I just watched the new Budweiser commercial for July 4 this year and I think it is genius. They used story to do good as well as make money. Lately I’ve been disturbed by mechanistic applications of story, but this? This is big picture, risky, embedded with big T Truth and I hope it does
The Story Factor is now updated and available on audible as an audiobook. Fifteen years of perspective and a genius editor (Stephen Brewer) helped me cut it from 13 hours to 5 hours flat. Producers Jay and Michelle from Beyond Measure Media took me into a real studio and monitored sound quality and my energy levels to meet their high standards. I hope you
I loved the movie The Martian. It’s based on Andy Weir’s debut novel “The Martian” I read the book first. Andy described it as basically Robinson Crusoe on Mars without the monkey. So I got curious about his writing process. He LOVES science, so did he use storytelling science to create this story? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6lYeTWdYLw I listened to several interviews. He loved science fiction- still
Uri Hasson uses fMRI scans to show how storyteller patterns of brain activity are significantly duplicated in the mind of a story listener. But of more interest to me, he pinpoints the yawning gap between lab research and real life near the end of his talk (after 10:00) Does the neural coupling magic happen everytime you tell a good story? No. No,
A person exposed to incivility (not a victim, just an observer) is 3 times less likely to help others in lab experiments. His willingness to share resources drops by 50% Worse, those who experience incivility first hand… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoT-nmSdAOs 48% intentionally decreased their work effort. 80% lost work time worrying about the incident. 66% said that their performance declined. 78% said
Anna Deavere Smith is a wonderful actor who “performs” stories by taking on the personality of the original teller. She brings people from Studs Terkel’s collections back to life and takes her audiences on a tour . Here she is pitching a workshop on Empathy but this little clip reminded me how to really pay attention and I thought it might be
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
