Summary
Using the Story Tools: A Six-Step Process
Story: “A Sprint to the Finish”
INTRODUCTION
A RUSHING RIVER
This book is written for people who want to make a difference; people who want to build, create, learn, share, and inspire; people who want to give themselves and others the powerful gift of story.
What is your story? Have you thought about it? Certainly, you are full of stories. We all are. Stories are one of the things that make life and work fun and fulfilling. They are all around us every day as we move through the to-dos, experiences, ups and downs, and all of the other “stuff” of life.
Imagine for a moment that you are standing knee-deep in the middle of a rushing river. The water flows past you, and underneath your feet are rocks and sediment. You are holding a dented metal pan with a screen on the bottom, and you reach down into the riverbed and pull up a panful. As you shake the mud and grit out of the pan, gold appears. Gold nuggets. These gold nuggets represent the experiences—the stories—of your life. The mud and grit that get shaken back into the river represent all of the forgettable data and details of your life—the stuff that happens in between the stories and experiences.
Now imagine yourself getting off of the elevator at work and walking into a meeting. You are in the midst of a rushing river of information. You have e-mails to attend to, voicemails, presentations, and paperwork. You have responsibilities and goals and a limited amount of time. Empowered by technology, information comes at you nearly 24/7 from many different angles. Your “pan” fills very quickly. In fact, your pan may fill so quickly that you often find yourself just trying to stay ahead of the mud and grit without ever getting to touch the gold!
But it is in experiencing and telling these stories—the gold nuggets—that we establish a connection to each other and to the organization. The gold is the stuff that allows leaders to lead and people to perform. All of the rest is just “mud and grit.”
INFORMATION REVOLUTION
Over the past couple of decades, technology has transformed our organizations and our work lives. We now have access to more information than we could ever hope to use. Indeed, information is now, quite literally, “in the air.”
Technology has helped us capture most of the high-value information in our organizations. Thanks to technology, we now know who our most profitable customers are, how they behave, what they purchase, and how much they spend. We know how our entire supply chain is affected by a change in pricing strategy and we know how to distribute trucks or call volumes across our different resources. We can give our people access to their benefits information through an employee portal, their training through a learning management system, their
