UXweek2007: Kevin Brooks on Storytelling
by DanKevin Brooks, Motorola
Inadvertent collaboration–ends in a very good deliverable that isn’t exactly planned and using simple ingredients. This is what collaboration and storytelling is all about.
Storytelling is mostly about listening. About what you hear and how you hear. And that’s hard. It’s hard for us to listen to each other. We tend to listen for our opening or to trump or to serve our own inequality meter. We are a listening-starved culture.
Listening serves another role: to deeply understand what someone else is saying and to empower the speaker. And to deepen our relationship with the speaker.
Speakers have an expectation of being interrupted.
To survive, we need water, food, and stories.
Appreciations: Honestly finding and expressing what specifically you liked, referring to how you or the speaker were positively affected. Balances out the internal critics.
Structures for Stories
Structures are patterns for stories that create audience expectations. These can be cultural. Familiar larger structures like the hero journey, murder mysteries, flashback stories.
Bracketed story: going backwards and forwards in time, then coming back. Sets up a deeper meaning when return.
Ending first: the trip through the story is the point.
The purpose of storytelling is to give the listener something to hold onto.
For the listener, your job is not to fix the person you are listening to. This is hard for male engineers especially. Don’t be concerned about silences.
Storytelling can be collaborative. Collaboration is not the least common denominator!
When stories fit together, we think and see differently. Create analogies. Go back to ideal state of the situation is. Break the rules of rut culture.
Use small teams built organically through listening practice. Do it for 2 minutes a day.
Support a culture of questioning.
Seek opportunities to see the world as holding multiple stories.
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August 13th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
[...] at UX Week, I attended Kevin Brooks’ presentation on storytelling. Dan has written extensive notes on the session, so I won’t repeat [...]
August 14th, 2007 at 1:34 am
“Listening serves another role: to deeply understand what someone else is saying and to empower the speaker. And to deepen our relationship with the speaker.” - Like it!