Not long ago, I blogged about a community storytelling initiative in Oakland, CA. Commenter Tim Enerata pointed out that lots of place-based, community-based storytelling projects are thriving out there, some of which are listed at The Center for Digital Storytelling’s StoryMapping Stories page.

I’ve also just come across Denver’s Five Two Eight O, described as being “about you, your life, and your neighborhood in the context of Denver’s larger community, its intersecting histories, development, challenges and successes.” Further:

Five Two Eight O draws on personal stories, the arts and dialogue to bring people together to identify and explore what it is to live together in this city, this neighborhood, this time- as ourselves, with our own experiences, among these particular people.

You’re probably curious as to what Five Two Eight O stands for:

Five Two Eight O stands for: five events (one in Berkeley-Regis; one in Lowry; one in the Santa Fe Arts District and one in the Five Points area). The fifth and final event is a culminating evening of art and performance created and developed from the four preceding neighborhood events - a two-act celebration of Denver’s community and communities. Eight stories will be presented in that final evening — stories told and heard this summer, when Five Two Eight O comes to your neighborhood. Dialogue circles (O) will be an integral part of every event.

The stories of some of the folks behind this project can be accessed from its site and are quite fascinating.

Both Two Men Talking and the related site narativ are rather spare Web sites into which one must do a bit of digging to see what they’re all about.

A press release on Two Men Talking explains the origins:

Murray Nossel and Paul Browde met in 1974 in Johannesburg when they were 12-year-old rival schoolmates and were challenged by a teacher to tell each other a story. Decades later, they met by chance in a New York street and the story has continued, but has become the tale of their own experiences and individual and shared lives. Murray is now an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and Paul a psychiatrist, and their conversation is frank, unsentimental and without boundaries. Within a broadly chronological framework, TWO MEN TALKING examines their shared experiences growing up white, Jewish, gay and privileged under the apartheid regime. Over the many years of performing this show, this unscripted piece has dealt with difficult issues including harassment, homophobia, racism and AIDS, each of which has deeply touched the lives of the two men. Each performance is absolutely unique as the way they tell the story changes in a continually transforming and developing piece. The combination of theatre and real life and has inspired audience members to tell stories of their own, and to better value their own relationships.

Murray apparently now leads story workshops and seminars with special guest Paul under the name narativ, described this way on the narativ site:

Discover your Life Story as a source of creative expression. Clearly and confidently communicate who you are + what you do. In an amazingly short time you will learn how to master your own storytelling ability and be taught how to use that skill to succeed in any part of your life, including business and socially.

I continue to be amazed at the generosity of spirit in the storytelling community. There is such an aura of sharing. Copious, rich material is offered on Web sites. Practitioners generously give of their time to answer questions and promote their craft.

The latest gem I’ve found is a fabulous 50-page booklet, Story Guide: Building Bridges Using Narrative Technique, on the site of Sparknow, a knowledge and communication consultancy. Want a slew of ideas for how to apply storytelling ideas to support knowledge sharing, change, and communication in organizations? Here they are, free for the taking. These exercises are also great for building community.

The exercises and guidelines include:

• Warmups and icebreakers
• Questions for drawing stories out of participants
• a 7-element structure for shaping and sharing stories (with handout)
• Checklists
• Object and display exercise
• Postcards technique
• Jumpstart stories (Seth Kahan’s technique)
• The half-a-story technique
• The future story technique, with handout (Madelyn Blair’s technique)
• Story-in-a-story technique
• Troubleshooting log

There’s not a lot in the booklet about how and why story works — but plenty of other books and articles address those topics. What the booklet does offer is illustrations of how the techniques are actually applied.

It was created partially by and for SDC, the Swiss Aid Agency, but any organization can use it.

You can download the booklet here.

There’s a phrase I love from the booklet — “experience capitalization” — capitalizing on sharing experiences.

The Chief Storyteller is a firm that helps businesses tell their stories. Visitors can download short PDFs of these stories.

What I found intriguing is The Chief Storyteller’s five-phase approach to telling a client’s story, especially Phase 1 (see below), which includes an elevator speech, Web site, success stories, advertising/PR, testimonials, marketing/development, and sales.

Each aspect of Phase 1 applies to job-seekers and how they tell their story in the job search:

• Job-seekers, too, need an elevator speech. See entries in my blog-within-a-blog, Tell Me About Yourself, beginning here.
• I recommend that all job-seekers buy their own name as a domain name if possible and craft a personal/professional Web site with a resume and/or career portfolio on it.
• Success stories must be stock-in-trade for any job-seeker, especially on a resume and in interviews.
• Advertising and PR are a little farther afield for job-seekers, but some certainly may want to send out press releases about their accomplishments.
• Testimonials can be included on a resume, cover letter, and in various social-media profiles, especially LinkedIn, which provides an accepted venue for recommendations/testimonials.
• I would characterize marketing and development as the things the job-seeker does to disseminate his or her message, such as direct-mail campaigns to employers.
• Finally, I equate sales to the way the job-seeker sells himself or herself in the interview and closes the sale at the end of the interview.

The Chief Storyteller also has a blog.

I’ve been really into “attending” webinars recently.

I never did teleseminars because I’m phone-phobic. Even if I was not expected to speak, I wanted nothing to do with any learning opportunity that involved the phone.

But now that learning options are available that just require my laptop, the Web, and a headset, I’m all over it. Especially if it’s free or cheap. I can even do teleseminars and conference calls now as long as I use Skype, my computer, and my headset. Yes, I am a very quirky person.

I participated on June 25 in an excellent webinar put on by organizational story guru Terrence Gargiulo. Here’s what made it so great:

• He used the wonderful GotoMeeting platform that enables participants to see the presenter’s desktop and use interactivity tools.
• He opened with two fun trivia questions (both of which I answered correctly I might add).
• I had heard Terrence is an excellent presenter — and it’s true.
• He’s also a great storyteller.
• He had great visuals with cool highlighter and mouseover effects.
• He respected his audience’s time. In contrast, I attended a webinar the night before that went way over time.
• He wasn’t trying to sell anything. Again in contrast to the weak webinar the night before.
• He gave a shoutout to A Storied Career. Woo-hoo!
• He provided copious handouts.
• He gave a prize. Random drawing. I didn’t win.

The only slight downside was some audio funkiness resulting from unclear instructions about muting and unmuting. Pretty minor.

I was amazed when Terrence said this was the first webinar he’d done because he did a great job with it. He says he hopes to do more, and I hope he does. He’s looking for topic suggestions. E-mail him here if you have any thoughts.

In her company’s blog, Creating Tomorrow (which is also the name of her company), Trina Roach relates this story she once heard:

When I first started out in advertising, I was told the story of the agency’s successful launch campaign for a major client’s new product. When the agency introduced the idea for the campaign to the client, the client was livid. It wasn’t what they expected, and it certainly wasn’t what they thought they needed for their product to be a success. The agency believed in their concept and stood behind their innovative idea 100 percent. Their middle ground? They agreed to develop a parallel campaign more in line with client expectations and to pay to put both campaigns into market research. The client agreed to abide by the research results, and launch the winning campaign. In the end, the agency version got the highest-ever research scores. It gave the client’s product a massive push into the market, became talk-of-the-town, and went on to win a creative prize in New York. Oh yea, in the end the client agreed to pick up the research costs.

Roach goes on to enumerate several types of stories used in leadership, some of which I was familiar with, some not. They include the “Who am I?” story, the “Why Am I here?” story, the “What do you want to know?” story, the “What are our core values?” story, and the crux of the story above, the “Where is out middle ground?” story. Here’s how Roach describes that kind of story:

Where is our middle ground? — As a leader you are sometimes called upon to bargain even when you strongly believe you are in the right. The challenge here is to let the other party see that you truly understand their perspective, while challenging them to give your method a try.

Another bit from the nice outline (by “gwennis48” at the Luther I. Replogle Foundation) of key points from the presentation that Andy Goodman delivered. I’ve blogged previously about my fondness for Goodman’s Web site and company…

To build a lasting storytelling culture in your organization, identify the organization’s core stories, Goodman advises:

To build a storytelling culture, these are the stories that you need:

1. the “Nature of our Challenge” story
2. the “How we Started” story
3. the emblematic success stories
4. stories about your people; performance stories
5. the “Striving-to-Improve” story
6. the “Where We Are Going” story (the future)

Also on the subject of nonprofit storytelling, Kivi Leroux Miller posts on the blog Nonprofit Communications Five Questions Nonprofits Should Answer with Stories, as well as a terrific collection of great nonprofit storytelling sources.

Found some nice nuggets in the storytelling section of the blog (Mighty Casey Media Mighty Mouth Blog) of Casey Quinlan, who describes herself as a “20-year veteran of network news and sports, now a writer, speaker and storytelling guru helping companies and their customers get to ‘happily ever after’.”

She suggests using stories to hold the attention of large audiences:

What are the major points you’re trying to make? What’s the essential story behind each of them? And, most important, why does your audience care how that story turns out? With those elements identified, turn each of your major points into 60-second stories, with interaction time between each of them for the audience to engage with you about the information you just shared.

Her thoughts on stories told during networking are eye-opening and at odds with what I write about here regarding having an “Elevator Story” ready to tell in networking situations:

Do you have a set spiel? Something that you have down pat, that you can say backwards and forwards without thinking? How sincere, how authentic do you think that sounds to your audience? Canned Spam, anyone?… Once you get to that place of comfort, telling your story is organic — it comes easily, from the heart, and communicates clearly to whoever you’re talking to … The approach I’ve seen so many people use — the one I referred to above as pasteurized processed pork product — is to come up with a spiel you can easily remember and repeat, and then do just that. Lather, rinse, repeat. The issue you face if you do choose to tell your story that way is this: how can you communicate value without some element of passion? … You have to keep your story fresh, for yourself AND for your audiences. Canned won’t cut it.

I appreciate Quinlan’s viewpoint that the story needs to sound fresh and spontaneous, not canned and hokey. I wish she’d give examples of what these fresh stories might look like, but I guess that’s the point; giving examples would only encourage readers to adapt and can those examples for themselves.

And nice words here about business storytelling:

Storytelling, in the business sense, is the authentic statement of your value in the marketplace. It’s not charts and graphs, it’s not a slide presentation — let me repeat that, it is not a slide presentation — it’s the language, spoken or written, that says why you’re the best at what you do.

I don’t completely agree with her about the slides. While I agree that slides with charts and graphs and lots of type are not helpful, I think minimalist slides that contain mostly images, such as the pecha kucha presentations I’ve written about, can enhance storytelling.

Quinlan also interlaces her entries about storytelling with her personal saga of going though chemotherapy for breast cancer.

You can also hear a podcast interview with Quinlan.

ChangingMinds.org has a nice section on Storytelling in Organizations, including what’s special about organizational storytelling, its purpose, storytelling channels, and a section on teaching tales.

The site also lists a wider variety of organizational story types than I’ve seen before, including:

• Cautionary tales
• Genesis stories
• Leadership stories
• Stories of failure
• Founder myths
• Heroic stories
• Stories of hope
• Fearful stories
• Stories of transformation
• Visionary stories
• War stories

Anecdote, the Australian consulting firm that specializes in organizational storytelling, is offering a new white paper entitled, Three journeys: A narrative approach to successful organisational change.

Here’s an excerpt provided by Anecdote:

This paper describes the approach we take with clients to successfully foster change in their organisations. It is based on our deep knowledge of both complexity and narratives, and it reflects our holistic approach in working at both systemic and personal levels to help organisations and their people move forward. Coaching is integral to our process at each step of the way and to our clients’ success in reaching their change and improvement goals. Our approach helps leaders and organisations embrace the need for change, approach it openly, prepare for it fully, and achieve the critical outcomes — whether it be a new technology, a turnaround, a new strategy or some other cause.