Chapter 16
For this exercise you will need:
- A stack of index cards for each participant. (Get a lot! It's very possible a participant might use as many as 20 cards.)
- A set of colored felt-tip pens, such as Sharpies, for each participant
The beginning of motion picture technology brought with it new insights into our ability to make meaning. In 1918, the Russian director Lev Kuleshov conducted a famous experiment that had huge implications for the developing language of cinema, and how audiences interact with the images they see projected on a screen.
In his experiment, Kuleshov filmed an actor staring into the camera with no expression. Later he filmed individual subjects, such as a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a pretty woman reclining on a lounger. Then he edited those shots so that each was followed by a so-called reaction from the man. However, the reaction in all three cases was the same identical footage he had captured earlier. For early film audiences—many of whom had never seen a motion picture—the effect was powerful. They described the man's hunger, sadness, and lust (respectively) and even marveled at his acting.
Of course, today we experience this all the time in our media-saturated world, so this capacity of the mind to construct a story may not strike us as extraordinary. When given two pieces of information that are not correlated (visually or otherwise), the mind will work pretty quickly to fill in the gap between the two items by filling it in with a story. It's remarkable, really, how effortlessly this happens.
The famous Kuleshov experiment, 1918. Identical film footage of an actor with no expression were intercut with images of a bowl of soup; a pretty woman; and a child in a coffin. Early audiences were amazed at the “acting” as the man seemingly “responded” to each image with hunger, sadness, or lust respectively. Audiences were confused when they were told it was the same footage.
This is why comic books and graphic novels are such a vital art form. In his brilliant work Understanding Comics, artist Scott McCloud demonstrates vividly how when you put two pictures side by side, you have created—in a very real sense—movement. The audience supplies the meaning that strings the pictures together.
Storyboarding is powerful for this reason. It makes your story visible, and invites a unique kind of cocreative participation from both the maker of the storyboard and the audience. By rendering only a few frames of your story, your mind (and your audience's minds) fills in the spaces in between with robust narrative meaning. The engagement this creates is strong. I have seen teams present storyboards that generated cheers, laughter, groans, or even shouts of anguish.
Furthermore, storyboarding differs from verbal storytelling in that it works beautifully as a pure ideation process. A certainly spontaneous improvisation goes into verbal storytelling, but storyboarding is different. For one thing, it is slower and that means the creator is forced to reflect more deeply on the meaning he or she is creating on the paper. Also, the use of your hands and the kinesthetic feel of markers on the paper activates expansive, nonjudgmental thinking. Per Kristiansen, one of the innovators behind the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology, calls the hands “the leading edge of the mind.” The act of moving your hands actually generates (or constructs, for our constructionist theorists) new connections and new knowledge in the mind.
Even very young children are able to grasp the narrative movement that is created when images are placed side by side. Source: George Herriman, Krazy Kat 1918 [Comic Anthology].
There are many scenarios where storyboarding is a powerful exercise. You can use it to generate new insights into current reality by having participants generate a series of story frames that depict what is.
It is also used to generate big insights into desired future states by having participants draw the story frames of what could be. It is especially useful in innovation work, and legendary design firms, such as IDEO, rely on it to pioneer new products and processes.
First we will focus on a classic storyboarding exercise—an innovation story. Then we will explore how to extend storyboarding to your other work challenges.
Classic Innovation Storyboarding
In this exercise, you or your team will create a new, innovative offering. This may be a new product for your customers, a new process to improve work flow in the organization, the addition of a new feature to an existing product or service, or the application of a current offering to a new customer group. Or it may be a redesign of a current offering that you think could be better. You will gain tremendous insight into this offering by rendering it as a story.
Working in pairs or trios, you will create a storyboard with three “chapters” that you will recognize from your Marketing 101 class:
Each of these three chapters will be illustrated with three subsections:
The innovation storyboard should have at least nine cards, but it may have many more. For example, you will likely wish to create multiple cards depicting the “steps of the hero using your solution.” This can be a rich exercise in user experience design.
Introduce the storyboard elements above.
Team members should generate at least one card for each subsection. That means the final storyboard will have at least nine cards. (If they create title cards for Problem, Solution, and Benefit as shown in my example above, that will put them at 12 cards.) They will probably generate even more than that, since the “steps of the user encountering your solution” often ends up being multiple cards.
Split the group up into teams of two or three. I always like the energy of multiple groups working simultaneously at different tables, so if you have only four people, then create two pairs working separately.
Emphasize that rough is better and that their storyboard will be very effective with stick figures, smiley faces, squares that represent buildings, arrows, and so on. (In the Appendix you will find an Icon Cheat Sheet with simple ideas for images that team members can easily copy.)
Also emphasize that they will think by drawing. They should not spend an hour planning in detail what they will draw! It's important to put pens to cards as quickly as possible. They should just start making a line, even if they're not sure yet what they are creating! Because the hand is the leading edge of the mind, insights emerge after they start drawing, not before.
The index cards beg for experiments in sequencing. “What would happen to our process if we switched these two cards?” “How does our offering look different if we reverse the entire sequence?” “What if we got rid of the third step?” Encourage participants to play.
Give them 90 minutes to work, and tell them to start creating the cards.
As you circulate and see how they are doing, point out a couple of advantages of the card-based approach:
- They can quickly change their minds about the content simply by adding or removing cards.
- Even more powerfully, they can switch the sequence of cards around. This is one of the main advantages of the storyboarding methodology. As participants move deeper into the work, they may have flashes of brilliant insight: “Wait a minute! What if the last step in our process would work better as the first step?”
At the end of the work, if there are multiple teams, they can take turns presenting their innovation storyboards to one another.
If the teams are both working on the same problem, they may even wish to combine cards from the two presentations for even greater flashes of brilliance.
Stick the cards up on a cork wall, or tape them to a whiteboard; you can use them as visual organizers as you begin capturing further resources or action plans for each story element.
The Fast Version
If you want to generate faster insights that perhaps don't go as deep into the problem solving, you can shorten the work cycle. Also, this works well if you are working alone and would like to move faster.
Instead of using multiple index cards, use three sheets of standard copier paper turned lengthwise in landscape orientation; or use a single large flip chart page.
Use the same outline, but combine the three chapters so that each is rendered on a single page. Note also that in this version of the exercise, you lose the ability to resequence steps. Nonetheless, even in this compressed cycle of work the visual thinking will generate fresh and surprising ideas while giving you a more detailed vision and mental map of what you wish to create.
Other Storyboarding Frameworks
We just explored the power of storyboarding in an innovation context. But you might have already sensed that storyboarding is a powerful tool with applications far beyond innovation. It is an endlessly configurable tool that you can use anytime you want to render visually what is—and it is even more powerful for showing what could be.
“All things are created twice: first in the mind, then in reality.” Stephen R. Covey popularized this quote in his classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and it is a perfect positioning of storyboarding process. Storyboarding exists as an additional step between imagination and reality, between vision and execution. It is a powerful opportunity to reflect and think expansively and critically before creating.
Storyboarding works for any future process that requires human engagement. For example, if your team is planning next year's big sales summit, you might storyboard the entire event from the participants' point of view (from checking in to the hotel, to the keynote address, to the cocktail social, to the awards ceremony, and so on). The visualization may reveal challenges to the design or opportunities to vary the energy with different kinds of activities.
As another example, you might storyboard the user interface for a new piece of software or smartphone app. What does the user see upon launch? Where will he or she click? What happens next?
An Example: My Creative Process Storyboard
Michelle James is an expert in applied creativity, and she designed a whole-brain, story-based methodology and workshop called “Create Your Own Creativity Model.” So much of Michelle's work captures my own imagination.1
I was invited to speak to a group of artists and musicians here in the rich creative community of Nashville, Tennessee, on the topic of creativity. What a great opportunity to do some self-awareness work! Inspired by Michelle, I developed a storyboarding exercise to help people enhance their awareness of their own creative processes.
I offer this here both as an exercise that you are welcome to modify or repeat exactly as described, and a case study on the process of connecting a storyboarding exercise to a specific challenge.
The My Creative Process storyboard exercise has been a hit here in my home of Nashville, where there is a strong creative population in music, book publishing, and entrepreneurship. But it is powerful in any context where you are focusing on innovation or environments that depend on creativity. (Which would be all environments, right?) Organizations depend on regular output, and yet creative product is notorious for being cyclical and irregular. It's a classic challenge for managers in creative environments. In my career as an advertising copywriter, I don't recall ever having strategic conversations about how each of us created—and I can imagine now how helpful those conversations would have been for a manager trying to align a crazy team of unpredictable creatives.
I find that this exercise is especially meaningful at an individual level. Everyone I know—my friends, my colleagues, my kids, and myself—is at some level a frustrated creative. I bet that you feel the need to create and that you also know how it feels to be stuck—whether it is a case of writer's block or a lifelong frustration that you're not generating the work you know you're capable of. People are often deeply moved by this exercise because it leads to self-awareness around the most sacred parts of their identity.
This is the product of My Creative Process storyboards for a group of artists and musicians in Nashville. In this case, we had limited time, and instead of index cards, each person used a single flip chart page divided into three “chapters.”
I almost forgot to mention that, like all storyboarding, this exercise is a lot of fun! There is nothing more energizing than being in a room where people are telling the story of their own creative process. I learn a lot every time I do this.
I'll never forget the artist who told me that a big part of her creative routine was to walk around her house and yard backward.
“Backward?” I asked her.
“Yes, I go out the front door, walk around the entire property backward, and end back at the front door. When I get back to my desk I have lots of ideas.”
“Why does that work?” I asked her.
“I don't know why,” she said, “but it does.”2
Michelle James explains the unique power of this exercise in self-awareness:
“While there are patterns and themes true to all creative process, there are as many ways to create as there are people, no one's creative process fits neatly into an externally designed set of steps. Rather than impose linear sequential steps to a nonlinear, individually unique creative process, I use storytelling as the entry point to the Create Your Creativity Model process I developed. Using story, along with Socratic dialogue and visualthinking exercises, participants extract meaning and relevance, from within themselves, before getting into the design and development of their unique creativity model. Then they form what they had “mined” into a model. After it is created, there is a sense of pride and celebration participants experience in clearly seeing how they indeed are creative, and in a unique way. It gives them the courage to put themselves out there.”
Building the Exercise
Let's look at the process of making this happen. We've decided to build a storyboarding exercise on the subject of the creative process. What needs to happen next?
We need to begin with a structure. When you ask people to create a storyboard, they are going to look to you for guidance, a framework, an outline, and a series of chapters to give them direction.
If you recall, the innovation storyboard in the previous chapter was built on the classic problem/solution/benefit structure.
So what are the chapters for our personal creative process storyboard?
I always begin at the simplest level of before/during/after. Remember, we are rendering a story here, and before/during/after puts us on a timeline of change, which is where stories live.
In terms of the creative process, I might further define these chapters as:
- Visioning (All the actions you take before you start creating)
- Executing (The actions during the creative process)
- Making it live (The actions after the act of creating)
To further define how this might work, I developed a page of prompts or things to think about during each of those three phases. You can see those prompts in the previous box, which I also placed in a handout and distributed to my audience.
Now Begin the Activity
Introduce the storyboarding activity and the structure you defined (in this case the stages of my personal creative process).
Distribute materials, including the Icon Cheat Sheet to build confidence.
Allow participants 45 to 60 minutes to create their storyboards.
Have them take turns sharing their storyboards with one another.
A group of artists deepens their self awareness of their own creative processes, from the Vision stage to the Execution stage to Making It Live in the marketplace.
Where Do I Go Next?
You can probably see how to extend this exercise to other topics besides creativity, and that's the beauty of storyboarding. It is very easy to adapt. To do so, simply:
- Name the story that you want participants to storyboard.
- Provide a high-level structure to guide them. This might be a “before/during/after” framework. Other possibilities include the innovation processes described in the previous chapter (Problem/Solution/Benefit) or even the Hero's Journey (as described in Chapter 15, “Strategy Is a Story”).
Or you could use a classic change journey, which is Current reality/New behaviors and mind-sets/Desired future state. (See Chapter 14, “Creative Tension Pictures.”
- Then give them a series of index cards (which allow you to define steps at a more micro level and thus takes longer), flip chart pages, or copier paper (which are for broader steps and moves faster)—and put them to work!