Had to get this out there as soon as I learned of it: The agenda for this year’s Golden Fleece Conference has been posted — now with its own Web site.

And it looks as fabulous as ever.

You can link to registration, speaker bios, and an overview, too.

If you are into applied storytelling, I cannot recommend this conference highly enough.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Pam Hoelzle has developed what she calls a “visual and quick outline to aid in business and organizational storytelling.” Especially given the nifty graphic she’s developed to go along with the outline, I think we can safely call it a “model.”

I was naturally intrigued to apply this model to my favorite type of business storytelling, storytelling in the job search. What follows is Hoelzle’s outline with my adjustments (in bold)

1. What’s the BIG Idea that inspires you as an employee or prospective contributor to an employing organization?
2. Who is the target employer or type of employer?
3. Now, what is the problem/opportunity (stated in the employer’s words, such as in a job posting)?
4. What is it that differentiates you from other candidates?
5. What is YOUR PROMISE? What is the one sentence that clearly states what you have to offer prospective employers, particularly the targeted employer? (You can think of the response to this question as your personal branding statement.)
6. Now, what are your high-value innovative solutions? How have you solved for past employers similar problems to those the prospective employer is faced with or addressed opportunities similar to those the prospective employer has?
7. Values and Personality: What are your values, your preferred workplace culture, personality, tone of voice, likes, dislikes?
8. Keywords. These are the keywords of your story. These are the words you want to engage in and around online and in real life. These are the words you will be found around, listen for, engage with. [I’m really glad Hoelzle includes keywords because they are extremely important in the job search and should appear on your resume.]
9. Reviewal and Storytelling. All of your past employers’ testimonials, excerpts from performance reviews, and stories should be retold in written form, video, audio so that they are easily shareable across today’s media and networks. [All of this might be a bit much for the job search, but recommendations, testimonials, and success stories can certainly appear on your LinkedIn profile and other social media.
10. Engaging. Engaging happens as we share, listen and relate, online and in real life.

In Hoelzle’s posting about her outline/model. she provides examples from her own business. If you’re more interested in using the model for its intended purpose — business storytelling — than for job search, you’ll want to check out “her posting.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Still basking in that Valentine’s Day afterglow? Looking to start your workweek with a smile?

Enjoy Terrence Gargiuolo’s beautiful, brief video, Organizational Relationships.

Terrence kicks off by asking some thought-provoking questions about technology and whether it has brought us closer together or hindered relationships. He wonders whether we can fulfill our basic human need for connection within organizations, workplaces. One way we can, of course, is by sharing stories — carefully.

Some words and ideas from the video:

There may be no short cuts to forming relationships but the shortest distance between two people is a story.

Draw the stories of people around corporate imperatives and watch how people are drawn to each other and become more engaged performers.

Be vigilant in your story endeavors. The path to relationships is wrought with traps… We tend to see the stories we expect. Tell the stories we need. And only listen when we need to make sense.

By the way, Terrence offers some other nice videos on Vimeo.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Francisco Inchauste’s eagerly anticipated Part 2 of his Better User Experience with Storytelling article kicks off with interviews with four practitioners in the field — Dorelle Rabinowitz, Curt Cloninger, Christian Saylor, and Cindy Chastain (You might want to read Inchauste’s comments illuminating my entry about Part 1 of his article.)

He asks each his or her approach to storytelling in user experience design, how they feel storytelling ties into business’s profit motive, and what resources each recommends for those who want to learn more about storytelling in user experience design. Among those resources — plus some tools that Inchauste recommends:

• Personas Template
• Experience Themes Matrix
• Whitney Quesenbery’s Storytelling for User Experience Design (book to be released this year, co-authored by Kevin Brooks).
• Experience Themes by Cindy Chastain
• The Art of Storytelling by Christian Saylor
• A Case for Web Storytelling by Curt Cloninger

• Storytelling: A Compelling Design Tool
• Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

Some snippets of the expert interviews that resonated with me:

• Rabinowitz: “I realized that storytelling facilitates communication, that people respond emotionally to stories, bond over stories and share stories again and again, and that the more I integrated storytelling into my work the better the work was.”
• Cloninger: “… narrative design … means allowing the user to have some kind of personal say in completing her experience.”
• Chastain: “Brand message is no longer the thing that sells. Experience sells. If the intangible pleasure, emotion or meaning we seek can be made tangible through the use of story and narrative techniques, we will build more compelling product experiences.”
• Saylor: “I strongly believe that everything has a story associated with it. Every business, social group, concept, methodology and relationship is desperately seeking out better ways to engage with its audience. Some just happen to do it on a large scale (Apple), while others quietly create a pattern of life that goes unnoticed until it disappears (the remote control). From packaging that sits on the store shelf to the applications that follow us throughout our days, story influences just about every aspect of our lives. Story is all around us. It gives us a sense of understanding and knowledge of the people and things that are important to us.”

Later in the article, Inchauste offers examples of storytelling applications in several design realms: Packaging: Apple; Technology: Microsoft Courier; Marketing: Six Scents Perfume; Architecture: HBO Store; and Websites: Showtime Sports

[Illustration credit: I’m pretty sure Inchauste designed the “Good design tells a story” graphic.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I learned two new things from a Worldwide Story Work teleconference this week presented by Malcolm Jones, an expert in ideation and sketching. Well, probably a lot more than two, but these were the ones that really stood out.

1. An affinity for visual storytelling over text-based storytelling (or vice versa) probably reflects one’s learning style. Yes, that’s kind of a “duh” statement, and I’m sure I knew it on some level, but I hadn’t thought about it before Jones’s teleconference (even though Wednesday’s entry was about learning styles). I found it difficult to personally relate to Jones’s assertion that writing is very difficult for many people; yet, that observation is true to my experience. Writing comes incredibly easily to me, but I know from six-plus years of teaching business communication to college students that writing is agony for many. Some find linear storytelling to be a painful process, Jones says, and visual storytelling is less linear and more spatial than written storytelling. He also points out that the brain takes in visual stories differently than it takes in linear, written stories, yielding different insights. And an affinity for one over the other reflects differences in right- or left-brain dominance. Especially intriguing was Jones’s reminder that some 60 percent of people are visual learners. Given that stat, it’s almost surprising that visual storytelling isn’t more dominant over text-based storytelling.
2. Like other kinds of storytelling, visual storytelling is now being used in business — in business comics, games and other forms of play, and a field that was completely new to me, graphic facilitation. Jones cited Kevin Cheng as a major name in using comics for User Experience Design and later shared with me links by and about Cheng: The Power of Comics: An Interview with Kevin Cheng, Communicating Concepts Through Comics from Cheng’s own blog, and Examples of Comics in Designing Customer Experiences. In graphic facilitation, Jones says, a graphic artist works with a facilitator to create a visual story of what goes on in a group meeting. A site describing an upcoming workshop on Graphic Facilitation also provides a good description: “Using graphics to lead group process in a highly engaging, interactive way. … Participants learn to draw, create large-format displays, record, and practice facilitating and receiving feedback. They also design a meeting process and learn about methods of documenting visual meetings” and Graphic Facilitation is all about “applying visual language to group processes.” (A couple of resources on Graphic Facilitation: The Center for Graphic Facilitation, Graphic Facilitation Focuses A Group’s Thoughts — and apparently the definitive book on the discipline is David Sibbet’s Graphic Facilitation: Transforming Groups with the Power of Visual Listening). Jones also noted that storytelling literally comes into play in business in the form of games and role-plays. He reported that corporate groups are building things out of LEGOs to solve business problems, using a process called LEGO Serious Play. Jones cited a book on business play, which seems to cover more than just LEGOs, Serious Play.

Jones talked a bit about comics and storyboarding and recommended three tools:

• WittyComics, one of Jones’s favorites
• StripCreator
• DesignComics (Jones wasn’t very enthusiastic about this one).

To that list, I would add ComicLife, the comic software app for Mac. I’ve never used ComicLife for an actual comic, but I use it lots of other graphics functions since I don’t have and don’t know how to use Photoshop. As Jones notes, these tools can help one tell a story with comics — but necessarily a good story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’m not sure how I managed NOT to attend Terrence Gargiulo’s latest free webinar this week, but I missed it.

As usual, he is offering the recorded webinar, Facilitation Techniques with Stories, free to people like me who missed it (also embedded below).

He also offers a downloadable Facilitator Guide: Helping Others Make Sense of Stories and a paper, Nine Ground Rules of Working with Stories in Groups.

Terrence’s generosity is part of the culture of the storytelling community. We believe in sharing. Still, I constantly amazed at the incredible storytelling riches that are out there free for the asking.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Came across two good slideshows recently that illustrate two applications for storytelling.

Organizational storytelling: I don’t know how Tell Us Your Story: Cultivating an Organizational Storytelling Culture by Teresa Bailey ended up on my desktop, but there it was after I researched storytelling at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for this entry. Although the presentation doesn’t quite stand on its own without narration, the viewer can glean solid information about how storytelling developed at JPL and how it works.

Online Storytelling in Nonprofits: I’ve written previously about Roger Burks and his campaign against what he calls “poverty porn” in favor of “humanitarian storytelling. Burks, senior writer at Mercy Corps, gives a nice presentation that illustrates how humanitarian storytelling is executed at Mercy Corps (which has more than 2,000 stories on its site), how it engages its audience, and how the approach developed after the late-2004 tsunami. It’s called Online Storytelling at Mercy Corps, and it’s embedded below. This show is easier to follow than the JPL one because it has an audio track. Burks talks about why storytelling is effective, how to choose stories, how Mercy Corps integrates storytelling into its Web site (and makes the action step — donating — more prominent), how the storytelling approach has resulted in much greater donations than similar organizations elicit, and how its latest strategy involves authentic but not necessarily polished entries on it blog, especially useful for real-time disaster coverage, as Mercy Corps is currently providing about Haiti.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve published several entries recently about April’s Storytelling Weekend in Washington, DC (April 15-17). Steve Denning has now provided a one-stop link to learn about all three days of the weekend and links to register. More details and a registration link are still to come for the Saturday event, Golden Fleece Day.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Lou Hoffman, president and CEO of The Hoffman Agency, writes about storytelling as seen through a business prism in his blog Ishmael’s Corner.

He has identified his top 10 storytelling-related blog posts of 2009 in two parts:

• Part I
• Part II

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

President Obama repeated yesterday that the US intelligence community “failed to connect the dots in a way that would have prevented a known terrorist from attacking America.”

I’m thinking that imbuing the various intelligence organizations with storytelling techniques could help them get better at connecting the dots.

That’s what storytelling’s all about after all — connecting dots, making meaning, sensemaking.

Obama talked about better analysis, but perhaps conventional analytical approaches aren’t best suited when there are dots to be connected.

My colleagues who are storytelling practitioners and consultants know better than I do exactly how the organizations could be trained in storytelling approaches.

NASA could also provide an excellent model for storytelling approaches as storytelling is well-ingrained in the NASA culture. This article (and many others) describes how storytelling works to teach lessons at NASA: “APPL [NASA’s Academy of Program and Project Leadership] uses stories as their chief knowledge transfer method — the mechanism these program leaders use to shape and define their culture and to pass along lessons to the younger generation. Quite frankly, the process of writing the stories is often how they discover lessons in the first place.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.