See Jessica’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Jessica Lipnack (continued):

Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues are storytelling media?

A: I’m in. I keep Endless Knots, an active blog, am on LinkedIn (though I’m trying an experiment there where I only accept inbound links but don’t actively link to others), Facebook, and, yes, I have my avatar on Second Life, plus a bunch of others. You’re telling your story everywhere you appear online — when you write your profile, list your favorite music, post your pictures or videos. All of it together becomes your story.

Of these, the blog is the most powerful storytelling device for me — and, I think, for some of my friends in professional positions. (Much as I’d like to make films, I’m not a filmmaker — yet ☺.) The power of storytelling for executives cannot be overemphasized. One colleague is using his blog to help transform his hospital’s culture — and clinical outcomes — simply by telling the ongoing story of what’s happening in his academic medical center.

Q: What future aspirations do you personally have for your own story work? What would you like to do in the story world that you haven’t yet done?

A: I’ve published short stories but I’ve yet to publish a novel (one is complete, another on the way). Much of what I practice professionally, as a management consultant, I express in my fiction. Fiction makes it easy to say difficult things–and to create worlds that are positive and optimistic.

I could not be more pleased to present the second in my series of Q&A interviews with story practitioners. This interview is with Jessica Lipnack, whom I first encountered early in this decade through her expertise in virtual teams, another one of my interests. I read her book (co-authored with Jeffrey Stamps), Virtual Teams, and drew on it heavily in teaching my students about virtual teams and guiding them through a virtual-teams project. I was delighted to find that Jessica was a member of Worldwide Story Network and thrilled that we share interests in both virtual teams and storytelling. Learn more about Jessica below. I am presenting the Q&A with Jessica over the next four days.

Bio: Jessica Lipnack is the CEO and co-founder of NetAge, a consultancy that provides advice, education, and ideas on virtual teams, collaboration, and organization structures. She is the co-author (with Jeffrey Stamps) of six non-fiction books on this subject, including Virtual Teams, The Age of the Network, and Networking. She has written articles and op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, The Industry Standard, New Age Journal, Mother Earth News, and more. As a fiction writer, Jessica’s work has appeared in Ars Medica, the Global City Review, Mothering, and The Futurist. Jessica lives in Massachusetts. For more information, visit her website and blog. 

Q&A with Jessica Lipnack:

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

A: I’m a writer. Writers tell stories regardless of genre — fiction, nonfiction, poets, business writers. I’ve been writing stories professionally since I took a job as a reporter for my hometown newspaper when I was sixteen. I worked at The Pottstown (PA) Mercury for four summers, eight-hour shifts, five or six days a week, and wrote a lot of stories. When Jeff Stamps and I started writing books for organizations (e.g., Networking, The Age of the Network, Virtual Teams), we included stories in all of them. But not just stories. After exposure to the work of Ned Hermann, we understood that people have differing cognitive preferences, different ways that they learn. Some respond most strongly to vision, some to theory, some to method, some to stories. Hermann’s approach became a design principle for our books — all four cognitive styles had to be included with every chapter. That said, we’ve begun nearly every chapter in every book with a story so as to engage people emotionally.

And, I’ve done some acting. There you learn how to connect your words, your expressions, and your gestures emotionally. Learning to act, at least in the limited way that I have, has helped with presentation skills, critical to good storytelling.

And and I’m a public speaker. By the time you’ve given a hundred speeches, you figure out what connects with audiences and what doesn’t, how to pace yourself, when to be funny, and when to be dead serious.

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

A: Four things here:

1. The best writers — or at least the ones I love, big names like Doris Lessing and Geraldine Brooks, both of whom write both fiction and nonfiction, and best-kept secrets, like Roland Merullo, who writes superb novels and superb nonfiction — have had the greatest effect on my storytelling. I’ve learned technique by reading them. The list of all who’ve influenced me could be very long but Annie Lamott’s Bird by Bird is a popular and recent book that’s been helpful; EM Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a lecture series from long ago, is worthy of study; and Ursula Le Guin’s advice is in a category of its own for its usefulness for anyone truly committed to storytelling.
2. I’ve been influenced by business people who tell good stories: an oil company executive who put his company’s one-hundred-year history on huge wall boards that he walked his colleagues around, explaining the challenges facing them; an Army general who has the authority to require senior officers to blog, which he has. These people understand the power of story — and how to reach people deep inside, where truly meaningful change transpires.
3. I’ve benefited immensely from being a member of Francis Ford Coppola’s writers’ site, Zoetrope.com. Although the site is for fiction writers — including screenwriters, poets, short story writers, and, inevitably, novelists, its structure encourages writers to critique one another’s work constructively.
4. My literary agents and my editors have been terrific and indispensable teachers about language and shaping big stories.

I’m delighted to initiate this series of interviews with some of the gurus of both performance and applied storytelling. First up is Molly Catron, whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak at the 2005 Golden Fleece Conference. Read more about her below.

Bio: Molly Catron left her day job in the corporate world in 2001 to become a storyteller. Like most storytellers, she felt a “calling” to tell stories aimed at uniting the heart, mind, body, and spirit. Her stories come from characters and personal experiences of childhood and as an adult. She has learned to observe life through the lens of a storyteller and can see value in the simplest encounter.  In her work as a change agent in the corporate world, Molly often uses stories to “hold up the mirror” for others to observe their behaviors and assess their values. She has a master of arts in storytelling from East Tennessee State University and is currently on the Board of Directors for the Tennessee Storytelling Association and a performing member of the Jonesborough Storytellers Guild. She lives on a farm in East Tennessee with her husband, Wayne, and is Nana to four grandchildren. See her current projects here: Current Work for Molly Catron.doc

Q&A with Molly Catron

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative?

A: I came from a family of people who told stories. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I was faced with teaching the principles associated with some of the organizational change efforts, I found myself telling stories. The stories put the facts in an emotional context working in the 18 inches between the heart and the head where true change occurs.

Q: What attracted you to the field?

A: I had worked for years in a manufacturing environment first as a chemist and later as an organizational change agent. I had always felt out of step with my peers (chemist and engineers). Because of a large donation to the International Storytelling Center, my company was asked to partner with the center to study the use of story in business. I was known for my stories so was the natural one to be selected to lead the effort for the company. When I became engaged in the storytelling community, I found my home. I belonged with them. In one of my stories I describe them as a group of people who laugh and cried with east, who applaud difference, thought deeply and used delicious language ….and they DO NOT wear golf shirts or use sports analogies.

Q: What do you love about it?

A: I always amazed at how a powerful, yet often simple, story can reach deep within the heart of a total stranger and bring them so very, very close. You see it in their eyes and feel a resonate energy. It is that magical moment of connection that delights me and feeds my spirit.

Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now?

A: When getting my master’s in storytelling from ETSU, I remember sitting in a class and hearing Dr. Joseph Sobol say, “Anthropologists say storytellers arise when the society has lost its way.” Wow, that resonated in every part of my body. I think too often storytellers do not understand the power they hold in the spoken word…power to influence…to inform…to inspire…to change. We are needed more than ever in this society which, in my opinion, has somehow forfeited their soul in the name of progress.

Q: What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?

A: Everything was mechanized in the Industrial Age. We became “human doings.” We severed our connections. We learned to praise logic and ridicule emotions. We became like our machines…different parts operating separately at breakneck speed disregarding any interdependency. I think we long for the lost connection. We were not machines. Our emotions reflect are humanity. Without them we are cold and deep down within us, we feel the void and fill it with a lot of bad things. We want to love and be loved (warts and all). We want to share our experience with life. We need it to have meaning. Somehow, in that magical space between the teller and the listener, we feel that connection and once felt, it isn’t easily forgotten.

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

A: I think it is very important to find your own unique voice. Some say that stories seek out the teller to be told and I know I have experienced that feeling. If I come from an authentic place and take the journey of the artist, I will be a good vessel for the story. When I first met David Novak, he reminded me that you don’t construct a story, you grow it. It is an organic process. Some stories take form in a matter of minutes and others take years. If you rush the process, the story is not all it could have been. This was hard for me because I had been trained to produce a “product’ and usually with a deadline. I had to learn to love the process and wait patiently for the story to form first in my heart, mind, body and spirit before I could carry it out to the world with my words.

Q: You write about a model of love and grace:
The body carries us.
The mind teaches us.
The heart warms us.
The spirit inspires us.

How does story fit into that model?

A: The rest of that thought is important: When they unite we are passionate, joyful and committed. I have often added the fact that stories can take us there.

I think a powerful story manages in the most magical way to work on our heart, mind, body and spirit in a beautifully choreographed dance. I have studied some brain topology and understand some of the mechanics of how story functions in our neural networks but I prefer to think of story as a wonderful return to a very basic way of balancing our human experience. Stories have always been with us but we forgot them. We stopped gathering around the fire, the quilt, the dinner table. We left to sit silently in front of some form of media. We let ourselves wither in the desert of our beloved technology.

Q: One of the workshop topics you list on your Web site is Personal Mastery, and you talk about writing personal “life scripts.” Do you believe it’s possible to change one’s life by changing its story or script?

A: I taught the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey) as part of an effort to encourage character building (personal mastery) within the company culture. As part of my certification process, I went through the painful process of writing a personal mission statement. Although, it was painful, it was one of the most beneficial things I have ever done for myself and it ultimately led to an early retirement and a change of career. I had let society write my life script and had never questioned its interpretation of my purpose and value. As part of getting the master’s, I took a postmodern psychology course and was so absolutely excited to learn about the “dominant story” we tell ourselves and how it influences our lives without our conscious knowledge. I studied the woman’s movement and realized how that movement fragmented because groups within the movement could not agree up the new dominant story for women. I think we still haven’t defined it and that contributes to all the stress for women and men. Well, anyway, that’s a whole other area of work I am interested in and that’s bringing women back together in groups to redefine our story. When we were in the red tent or gathered around a quilt, we shaped our story and supported each other in its plot but now we are apart. Women must to gather again.

My five-question interviews with some of the best-known folks in both applied and performance storytelling will commence Tuesday, Sept. 1.

Eighteen practitioners are featured in these Q&As: Molly Catron, Terrence Gargiulo, Jon Hansen, Loren Niemi, Gabrielle Dolan, John Caddell, Shawn Callahan, David Vanadia, Svend-Erk Engh, Sharon Lippincott, Tom Clifford, Ardath Albee, Sharon Benjamin, Carol Mon, Ron Donaldson, Jessica Lipnack, Cynthia Kurtz, and Stephanie West Allen.

Among others who’ve agreed to participate are Annette Simmons, Christina Baldwin, Tim Sheppard, Michael Margolis, Victoria Ward, Steve Lovelace, Sally Strackbein, Thom Haller, Karen Dietz, Tim Enerata, Eric Wolf, Erin Fogarty, Rick Stone, David Drake, Nicky Fried, Natalie Shell, Madelyn Blair, Lori Silverman, Kivi Leroux Miller, Karen Gilliam, and Kathleen Golden.