An interview by Michelle James with Michael Margolis enjoyed significant buzz and retweeting on Twitter — and with good reason; it’s filled with gems. One of my favorites is Michael’s response to the question “What is one technique or approach that people could start applying today to bring more creativity into their work or their business organization?”

Michael says:

In my journey to become a better storyteller, I’ve had to learn how to become a better story listener. The responsibility is on me to become a better listener by listening to others stories. As I develop a deeper intimate understanding of their world, I can share in a way that better relates to another’s story (i.e. it’s not always about me!). You can do this too. Channel your inner-anthropologist, and go observe and listen. Here’s one simple idea:

1. Buy a digital video camera (about $100 now!) – and go around asking a bunch of people the same question.
2. If you’re in a big company, ask co-workers a question about mission or passion.
3. If you’re more on your own, go out in public, or better yet where your customers gather, and ask them ONE question about their lives.
4. In either case, the question has to be something that people will have energy around. If there’s energy, you’ll collect great stories.
5. Finally, look at the patterns of what you hear. What is the common storyline or variations on a theme? If you can find where people agree, build your own story around that. You can also learn a lot about the status quo story you might be up against.

(By the way, don’t ears look weird in quantity?)

Here’s the second half of my list of applied storytelling’s top growth areas in 2009. See yesterday’s entry for the first half.

1. 6. More business and cultural leaders recognize that storytelling skills are crucial in the 21st century. Story practitioners Lori Silverman and Karen Dietz are seminal evangelists for the idea that a millennial individual needs storytelling skills — that storytelling skills must be a core business competency. They’ve written new article that encompasses this belief. Others are picking up this battle cry. Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, writes in his book Crushit! that “storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.” James R. Gaines, who was the top editor of Time, Life, and People magazines and now works at Flyp, has learned from his new digital experience that it’s “the crafts and the art of storytelling … that need updating most urgently for the digital world.”
   7. Though PowerPoint-style presentations still dominate by far, more presentation experts call for storytelling in presentations. The slide-sharing site SlideShare held its first “Tell Me a Story” presentation competition, and while I felt that the winning entries did not tell stories as well as I would have liked, the idea of the competition was a step in the right direction. Slides themselves (a.k.a. PowerPoint) may be the biggest impediment to storytelling in presentations. Look at the superb TEDTalks series, in which slides are often not used, and when they are, they take a back seat to the presenter’s storytelling and prowess in delivering a talk. The blog Presentation Zen cites this talk by Hans Rosling, in which the speaker uses slides, but integrates the statistics on those slides into dramatic, energetic, suspenseful storytelling that builds to a wonderful climax. (see below)

1. 1. Influenced by the huge role storytelling played in the 2008 US presidential election, observers are increasingly scrutinizing “the narrative,” as presented by politicians, the media, and others. My storytelling colleague Paul Costello chronicled the role of storytelling in his book The Presidential Plot. Since then, observers have scrutinized “the narrative” of America political life and who controls it. The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart rails against what the media has done to the narrative. Others worry that President Obama has lost control of the narrative that made him so successful in 2008.

1. 1. Transmedia storytelling increasingly becomes marketing’s darling, especially for marketing entertainment. Transmedia is by no means new, but I have never seen the degree of buzz about it as I have this year. Just in the pasty few weeks, buzz has been tremendous. Daniel Prager wrote on The Ocean Agency’s Blog: “You will be hearing more and more about “transmedia” in the coming months, as major brands are testing the waters creating advertising and marketing storylines that exist across multiple platforms and networks.” (The blog is also the source of the Transmedia sphere diagram copyrighted by Stephen Dinehart). Much re-tweeted recently has been transmedia academician Henry Jenkins’s Seven Core Principles of Transmedia Storytelling and Bud Caddell’s easily referenced visual thereof (you can download it here.) And of transmedia storytelling, Allison Norrington writes on Wired.co.uk: “Authors are increasingly ‘curators,’ ‘story architects,’ or ‘experience designers’ and are looking toward the creation of storyworlds rather than a linear stream.”

1. The next big question becomes, how will storytelling fare on Web 2.0’s successor, the Real Time Web? In the age of Twitter, it has become increasingly clear, especially in the last week as Google has introduced real-time search, that the Real Time Web will be the successor to Web 2.0. What provoked me to consider how the Real Time Web might affect storytelling was this short clip of storyteller Cathy Brooks in which she talks about businesses not understanding the power of the Real Time Web. I would like to pursue this issue further and learn more about the challenges of storytelling on the Real Time Web. In the meantime, the Real Time Web aids me tremendously in discovering the many items about storytelling that I write about in this blog. On the other hand, the fact that many others are using real-time tools means that the Real Time Web very often “scoops” me and alerts readers to storytelling goodies before I can blog about them. Thus my adaptation becomes trying to offer some synthesis and analysis about storytelling content since I am unlikely to be the first to bring this content to my readers.

What growth areas have I left off? Which areas on the list would you have left off?

Well, I wanted this entry to be the top 10 applied-storytelling developments in 2009, but none of the areas I identified within applied storytelling — with the possible exception of No. 10 — are really new this year.

Instead, these are areas experiencing tremendous growth and buzz this year. If we heard about them last year and before, we heard a lot more about them this year.

Here’s the first half of my Top 10 list:

1. Twitter not only unites the storytelling community by disseminating storytelling information in real time, but it also serves as a storytelling vehicle for some. Twitter has given the storytelling community new ways to keep on top of storytelling news and thought in real time. We can follow other story practitioners. We can find tools to bring us regular tweets focused on storytelling. Twitter’s new list feature enables us to focus our “listening” efforts on story practitioners. The community is more cohesive through tweeting and re-tweeting our passion. My periodic roundups of what’s hot in the Twitterverse have spotlighted the storytelling topics that are getting the most buzz. Arguably, Twitter is also a storytelling medium in itself, as I’ve written about here, here, here, and here, where I blogged about Cathie Dodd’s Labor Day Twitterthon.In his Censemaking blog, Cameron D. Norman, PhD, recently noted that the “narrative fragments” of Twitter tweets may “better fit with our cognitive tendencies for sensemaking.” Tweets may be more like the interactions in our everyday lives in which communications rarely comprise “a full-fledged story; one that had a clear start, middle, end and coherence that could only be gathered from the story itself, not past relationships with the storyteller.” Norman talks about Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework as providing “a theoretically-grounded and data-driven method of making sense of large quantities of narrative fragments; the kind we tell in organizations and communities.”

   You can devise lots of ways to keep up with what the Twiiterverse is tweeting about storytelling, such as by following the folks in Kat’s Definitive Story Follow List or @AStoriedCareer’s Twitter list of storytelling practitioners, or by setting up various kinds of search streams and alerts on the term “storytelling.”

2. Storytelling for career and job search makes significant strides. To the best of my knowledge, the first book completely devoted to storytelling in the job search was published this year. That would be my book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career. More career practitioners are recognizing the value of storytelling; I know of four of them who recently attended a workshop by New York City’s Narrativ. I increasingly learn of more and more career and job-search gurus who are lending their voices to the chorus to those of us who support storytelling in the job search.
3. Digital storytelling explodes, especially in education. Conduct a search of Google or Twitter for the term “storytelling” and note how many of the results are about “digital storytelling.” As I monitor thought, happenings, comments, developments in the storytelling world, I am struck by the omnipresence of digital storytelling. Educators in particular are singing the praises of digital storytelling for teaching and learning. I’ve chosen not to make digital storytelling a major topic on A Storied Career simply because it’s such a huge niche, and I assume that others who practice in this niche can cover it better than I can.
4. More Web sites and Web-based applications/tools spring up to facilitate storytelling. I’ve discovered these in the last year (However, some may have emerged before this year): Storytlr, Great Life Stories, Always Stories, The Timeslips Project, We Are Storytellers, The Legacy Project, Flokka: Share Your Stories, Cityscapes of the Displaced, Bloombla, Why Go to Therapy When You Can Go Absolutely Insane?, Penzu, Storyz, Life Story Telling, LifeSnapz, Creativity Workshop, Scrapblog, Women’s Memoirs, ThisMoment, Telling Herstories, LifeBlob, Story of My Life, and Makes Me Think. In fact, so many storytelling platforms have emerged online that inevitably some are succeeding, while others aren’t making it. As reported on Mashable, Storytlr is shutting down on the last day of this year for lack of time and commercial interest to sustain the platform. But the founders are open-sourcing the platform so “existing users can download all of their data and migrate to a self-hosted solution.”
5. Social media is increasingly seen as storytelling media. Much discussion this year has swirled around the storytelling capabilities of social media. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen articles like the much-re-tweeted Three Reasons Why Storytelling is the Key to Social Media Marketing Success and slideshows like the one below. Many of the story practitioners in my Q&A series debated the storytelling properties of social media.

 

Storytelling through Social Media: The Modern Narrative Defined from Ed Schipul

 

Tomorrow: Conclusion of my Top 10 list.

Lisa Rossetti is developing a female leadership development and coaching program and will soon launch the Web site Q2Lead. I offered to publicize her research needs:

As a writer and narrative researcher, I am collecting conversations and stories from women who are Leaders in their own Life.

Women often do not recognise or acknowledge their leadership qualities and achievements. They often prefer to step back from the limelight, or simply don’t identify with the Hero Leader model which has been around for many years certainly in the corporate world. Yet wherever and whenever a woman said “Look! this needs doing or changing — and we can do it,” they showed up as a leader!

Female energy in leadership prefers collaboration to individual or heroic charisma, inclusivity to standing out in front, and intuition over obsessive data. I would love connect with any woman who wants to share their “pivotal” experience with me. That moment when you realised that you had indeed stepped into being a “leader for change.”  What was that like for you? What or who persuaded you to take that step?

> I have a Facebook page Conversations with Women who Lead Change — or simply email me.

Here are three ways that folks are applying storytelling in creative, innovative ways:

• • PSST! is a collaborative film project of 17 brilliantly produced films by 51 teams of designers, directors, animators and composers. Every film is comprised of three sections — beginning, middle and end — each produced by three different teams. This process is the whole idea behind PSST! — a technique derived from the Dadaist game of Exquisite Corpse and the children’s game Telephone and applied to the arts of motion graphics, animation and film-making.

• Storytelling to sell wine. “The Drops of the Gods” is a Japanese Manga comic series that, as described in the blog Truly Madly Deeply, follows the main character Shizuku as he learns about wine, allowing the reader to do the same. (I could not locate a way to see the comic online, but if you click on the image, you can see a slideshow from the New York Times.) From Truly Madly Deeply: “At the start of the series, Shizuku has rebelled against his father, a famous wine critic, by refusing to drink wine and working instead for a brewery. Suddenly, though, his father dies and leaves in his will a description of 12 wines he considers the world’s best, comparing them to the disciples of Jesus. Pitted against his adopted brother, who happens to be a sommelier, Shizuku must catch up in his knowledge so he can find the 12 wines mentioned in his father’s will and inherit his father’s vast cellar. … Since coming out of nowhere four to five years ago, this 20-something Japanese would-be sommelier has quickly become the most influential voice in Asia’s wine markets. In Japan, wine sellers grab copies of the magazine as soon as it comes out on Thursdays, quickly showcasing a featured wine in their stores or on their Web sites. People regularly enquire about specific wines that are referenced in the comic series.”
• Storytelling to help people deal better with the experience of psychosis. Psychiatry24x7.com has released the online serial: The Secret of the Brain Chip: A self-help guide for people experiencing psychosis. Psychiatry24x7.com intends the serial to serve as an anchor in periods of loneliness and confusion for all involved. ” Although this exceptional guide is not a replacement for therapy,” the site says, “it is a source of practical tips and dedicated information, as well as support.”