlist
• Announce the theme via your blog, Facebook page and Twitter
• Invite people to add tunes (or videos, photos or other media) to a collaborative Spotify playlist
• Hold discussions on your blog or Facebook page about the best way to order the items
• Share the playlist and promote it as a story
• Inspire others to do the same, or create complimentary artwork to accompany it

I would like to learn more about the “promote it as a story” item. What’s the best way to do that?

The other approach I observed also allows for nonlinear storytelling. Trailmeme, which bills itself as “a way to tell stories with Web content,” reminds me a lot of the more buzz-generating Storify, the tagline of which is “create stories using social media.”

A “trail,” according Trailmeme “is a (partially) sequenced collection of digital objects, such as webpages. A trail can be a straight sequence of pages or contain branches and other interesting features that allow you to construct more complex patterns and stories, such as organizing a tutorial into two branches for ‘beginner’ and ‘advanced’ material.”

Mouseover the little camera icon at left to see a sample nonlinear “trailmap.” You can also see a video about Trailmeme below. Seems to me that the Trailmeme site emphasized storytelling more the first time I visited than it does now; the “story” concept seems more toned down.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Kristiaan Van Woensel, Questions 5 and 6:

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: My business experience tells me “storytelling” is the word that triggers marketing managers. People in general, associate “storytelling” too much with the “once upon a time” cliché, which makes it pretty hard to be taken seriously as a business-communication consultant!

“Brand storytelling,” “story sharing” or “story working” are non-provocative terms I use in my daily meetings with managers and they work fine!

The best definition of “story” for my business purposes is the one from The Elements of Persuasion book. (Richard Maxwell & Robert Dickman):

A story is a fact, wrapped in an emotion that compels us to take an action that transforms our world.

We use this definition as a turning point in our corporate presentations and the public seems to like it! [Note: Link in this paragraph goes to the presentation illustrated above.]

Why do they actually? More than likely, because we emphasize on the word “fact,” which is a pretty important “nuance” to pharma marketers, who breath scientific facts and data!

Q: Your Web site states: “Marketing plans don’t read like a novel and actually they should.” How do you go about creating marketing plans that read like novels — or at least have story elements?

A: A marketing plan is much more than a strategic document, reserved for marketing department and sales force only. A marketing plan is the lighthouse on paper, that will lead every member, working on a brand team, toward the common objectives for the upcoming business year. No matter what your function or position is within a team, you should know the base of the marketing plan of the brand you’re working for!

“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” That goes for a brand team as well! For a marketing plan to be really successful, it should be understandable for every brand team member so that you, as brand team leader, can get your team aligned.

What we propose brand managers to do is quite simple: shape your 60-page marketing plan into a story of one page and win the hearts of all brand team members! Drill down your marketing plan to the essence and focus on three story elements to create your one pager:

Quantitative brand objective 2011: “how much” you want to get!

Qualitative brand objective 2011: “how good” you want to get!

Main brand program 2011: “how” you are going to get your brand objectives!

A simple job to copywriters and storytellers, but I admit, a true burden for marketeers! Why is it so hard for marketeers?

It’s in the marketeer’s DNA to collect the 3 F’s, with their analytical minds: Facts, Figures and Features. Marketeers think, speak and live by numbers and graphs, not by stories…

So, here’s where The Story House jumps in and supports brand managers with the making of their brand plan story. We give recommendations about the most appropriate metaphor or story angle to use for a particular brand-plan story. We advise brand managers to use or speak their audience’s language! Brand managers speak mainly rationally while sales people and non-marketing employees talk more “emotion.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Kristiaan Van Woensel, Question 4:

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

A: Like a sponge is predisposed to take loads of water, nothing else pleases me more than diving into storytelling books and swallowing new insights and ideas! Although we have a common idea about what defines a good story, I’m surprised everytime I open a new storytelling book to run into new and different insights about the art of storytelling.

The books that have lit the fire within me are various, but each deserves my recommendation: The Elements of Persuasion (Richard Maxwell & Robert Dickman), The Springboard (Stephen Denning), Wake Me When the Data is Over (Lori Silverman), The Story Factor (Annette Simmons), Storytelling: Branding in Practice (Klaus Fog), What’s your Story? (Craig Wortmann), Made to Stick (Chip & Dan Heath), The Elements of Story (Francis Flaherty), Believe Me (Michael Margolis), Story (Robert McKee), The Making of a Story (Alice LaPlante), Storycatcher (Christina Baldwin), Resonate (Nancy Duarte), All Marketers Are Liars (Seth Godin), and Speak Human (Eric Karjaluoto)

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Almost daily, someone thanks me via Twitter for featuring him or her in the StorytellingPractitioners Daily. This week, I was also chided for a less-than-appropriate choice of content.

The thing is … I don’t make the content choices. I feel very guilty about the expressions of gratitude because I play almost so role whatsoever in choosing the content that is featured in this online publication.

The publication is automatically generated every day by a site called Paper.li, which “organizes links shared on Twitter [and apparently, now Facebook] into an easy-to-read newspaper-style format.”

I don’t know how content is chosen; I’m assuming it’s through some sort of algorithm.

For a Twitter-based publication, Paper.li uses either the links tweeted by a person’s followers based on a hashtag, or in the case of StorytellingPractitioners Daily, the tweets of people on a given Twitter list.

To be included in StoryPractitioners Daily, a person or entity needs to be on my @AStoriedCareer StorytellingPractitioners list. My only role in choosing the content for StorytellingPractitioners Daily is having placed specific Twitter followers on my StorytellingPractitioners list.

If you want to be included in the StorytellingPractitioners Daily, follow @AStoriedCareer, and be sure I can discern from your profile that you should be on the StorytellingPractitioners list.

I appreciate the thanks, but I really don’t deserve them.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Kristiaan, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Kristiaan Van Woensel, Question 3:

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: Over the last 10 years, globalization and the Internet have changed the way how we tend to drive business, dramatically! You can clearly say and see, “there are no barriers anymore for companies to conquer the world,” in times where everything and everyone is deliverable and accessible, 24/24. All this may not have frightened companies as such; a great part of its employees, however, are having problems with coping and adapting to this overwhelming biotope. People got off track since their place in society got swallowed by a bigger entity. “From local to global” is just one scary leap too much for many of us. People have lost their ability to do what antcesters ever did before them: the primary need to tell and share stories with people around.

Not a big surprise, that a former Harvard College social network became such a huge hit and currently groups more than 500 million users worldwide. But what Facebook really demonstrates is “The law of proximity” in practice: (objects near each other tend to be grouped together).

The closer we are to someone, the more we are willing to share, the deeper our stories will be and how bigger the overall storyboard will look like. You can have so many friends on Facebook; you’ll exchange profound stories with only the closest you know in a setting that is familiar to you and where you know exactly what you may expect: resonance with your public.

Globalization makes “finding of resonance” very hard if not, impossible. Storytelling helps us to restore our local biotope!

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The new Web site of seminal storytelling speaker and author Annette Simmons features, for the first time, a blog.

She shared with me her first blog post, Words are no more powerful than the stories they tell, sparked by the tragic events last weekend in Tucson.

Please give it a read. I think you’ll find your thoughts provoked by her observations on the metaphor of war and the power of words and stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Kristiaan, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Kristiaan Van Woensel, Question 2:

Q: You noted in an e-mail to me that your “biggest challenge is to persuade pharma brand managers to wrap up their scientific data in a context and emotions, rather than do data mining solely.” How do you address that challenge? How do you get buy-in for storytelling with your clients? Also, why did you choose to target the pharmaceutical industry?

A: A controversial phenomenon that I acknowledge in pharma business for several years now is that its marketing and brand managers tend to ignore the uniqueness of their business targets: physicians (the ones that prescribe the drugs for patients)! The profession of physician, being a general practitioner or a specialist, is quite complex since his/her daily life balances between science (data and ratio) and people (emotion) in every aspect of his/her acts. However, the majority of pharma marketeers emphasize mainly on one side of their brand communications: scientific data from clinical trials that support the excellence of the brands they work for. Odd but true … the human side of the doctor, his/her ability to listen to patient stories, short and long, his/her empathic ability to live together with patients emotions, being it happiness, sadness, defeat or loss, has been neglected by pharma industry. “Speak human” to “human” physicians, through “brand stories” is what we preach marketeers to do!

Scientific data give physicians the intellectual permission to prescribe drugs, but it is an emotional reason that make them actually do it.

So, I use three arguments to create the buy-in for “brand storytelling” in my discussions with pharma brand leaders.

People remember stories, not data: I illustrate the power of brand storytelling through examples from outside pharma industry. What’s important is that you need to focus on recent ‘best practices’ that can open managers’ eyes and change their paradigm. The rescue team in Chile, relying on Oakley eyewear to protect the miners’ eyes when they were brought back to the surface is a great and successful brand story to tell. The features of the Oakley Radar® sunglasses were inferior to the rescue itself. The world cared about the 33 Chilean miners when they left the belly of the earth after 69 days of captivity. We wanted to do everything to get these heroes back with their families, healthy and well. Protecting their eyes against UV light was on everyone’s mind. The world will never forget those images of the return of the miners with flashy eyewear … it is an unforgettable (brand) story. Alas, the story data will vanish with time: 33 Chilean miners; 630 meters depth; 69 days of captivity; number “33” is a magical number says Chile’s president! (rescue was on 13-10-10 → 13+10+10=33) along with the Radar® ‘s features. (see brand story case - ‘“How the Radar made the globe care”)

“Speak human” to physicians because they’re humans, too! The graphs we present in our corporate presentation focus on the physician’s balance between the scientific part of his/her job and the human aspect.

Showing the visuals helps us a to win the managers’ confidence to use a more balanced brand communication. We show them all different means that can support them when shaping a pharma brand message into a pharma brand story (see green table*).

Stories are made to share: Unlike scientific data, good stories are made to share from physician to patient, and from patient to patient. Scientific data do resonate for physicians, but they hardly do for patients. However, data that are wrapped up in a compelling context, could resonate with the patient’s worldview!

I’ve never targeted pharmaceutical industry consciously. How I ended up in pharma business is a story that stands on its own. Being a former physical education teacher, now almost 25 years ago(and at that time 20 kilos lighter), I was formed to become a coach of sportsmen or a physical education teacher, just like many of my family members before me. However, I was looking for a bigger challenge in my professional life, that would combine multiple skills and aspects from my educational background: medical science, social skills, management skills. My first assignment in a major pharmaceutical industry fulfilled my expectations completely : interaction with doctors, scientific talks, organizing meetings, etc. I loved my business environment right away and stayed! Over the last 20 years I have worked for 3 major pharma companies in different sales and marketing assignments until I started in 2009 with The Story House.

• Use story elements
• Use founder stories
• Use GM stories
• Use R&D stories
• Use marketing and sales stories
• Use literature stories
• Use HCP stories
• Use patient stories
• Use family/patient relative stories
• Use PAG stories
• Use visuals
• Use metaphors
• Use sequels

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I learned about Kristiaan Van Woensel when he made a comment here on A Storied Career, which inspired me to look into his Belgian agency, The Story House. I’m delighted to have him as part of the Q&A series. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: Kristiaan Van Woensel is a communication consultant and founder (in mid-2009) of The Story House, a business communication consultancy.

His fortune in life is to help people wherever he can and to share his knowledge and experience with anyone who wants to listen. His family is his treasure!

His passion is the understanding of how humans interact and how to use these insights for business purposes.

His mission is to help marketeers how to tell about their brands in passionate stories. His 20 years experience in multiple marketing and sales assignments in pharmaceutical industry, together with his expertise in “brand storytelling” (for Genzyme, Ipsen, Mylan, Pfizer, Xwebinar…) are helping him to make pharma brand managers see to speak “human” with their business targets, physicians.

An extended bio can be found on LinkedIn.

Q&A with Kristiaan Van Woensel, 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: “Well, let me tell you a story about … this marketing manager who had been working for several major pharmaceutical companies over the last 20 years … until that moment in time, four years ago to be precise, when he discovered he still loved the job but had no private life anymore. There was not enough time left to spend with his family after work, there was hardly some time to read the classical fairy tails for bedtime to his kids. The manager even fell asleep before his kids heard little Red Riding Hood’s plot. Sounds familiar to you? So, one evening he told himself this had to stop and started the day after with creating his own child stories in the hope to stay awake at least (from his childhood on, he loved to create and tell stories out of the blue) and to entertain his children with quality time.

That decision was a turning point in the man’s life. The storybuilding and storytelling worked out really well, even so fine his kids were thrilled night after night to hear his stories along with seeing his funny gestures. Unlike the classical fairy tales, they were motivated to retell his stories in detail afterwards to family members. And the man … stayed awake, mission accomplished! However, he realized some of the stories were nicely written and entertaining, so he started to write down what he had created before history would take it all away from him, forever.”

That was my first children’s book I wrote, but more importantly, that act made me realize I had failed to create successful brand messages in my daily job. “Light the fire within your customers with compelling stories that they can understand, breath in and breath out and share with peers,” should have been the essence of brand communication. Until then, I realized I had focused too much on pure brand message delivery solely and too less on (brand) storytelling. Yet, the latter had always been an essential part of who I am, only I wasn’t aware until that experience of the children stories. How can I thank you, my sons!

Not much later, I quit my job and started my own communication agency The Story House and became a missionary of brand storytelling in pharma industry in my home country, Belgium.

What intrigues me so much about storytelling for business purposes is actually threefold.

Firstly, “storytelling” is such a rich and meaningful medium to work with, and for the creator, and for the teller, and for the listener, and for the story characters that drive the story! Not in the least for the sponsor of the story! Defining which story elements, which story angle, what tone of the story, which images, which metaphors you are going to select to make the most inspiring brand story, makes it all so special!

Secondly, people are surprised to find out that capturing the right brand story for the right moment, ain’t necessarily a “mission impossible!” Mostly, marketeers don’t realize they already possess the story they’re eager to communicate. We, at The Story House, are pretty much the katalysator for marketeers to bring up their best brand stories.

Thirdly, storytelling is such a thankful medium! Since we work very closely together with our clients in the creative process of a brand story, in which they bring up most story elements themselves, the client’s engagement to deliver an excellent story is strongly present. People have the feeling they’ve created the story from A to Z, which makes them proud story owners.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been running excerpts from the first and second parts of storyteller Eric James Wolf’s interview with me. In this excerpt, he asked me how I describe the benefits of storytelling to other people in the business world. My response:

I call upon the gurus who evangelized storytelling long before I did — people like Annette Simmons and Steve Denning and others, early pioneers who wrote books that have become the foundation for current business narrative/organizational storytelling.

Simmons characterizes the effectiveness of stories in business in her landmark book, The Story Factor (Chapters 2 and 5):

• Story creates power.
  
• Story is a form of mental imprint.
  
• Story is a dynamic tool of influence because it gives people enough space to think for themselves.
  
• In a complex environment, people listen to whomever makes the most sense — whomever tells the best story (Simmons’s followup book is titled Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins.)
  
• Story makes sense of chaos and gives people a plot. People need story to organize their thoughts and make sense of things.
  
• Story invites people to creatively reframe their dilemmas, while rules alienate people who want to think for themselves.
  
• Change people’s stories and you change their behavior.
  
• Story is like mental software that you supply so your listener can run it again using new input specific to the situation.
  
• Story is uniquely equipped to touch you and help you touch others in this place that cannot be understood, explained, or reduced to a flow chart.
  
• Story builds connections between you and those you wish to influence.
  
• Story helps the brain remember.

And from the Australian consulting firm, Anecdote:

• Stories reveal what’s really happening in your organisation
  
• Stories inspire us to take action
  
• Stories stick in your mind much better than [bulllet] points and clever arguments
  
• Stories connect us to a purpose and improve our performance
  
• Stories share and embed values

Marguerite Granat posted a list of rationales for story in business, which I reprinted here.

Finally, not part of my response to Eric Wolf, is a post by Mike Hamilton on Get Synchronicity entitled Core Elements of Storytelling, in which he lists these benefits (see his full post for his elaboration on each):

• Storytelling is the great equalizer.
• Storytelling clearly and quickly communicates complex ideas.
• Storytelling is a powerful instrument of persuasion and influence.
• Storytelling is your personal business card.
• Storytelling communicates and builds value systems in organizations.
• Storytelling encourages collaboration and unifies teams.
• Storytelling builds community and promise.
• Storytelling ignites action.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Not too long ago, I came across the “36 Dramatic Situations that may be found in many stories,” developed, according to ChangingMinds.com, by 19th century French writer Georges Polti, in turn, based, Polti said, on the list identified by Goethe who said it was originated by Italian Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806).

The first thing you’ll notice is the dated feel to many of these situations. I don’t even get some of them; what, for example is an “involuntary crime of love?”

The ChangingMinds site notes that some folks have taken the list of 36 as definitive. Although “Polti initially said there was ‘exactly 36 dramatic situations … and therein we have all the savour of existence,’” based on books like Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, it seems likely that the 36 situations could edited and condensed. Vengeance is vengeance, and self-sacrifice is self-sacrifice, so their underlying motivations seem superfluous.

How would you edit and modernize the list?

Antiquated though the list may be, it’s worth pondering. The situations could be used as story prompts. Over 36 days, you could each day choose one and write a story about it. You could analyze books and movies based on how these situations fit.

Can you think of any contemporary plot situations that aren’t covered by the list, perhaps because of the way the world has changed since the 19th century?

1. Supplication
2. Deliverance
3. Vengeance of a crime
4. Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred
5. Pursuit
6. Disaster
7. Falling prey to cruelty or misfortune
8. Revolt
9. Daring enterprise
10. Abduction
11. Enigma
12. Obtaining
13. Enmity of kinsmen
14. Rivalry of kinsmen
15. Murderous adultery
16. Madness
17. Fatal imprudence
18. Involuntary crimes of love
19. Slaying of a kinsman unrecognized
20. Self-sacrificing for an ideal
21. Self-sacrifice for kindred
22. All sacrificed for a passion
23. Necessity of sacrificing loved ones
24. Rivalry of superior and inferior
25. Adultery
26. Crimes of love
27. Discovery of the dishonor of a loved one
28. Obstacles to love
29. An enemy loved
30. Ambition
31. Conflict with a god
32. Mistaken jealousy
33. Erroneous judgment
34. Remorse
35. Recovery of a lost one
36. Loss of loved ones

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Peter Guber, Question 5

Q: What makes your new book, Tell To Win, so special?

A: It can change your Monday. In fact, it can change every day both personally and professionally. Using the emotional propulsion of a powerful narrative or any of the core elements described in detail in the book can be a game-changer. Success and failure are millimeters apart. The ability to tell purposeful stories is in everyone’s DNA. Tell To Win tells you how to unleash it and power your success.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Peter Guber, Question 4

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: We’re living in an age of acute economic uncertainty and rapid technological change. It is not the 0’s and 1’s of the digital world, but the ooh’s and aah’s of telling your stories that can overcome fear and make the powerful emotional connections in its listeners, compelling them to act. Great stories sell products, build brands, foster relationships, and change history. Connecting with others through telling your story is your single most powerful advantage.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Peter, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Peter Guber, Question 3:

Q: In yesterday’s post, you championed oral, face-to-face storytelling. Is it not possible to achieve the same effects of oral storytelling with written or digital storytelling or other delivery methods?

A: I would say you can’t yet duplicate the same effects of telling oral stories in the same room breathing the same air, pressing the flesh. However, many of the critical elements of telling purposeful stories work in other mediums.

Always motivation comes first which starts with you — your intention. This authenticity must shine through. The trick is not to try to be interesting, but to be interested — know what your audience is interested in and deliver what’s in it for them.

All good telling of stories has a goal — the action you want your listener to take. Don’t hide it. Interactively, engage your listener, your audience, so it’s not a monologue, but a dialogue. It is a conversation in which the telling becomes a “we” experience rather than a “me” experience. A critical marker is the willingness of the teller to surrender proprietorship over the story so the listener can own it and viral market it as her own.

The story content is lurking everywhere — first-person experience is best, but equally powerful is an observed event, a movie/book/artifact, or even a metaphor or analogy

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Peter, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Peter Guber, Question 2:

Q: You particularly emphasize oral storytelling. What’s your rationale for that emphasis?

A: The highest and best use for telling purposeful stories is in the room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading each other’s micro-expressions — something you can’t do as effectively in any other medium.

In writing my new book, Tell To Win, I conversed with the foremost folks in technology — people like Chris Kemp, chief information officer at NASA Ames Research Center, Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer at Hewlett Packard, and Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, and many others — and asked them if digital or state-of-the-art technology could replace what I call state-of-the-heart technology. Their response was an overwhelmingly consistent “not at this time.” In fact, Arianna said it best when she asserted in front of one of my master’s UCLA classes where I’ve been a professor for more than 30 years, that the more time we spend in front of screens, the more we crave the intimate in person interactions where we tell our stories to realize our dreams. And, she didn’t stop there! She exhorted my students that if there’s something incredibly important upon which everything depends, you always want to be in the room.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I believe my first exposure to Peter Guber as a storytelling guru was his participation in Steve Denning’s annual Smithsonian storytelling conference a few years back. Though I didn’t attend that year, I became aware of Guber’s passion for storytelling. Later, I read his popular piece in the Harvard Business Review, “Four Truths of Storytelling” (which you can purchase for $6.95 from Harvard Business Review; Steve Denning offers a summary of the article here). I’m thrilled to have him participate in my Q&A series. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: Founder and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, the visionary multimedia venture spanning movies, TV, sports, and new media, Peter Guber is an enormously successful executive in the entertainment and communications industries. 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 can currently be seen as co-host of “In the House,” a weekly, national half-hour news and interview show on Encore and KNBC. “In the House,” and it’s predecessor, “Shootout”, have been on air for more than six years.

A passionate, humorous and tireless motivator, Guber is a sought after speaker at numerous global events. He is a weekly entertainment and media analyst for Fox Business News and has also appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Today Show,” MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” Fox News’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” and CNBC’s “WSJ with Maria Bartiromo.”

A noted author, Guber co-wrote the best seller, Shootout, which was released in hardcover and paperback. In December 2007, Guber wrote the cover article for the Harvard Business Review titled, “The Four Truths of the Storyteller.” He also authored op-ed pieces for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Guber’s third book, Tell To Win — Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story, will be published by Crown on March 1. The core message of his forthcoming business book is that a purposeful story, well told, can move people to shared goals and greater success.

Guber is co-founder of Geek Chic Daily, a daily email newsletter with inside information on video games, technology and apps, comics, collectibles, TV and film. He is an investor and serves on the board of directors of Demand Media, a leading content and social media company at the forefront of the new media landscape. Guber is the chair of the Founding Board of Advisors for The Center for Managing Enterprises in Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES) at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In November of 2010, Peter Guber, together with Joe Lacob, Managing Partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, acquired the Golden State Warriors. Guber is owner and co-executive chairman of the NBA franchise that services the Bay Area.

Guber is a full professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and has been a member of the faculty for more than 30 years. He is a member of the UCLA Foundation Board of Trustees, as well as the winner of UCLA’s prestigious Service Award for his accomplishments and association with the university.

Connect with Peter Guber through Facebook and Twitter.

Q&A with Peter Guber, Question 1:

Q: You’re a well-known storyteller in the area of entertainment, having produced a plethora of the most critically acclaimed and financially successful movies ever. What inspired you to write a new book about telling purposeful stories?

A: I’ve had 40 years of experience in every area of telling stories — from leading entertainment companies, sports enterprises, new-media ventures, entrepreneurial endeavors to serving as a professor at UCLA where among the many courses I teach is an annual class called “Navigating A Narrative World.”

Despite this history, it wasn’t until Act III of my life when I had an epiphany that the power of oral storytelling is the secret to professional and personal success. My “ah-ha” was that everyone shares a universal problem — to succeed you need to persuade your listener or listeners to support your vision, dream, or cause. In decoding my own successes and failures, a consistent pattern emerged. I realized that when I was successful, I was connecting to my listeners emotionally, aiming at their hearts by telling purposeful stories. Embedded in these stories was the information on which I wanted them to act. When I failed, I was firing soulless PowerPoint bullets, facts, and information. In other words — I was firing blanks!

Through my new book, Tell To Win, as well as through media interviews, speeches, articles, and graduate courses I teach at UCLA, my mission has become to empower students and others to benefit from the persuasive power of telling purposeful stories and using this as their game changer in the Act I’s and Act II’s of their lives. In fact, it was at the exhortation of my master’s students that I codify the currency that resulted from “Navigating A Narrative World” so it could be shared with a wider audience, that inspired me to write a book on this subject.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Back on Dec. 12 (last year!), I invited readers to come along on a journey to create a “Bio: Based on a True Story,” consisting of mapping plot points, finding the through-line arc, and packaging the story for social media.

This journey springs from a series of three webinars delivered by Michael Margolis as a followup to his recent Reinvention Summit: Virtual Summit on the Future of Storytelling. Two webinars were to have taken place in consecutive weeks in December, but Michael came down with the flu and had to postpone the second one, which turned out well for me because I’ve had more time to ponder it, do my homework, compose this post, as well as summarize the first webinar on a separate page.

Webinar 1, as you can see in the graphic, was about remembering and mapping plot points toward one’s personal bio story. In this post, I’m attempting to describe my own journey through the major concepts and exercises in the process.

Early on, Michael criticized bios that include phrases like “[name of person] is the leading blah, blah, blah.” Oops … as in my statement right here on this blog: “Kathy Hansen, PhD, is a leading proponent of deploying storytelling for career advancement.” At least I said “a leading” rather than “the leading.”

“Is it really about superiority?” Michael asked, “noting that “if you’re really the leader, it should be self-evident.” That’s certainly food for thought for me because perhaps people don’t consider me a leading proponent of deploying storytelling for career advancement. Storytelling in job search and career is clearly my major niche, but others do what I do. I know I bristle when folks write about storytelling in job search and career and don’t cite me as one of the experts. I need to think about whether I really own this niche, and if so, how well am I getting my message across.

Next, Michael talked about the need for a backstory and how our identities play into that. The name we are given at birth is clearly part of that story. Michael presented an exercise, taken from a writing exercise in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Without lifting our writing instruments off the paper for a period of — I think — two minutes, we were to write everything that our given names evoke for us.

I didn’t participate in the exercise at the time, in part because I was typing up notes about the webinar and partly because, as an introvert, I don’t enjoy or do well with activities in which I have to brainstorm on the spot. I need time to ponder and process.

But if I had, my thoughts about my name, “Katharine,” would be:

• It comes from the Greek and means “pure.”
• Family lore has always had it that my sister and I should have switched names. I was named for my maternal great-grandmother, Katharine Hathaway Fenimore, while my sister was named for our paternal grandmother, Margaret Robinson Sumner. However, my sister looked like Katharine Hathaway Fenimore and had traces of her personality, while I looked like Margaret Robinson Sumner and was a bit like her in demeanor.
• I love my name and the fact that I share its unusual spelling with admirable women like Katharine Hepburn and Katharine Graham, but I don’t love the fact that people misspell it as Katherine 98 percent of the time.
• I usually like to see my full name, Katharine, in print, but like to be called by my nickname, Kathy.

Other factors than play into our backstories, Michael said, include our parents, geographical backgrounds, and where we went to school (or where we studied, as Michael put it).

The fact that my father was a writer has always been hugely influential in my life.

South Jersey, where I grew up, was a good place to leave, but my beautiful hometown, Moorestown, is intertwined with my family history, my ancestors having played a role in founding the town in 1682. I’ve always found it significant that both my maternal and paternal ancestors came to America from England on the same ship, the Kent, in 1677.

I think less significant in my schooling than any single school I attended was the fact that it took five universities and 19 years for me to earn my bachelor’s degree. The school at which I earned my doctorate was significant for its unsuitability for my obtaining the kind of teaching job I wanted (of course, I didn’t realize it was unsuitable while in the program).

In the webinar’s final exercise, the one we are to prepare for the next session on Jan. 18, has us creating a graph in which the X axis represents our age, broken down in decades. On the Y axis, we are to plot five experiences in which we felt most connected and five in which we felt most disconnected with our values. Michael’s own graph is shown at left.

Michael asked us to think about the story goes with each plot point. “What core value is being represented by each point?” he asked, and “Why was that moment so important?” We are then to connect the dots and look for themes and patterns.

In theory, we’ll see a pattern showing “what we geek out on,” a concept also shared in the previous session.

Procrastinator that I am, I haven’t created my graph yet. I’ll share mine around the time of the Jan. 18 next session. I have been thinking about what I geek out on however. I feel that everything I love doing can be summarized as “sending content (a.k.a., information) out into the world.” That applies to teaching, blogging, book and article writing, presenting, emailing and social-media-ing with friends, even things like sending Christmas cards. I have a particular fondness for compiling packets of information and disseminating them to folks. I don’t even necessarily need feedback on what I send out. I just like knowing it’s out there.

Look for more on this journey toward a storied bio mid-month.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As a I read part of CNN.com’s series about storytelling and reporting skills called iReport Boot Camp a few months ago, it occurred to me that the story-editing tips in the article by CNN.com Enterprise Editor Jan Winburn could apply to stories in presentations and in the job search. I’m sure they could apply to many other storytelling applications, too, but those two were on my mind. Here are the five questions Winburn recommends in editing a story:

• Through whose eyes am I telling this story? As a job-seeker, you’re probably telling the story through your own eyes, but it could be through the eyes of a present or former employer — telling what the problem/situation/or challenge looked like through the eyes of the employer and what you did to address the issue and get results. As a presenter, you might be telling the story through your own or other eyes. Say you’re telling a story on behalf of a nonprofit; you might tell it through the eyes of a person typical of those you’re trying to help.
• Who has something at stake?For the job-seeker, the “who has something at stake” may be you, your employer, your team, your customers, and other possibilities. The presenter could answer the “Who has something at stake?” question in a number of ways. As Gerry Lantz pointed out in a presentation last year, it’s also important to look at what’s at stake. The “what’s at stake” detail can be especially vivid and compelling in a job-interview story, as the interviewer gets a sense of the impact of the job-seeker’s contribution.
• What’s going to happen next? For Winburn, this question refers to building suspense and not revealing the climax too soon.
• What’s the story really about? Winburn suggests this exercise to answer the question: “Describe your story in three to five words. Now reduce that description to one word. If you can’t, you’re still focused on the story’s content. Finding just one word will force you to name its theme.” Being able to pin down this theme is important to ensure you are telling the right story for the situation. In a job-seeking situation, for example, you’d want your theme to coincide with skills, strengths, requirements, and so forth for the targeted job.
• Where should the story begin? Winburn says to “begin with a scene or a moment or description that contains the story’s essential meaning.” Job-seekers and presenters would want to start in a place that doesn’t include too much extraneous background.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Curious about the winning 6-word “story” to sum up 2010 that I mentioned here? Me, too. I can’t find the winner in print anywhere and don’t have the patience to listen to the 30+-minute radio show that announced the winner a couple of days ago. The contest got 300+ entries, and radio host Leonard Lopate interviewed seven submitters on Dec. 29.

The show is embedded below. Hey, if you listen to it and learn the winner, why not post it as a comment so we all know? Yeah, I know we’re ready to devote our energies to 2011 and say goodbye to 2010.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The ladies at Women’s Memoirs have compiled 11 lists of 111 items each for 2011 — such as 11 tips for staying motivated with your journaling in 2011, 11 great memoirs to read in 2011, 11 ways to scrapbook your stories in 2011, and more.

Read them over the next 11 days, starting with today’s 11 Memoir Predictions for 2011.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.