Chapter 13
For this exercise you will need:
- A group of stories to analyze
- Large-sized sticky notes of differing colors
- A lot of wall space for posting and rearranging the stickies. This may be a large whiteboard, multiple flip charts, or a very long sheet of butcher paper taped to a wall.
Every story you hear is packed with meaning. They're like those clown suitcases, where the clown pops it open and starts pulling out a ridiculous amount of content: Clothing! A vase! An extension ladder! Another clown!
Amazing how so much meaning can be packed into such an efficient, little package that is a single story.
And that's just one story! When you have a bunch of story suitcases, they collectively hold deep wisdom about the team and the organization. With a little bit of thought and an elegant process, your team can begin to mine those stories for gold.
As we explored in Chapter 6, “Summoning the Muse,” the great opportunity of story work is to build your and your team's capacity for meaning making. Here is a simple process for hearing the deep wisdom that your organization's stories is waiting to release to you.
First we will look at a simple version, and then a more robust process that can dig even deeper into a large pool of stories.
The Classic Version: Working with a Few Stories
The harvester/witness model described in Chapter 6 allows individual team members to immediately respond to a story as makers of meaning. Here, harvesting is a group analysis as team members begin to surface the meaning not just within stories but across stories.
Let's say you host a single story circle with five members in the group. They will generate five stories. There's a lot of information buried in those stories!
The team will identify some of those themes with a classic sticky note “affinity grouping” exercise.
At the conclusion of the story circle, provide a question that frames what you would like for them to draw from the story. An open-ended question usually works best: “What new truth or big insight do you take from that story?” You may also tailor the question to your unique context: “What do these stories reveal to us about innovation?”
Each participant writes a single big insight they got from one story on a sticky note. If I was in a story circle with four stories (including my own) I will create four stickies.
Let's say the team starts with Karen's story. On a sticky note, each of the five team members will write down the “one big insight” that they took from Karen's story. (Yes, Karen also identifies an insight from her own story.) Now there are five sticky notes with insights from Karen's story.
They will do this with each member of the story circle. At the end, the team will have 25 sticky notes, each with its own big idea.
Next, have team members place their stickies on a flip chart or wall. Instruct them to group similar items together, and then identity the theme or category of that grouping. They may write the theme on a larger sticky note, or directly on the flip chart.
If you have multiple story circles, each team will create its own separate flip chart.
At the close of the activity, simply discuss: What were the big themes? What did you hear that was expected? What did you hear that surprised you? What does this tell us about US? What needs to happen next with these insights?
It requires thoughtful analysis to discover what the disparate group of stories have in common. Participants may be surprised as the themes begin to emerge.
Going Deeper with Story Element Extraction
When you have a lot of stories, the pool of meaning is quite dense. To extract meaning, the process needs to be a little more robust. This innovative variation of the process was developed by knowledge management pioneers Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz.1 With generosity and enthusiasm, Cynthia has agreed to share it with you.
For this exercise you will need approximately 20 stories for each group to work with.
The stories should be written down so that they can be distributed and reviewed by people who did not originally hear them. Thus, when you host a story circle (or any of the “fractal” mining frameworks described in Chapter 11), build in some extra time for each teller to write down their story for you to collect.
You will also need large sticky notes in three different colors. Be forewarned the group will consume a lot of these sticky notes.
This process takes at least 90 minutes to complete. But you could easily continue over drinks and late into the evening.
With roots in the field of knowledge management, this process draws deep wisdom from the many stories that exist in the organization.
Distribute the Stories
Get into groups of three to six people. (If you have more people, then create multiple groups and have them all do this exercise at the same time.)
This works best with a lot of stories. To get the clusters of meaning we need for the analysis, you should have at least 20 stories to work with. More is better.
Ask the group, “What is this story about?” Yes, keep the question that simple and that broad.
What is this story about?
Distribute the stories to the groups. The format of these stories will depend on how you have previously collected the stories. So, for example, if you previously did the timeline exercise as described in Chapter 11, “Fractal Narratives,” you'll have all the story titles on sticky notes. If you have the entire stories captured in a written format, that's even better.
If you only have around 20 stories, then you may give every group the same bundle of stories. If you have a lot of stories, each group may have a totally different group of stories. This exercise will work either way.
The group should review the stories. If members are unfamiliar with the stories, then they will need to read them or otherwise review them. They can do this out loud, but if you are constrained by time or if the stories contain sensitive information you should review them silently.
Collect Ideas
Participants should write their answer to the question “What is this story about?” on sticky notes. One brief idea per sticky note—only a few words per note.
So for example, let's say we're in a group together shuffling through our stack of stories, and for some reason the Coca-Cola story that I shared earlier in “Four Core Stories” is in there. If you recall, that story went like this:
So, let's say our team spends a few minutes talking about that story, and members create sticky notes (all the same color) to answer the question “What is it about?”
Perhaps the team captures these ideas about the Coke story:
Kurtz makes a fascinating recommendation here: Have participants turn the sticky notes 45 degrees so that they are diamond shaped rather than square. “I find that squares cause people to start the process of categorizing their notes as they write them,” she explains. “Something as simple as getting them to turn them 45 degrees breaks their categorization thinking.”
Notice that these are perceptions, and some are emotional and maybe even debatable. This is fine! Perception and emotion are welcome in this exercise. This process is meant to reveal those mental models.
The team does this for all the stories it has been given. At the end, the team will have around 30 to 100 sticky notes.
Cluster the Answers
The group should have anywhere from 30 to 100+ sticky notes with ideas on them. (If it started with 20 stories, this assumes it came up with around three to five ideas for most of the stories.)
Now stick all the notes up on a wall, whiteboard, or series of flip charts. Tell participants that whenever they see ideas that are similar, place them close together. When they see ideas that are dissimilar, place them farther apart.
A series of clustered ideas will emerge. The group should try to come up with six to eight clusters of similar items.
Note that at this point, we are no longer talking about the specific stories! We have left the stories behind, and will spend the remainder of the exercise talking only about the meaning that we have extracted from the stories.
Name the Clusters
Now get the sticky notes of a second color. Give each cluster a descriptive name.
After the team groups the insights, they will give each cluster a descriptive name on a different colored note.
Describe the Attributes of the Clusters
Now get sticky notes of a third color. The team will discuss:
- What is positive about each cluster element you identified?
- What is challenging about the attribute?
The team will capture from two to four ideas on the third color of sticky notes.
Let's pause and reflect on what we have now. There will be several large groupings that might look something like the one below.
On the left we can see our original ideas grouped by the similarity which the group decided all had to do with “brand” (including one that you may recognize from the New Coke story). The name of the cluster is up at the top, and the positive and challenging attributes are in a third color on the right.
Again, you'll notice that some of these attributes are opinions; some are principles; some are specific to the company and others aren't. But some important themes and truths about the team's work are starting to emerge. It's all good.
Let's take it even deeper! Next we will gather all of these attributes and move them over to a new work space for another round of sorting.
Transfer, Group, and Name All the Positive and Challenging Attributes
But we're not done yet! As Dave and Cynthia discovered in their work at IBM, one more round of sorting and affinity grouping can help distill the extracted meaning down to its purest essence.
Grab all of those attributes on the third color of sticky notes, and bring them over to a new space for one more round of sorting and clustering.
Cluster them by similarity, exactly like you did before. This should move a little faster than it did before, because the team will be familiar with the process.
And, exactly like before, come up with descriptive names for the clusters.
The team is now having conversations that may be quite far removed from the stories they originally told, but which hold urgent relevance for the organization.
Assess and Reflect
Do you see what we just did? We extracted story meaning like boiling down a solution so that all the extra stuff vaporizes and only the core elements remain. Cynthia calls these “story elements”; Dave refers to them as “archetypes.”
If multiple groups were working simultaneously, teams can take turns sharing their final story elements with one another.
Discuss the final story elements. What deeper truths do these reveal to you about your organization (or the original bank of stories that you started with)? How would you describe the meaning of these elements to someone who just came in?
How might these elements inform what you will do next (whether the context is marketing, knowledge management, change management, strategic communications, etc.)?