Storytelling and Project Management II

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. Rather than write a lengthy post, I thought I would create a graphic showing all the stages of the traditional waterfall PM process within the context of the structure of a story. As you see in the graphic, storytelling and PM are connected at touchpoints that display the cognitive processes occurring in each phase. The folks over at Greyswanguild offer a very interesting discussion of those cognitive processes in a blog post called The Six “What’s” of Sensing and Thinking (link below). What I have proposed is an approximation and a reframing of how PM can be viewed with the structure of a story; therefore, bear in mind that, as with everything, you may see overlaps, redundancies, and things that may not quite fit according to your experience. However, I want you think about how the power of narrative can impact the transfer of knowledge and have real applications in critical business processes.

Project Management Reframed as Storytelling