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:
Bioneers has a radio series in which one 30-minute, well-produced, free episode features Rachel Remen, teacher and master storyteller, who packs several stories into her discussion about how the power of story can deepen lives and enrich work.
From Remen’s Web site:
Most health professionals do not take the time to remember and tell their own stories or have the opportunity to listen to the stories of colleagues. Yet our stories can heal us. Taking time to discover our own stories and explore them in the context of our calling and commitment can ease our loneliness and restore our sense of energy, meaning, purpose and direction in our work life.
Remen conducts workshops featuring a series of experiential exercises and discussions, using imagery, symbolism, poetry and journal writing to enable participants to find their own stories and discover what sustains them. Participants have the opportunity to remember times of loss, healing, mystery, love and grace; to share these stories with other professionals and to listen to the stories they tell in return.
Lifefilm_Intro from lifefilm on Vimeo.
After I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor about a company that makes DVDs of people’s life stories, I wanted to find out more about the company, LifeFilm Productions.
Not one’s whole life story — the sample films on the company’s site are about 15 minutes each — but the story of an important piece of your life. As the company explains it:
A Lifefilm is a film that tells your life story. What is that story? That’s up to you. It could be the first years of your child’s life. It could be the tale of how you and your husband met and fell in love. It could be a celebration of your parents and your family history. Whatever the story or occasion, we can custom-tailor a lifefilm for you.
The 53-second video above also offers a flavor of these kinds of filmed 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.
Stephanie West Allen turned me on to this entertaining video from Ira Glass’s This American Life Showtime series. It tells the tale of a guy whose wife experienced an embarrassing incident while waving to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on the streets of New York City. In the story, the man is with his wife … but the punchline is that he wasn’t actually there. His memory of the incident is apparently false.
In addition to its being an amusing story, the video resonated with me both because I have my own (probably) false-memory story and a story of encountering Jackie Onassis on the streets of New York.
False Memory (probably): My parents were having a cocktail party when I was about 6. I got out of bed, went downstairs and outside, stretched my arms out and flew across our driveway. I was about 5 or 6 feet off the ground and did not swoop around but rather stayed at an even altitude during my flight. This memory had always been so vivid that my brain is convinced I really flew across the driveway.
Jackie Onassis: I was a young teenager, maybe 14 or so, and I was visiting my dad in New York City on Easter weekend. We were walking along Fifth Avenue during the “Easter Parade,” and my father turned to me after we passed someone and said, “Do you know who that was?” “No,” I said, “I didn’t see.” “It was Mrs. Onassis,” he said. My big chance at a celebrity sighting, and I hadn’t even been paying attention to people passing us!
Those of us in storytelling circles constantly read about how organizations need to tell their stories and brand themselves with stories, but examples can be hard to come by. Here’s just one company Etsy, that has done it well, describing its first five years of tremendous growth.
Etsy says the essence of what the company is about can be captured in the picture book, Swimmy, read in the video that previous appeared above. 2020 update: The referenced video no longer seems to be available, but this article captures its essence.
… Our vision is to be the eye — to be a kind of organizing principle. We do not want Etsy itself to be a big tuna fish. Those tuna are the big companies that all us small businesses are teaming up against.
Come to think of it, Quint Careers does a pretty good job of telling its story, as in this piece celebrating Quint’s first 10 years.
Wendy Bigham wonders about people who tell important stories at difficult times in their lives. Her exemplar is Randy Pausch who has a best-selling book and highly viewed video, The Last Lecture, life lessons (Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams) delivered like the college professor he was before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
As a former journalist who is now in PR, Bigham asks, “… when has someone told you a difficult story for print at a bad time in their lives? What was the story?” Another question might be, when have you told a difficult story at a difficult time?
I post this entry on May 19 as it is the first anniversary of the death of my cousin, Anne Ertel, who died of pancreatic cancer.
Pausch has outlived his prognosis, but I’ve never heard of pancreatic cancer having a good outcome. Folks can follow Pausch’s progress here.
Here’s a way to test the ability of stories to teach — at least compared to PowerPoint presentations.
Writing in Newsday, Patricia Kitchen told of the technique of Manhattan-based organizational consultant Ben Dattner that “vividly illustrate[s] how stories are memorable and PowerPoint is forgettable.”
Writes Kitchen:
Dattner asks his master’s-level classes at New York University to put away their notes following team presentations and call out details they remember from the slides. The students are often shocked at how few bullet points they can summarize after listening for 20 minutes – usually around 5 percent of the PowerPoint content,” he says. “However, students generally remember about half of the stories or anecdotes in the presentation.”
Try it yourself or with students/audience members the next time you’re in a situation in which you can compare PowerPoint-heavy presentations with talks that are anecdote-rich.
In a terrific testament to how storytelling aids learning and makes students want to learn, creator Caitlin Kelleher describes Storytelling Alice:
As my thesis work, I created and evaluated a programming system for middle school girls called Storytelling Alice that presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling. Storytelling Alice includes high-level animations that enable users to program social interactions, a gallery of characters and scenery designed to spark story ideas, and a story-based tutorial. To evaluate the impact of storytelling support on girls’ motivation and learning, I compared girls’ experiences using Storytelling Alice and a version of Alice without storytelling support (Generic Alice). Results of the study suggest that girls are more motivated to learn programming using Storytelling Alice; study participants who used Storytelling Alice spent 42 percent more time programming and were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice (16 percent of Generic Alice users and 51 percent of Storytelling Alice users sneaked extra time).
Here is the information on her dissertation that reports those results:
Kelleher, C. Motivating Programming: Using storytelling to make computer programming attractive to middle school girls. PhD Dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science Technical Report CMU-CS-06-171.
Another excellent explanation of the project is here.
See this earlier entry.