Or How Stephen King Would Build A Story For Your Project Living generates stories. Stories of our experiences, world and relationships. Businesses and organsiations are also story-generating machines. These stories are an underutilised resource that can take projects to a new level with a process called 'generative story thinking'. Generative story thinking is what allows…
William Shakespeare was a playwright, poet and theatre owner who lived over 400 years ago. His work is still performed today, translated into countless languages, taught in schools and studied by scholars. How does someone achieve this type of longevity? Two words, Shakespeare was – ‘audience centric’.
But this is not why is conceptualising what our lives will be like in the future is difficult. The wiring of our brains leads us to be bad at it. We evolved to think day by day. To survive situations as they occurred in weeks and months. And for hundreds of thousands of years, this has served us well.
What does Co-Design, Complex Systems Theory and Storytelling have in common? Can co-design methods be used to gather stories as a qualitative data set in processes of innovation, change or disruption? To use stories as a qualitative data set, it is necessary to see storytelling as a system of feedback loops that deliver new learnings…
With storytelling, smaller is bigger. I recently met a screenwriter and he told me about a project he's working on, a cross-cultural romance. In his story, a feminist from the West falls in love with a chauvinist from the East. He was having trouble creating the backstories of these characters, why they are together despite their differences. We kept coming up against sticking points and the story wasn’t working.
Once upon a time there was a president who was known primarily by his initials, JFK. He and the nation he represented was upset that Russia was beating them in a competition called the space race. Every day the USA and Russia ran against each other to be the ‘first’ when it came to exploring…
Storytelling Built For Innovation 