plus Field Guide companion doc to this download on same page

If you want to improve your communication skills and utilize storytelling as a valuable tool, you might wonder how to begin or which story to tell. Try this exercise:

Taking your offering to market requires a clear message that resonates with the audience. Your message is meaningful or meaningless: either your message aligns with the dominant cultural narrative and is accepted relatively easy, or your message must alter the cultural narrative before it gains widespread acceptance. Progressive ideas shift the dominant narrative, often at great cost to the messenger. Martin Luther King, like Moses, did not live to enter into the Promised Land. What makes a message convincing? What is a narrative? What makes it dominant? How does a message gain cultural acceptance? How does one shift or disrupt a cultural narrative? We will attempt to answer these questions by drawing on a number of diverse ideas and integrating them into a practical model.

One of the most effective approaches I have learned is called SCIPAB, a technique developed by Steve Mandel and now spread by the company he founded, Mandel Communications. I was lucky enough to be trained in SCIPAB by Mandel Communications as part of a more general “presentation skills“ training. I don’t want to steal their thunder (or their business!), but I do want to share some of the insights that I carry with me and use regularly. SCIPAB is an acronym, which stands for the phases of a story: Situation Complication Implication Proposal1 Action Benefit

We argue that the reason so little progress has been made against obesity and type 2 diabetes is because the field has been laboring, quite literally, in the sense intended by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, under the wrong paradigm. This energy-in-energy-out conception of weight regulation, we argue, is fatally, tragically flawed: Obesity is not an energy balance disorder, but a hormonal or constitutional disorder, a dysregulation of fat storage and metabolism, a disorder of fuel-partitioning. Because these hormonal responses are dominated by the insulin signaling system, which in turn responds primarily (although not entirely) to the carbohydrate content of the diet, this thinking is now known as the carbohydrate-insulin model. Its implications are simple and profound: People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.

Design fiction is one of the tools the students learn to prototype the future of business. Designers often use this strategy to help stakeholders envision divergent scenarios for their organization in the context of uncertainty. We asked the students to consider the forces at play in today’s fast-changing society, such as artificial intelligence and decentralized governance models, and write a story about the future. Zooming out of this aspirational story, they mapped out what would have to be true from a technological and business standpoint to bring positive aspects of that future to fruition, while calling attention to factors or decisions that could negatively impact our world years from now. At its core, design fiction is a strategic exercise that connects the dots between vision and execution, transitioning teams from imagining the future to taking action.

The Journey Chart is an overview of the different elements of a project juxtaposed to show how they work together over the duration of the player/audience/reader experience. I’m sharing the Journey Chart Method because I’ve found it to be a nifty way to externalise, discover, inspire, unify, direct, and communicate the various elements of a project and how they are all connected.

Why is it important to make sure that emerging media and communications technologies are created by people from a wide variety of backgrounds and identities? The media we consume has an enormous impact on our perception of reality. With this toolkit, we are trying to achieve something that humans have not yet achieved in the history of mass media — fair and equitable representation of the world’s stories and images.

We realized we were using insider language to describe innovation (as exemplified by internal blog post titles like “Using GIS Technology to Map Shelter Allocation in Azraq Refugee Camp”), rather than communicating what innovation looks like and the benefits it would bring to UNHCR staff (for example, “How UNHCR Used Creativity to Improve Journalistic Accuracy and Collaboration, One Step at a Time”). So, we hit the reset button and asked ourselves these four questions before crafting our internal communications strategy: What do we want to change? What do we want to be true that isn’t true right now? Whose behavior change is necessary to making that happen? Who has to do something (or stop doing something) they’re not doing now for us to achieve that goal? (This is about targeting a narrowly defined audience whose action or behavioral change is fundamental to your goal.) What would that individual or group believe if they took that action? In other words, what does that narrowly defined audience care about most, and how can we include that in our messages? How will we get that message in front of them? Where are their eyes?

Also see author's org: https://www.hope-based.com/ 5 shifts: 1) Fear to hope 2) Against to for 3) Problem to solution 4) Threat to opportunity 5) Victims to heroes

Schultz writes: “Starbucks’ coffee is exceptional, yes, but emotional connection is our true value proposition. Starbucks is not a coffee company that serves people. It is a people company that serves coffee.”

"Real-world personalized training is the key to engagement Our key to learner engagement has been the use of real-life stories told in real-life places. This strengthens relevance and motivation and demonstrates actual on-the-job benefits. Secondly we use interactive, branching narratives that show learners the consequences of their decisions – intrinsically motivating them through autonomy and providing multiple learning pathways. Third and finally our participatory experiences focus on doing rather than just knowing – making the learner an active player in their own personalized learning journey."