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• Walk in my shoes

  Jocelyn Ling 2:16 pm on April 20, 2012 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: personal (12)

  

  Pic credit: Jody Mac­Don­ald

  And it came to me. A moment of chaos. A moment of seren­ity. Breathe in. Breathe out. Red coloured chalk rains down, stain­ing the ground like a polaroid photo com­ing to life. Past the cheap silk and whirls of bod­ies that from far off, they look like beau­ti­ful coloured beads. In the briefest moment, spring pushes through in this cel­e­bra­tion of rebirth. In the next instance, I inhale — some dense, sharp sub­li­ma­tion of reality.

  ***

  How do you see DIGNITY? Van­cou­ver, 24/5

   

• "Even Well-Meaning Gatekeepers Slow Innovation" - Jeff Bezos

  Jocelyn Ling 2:31 pm on April 13, 2012 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration (14), innovation (11), inspiration (15)

  “The most rad­i­cal and trans­for­ma­tive of inven­tions are often those that empower oth­ers to unleash their cre­ativ­ity – to pur­sue their dreams”… “These inno­v­a­tive, large-scale plat­forms are not zero-sum – they cre­ate win-win sit­u­a­tions and cre­ate sig­nif­i­cant value for devel­op­ers, entre­pre­neurs, cus­tomers, authors, and readers.”

  - Jeff Bezos Annual let­ter to Ama­zon shareholders

   

• My Week's Discoveries: Storytelling Resources

  Jocelyn Ling 3:20 pm on April 9, 2012 | 2 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration (14), design (8), presentation (5), storytelling (2), world (16)

  Update (April 17, 2012): Guess what? I found more awe­some resources to add to the list!

  1) Map­Story - A crowd­sourced plat­form where the global com­mu­nity shares stories. 

  Map­story allows any­one and every­one to cre­ate, share and col­lab­o­rate on sto­ries to improve our under­stand­ing of global dynam­ics, world­wide, over the course of his­tory. The cool com­po­nent about Map­Story is the “Story Layer” fea­ture, where you can layer on maps, data, etc. onto other sto­ries or cre­ate a sto­ries by com­bin­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent layers.

  2) DefineAmerican.com — Plat­form dis­cussing the immi­gra­tion debate in America

  This plat­form tack­les a spe­cific prob­lem in Amer­ica — the immi­gra­tion sys­tem. It uses sto­ries to bring in new voices into the immi­gra­tion con­ver­sa­tion. The plat­form is started by Jose Anto­nio Var­gas, an award win­ning jour­nal­ist who came out as an ille­gal immi­grant. HIghly inspir­ing. In the sto­ries sec­tion of the web­site, the pub­lic writes in, shar­ing their sto­ries and opin­ion on the immi­gra­tion debate. Def­i­nitely worth send­ing in your story too, and have your say about the DREAM Act.

  ***

  Given that I spent most of my time last week research­ing about sto­ry­telling, my (last) week’s dis­cov­er­ies are all sto­ry­telling related. Below is a small col­lec­tion of tools, plat­forms, posts and resources cen­tered around storytelling.

  1) Cow­bird — A Wit­ness to Life 

  Out of my many start-up ideas, one of them that I loved the most was to have a sto­ry­telling plat­form where peo­ple could share fic­tion and non-fiction accounts of their lives. Then after shar­ing this idea over cof­fee with an inter­ac­tion designer friend of mine, Tony Chu, he informed me of this seri­ously kick-ass plat­form called Cow­bird. When I checked it out, it was almost exactly what I imag­ined for; using sto­ry­telling as a short short-term goal is to pio­neer a new form of par­tic­i­pa­tory jour­nal­ism, grounded in the sim­ple human sto­ries behind major news events. Cowbird’s long-term goal is to build a pub­lic library of human expe­ri­ence, so the knowl­edge and wis­dom we accu­mu­late as indi­vid­u­als may live on as part of the com­mons. I promptly signed up for an account after check­ing this out. You should too.

  2) Story Pirates 

  This is a edu­ca­tion and media orga­ni­za­tion tar­geted towards encour­ag­ing kids to write sto­ries. Story Pirates encour­ages cre­ativ­ity by then bring­ing these sto­ries to life — through plays, stand up and dif­fer­ent forms of per­for­mances. They’re most famous for the Idea Storm Pro­gram — a writ­ing work­shop that is fol­lowed by a musi­cal sketch com­edy fea­tur­ing sto­ries by stu­dents and per­formed by pro­fes­sional artist. Super fun.

  3) Startstorytelling.com — The starter guide to non­profit video storytelling

  A really com­pre­hen­sive  resource for non­prof­its to end­ing bad videos. This is put together by Cau­seVox and Lis­tenIn Pic­tures, two great orga­ni­za­tions that are in the non­profit space and who were also on the Be Social Change Panel in my pre­vi­ous post. If you’re a non­profit and look­ing to spread your mes­sage via video — this is a must read. Did I men­tion it’s free too?

  4) Get Sto­ried — Teach­ing Entre­pre­neurs how to tell their story 

  So appar­ently sto­ry­telling is an actual con­sult­ing busi­ness, and Get Sto­ried man­aged to do this. They have a great man­i­festo and offer advi­sory ser­vices & var­i­ous sto­ry­telling pro­gram. Next week is their Rein­ven­tion Sum­mit 2: An online con­fer­ence for sto­ry­telling in the dig­i­tal age. An intrigu­ing con­cept that allows for scale and low oper­a­tional costs. GetStoried.com also has a great list of sto­ry­telling books to check out here. A book that is not on the list or related to GetStoried.com that is on my per­sonal to-read list is: Res­onate: Visual sto­ries that trans­form audi­ences.

  5) IDEO Human Cen­tered Design (HCD) Connect

  It’s not secret that I love IDEO’s work and last week, the HCD Con­nect was launched, a plat­form where the pub­lic takes on the world’s chal­lenges by shar­ing sto­ries, ques­tions and resources. I haven’t got­ten around to play­ing with the plat­form yet but my imme­di­ate impres­sion is that it is pretty similar-ish to OpenIDEO to solve global chal­lenges using crowd intel­li­gence. I’ll let you know my full thoughts once I’ve had the time to play around, but it’s def­i­nitely worth check­ing out.

  6) And finally… a plethora of other sto­ry­telling resources/articles that was com­piled by Rob Wu of Cau­seVox. Knock your­self out. (Tip: I would start with Blair Miller’s next phase of storytelling)

  • Dig­i­tal Sto­ry­telling from Soup to Nuts by Denise Atchley
  • Dig­i­tal Sto­ry­telling Fes­ti­val Dig­i­tal Sto­ry­telling: A Tuto­r­ial in 10 Easy Steps by JD Lasica
  • Sto­ry­telling through Info­graph­ics by Debra Askanase, Com­mu­nity Orga­nizer 2.0
  • Data can tell sto­ries by Beth Kan­ter, Zoetica
  • 4 Tools to Tell Sto­ries Online by Amy Sam­ple Ward, NTEN
  • The Next Phase of Sto­ry­telling by Blair Miller, Acu­men Fund
  • How to Get Started in Sto­ry­telling for Fundrais­ing by Cara Jones, Sto­ry­tellers for Good
  • The Power of Sto­ry­telling by Linda Ziskind, Z2 Consulting
  • How to find amaz­ing, pow­er­ful sto­ries for your non­profit video, by Socialbrite
   

• (De)Constructing the Power of Storytelling

  Jocelyn Ling 2:17 pm on April 5, 2012 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration (14), design (8), Global Voices (4), inspiration (15), presentation (5)

  “Of all our truest hopes and desires for our work is that, what we find, we our­selves never knew. It came as a shock. It came as a sur­prise. It was new. We could never have known what we were going to do before we did it, and in that sense, we dis­cover too. Here is what I’ve got to say to you: there are things in your life you will see; there are sto­ries you will hear; if you don’t write them down, if you don’t make the pic­ture, they won’t get seen, they won’t get told.” – Emmet Gowin

  Sto­ries have always been essen­tial to the human condition. I’ve writ­ten before  on how sto­ries are a win­dow into how we per­ceive the world around us. Lately, I have spent quite a bit of time reflect­ing on the role of sto­ries and their impor­tance in gen­er­at­ing engagement, empathy and to deliver insights about peo­ple and behav­iour. A great event by Be Social Change on the Power of Nar­ra­tive on Cre­at­ing Impact that I attended recently really helped com­plete some of the reflec­tions that I have been mulling over, and thought I’ll share some of my thoughts:

  Be Social Change Sto­ry­telling event. Pan­elists on the RHS. Photo taken by: Alex Mora from Xelaarom Pho­tog­ra­phy

  1) Prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions: Co-creation of a story

  The are two main cat­e­gories of sto­ries that are told: our own sto­ries and sto­ries on behalf of someone/something. In both cir­cum­stances, ele­ments of a mem­o­rable sto­ries usu­ally starts with Authen­tic­ity, bridged by Nar­ra­tive Trans­port and end­ing with Com­bined Rel­e­vance (a com­po­nent that the audi­ence can relate to). Sto­ries can be prac­ti­cally used by prod­uct sto­ry­tellers, com­mu­nity archi­tects and in vir­tu­ally almost any posi­tion that calls for value con­nec­tion with your audi­ence. The role of a sto­ry­teller is not meant to replace the mar­keter, brand strate­gist or founder. Instead, they dwell in the realm of syn­the­siz­ing the over­all pic­ture, mold the value propo­si­tion and know what entry points in cur­rent con­ver­sa­tions that they can enter into. They are con­nec­tors who look for the puz­zle pieces and bring them together in frame­works that inspire appro­pri­ate solutions.

  To a cer­tain extent, sto­ries are a moral and value com­pass. Our own sto­ries that we tell help us under­stand our own world bet­ter, and the sto­ries we tell on behalf of oth­ers ensure that we have enough insight to an organization/product’s value that we stay on the right path. The rea­son why I believe it to be a com­pass is because if you are not moved (to action/direction or emo­tion­ally) by your own story, why should some­one else be moved by it too?

  2) Fram­ing a narrative

  

  A good story holds so much emo­tional com­plex­ity. A really impor­tance point to dis­tin­guish (and you’ll be sur­prised by how many peo­ple mis­un­der­stand this!) is that sto­ries are NOT an opin­ion, bul­let points, or arti­cles. They are a moment in time, an expe­ri­ence. At the event, Annie Esco­bar, co-founder of  Lis­tenIn Pic­tures, a media com­pany that crafts cin­e­matic sto­ries to inspire action (Their mis­sion is to end bad non-profit video!), shared some of the ways that she uses to (re)frame a nar­ra­tive via the: chal­lenge plot, con­nec­tion plot, cre­ativ­ity plot or empa­thy plot. Non-profit tend to grav­i­tate towards the empathy/sympathy plot (highly over­rated these days) and I would like to (re)frame this approach by say­ing that non-profits should tell sto­ries that come from a place of empa­thy instead of just evok­ing sympathy.

  A great way to decon­struct a nar­ra­tive is to use Simon Sinek’s Start With Why Golden Cir­cle. Simon explains in his book that we need to start look­ing at ideas, sys­tems and in this con­text — sto­ries with a clear and pur­pose­ful out­look: “WHY?”

  “Peo­ple don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. A com­pany needs to say and do only what they believe. If what you do, doesn’t prove what you believe, then no one will know your “why” and you will be forced to com­pete on price, ser­vice, qual­ity, fea­tures and ben­e­fits, the stuff of com­modi­ties…” –Simon Sinek, Start With Why

  3) A Storyteller’s respon­si­bil­i­ties and characteristics

  A great sto­ry­teller can be pow­er­ful influ­encer… and with great power, comes great respon­si­bil­ity (yes, I totally just quoted spi­der­man!). Blair Miller, Acu­men Fund’s Lead­er­ship Man­ager (includ­ing Acumen’s Fel­lows Pro­gram) wrote a great piece a while back empha­siz­ing on a storyteller’s respon­si­bil­i­ties as the next phase of sto­ry­telling. She high­lighted three respon­si­bil­i­ties: sto­ry­tellers must be dynamic, must come from a place of empa­thy and must uncover ways to be replace­able. I would like to build on her piece that on top of those respon­si­bil­i­ties, great sto­ry­tellers should have these two characteristics:

  i) Unre­lent­ingly curi­ous — some­one who is inquis­i­tive, loves to learn about oth­ers and uncover the ‘other side of the story’. He/she should have the humil­ity to con­nect with every­one and any­one and know that the story they are telling is one chap­ter out of tens of dozens.

  ii) Provoca­tively immag­i­na­tive — some­one who has the imag­i­na­tion pow­er­ful enough to see a moment/experience and able to (re)frame it into a com­pelling story. He/She knows when to ask the right ques­tions, when to hold back and when to dig deeper.