Chapter 9
For this exercise you will need:
- Pencil and paper
- A slide or handout that shows team members the story spine structure
Stories are simulators. When we hear stories, we see—and feel—ourselves in the story, and it becomes a valuable way to test our reactions and mental models without those pesky real-world consequences.
At a primal level, story is a survival technique. In the classic The Uses of Enchantment, Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim says that some children showed high levels of resilience in concentration camps because of the fairy tales they had been told over and over, which had equipped their young psyches with rehearsal in chaos, fear, vulnerability, and survival. They had already met the wolf at the door.
In this exercise, you will similarly use stories to simulate possible future events and increase your team's capacity for agile responsiveness.
With connections to Pixar and Hollywood screenwriting, the classic story spine structure is a template delivered with a twist: You are using it to tell the story of a plausible event that hasn't happened yet, but could. This innovation of using the story spine for a future story comes from Kat Koppett, master of bringing improvisation-inspired learning to leadership development. You can find her version of the offering in her book, Training to Imagine.1
What is going to happen in the future? What might go wrong? What might go right? And—most important—will you and your organization or team be ready for it? This is the realm of a discipline known as scenario planning, and this simplified framework is a simple way to introduce teams to the discipline. In this process, you will use the story spine template to define possible futures that your team or organization may face and then construct possible stories, events, and management strategies leading up to those futures.
An important feature of this story is that even though it describes a possible future, it is told in the past tense. Because the story begins with “Once upon a time,” you will tell the story as if the events had already passed. This may seem odd for a story that is about an event that hasn't happened yet, but the effect is powerful. By telling the future story as if it had already happened and been resolved, this invokes the reality in the mind. People can visualize themselves as taking action as protagonists in the story. It becomes real and as a result intimidating future events are rendered toothless. You won't truly feel the effect until people start telling their future story—and you will feel a buzz of energy start to creep into the room.
Where Did the Story Spine Come From?
The story spine is a classic story structure. It has been linked to story development at Pixar,2 and to the Hollywood screenwriting guru Brian McDonald in his much-praised book Invisible Ink. But its genesis is traced back to Kenn Adams, a playwright and actor who developed the spine as an exercise for improvisational (improv) theatre.
Just take a quick read through the story spine structure. As you do, notice how easily a story starts to formulate in your head—even before you've defined any of the details!
Here is the story spine, which is so simple it can be presented on a cocktail napkin:
Get Ready for This Exercise
The story spine can work with one person as an individual activity, or it can be scaled to large groups, with members broken into subgroups of around five people.
You'll need about 1 hour for the exercise as it is presented here.
Give each participant a page that lays out the story spine. You are welcome to create one using the text that is presented in the napkin image.
Introduce the Story Spine
Start by explaining the story spine, similar to how I explained it at the beginning of this chapter. (Sharing its Hollywood bona fides is a great way to start. People are engaged by the idea that they may be tapping into Pixar magic when they craft their stories!) Walk participants through each of the stages. You might even ask someone to think of a favorite movie and describe how it follows this structure.
Share the purpose of the exercise: “Using the story spine, we are going to imagine possible scenarios that could affect [you/the team/the organization] in the future, and we are going to weave stories about how we will survive those scenarios.”
Start with the Climactic Event: “Until Finally . . .”
Every great story has a transformational moment when everything changes. So what are some possible events that could affect or disrupt business in the future?
Participants may notice that this is actually close to the end of the story spine. We are not starting at the beginning, and this is intentional. Instead, we wish to identify the disruptive action first—the “until finally”—and then in a few minutes we will come back and build the story around it.
Give participants a few minutes to think individually about events that could disrupt the business (or team) in the future. These aren't necessarily negative events! (For example, your organization acquires another company.) Tell them to think in terms of:
- A significant change to a customer or key account
- Changes in leadership
- Changes to the structure of the team or organization
- A legal event
- A competitor makes a big change
- Disruption to relationships or trust levels
- Marketplace disruption
- Disruptive technologies
- Health and safety disruptors (I worked with one logistics organization at a safety summit, and many wrote variations of agonizingly plausible scenarios, such as “. . . Until finally someone was crushed by a shipping container.”)
- Black swans—events that are extraordinary, but plausible
Write down at least four or five possible disruptors on a page. Give the group 5 minutes to do this individual work.
Identify a Single Event That the Group Will Focus On
Each member of the small group will take turns sharing his or her events with the others.
At the end of this conversation, there will be a lot of possible disruptors—probably too many to build stories around. The team should identify the items that they deem most urgent or most important to build a story around. Multiple team members may choose the same item (but be aware that they will each construct their own separate story about that item), or each member may choose a different item.
At the end of this discussion, each team member will have a single event that he or she will build a story around.
Complete the Story Spine!
Working individually, give each participant 10 minutes to write a story around his or her event.
Participants will want some information on each of the story spine elements. Again, you are welcome to reproduce the text below. (If you do, please include the statement “Copyright 2015 David Hutchens.”)
Allow participants 10 minutes to write the story. (Give them alerts when there are 5 minutes, then 3 minutes, and then 1 minute left.)
As a final step, each person should think of a title for his or her story and write it at the top of the page.
Here is a story one person captured using the story spine:
This story suggested a connection between organizational capacity and the management culture. This was a new idea to the team, and the beginning of a long-overdue conversation.
Next, the participants can take turns telling their stories using the Story Circle structure (Chapter 2). If you have a lot of team members, you can use Twice-Told Stories (Chapter 5) to bring the most powerful stories to the larger group.
Where Do I Go from Here?
You might discuss: What is the likelihood of each of the events happening? What would need to be in place for our company to respond, based on the actions you proposed in your stories? What wisdom can we draw from the “And that's why . . .”lessons learned?
You might also wish to discuss the variety of stories. Were there common themes? Did some people address similar challenges with radically different stories?
Based on the experience you just shared, and the disruptors you identified, what needs to happen next?
Be sure to capture the stories so that they are not lost.