storytelling

If you're interested in the more traditional application of storytelling, our good friend Peter Christie will be running a series of workshops on how you can harness your own storytelling ability.

The two workshops are entitled: The North, South, East and West of Storytelling in Organisations (11th to 14th October) AND Life Storytelling in Organisations (14th to 17th October). They'll be run in the Maluti Mountains in the Free State.

Contact Peter at bigchief@nottheboredroom.co.za if you're interested.

The turnaround of Xerox is an important case study in today's global economic situation. Here's a Fast Company article that outlines how important stories are in this context. The article also shows how litte "s" stories becomes Big "S" stories:

Storytelling is hugely important. At our town meetings, the most frequently asked question wasn't whether we'd survive, but what we would look like when we did. I got great advice: Write a story. We wrote a Wall Street Journal article, because they had been particularly nasty about us, dated five years out. It was about where we could be if we really stood up to the plate. And people loved it. No matter where I go, people pull that article out. They personalized it.

Stories exist at all levels of the corporation. You talk to tech reps, and they'll tell you what they did to help turn this company around. Whether it was saving a buck here, or doing something different for customers, everyone has a story. That creates powerful momentum -- people's sense that they're able to do good things. It's much more powerful than the precision or elegance of the strategy.

Shaun at Anecdote has launched a mini-experiment in the form of Story Week. Each day, starting today, he'll be publishing a story and asking us to gauge the impact the story has on us. He's hoping the results will tell us something of what makes a story so powerful, and what stories move us.

Mosey on over to the first installment here ... a story by the US Storyteller in Chief, Barack Obama.

Over the last few months we've been refining the way we approach narrative in organisations and have found something that now works for us, and is pretty simple to understand. 

Head on over to our Narrative Model page to see the model in full details.

Credit must be given to Shaun Callahan from Anecdote who originally developed a very similar model that we've tweaked.

Here it is: our approach to stories within organisations.

The components of this model are:

The difference between big and small "s" stories

Big "S" stories are the stories we normally associated with Storytelling - the well-polished, entertaining stories we grew up with, and the stories told by our favourite Storytellers. They were told to us as fairytales, they are shared around the campfire, and told at conferences as the defining stories about our nation, race, culture and people. 

Small "s" stories are the fragments of experiences that we share in everyday conversation. They are the stories we tell when we get home and tell our family how our day was. They're the stories we tell around the water cooler and as we stand on the smoker's balcony. 

And so, there's a difference between Storytelling and storytelling. It is also important to note that every Big "S" story has emerged out of a collection of Small "s" stories.

The nature of every story

In general, stories are rich in the following two dimensions: touch and concept. That is, stories are high in touch as they touch our hearts and move our emotions - they are entertaining! Then, within the DNA of every story, no matter how deep or polished, is a level of complex information that is valuable - these stories are high in concept.

What stories do

Stories that are high touch and high concept do a few things:

- they provide insight
- they provide us with meaning
- they create influence as we share them, and
- stories inspire people to take action!

Storytelling

We believe that everyone is a storyteller! You may not consider yourself a "S"toryteller, but you are certainly a "s"toryteller. Standing around the braai/barbeque, sitting around a dinner stable, standing amongst friends with your favourite drink ... everyone becomes a storyteller. 

The overall power of storytelling is its ability to enhance communication skills - for both the individual and the organisation. Through prospecting the available stories of yourself, or about your organisation/brand, you are able to identify the patterns within the stories and what the main personal or brand story should be about.  

Storygathering

Also known as storylistening, storygathering is an underutulised technique in organisations. If our assumption about small "s" stories is right, then there are multitudes of stories being told all the time - especially by your employees and customers about your organisation. Imagine how useful it would be if you were able to gather and harness those stories?

Doing just that allows you to solve amazingly complex problems in surprising simple ways. Through discovering and gathering the stories about your problem, you are able to make sense of what those stories are saying, and are then able to act in a contextually relevant way to shift your problem.

Credit

Credit needs to be given to Shaun Callahan of Anecdote in Australia who originally developed this model. We've tweaked it for the South African context and use it with permission.