What's Inside
Circle of the 9 Muses contains dozens of tools and processes with nearly endless variations that can enable your work as a leader. As a field guide, Circle of the 9 Muses isn't meant to be read in order from front to back (although if that sounds like fun to you, then go for it). Instead, pick a tool or chapter or process that looks interesting to you. Each provides links to multiple other tools in the book, so you'll quickly forge your own unique path through these pages. Here's a peek at what you will find inside.
The Fundamentals
You may wish to begin your explorations here. These are the processes and disciplines that are foundational to much of the material throughout this book.
A lot of leaders ask, “Which stories should I tell?” Tell these. This is a simple construct for helping leaders think about the kinds of stories they should be strategically finding and sharing in order to build their own leadership and develop the organization.
When you place people in circles to tell stories to one another, it's like summoning the Greeks' nine muses who bring gifts of wisdom and knowledge. A story circle is a timeless construct of human interaction, but in organizational settings it requires some purposeful planning. Here's how to create a successful story circle for your next gathering.
Stories are extremely sensitive to context and framing. How you ask for stories matters. Here you will explore the nuances of the framing question so that you can generate a rich story experience every time.
A lot of leadership storytelling is spontaneous and rough around the edges; but there are times when you want to tell the most compelling story, in the most compelling way. Explore story theory from anthropologists, Hollywood script consultants, and folklorists. Then work through a step-by-step process that will imbue your stories with that edge of your seat quality.
Branching Out
Ready to start connecting stories to the most urgent work of your team and organization? These innovative processes have been developed and tested in the most influential organizations in the world . . . and now we've made them actionable and accessible for leaders like you.
A natural extension of story circles, twice-told stories is a fun group process for helping the most compelling stories emerge. It provides a natural filtering mechanism and demonstrates the viral quality that stories can have. But there's much more to this exercise! It makes some dramatic statements about the bigger story that we are all living — and creating — together.
Once the story has been told, the real work is just beginning. This exercise will help your team build its capacity for meaning making — having the important conversations about what they heard from the storyteller and her story. It will also help you to explore easy-to-implement ideas for responding to stories with conversations that matter.
The story circle is at the heart of your work as a storytelling leader. The format is so basic and simple that it invites creative iterations and innovative approaches. Here are a few variations from the world's top story innovators that you can use to unleash your team's genius.
Identify the voice of your brand, your offering, or even your own leadership by connecting it to archetypes — the deep story patterns that are encoded into our subconscious minds. The result of this exercise is a deep and shared awareness of who you are as the protagonist of your own story. The result? Stories that create indelible awareness among your many audiences.
The ultimate destination of leadership is the future, and it's an urgent topic for your storytelling. In this fun and simple exercise from the discipline of scenario planning, members of your team or organization will identify possible scenarios for your work by crafting stories about the future.
Encounter a remarkably simple, visually driven exercise for recreating the story of your (or your team's or your family's or your organization's) history. This is a fun activity that will give you a bird's-eye perspective of your experiences while also drawing fresh wisdom from them.
One of the roles of a leader is to define the bigger story that your team is living. When you define this broader metanarrative, you create an opportunity for team members to bring it to life with their individual stories. This practical exercise will provide you with some frameworks to define the larger story and invite others to be a part of it.
Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey is a massively influential story construct that is at the heart of the grand narratives told by ancient civilizations, world religions, novelists, and Hollywood hit makers. It can also be a powerful way to define the dramatic journey of your work so you can invite others to start telling their stories.
There's a lot of meaning in the stories that you and your colleagues have generated across the many exercises in Circle of the 9 Muses. This exercise provides team members with an active way to start discovering the buried themes, patterns and knowledge that lie hidden just beneath the surface.
“We are here. We are going there.” This creative tension construct is one of the fundamental cores of your leadership storytelling. This visually driven exercise is very easy to deliver, and yet it generates powerful insights into each team member's own capacity for leadership and change.
It's a core task of leadership: identifying a course of action, and then influencing people to come along. So much strategy communication centers on goals, numbers, and metrics. By positioning the strategy as a narrative, you help connect it to the deepest aspirations of the people in the organization.
This classic exercise uses storytelling and visual thinking to generate fresh innovation for your offerings. This simplified version of storyboarding is inspired by disciplined techniques employed by some of Silicon Valley's (and the world's) most influential innovation incubators.
What's more engaging than hearing a story? Stepping into one! You are surrounded by amazing stories of leadership. When you take your team out of the office and step into a world different from your own, you encounter big new ideas.
With digital tools (such as smartphones, tablet computers, and more) it has never been easier to craft and distribute your stories in fresh, compelling, and fun ways. The technology is changing fast, with new possibilities being generated all the time. This chapter will offer a peek at the possibilities and inspire your own exploration.