John Caddell's blog

Kathy Hansen of the A Storied Career blog has been conducting interviews of storytelling figures large and small for nearly two years now, and has collected these into an e-book, available via this link.

I’ve been following the interview series with interest and, as mentioned in the title of this post, it’s a very wide-ranging look at storytelling and its uses. As such, there’s some of it that doesn’t speak to me very much. On the other hand, there are parts that I find extremely valuable. Like this…

Cynthia Kurtz on “approaches that don’t respect the integrity of the raw story and end up … injecting the biased interpretations of people outside the community:” There are two positions embedded in that statement — raw stories and self-interpretation — and I can tell a story from my own experience describing how I came to my current understanding of each position. The first position is that raw stories of personal experience are far superior to crafted stories for the things I care about when working with stories. For the purposes of advertising products and services, delivering specific purposeful messages, and entertaining people, crafted stories are often (but not always) best. But for the purposes of helping people learn, think, make decisions, get new ideas, grow, and get along, I’ve found that there is nothing better than a raw story. (NB: The entire interview with Cynthia is so valuable I have printed it out and refer to it regularly.)

and this:

Whitney Quesenbery on storytelling in user experience design: Although user experience [UX] stories are built on insights from research, their purpose is to help create something new. Often, they explore how a new or updated product can change an unsatisfactory experience into a good one. They describe a possible future condition, and in doing so help it become a reality.

This is not all user experience stories, of course. Sometimes, we use stories to present a current or past situation. But the reason we spend time thinking about current experience is to be able to create new experiences — and move us into the future. … Every UX project involves managing a lot of information. Even a small site involves balancing the business goals, user needs, and technical possibilities. When you are working on a large project it’s hard to stay focused on the goal of creating an excellent user experience, because you are managing so many details and (sometimes) conflicting needs. The other difficulty is keeping the “user” in sight. Perhaps that sounds strange for work on the user experience, but typically the users are not part of the design and development team, so it’s easy to ignore them.

With their ability to communicate so effectively, and on such a deep level, stories are one way to manage both challenges. They are a natural way to describe events, brainstorm ideas, engage the imagination, and build community around the new design.

oh, and this (self-promotion alert):

John Caddell: There has been an immense amount of investment in the last 20 years in business-process re-engineering and process standardization and in IT systems and to support those initiatives. We’ve taken process improvement about as far as it can go. In fact, we’ve taken it a bit too far. With companies applying Six Sigma to things like sales processes (???), and not surprisingly achieving poor results, it is time to seek new tools. And narrative is a perfect tool to help shed light on complex questions (Is our reorganization helping the company to perform better? Is this a good or lousy place to work? Why aren’t people buying our new product?).

Here are some of the other contributors whose work I know and respect:
Stephane Dangel
Thaler Pekar
Shawn Callahan
Ardath Albee

So, I’d recommend you take a look; you’ll likely find things that you can use.