I’ll make this somewhat brief as I’m sleep-deprived from watching a source of thousands of stories — the royal wedding.

I’ve written before about What Stories Can Do That Metrics Can’t.

A couple of recent articles underscore that point. I’m kind of taking them out of context, but together, they make the point that we often need more than data.

In the first article, In a Data-Heavy Society, Being Defined by the Numbers (which does not even mention stories), Alina Tugend laments that our society is turning more and more to numbers. She cites journalist and author of How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer: “Numbers make intangibles tangible. They give the illusion of control … We want to quantify everything, to ground a decision in fact, instead of asking whether that variable matters.”

Tugend closes the article by talking about how author Robin Black got caught up in measuring the success of her book of short stories. The stories of the impact her book had on readers provided a reality check about measuring success:

All those numbers help us lose sight of why we’re really doing what we’re doing. Ms. Black, for instance, said her books were largely about loss.

“I’ll get a letter from someone who says, ‘My daughter died, and reading your book really helped,’ ” Ms. Black said. “That’s so meaningful. How do I measure that against 500 Twitter followers?”

The second article, Joe Chernov’s Measuring by Anecdote with SlideShare, provides some apt words on why a story may be a more meaningful — or at least more complete — way to “measure:”

Sometimes data isn’t enough to fully measure a phenomenon. Sometimes a story is required to hold all of the data together, the way mortar is needed to fix bricks in place.

Numbers can tell us a lot. But they cannot imbue meaning the way stories can.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Nice synchronicity this week among three organizational-storytelling luminaries.

In The Benefits of Building a Narrative Organization, my friend Thaler Pekar describes these four benefits — brand identity, audience engagement, smart leadership, and knowledge sharing — and gives a terrific example of each.

In “Organizational Judgment,” another one of his well-produced conversation-starter videos (embedded below), my friend Terrence Gargiulo says, “Bring a storied consciousness to work so you don’t have to make judgments, but you can act decisively.” Like Thaler, Terrence shares an illustrative story, about seeing a family in an airport, post 9/11, that appeared to be Muslim and how the people in the boarding line seemed to be making judgments about the family.

Terrence says:

Judgments separate us from others. They hold us secure and tight in assumed positions of superiority. What if we let the scaffolding of being judgmental drop away? Can we really halt our knee jerk reflexes to label, categorize and evaluate people’s actions and words based our individually constructed value driven world view? While good intentions and self-awareness are a start — they’re not enough … Stories help me quite a bit.

When radical-management guru Steve Denning heard that the TED folks were hosting their first-ever open audition for speakers, he was excited, though he lamented that it would be “impossible to summarize a big complex, even intimidating set of ideas like radical management in 60 seconds, particularly given the short deadline for preparing the video” (April 25).

But then Steve thought, “Why not use storytelling and give it a shot? If storytelling is really worth its salt, surely it should be able to communicate anything very rapidly and powerfully.” So, the result — a video not so much about storytelling as presented in something of a story form — is How Organizations Became Curators of the Human Spirit.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Remember how I wrote recently that a number of special days are set aside to celebrate storytelling?

I just learned (from my former student Stephanie Ryan) that today is one of them, National Tell a Story Day. The day doesn’t appear to have its own Web site, but the site Holiday Insights has this to say about it:

Tell a Story Day celebrates story-telling of all kinds. It doesn’t matter if its fiction or non-fiction, a tall tale, or folk lore. Today is a day to tell ‘em all. Stories can be from a book, other written material, or from memory.

Our research discovered two distinct holidays, one in the U.S. The other is in Scotland and the UK. The latter is by far more prominent and organized. These two holidays are exactly six months apart.

Our research did not find the creator, or the origin of this day. We do wonder why the British holiday and the U.S. holiday are exactly six months apart. We believe there is some kind of story here.

Libraries celebrate this day with story telling hours for kids. You can enjoy today telling stories to your kids, family members, or organizations and groups that you belong to.

Make Tell a Story Day an important and pleasure-filled experience. To enhance the enjoyment of the story, try setting the atmosphere. If it’s an eerie or spooky story, turn down the lights. Bring decorations and memorabilia that speak to the theme. If its about a person, display a picture of the individual.

OK, so it’s a bit late to plan a formal activity, but you can always tell a story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A storytelling challenge on the Mozilla Drumbeat site caught my eye, but first I needed to understand more about what Drumbeat is. It’s a global community of innovators who are “building a more awesome web and world” by connecting with others, finding projects that need help, or sharing their own projects.

“Mozilla is all about shaping the future of the web for the public good,” the site says, and building more things that make the web better, not just software. They’re doing that “by reaching out to new kinds of people — educators, filmmakers, journalists, scientists, artists — to work together on open projects and design challenges that build a better web and world.”

A challenge just issued on Drumbeat is to explore ways to “enrich news video through things like added context, deeper viewer engagement, and the real time web” and discover “untapped possibilities inherent in many-to-many, web video.”

I was especially intrigued by the list of items suggested as food-for-thought springboards, particularly with Storify very much in the news this week:

• Visit sites like Storify and Paper.li. What might a similar aggregation experience feel like for video?
• Watch how the recent PBS Annotated State of the Union video mixes analysis of the speech with the video itself.
• Check out Arte’s experiments with “semantic” [1] [2]
• Read about The Stream, and consider how social media and live video can complement each other. [I believe The Stream is powered by Storify, as noted in yesterday’s post.]
• Visit the Popcorn.js site and check out some of the examples and documentation. Then, visit Mozilla’s Web of Wonder, and consider how new technologies like WebGL, canvas, and CSS3 can help address this challenge.
• Explore how transcripts, subtitles, and linked text can give users different ways to engage with rich media.

The “Unlocking Video” Mozilla Drumbeat Challenge then asks participants to consider:
What creative storytelling approaches do these new web video tools open up for news organizations?

• How might you tell a story by pulling in video, data and other material from across the web?
• How can semantic video help audiences dig deeper into other forms of context and content?
• How do we create compelling narrative experiences — and avoid overwhelming viewers with too much information?

The challenge is open until May 6, and full details can be found here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

You’ve probably seen this graphic on Guy Kawasaki’s site. Just wanted to include it here because it succinctly captures many high points of organizational storytelling/business narrative.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Story platforms launch all the time on the Web, but few have enjoyed the buzz that Storify has. I wrote about it here and here.

In private beta for many months, Storify is finally in public beta — meaning anyone can go to the platfom and create an account to tell stories with social media.

Storify has a journalistic bent rather than a personal or “lifestreaming” slant. The New York Times notes:

Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites. During a private test period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and other outlets used the service.

From the Storify folks:

Storify stories have been viewed more than 13 million times on our site and across the Web since our private beta launched at the end of September 2010. We had 4.2 million views just in March, our biggest month yet.

Our private beta users have created more than 21,000 stories. Storify stories have been embedded on more than 5,000 sites — including some of the most-read destinations on the Web like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, PBS, CBC, and many other blogs and sites.

Storify is powering an entire show on Al Jazeera that revolves around social media.

You can log onto Storify using a Twitter account.

As I worked on this post, a Storify story with local interest caught my eye. Columbia River Crossing is about the response on social media to the decision to build a “deck truss” bridge across the Columbia River. Although this story consists mostly of tweets, richer and more diverse content is possible on Storify.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Get Storied is recruiting 2-3 Story Fellows to join its team this spring/summer in unpaid positions:

Ideal candidate(s) is a go-getter creative or consultant who wants to help manage a new tribe of storytellers emerging across disciplines. If you’re a refugee in transition from the advertising, PR, and/or publishing industries you might also be a great fit. Web and social media savvy is a definite requirement. You value the idea of being a part of a global movement working to democratize storytelling. In return we can offer you experience and status beyond the constraints of an internship or ordinary volunteer gig. You’ll get personalized business cards (after the first month).

Despite the lack of pay, the positions are said to offer the opportunity to …

• Contribute to a global movement in support of storytelling for all
• Study, track, and share about the latest storytelling trends
• Create and promote stuff (blog posts, email campaigns, new programs)
• Develop a portfolio of work you can use to advance your career goals
• Have your bio/picture listed on the Get Storied website (after the first 30 days)
• Get your own personalized Get Storied business cards (after the first 30 days)
• Receive regular video coaching sessions and feedback
• Telecommute to your internship, with flexible schedule
• Be affiliated with a pioneering business model and global platform
• Create something real and meaningful
• Earn an awesome recommendation letter and reference

Lots more info on requirements and other particulars here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been communicating with Bob McIntosh over the last few days. In his blog Things Career Related, he writes: “Often at behavioral interviews the employer will ask for specific events meant to extract particular skills from a job candidate.”

Yes, indeed. Behavioral interviewing is one of the best uses of storytelling in the job search. Behavioral questions, which typically start out with a phrase like, “Tell me about a time …” cry out for stories in response.

Bob McIntosh points out:

This method of interviewing is effective for a number of obvious reasons:

1. It is an excellent way for employers to learn about the candidates’ work experience and relevant accomplishments, or lack of accomplishments.
2. Past performance is a true indicator of future performance.
3. Telling stories is not an easy thing to do, especially if you’re not prepared to tell them.

Bob lists these principles for stories in response to behavioral questions (see the elaboration on each point in his post). I was especially interested in his 20-60-20 principle for Situation —> Action —> Result stories. I think I might tend to give more weight to the result since employers are especially interested in results, outcomes, and metrics:

Meaning. What meaning does your story have?

Form. In a Complete Interview Process workshop I lead, my participants construct a story using the following form: the problem or situation, approximately 20% of the story; the action taken to meet the situation, 60% of the story; and the result of the action taken, the remaining 20%.

Achieving success.

Preparation is paramount to success.

The method I prescribe for preparation for behavior-interview questions is to develop a databank or arsenal of 10-20 skills based success stories. They should focus on skills likely to required by your targeted employer. Behavioral questions can be very hard to predict, but you can be fairly sure they will center on skills required in the targeted job.

Bob recommends just five stories — and you can probably manage with five as long as you have the mental agility to make each of those five stories fit a variety of questions. But 10-20 is a better number to shoot for, in my opinion.

I’ve developed an exercise (adapted from Norine Dagliano) that shows the value of developing as few as three stories and provides a jumping-off point to craft more.

I took an audience through this exercise at a conference in Los Angeles. I’ve uploaded the handout so you can try the exercise for yourself, or if you’re a practitioner, take your students/clients through it. The beginning part of the handout won’t make a lot of sense because it’s tied to my slides from the presentation, but I’m working on adding an audio track to the presentation so you can soon check it out. Here’s the handout: KHansenStoryHandoutREV.pdf

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Updating an Easter post from three years ago …

“Padre,” the Rev. R. Craig Burlington, our rector at St. George’s Episcopal Church when we lived in Maplewood, NJ, told a wonderful story in his Easter sermon one year. Here it is as best I can remember:

During Holy Week, the Burlingtons’ beloved family cocker spaniel (Teddy I think his name was) had gone missing. The children were bereft. On Easter, Padre heard the kids shouting ecstatically, “He’s alive, he’s alive!” Padre’s immediate thought was how deeply his offspring felt the message of Christ’s resurrection. Of course, the real reason the children were so gleeful was that the prodigal Teddy had returned home.

~~~

Meanwhile, blogger The Laughing Pastor writes stories about people in his church. “These stories tap into the joy and the awe of God’s presence.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Saw a wonderful convergence yesterday of the work of two terrific new friends. I met both of them for the first time face to face at the recent conference of the Career Management Alliance in Las Vegas. Karen Siwak, who got me more excited about storytelling in resumes than I’ve been in a long time, wrote a guest blog post on Tim’s Strategy, the blog of Tim Tyrell-Smith. I got to know Tim pretty well after I brazenly asked him if he would drive me to LA from Vegas on his way home to Orange County after the conference, and he kindly agreed.

I wrote almost two weeks ago about Karen’s fascinating presentation at the conference. But nothing beats Karen’s own words about her process of teasing out stories and translating them into compelling resumes. She has developed a highly effective story-soliciting technique with the clients for whom she writes resumes, but her blog post suggests that job-seekers can, to a great extent, apply the technique when crafting their own resumes. Here’s her first point:

Before you start writing your resume, create a detailed map of your career plot line, all the stories that define your career path. I’m not talking about simple CAR/PAR/SAR statements, but the nuts and bolts of how you came to be where you are today. What was going on the company, in the industry, when you first came on board? What was your mandate, the first challenge, and how did you go about tackling it? And then what happened? And then what happened after that? You will end up with dozens of stories, far more than you will need for your resume, but this is good. You are better off having a lot of stories that you can choose from, than a limited number of stories that have no connection with each other or with your audience.

The most eye-opening piece of this advice for me was Karen’s admonishment to go beyond Challenge (or Problem or Situation) —> Action —> result statements and simply focus on the chronology of how each job developed.

Here are the rest of her points; you can ( and should!) get the details in the full blog post.

• Develop a detailed picture of your target audience — the kind of company or hiring manager you want your stories to appeal to.
• Winnow through all the stories you’ve collected, and identify which ones will have the greatest impact on your target audience, which ones will “speak” to your target’s goals and challenges.
• Create context for your stories, so that your reader will understand the full scope and scale of your contributions.
• Write your stories in succinct bullet points.
• Sequence the bullets in a way that makes logical sense to the reader, which most times will be in the same order in which they occurred: did this, then this, then this, then this, culminating with a big bang legacy impact.
• Make the first impression count.
• Keywords, keywords, keywords.

Karen conducts exhaustive research on her clients’ target audiences, which is so appropriate. Any storyteller, whether novelist, reporter, or resume writer, will tell the right story upon understanding the audience.

I’ve encouraged Karen to write a book about her technique. I hope she does.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Several days are set aside each year by various organizations to celebrate storytelling. Some of these special days are relatively new, having been marked for just the past few years. The recent vernal equinox World Storytelling Day began in Sweden in the early 1990s and became a worldwide celebration in 2003. The day lauds the oral tradition and seems to always carry a nature theme; this year was water, and I recently learned that 2012’s theme will be trees.

Another relatively new observance is International Day for Sharing Life Stories, marking its fourth year on May 16. That preceding link is a Facebook community page. Both storytelling days I’ve mentioned seem to have difficulties with maintaining a consistent and informative Web presence. If you search for International Day for Sharing Life Stories, you’ll find a site dedicated to the 2009 event.

This year, the Center for Digital Storytelling and the Museu da Pessoa (museum of the person) are sponsoring a video production challenge for the weekend prior to the Fourth International Day for Sharing Life Stories. The goal is to gain broad recognition of May 16 as an annual day for sharing, listening to, and gathering the stories of people’s lives.

From the page describing the challenge:

BLINK is an online festival dedicated to an intimate form of spontaneous, reflective filmmaking that is growing out of our reliance on/acceptance of pocket sized mobile media. Our smart cellular devices have still and video cameras, ways to record audio, ways to edit and mix, and output to the world.

To participate we are asking you to create a 2-minute digital story on the weekend of May 14-15, 2011. The idea is to choose a moment to capture images/events, and then write and record a narration, and edit the movie on your mobile device. The idea could be as simple as a single image with a voiceover narration, or as complicated as a fully made video with moving image, still image, illustration, even animation.

Participants can upload their story to the International Day for Sharing Life Stories Facebook Community page anytime during the weekend of May 14-15.

Organizers will randomly select two stories from those submitted to win a special prize — a full scholarship to a any standard workshop produced by the Center for Digital Storytelling in 2011-12.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I came across a concept today, “the Total Life List,” proposed by Bruce Rosenstein in his book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. In an interview with Vern Burckhart on Idea Connection, Rosenstein describes the concept:

at the end of each chapter … readers are guided to list current activities and future goals in a variety of work and non-work areas, and also to list the people involved in those areas, such as family, friends, colleagues, and associates.

The idea seems to be akin to a bucket list, except that listing and appraising current activities appears to be a way to live a more balanced life:

The Total Life List, which I mentioned earlier, is a great device … [for] deal[ing] with Drucker’s systematic abandonment question for many areas of your life: ‘If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?’

It occurred to me that a Total Life List is both a way to analyze one’s life story to date and construct a future story.

In his blog WritePlace, Web Moore shows know evidence of knowing about Rosenstein’s Total Life List concept (and it probably would have been impossible for him to know of the concept since Moore’s post was written in 2008, and Rosenstein’s book came out in 2009); yet, he offers a blog post with that name that equally seems to lend itself to analyzing the story to date and constructing the future story. Some sample items:

• Conquer the world!
• Visit all 50 U.S. states
• Participate in the Antarctica Marathon (safer than the Ice Marathon)
• Which may lead to a desire to become part of the Seven Continents Club
• Visit all 7 continents
• Advance oneself with integrity: never seek to advance at the misfortune of others
• Learn to read music and play the piano comfortably (getting closer…)
• Always remember that life is short; make the most of each day
• Travel to Everest Base Camp via either Tibet or Nepal
• Write a book
• Continue to learn, grow and push oneself forward; be bold
• Maintain creativity: inspire and be inspired
• Participate in a triathlon
• Visit the Great Pyramids, Great Wall of China, Denali, Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu in Peru, Petra in Jordan, Angkor in Cambodia, Acropolis of Athens in Greece, Old City of Jerusalem and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe (and maybe swim in the Devil’s Pool).

Looking at Moore’s list of completed items in the same post reinforces that idea that he apparently leads an adventurously storied life. Too bad it appears he stopped blogging in 2010.

What do you want your story to have been in five years? 10 years? 25 years? At the end of your life? Start making a list.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve written previously about Spoken Stories, which encourages folks to submit stories, poems, and creative writings.

The site also has a Stories Genome Project:

We have an ambitious plan to collect stories from all over the world. Our mission for this project is to collect, preserve, save, document and present both ancient and modern stories; and organize them in a sequential framework. So that all of humanity can benefit from the wisdom of stories. This is a member/user/visitor driven project and we need your help. The success of this project depends on your willingness to submit the stories of your region and country.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I didn’t blog yesterday. May have been the first day I missed in 2011, perhaps the first since I was busy with our cross-country move a year ago.

And today I’m blogging about not blogging.

Lack of material? Never.

Lack of passion? Never.

As I’ve written about before, I’ve always found it difficult to devote as much time as I want and need to this blog that contributes almost nothing toward my livelihood (but contributes enormously to my happiness).

As spring slowly (very slowly) makes its way to Eastern Washington state, I find myself torn in even more directions than before. There’s always a lot to do on a 40-acre woodland farm, and soon even more activities will demand my attention.

We’ll be doing more true farm things this year — putting in a large vegetable garden and acquiring our first flock of chickens. We have a guest house that I’ve been slowly remodeling.

I’ve also had a long-time fantasy of pursuing more creative activities with my hands. In particular, I’d like to use painting techniques to repurpose old furniture, perhaps even selling my pieces someday.

Late spring and summer here are so gorgeous that the pull of outdoors is strong.

Last fall, inspired by Michael Margolis’s Reinvention Summit and subsequent webinars, I determined that I wanted to reinvent myself as someone who could make a living from my storytelling passion. I haven’t yet figured out how to do that.

Now perhaps I’m thinking of reinventing myself as a Renaissance Woman who includes woodland-farming and furniture refurbishing among writing, editing, Toastmastering, and, of course, blogging.

The only person who has demanded that I blog seven days a week (since Feb. 1, 2008) is me. That’s still the goal.

But as I enter a new phase of reinvention and transformation, I’m experimenting with not beating myself up if I skip a day from time to time.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A nice, new slideshow from Anecdote/Shawn Callahan, entitled The Essentials of Business Storytelling (embedded below), succeeds on several levels.

I’ve discussed the dilemma of slideshow storytelling (or even just slideshow presentation) more than once in this space. Can a slideshow stand on its own without narration? Some slideshows on SlideShare have audio narration, but most don’t. I just uploaded one from my recent presentation in LA that absolutely makes no sense without narration; I’m hoping to add an audio track to it.

And if a slideshow doesn’t offer an audio track (and isn’t delivered live by a presenter), will it have too much text on each slide to be aesthetically pleasing?

The Anecdote show does indeed stand on its own but still has attractive, appealing slides that aren’t crowded with type. (I will say that when the slideshow plays at its own pace, I couldn’t always finish reading each slide before the next one appeared, but then I’m a slow reader.)

The focus of the show is story recognition. Can we spot a story when we see/hear one? That discussion culminates in our being directed to Anecdote’s new The Story Test, which I wrote about here.

The slideshow does contain some very text-heavy slides when it gets into comparing a story with a non-story, but the viewer has the opportunity to view and absorb them several times as the story criteria are discussed.

Jon Thomas, in his recent Q&A here, said:

[SlideShare is] the first technology created for mass access and consumption of slide decks without a presenter. I believe there is a distinct way to design a presentation to be consumed on SlideShare or any other non-live environment (more akin to an eBook), and there’s a distinct way to design a presentation intended to be presented live, with a presenter.

I believe The Essentials of Business Storytelling can work both ways. And it offers stories, to boot.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I belatedly happened upon a thought-provoking and insightful piece by my friend Cynthia Kurtz (Note to self: Set up a Google alert for “Kathy Hansen,” not just “Katharine Hansen” since I, duh, blog as Kathy Hansen).

The thrust of Cynthia’s post is that she used to take on the attitude of what her mother called “a little snot” (I love that since I’ve been known to be a snot myself; just ask my husband) about the diverse ways in which story practitioners have defined “story,” especially in my Q&A series.

“One day about a month ago,” Cynthia writes, “I was asked for the millionth time during an interview: ‘What is a story?’ As I prepared to give my practiced and perfectly correct response I suddenly realized I was completely wrong. Or rather, wrongly complete.”

She then describes these three fundamental dimensions or aspects of story:

Story form is the internal structure of a story: things like setting, characters, plot and point. A good story uses effective narrative form to deliver a message well. 

Story function is its utility to our thinking and learning: things like meaning, understanding and connection. A good story helps us learn what we need to learn, find out what we need to know, or remember what we need to remember. 

Story phenomenon is the story of the story: things that describe context, like where and when and why a story was told, who heard it, how it can and will be retold, and so on. A good story lives on because it sustains the health of the community.

“No definition of story,” Cynthia writes, “can be truly complete without considering all of these dimensions in the same way that no story of humanity can be complete without including the story of every single human being. … Different definitions of story have different practical utility in different contexts.”

She concludes: “I’m thinking the next time somebody asks me, ‘What is a story?’ I’m going to say, ‘What do you want to do?’”

By excerpting, I’m oversimplifying. I strongly recommend you check out Cynthia’s excellent contribution to the conversation about the definition of story.

Image credit: The graphic above is the logo of DefiningStory.com, the company of Sally and Ray Strackbein.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Almost 20 years ago, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) published Guideline on Teaching Storytelling. This beautifully written piece from 1992 (last edited three years ago) has lost none of its timeliness or power in the two decades since it was written. This excerpt reinforces why my friend Sean Buvala contends that “storytelling … requires a live audience of at least one person.”

The storyteller begins to see and re-create, through voice and gesture, a series of mental images; the audience, from the first moment of listening, squints, stares, smiles, leans forward or falls asleep, letting the teller know whether to slow down, speed up, elaborate, or just finish. Each listener, as well as each teller, actually composes a unique set of story images derived from meanings associated with words, gestures, and sounds. The experience can be profound, exercising the thinking and touching the emotions of both teller and listener.

As you read on in the NCTE guideline, you realize that the audience being discussed is probably younger children of primary- and elementary-school age, but most of the guideline applies to any story audience.

The piece captures …

How we relate to stories told to us and how they help us connect and communicate with each other: “Often listeners are likely to be reminded of a similar tale from their own lives. … By exploring story territory orally, we explore ourselves … storytelling is communication, from the teller to the audience, not just acting or performing.

How listening to stories helps us learn to write and use language: Sitting in a circle and swapping personal or fictional tales is one of the best ways to help writers rehearse. … Those who regularly hear stories, subconsciously acquire familiarity with narrative patterns and begin to predict upcoming events. Both beginning and experienced readers call on their understanding of patterns as they tackle unfamiliar texts. … Learners who regularly tell stories become aware of how an audience affects a telling, and they carry that awareness into their writing. … The comfort zone of the oral tale can be the path by which [listeners] reach the written one.

The best thing about the guideline may be this line that appears at the bottom: “This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.” If you’re looking to make a case for storytelling in education or just want to read a share a beautiful piece, check the guideline out.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Louise L. Hay (whom I mentioned here) among her many activities, disseminates affirmations. I see them almost daily on Facebook. I appreciate her affirmations, but never has one resonated with me as much as this one did. I had to share it:

Life is sacred. I hold in my heart all the parts of myself — the infant, the child, the teenager, the young adult, the adult, and my present and future self. My story includes every success and every failure, every error and every truthful insight, and all of it is valuable. I have compassion for me, and I also feel compassion for others. I create a life of acceptance and understanding.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The following is the summary — which I told as a story — that I gave of the storytelling track at the just completed conference of the Career Management Alliance. I have linked portions of it to my recent posts that provide more detail about the sessions I’ve referred to here.

As a teenager, Alice was adrift about what her future career would be.

One day, she stepped through the looking glass and found herself in *Leslie Landrey’s two-and-a-half-day workshop, Boom-Splat-Pow. Leslie helped Alice through the process of stepping into the frame of a comic book as a way to discover her career goals. Instead of the usual and expected assessments, Leslie applied a number of creative techniques to helping Alice figure out her future. Alice participated in such activities as drawing the highlights of each day in the daily squares of a large desk calendar and creating collages so she and Leslie could see what patterns might emerge. She engaged in playful activities like ring toss games and fighting with Star Wars light sabers. By creating her own comic-book character, Alice attained ownership in the process of planning her career.

Still traveling in the world behind the looking glass, Alice embarked on a satisfying career based on what she had learned. One day, however, she came across a little bottle labeled “drink me,” so Alice did. Consuming the potion enabled Alice to see her future self, a self whose early career had been satisfying at the time but who was now ready for a transition. This future Alice needed someone to help her create a new story for herself.

Luckily, George Dutch was waiting for her in this looking-glass world. George told Alice that the No. 1 workplace disability is depression, and Alice believed it. George took Alice through his process of Personal Story Analysis. Just like Leslie Landry, George found less value in nometheic forms of assessment that look at skills, values, and traits, and instead focused on an idiographic approach that studied Alice’s individual behavior and uniqueness.

George asked Alice to break her life story into decades and look at the activities that had been enjoyable and satisfying in each decade. Alice began to develop a sense of the power of her own story.

Through George’s Personal Story Analysis Process, Alice learned about her natural talents, preferred subject matter, natural relating style, and essential motivation, aspects that all added to her key success factors. George presented Alice with her Individual Passion Pattern Map. Alice’s image of herself was shattered — in the best way possible. George told her that the next step was to translate her story into a new, different, and better job that matched her pattern and was in harmony with her authentic self.

Alice left George feeling a sense of “I can do this,” but now she needed a resume to pursue this new career path. In her journey through the looking glass, Alice then encountered Karen Siwak, who told her that stories are a resume differentiator, but most resumes don’t tell a compelling story.

Karen began asking Alice a series of questions, and Alice found that she enjoyed telling stories in response to the questions. “It’s all about asking the right questions,” Karen said, “and applying brain psychology to encourage job-seekers to tell stories in the order in which they occurred. Karen ended up with pages and pages of Alice’s stories, and it was now her job to strategically choose which stories to include in Alice’s resume and which to leave out. Karen helped Alice determine her targeted employers’ pain points — what would keep managers up at night — and used the stories in Alice’s resume that would provide compelling response to those pain points. Instead of a summary section that provided white noise ignored by employers, Karen taught Alice to start her resume with a hook.

Alice ended up with a resume that helped her create connection with employers. She found that she didn’t have to defend her resume to them and that she could more easily remember her accomplishments because they were in story form.

Now it was time for looking-glass Alice to go on interviews. That’s when she found Chandlee Bryan, who taught her the LEAPING methodology for storytelling in interviews, in which L stands for Listening, E stands for Evaluation, A stands for Assessment, P stands for Purpose, I stands for Intent, N stands for Narrative, and G stands for Glimpse. Chandlee taught Alice how to listen without saying anything and how to isolate the strengths that would appeal to employers. Alice learned how to structure her stories by visualizing the outcomes and how to tell only what can be observed with the five senses.

Alice learned to soar in interviews by providing interviewers with a glimpse into her passions, genuine interest in the job, and her capacity to perform.

Armed with all her knowledge from the career practitioners she met during her journey, Alice was ready to step back through the looking glass and begin her storied career.

*Although Leslie Landrey’s conference session, SPLAT-BOOM-POW! Creative Career Design for the 21st Century, was part of the storytelling track, I didn’t blog about it. I greatly enjoyed Leslie’s highly creative presentation, and her premise of creating one’s own comic-book character certainly relates to storytelling; however, story was not a major thread in her session. Here’s a bit more about it from the conference agenda:

This is no mild-mannered session! Drawing from 3 years of in-depth research on sequential art, hero mythologies, as well as from personal experience as a career counselor for 20+ years, our own super heroine Leslie Landrey will turn this workshop into its own Career Design Studio.

SPLAT-BOOM-POW is an energetic, fun and collaborative event for anyone who desires a deep revitalization of their relationship to work. Drawing from the structure of comics, graphic novels, Japanese manga, and superhero/heroine mythologies, you’ll be a part of a creative and unique experience, configured especially for this event. You’ll engage in reflective and ‘hands-on’ practices that nourish reconfigurations of work ‘identities’ consistent with future transformations in global work-spheres. Join us as we explore this exciting, new model of Creative Career Design.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This is the third of my reports on the storytelling track at the just completed conference of the Career Management Alliance.

My friend Chandlee Bryan has developed a methodology for preparing job-seekers to tell stories in job interviews based on what she learned through training with New York City story-consulting firm, Narativ. You can get a good flavor of Narativ’s principles in this post about a webinar featuring Narativ co-founder Murray Nossel.

Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted all my notes from Chandlee’s session. I do have them audio-recorded, so I could listen again, but I’m traveling today and eager to get this material to you, so I’ll do a short post now with the hope of a more detailed one later.

Chandlee has come up with an acronym for her methodology, in which

• L stands for Listening
• E stands for Evaluation
• A stands for Assessment
• P stands for Purpose
• I stands for Intent
• N stands for Narrative
• G stands for Glimpse.

Some of the principles of this methodology involve listening without saying anything and isolating strengths that will appeal to employers. Chandlee advises structuring her stories by visualizing the outcomes and tell stories that describe only what can be observed with the five senses.

LEAPING is about providing interviewers with a glimpse into her passions, genuine interest in the job, and the job-seeker’s capacity to perform.

To further illustrate the LEAPING technique in lieu of more detailed notes about the session, I’ve set up the main LEAPING slides on this page.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My best friend and I rendezvoused in Las Vegas last week for the conference of the Career Management Alliance. She had asked me if I’d like to join her on a tour of Zappos, but unfortunately, I was arriving a day later than her tour was scheduled.

When I arrived in Vegas, though, I saw the 2010 Zappos Culture Book she had been given on the tour.

Coincidentally, I had just read Dr. John Sullivan’s 41 Advanced Recruiting Approaches … You’ve Have Never Heard of, in which one of the techniques is this:

Many great firms have difficulty selling candidates because they cannot communicate the employee experience are employees and managers struggle to convert potential referrals because they are not completely aware of best practices and powerful stories that make the firm a top place to work. Develop a story identification process and create a story inventory or Wiki to catalog your top success stories/examples. (Zappos)

(The slide, above right, is also Sullivan’s work.)

I am not sure that Zappos thinks of the content of the Culture Book as stories. Some items are stories, some are not. In an article in Inc. on Zappos, Max Chafkin refers to “essays” that comprise the Culture Book:

[Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh] assigned and collected short essays from every employee on the subject of the company’s culture and published them, unedited, in a book that he distributed to the staff. Every year, all employees, both new and old, contribute a fresh essay to the book, which has grown to 480 pages. Hsieh uses it as a way not only to get employees thinking about the meaning of their work but also to show the outside world what he has built.

However this content is characterized in the Zappos world, Sullivan is right on target when he says an inventory of organizational stories is a powerful tool in luring prospective employees to work there. Assuming, of course, that employees are tell positive stories about the company culture. By the way, you can obtain the Zappos Culture Book on Amazon for as little as $4.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This is the second of my reports on the storytelling track at the just completed conference of the Career Management Alliance.

I first wrote about Karen Siwak and her support for storytelling resumes here and here, but her presentation at the conference completely re-energized my thoughts on storytelling resumes.

Karen had used storytelling as a therapeutic modality as a trained psychotherapist. When she started as a resume writer and job-search coach, she, like many resume writers, used questionnaires to collect information from her clients. Her questionnaires would request from clients information such as their top 10 accomplishments with metrics.

While working with a particularly difficult client who struggled to give Karen any metrics, she fell back to her storytelling therapeutic techniques. “Suddenly, wow,” Karen says. “By probing her career story, I not only got a whole new insight into who my client was, but I now understood how I could market her.”

Karen learned that “if you use questionnaires, you’ll get resiumes that are easy to write but don’t lend selves to compelling stories.”

Karen began to fine-tune a “story-soliciting” process that she calls “incredibly powerful,” consisting of a series of questions. The biggest surprise for me in Karen’s presentation is that she found her clients didn’t respond well to requests for “CAR statements.”

I’ve talked about CAR, or Challenge —> Action —> Result, stories for years (along with the variations Situation —> Action —> Result and Problem —> Action —> Result and a number of others). While the concept of storytelling in job-search materials is relatively new, job-seekers and career practitioners have known about CAR/PAR/SAR stories for years. But Karen says she elicits more and better stories with her line of questioning. Brain psychology, she notes, tells us that people recall stories in the same order they occurred.

“Most people, when presented with the right line of questions, like to tell stories,” Karen says. “They get more excited about what they have to say, and engaged in the writing and career-planning process.”

Karen asks questions such as:

• What was the workplace like when you started?
• What was going on in the company when you started?
• What was it about that situation that engaged you? (That’s what they’ll enjoy doing again.)
• What was the legacy of your work?

Having a story-listener as part of the process is important, and here’s why: “If you are in the same room with them, [the client’s] eyes light up when you’ve hit on the right line of questioning; over the phone [the client’s] voice ‘lights up,’ too,” Karen notes. ” When the storytelling mode is switched on, they get more comfortable with telling stories.” Even entry-level college grads can come up with stories for their resumes — for example, stories about projects they’ve conducted while in school.

“A great career story will be a resume differentiator,” Karen says. “Everyone will have compelling stories that will make them different. Two people can have similar metrics and achievements, but the context in which those occur is what will make one candidate stand out from another. Example…”

Increased sales by 10% — Without the back story, there is no real way to tell if this is a great metric or not

10% sales increase in territory with minimal competition — Perhaps not so great.

10% sales increase in a mature market segment where share shifts are typically measured in fractions of a percentage. — Now that’s an interesting story

“Remember the components of journalism — who, what, where, when, and why — to get the full story of what your client has achieved over their career,” Karen advises.

Research employers to know what stories to include and exclude
As a storyteller, think strategically about what to include and what to exclude. By knowing the career story you want to tell, editing down to the bare essentials becomes easier.

Know your target — which employers — and what they’re buying motivators are, Karen advises, and then use resume storytelling to market your client as the solution to those specific needs and then use storytelling to “speak” to your target’s greatest challenges, pain points, and goals. “Clients need to understand what their target companies really do and what their culture is,” Karen observes. That information gives them more focus for their resume … and their entire job search.

That’s what Karen did in the case-study story she told in her presentation. With her client, she worked to determine what kind of organization would be interested in hearing his story and developed a list of 20 organizations, later narrowed down to 12 based on preferences and geographical considerations.

Then, Karen worked with her client to develop 60-70 stories. Obviously that’s way too many for a resume, so Karen researched to determine the pain points of the target organizations — what kept the management up at night. She conducted a “so-what test” on each story.

She then focused on her client’s six most compelling stories. She considered what “uh-ohs” a hiring manager might see in his story. She obtained endorsements from people he’d worked with and used “keywords that really matter” to produce an excellent storytelling resume. Resume stories need to be organized in a logical flow, Karen notes. They can be presented in sequence, but they could also be organized around themes or case studies.

Karen’s aim was a resume that would mesh well with what she calls “the eye dance,” the way a hiring decision-maker’s eyes will flit very quickly (usually no more than about 20 seconds) over a resume. She also rails against what she calls “white noise” summary sections, which are full of fluffy adjectives and unsubstantiated claims. Hiring decision-makers rarely read them. “Purple prose sucks when reading a resume,” Karen asserts. You don’t need adjectives.”

Instead, Karen uses a “hook,” a clear unfluffy statement about how the job-seeker can meet an employer’s needs — What does this person know and do better than other job-seekers? The job-seeker can then use the same hook as an elevator pitch, asking his or her contacts, “Do you know a company that has this need?”

The bonus in resume storytelling is that it carries over to the interview. “People remember more of their history and their accomplishments when they tell stories,” Karen says.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

At the beginning of this week, I promised some new material on storytelling and career/job search, which I knew would spring from the storytelling track at the just completed conference of the Career Management Alliance. This is the first of several reports.

It’s amazing how much more vivid, clear, and exciting concepts can be when you see their originators explain them passionately in person than when you simply read their words.

I came away from the conference’s storytelling track re-energized about storytelling in job and career. My colleagues George Dutch, Karen Siwak, and Chandlee Bryan delivered brilliant presentations on their niches in the world of storytelling in job search and career.

George (shown at left on the storytelling panel at the conference) has previously discussed his Personal Story Analysis and Individual Passion Pattern Mapping methodology on these pages, but he brought it to life in his presentation. He left most of the attendees in his workshop hungering to learn his methodology. He would like to train others but notes that he has not yet determined how to teach parts of it.

His jumping-off point is the fact that — according to the World Health Organization — the No. 1 workplace disability in North America is depression. “If individuals lose the thread of their story and how it relates to the bigger Story that shapes our worldview, our deepest values, our culture … then we put our lives in danger at many levels,” he said in his Q&A.

George’s methodology orients clients to a long-term process and works best with people who are want to get into a different career.

The case study (and I note that a case study is in itself a story) George presented in the conference is this one that he also offers in the success stories portion of his site. It’s the story of a software tester who “needed to make a career change … to find professional fulfillment.”

George finds less value in nometheic* forms of assessment that look at skills, values, and traits, and instead focuses on an idiographic approach that studies clients’ individual behavior and uniqueness.

(*Most references I’ve seen say “nomothetic” rather than “nomotheic.” Here’s a Wikipedia entry on nomothe[t]ic vs. idiographic).

George’s Personal Story Analysis bears many similarities to another idiographic method, the Dependable Strengths Articulation Process (see also Dependable Strengths®: Finding Your Unique Excellence)

Like Dependable Strengths, George’s approach has clients look at the activities that have been enjoyable and satisfying. While George distinguishes between activities that were “enjoyable and satisfying,” and those the client was proud of, Dependable Strengths has participants identify experiences that they can characterize as those they feel they did well, that they also enjoyed doing, and are proud of. George asks clients to break their life story into decades. They began to develop a sense of the power of their own story.

Clients then identify their top eight enjoyable experiences and elaborate on them using these questions/prompts:

• A clear statement of the enjoyable activity (in one sentence)
• What caused you to get started in the activity?
• Write a detailed story of what you did. Note the parts that were particularly enjoyable.
• What parts gave you the most sense of satisfaction and fulfillment?
• Was there some significant reason you stopped the activity?

Through his book, JobJoy: Finding Your Right Work Through the Power of Your Personal Story, George offers a downloadable version of the exercise, Enjoyable Achievements and Autobiographical Events, but his aim is not for individuals to take themselves through the process (he believes they need a professional to guide them) but for them to send their completed exercises to him so her can develop (for a fee) a “JobJoy Report.”

Based on this input, George conducts his Personal Story Analysis Process that identifies that client’s natural talents, preferred subject matter, natural relating style, and essential motivation, aspects that all added to their key success factors.

He then presents clients with a highly detailed Individual Passion Pattern Map, which often surprises and empowers the client.

The next step was to translate the client’s story into a new, different, and better job that matches his or her pattern and harmonizes with his or her authentic self.

Clients feel a sense of “I can do this.”

In the Ideal Job Exercise, clients develop an your ideal job description that summarizes their strengths in a single statement:  

To fulfill my motivational pattern, I need (Insert your preferred subject matter — e.g. visual, shapes & forms, tools, etc.) and require my talents (Insert your natural talents — e.g. problem-solving, organizing, whatever.) and which has the end result of (Insert you essential motivation, e.g., a quality outcome, etc.)

  “Integrating the ingredients of your motivational pattern through this exercise,” George says, “gives you an effective tool for remembering and communicating your strengths to others and provides a standard against which you can evaluate a particular job fit.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Trey Pennington, Question 5:

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: On my blog and in recent speeches, I’ve speculated that storytelling will be one of the two big trends for 2011 (the other being a perpetual cry to “get back to the basics”). There is a danger of storytelling becoming yet another throw-away buzzword of commercial communicators in search of the next hot thing. I shudder when I see or hear someone getting excited about storytelling as a way to “sell more” or “get my point across.” I can’t imagine Jay O’Callahan ever uttering such thoughts.

Both trends (storytelling and getting back to basics) are fueled by a sense of being overwhelmed and of being frustrated. Over the past five years we’ve experienced an explosion in media creation and distribution options. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blog are now commonplace words. Human beings just can’t handle it all, so we all return to the simple things — like stories — to help us make sense of it all. Indeed, Annette Simmons says “we don’t need more information; we need someone to help us make sense of it all”.

It may also be that, in a world shrilly shilling the suffocating silliness of the shiny new thing, story is the familiar, safe, simple thing — we were comforted, amazed, enthralled by story as children and we secretly long for those feelings once again.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Trey Pennington, Question 5:

Q: What future aspirations do you personally have for your own story work?

A: One of my tweets was quite popular last year — “we’re all newbies at something.” In a craft so filled with accomplished practitioners, I feel like a new-newbie in the world of storytelling. Time spent with folks like Connie Regan-Blake and Sean Buvala both inspire me and challenge me. There’s so much to learn. I would absolutely love to learn more by pursuing a master’s in storytelling from East Tennessee. What a thrill it would be to immerse myself in the culture there!

I would also love to merge two disciplines into the river of commercial communication dominating the corporate world — ethnography and storytelling. For more than three years I’ve said, “DON’T hire a social-media director! Hire an ethnographic researcher!” My work with politicians lead me to encapsulate the challenge in one phrase: during one meeting with a whining wannabe politician, I heard him utter the phrase, “If we can just get our message out” three times. I just let it go. But when he said it a fourth time, the dam broke. “No. No you don’t. Stop saying that!” I burst out. “You don’t need to get a message out; you need to get a message IN!” I told him to stop talking and start listening.

As I grow in understanding of and effective use of the craft of storytelling, I would love to help the corporate world embrace the heart of the storyteller and abandon the self-aggrandizing, self-promotional idolatry of commercial communication.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Trey Pennington, Question 4:

Q: What people or entities have been most influential to you in your story work and why?

A: Annette Simmons and Doug Lipman are two storytellers who’ve shaped my thinking about and understanding of the craft. I discovered Annette when she released The Story Factor. Her practical approach to story, especially her six types of stories, seems to make storytelling accessible to people of all walks of life, including business people. Annette seems to be one who bridges the world of art and the world of commerce, (which is something you do exceptionally well, too!). Doug also makes storytelling accessible. His The Storytelling Coach presents a refreshing worldview that not only empowers effective storytelling, but also helps people adopt the mindset essential for successful engagement through social media. Even though his book came out long before Facebook’s founder was even driving a car, Doug’s book should be required reading for everyone hoping to use the platform for commercial purposes.

I’ve also enjoyed working directly with Sean Buvala, who is @storyteller on Twitter. He made the journey across the country from Phoenix to Greenville to join us for the inaugural Social Story Conference in 2010.

One more storyteller, possibly an unexpected one, who has shaped my thinking for nearly 25 years is the legendary Tom Peters. I’ve purchased all the digital recordings I can find of his live presentations. Though he doesn’t specifically teach storytelling skills, he aptly demonstrates effective storytelling in what he says and does.

Here’s a link to a post I wrote about Tom Peters and his assertion that “story is more important than brand.”

Here’s a link to a post I wrote about Annette’s six types of stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Trey Pennington, Questions 2 and 3:

Editor’s note: As I noted yesterday, Trey last year launched the Social Story Conference.

Q: Why Social Story Conference?

A: After attending 30 or so social-media conferences, I realized there was an opportunity to bring storytelling to center stage for people who really wanted to leverage emerging media to make something good happen. I had a hunch that storytelling would add substance to social media.

We put together an outstanding team to launch the conference. I scheduled the first one for Denver. I have quite a few friends in the area, consider the area to be a wonderful storytelling canvas, and wanted to put the Soiled Dove Underground to good use (it’s a perfect venue for a storytelling/social media conference! Love the set-up).

I overreached in Denver and just couldn’t pull it off (couldn’t get the money to work out). I tried again in my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, was able to keep the expenses down (mainly due to the non-stop diligence of Kathryn Hardaway and Aaron von Frank).

Social Story Greenville sold out and was a wonderful event. People drove from as far away as Birmingham, Alabama, and Greensboro, NC, to be a part of the event. The cast of characters was splendid — we started off with an “alternative artist” in Tim March who had the entire audience beating cadence on trash cans, hub caps, bowling pins, and a cadre of misc percussion pieces. The rest of the day was equally non-traditional. In the end, about 150 people got a fresh look at what human communication can be.

Yes, indeed, I would enjoy hosting more Social Story Conferences. The focus on storytelling and social media seems to be a good one. One of our keynote speakers, Rick Murray, president of Edelman Chicago, said the world of commercial communication is dying for people who can use media to tell a good story. Sounds like Social Story would gather those storytellers together under one roof.

Q: On the site for the conference, you said, “We’re now in an age where the story you tell, the relationships you build, and the technologies you use to connect to and communicate with your constituents will determine your organization’s success.” Without giving away all your secrets, can you offer a few over-arching guidelines for best practices in telling the story, building relationships, and choosing technologies? And do the same principles apply for individuals, for, say, job search and career advancement?

A: “This is the age of the consumer, the age where every individual is a publisher,” or so the headlines proclaim. In such an era, it seems the old fashioned art of LISTENING is more valuable than ever before. The explosion of media does make it simple to publish something — it also makes it easy to listen in on what people are saying. To leverage the proliferation of media, one must apply discipline to pay attention to what others are saying. The ultimate goal of that listening is to figure out how one can use his/her/their treasures to help other people accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish. Peter Drucker summed up this thought beautifully over sixty years ago when he defined the purpose of a business: “The one and only purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” The best way to fulfill that purpose is to listen to those customers to hear what it is they want.

Here’s a checklist that might be a helpful “guideline”:

Be alert.

Pay attention.

Acknowledge others.

Affirm others.

Advise to help others.

Connect people with the people or content they need to accomplish what they want to accomplish.

I realize that doesn’t sound like “storytelling,” but I’m thinking such a discipline would be the necessary prerequisite to storytelling in business.

As a final thought, it seems to me storytellers model well Zig Ziglar’s famous, and essential, worldview: “You can have everything you want in life if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Trey Pennington and I have been social-media buds for a few years now. He once chided me for not engaging with him very much on Twitter. I explained that I’m much more of a Facebook gal, and we’ve been much chummier ever since. I admit that I thought of him as a social-media expert with a passing interest in storytelling — until last summer when he launched (with Sean Buvala) a social story conference. That’s when I knew I wanted him to participate in this series. Trey Pennington is a professional speaker, storyteller, radio talk show host, as well as Twitter, blogging, and marketing expert. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: [in his own words from his LinkedIn profile]: Advertising legend David Ogilvy insisted his clients give him products to sample before he would create ad copy to sell those products. No doubt he had a blast sampling the product while he dreamed up the classic headline “Should every corporation buy its president a Rolls-Royce?”! To sell in print, he had to be sold in person himself.

A good story to illustrate a good point: If you’re in sales, you should love your own products if you expect to woo others with them.

Stories give facts or thoughts not only context, but life. We all love a good story. We’re alert for the next good one. Companies who weave the drama of story into everything they do will get the attention of their marketplace and gain the opportunity to connect.

Finding those stories (I like to think of them as hidden treasure) and putting them into print and getting them in front of people who care, is what I do for fun (and for a living, too).

Q&A with Trey Pennington, 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: How human beings interact with one another has been a lifelong fascination for me. Over the last 25, I’ve studied everything I could find about the nature of man, how man perceives and interprets the world around him, and how he conveys that meaning to others. That study started with business biographies and psychology then morphed to advertising copywriting and theology. Getting an MBA didn’t quench my thirst for understanding, and so I studied education. The master’s in education wasn’t enough either, so I completed yet another 30 hours of post-graduate study toward a doctorate in education. It was along the journey toward the doctorate I discovered Milton Gregory and The Seven Laws of Teaching, which in turn lead me, maybe somewhat surprisingly, to Doug Lipman and August House publishing.

What I saw in Doug’s work resonated with the longing in my own heart — I longed to be heard, to be understand, and to live a life of significance. Doug beautifully paints the storyteller as one who facilitates that journey. As I read all of Doug’s books, and then Annette Simmons’, and Ruth Sawyer’s, and everything else I could find, I concluded that storytelling captures the essence of what it means to be human.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Regular readers know that one of the major themes of A Storied Career is storytelling in the job search and career. Career practitioners are spotlighting the phenomenon more than ever. The white paper Findings of 2010 Global Career Brainstorming Day: Trends for the Now, the New & the Next in Careers affirms storytelling’s importance, especially in resumes and interviews:

In a world as chaotic as we live in, where people are becoming increasingly accustomed to sound bytes of information, they still do need context. Storytelling provides a framework, context, and pathway to understanding. It’s compelling; it creates connection; it personalizes; it captivates. It hold attention in a multi-tasking world. In job search, those stories must be tied to value to prove that the job-seeker can meet the need and exceed expectations.

The brainstorming day was held in December 2010 by the Career Thought Leaders Consortium, publishers of the white paper.

The recognition is timely because I am about to leave for two conferences in which job-search storytelling will play a significant role. At the conference of the Career Management Alliance in Las Vegas, an entire track has been dedicated to storytelling. I’ll be moderating a storytelling panel with three colleagues, who will then deliver full sessions on Using Pattern Recognition in Story Analysis (using life stories to foster career decision-making), Storytelling: Your Resume Differentiator, and Stick the Landing — The Art of Storytelling in Interviews. You can follow tweets from that conference at #CMAVegas2011.

Starting no later than a week from now, I’ll report what I’ve learned from these sessions. After that conference, I’ll go to Los Angeles to speak on storytelling in the job search to a group of career counselors who work with MBA students.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The importance — or lack thereof — of defining what a story is has been an ongoing theme in this blog. See a compilation of views from my Q&A subjects: DefiningStory.pdf.

My own thinking has evolved. I am certainly in favor of a stricter definition of storytelling than I used to be. I still tend to hold a fairly broad perspective on the definition of story. At the same time, I get frustrated to see many people claim “story” status to entities that really do not seem like stories to me.

For those who care about a strict definition of story — or who want to understand the perspective of strict story definers — two new methods have surfaced.

The first is an entire Web site, The Story Test, developed by the folks at Anecdote. The site presents 10 examples and asks the user to choose “yes” (this is a story) or “no” (it isn’t). You don’t get Anecdote’s view of the “correct” answers until you go through all 10 examples. I scored a 7, meaning I’m “on my way and with a little more work, I’ll be spotting stories all over the place.” (I also went through the examples very quickly, skimming them because I wanted to see what would be revealed at the end.)

The examples are all taken from real speeches and pieces of writing, and I’m guessing the authors purported all of them to be stories. If you want to cut to the chase and see both examples and explanations for how they are or are not stories, you can go here.

The other method — or test — comes from Thaler Pekar in a blog post from earlier this week. She writes:

If, upon watching a video on an organization’s web site, your description of the video is, “It’s the story of what they do”, or, “It shows what they do”, you’ve viewed a message, or a description, or lots of information, not a story.

If your response is, “That’s a great story about what the organization accomplishes,” or, “I could really relate to [the protagonist]”, or, later that day, you find yourself sharing what you have seen, now that’s a story.

Here’s another test: did you watch something about people in general, or one particular person? And not simply told by a person, but about a person, and his or her challenges, triumphs, and resolutions?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The Moth Radio Hour has won a 2010 Peabody Award, the most prestigious award in radio broadcasting.

The Moth Radio Hour debuted in 2009; its fourth season will soon (May) air on public radio stations across the country this spring. The Peabody Committee said the show “reinvented and reinvigorated” the art of storytelling. You can hear previews of this season’s shows on its site, as well as listen to stories from previous seasons.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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

Q&A with Jon Thomas, Question 10:

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

A: Never be afraid to show your humanity. We are all human and we connect with others when we see their humanity. If someone puts up a front and tries to appear perfect, like a brand that shoves consumer complaints under the rug, we’ll never be able to fully connect and embrace them.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.