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Annette Simmons

The art of seeing the story…

Joe Dager of Business 901 and I begin by talking about the similarities between storytelling and art in this podcast. I promise to send out a new Story Factor Podcast soon. I’ve been writing and editing the second edition of Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins and there is so much I want to add!

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Annette Simmons

Episode #16 – Narrative Intelligence – thoughts from Madelyn Blair

The best part of this podcast may be when Madelyn’s husband shows up and gives her a bouquet of red roses for their 40th anniversary! But the rest of it is pretty good too. This week’s conversation begins as Madelyn Blair (www.pelerei.com) describes the idea of Narrative Intelligence.  She describes a quick process she recently used

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Annette Simmons

Episode #15 – More Moth Secrets from Lea Thau

Lea Thau, creative director of TheMoth.org for a decade (2001-2010), Lea teaches business people not so much how to tell personal stories, but  how to use the principles of storytelling to shape strategy, to roll out new initiatives, or frame business proposals.  However I learned most by asking more about her process at the Moth and

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Annette Simmons

Episode #11 – Jim Signorelli on Story Branding and Archetypes

Happy 2014!!  One of the best interviews yet!! Jim Signorelli on Storybranding and Archetypes Jim Signorelli approaches story using a tried and true process. “We want to look for joiners rather than buyers.” After gathering the back story and the facts, they conduct an archetypal analysis asking the team to individually choose the archetype that best represents

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Episode #2: Karen Dietz

Karen is the best curator of articles about successful storytelling I know.  We go back a long way.  She and I met in the world of traditional tellers “back in the day.”  Today she has a finger on the pulse of business storytelling.  In fact, Karen Dietz and Lori Silverman have written a new book:

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Popular Posts

Paradox: Root Cause of Polarization

According to Pew research, disdain between opposing political parties in America has doubled in the last 30 years, coincidentally the span of my own consulting business, Group Process Consulting. My efforts to document true stories about these escalating conflicts inadvertently produced a set of oral histories across the years: Territorial Games (1997), A Safe Place

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Contrasts, Not Conflicts

 “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”  Groucho Marx Troublemakers erode trust faster than we can build it back right now. Yet, many of these “troubles” are invented conflicts that distort predictably contrasting values. It helps to know what to look for. And once

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Storyteller’s Confession: My Secret Mission

I’ve been trying to infiltrate the halls of power for decades. My secret mission is to increase the diversity of thought by teaching those without a voice how to tell their stories and by teaching leaders how to find and retell stories that broaden everyone’s understanding.

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

We need a Magic School for Storytellers Thirty years before J. K. Rowling created Harry Potter, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series imagined a magic school that taught apprentice sorcerers how to avoid abusing the power of magic. Le Guin points out early in the series that “even to light a candle is to cast a

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 7 of 8

Truth in Storytelling When I wrote the first edition of The Story Factor twenty years ago, I began with the idea that people don’t want more information. They want faith in you and your positive intentions. I never suspected that two decades later we’d be discussing an explosion of stories that intentionally undermine this faith. Without

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