Around the world, Down Under, a daring but charming young company, Anecdote is touting that most ancient of experience-design crafts: storytelling -- relabeled by Anecdote, “business narrative.” Led by experienced electics Andrew Rixon, Mark Schenk, and Shawn Callihan, the Australia-based company is pioneering the use of business narrative in Australia, Southeast Asia, and other (for North Americans) exotic realms. It's also reaching out to other Asian, European, and Western Hemisphere markets.
Anecdote is offering several opportunities to delve into the business narrative experience:
1. If you're in Australia in November, you can attend one of several storytelling and improv workshops led by the Anecdote team and American Izzy Gesell CSP, one of the first people to bring improvisational theater concepts to organizational life. The workshops are entitled -- take a deep breath -- “Change your Story, Change your World: How storytelling and improv theatre skills can help you honour your past, understand your present, and shape your future.” Izzy will be touring the Australian Eastern Seaboard with Anecdote, delivering this workshop in several commercial centers.
2. You can get a taste of this workshop by participating with Anecdote (it's free!) in an EVOLVE ‘Leading Light’ webinar that Anecdote will conduct on Tuesday, October 10, at 10 AM Sydney Time. (For North Americans, the webinar takes place the preceding day, Monday, October 9, at 8 PM EST.) All you need to participate is a telephone. Having Web access will enhance the experience.
3. Later this year, Anecdote is launching a new online service based on storytelling, Zahmoo. It's designed to help organisations big or small, public or private, government or non-government, to address the challenge of evaluating intangible, hard to measure projects. Rixon writes, “Some call it a story approach to organisational learning. Others know of it as Most Significant Change. We call it Zahmoo and we'll be releasing it live into the world later this year.” You can visit the Zahmoo website to register and be notified when the service launches. In the meantime, you can read more about it on Anecdote's Zahmoo blog.
I visit the Anecdote website frequently. It's full of good ideas, case studies, white papers, and the proprietors' own insights -- all told in a charming, easy to assimilate manner, as you might expect of professional storytellers. (Something to think about for our too often buzzword-confounded design profession.)
BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
