http://www.beedocs.com (timeline software for Mac)
Clive Holtham’s work on “slow knowledge” and interactive games for KM http://www.sparknow.net/publications/EGOSHolthamFinal.pdf
Journal of Narrative Therapy http://www.dulwichcentre.com.au/international-journal-narrative-therapy.html
Rory’s Story Cubes http://www.thecreativityhub.com/tools/storycubes/
Future Backwards technique http://www.cognitive-edge.com/method.php?mid=10
Tetramap team and leadership profiling http://www.tetramap.com/
Kendall Haven’s book “Story Proof” http://www.amazon.com/Story-Proof-Science-Behind-Startling/dp/1591585465
Keith Johnstone’s book “Impro for Storytellers” http://www.amazon.com/Impro-Storytellers-Theatre-Routledge-Paperback/dp/0878301054/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283775997&sr=1-2
{ 3 comments }
Thanks, Patrick.
Victoria, I have been mulling over ‘In Your Shoes’, the framework, the responses etc. I recognise that the 2nd wave is important part and it is necessary to have the time and patience, and to ensure that commitment from the client at the start. It’s always worrying to see, or imagine, people simply going through the motions. In the ‘Crossing the Room’ activity, it was interesting to see that the ‘buyers’ held together in their pairs much more strongly than the sellers. Once the buyer ‘characters’ were introduced, the sellers tended to respond directly to them at an emotional level.
I am wondering whether the order in which the introductions were made would affect that. For example, if the sellers had started with their messages first, and the ‘characters’ resonded as appropriate before explaining who they were… what would the likely scenarios be?… still mulling…
I was a little confused about whether there was to be just one message at a time, or multiple messages directed to different target buyers. Would the ideal response be the most number of buyers crossing the room, or the best type of buyer etc…?
Many more questions that I have to think through…
Hello Rosemarie,
I’ve been giving it a great deal of thought too and don’t quite know what the right answer is, but it certainly shows up the nuance of an instruction placed slightly one way or another and what can happen. A child with a chainsaw indeed.
Let’s go to my other experiences first before reflecting on this one. In the actual running of the ITS experience, we build it over three hours from the building blocks we worked through and the thing we powerwalked through in 15 minutes normally takes about 45 minutes, perhaps longer. Each stage is built and reflected on slowly and carefully and the whole pacing of the set up of the Mind the Gap part is quite slow and considered and structured, so there’s a chance for the mania and charicature and banter to settle down and it to become, at it’s own pace, more serious and reflective and considered. It was inevitable that we would not reach this stage on this occasion, as we discussed.
I’ve never before had the experience of what happened this time and I think it could be the instructions, but not quite as you suggest. The ‘Buyers’ or managers always start, in other experiences, by seeking to engage the whole audience and then we explore, through individual reactions, why particular characters have behaved as they have. So this was an exception and it’s interesting to wonder why.
The disadvantage of starting with the Buyers would be that you miss that moment of the characters all sharing themselves a bit (which is very important as a group activity I suspect) and that key moment where they get to stand, together, in their characters, which creates a certain kind of embodiedness. You couldn’t do this so easily by starting the other way round and I think you’d miss part of the narrative journey and shift from head to heart, if you did skip it.
As to segmenting Buyers and having different messages for different Buyers, yes certainly. And for different settings you’d be thinking in different ways about how to handle that and finetune it, which is what happens when it is run for real. There, there’s a chance to home in on particular categories through particular characters and see how to unblock obstacles to communication.
I’m thinking, on this occasion, also, that the ATL/BTL part of the exercise was necessarily a bit approximate and pointed more at the conference sellers than it’s buyers.
What I think might have worked would have been to get the Sellers to step into the shoes of Shawn and Patrick and Rama, or the National Book Council, and invite people to cross the floor from that point of view.
Actually I also had a different moment of insight here, which was the way, when the Sellers were using words like ‘innovative, creative, exciting’ the whole crowd of Buyers fell back a bit and got more hesitant. In some ways I found that the most useful insight we generated.
I was overall pleased to see the possibilities of adapting the building blocks to suit different settings, and think we discovered that this might well work in a Singaporean setting in different industries as well as in the settings and cultures it has been developed in, as a whole model, or that components might find a place in other forms of engagement. So for me, showing it as a kind of Work in Progress and wondering whether it would transition from one environment to another, I was heartened by the quality of the work we did together.
Rosemarie,
Sorry, I’ve made the comment a bit confusing by swapping my terms but can’t find how to edit a comment so here is the amendment:
Hello Rosemarie,
I’ve been giving it a great deal of thought too and don’t quite know what the right answer is, but it certainly shows up the nuance of an instruction placed slightly one way or another and what can happen. A child with a chainsaw indeed.
Let’s go to my other experiences first before reflecting on this one. In the actual running of the ITS experience, we build it over three hours from the building blocks we worked through and the thing we powerwalked through in 15 minutes normally takes about 45 minutes, perhaps longer. Each stage is built and reflected on slowly and carefully and the whole pacing of the set up of the Mind the Gap part is quite slow and considered and structured, so there’s a chance for the mania and charicature and banter to settle down and it to become, at it’s own pace, more serious and reflective and considered. It was inevitable that we would not reach this stage on this occasion, as we discussed.
I’ve never before had the experience of what happened this time and I think it could be the instructions, but not quite as you suggest. The ‘Sellers’ or managers always start, in other experiences, by seeking to engage the whole audience and then we explore, through individual reactions, why particular characters have behaved as they have. So this was an exception and it’s interesting to wonder why.
The disadvantage of starting with the Sellers would be that you miss that moment of the characters/Buyers all sharing themselves a bit (which is very important as a group activity I suspect) and that key moment where they get to stand, together, in their characters, which creates a certain kind of embodiedness. You couldn’t do this so easily by starting the other way round and I think you’d miss part of the narrative journey and shift from head to heart, if you did skip it.
As to segmenting Buyers and having different messages from Sellers for different Buyers, yes certainly. And for different settings you’d be thinking in different ways about how to handle that and finetune it, which is what happens when it is run for real. There, there’s a chance to home in on particular categories through particular characters and see how to unblock obstacles to communication.
I’m thinking, on this occasion, also, that the ATL/BTL part of the exercise was necessarily a bit approximate and pointed more at the conference Sellers than it’s Buyers. Normally, the development of the ATL/BTL picture and of Characters flow through more coherently. This was a compromise for workshop purposes. The alternative would have been to take a particular company and work through that, but we wouldn’t have had time to do that in enough depth, so I chose to accept the trade off in the interests of getting at least a taster of each step of the experience. That could have been a mistake, although I think it probably worked well enough for our purposes.
What I think might have worked would have been to get the Sellers to step into the shoes of Shawn and Patrick and Rama, or the National Book Council, and invite people to cross the floor from that point of view. So the way I set the instructions for developing the Sellers’ messages could have been specifically to invite the Seller pairs to work up their messages/invitations from that position. That might have limited the playfulness just a little bit so that the wine, women and song banter would have made way for a bit more serious experimentation by the Buyers with what kind of (storied) invitation would be persuasive. What it might show is that the flaw that we spoke of earlier in the session, of not developing characters for the Sellers was exacerbated by the way we had to work in a cooked up scenario here.
Actually I also had a different moment of insight here, which was the way, when the Sellers were using words like ‘innovative, creative, exciting’ the whole crowd of Buyers fell back a bit and got more hesitant. In some ways I found that the most useful insight we generated.
I was overall pleased to see the possibilities of adapting the building blocks to suit different settings, and think we discovered that this might well work in a Singaporean setting in different industries as well as in the settings and cultures it has been developed in, as a whole model, or that components might find a place in other forms of engagement. So for me, showing it as a kind of Work in Progress and wondering whether it would transition from one environment to another, I was heartened by the quality of the work we did together.
I hope this is a useful response. Your comments were really useful, so keep’em coming!!
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