Storytelling, a Path to Innovation

Blue Moonlight
April Gornick
www.ArtCollectorsProgram.org

Last December, I attended, as a member of the Association of Knowledgework (AOK), a world café on the future of AOK.  There I met and chatted with Madelyn Blair, President of Pelerei, Inc.  She told me about Golden Fleece, which I also subsequently joined. (Because I have nothing but time to spare, no?  But I've learned not to ignore these signposts in life when they seem to just pop up unannounced).  Golden Fleece is "an international community of practice devoted to storytelling in business and organizations." 

What convinced me to pursue this "line of inquiry" was a simple statement Madelyn made when I asked her about the value of storytelling for learning.  She replied, "Story is context."  You know those moments when  your mindset does that whole tectonic-plates-are-shifting thing?  Well, I had one of those moments when she said that to me.  Click here for a nifty little clip from the October 2007 Golden Fleece event in Copenhagen.

Joining Golden Fleece is how I heard about the annual storytelling conference that is concluding today - three days of nothing but storytelling, storytelling techniques, and the value of storytelling.  Regrettably, I could only attend the Friday seminar at the Smithsonian, "Storytelling, a Path to Innovation."  Four speakers were featured:

• Dorothy Leonard, William J. Abernathy professor of business, emeritus, Harvard Business School
• Linda Coffman, (retired) senior manager, learning technology, Global Learning and Development Organization, Proctor & Gamble
• Claudia L'Amoreaux, or "Claudia Linden", education community developer for Linden Lab
• Steve Denning, senior fellow, James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland

I'll admit that Claudia's presentation was what I was most curious about.  I'm "in" Second Life (SL), but have insufficient time to do much there, including figuring out how to get my avatar moving about (safely) and doing stuff.  Last time I went in to SL, I had to be rescued by one of the SL helpers.  After flying around a bit, I'd gotten myself stuck in a trough in the ocean and couldn't remember how to levitate myself out of there.  Good times.

Anyhoo, Madelyn did a great job moderating the event.  I've summarized my notes from the event below - you can assume all the speaker-specific content below is their copyrighted material.  The seminar concluded with a fun story told by Svend-Erik Engh; how I wish I could have attended the event with him the night before!

Madelyn kicked it off by listing four barriers (to understanding the value of storytelling, I presume...I was late.)

1. Limited exposure
2. Fear (that old bugaboo!)
3. History
4. Assumptions

She did two exercises, which I'll describe later, to explore perspective and assumptions.  I thought they were quite fun and effective.

Dorothy Leonard - Deep Smarts:  How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom
These were her key points, and this is her copyrighted content.  Stories:

• Reflect and influence culture for innovations - both positively and negatively
• Can help normalize the emotional roller coaster of innovation projects
• Suggest how to innovate - processes and practices that work
• Can teach the wrong lessons and can be untrue (think of China's Great Leap Forward)
• Can reveal experts' unarticulated patterns of thought that are novel to other individuals

My key takeaway:  Dorothy stated, "Stories are often powerful because they call on our visual memory."  Visual memory is tied to our emotions.  This linkage between emotion and visualization allows people to create meaning, if, and only if, the receptors are in place in the person's brain.  Receptors can be created by more structured knowledge.

Here's a recorded interview with Dorothy that I found, in which she talks about "deep smarts", storytelling, and coaching.

Linda Coffman described how she created inexpensive digital storytelling based on the stories written by Proctor & Gamble's self-anointed "corporate storyteller", Jim Bangel.  She had a mandate to develop a research and development pipeline for learning and development.  It had to be scalable, efficient, effective and, by the way, "do something" with Jim's stories.  There were challenges with using Jim's stories:

• They were fictionalized, which could result in no buy-in from the viewer, and fake and missing emotion
• How to animate the fictionalized characters
• Jim's stories contained very overt messages. Viewers might have difficulty in putting themselves in the story.
• Many were too complex - they contained the facts, figures, graphs, charts, etc. that the P&G audience expected and was comfortable with

Linda's 3 elements of digital storytelling:

1. Visual
2. Voice of narration, usually first person
3. Music - there's lots of research that show music supports the emotion of the story.  Emotions can bridge the gap between two brains, and facts and figures can hang on that.  The emotion is the connecting factor.

Other key points - you have to have a good story to start with, and the challenge is to edit it down, usually to 350 words.

Resources:  Center for Digital Storytelling, The National Storytelling Festival

Claudia L'Amoreaux, or "Claudia Linden"

Unfortunately, I think Claudia's presentation was hampered by the fact that, in spite of 1.5 hours of trying, she could not get past the Smithsonian's internet security and load Second Life.  The world could not be initialized... She had someone standing by to interact with her inworld, but was not able to show that.  She provided an "avatar's eye view" of Second Life with some nice screen shots.  Her enthusiasm for the metaverse, or as business is calling it, the "3-D internet", was quite strong, but I didn't come away with a strong case for why or how storytelling is used in SL to create innovation (and believe me, I want to be convinced).  This opinion may be heavily influenced by my complete ineptitude in Second Life.  Because Second Life, as Claudia showed it, is certainly an amazing display of creativity and innovation in and of itself.

Some facts and points Claudia made.

• Everything in Second Life is created by the residents.  SL is an entirely user-created world - that's key to how it's developed.
• The world is vast - there are 20,000 regions
• It has an economy.  The currency is lindens and the current exchange rate is 270 lindens to US$1.00.  US$1 million per day moves through Second Life.
• Two of the unique elements of the metaverse is that users conjure contextual space and contextual identify.

Other terms she used:

• "steam punk" - design using 19th century technology running on steam.  Imagine a steam-operated robot.
• mixed reality - while an event is going on in "first life" (or the "meat world" - the term I prefer), simultaneously computers are being used to pull in participants who can only attend in Second Life.

I was interested to hear some frustration on the part of the participants in the room.  It seemed like a lot of them had never been in Second Life, and were exasperated because they couldn't grasp how it worked - how did one move in Second Life, did you use your mouse, how did one communicate, etc.  Claudia explained that she had made a conscious decision to not have this presentation be "Second Life 101" since there are so many resources about that out there already.  I agree with her, but I think again, that the fact that she couldn't do the type of presentation she had set out to do was a challenge.

Steve Denning - The Secret Language of Leadership

Steve spoke about "hot spots" and how innovation happens in groups.  He ran us through a multi-step interactive exercise (which is when I found out that the guy sitting on my right had come all the way from Finland for this event).  I'm not going to reiterate all his content; it's in his book listed above.  What I particularly enjoyed is the example he used - Al Gore's unsuccessful 2000 run for the presidency.  Basically, he showed how in 2000 Al Gore screwed up his storytelling big time, but by 2006 he had advanced his skills so much that he'd won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize.  Al Gore had figured out how to tell stories that connect with people.

Steve also debunked the "myth of the lone genius".  Citing Randall Collin's The Sociology of Philosophies, he made the point that in all the world's cultures, through thousands of years of human history, there were only 3 instances of a single person coming up with truly innovative ideas all alone.  Everything else had been created by, yes, you guessed it, groups.

Steve's model for creating and sustaining a movement:

1)  Tell the story of who we've been ===> 2)  Tell the story of who we are ===> 3)  Tell the story of who we are going to be.

He cited Barack Obama as someone who is masterful at this strategy.

Building on this model, one can create effective presentations to spark innovation by:

1) Getting clear on the goal ==> 2) Intuit the story of the group (be sure to get to the story of the least enthusiastic unique individual) ==> craft the story of who we are.

Numbers 1) and 2) above create the narrative foundation that gives credibility to 3) the story of who we are.

Whew!  Still with me?

Okay, here are Madelyn's two exercises.

The first one was about perspective.  She handed out sheets of paper in 3 different colors.  Each color had a different role on it:  thief, janitor, and opera singer.  People paired up to look at the room we were in from the perspective of the role listed on the paper.  Here are people's takeaways:

• I learned something new from my partner that I hadn't thought about on my own
• No-one looked at the room in the same way
• Madelyn gave us that specific perspective
• It wasn't difficult to change perspective; it just takes intention
• "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

The second exercise tested our assumptions.  Madelyn asked us to think about instruments that don't create sound. Four people volunteered their ideas.  Madelyn decided to hold an impromptu concert and asked all four to get up on stage and play their soundless instruments.  This is what we "heard":

• a keyboard that projects images and colors on the walls
• a flute with gills and multiple fins - different fins flapped depending on the note played
• Philip Glass' composition "6:36" - which consists of six minutes and 36 seconds of silence
• sound expressed as dance movement (this person was a former dance teacher at Gallaudet University

It was quite lovely to watch.

So there you have it, lads and lassies.  $98 dollars (nonmember fee) and well worth it. Steve said all the PowerPoints will be at storyatwork.org.

And I regret to inform you that, according to Claudia, people have figured out how to run PowerPoints in Second Life.  Sigh...

*shakes head in disappointment*