I want to revisit our recent conversation on storytelling and project management. In that discussion, I spoke about how storytelling could be helpful at various stages in the PM process. After that post, several of you reached out to me and asked if I would provide the full picture, detailing how all the PM stages could be reframed as storytelling

The ability to listen “for the story” and “listen to the story” means that the leaders are focused not on what they themselves are saying, but on what others have to say.

In the initiation phase, when you are trying to determine the nature of the project, foundational stories are helpful to set the stage for the project. The actual skill needed here is for the PM to ask the kind of questions that will elicit the right foundational story to get the project off to a good start;

There are many ways in which an organization can improve its EQ; one of the most effective is storytelling. With storytelling organizations can provide spaces where many voices and stories can be heard.

This is one of the first questions I usually get when I do storytelling workshops. People want to know that what they say will matter to others; that it will be useful, helpful.

Tell me about yourself! That’s the first question job applicants usually get in interviews. How they answer it could determine the outcome of the process, because, as we’ll see, the response to that question is more art than mechanics.

I have decided to write a few chronicles about storytelling, because the more I study and practice storytelling, the more I realize how much more there is to learn.

We grow up hearing stories and learning to turn our experiences into stories. Because storytelling is part of the human experience, everybody has a story, but not just one, many.

A few years ago, I led a storytelling event featuring data stories. I reached out to people throughout the company (and beyond) to tell stories about how they used data. Because the event was in October, and I wanted to get as big an audience as I could, I tied the event to Halloween and made it about data horror stories.

Organizations rarely tell stories of failure; as a matter of fact, even for people it’s very hard to acknowledge their mistakes. In many organizations, failure is a sign of weakness and vulnerability that would give an advantage to a competitor or an adversary.