A Story of Innovative and Inspirational Tales
I’m sitting here thinking of what to write for today’s weeknotes and the Medium prompt states “Tell your story…”. Therefore, this week I’ve decided to do just that… share how stories have been fundamental to my passion for community development, my motivation to discover more about innovation, and are the ‘secret sauce’ to the social hackathons that I deliver alongside my Cwmpas colleague Martin Downes (what we call #HackOfKindness*)
I cannot underplay the power of storytelling enough — it has been alive as long as man has been able to communicate and even now the latest artificial intelligence doesn’t hold back: —
The power of stories is immense. Stories have been used throughout history to entertain, inform, educate, and inspire people. They can be used to convey complex ideas and emotions in a way that is easily understood and remembered.
In addition to their entertainment value, stories can also be used to teach important lessons, convey cultural values, and inspire change. They can be used to create empathy and understanding, and to challenge our preconceptions and biases.
Overall, the power of stories lies in their ability to engage, inform, and inspire us, and to help us make sense of the world around us.
ChatGPT4 29/03/2023
My passion for community development comes from over 20 years experience and has been solidified by witnessing countless inspirational individuals overcome adversity.
For anyone that works or has worked in community development at a grass roots level, you probably feel like that you’re on a hamster wheel; stuck dealing with the ‘here and now’ with little time to properly assess, monitor or evaluate. At the point of leaving grass roots community development (and getting off the hamster wheel), I finally had the ability to reflect and learn from my experience, most notably within a project management role I held with Oxfam Policy and Practice. At Oxfam, I managed a project that applied the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach across deprived communities within Wales. This focussed on assisting individuals to identify and harness their strengths (or ‘assets’ as they are more familiarly known), while capturing in the region of 160 case studies, each of which had its own story to learn from. This reflective practice has significantly improved my knowledge, my understanding, my delivery and my passion. It has also played a significant part in allowing me the time and opportunity to recognise the benefits of applying creative/innovative practice to a community context, especially from an asset based community development (#ABCD) perspective. Furthermore, it has provided me with a wealth of stories in order to help create context for others to understand.
I must admit, there have been a few ‘bumps in the road’ with my passion for community development (mostly due to being overwhelmed on a personal basis), but none more so than in/around 2017–2018 where I became really frustrated with how little voice the third sector had in the design and development of national welfare programmes. I even got to the point of seriously considering a complete career change. However, fate kicked in and a colleague of mine recommended a book to me that hadn’t even been released at the time. With serendipity on my side, my pre-ordered book arrived in May 2018, on the morning I was going on holiday (so I also had the time and space to read it). That book was “Be More Pirate” by Sam Conniff-Allende. The book is full of stories that cover history, social activism, entrepreneurship, innovation… and of course pirates! I’m not going to spoil it for you — you’ve really got to read the book yourself as I cannot do it enough justice— but the community development and public service sector can learn A LOT from the golden age of pirates! Now, whenever I get frustrated about a system, or confronted about institutional blockers and barriers — I start with a single response…”Be More Pirate!”.
Furthermore, my interest in innovation also originated from “Be More Pirate”; within the book Sam Connif-Allende provides examples of creative/innovative “modern day pirates” such as Banksy and Elvis and Kresse that have these amazing ‘out of the box thinking’ stories… and I wanted to know more! To this day, I’m STILL trying to read/listen to all that I can manage (in amongst balancing work and a 2 year old daughter), from the likes of dave trott, Rory Sutherland, John Hegarty, Adam Grant and Matthew Syed.
A few years later, I find that I can now play my part to try make a difference; by delivering the #HackOfKindness events, I get to a) introduce service providers and service users to each other to learn and respect each other’s perspectives, b) I get to see them work on solutions together in an equal and reciprocal way, c) I get to introduce communities to the world of creativity and innovation; by combining my recent innovation knowledge with the experiences from my community development, I find that I can quite easily marry the two by citing innovation stories in the context of community development and service design. Failing that, I can simply re-iterate some of the amazingly innovative and creative stories from the industry world that have captured my attention. So what are these stories?
In true Fast Show style (for those in the UK and know your British Comedy), “This week, I have mostly been…” …reading Dave Trott’s awesome book “Crossover Creativity”. Below are just some of the stories that have caught my attention (stories that I can directly use to help convey a particular concept or context at our #HackofKindness events).
Ward Cunningham, the inventor of Wiki once said “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, its to post the wrong answer.”; people are quicker to correct a wrong idea than answer a question.
An interesting concept (and possibly a strange business model for Wiki), but I actually witnessed this happen earlier this week.
Almon Strowger (a caretaker), in 1889 invented the automatic telephone switchboard when he discovered that his competitor’s wife was the local switchboard operator, diverting all his clients to her husband’s business. Furthermore, to slow down the number of call to his switchboard, he also invented the revolving dial.
There’s a lot of things being demonstrated here; diversification, determination, motivation etc. but for me its how Strowger single-handedly looked upstream to ‘scratch his own itch’ and change the world we live in for ever.
In 1953, it was a foregone conclusion that Ferrari, with the much powerful car and Alberto Ascari (world champion) as driver, were to win Le Mans 24hrs. The only car anywhere near was the Jaguar C-Type, but it’s drivers had been disqualified the day before and spent all night drinking. Unexpectedly re-entered into the race 6 hours after an all night drinking session, they won Le Mans and set multiple records including fastest finish. Not because they had a faster car or drivers, but because they could slow down quicker - they had disc brakes that allowed them to take turns quicker and with less stress on the vehicle having to make abrupt breaking and quick acceleration in and our of corners, the car required less maintenance throughout the race. Recognising that Le Mans is not a straight road and full of twists and turns, while everyone was obsessed with making their car go faster, Jaguar concentrated on how to best move slower…and it paid dividends.
For me, this story demonstrates the ‘Zig-zag’ method of looking in the complete opposite direction for a creative solution.
Insightful, thought provoking, interesting, don’t you think? I can read stories like these all day long! At our latest #HackOfKindness, I believe a counted that Martin and I told 22 different mini stories like these throughout the day to convey asset mapping, challenge mapping, solution mapping, creative techniques and prototyping. We use the State, Illustrate, Act methodology: —
1) State the concept;
2) Illustrate by telling a related story;
3) Pose an interactive task that aims to trigger all visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles.
Due to constant iteration, every hack has been different, with different tasks and different stories. So if you want to hear more of these stories, or some new ones, I encourage you to read more from these authors and for a little taster, feel free to attend one of our hackathons!
To end, I’m going to leave you with the final line from the penultimate story from Crossover Creativity: —
“People are happy to accept information as long as its wrapped in entertainment and stories”
Dave Trott, 2023
Until next week!
*Our Cwmpas #HackOfKindness events are one-day social hackathons where we bring stakeholders together explore fresh ideas to resolve social problems through diverse teams and multiple mini workshops. If you would like to know more, feel free to contact either myself (paul.stepczak@cwmpas.coop), or Martin Downes (martin.downes@cwmpas.coop).
