washington - storytelling weekend - golden fleece

So the Golden Fleece Storytelling conference takes place in Chevy Chase*, Maryland - just north of DC. I'm navigating while Prof. Golden is driving the small rental car through driving rain from Reagan National Airport. We make it in enough time to see Kelly Cresap open show.

• Cilian Fennell does a masterful presentation on the hero's journey as it relates to innovation. I think the Joseph Campbell stuff has been overused somewhat but it is hard not to warm to a session that included gorgeous pictures of the Irish landscape, parasitic biology, recent Irish economic history and the question: "What colour is the Gaelic language?"
• Oran Sandel's session involves physical theatre and movement which normally I'm not adverse to. But for some reason I have a bit of block with it and hide in the coffee room. Oran's a good guy though.
• I finally get to meet Victoria Ward from Sparknow. She presents with Ellen Collins from the MLA on this research. Love it. Especially the part about using stories to define the boundaries of "knowledge transfer" in this this context.
• I am ashamed to admit that I have to leave Leif Josefsson's presentation on the Metafari to pass out from jetlag. Oh well.
• Gerry Lantz & Deb Maher talked about Appreciative Inquiry - which is a positive way to end the day.

All in all, a fun day. There was a student film crew wandering around so I wonder if we'll see any outputs from that...

*I think Fletch was his finest hour - how about you?

washington - storytelling weekend

So the Friday of the Washington DC Storytelling event took place in the S Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian. It was a Steve Denning production with four speakers and Madelyn Blair MCing. The auditorium was huge but the seats were bolted down lecture-style which didn't make for a particularly collaborative experience. I believe Steve recorded the sessions so I'll put a link up to those when they are ready but in the meantime, some observations:

• I liked Madelyn's intro - esp. her story about the antique shop-owner's comment.
• Dorthothy Leonard was pretty darned good as a presenter - as you'd hope a university professor to be. I'm a fan of Deep Smarts so was interested to hear her take on the role of story in the innovation process. The key thing it reinforced for me: If you want to find out an organisation's attitude to innovation - and therefore what forms of innovation will succeed - then listen to its stories.
• Linda Coffman has been working on the uses of digital storytelling in learning at P&G. It seems that P&G have started some work in this area - the question is: will they actually deploy it? Of the two stories made, one is pretty dire (as Linda herself acknowledged) but the second one is very powerful (although the subject matter initially baffled some men in the audience). A suggestion to P&G: Easy on the emotive soundtrack - it felt a but manipulative. The more powerful your story, the simpler your visual and audio cues. BTW check out the Center for Digital Storytelling.
• Claudia L'Amoreaux is (if she'll pardon the expression) a hippy. And Education Community Developer for Second Life's Linden Labs. Her discussion on Second Life really brought home to me how those immersed in the SL environment are using it creatively and flexibly. I remain to be convinced that it's quite right for me but I am willing to give it another go.
• Finally Steve Denning was up - talking about creating dynamic team/organisational "hot spots" through story. By this stage, I had been awake for about 48 hours and crashed part-way through Steve's presentation. I am looking forward to the recording though.