Anthony Weeks • Stories and Storytelling
Isn’t this how we value and legitimize our role as facilitators, process designers, and graphic recorders? We are in the room with teams who are talking about things that are important to them. Our marks on the page are not for entertainment. We believe in the power of understanding how things work, the value of making good decisions, and the translation of decisions into meaningful action that will hopefully change the world. Our role is to help groups accomplish those very noble and crucial objectives. Telling good stories—and listening well to stories—is essential.
The International Forum of Visual Practitioners conference in Austin in 2015 set me on a path of inquiry about the deeper practice of storytelling and storylistening. I met people from all over the world who were doing gorgeous work with beautiful colors, impeccable calligraphy, and ingenious graphics. While humbled and inspired, I noticed the conversations tended to center on the aesthetic value of our work, not the listening value.
After the conference, I pursued the discussion online in the Graphic Facilitation Facebook group by asking, “Pretty chart… but how did you listen in this particular conversation?” Amidst the vague and inchoate responses, the question remained: “Are we doing all we can to be good storytellers and storylisteners?”
I asked myself, “Who do I know who listens?” I began to compile a robust list from my networks. Psychotherapists, 911 dispatchers, clergypeople, investigators, judges, musicians, conductors, ASL interpreters, marine bioacousticians, doctors, HR specialists, futurists and forecasters, historians, and museum curators. I knew a lot of listeners.
After I asked people in my network ,“Who do you know who listens?”, the list grew longer. I began interviewing these people. Each session began with three simple questions: “How do you listen in your work? How did you learn to listen that way? How does listening matter in the work you do?”
My research thus far has been rewarding and surprising. I’m discovering a variety of qualitatively different listening styles. Once I learned how others approach listening, I began to realize I needed additional information about the context, purpose, and intention of my own listening. Merely saying “I listen” was no longer sufficient.
Take my interviews with Larry and Shannon, for example. Larry is an emergency response dispatcher while Shannon is a psychotherapist in private practice. When I began reviewing the first transcripts, I began to tingle all over. Through their wisdom and experience, I heard a vocabulary and taxonomy around listening begin to emerge.
Initially, Larry offered multiple disclaimers about his lack of suitability as an interview subject for my project: “I’m not a good listener! I’m a terrible listener. Even my wife doesn’t think I’m a good listener!”
When we finally spoke by phone, Larry issued his protest once again.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “You’ve told me that. Tell me how you do listen in your work.”
What he described was a methodical and efficient process of asking questions about the emergency, the current location and status of the caller, the urgency of the need for response, the resources (if any) already at hand, and the type of response that would be most appropriate and helpful.
“I’m not a therapist,” Larry laughed. “I don’t get into a lot of history stuff, and I’m not interested in all the other things in their lives that might be going wrong. I just don’t have the time to get into it. I do try to calm them down, though, and stay calm myself. Otherwise, I won’t get the information that I need in order to respond. It’s a transaction, really.”
Transactional listening.
“I don’t think the people who call you would want you to be a therapist,” I offered. “It sounds like you have some pretty specific filters in place for how you listen.”
Larry and I arrived at the epiphany at the same time. Transactional listening is still listening—and useful listening, at that. In Larry’s case, this type of listening—specific and goal-oriented, relying on filters and prescribed intentions—might literally mean life or death.
Anthony Weeks • Stories and Storytelling
“Ha!” Larry said triumphantly. “I am a good listener, then. How about that? I can’t wait to tell my wife that I’m a good listener… maybe just not to her.”
In the early 1990s, Shannon and I were both on the therapy staff at a small Minneapolis non-profit serving survivors and perpetrators of domestic violence. While my path led me to facilitation and visual storytelling, Shannon continued to work with survivors of trauma and pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology. She maintains a private practice, consults with agencies and organizations, and teaches psychology graduate students.
When I asked Shannon, “How do you listen in your work?”, she paused for a few moments before saying, “Sometimes, the listening is the work.”
When I asked her to explain, she offered an insightful observation about her work with survivors. “Often, people who have been traumatized are isolated, have few social resources and connections, and have been disbelieved by family, institutions, and service providers. They are conditioned over time to understand that speaking out leads to further traumatization, abuse, and marginalization. As a result, being listened to is therapeutic unto itself, even if there is not a stated ‘therapy goal.’”
“I don’t start out by asking people what their goals are,” Shannon said. “Sometimes, they don’t know. Sometimes, they just need to talk and be listened to. They’re so used to being shut down and told that they are crazy that they haven’t experienced being listened to in an open and non-judgmental way. Eventually, we may surface some needs that they’d like to address in more depth. Initially, though, a lot of my clients’ primary need is to be listened to, heard, validated, understood. I listen to what they have to say and stay present with them so they know it matters.”
Open. Non-judgmental. Validation. Being present. What do we call this kind of powerful listening? I would call Shannon’s style empathic listening. It is the creation of a space and forum where the listening itself is the priority while goals and objectives are deferred. Empathic listening is not “efficient.” Listening for the sake of listening would likely make a task-centered meeting facilitator or a goal-oriented executive go absolutely mad. Moreover, empathic listening, as Shannon practices it, is exactly the wrong kind of listening for the time- and need-sensitive work Larry does.
As I continue my exploration, more modes of listening emerge. Forest, a marine biologist, studies the sounds of tiny shrimp and crab footfalls in order to assess the health of coral reefs. His listening is data-rich, populated with millions of data points from which the story emerges. It’s quantifiable, data-informed. Systemic listening. Mike, the audio engineer, claims that listening to music in groups is one of the best ways of learning how to listen. This is social listening. The social experience of sharing a piece of music reveals new understanding and learning, based on the subjectivities of the individual listeners.
Anthony Weeks • Stories and Storytelling
How do I listen?
I am a work in progress. In the past, I might have advertised myself as a versatile listener. “Yeah, I listen, and I draw out the key content points, quotes, questions, relationships between ideas, blah blah blah.” Based on what I am learning, my listening is one type. It is selective. While my graphic facilitation clients are dazzled by the fact that I can listen, synthesize, write, and draw at the same time, sometimes I question how effective my listening is in the context of my work.
Personally, I despise being a transactional listener. You talk, I listen and “capture” every little bit of what you say. It’s a day job, but it isn’t what I am good at nor what I love to do. What I really love is this storylistening, most prominent in my work with scenario development groups, forecasting-for-strategy sessions, and conversations based on e
thnography and user experience. When we are talking about emergence, disruption, discontinuous storylines, and points of divergence and convergence, I light up. I am both scared and excited because I don’t know where my chart is going to go. I don’t know how the next 60 minutes will unfold, much less the next 10 years!
This is when I turn around and ask the group: “Who are we talking about here? Who is the protagonist? What is the tension? What’s the story?” If there is still some confusion, I might say, “Let’s start with ‘who cares?’” The listening becomes social, empathic, and open to unpredictability. If my charts in a discussion about the future of work look the same as those from a meeting about a civil rights educational program, I have missed my mark. Each is a story in its own right, revealed by a process of intentional listening best suited to the conversation at hand.
We need more models of storytelling and storylistening in our work. The field of graphic recording, graphic facilitation, and visual storytelling has become mature enough that simply picking up some markers and saying, “Okay, I’m going to listen and capture the conversation” is not good enough anymore. We must think more rigorously about how we listen. Are we transactional listeners? Empathic listeners? Systemic listeners? Social listeners?
As storytellers and storylisteners, how do we make our charts different from scattergrams of bullet points, with some nicely conceived but essentially inert graphics thrown in for good measure? A scattergram assures that you aptly captured the information. Still, it misses profluence, a sense of the story’s flow. A story makes people feel something that they had not felt prior to the conversation. It reveals something, rather than capturing something.
When I approached Refugio (the worshipper of the Virgén de Guadalupe rock), Kitty (the immigrant housekeeper), and Diana (the actress with cerebral palsy) about making films about them, they all said, at one point or another, “Why do you want to make a film about me? I’m not that interesting.” Just like Larry the emergency response dispatcher, Shannon the therapist, and most of the people I spoke with about listening.
Ultimately, they were all fascinating. More than that, they inspired me because their stories were so much more than I ever expected, and invariably, their stories were more fascinating to them than they ever expected, once we began the conversation.
Certainly, we can dutifully record what is said, be faithful to every letter and word, and maintain our dignified silence on the side of the room as we write, write, write away, with a picture or two for visual interest. At some point, though, there could be a breakthrough, a flash of recognition, a collective bolt of insight when we ask the simple question: “Yes, and what’s the story?”
Are we capturing information and data or are we liberating stories?
This is the role of the storyteller and storylistener: to elevate the disparate moments, data points, and comments into something bigger. Every conversation, no matter how seemingly mundane and banal, contains a story—or a multitude of them—waiting to be revealed.
Who are the storytellers and storylisteners you admire? What can you learn from their approach and experience? What do you bring back to your own listening practice?
Anthony Weeks • Stories and Storytelling
ANTHONY WEEKS After a masters degree in social work, an MFA in documentary filmmaking, and 18 years as a narrative facilitator and illustrator, Anthony Weeks decided to just call himself a storyteller and storylistener and leave it at that. He is based in San Francisco and travels globally to help others discover what “profluence” means.
Reference
Rutledge, P. “The Psychological Power of Storytelling,” Psychology Today, 16 January 2011. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-media/201101/the-psychological-power-storytelling (accessed 15 June 2016).
The Secret to Long-Term Impact in Your Engagements
Mary Alice Arthur
Every meeting—whether it is focused on business, community, action, or relationship — is predicated on hope. We are hoping for understanding or mutual agreement. We are coming for action or to create something together. We are longing for the resolution to a conflict or the easing of some need. Often, even with the greatest will and intention in the world, we are disappointed when nothing seems to come out of the time and effort we have invested. And sometimes, even when we sense that something significant has taken place, we are blind to the potential waiting for us. Something is missing in making the most of our time together.
Over more than 25 years of facilitating groups of all kinds I’ve grappled a lot with this myself. Why is it that sometimes action happens and sometimes nothing happens? Sometimes it seemed like all the reports or Post-It notes in the world didn’t add up to the sparkling promise we seemed to see together. I began to realize that it didn’t depend on leadership or a single person; it depended on what we could see together. Then, in 2007, I learned about the Art of Hosting,1 which has a strong practice of creating ways to help people capture what they are learning and thinking about. Something clicked into place.
I found out that every meeting holds the potential for collective intelligence to create wiser action. The key to long-term impact lies in paying attention equally to what comes before, during, and after a meeting or event, and getting strategic about it. What is that special something that helps us to capture “the magic in the middle” that happens when groups discover something together? What is the practice that helps us to move from meeting to manifesting? The secret lies in harvesting.2
Harvesting and the art of hosting
The word “harvesting” was coined by the Art of Hosting network. Hosting is what we call the art of working with a group to support them through inquiry and emergence into the co-creative work that leads to focused results. Hosting and process design support participants to bring what they have in experience, worldview, expertise, and curiosity to the table. Good hosting is like the difference between carrying tea in a teapot and carrying it in a shallow saucer. Either way you are transporting tea, but if you trip, the tea stays in the teapot, but sloshes all over the floor from the saucer. A teapot just makes a better container in case of turbulence.
With a solid container, we can tease out our different ideas, stay together when new perspectives arise, and then create something helpful together. A well-hosted event supports people both to step into supportive relationship and be more effective in the tasks they want to undertake together.
All of this I knew from my background as a facilitator. What I learned about harvesting means I now take a totally different approach. Harvest-ing is more than reporting on or documenting the outcomes of a meeting; it is treating the things we uncover and experience together as the important puzzle pieces they are. Harvesting acts like a group’s collective brain, creating both a group memory—which is valuable when you want to dive back into the stuff you worked on together—and a way of analyzing and synthesizing information to make new meaning. It is both a skill and a practice that supports and enhances the individual and collective sensemaking that leads to wiser action.
Mary Alice Arthur • The Secret to Long-Term Impact in Your Engagements
In a very real way, doing the work of synthesizing and sensemaking together makes a group into a community because they have created and are holding something together. It helps to make it possible to look for patterns, meaning, and actions that will help us move forward, and we become more committed to a collective future and our stake in it. Just think about the last time you had a challenging work experience, but made it through with the others and got results. Since you had to struggle together, you have ownership of what you created, and most likely a deeper relationship and a greater sense of responsibility for your results. You are prepared to do something because you grappled with it and you care about it. You’ve seen something together and now you have a collective meaning around it that
gives energy to your actions.
Harvesting is a companion to hosting in the same way that the black and white halves make up the yin/yang symbol and it is a strategic asset in the healthy life of any group.
When I begin working with a group, I always ask first about the harvest. What is it we want to get out of this meeting, event, or initiative? I ask about the purpose, both in a tangible and an intangible sense. How we feel about the work we’re doing and the results we want to achieve, the strength of relationship and trust we can create together, is equally important to the what we are creating together. As that very simple African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further, go together.” But this “going together” is difficult if we don’t know both what we want to do and how we want to do it. Discovering and understanding what we hold in common is the beauty of harvesting.
What is harvesting for?
At first glance, most of us in organizational, community, or group settings might be surprised with both the word and the concept of harvest; it seems to be a word that belongs with gardening or farming. My father was an amazing gardener and for most of my youth he had a big garden and produced embarrassingly many zucchini. I was too young to appreciate it at the time, but now I see how the work I’m doing with groups is similar to how a gardener needs to have an intention, be tuned into the growing cycle, and tend their patch well in order to produce what they planned for.
Drawn Together Through Visual Practice Page 9
