Storystorming
Explore your domain — by literally watching your language
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It’s a clear and peaceful sunday morning in Vienna, not stormy but storming! For some psy reasons I can’t sleep anymore. So? Before my family gets up and wants to have breakfast with me, I write about a really lightweight workshop format I had my fair share of client successes with in the recent months ...
… it is a format to explore and understand user journeys, work procedures and whole business processes by telling stories and by focusing on their domain language. I currently use it in the context of software projects, but it can turn out to be useable way beyond this context.
The aspects of Storystorming, I blog about today are influenced by Stefan Hofer’s and Henning Schwentner’s thoughts about Domain Storytelling, by Alberto Brandolini’s EventStorming and Adam Dymitruk’s Event Modeling, which I had the honor to learn about during Alberto’s Summit 2018 in Bologna. See a picture of this awesome community meetup below. I will forever remember Bologna! Then there are also influences coming from Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping and — last not least — its style is also a bit induced by my in-depth knowledge of Stephen White’s BPMN, a very powerful, almost almighty process model and notation and an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 19510:2013) by now. But, as much as I adore its beauties, inner values and semantic completeness, it is in my mind — for several soft and fuzzy reasons — not well-suited to simply learn about your processes and, you know, explore your processes’ potentials, together!
What did convince me that Storystorming “deserves” its own blog post? Well, it does have a very unique proposition, in that it allows me to literally, and word by word “watch” and “improve” my (domain! 😛) language. Plus: I know by now what happens in a room after having explained this method … and that this just requires 5 minutes. Imagine you are the lucky software developer: you have one or even several domain experts in a room! Now you have this once-in-a-lifetime :-) opp to understand what they are up to. Now you can ask them all the important questions to understand their work…
