| 8/09/08 | | Finding stories |
Tell stories to hear stories
Listen to stories to remember your stories
Mark and I penned these observations while developing our course on storytelling. The first one, "tell stories to hear stories," reminds us that a good way to find stories is to tell some yourself. Here's an example. When I see my teenage daughter after school I would often ask how her day went, whether anything interesting happened at school, and the standard response is often monosyllabic: yep, nup. In fact the more questions I'd ask the shorter the answers. So I changed tack and rather than ask questions I simply recounted something that happened in my day. I would launch into something like, "I met a bearded lady today. This morning I drove down to Fitzroy to run an anecdote circle for ..." and immediately my daughter would respond with an encounter from her day. A conversation starts and it's delightful.
Our second reminder is the flip-side to the first. If you want to remember your own stories go listen to other people's stories and then don't forget to jot your anecdotes down. Many of our stories are ephemeral, flooding our memory banks when the conditions are right and evaporating just as quickly. Often a story will come to mind and you will have no idea why you would ever retell it but make a note anyway. Just being aware of our stories is an important first step in the effective application of business narrative.
Send this entry to:
Email to a friend
View the Technorati Link Cosmos
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
| 3/09/08 | | Seven personal skills for effective collaboration |
It's easy to talk about what collaboration is or is not or the types of collaboration. What's difficult is to change your practices (read behaviours) to improve your chances of an effective collaboration. Here are seven personal skills that we all need to master to give collaboration a chance.
- How to apologise
- How to advocate your point of view without harming your collaborator's feelings
- How to spot when a conversation gets emotional and then make it safe again to continue meaningful dialogue
- How to listen and get into the shoes of your collaborator
- How to define a mutual intent that will inspire action
- How to tell and elicit stories
- How to get things done so you have something to show for your collaboration
What are some of the fundamental characteristics of a great collaboration? And how does my list of seven stack up against your experience?
Send this entry to:
Email to a friend
View the Technorati Link Cosmos
Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
| 3/09/08 | | Storytelling for business leaders workshop in Melbourne—23 September |
This workshop has turned out to be one of our most popular offerings. In the last few months we have delivered it to sales people in IBM, engineers in Allinta and have just received word we have been selected to deliver it to NAB leaders throughout the bank.
The great news is that you can attend this workshop in Melbourne in a few weeks time. It's all about using storytelling techniques in a business context to improve communication and staff engagement.
We focus on three areas in the one day workshop:
- helping people find stories to retell. We call this prospecting for stories
- learning about different story patterns and when to use them. What is a vision story? What is a sparking action story? How to use a values in action story?
- practising retelling your experiences in an engaging and memorable way that suits the context
If you're interested, just email us and we will send you a registration form.
The cost is $495.
It will be held in Brunswick
Starts at 8.30 and finishes at 5.00pm
If you want to learn more check out the workshop blurb.
Send this entry to:
Email to a friend
View the Technorati Link Cosmos
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
| 3/09/08 | | Emotion, memory and stories |
Do you remember where you were when you first saw the those two jumbo jets plunge into the World Trade Center? How well do you remember what you were doing when you saw it? Can you remember the room you were in, the people in the room with you, what you said, what you thought?
When strong emotions surge through us our bodies respond by pumping adrenalin into our blood stream. In addition to preparing us to run or fight, adrenalin enhances our memories of what was happening when the emotion hit. This biological response was probably a very good feature of our species in times past because you want to remember exactly where that T-rex, that scared the bejesus out of you, hangs out.
Stories create emotions too and therefore there's no surprise that we remember the best stories, they ones that touch our hearts, make us laugh or even just create a feeling of puzzlement.
Last week I was teaching our storytelling for business leaders workshop to an energy company and I started the day with a Jumpstart Storytelling session. One of the most popular stories was this one which was originally told by a CEO many years ago but remembered clearly by the participant.
In prehistoric times there was this family that lived in a cave. They were very happy in their cave. They led a good life but one day they noticed across the valley another cave that looked pretty good. So after many weeks of discussion they made their mind up to move to the new cave. As they crossed the valley they noticed just how rich the soil was and thought it would be even better to settle there and till the soil. Which they did.
The CEO never explained the story nor mentioned it again, but the discussion it started about what it meant continued for years.
Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman say stories are facts wrapped up in context and delivered with emotion. The three factors are equally important: fact, context, emotion. But emotion is often set aside in a business context and we are only now seeing its inclusion as a legitimate factor to consider.
The relationship between emotion and memory was first brought to me attention in Maxwell and Dickman's book, The Elements of Persuasion
Send this entry to:
Email to a friend
View the Technorati Link Cosmos
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
| 31/08/08 | | A new workshop, but what should we call it? |
Many of you will be familiar with our business narrative workshop. It's a one day event where we cover how to find anecdotes in an organisation and then help your people make sense of the patterns they contain so new initiatives can be designed and implemented.
Every time we run this workshop the participants say it should be two days not one. So we are expanding this workshop and focussing it on how it helps people foster change in a productive way.
The problem is we are not entirely sure what to call it. Can you give us a hand please? I've created this poll to get your thoughts and would really appreciate any ideas.
Thanks for your help.
Send this entry to:
