Reinvention Summit 2 - A week of Story

People respond to stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers. Because now the folk who never had any thought in their head but how to run from lions and keep far enough away from rivers that the crocodiles don't get an easy meal, now they're starting to dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the same, but the wallpaper's changed.

- Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

(One of my favorite story quotes.)

This past week I attended Reinvention Summit 2. Each day had 4 sessions that tackled story from a variety of angles. At the end of each day, J and I would sit there for a bit, just getting our heads around what we had absorbed. I have homework to do yet - a few sessions that I missed most of and want to watch, worksheets, book shopping, and lots of links to follow. This is going to help me immensely as I step forward on the Initiative front the remainder of this year.

One key takeaway for me was to set fear aside. I hadn't really acknowledged that it was holding me back. "Nerves". "Not my cup of tea". "Too risky for me". "I don't want to deal with the paperwork." Really all fear-based. Afraid of stepping out and not having anything of value to say. Of crawling out on a limb only to have it crack under my weight. Of not having a clear enough direction and so ending up going nowhere fast.

What I learned this past week is that, if I let myself think those sort of thoughts, there will always be some reason NOT to move forward. That I share a love of story with a large number of smart people, so I don't have to do anything alone. That story excites me and makes me happy and I already knew that when I'm excited I'm pretty good at bringing other people into the fold.

I just have to do it.

Here's a snapshot of just my tweets and retweets from the week so that you can see a bit of the themes that I appreciated enough to share.

What I think jumps out here is that subjects related to connecting stand out as much as creating stories (connect, audience, change, conversation, love, tell, culture, world, people, share).

Some specific key quotes (all from Michael Margolis @getstoried, btw) out of those tweets include:
- Life is a conscious creation - get comfortable creating something on your own terms.
- It's not a job to you. It's a quest.
- We are all self-made individuals and we now have the tools to become whoever we want to be.

Maybe these jumped out because of the fear discussion above.

There was a ton more - a great cast of speakers and a great tribe of participants. Like I said, I have homework to do yet, so I suspect this won't be the last post you see on the topic. ;-)

As part of setting aside my fear (and part of shoving myself into interaction so I don't revert to bashful wallflower), I contributed to the Tribe Showcase and shared the story of my projects - nascent as it is. AStoriedCareer did a nice writeup of the Showcase here. I also provided feedback on the impact of the summit that was shared in the final session, so that was pretty cool.

The experience was awesome and I can't wait to see the path I carve for myself from here and for future encounters with the Tribe on the road ahead.

Storytelling that heals - digital style

Saturday, Jenny and I went to BarCamp Rochester. We were a bit wary. It was our first time going to a geek unconference and several of the presentation titles seemed way-over-our-heads-geeky. But we both wanted to share and to test ourselves and keep up our presentation skills. As we think about getting ourselves and our thinking out in front of people more often, this seemed like a good place to start.

I wanted to present something about story, but it took me a while to craft the exact angle I wanted to take. Working in healthcare market research, I had started to gather a bunch of articles and posts on storytelling in that space, so I decided to focus there.

The result is the prezi below. I talked more to the opening parts of the presentation, so I'm also posting a video. Note, however, that the video includes some Q&A and runs about 16 minutes. (OK, video upload being a pain, so I'll just update this post when I get it up)

It went well! Yes, I read from the screen more than I should, but I also didn't want to read from the laptop and some of the quotes were long. It's all a matter of chops. I like presenting in these environments, so I am bound and determined to chase more opportunities coming up. The Q&A was a good exchange and I think people enjoyed and learned from the prezo. Here are reactions in tweets.

What do you think? And what can we do to roll some of the ideas in here forward, to crank up the support for storytelling as a healing tool?

Object-oriented stories

The Reading Glove is designed to present a tactile storytelling experience. You go into a room that has a table covered with objects and put on a glove with an RFID sensor. Each object is tagged and will give you a bit of the story as you pick it up and pass the tag by the glove.



I find this fascinating as it integrates storytelling with tech in a novel way. Karen Tanenbaum talks in this interview about how the Reading Glove's current state is a scaled down version of her original idea of an entire "haunted" room that could tell a tale.


I had a couple initial reactions:

• Haunted room?  Coooolness.
• This reminds me a lot of exploring within many of the puzzle games that I enjoy. You go around the room - looking for a cursor change to indicate that this is an object that you can interact with. You can add things to inventory for later use, get backstory through reading notes and journals and looking at photos,and interact with buttons, bells, knobs etc, sometimes just for silly effects.
• Moving these type of interactions into the physical realm to tell a stand-alone story is pretty cool, but I'd like more. Some sort of visual interaction perhaps (the glass of a mirror or photo frame is actually a display that plays a bit of a visual story or has a visual narrator). Maybe a way to link stories in different locations into a larger tale - or to spread a story out over a city - a scavenger hunt object-oriented story - love it!
• I like the ability for a group of people to experience the story together, but I'd like if there was a private feed option (headphones or something) that could bring the storytelling to places that might not be rooms explicitly set aside for it - into public spaces.
• This could easily be adapted to make interactive displays in museums even more interesting and functional.

Reading RFID isn't super new.  A few years ago, companies got started selling codes that other companies could put on their products that could "record and share" the story of whatever it was.  The examples that I saw I remember being a bit "tired" - quick updates like "bought here on this date", etc.  "Jane gave this to Sue".  But the possibilities were there.

What the reading glove does is provide an interim step where people don't have to get creative on their own with a new technology to boot, they just need to experience it.  I think there could be some really cool things we could do in the object-oriented story space.  Hopefully we'll see some happen.

Top 10 cool people who influence me from afar

My first top 10 list - I think. I wanted to share some of the people whose work and thinking and just the way their brains approach things inspires me and helps me over hurdles. This does not include any important friends and family members. These aren't in any order of importance, necessarily.

1 - Jane McGonigal- Someone as fascinated with how people interact through games as I am with how they interact through story. She's done great work and come up with some fascinating game systems. I look forward to seeing where SocialChocolate and SuperBetter go.

2 - Jan Chipchase - One of those brilliant anthropologist/ design minds who see the disfunction of things that should work and the functionality in jerry-rigged work arounds. His work in India and Africa - understanding the interaction with devices in the daily lives of the masses, is very cool.

3 -Oliver Sacks - Anthropologist on Mars got me hooked. I had always wondered what life was like, what the world looked like, to people with different neurological issues. Sacks explores these marvellously, putting you in the head of a painter who, after hitting a bump in the road, can no longer perceive color, of a doctor with Tourette's, and more. I'm currently reading Migraine, which is a bit dense but tells me so much more than any docs have.

4 - Umberto Eco - The man is a genius of language, its use, and hidden meanings. Foucault's Pendulum is my favorite to date, although I need to reread it and I have a couple of his newer books to still get to. Baudolino had some great storylines that still stick in my head.

5 - Neil Gaiman - A master storyteller, who has a firm belief that a large part of the experience of a story is what the audience brings to it. I've been following his blog for years, an avid fan, and I just really like the twisted cool way he thinks.

6 - Henry Jenkins - An expert on transmedia storytelling who often finds great examples like the guest blog post around Cookie Monster and Canadian healthcare. His book Convergence Culture was a great entry point for me into what the technology of today can do to shift storytelling.

7 - Dan Ariely - His work on why we make the decisions we do is incredibly interesting, as is his background and how he came to his initial observations of behavior.

8 - danah boyd - I started following danah when I was doing quite a bit of research on teens and sharing. I like the way she thinks and her perspective on the issues that she writes about/ speaks on.

9 - Seth Godin - I find he's got a great way of stating what just makes sense, but what so many fail to see.

10 - David Eagleman - Much like Sacks in delving into what makes our brains work the way they do and offering great slices of perspective, but maybe even a more diverse thinker. A new discovery for me, I have to check out his books.

The power of stories

To brighten your week - here's the Oscar nominated short

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

One of five nominations for the 2012 Academy Awards’ Best Animated Short category, this film inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, “Morris Lessmore” is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor. Morris Lessmore is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story.

(via invisibly)(via BookshelfPorn)

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The evolution of myth

I just finished Book #2 A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. In it, she walks through each of the stages of civilization and
discusses the myths of those eras. She's quite matter of fact, which on a subject like myth can be a bit disappointing, because it seems like the richness of the subject is lost in her translation, but she did outline an evolution of myth that I found quite interesting and wanted to share.

People have pretty much always spun myths. These weren't codified in writing, obviously, in the early days, but signs of them still remain. Traditions formed around the myths and children were taught their intricacies. These were life lessons - beliefs on how to deal with the existence we are faced with and as existence changed, so did the character of the myths, although they always dealt with answering the main questions about our life and death.

The earliest myths (based on paleolithic graves and observations among pygmie and Aboriginal tribes) were about transcendent experiences. The Sky God overlooked all and represented the ultimate transcendence. But transcendence is a hard thing to hang your understanding of the universe on. Myths cannot focus on the supernatural alone, but need some connection to humanity. They need to be put into practice in order to reveal their hidden truths. The Sky God eventually "disappeared". Some cultures have myths that details how he was removed from the picture. It would put some mobsters to shame.

Shortly after the Sky God exited, myths were formed that focused more concretely on the reality of death. Society was becoming agrarian and struggled to tie the cycle of the harvest to the passage of their lives. Strong, vengeful female goddesses emerged who set the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in motion.

From the farms, man moved to towns and cities. Myths in the era of urbanization were built to explain order's fight with chaos.

Finally, at the dawn of many of today's established religions, in the scientific era, man turned to logic before myth. To order, to experiment, to evidence. Without myth to give structure and meaning to life, society began to despair. Cruel acts of unspeakable violence emerged as the myths that taught compassion, the ability to identify with your fellow man, were pushed aside in favor of cold, hard facts.

So here we sit. Desperately seeking someone to pull us back to a life full of stories and myth and hope. In need of myths that can help us to understand the latest permutation of life on this planet. Who will take up that lead? Organized religion is mired in ritual that has lost its meaning. Perhaps the arts is a better place to look. And to each and every one of us, telling stories and making life a little better for all who listen.

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow beings, not simply those who belong to our ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion,which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource'.

We need stories - go tell one.

My day job is all about data, and yet...

I believe in data driven decision-making. I believe that data can be the backbone to a story and is often a compelling aspect of changing corporate minds.

But data isn't everything. Data alone is a snore to those not equipped to or interested in swimming in it. Personally, if I'm thrown a bunch of data and forced to digest without the ability to look at the angles that I want to explore myself, I get quite upset and then bored.

In Lincoln on Leadership: Executive strategies for tough times by Donald T Phillips, he talks about Lincoln's proclivity for using story to bring his message home. Many important statements and answers had a story involved, often stories of simple folk on the frontier. Phillips includes a quote from Thomas J Peters and Nancy K Austin:

"It turns out that human beings reason largely by means of stories, not by mounds of data. Stories are memorable. ... They teach. ... If we are serious about ideals, values, motivation, commitment,we will pay attention to the role of stories and myths."

So it depends in part on what the objective of your communication is. Data still has a role in making reasoned decisions. But when seeking emotional buy-in, excitement, motivation, commitment to a cause or value, then the most powerful tool you can use is story.

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Leveling up in 2012

Challenged to think about my next level and how I plan to attack it, I focus on much of what I've already posted regarding my themes and challenges for the year. The next level for me will mean cutting down on piles of materials (physical and mental) by starting to USE them. Taking risks, making commitments, staying disciplined - all at levels that aren't default for little miss "you'll find me in the corner with a book".

On this journey, I expect some key guides to help (no commitment needed guys, just by being you). J. Jack & Lorraine. Jenny. Mom & Dad. Probably others.

Let the games begin. (Or crank, since we're a couple of weeks in already.)