The tally is in for Sunday’s Blog Action Day: 2,710 bloggers from 109 countries registered to take part in Blog Action Day 2011.
Go here to see the range of bloggers from different cultures, countries, and
languages who committed to blog about food for Blog Action Day, October 16, 2011.
I recently had the most pleasant experience of having Graham Williams, pictured at right, nominate himself and his partner, Dorian Haarhoff, to participate in a Q&A interview. I loved the self-nomination, not only because I knew the pair would be motivated to respond quickly (they did!), but also because I was eager to learn more about The Halo and the Noose. Graham and Dorian are also my first Q&A participants based in Africa. This Q&A will run over the next five days.
Bio: Graham Williams and Dorian Haarhoff run the corporate story 
resource web site The Halo and the Noose. They bring a unique blend of business experience, acumen and insight into the role and manner of using storytelling and listening, poetry and metaphor in business life. And impart new outlooks, skill and confidence to others. Part of their mission is to bring healing and possibilities to businesses. The site offers credible, quality resources to an elite readership.
Graham was previously a senior executive with Shell, is a thought-leader for the Institute of Management Consultants, and his formal disciplines are psychology, economics, consumer behaviour, and business economics.
Dorian, pictured at left, is a poet, writer, and mentor steeped in story. A former professor of English, he is a speaker, entertainer, and writing coach.
They are based in Cape Town, South Africa.
The Halo and the Noose, their first book, was published in 2009 and offers 
an innovative approach to the stories that beat in the heart of an organization. It addresses techniques and practical applications. At a deeper level the book shows a way of being in business and doing business.
Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting and partner in Designed Learning: “This is the best book about business and leadership that I have seen in a long time. It is fresh, interesting, needed and written to reach out and touch the toughest part of each of us. This is not just about storytelling, but more importantly, about how we can all change our story and create a future distinct from the past”.
Ralph Windle, author of The Poetry of Business Life and founder/ director of The Creative Value Network: “The authors set out their complex and important themes with an impressive directness and clarity. They achieve this by the simple, persuasive device of practising what they preach. For the narrative moves between argument and story in a seamless way which argues a deep but unobtrusive scholarship in the literatures, cultures and traditions of many societies. The book should be seen as an exciting further step in the long process of re-connecting business life to the mainstream of human history, experience and potential”.
The Halo and the Noose was followed by Story Matters @ Work which deals with applications of story in various corporate functions, at various levels. Mindfulness and imagination are shown to be two key ingredients for effective storytelling and listening.
Much of their time is presently being spent on interventions with leading organisations wishing to better use story in order to forge emotional connections with their brand. They assist companies to achieve a triple bottom line — to do well, to be well and to care for the environment.
Graham and Dorian invite you to connect and converse with them at The Halo and the Noose.
Q&A with Graham Williams and Dorian Haarhoff, Question 1:
Q: Why The Halo and the Noose?
A: Our Orientation for The Halo and the Noose begins: “Stories can free us or trap us. They are like the two-edged sword. It depends on the telling, the motive for the tale and how we interpret the meaning. They can open us to new possibilities or keep us choked by or strangled in existing paradigms and orientations – whether these are about belief systems, values, religions, thinking styles, business and life journeys, strategies or behaviour patterns. Writer Dan McKinnon advises, “A halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose”. “. The reverse is also true. We acknowledge him for the book’s title. We also dedicate the book to those readers who seek the liberation of the halo and wish to escape the entrapment of the noose……….“
For the fourth year, I am participating in Blog Action Day. This year’s topic is food.
As a blogger about applied storytelling, my goal with Blog Action Day is to explore the ways food and story intersect.
We can tell something of a visual story with food. Food is is the center of many of our cultural traditions — the stories we regularly enact. A PBS series, for example, The Meaning of Food explored “our relationships to food and reveals the connection food has to our identity: personal, cultural, and familial. Everything about eating — including what we consume, how we acquire it, who prepares it, who’s at the table, and who eats first — is a form of communication that is rich with meaning.” When the series site states, “Our attitudes, practices, and rituals surrounding food are a window into our most basic beliefs about our world and ourselves,” it could just as easily be saying that attitudes, practices, and rituals surrounding food are a window into our stories.
Similarly, Earthbound Farms supports its brand by offering a Web site 
section of Food Stories, about how “the stories of our food adventures are the stuff of rich family traditions and deep friendships.” Doesn’t look like the site has been updated since 2009, however.
The blogger behind Victual Storytelling asserts that a story to tell exists behind every meal. “I hope to show you something new about food,” she writes, “through the meals I eat, the people who feed me, those I cook for and the stories behind the food.”
Much of the narrative about food in recent years has concerned the unhealthful and inhumane aspects of the Western diet, the industrial food system, and factory farming. Author Michael Pollan(The Omniivore’s Dilemma and several other titles) is well-known for telling the harrowing stories of our food system. A Canadian effort that has gained significant buzz is The Story of Food, a 5:40 video intended to get people thinking “about our broken food system and what’s gone wrong!” The film is embedded at the end of this post.
How did our system get this way? The book, The Hungry World “tells multiple stories about people and institutions that played major roles in the 20th century struggle to ‘modernize’ the production of food, an intrinsically non-modern activity.
In From Factory Farm to Vegan, Angie Hammond tells her story of growing up on a chicken factory farm but later evolving into a vegan.
The flip side is of the farming system is the relationship of food to sustainable living, a subject covered in Cooking Up a Story, which offers “unique documentary stories about farmers and ranchers, food artisans, and others whose lives center around sustainable food and agriculture.”
Consumers are increasingly concerned about the story of where their food comes from. In the curriculum guide, Nourish, “Each story includes when, where, why, and how a certain food gets from the farm to your plate and who is involved in getting it there.”
In Food Curated, Liza DiGuia hopes to share stories of where good food comes from through short documentaries. “I believe food is a shared experience,” she writes, “and there is so much to the process that I find so beautiful and so compelling to film and capture.”
Perhaps the most significant way that Blog Action Day can raise awareness 
of food issues is by addressing hunger. As with any sort of cause, stories are a powerful way bring the issue to life. Three sites that tell stories about hunger are:
The Story Of Food from USC Canada on Vimeo.
I’ll be participating in this effort — with a story spin — for the fourth year on Sunday:
So there I was, cruising along toward the first major Toastmasters benchmark of 10 speeches. I gave my ninth speech this week.
In every speaker’s career comes a speech, or perhaps more than one, that 
he or she beats himself or herself up over. In his blog, Manner of Speaking, Toastmaster John Zimmer summarizes some of the things that can go wrong:
I had practiced my ninth speech to the same excessive extent as usual, rehearsing in 10 times the morning of the speech. I knew it cold.
But during the speech, several distracting things happened to totally make me lose my mojo. Our Toastmasters banner fell off the lectern. I may have knocked if off; I couldn’t tell you because I was in that speaker’s zone where you’re not that aware of your surroundings. Then a guest’s cellphone emitted a loud, obnoxious ringtone; he didn’t know to turn it off for the meeting.
Both interruptions threw me off my game. In two spots in the speech, I blanked out on the next line and had to peek at my cheatsheet.
But perhaps worse than the distractions and forgotten lines, I felt I was just not connecting with the audience. I could tell by their facial expressions. I’m not sure why I didn’t connect.
I know I was not as committed to this speech as I have been to others. I had planned for a long time that this topic — steps to success for young women — would be the subject of my ninth speech, but as I worked on it, I became less and less in love with it.
It had no stories. I of all people should know that a speech is always better with stories.
Despite my personal disappointment with my performance, I know that if I didn’t have any setbacks as a speaker, I probably wouldn’t grow or learn anything. My ninth speech was no triumph, but it may have taught me to pick topics about which I have more conviction, to include stories in my speeches, and to become less unnerved by distractions.
Rolling with the punches is the point of Zimmer’s post:
Every time we stand up in front of others, we are taking a risk. Things can, and do, go wrong. We can get hurt in the process. Sometimes a little, sometimes more than a little. It’s part of the deal; it’s part of the process; it’s part of the price of admission.
If you’ve never had a bad public speaking experience, chances are you haven’t done much public speaking. If you want to improve, there is only one real way and that is to speak. And if you speak, you will certainly have setbacks. You can’t avoid them forever.
Public speaking is a risk. Just like life. But if you persevere, the rewards are tremendous.
If you’re interested in the connection between story and career, Herminia Ibarra is a name you need to know.
I first encountered her well-known Harvard Business Review article (Ibarra,
H. & Lineback, L.K. [2005] “What’s Your Story?” Harvard Business Review, January, 83 [1]: 64-71) during my dissertation research and referred to it often.
But it wasn’t until I began soliciting nominations for a list of indispensable career books for the 15th anniversary of A Storied Career’s parent, Quintessential Careers, that I learned of Ibarra’s 2003 book, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career.
Ibarra presents a new model for career change in which knowing what kind of career change we want is the result of doing and experimenting — as opposed to the common view that we must know what we want to do before we can make a change.
Story and narrative, Ibarra says, play a role in this career-change experimentation:
Throughout a career transition, the narratives we craft to describe why we are changing (and what remains the same) also help us try on possibilities.
She describes a case study in which the subject’s attempts to explain her transition were often clumsy — but the more she told her story, the more sharply defined it became, and the more excited she became about it. “Each retelling informed her evolving story,” Ibarra explains.
Later in the book, Ibarra notes:
People devote considerable energy to developing their stories — what key experiences marked their path; what meanings they attribute to those experiences; and more importantly what common thread links old and new.
Ultimately, though, our stories “never reflect objective reality,” Ibarra asserts, which is “why revising our stories is a fundamental tool for reinventing ourselves.” Further:
One of the central identity problems that has to be worked out during a career transition is deciding on a story that links the old and new self. Until that is solved, the external audience to whom we are selling our reinvention remains dubious, and we too feel unsettled and uncertain of our own identity. To be compelling, the story must explain why we must reinvent ourselves, who we are becoming, and how we will get there.
Although others view us as unfocused before we fully have a story, retelling and rehearsing the story “until it comes out just right” results not only in a polished story but in a narrative that can inform the next step.
Indeed, Ibarra lists story-retelling as one of nine unconventional strategies for career change. “Take advantage of whatever life sends your way to revise, or at least reconsider your story,” she says. “Practice telling it different ways to different people, in much the same way you would revise a resume and cover letter for different jobs. But don’t just tell the story to a friendly audience; try it out on skeptics. And don’t be disturbed when the story changes along the way.”
Through discovering Ibarra’s book and Web site, I also learned of an academic paper she authored that I look forward to reading:
Ibarra, H. & Barbulescu, R. (2010) “Identity as Narrative: Prevalence, Effectiveness, and Consequences of Narrative Identity Work in Macro Work Role Transitions.” Academy of Management Review, January, 35 (1): 135-154.
You can access it through library or university databases.
I am often beyond surprised by which of my blog posts gets attention and resonates with readers.
My Saturday post about the Earth’s stories got some mini-buzz.
But who would ever think of connecting geology with one’s career story? Apparently my colleague Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter. She has written a brilliant post comparing the story-inaccessibility I’ve experienced with my geology interest to the way job-seekers’ career stories are sometimes obscured.
“Tasked chiefly with telling stories on behalf of my job-seeking clients,” Jacqui writes, “I am hired to narrate career stories that are both accessible and interesting to their hiring decision-maker visitors.”
She then offers story-development tips and processes “to help boost accessibility to your career story (Be sure to read her post to get the full elaboration on these great tips):
This idea of targeting job and employer with the stories you choose for your resume is so important. I get asked all the time to critique resumes. The first thing I always ask for is a sample job posting typifying the kind of job the job-seeker is targeting. I can’t effectively critique a resume unless I can see how sharply it focuses on a given job and/or employer. I’m in the process of developing a list of indispensable career books for the 15th anniversary of A Storied Career’s parent, Quintessential Careers. Mentioned in the brilliant Guerrilla Marketing For Job Hunters 3.0 is the No. 1 job-seeker mistake: Lack of focus in the job search. Sometimes a job-seeker will respond to my request for a job posting by saying he or she isn’t sure what he or she wants to do. Your resume will be of very limited value if employers can’t see, as Jacqui puts it, the thoughtful conceptualization of your career target.
And Jacqui is right on the money in her assertion that one set of accomplishment stories won’t work for every job and employer; you need to pick a set specific to each target. My new workbook offers numerous exercises aimed at developing job-specific and employer-specific stories.
I love Jacqui’s final point about how valuable story development is as interview preparation. I ask clients to complete a grueling Accomplishments Worksheet that asks 18 questions for each past job (in the workbook, I ask for these accomplishments in story form). Many balk at all that work and wonder why they hired a resume writer. The smart ones, though, complete the worksheet diligently and then sing its praises for how well it helped them prep for interviews. (In the meantime, their work has enabled me to create a resume that is many times more effective than it would have been without their accomplishment stories.)
The Earth is a wonderful storyteller.
When we spent our first summer in Eastern Washington, I became absolutely fascinated by the diverse geology of our new locale. We live in an area that, 250 million years ago, was under the Pacific Ocean, though not far from the coastline — at that time, roughly the border between present-day Washington and Idaho.
It’s also an area that, 17 to 6 million years ago, saw thousands of years of lava flows pouring over it.
And, during the most recent Ice Age, advancing glacial ice resulted in 
cataclysmic flooding that formed gigantic, deep lakes and resulted in many of the geological formations that exist today, such as Dry Falls, pictured at right.
I stand in awe of dramatic stories that unfolded long before the human story began.
The Earth tells her stories through what has been left behind after these dramatic events. The stories of undersea existence, volcanic activity, glacial flooding, and more are told all at once and in a nonlinear fashion. In our area, we can see the legacy of glacial lakes from 10,000 years ago and then travel a few miles to see volcanic evidence from a much earlier era. And the story continues as the earth continues to evolve. Volcanoes erupt. Tectonic plates clash. Floods and landslides change the landscape.
A week ago, I went on a geology field trip led annually by a local geologist. As fascinating as it was, much of the science went over my head; I wish our leader had been a bit better as a storyteller. Some scientists are brilliant storytellers who facilitate the layperson’s understanding. Our leader wasn’t awful, but I wish I could have grasped more of the story.
I was so fascinated by my area’s geology when we spent our first summer here in 2009 that I bought several books on the geological history of the region. But like the field-trip leader, they didn’t tell the Earth’s story in a very accessible way. The best, most storied, easiest-to-understand resource I found turned out to be a free 14-page booklet I picked up from the National Park Service.
Despite my struggle to fully understand the story, I’ll continue to study it. The field-trip geologist said the trip route he’s considering next year includes geological phenomena that are more a billion years old.
Can you imagine?
Gerrit Hall’s article, The Relevance of Storytelling in Your Job Search, was not exactly epiphanic for someone like me who has been immersed in job-search storytelling for several years now.
But Hall did mention a rationale for job-interview storytelling that was new
to me. Job-seekers who respond in story form show they care more about their own work history, Hall says, than those who fail to deploy stories.
Hall contrasts these sample job-history summations:
“I was an intern for a while, then I started working as an assistant, and then I did some work as a manager…”
vs.
“I started working for ABC Company as an intern, learned a lot about the company, and was quickly promoted to an assistant position. After I sold the most units in one quarter, I was again promoted to manager, where I lead 15 people in the department.”
Of course, the job-seeker could likely tell an even better story than the second example indicates, but even as is, that summation is more compelling than the first.
In Steve Jobs’ legendary 2008 Stanford commencement speech, which has been posted all over the virtual world since his untimely death, he says he plans to tell three stories and does so. The speech is rightly cited as a classic example of using stories in presentations. I can think of no better way to pay tribute to this storytelling genius than to provide an opportunity for you to see this speech — just in case you haven’t.
Here also is the transcript of the speech.