Here’s Rosemarie Somaiah’s opening story from Origins 2010: a story of strategy and intended conquest, with unintended consequences, especially for Singapore! You can download the original video file here.

Here’s a nice post from Bas De Baar on using storytelling to engage in participative project planning. De Baar doesn’t make this explicit, but he’s actually using the archetypal story form of the Hero’s Journey. Thanks to Tony Joyce for this lead.

I was handed a charming book when I was at Origins Asia and I want to write about it, because it upholds so many of the principles of building story systems that Sparknow has developed over the years.  I’m working on a set of wildly metaphorical labels as hooks for the 12 principles and plan to use these as an organising device for our archives & research. Some of them I spoke of, in the keynote and in the workshop – the red thread, the second wave, pebbles & diamonds. Others I inferred but wasn’t explicit about and am still searching for the right temporary handles -two tribes, the spaces in between, mechanical advantage, themes & variations, safekeeping. More on all that in due course.

Anyway, the book was called ‘Tales from Teaching’ and here, pretty much as I’ve written them, are my fieldnotes about it.

Name | Tales from Teaching, Hope: Tampines Junior College, Singapore, Tales from Teaching 2010

Principles | #1 red thread    #the second wave #4 pebbles & diamonds  #5 two tribes #6 the spaces in between #8 mechanical advantage #9 the suitcase & the journey #themes & variations #12 safekeeping

Situation |
Tampines Junior College wanted to find a way to infuse the missions statement (lead, care, inspire) with new energy and meaning for teachers. They wanted to find a way to get teachers to share stories without being intrusive, and were looking for the right form of invitation.

Intervention |
Teachers were invited to fill in a mock examination form, structured precisely to echo the kinds of exams they set their students. So, for example:

SECTION B: Select ONE of the following questions.

Care (verb): To be concerned or considerate

1. How much care is enough Using authentic material from your colleagues, attempt to quantify the amount of care teachers give to their students.

2. There is always hope.  Discuss how caring teachers are simultaneously bearers of hope.

3. Care = Teacher = Hope. Discuss the significance of this relationship in whatever way you deem fit.

4. Using a quotation, explain the importance of a culture of care to schools today.

The answers take all kinds of forms, including poems, pictures, stories – sometimes fictionalised, acrostics, reflections, personal fragments of autobiography. They’re carefully scattered in juxtaposition with no bridging materials, or authorial intervention, and allow the reader to find their own way. They are presented as exam answers in a short, 58 page booklet.  The front page looks like this:

Front cover of tales from Teaching 2010 published by Tampines Junior College

Fieldnotes |
This is a beautifully witty, elegant and very slim intervention, playing with the form and substance of the setting of the teaching professional and the normal day to day tasks and using these as an unthreatening invitation to share personal stories. The polyphonic result reclaims the abstract words of the mission statement and puts them back into the living teachers and values acted out at the school.

There’s some neat mechanical advantage here too (using one intervention to achieve several things at the same time). The process of inviting the teachers to engage leads them to reflect, so their own reflective capacity is built, while the resulting materials can be published and distributed. The reincorporation of the personal, so vividly, in the collective (the red thread of personal material reincorporated into the collective so that individual and institution are visibly connected) means that individuals can see themselves quite clearly in the organisational whole.

Note also the safekeeping. By anchoring the intervention in a familiar form, this feels like a safe space, and so the teachers are willing to be quite vulnerable and open because they feel at home. There’s more to be said about the possibilities of using recognised organisational artefacts and forms as windows into a different way of communicating.

Theoretically, this brings to mind Ken Gergen’s work on social construction, the reconstruction of mean and a collection of personal meanings (1) and Madelyn Blair’s ideas, derived from this, about story in a word (2).

I do wish I hadn’t mislaid the card of the lady who gave it to me, but I will work out who she is and have a longer conversation with her about how they went about it.

References & notes |

(1) Ken Gergen An invitation to social construction. London: Sage, 1999. 2nd ed 2009 ISBN 0-8039-8377-8

(2) Madelyn Blair of Pelerei has spoken in an earlier blog about story in a word. Instructions on how to run a story in a word session can be found in lots of places, including in the DEZA story guide available online from DEZA and also in Sparknow publications.

I thought it might be interesting to share bits from my fieldnotes of preparation for the keynote speech.

In early 2002 Sparknow started out on a five year partnership (their description of the relationship) with the Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation (SDC).

To use their own language, one of the earliest working sessions with the SDC had in it a ‘moment fort’ which I have carried with me since.

(A small detour here, to say that we discovered at that time that French, of the four official languages of the SDC, was generally the default language for telling stories, regarded as more elastic, more vivid, and more dancing than German, Italian or English.)

We had asked two trios each to use the project experiences of one of the trio to map the unfolding long story of a project, tracing back to before the formal start and forwards to after the official finish.  We used a kind of worksheet we’ve come to call a narrative grid (probably the grid part because it sounds rather rigorous and handily unstoried):

(For fun, instead of trying to draw this in word, or powerpoint or omnigraffle or something, I decided to draw it on the window of my office, so you can also see a tiny bit of my view, treetops & clouds today.)

Perhaps because in French, certainly to our surprise, each group spontaneously conjured a metaphor to summarise the storyline they’d traced.

One group described the role of storytelling ‘sous l’arbre palabre’ or under the palaver tree, the glue of companionship and exchange in informal settings in the field.

The other fell on the notion of the ‘one winged butterfly’: the storytelling is rich and vivid and expressive, in both the formal and the informal settings of the organisation until the formal processes of project management and evaluation kick in. The institutionalisation of procedure, they felt, rips the other wing from the butterfly.

This led to an early shared ambition to develop a story system to put the other wing on the butterfly.

Now of course, the metaphor is mistaken. Butterflies have four wings, not two, but I don’t think that to stickle about it detracts from the vividness of the image in the mind’s eye.

Some years later, butterflies came up again, this time in conversation with a colleague. I don’t recall the precise time, place or task, but I do remember Matthew saying:

The trouble is, stories are like butterflies.

Alive they are delicate, beautiful, a sign of a healthy ecology.

Dead, they are simply a collection of dead things, doused in formaldehyde, pinned in a display case, and shown off.

Our job is create the conditions for breeding butterflies, while are clients are asking for collections in display cases.

I expect he was a little less lyrical than that, but not much. Matthew has a good way with words.

The organisational story movement in Asia Pacific is both only just beginning and, in circular time, has been here over millennia, woven through many cultures, for ever. This is a beautiful paradox, and I’d venture that if any place on earth has the variety, the tradition, the openness to innovation, to put the other wing on the butterfly, and foster an ecology of organisational story systems, it is this region, here and now. In the opening words of Corporania, our first serious experiment in organisational story telling:

‘Once upon a time. It might be tomorrow.’

Here’s the TV interview with our Origins speakers Victoria Ward and Olivier Serrat on Monday 6th September.

Go to Victoria Ward and Olivier Serrat Interview on blip.tv
Download the video file.

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

Hello everyone. I wish I could come and join you at what looks to be an amazing get-together (but as the mother of a small child I don’t travel much, yet). As a quick introduction to those who don’t know me already, I’m Cynthia Kurtz, and I’ve been working in the area of organisational and community narrative since 1999, on what I call the “listening side” of the field – meaning, I help people gather and work with stories for sensemaking, understanding and decision support. I’m located in New York. I’ve done something like sixty projects for corporate and government clients in this area, and I’ve had a hand in developing some of the ideas, methods and software in the field.

In the past few years I’ve been on a mission to bring the ideas and techniques I’ve come to rely on to the aid of every small group with a goal. The first part of that mission was my free book Working with Stories, the third edition of which I’m working on now (and posting new sections as I write them on my blog at storycoloredglasses.com). The second part has been work on software tools to help small groups share and work with their stories. Last year I built, released and beta-tested an open-source story-sharing web application called Rakontu.

Patrick Lambe asked me to post something here about Rakontu because he thought it would be of interest to the group. I didn’t know what to say at first, because Rakontu is “having a nap” right now due to lack of funding, and it’s not in active use at the moment. But the fact is, I’m not all that worried if the software itself doesn’t survive. A lot of software doesn’t, and it’s the ideas in Rakontu that matter most. And it is those ideas that I think you all would be most interested in hearing about. So, I thought about what ideas from the Rakontu project are worth passing on. What I wrote soon grew far too long for a post here, so I posted the full essay on my blog. This is an abridged version. My hope is that these ideas will spark discussion before, during and after the conference as they mingle with those that come to the conference in person.

Supporting sharing over performing

The kind of storytelling I’m interested in supporting is the kind that leads to conflict resolution, perspective-taking, mutual learning, strong communities, and effective decision making. I call this story sharing to distinguish it from storytelling in which performance is a larger force. Over about a decade of observing the web, I’ve noticed that the highest sharing to performing quotients can be found in the still, quiet pools where long-term, somewhat coherent social groups meet, and in which people help each other through difficult conditions and decisions.

In Rakontu, I tried to increase story sharing by using a utility-based rating system, where stories were rated according to the goals of the group. This did not work! Even I myself felt the urge to perform for high ratings. I’ve now realized that if you set up a rating scale, it doesn’t matter what you call it. People evaluate everything, every minute of every day. It is what keeps us alive, and we can’t stop doing it. If I was to try this again, I’d keep the evaluation for utility, but I would pull it deep down to provide utilitarian mining without visible ranking. My guess is that one of the reasons plain-vanilla newsgroups and email work well for story sharing is that ratings play little part in the interactions. For some online communities and tasks, reputation and ranking are essential elements; but for story sharing, ratings draw attention to storytellers and storytelling events and away from stories. When attention is drawn too far away from stories, the experiences in them do not accumulate into the useful aggregations the group needs.

Building a café in a library or a library in a café

Story sharing is both a verb (storytelling) and a noun (stories). In off-line conversation, people are the cafés and the libraries in which stories live, and stories move fluidly from telling to remembering to retelling. When an old woman remembers a story she heard in 1923 and tells it to her great-grandchild, the passage of the story from memory to event is effortless and natural. In the online world, walls between event and memory reduce the capacity of the collective narrative machine to churn its content, which is critical to useful story sharing. What I see on the internet is either stories entirely absorbed in events and never transferred to memory, or stories stacked up in memory and never returned to the world of events. Spaces for on-line story sharing must be mixed-use facilities where café tables intermingle with library shelves. This is one of the central ideas of Rakontu.

One of the ways I tried to support intermingled event and memory in Rakontu was in volunteer roles as balanced packages of commitment. The four roles Rakontu members can take map onto Richard Bartle’s 1996 framework of member motivation in multi-user dungeons (MUDs). MUDs are like story sharing sites because people are building something and living in it at the same time. Bartle’s framework places the dimension of activity (acting on versus interacting with) with the dimension of focus (people to environment). Rakontu’s roles populate this matrix so each member can commit to activities that suit their motivations. The roles also create links between café and library elements of the Rakontu and help it address both memory and event.

Embodying knowledge about narrative

People vary in whether they tell stories, whether they think they tell stories, and whether they are good at telling stories. They also vary in whether they understand why and how story sharing matters. In Rakontu I did not try to explain any of this, but shaped the experience itself so that it embodies knowledge about stories and storytelling rather than trying to spread it. Probably the best successes of Rakontu so far have been in this area. One thing that seemed to work well was the system of typed annotated links between stories. In Rakontu, when someone sees a topic, they can respond to it with a story, and that link, and their annotated reason for it, is kept and can be reviewed and searched. When someone reads a story, they can tell another version of the events it recounts, tell another story it reminds them of, or explicitly link it to another story for any (annotated) reason. As I participated in building a collection of stories using Rakontu, I found these links an essential tool for “getting around” in the library we were building.

Another success was in Rakontu’s question-asking system. When anyone tells a story in Rakontu, and when anyone reads a story, they are presented with several questions that capture their interpretation of it, such as “How do you feel about this story?” and “Why was it told?” Some stories will only collect one set of answers, but relevant or controversial stories are likely to collect many sets that represent varied interpretations. This gives people a way to voice their diverse opinions about stories that can accumulate into useful patterns. It also creates a closer analogue to what happens to offensive stories “in the wild,” where stories are not “deleted” from memory but become weighed down with so much context-rich commentary that they sink into oblivion.

Building for commitment

Rakontu worked best when it was being used by people who knew each other, and this was as I expected. It is for this reason that I think story sharing sites like Rakontu will work best when they can be “seeded” with stories collected in more fluid conversation, both at the start of site creation and at intervals afterward. I’ve seen many story collecting web sites go up in which complete strangers post stories, and I’ve never seen one of these succeed – in the ways I would like to see story sharing succeed. They do sometimes succeed in the sense that people looking for information find what they need. But for working towards a common goal that will benefit everyone in a group, this sort of story collection lacks the connective tissue to build something larger.

In general I think web software has been wonderful for people finding and meeting people. It has been wonderful for people trying to draw more people to a cause. It has done a dismal job helping people who already know each other do anything but bring the most basic information together. In my opinion, Margaret Mead’s small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens trying to change the world are still waiting for their internet. If there is one thing I think could not be stripped away from Rakontu without ruining it, it would be its emphasis on helping small groups achieve common goals. Because it’s unique, because it’s needed, and because it’s what stories do best.

You can find out more about Rakontu and its goals and concepts at rakontu.org, and I’d be happy to talk to anyone interested in these ideas.

There is a great feature in today’s Straits Times on the Origins Conference, and its parent, the Singapore International Storytelling Festival. Several of our speakers and participants are quoted. Download the scanned article here.

I’ve always been fascinated with how stories connect with one another. For most of us who are not natural performers or orators telling a single big story in a compelling way seems daunting. I’ve noticed that most stories are more like snippets; small bits and pieces. Even when they’re not the flow of conversation between people or the impromptu opportunities that present themselves for sharing stories requires us to condense our stories.

Here are some questions I’ve been thinking about:

How do stories change when we need to collapse them?
How much can we condense or abbreviated a story before it loses its impact?
When we link several stories together (two or more in a rapid string)? How does that impact us as a teller? And what effect does it have on listeners? Can they follow us? Will it trigger stories for them?

I’ve been releasing short two minute video blog pieces where I have been experimenting with story richness. I’ve been playing with story forms (anecdotes, metaphors, visual metaphors, cliches, alluding to other personal stories without going into them, and references to well known stories or movies, etc…).

How do these “story forms,” enrich conversations and presentations and when do they detract? Are they still stories? Are these story skills more easily practiced by others because they might mimic natural forms of communication better? Can we be more mindful and aware of these forms of stories and by doing so become more effective at connecting with each other?

In my latest video I gave myself a hard challenge. I wanted to tell three stories in less than a minute and half and still have it be cogent, effective, evocative for others, and well connected to the front part of the video. I then further challenged myself by giving myself one take only. I turned the camera on and away I went. I had a mental schema in my mind and I had identified the stories but I had never tried telling them all together and I had never tried to tell them all in less than a minute and half.

Here’s the result. I’d love to hear people’s experiences and thought about the questions below and I hope the video is a good conversation starter.

Link to Video Example

In case the picture based link does not work here is a text link to the video…

Here’s a link to a library of the videos

Look forward to hearing people’s ideas…

The power in telling stories is a nice article by Shelley Anderson on the open democracy website. She opens with a very small story of non-violent action, a story about shopping, and then looks at the things that make it powerful

The first is that it is an oral anecdote—as far as I know, it has never been documented. The second is that the protagonists are anonymous. During my work for an international peace organisation I have come across many such stories of successful nonviolent actions. Many are personal, eyewitness accounts; others are stories passed on by older family members or colleagues. Most are unwritten and will remain unwritten. Most, especially if the main protagonists are women, are anonymous.

The third characteristic of this opening story is its ordinariness. Shopping is an act of daily life which millions of people engage in. It is an unremarkable act.

She goes on to talk about the power of such ‘anecdotal, anonymous and above all, ordinary’ stories in shifting antagonistic situations.

Now I don’t know exactly how this links up, but I lunched yesterday (in Darwin’s House) with someone who is working nationally in social services in the UK, and we spoke of the entrenched feeling of the sector, the sense of victimhood. All the efforts to find stories that will overcome or shift the pattern seem to run into a wall of despair. The dangers of storytelling in such  a situation are that once the defences are breached, the feelings that pour out are tumultous and uncontainable.

Alida Gersie is a brilliant therapist who specialises in narrative and I’ve been lucky enough to have experienced her coaching. She’s written several books on storytelling and storymaking that are off the beaten track for most who work on story in organizations. But I can recall a kind of story she calls a liminal, or gateway story (I can’t remember the precise term or track down the book this second). The liminal, or gateway story is the one just  under, just behind your tongue and it acts like a lock on the rest of your reservoir of stories, particularly at times of upheaval, uncertainty, despair, unhappiness. Your fear is that the gateway story, once told, will unlock an uncontrollable flood of stories so you’ll be quite determined to hang onto this story and hold it close to yourself, because there’s no telling what will happen to you if you let go of it.

We spoke of this at lunch yesterday and wondered, together, about whether ordinariness in storytelling, has an important place in helping the griefstruck to start to shift patterns. This would displace my general assumption about getting emotion into the room through jumpstarts or appreciative enquiry or whatever, and shift to paying attention to small, slightly surprising, but quite undramatic moments, as as starting point for other work. So perhaps in emotionally complex situations, we’re looking for less story rather than more, or is this where objects and small neutral ‘third’ spaces for storytelling might come in to make things  a bit safer?  Then, how can the invitation to share stories also become an invitation towards hope and away from despair?

This reminds of some work we did years ago with the Countryside Agency when it was being merged, training story collectors to collect the stories of the difference the Agency had made in one region.  We started in the normal way by asking for turning point stories and used an A3 sheet (big fan of worksheets) based on the turning point template in the storyguide we made with the Swiss aid agency.

As we debriefed, we heard stories of impact which were, for example, knowing who held the key to the village hall, so that a meeting on a parish plan wouldn’t have to be held in the rain. Not exactly Hollywood drama, and this was a relevation to them.

We’re not going to find stories of car chases in the backstreets of Norwich.

(Norwich is a big town in the east of England.) And this became the challenge. Because the anecdotal, often anonymous and above all ordinary tales of their day to day impact were not the kinds of stories that carry easily to a meeting with Whitehall, or the Chief Executive’s keynote speech to open the annual conference.

I can’t yet, quite tie these things together, because I’ve only just started to place the small fragments side by side and see what I can make of them, but I think there’s something niggling there.