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:
This is the first of at least ten Story Factor Podcasts. In this one, my audio guy Jay makes me explain what I want to do and I just talk… doing what I do: butchering metaphors and discovering what I am thinking by hearing what comes out of my mouth. I have no 3 second
I think we spend too much time looking for the “right” story. We can’t know a story is effective until we try it out because stories are co-created. I have suggested we expect a 30% fail rate – a percentage I made up – so people won’t craft a story to death before they try it out. I
“An Ethiopian taxi driver in NYC once shared his grandfather’s favorite saying with me: A man who beats his horse will soon be walking.”
Earn your turn! Listen first. If there is dead silence offer your story as a little gift to get things rolling. Begin with an obvious link to their particular use for your story. “I am particularly interested in… how you do X…because my interest in X started one time when your focus on X…because I
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
“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
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.
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
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
