news & noticings

Stories and storytelling are a thread that has run through our work right from our earliest days. So you won’t be surprised to hear that Adam Westbrook’s article for journalism.co.uk, It is time to take storytelling seriously, grabbed our attention. It’s about a new book about what it takes to produce standout storytelling.

From the blurb:

This unique book lets you listen in on 25 of the world’s best digital storytellers. They each share one golden piece of advice, the sort of wisdom only experience can teach.
This is a book like no other: it’s not about the basics, or the easy wins. It’s about creating remarkable, high quality stories that endure and make an impact.

And it’s written by the people who really know what they’re talking about. Almost all of the contributors have won awards, including Emmys, Webbys and BAFTAs, and work for The New York Times, The Guardian, Media Storm, This American Life, the BBC and others.

After hand picking more than 20 of the world’s most renowned digital storytellers we gave them a challenge.

Share one practical piece of advice that they’ve learned in the course of making high quality stories. It had to be something you don’t read in your average book or on the average blog. And they had to do it in just 200 words. The result is a book which you’ll be able to digest in a single sitting, but still rich in the sort of knowledge and experience you can’t get anywhere else.

This book is for anyone who wants to be better at digital storytelling, whether in video, photography, audio, web design, interactives and more. From j-students to seasoned pros, it is aimed at anyone in hot pursuit of excellence, over mediocrity.

You can find out more about (and buy) the book here.

Victoria went to see Epidemic at the Old Vic Tunnels this week, a musical by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Suzy Davies, based on interviews conducted with over 250 Londoners, exploring issues surrounding obesity and mental health, performed by a cast of 120 young people from across London.

Brilliant staging, great music and brilliantly witty songs combine with the pumping energy and talent of the people in it, and although it thumps a few tubs, it also finds a way to give you access the issues in a complex, shaded way. You walk out glowing with the dark hilarity of it, wondering at the scale and wit of the production, and with different questions to the ones you went in with.

18 months and 500 people’s contributions went into making the musical. For us at Sparknow, there are insights in the process of making Epidemic that chime exactly with our own experiences of client work:

• In the development phase the production team experimented with a dystopian future where everyone relied on technology to fix them, but community trial audiences wanted something more than a warning from the future, they wanted an understanding of how people feel today and hope for ways people can connect.
• To avoid being a public service announcement they had to find a way to raise questions.
• They decided to make a musical as a challenge, but also as license to explore the subject matter in a fantastical way, bringing the themes to the audience.
• Rather than verbatim theatre, to get round sensitivities of personal narratives they made it entirely fictional, although of our world and recognisable.

Finally, the whole process of making Epidemic feels very Sparkish. As the programme says:

‘One of the ideas that filters into the narrative of the piece came from Professor Ian Roberts of the London School of Health and Tropical Medicine. Science has proved that three ways to improve well being are access to green spaces, increased physical activity and human interaction.’

The Old Vic New Voices team took the idea of human interaction and threaded this right through the process of making Epidemic, as well as into the themes in the musical that is the product of that process. People who would never otherwise have met came together to work towards a shared goal.

There’s a bit more about what went into the making of Epidemic, on the Wellcome Trust’s blog.

Recently, a World Health Organization client shared with us some of the collaboration tools she’d woven into a training course on ship inspection and sanitation. We particularly liked the way she adapted future story, a tool that Sparknow uses a lot. She allowed around 30 - 45 minutes and used it to plan for the continuation of training development.

instructions for game

1 | Ask the participants to work in groups and assign a dream weaver and a dream planner.

2 | The group will make a future story (December 13, 2012) about the training, coming up with a story or bullet points of what the story has been, looking back from one year on from now.

3 | They will then identify the three main things that make this future story possible. The dream planner leads.

4 | The dream weaver will put the bullet points of the story together from step 3 with other dream weavers and present this to the plenary (once they have agreed).

5 | The dream planners will then put the three things (from each group)  from step 4 and plot them on the timeline.

6 | The dream planners can then present to the plenary for some comments and adjustments (can put names of people responsible, etc).

photo | FrankBonilla.tv

For five years, retired General Stanley McChrystal led the Joint Special Operations Command, the branch of the military charged with special operations planning. The crucial lessons he learned (including the importance of shared consciousness and purpose, inclusion and transparency, and smart autonomy) have applications in all industries. He talked about them at Fast Company’s recent Innovation Uncensored conference.

Sparknow recently ran a workshop on interviewing techniques for a cultural foundation in London. We talked about ways to open the door of conversations to reveal surprising insights. Some of the methods we discussed included:

• using objects to bring a personal story into the conversation
• naïve interviewing, with the interviewee holding back their involvement in the content
• involving two interviewers in a conversation, a lead to get to the first wave of information and a note taker who can get to a second or deeper wave by bringing in clarification questions from the periphery.

Interviewing practice is an ongoing learning journey. Even a small door crack can reveal a deeper understanding of a topic, however closed or open the subject.

Fast Company magazine has a series of three 30-second videos on How do you change the direction of your business?. Here’s one of them.

There are also contributions from Douglas Lebda and Simone Barratt.

An important aspect of our work is giving people in different parts of organizations a voice and linking the front line to the boardroom. Our work with HM Customs & Excise is an example.

In an article for Forbes, John Kotter, a change and leadership guru, identifies ‘the real reason’ behind the Kodak downfall…

photo | Gilderic Photography

‘Historically, Kodak was built on a culture of innovation and change. It’s the type of culture that’s full of passionate innovators, already naturally in tune to the urgency surrounding changes in the market and technology. It’s these people – those excited about new ideas within your own organization – who keep your company moving ahead instead of falling behind. One key to avoiding complacency is to ensure these innovators have a voice with enough volume to be heard (and listened to) at the top. It’s these voices that can continue to keep a sense of urgency in your organization. If they are given the power to lead, they will continue to innovate, help keep a culture of urgency and affect change.’

Take a look at the original article Barriers to Change: The Real Reason Behind the Kodak Downfall.

photo | tonyhall

Sparknow met up with Lisa Hirsch last week. She was passing through London on her way back from the Ghent Appreciative Inquiry conference and we had a coffee and an exhilarating conversation, mostly an exchange of practices.

We first met Lisa in 2006 in Tennessee, at a conference for the United Ways being held at the International Storytelling Center and still have a crumpled up copy of the handout she shared about interviewing stories out of people and have constantly referred to it. Here it is:

• Have a purpose – what do you want to find out?
• Surprise and invite the interviewee ‘I’ve never said this out loud…’
• Make the questions ‘juicy’ – have them be about something you are genuinely curious to learn
• Construct them so they appeal to the head and the heart – what does the person think and feel?
• Provoke self-discovery and learning for individuals, groups and organisations – ‘I’ve never thought about it this way before’
• Include questions that inspire people to think about the future – trends, possibilities, hopes, improvements, leverage

We spoke at some length about ways to get at the negative hopefully but realistically. Lisa spoke about how well the ‘three wishes’ question does this. If you had three wishes, what would you change about this organization/project/circumstance? It’s normally concrete, realistic, hopeful, negative culture slanted through the positive of wish.

We’ve agreed it mustn’t be six years before we meet again.

At Harley-Davidson’s biggest motorcycle factory, there’s an enormous vacant lot where 41 buildings once stood on 232 acres of land.

‘It’s like Cortez burning the ships when he reached the New World. There’s no going back to what this factory used to represent,’ said York General Manager Ed Magee.

photo | mcwont

York is a model of efficiency that Harley wants to replicate at all of its factories The new manufacturing system will eliminate several hundred jobs but will lower costs and make the plants more responsive to changes in the motorcycle marketplace.

Blue-collar employees now work in teams of six to 14 people and have more responsibility for making their own decisions. One team, led by an hourly wage worker, implemented 124 changes that saved the company $100,000 a year and made the work area safer. ‘All of those ideas were there before,’ Magee said. ‘We just did not have a mechanism to capture and implement them.’

You can read the whole story in Rick Barrett‘s article for Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Winds of change bear down on Harley-Davidson plants.

Victoria visited the Jeremy Deller exhibition at the Hayward on the South Bank this weekend, mostly as research to see the timeline of the Miners‘ Strike constructed from archive materials,  supplemented by footage from the re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave.

On the way out of the exhibition is big black banner, in the manner of trades union or marching banners, called My Failures and a lovingly detailed collection of ideas that Deller has tried, and failed to bring to life. A delightful showcase of failure and an idea that could usefully be imported by organizations.