Visual Story Mining

With this exercise, I am honored to introduce one of my favorite story practitioners to you. Limor Shiponi is among the wisest and most challenging thinkers in the global business storytelling scene, and her approach to story is deeply informed by her Israeli culture. “Everything meets here in Israel,” she says of her culture, “and so there is impossible complexity coming into the stories. It is so dense it spits out diamonds.”

Earlier in Circle of the 9 Muses, we explored the difficulty that some groups have in warming up to a story session. Limor has experienced that, too, and she suggests this exercise as a way of priming the pump for a group of storytellers. “People don't always respond to 'tell me a story'” she says, “for the reason they can't imagine themselves speaking in front of others in the form of story. This exercise is great for “clearing the story throat”—and for any time that you wish to find stories.”

Here's how it works.

Place your team members in pairs at tables.

Give each couple a group of 10 visual prompts. For example, you could use “Rory's Story Cubes” (as featured in Chapter 6), or a set of metaphorical images such as those provided by VisualsSpeak (as featured in Chapter 14.) You could also use a group of random objects, or a stack of images cut from magazines. Limor says that simple images are best.

Round 1: Free Association

Pick up an image, look at it, and tell the other person what it makes you think of. It can be anything at all. Take turns going back and forth until you've gone through all 10 images.

Round 2: Think of Organizations

Now shuffle the images and distribute them again. Once again, take turns sharing what each image makes you think of . . . only this time generate the associations from your organizational experience. Think broadly over your entire career, and answer quickly without overthinking it.

Round 3: Think of This Organization

By now, both team members should be “warmed up” and generating ideas freely. Do a third round . . . only this time think about associations to your current organization.

Another difference this time is that your partner will write down what you say.

At the end of this round, you will have a page with the 10 things your partner said about this job; and he or she will have the 10 things you said.

Trade papers and review what you said.

Now it's time to tell a story! Pick one item from your page, and simply tell a story about it.

Limor says this exercise does a couple of things. First, the three rounds progresses from complete associative freedom to a sharpening of focus. It warms up the “filtering” muscle. In addition, they become comfortable “scanning” their experiences, and by the time they have the page with their ten thoughts about this job, they are already in a metaphorical/narrative mindset and can begin generating surprising connections about their current work.

“It is now easy for them to tell stories,” Limor says, “because they've already heard their own voice speaking in the story domain.”

Stories in Words

Terrence Gargiulo has written prolifically on how to use stories in organizational contexts. He says that individual words are containers of stories. “Words are how we index and retrieve our experiences,” he says. “A word can encapsulate a whole universe of stories. Words open the door to our memories and recollections. Words are the links to stimulating these associations.”

Let's test it now. Think about this word:

Success.

Pause for a moment and reflect on it. The relay boards in your brain are going crazy right now, retrieving associations, feelings, memories, experiences, and stories.

Dr. Madelyn Blair has developed a process based on this idea. There's a body of thought known as social constructivism, which says that we create our reality through our language and that this comes about through a complex, collaborative process. We assign meaning to our words, we come to shared agreement on the meaning, and then we bring them to life in community.

This leads to a curious phenomenon in which some words, used over and over, actually lose their meaning and their power—much like the old rechargeable battery in your cell phone that has lost its ability to hold a charge.

Dr. Blair offers a provocative example: “I daresay that in America, the word freedom has just about lost its meaning,” she says. That is, it has been used, manipulated, and loaded so much that it has become difficult to use it in dialogue because there is little shared agreement on what it means.

In this exercise, you'll use your company's mission statement (or vision statement or team goal) to infuse your most important work with new meaning and new urgency. Even if your organization has a mission statement that is a legitimate source of vitality and life, there are likely some dead battery words in there. (“What do we mean by excellence, anyway?”)

To prepare for the exercise, distribute copies of your company's mission statement or project it on a screen. Read it aloud, and then explain that over time words tend to lose their ability to hold a charge.

Then give these instructions to your team members:

Pick a single word from the mission statement. It can be any word at all. (Some participants may make unconventional choices. I was with a group that chose the word the from their mission statement, which may sound like a trivial choice. But their mission statement included the phrase “we will be the provider of healthcare in our community,” and they wondered whether the word the was loaded with outdated assumptions of singularity and preeminence that were sending a confusing message in their new age of collaborative partnerships.)

Option: For the above step, Dr. Blair says that sometimes she allows participants to regroup based on the word they chose. “The group that chose the word service is meeting in the back; likewise, if you chose the word excellence, then bring your chair over to the excellence group in the front left corner.” This takes an extra minute or two, but it brings team members into a deeper dialogue with others around a single shared word.

Now think of a personal story related to that word. This is a story from your world or your life. Don't try to connect it to the organization. “I chose the word service and it reminded me of a story about my grandfather being drafted into the army . . .”

Get in groups of four (or three, or two, depending on what works best for the size of your group). Your story should take 2 or 3 minutes to tell.

Monitor the time and room dynamics to make sure all participants have time to tell their stories in their groups.

If you have several groups, ask them each to select one member to repeat his or her story to the larger group.

Afterward, debrief by making these points and asking these questions:

When words lose their meaning, our role as leaders is to enliven those words—to recharge them—by telling stories that infuse them with new meaning.

The stories you just heard might, on the surface, have little to do with our mission statement. (Some of you might not have actually even said the word you chose, but your story was inspired by the word.) The stories brought new depth to how you think about some of the key words in our statement, didn't they?

Give me some examples of ways that you are thinking differently about some of the words in our mission statement. “What does the story about Granddad being drafted reveal to you about the meaning of the word service?”

How can these ideas change how we think about our mission? What new meaning do they bring to our mission?

Thaler Pekar, an expert on story and organizational identity, suggests asking for stories about the absence of the word, as well. For example, “When have you experienced a lack of service?”

Note that this exercise could be combined with Story Element Extraction (Chapter 13) to help participants identify the themes that span across their many stories.

The Client Sets the Frame

Here's another one from Limor Shiponi. Limor says she is constantly amazed by the exclusionary nature of story circles in almost every culture. Wherever there are story circles, it is notable who is not present!

Why don't you ask your customer or client which stories matter? Here's how Limor manages this process.

Have at least 10 participants individually call their customers or clients in advance of the session, and ask them a single question:

How would you describe what is best about working with my team (or my function or organization)?

Based on the customer or client response, each person should capture key characteristics and phrases on sticky notes. One idea per note.

For example, let's say Limor called her customer, asked him or her to describe working with her, and as a result captured these ideas on sticky notes:

When Limor and her colleagues come together for the story circle, each will put his or her sticky notes up on the wall. Each will take turns presenting what he or she heard from customers, as well as the key phrases.

Next, participants will regroup all the sticky notes according to similarity. (Thus, Limor's notes will become mixed in with everyone else's.) You will now have several affinity groups of notes with similar themes. Identify the big theme for each of these groups.

Pause for a moment and consider these themes. This exercise may yield some surprises! After all, what you assume is valuable about your offerings may or may not match what your customers actually find valuable.

Now take turns telling your own stories about the themes. So in the example here, participants will take turns answering the prompt: “Tell me about a time that you acted as a truth teller for our client.” The participant should tell a unique story, and not simply rehash the scenarios or points that the customer referred to in the original call.

Thus, in this process each member of the team will now have a new mental model about his or her own value offering because it was illuminated by customers and then brought to vivid life in the stories of the team.

Invite the Witness

Don't stop with customers. Who else should be present? Consider bringing in your stakeholders and retired leaders. It's surprising how often people will explore stories without inviting the perspectives of the people whom the story is about. So bring them in.

What if the witnesses have died or are simply unavailable? Bring in the witness to the witness. I recently helped a six-decade-old health-care firm capture its origin stories. The founder had died several years ago, but his 90-year-old widow was alive. We invited her to the office and captured video of her telling stories about her late husband's values and his intent in establishing the organization. The exercise was as much a gift to the widow as it was to the entire organization, which might otherwise have lost those memories forever.

Leaders have asked me specifically whether it is appropriate to tell someone else's story. The answer is absolutely. However, it is not appropriate to tell the story from the other person's point of view. Instead, tell the story from your perspective as a witness. “I heard a leader tell this amazing story the other day. He said. . . . And here is how it affected me to hear him tell that story . . .”

Story Distilling

This is a great exercise in pruning a story down to its essence. The purpose is not so much to make a story better by editing it (although it may certainly have that effect) but to prompt a teller to unearth the core meaning of a story.

Let's say you and a colleague have each told the other a 5-minute story. Say to the other person, “Let's tell those same stories again . . . but this time we have to do it in 2 minutes.” Take turns telling your 2-minute story. Use a timer!

Then do it again. “This time, we have to tell our same stories in 30 seconds!”

Then do it again in two sentences, then a single sentence.

Finally, it is always fun (and surprisingly meaningful) to conclude by telling the story in a single word.

Dr. Blair details a wonderful process for advancing this conversation over a series of e-mails with a friend in her e-book Essays in Two Voices. It is a rich exercise not just in editing but also in packing a growing awareness into a dramatically decreasing linguistic container. Her book Essays in Two Voices is in the bibliography and is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Audience Carousel

After you have hosted a story event in which participants have told stories, issue them this challenge: “You just told a great story to your colleagues in this room. Without even thinking about it, you tailored your communication to your audience. You made split decisions about what details to include and which to leave out, based on who is sitting in front of you. What would have been different about your story if you had told it to different audiences? Let's find out!”

Invite each participant to tell his or her story again, but this time imagine someone different is in the group:

Depending on the time and number of participants, you may have each participant tell his or her story multiple times for each fictional audience member—or you may draw names from a hat and have each participant tell his or her story only once to the selected fictional member.

One outcome of this exercise is that it demonstrates how fluid stories can be. It can be tempting to fall back on our favorite stories and tell them the same way, every time. But our role is to engage people, and that means bringing fresh perspective to the story every time we tell it, based on the audience.

Getting Personal: Stories and Significant Experiences

Annette Simmons, surely one of the most influential thinkers in organizational storytelling, says that this unexpected approach to story circles is her favorite. In this story experience, she asks questions to solicit stories that have nothing to do with business or the organization.

“We've assumed for so long that business isn't personal,” she says. “But it is. How can it not be? Doing a great job demands personal commitment. We want people to take it personally.”

The twist to Annette's process is that she demonstrates that these personal stories do indeed have links to the work and the organization that are urgent and vital.

This process works best when there's a gathering of around 15 to 20 people but can succeed with groups of 300 or more.

Number the four corners of the room that you are in. Place a piece of paper labeled 1, 2, 3, and 4 in each corner.

Tell participants that you are going to ask a yes/no question, and if their answer is yes, they will go stand in corner number 1.

The question is: “Who here has met a big celebrity?” Those who say they have will go stand in corner number 1.

Go over to the group (with a microphone if the room is large) and quickly poll the group: “Whom did you meet?” Follow your intuition and pick someone who seems especially engaged (or who has met a really cool celebrity.) Invite that person to tell the story. “Wow, you actually met Bruce Springsteen? Tell us about that! What happened?”

After that person has told his or her story, you as facilitator will connect that story to an organizational meaning. This requires some skill, although it is much easier if you think in terms of the Four Core Stories presented in the first chapter of this book. “Jane, that was an amazing story about meeting Bruce Springsteen and how you connected personally to his vision in ‘Born in the USA.' Can you see how that is really a story about values?” (Or change, vision, or identity.)

Now tell the group you are about to ask another question, and those who raise their hand must go to corner 2. (This will include some people currently in corner 1, as well as some people who are still seated. Shuffling people about like this brings a lot of energy into the room.)

The new question is: “Who here has ever buried a pet?”

Repeat the process above: Poll group 2, pick one person to tell his or her story, and then connect the story to one of the Four Cores (or make some other organizational connection.) Note that the buried pet stories are unique for their ability to generate both laughter and tears—sometimes simultaneously.

“At every step of the way,” Annette says of her process, “I'm helping the audience see that these are brilliant stories. Even the simplest ones are loaded with meaning.”

Repeat the process as many times as you wish. (After the fourth story, reassign corner 1 so that the people who are still sitting there can sit down and new storytellers can move into the space.)

Here are some personal prompts that Annette and I have used with success:

• Who has met a big celebrity?
• Who has buried a pet?
• Who has been to a concert in the past year?
• Who started working in a paying job before they were 14 years old?
• Has anyone ever won first place in an athletic event?
• Who here has gotten scared in the middle of the night at summer camp?

Show and Tell (“Relics”)

Terrence Gargiulo has written extensively about storytelling as a leadership skill, and has worked with leaders all around the world. He describes a process he calls “Relics” as a fun and simple way to elicit stories.

Simply ask participants to show a personal object to the others in the story circle, and then tell a story about it. This can be an object from their purse or wallet, such as a driver's license, a frequent flyer membership card, or a photo. Or, you can ask participants in advance to bring an object with them from home or from their desk at work. Because these objects are personal, members of the story circle will have instant recall of the stories associated with them.

“The objects by themselves have no power,” Terrence explains. “They are triggers for our memories and experiences. They are gatekeepers to layers of subjective meaning.”

This simple exercise has a surprising ability to connect people to one another. I remember a time I shared a story about a gift card that was in my wallet, and the story I told resulted in smiles, nods, and immediate connection in a circle of people I had just met. Terrence says, “Sharing a personal object and the stories associated with it opens us up to each other. The boundaries we are accustomed to maintaining between ourselves and others come down. We become more real and accessible to each other, and it satisfies one of our greatest needs—to feel accepted by others and connected to them.”

Capture Family Legacies

My wife, Robbie, spontaneously did this at dinner one night, and I was caught off guard by the unexpected power of the event—and how easy it is to replicate.

Next time your relatives are over for a meal (especially if it is a festive occasion, such as Thanksgiving in America), ask them whether you can capture a story. Prop your video phone up against a glass, press record, and use a very specific story prompt to elicit a specific story:

“Mom and Dad, tell us about that time you got lost while driving to your honeymoon.”

“I know when I was born there were some real scares for our family. Tell me about that. What happened?”

“Grandma, you made a brave journey to start a new life in a new country where you didn't know anybody. Tell me what happened during that first year.”

“Aunt Marcy, tell us again how you met Uncle Harry at the state fair.”

“Dad, tell us about the famous salmon incident at that fancy hotel in Boston.”

Even stories about seemingly trivial events will be loaded with treasure. The storytellers will quickly forget they are being recorded, and as they tell their stories their individual personalities—in all of their beautiful, maddening, human glory—will emerge. One day your relatives may be gone, and it is very possible these recordings will stand among your family's most cherished possessions.

Those are just a few ideas. (And, of course, there are many more to follow.) What other ideas do you have? Let me know what you have tried, and what you have learned. Write to me at [email protected].