I have to admit, at this time of heated debate over religious freedom, that my knowledge of Islam is virtually nonexistent. Although I unconditionally support religious freedom, I admit to feeling slightly uneasy about Muslims.

Knowledge is, of course, the way to eradicate uneasiness and fear.

In a highly thoughtful essay, The Power of Storytelling: Creating a New Future for American Muslims, Wajahat Ali talks about the exalted position of storytelling and storytellers in early Muslim culture. Throughout history, of course, stories have “inform[ed] and influence[d] a cultural citizenry of its values and identity.”

But in the US today, stories of Islam and Muslims have devolved into “daily stories of vile stereotyping, fear-mongering, and hysteria,” prompting Ali to predict, “If these stories persist with such simplistic, one-dimensional caricatures and formulaic narratives, then the predictable third act can only end in tragedy.”

The answer, Ali suggests, is “finally telling our own stories in our own voices and using art and storytelling as a means of healing and education.”

The second half of Ali’s essay offers a number of resources in which Muslims are telling their stories. Writes Ali:

These stories will ultimately influence the greater American narrative reminding fellow citizens that no group is a cultural monolith worthy of being painted with only black and white colors, and that even Islam is capable of benefitting America with its unique spiritual and cultural gifts.

I, for one, would like to make an effort to learn more about Islam through its stories and those of its followers.

Ali’s piece is superb. I recommend it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I have heard the term “net neutrality” for years, but I can’t say I really paid attention to it or even understood it.

But a guest posting by John S. Johnson on the site Hope for Film not only explained the term but offered up storytelling — and a free, downloadable communications guide — as a way to preserve it.

First, what it is and why it’s threatened:

… this principle of net neutrality that allows all sites, services and applications on the Internet to have equal access to consumers, and vice versa, is being fundamentally threatened. Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking to revise rules that have kept Internet Service Providers (ISPs) at bay for decades. These companies, like AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon, would love to become the gatekeepers of the Internet, reserving preferential bandwidth for those sites and services that make them the most money.

Johnson goes on to note that “service fees [could] force all but the super-rich from accessing and producing online content.” The answer, Johnson says, is to tell “the compelling story of how the loss of an open Internet will affect our daily lives” and “harness the power of entertainment and mass media to tell stories about key social issues, such as the fight for net neutrality, that will resonate with a broad audience and promote action.”

To that end, Johnson’s organization offers FTW! Net Neutrality For The Win: How Entertainment and the Science of Influence Can Save Your Internet, which “explains how we can use the untapped potential of narrative to increase support for net neutrality. Telling stories about how vital the open Internet is to our livelihoods is the key to getting people to take notice and take action.” You can download the free guide here.

Although the guide is very specific to the issue of net neutrality, its techniques can be adapted for other causes. In fact the technique, which Johnson’s research group the Harmony Institute calls “Entertainment-Education,” is explained in generic terms in the back of the guide, with examples of how it has been used for other issues.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I always especially appreciate content about storytelling related to employment. While my personal crusade is about storytelling in the job search, I’m also interested in the flip side — how employers use stories to entice, retain, and engage employees. Employee engagement is a major hot-button topic in HR, and some companies are using stories to excellent effect in this quest. One of them is Juniper Networks, reports Martha Finney, who interviewed Juniper’s Stacey Clark Ohara about the organization’s use of storytelling to transmit values. Noting that top-down values programs for employee engagement don’t work, Finney paraphrases Ohara: “It’s the experience of the employees, and the stories they tell about their experiences, that really keep the culture on track, she notes. … ‘we chose storytelling as the best way to inspire, inform and align the organization.’”

For executive stories in particular, Juniper chose video as the storytelling medium. Through Finney, Ohara offered tips to other companies that seek to instill values and engage employees through storytelling:

• Get executives on board. When they are willing to share their experiences through storytelling, others will be more likely to take the risk as well.
• Find the natural storytellers among your employees and recruit them first.
• Give your people time to prepare and rehearse their stories — but not so much that over-rehearsal causes the stories to sound wooden and inauthentic.
• Keep the stories short. [No indication here how short Ohara means, although the next bullet provides a clue.
• Keep the videos shorter. Just a few minutes is all that’s needed to get the main message across.
• Be clear about your purpose. Naturally, you won’t know if you’re successful unless you know what results you’re after. When you’re asking employees to open up and speak from their hearts, they’ll also want to know what the hoped-for outcome will be.
• Start small and build from there. If you’re just initiating this venture in a culture where stories haven’t been typically told, make the initial scope and objectives set as modest as you can. This will keep the process from becoming overwhelmed by overblown expectations.

Qualcomm provides its own spin on “communicate and reinforce the company’s culture and values, disseminate information, identify trends, share attitudes and behaviors, and on-board new employees,” as Tamar Elkeles reports.

Qualcomm’s program, begun five years ago, is called 52 Weeks. Elkeles describes the program: T

old from the employee perspective, stories provided insights about the company, business decisions, technology milestones, leaders, work teams, employees and products. To make them more personal, stories typically included pictures of the person the story is about or of teams and products referenced.

The 52 Weeks program initially started as a way to communicate company culture and values to new employees. All new hires at Qualcomm were automatically registered on their first day and, for the next year, received a weekly e-mail with a new story submitted by employees or initiated by the employee communications team, which reports to the Qualcomm Learning Center. Since its inception, the 52 Weeks program has expanded and evolved. What began with just an e-mail grew into a 52 Weeks Web site. In addition to new hires, thousands of Qualcomm employees have registered to receive the weekly e-mails and links to the site.

Each story is reviewed before posting by the employee communications editorial committee, which decides if it meets the following criteria:

Does the story fit into one of the company’s values, such as execution or innovation?

Does it meet some other organizational goal?

Is it memorable?

If the 52 Weeks Web site still exists, I can’t find it (perhaps it’s on a company intranet). but you can see a number of the stories from the program in this PDF of a presentation by Elkeles.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve come across (somewhat) recently four ways storytelling is being used in healthcare. Here are some perspectives on those approaches:

• Patient stories are widely available on the Internet but are not always trustworthy: In a guest post on e-patients.net, Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, notes three kinds of patient stories that can be found on the Internet:
• unedited user-generated stories in online health communities and patient blogs;
• professionally edited or “as told to” support stories;
• and promotional stories.

But, Gualtieri cautions, “Unless you know the author of a story, you never know for sure if it is true. … patients want to believe stories because they are desperate for information. Ultimately, most stories are from real people sharing authentic experiences, and the best way to weed out the others is to use common sense, be skeptical, check with a trusted medical professional …”

• Storytelling can promote health literacy:
In The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, Vivian Day discusses “the use of storytelling to present healthcare information in an easily understandable and captivating manner.” Citing the US Department of Health and Human Services’s definition of health literacy — “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions” — Day notes that more and more health information is out there, but it’s not always easy for the average person to interpret it. Storytelling provides an avenue through which an individual can “takes a new event, applies its meaning to past experiences, and visualizes future possibilities.” It “allows hearers to reflect on the story told and actively apply it to their life situation,” Day writes. The author lists several ways of using storytelling toward health literacy, such as having patients create books about their specific health problem, encouraging patients to tell stories in support groups, and sharing stories about loved ones who’ve learned that someone they care about is terminally ill. Day writes:

Hearing the stories of others, reflecting on these stories, and determining how these stories can be applicable to one’s life may be more beneficial than simply reading written information or watching an educational video.

• Narratives from physicians’ clinical experience transmit socially embedded knowledge, and webinars are an effective venue for those narratives: Katherine D. Ellington created American Medical Student Association (AMSA) National Book Discussion Webinars. A diverse group of physicians have discussed their books, writing pursuits, work experiences, and lives. The AMSA National Book Discussion Webinars offer a unique online experience between physician-authors and medical students to encourage reading beyond the medical school curriculum, both for professional development and for personal enrichment.” A significant part of the content conveyed in these webinars can be characterized using the words of one of the commenters to Ellington’s blog entry, citing a book called Expertise in Nursing Practice: “[N]arratives from clinical experience transmit socially embedded knowledge,” to which Ellington responded by also quoting the cited chapter: “[T]he function of narrative in a practice in revealing and creating social memory, skilled ethical comportment and the role of first-person narrative in community and culture building.”
• Patient records are more than just that; they are the patient’s story. Regina Holliday, a DC-based patient-rights arts advocate, writes, speaks, and creates art depicting her family’s nightmare journey through the medical system during her late husband’s cancer care. Her large mural titled “73 cents” became part of the national healthcare debate and was covered by the media. Holliday consistently uses story to illustrate the need for clarity and transparency in medical records. She writes poignantly about story here An excerpt, in which she likens a patient’s medical record to his or her story (emphasis added):

  I now sit in meetings for hours and watch power point lectures about electronic medical records. I listen to people dissect HIPPA regulations and incentive time tables. I hear arguments comparing ICD-9 code to ICD-10. And sadly, I hear many people tell me that patients should never see the entire medical record. … For too long the medical record has been considered a billing document or a legal document: property of the physician or institution, instead of what it is, the story of the patient.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Michael Margolis’s newsletter made me aware of this worthy project, “Be a Biographer” from The Blind Project:

“Be a Biographer” invites designers, artists and creative-minded people to help tell the stories of victims and survivors of the commercial sex trade through their designs. “We want to connect your talents with her needs. For freedom, love, hope, dignity and protection. Our role is simple. To tell her story. To be her biographer,” said Anthony Dodero, co‐founder of The Blind Project.

Right now millions of women and children are being enslaved and exploited in the multibillion dollar commercial sex trade. “In a system that treats human lives like meaningless commodities, the greater mission of Biographe is to restore and reveal the true value of those victimized. Because when every life has equal value, all stories, all hopes and all dreams are worthy,” said Jessica Sturman, The Blind Project’s lead fashion designer.

Biographe is unique in its method of connecting survivors and consumers together to bring attention to, and provide solutions for, sexual slavery. Fashion products are inspired by survivor stories, designed with the public at large through our crowdsourcing design process, and then made by women who have been rescued from the commercial sex trade. Proceeds from sales are then reinvested back into the women’s lives creating a virtuous sustainable cycle.

Participants have until September 15th to submit a design on www.beabiographer.com. Then from September 16th to October 7th, public voting begins to determine the 15 semi‐finalists (5 for each of the 3 stories) based on the highest number of votes. On October 21st three Grand Finalists will be selected by our panel of notable judges. The winning designs will be incorporated into fashion items, printed for gallery exhibitions and shown in advertising campaigns.

You can also read survivor stories on the site.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I know Alan Grayson from near my former congressional district in Central Florida is a pariah to many, but I am citing this powerful, very short speech because it starts with a story — about his grandfather searching for stuff in the dump that he could sell to support his family of seven children during the Great Depression.

He uses his story to make a point about what’s happening today. I think it’s effective. What do you think?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Storytelling is a hot topic in fund-raising and philanthropy. Andy Goodman is arguably the leading evangelist for storytelling in fund-raising; the folks at NTEN (membership organization of nonprofit professionals who put technology to use for their causes) regularly hold storytelling webinars; and my friend Thaler Pekar consults with nonprofits about storytelling and writes about story on PhilanTopic.

Thus, you might think that discourse about fund-raising is story-laden. Not so, says Frank C. Dickerson, PhD, whose doctoral-dissertation research revealed that fund-raising discourse:

1. focuses more on transferring information than creating interpersonal involvement; is
2. cold, detached and abstract rather than warm, connected and concrete;
3. is lexically complex rather than informal like person-to-person conversation; and
4. is more like argumentation aimed at the head than human-interest narrative aimed at the heart.

Dickerson, who wrote to me this past week to share his research, deployed discourse analysis, using methodology from the field of “corpus linguistics,” to address the research question: “What common text genre does fund-raising discourse most closely resemble?” Dickerson further describes his methdology:

The protocols used were developed in the 1980s at USC by Douglas Biber… . computer routines based on factor analysis that profiled 23 genres of texts. Biber’s seminal study made it possible to tag and tally counts of linguistic features in discourse.

Once averaged, these feature counts made it possible to profile written and/or spoken discourse of fund raisers. I examined the fund-raising discourse produced by 735 of America’s elite nonprofit organizations whose IRS form 990s identified them as raising at least $20 million annually in direct public support

Dickerson derived his findings from an evaluation of patterns across 1.5 million words of text in 2,412 fund-raising documents. “I performed a ‘linguistic MRI,’” he says, “to reveal the underlying linguistic substrate of what fund raisers write.”

Dickerson calls his findings provocative. “They are opposite what most would have expected.”

In fact, Dickerson continues:

Nothing about this is comforting. The message is a bit like that of an Old Testament prophet, uncovering a dysfunctional pattern in the way fund raisers communicate that has implications for

fund-raising practice,

future research, and

the education and training of development professionals.

“Although the study examines written texts,” Dickerson says, “the data apply equally to anyone who communicates with donors — whether raising significant gifts face-to-face from individuals of high net worth or soliciting entry-level gifts online or by direct mail. Anyone who talks with or writes to donors will benefit from this information. But like a mirror, statistics only reflect reality. They’re descriptive … not generative. But knowing how WRITERS WRITE and TALKERS TALK is the critical toward making incremental improvements in fund-raising discourse.”

Dickerson titled his dissertation Writing the Voice of Philanthropy: How to Raise Money with Words. “In my consulting over the past 40 years,” Dickerson explains, “I’ve observed that individuals need to learn how to write the VOICE OF PHILANTHROPY (the voice of the FRIEND-OF-MAN). That is, they need to write as if they are speaking for a PERSON in need or a cause affecting PEOPLE — whether the hurting and vulnerable poor, education, the arts, the fragile environment or defenseless animals.”

Fundraising writing at its best, Dickerson asserts, “should read like a conversation sounds. It should read like the banter between friends over a cup of coffee — filled with personal views, concerns, stories, and emotion about what matters to them. But fund raising has a serious problem.”

At his research site, The Written Voice, Dickerson offers two articles that review samples of actual texts studied and the results of several fund-raising campaigns conducted. He says:

One article (the longer version of The Way We Write is All Wrong) is a 35-page version from which my published pieces were derived. Near the end of this article I reproduce the world’s oldest extant fund-raising letter, written circa 98 A.D. to Cornelius Tacitus by Pliny the Younger [pictured]. It was penned during the reign of Roman Emperor Trajan to raise money for a school in Pliny’s hometown of Como Italy. Pliny’s letter is significant because it’s better constructed than most modern-day fund appeals.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In celebration of today’s International Day for Sharing Life Stories, here’s a little piece of my story:

Martha Beck recently told me everything I did wrong with my vision board in 2008.

So what’s a vision board, who’s Martha Beck, and what does any of this have to do with storytelling?

A vision board, says the site WikiHow, “is a collage of images, pictures and affirmations of your dreams and desires. It can also be called a dream board, treasure map or vision map.”

The sample shown at right is from EvolvingTimes.com. A vision board is a way to visualize your goals. Here’s where it gets very woo-woo, new-age-y: Supposedly, says the Squidoo lens on vision boards:

The law of attraction states, that which is like unto itself is drawn. What that means is if you are maintaining a vibration that matches what you are wanting, more things will come your way to make you feel that way. … A vision board is a tool to help you create a matching vibration to what it is you want to have/be or do in your life and in your world.

I submit that a vision board facilitates a kind of storytelling because it enables the user to craft a visual representation of a future story for himself or herself.

In 2008, I was experiencing the last gasp of my unsuccessful search for a new job teaching at the university level. I had made the short list of finalists for a position at a Southern California university and had been invited for a campus visit, a.k.a., a grueling day of interviews, a research presentation, and a teaching demonstration.

Oh man, how I wanted that job … and how I was absolutely sure I would get it. I had a slight networking “in” in that I had met a member of the search committee. The school was similar to the one at which I had taught for more than six years, and it was facing an accreditation process that I knew a lot about.

Around the time I was prepping for the campus visit, I learned about visions boards, so I decided to create one about my desire to teach at this California university. I cut out a picture of a wall with the school’s name on it and then cut out a photo of myself and pasted it so that I was standing behind the wall. I surrounded this main image with photos of the university’s campus.

I stared and stared at the finished vision board, trying to manifest the idea of me belonging on that campus. I carried the board around with me everywhere, including to the campus visit.

Arriving a few days early, I underscored my manifestation of success by having Randall shoot a real photo (at left) of me in the actual spot in which I had collaged myself on my vision board.

I should have caught on pretty quickly during the campus visit that the outcome would not go my way. The chair of the search committee did not even show up for my visit. His wife, also on the committee, told me he was suffering from allergies. The day was set up with a lot of downtime for me, the candidate, which seemed both considerate and a poor use of time. I spent a lot of time hanging out in the office of a search-committee member. We could have used that time to get to know each other better, but she didn’t talk to me much, and I didn’t engage her because I could see she was busy. A faculty member knocked me off my game during my research presentation by asking a question, though I had asked the audience to hold questions until the end (amusingly, the question was “How do you define storytelling?”). And only two members of the committee bothered to show up for my teaching demo. I should have realized the search committee was just going through the motions. But I was in denial because I so wanted the job.

I went home to Florida. Weeks passed with no word. I’m not sure the committee ever would have told me I didn’t get the job had I not pestered the committee member I was acquainted with.

The vision board had failed. I decided vision boards were a bunch of hooey and that I would never fall for anything like them again.

I had no intention of reading Martha Beck’s column on vision boards in the June 2010 O Magazine, but I really like Beck’s writing, and I was curious.

So, let’s say I don’t think vision boards are hooey. Let’s say I believe in them and assume that I did something wrong with mine in 2008. What does Beck say I messed up?

If I thought Basic Vision Board was woo-woo/new-age-y, Beck was even more so, and I don’t totally follow everything.

First, I apparently shouldn’t have been so literal and specific with my images. Beck says eschew the familiar in favor of the unfamiliar, “images that trigger physical reactions.” Unstated but implicit is the idea that I should not have created a vision board for a specific want but rather a more general feeling for what I wanted in the future.

Next, all that staring and manifesting was exactly the opposite of what I should have done, according to Beck. I should have stopped thinking about it and even lost or recycled my vision board. “The biggest mistake aspiring reality creators make,” Beck writes, “… is continuing to push something you’ve already set in motion.”

Beck’s prescribed third step is to be ready to take action when the reality you want presents itself. I may have gotten this step right.

Because here’s the thing … If I had gotten that job, we would have had to move to Southern California. The town in which the university is located is idyllic, but as for the rest of Southern Cal … ewwwww (no offense to those who like it there). A few months after the abortive Southern California experience, Randall stumbled upon cheap land in Washington state. That September we traveled to Washington, fell in love with a piece of land in Kettle Falls, and bought it. Last year we started building our house and decided to move here permanently (instead of being bi-coastal as we thought we would). And this year, here we are, deliriously happy permanent residents in an almost-finished house.

I thought I wanted a certain vision, a specific future story. But the Universe had other plans for me.

I’m thinking my vision board worked after all.

If you are considering the possibility that vision boards aren’t a bunch of hooey and are interested in learning more, you can find all kinds of resources by Googling “vision board.” You can even find vision-board Web applications, like Oprah’s (registration required).

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Because so many great storytelling sites and blogs exist out there, with new ones emerging all the time, I don’t usually write full blog entries about any single site or blog but rather group them together and/or list them on one of my inside pages.

But I’m singling out the brand-new blog Transformative Narratives by Yvette Hyater-Adams (pictured) because her story practice really resonates with me, and I’d like to encourage and support her new venture (and hey, it doesn’t hurt that she shares a birthday with my son and lives a few miles from where I grew up in New Jersey).

I especially love her story of how she came to develop her storytelling approach:

In the early 1980s, I took a Franklin Planner class where part of the course entailed writing down goals and integrating them in my daily, weekly, and monthly calendars. This was a logical and mechanical process. Because my artist brain didn’t work so linear, I did more than write a goal sentence. My goal became a little story. In order for me to experience the goal, I stepped into my imagination and created a fictionalized story about me living and breathing that goal. It was so real, I could smell, taste, and touch it. Writing that visual image made such a difference. Having written the story, I could release it and be it.

And here’s how she characterizes transformative narratives:

[T]ransformative narratives 1) emerge from real and imagined visual, written, and spoken stories, that 2) become material to use for self-awareness, insight, and visioning, and 3) crystallize into deliberate actions for change

I’m really looking forward to more from Yvette and her new blog.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of the best pieces I’ve read about how stories heal is by Allison Cox, who not only describes several ways storytelling heals, but also guides practitioners in telling healing stories and lists books about therapeutic storytelling. Here’s a choice snippet from Cox’s article:

During storytelling, listeners let go of defenses and relax into the known, safe environment of story. A shift in consciousness takes place. Those who listen, actually live the story adventures in their imagination. The audience is offered a chance to measure their own experience in the light of the immortal tale… immortal because people often forget important details of their lives, but will remember a story they heard as a child.

Cox notes that “story lends narrative structure to events that might otherwise seem random and meaningless.” Stories tell us we’re not alone when faced with life-changing devastation and struggle, as the people of Haiti currently are and the victims of the 2005 Indian Ocean Tsunami have been. The site Surviving the Tsunami provides “stories of compassion, hope, and dignity. They highlight the resilience of communities in the face of catastrophe and the impact of humanitarian efforts.”

Cox writes about stories as “survival tools [in] an increasingly complex society.” Stories are part of an empowerment movement that, as Bonnie Rochman reports on TIME.com, many are calling Patient 2.0. Rochman cites, for example, Association of Online Cancer Resources, or ACOR.org, an umbrella site for information and shared experiences. One example is a site under ACOR’s auspices, Stories and Faces, a clearinghouse of stories of children with cancer. The site PatientsLikeMe enables people to learn from the real-life experiences — stories — of patients like them.

While there’s virtually nothing on the site The HIV Story Project except what you see in the graphic below, the planned short film compilation and online storytelling component sound as though they will provide the same kind of mental healing that comes from sharing experiences through story. Cox writes about storytelling as a prevention tool. Prevention may not be the primary motive of the HIV Story Project, but I’m guessing that it will be one of the outcomes.

Update, Feb. 20: No sooner had I published the foregoing entry than I came across information about an upcoming symposium in Scotland, Storytelling as a Healing Art, June 13-19. You can download a flyer about it here: Symposium-Condensed-Info.pdf.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.