Book description
The action-based guide to powerful, influential organizational storytellingCircle of the 9 Muses captures the best practices of the world's most influential story consultants and knowledge workers to help you find, tell, and draw value from your organizational stories as impetus for action. This rich toolbox is loaded with fun, graphical instructions and dozens of unique, replicable, and facilitated processes that require no special training or expertise. You'll discover your organization's hidden narrative assets, use different templates and frameworks to tell the stories of your past, present, and future and then draw team members into rich meaning-making dialogue that translates into action. These activities can be exercised in endless permutations, and expert advice steers you toward the right activity for a specific purpose, including managing change, setting strategy, onboarding, defining the brand, engaging supporters or customers, merging cultures, building trust, and much more.
Organizational storytelling is a powerful managerial tool and an essential change management technique. This is about your influence as a leader. Knowing the right story to tell and how to deliver it effectively gives you and your organization enormous influence, and helps connect employees to strategy by providing understanding, belief, and motivation in their personal contribution. This book is the ultimate field guide to becoming an influential storyteller, with concrete, actionable guidance toward all the storytelling fundamentals.
- Identify your organization's "narrative assets"
- Craft an elegant, well-constructed organizational story
- Capture, bank, and share stories with extraordinary engagement
- Facilitate a dialogue to draw out meaning and induce change
The growing interest surrounding organizational storytelling has many change agents focused on "trying to tell better stories," but goals are useless without a plan of action. Circle of the 9 Muses helps you weave narrative wisdom into organizational development activities, engaging employees and driving change.
Table of contents
- Cover
- Other Books by David Hutchens
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Introduction: Dispatches from a World of Stories
- What's Inside
- Stepping into the Stream
- 9 Muse Story Recipes
-
Part I: Fundamentals
- Chapter 1: The Four Core Stories
- Chapter 2: Host a Story Circle
- Chapter 3: Story Prompts
-
Chapter 4: Capturing Fire
- Your turn: First, Pick a Story to Work On
- Clarify Your Intent
- Your turn: What Is Your Intent?
- Connect Your Story to Universal Plots
- Your turn: Choose a Plot Archetype
- Other Story Structures: FWA
- Declare Your Intent
- Other Tips and Techniques for Better Stories
- Technique 1: Throw 'Em Right into the Action
- Technique 2: Add Emotion (“The King and the Queen”)
- Technique 3: Add Sensory and Motion Information
- Technique 4: The “MacGuffin,” or Gleaming Detail
- Technique 5: Play with the Timeline
- Technique 6: Make It Shorter!
- Your turn: Provide Some Final Polish to Your Story
- Bringing It All Together: Geoff's Story
- Where Do I Go from Here?
-
Part II: Branching Out
-
Chapter 5: Twice-Told Stories
- Explain the Process to Your Story Circles
- Begin the Story Circles
- Close the Story Circle Experience and Select One Story to Retell
- Create the Story Theater and Begin!
- The Critical Epilogue: Name the Bigger Story
- Modifying the Exercise for Different-Sized Groups
- Capture It Visually!
- Another Delivery Option
- Where Do I Go from Here?
-
Chapter 6: Summoning the Muse (Story Listening and Sense Making)
- Meaninglistening and Storymaking with Your Team's Stories
- Roll the Dice!
- Listen Better
- Taking It Deeper: A Geography of Meaning
- Option: Use the Archetype Cards
- The Power of the Spontaneous Invitation
- Meaning Making and Individual Conversations
- “For Lack of a System”: A Story from Lori Silverman
- Where Do I Go from Here?
- Chapter 7: Story Circle Variations (Riffs, Jams, Jazz Licks, and Sitar Solos)
-
Chapter 8: Leadership Story Archetypes
- The 16 Archetypes of the 9 Muses
- Putting the Archetypes to Work
- Identify the Frame for Conversation
- Present the Archetypes
- Place Participants in Groups
- Have Participants Each Identify Three Archetypes and Write Them on Sticky Notes or Index Cards
- Present Your Cards
- Analyze and Discuss What Just Happened
- Taking It into the Future: The Transformational Question
- Using Archetypes as a Directed Listening Framework
- How to Apply Archetypes to Your Stories
- Where Do I Go Next?
- Chapter 9: Future Story Spine
- Chapter 10: Visual Timeline
- Chapter 11: Fractal Narratives
- Chapter 12: Fractal Narratives and the Hero’s Journey
- Chapter 13: Story Element Extraction
- Chapter 14: Creative Tension Pictures
- Chapter 15: Strategy Is A Story
- Chapter 16: Innovation Storyboarding (and Storyboarding Frameworks)
- Chapter 17: Step into a Story: Story Field Trips
- Chapter 18: Digital Storytelling
-
Chapter 5: Twice-Told Stories
- Appendix
- Contributors, Partners, and Friends
- About the Author
- Index
- End User License Agreement
Product information
- Title: Circle of the 9 Muses
- Author(s):
- Release date: July 2015
- Publisher(s): Wiley
- ISBN: 9781118973967
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