Full Circle Associates

My friend Shawn Callahan will be in Seattle March 26th and in Boston on March 29th to run his Narrative Techniques for Business day long workshops. I wanted to shout out to my Boston and Seattle colleagues to recommend the workshop. Here is some background (the rest at the link above).

Story listening is not something you can learn from a manual. This workshop teaches how to find and collect stories, how to make sense of the stories and then how to design interventions that improve how things work. Participants practice each step in the process with one another and receive feedback that improves their understanding and ability to work with organisational stories.

After the workshop, participants have access to an online forum to share what they learn when they return to their organisations to apply the narrative techniques. The online forum also serves as a place to ask questions and receive suggestions in the context of real-world implementation.

Workshop topics covered include:

* when narrative approaches make sense and when to use other techniques
* how many participants to involve in story gathering and the characteristics you should look for in selecting them
* two techniques that effectively elicit stories from just about anyone
* which media to use for preserving and analyzing stories
* ways to extract meaning from a large volume of stories
* how to formulate ways of tackling truly complex problems based on lessons from the stories

By the end of the day, you will be prepared to run a story listening project using the narrative techniques you have learned and practised. This might aim at collecting lessons learned from a large project, improving employee satisfaction, smoothing the way for massive organisational change or enhancing occupational health and safety.