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Apr 27, 2010

Many Reasons to Be a Good Story Teller

Posted by: SethG

The story as a way to express and make understandable the human experience is a keystone of human communication. When viewed across a variety of diverse contexts, the story takes on a role of a universal. It’s a communication tool applicable across multiple disciplines and as such the more we focus and hone our storytelling abilities the better we establish the conditions for success for any initiative where more than one person is involved.

From our work in the non-profit space, story and storytelling has been a prevalent theme. A good story drives a project-based giving campaign or community driven cause. It is what humanizes an initiative allowing people to make a connection and become motivated and inspired to take action. Most recently, at 10NTC I sat in on a excellent session on storytelling. I wrote a lot of notes and as I was going to write them up I came across these shared notes listed on the session site that captured the key details well.

The emphasis on the story as a foundational planning and communication element for critical nonprofit communications recently sparked a light bulb moment. I started thinking about my understandings of agile project management principals and the role of the story in that context. The ah-ha moment was simply a personal connection made where the practice of crafting good stories critical for creating effective outreach efforts applies rather strongly to numerous communication efforts in design, technology, educational and operational planning.

My initial exposure to agile project management principals was as a web application project/product manager. Specifically, I studied and practiced Scrum. My role, which I always get a kick out of saying, was that of the ScrumMaster. The philosophy behind this approach is that people work best and are most productive when they are engaged in the work that they do best. The idea is to get people working to produce reviewable solutions at regular intervals until the solution is deemed ready to ship by key stakeholders. Good developers should spend their time developing. Designers should be designing. ScrumMasters should be creating and maintaining the conditions for the team to be able to spend their time doing what they do best. Makes sense, right? I’m simplifying things a bit, but what scrum relies on to make this all happen is thoughtful and regular communication.

The high level communication starts with stories. Key stakeholders work with the ScrumMaster to describe new features and functionality by creating stories. A story may be as simple as users would like to search our blog and event content by keywords. Or sometimes a story can be a little heavier, such us users want to be able to contact each other and share information. The latter is often referred to as an epic story as by itself it is too big to be actionable and requires being broken down into smaller stories. These stories are like any other story. They explain who, what, and why. They play a role to humanize the development process. The story then fuels this process by providing the context and desired goal by which the work will be evaluated. Code is created to serve humans, so starting with a down-to-earth well crafted story is logical.

In many of our design projects we collaborate with our clients to learn or help identify the story behind a project. The story helps our design process by providing the human criteria for the design including audience, feeling, goal, and context. Sometimes the story is rather concrete as there is text that tells it or a visual that needs to be incorporated. However, there are frequently more challenging stories such as the desire for a company to connect with certain types of visitors to a website. These epic stories need to be broken down to describe smaller stories addressing things such as different types of people with different histories and motivations for visiting a site and the feelings they may have or want to have once there. These stories like those of the development process above, give context to the graphic and interactive design process.

In exploring business operations, both for our own company and in others prior, I have found the approach of defining and telling stories to be a great way to gain a high level understanding of a situation. When working to put in place a CRM solution, for example, there are so many challenges and pain points that a solution seeks to address. Each one of these can be told as a story. There’s a story about what is involved with responding to a client’s help request or to the process of yearly evaluations. Both of these can go a long way towards grounding the workflow analysis and CRM implementation. Without stories, there is a good chance that a CRM solution can lose the focus on the people that it is designed to serve and benefit.

As a former 5th grade teacher, I wish I had this focus on story when I was in the classroom. Part of my practice was to share the objective or goal of a lesson before we began. A good objective explained what the students will be able to do and should be aligned with teaching standards. I think it would be very interesting to go back and think about how I could express objectives as stories. Stories that not only share what students will do but would work to connect that work with a greater purpose such as a “real world” practical application so that the students might feel more motivated to engage in the work.

I’m a fan of the power of a story, and see a lot of value in training to be a good story teller as well as story listener. The next time you have a problem to solve, a project to plan, an audience to inspire, a community to rally, or a student to teach take a moment and craft a good story. Then tell it, reflect on it, revise it and hone your craft as there is likely always another reason to weave another good story.

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