I am preparing some questions tonight for an exercise I am running, and I rediscovered this elegant and simple process for constructing questions that elicit stories, courtesy of the Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles. Build the question. People remember events when they can picture an image reminding them of a specific situation. Combine this idea with the suggestion of adding emotion and you have the two building blocks to create good questions. First start with an image-building phrase: “Think about…” “Imagine…” “If…” “Consider…” For example, ”Think about a time when you were given advice by your manager.” Add an additional …
Stories that run deep within a culture arise out of the basic and unquestioned metaphors and archetypes that provide the foundation for a culture. This is true in all kinds of communities, including nation-states and villages, organizations and families. You can discover some of those foundational metaphors in your own communities by asking yourself “We are a community and that means…” As someone who has been working with the cultural narratives of the United States over the past few years, Rob Paterson has cast his eye on the way out of the rhetorical tennis match that passes for conversation on …
Chimamanda Adichie explains in a beautiful talk about how we construct single stories about people and cultures. This happens all the time with indigenous communities. People often hear one native person say something and attribute that quote or idea to a whole culture or even worse, to “Native Americans.” Adichie goes deeply into how the flattening of stories results in power shifts that lead to marginalization. Spend the time watching…
And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling. Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue. The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood. The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me …
I’m off to Estonia on Saturday to run an Art of Hosting workshop with Toke Moeller and Piret Jeedas. To say I’m excited is an understatement. First, this is only the second trip to Europe I have made since I left the UK in 1981 after living there for three years. It’s interesting to see how things have changed in Europe over 30 years. On this trip I am intending to connect in London, during a brief stopover at Heathrow, with one of my school buddies from those days, who I last saw when I was just 13 years old. …