Working with Story Lab
Diminishing (personal) oppression by enabling anyone to make sense of the world through working with stories
What is the future you want to create?
I want to create a future where all voices are seeked to be heard in decision making. So inclusive decision making. Or “nothing about us without us”.
In that future the place for numbers and statistics is far more limited than is usual today. The main challenge seems to be that there is no counter-force against the abundant and cheap availability of cold hard (measured) data.
We believe the concept of warm data (in the narrative domain stories and data generated by people by answering questions about them and make sense of the patterns they form) is key to connect the domain of hard economics, business and science with the social domain and sciences. Using the PNI approach we think we can build a bridge with warm (semi-hard/soft) data.
How we track progress
We track progress by counting the number of “thank you’s” after workshops, in stories shared via StoryPoints and by customers after or during projects.
How we are doing so far
Over the years we have developed the tools and applications for a wide range of challenges. From quality-experiences of customers and patients to citizen participation in policy formation and evaluation to safety & security using human observer networks. In addition we use narative methods for facilitating change/transformation in organisations and services networks (social services domain) and for supporting agile development and introduction management (often wrongfully called innovation).
What are we not doing?
We don’t analyse narratives, we always respect stories as they are. Including typos and errors as these show a lot about the storyteller/sharer.
We also don’t apply Artificial Intelligence to create meaning. We plan to use AI to create meaning from the warm meta data though.
What we have learned so far
There are many things we learned, but the most powerful one was that we keep on being surprised by the power of working with narratives. How people discover new things, how people learn, how people (re)connect through working with stories keeps on amazing us. This gives us the confidence that participatory storywork has huge potential to re-balance the use of human smartness.
How can you help us?
We are looking at increasing the use of story in business and government processes. Both decision making in companies, organisation and democratic processes are in dire need of re-connecting to customers, patients, employees, citizen, etc. So any opportunities to re-apply existing or develop new cPNI application are welcome.
We are also looking to expand our partnerships in Europe, Africa, the Americas and the East. That means we are looking for individuals or companies that want to seize the opportunities related to the fact that the market for narrative business solutions is near empty on the supplier side.
We also depend on keeping our leading position on the science front. We cordially invite scolars and practitioners to join www.pni2.org to further develop PNI.
How can we help you?
We can help organisations, public and private, that need insights in order to make better decisions, preferably participatory. For that we apply narrative methods, i.e. stimulation sharing of stories/experiences and working with them to gain insights, see trends early, gain perspectives, connect cultures, help people learn, etc.
Working with Stories has lots of connections with other scientific fields such as anthropology, language theory and complexity science. I entered the narrative field from the unlikely corner of chemistry. Or better quantum chemistry, where molecules are simulated from first principles. And molecules have emergent properties not found in its constituent atoms. After all water (H2O) has totally different properties than Oxygen (O2) and Hydrogen (H2). From these very small Ångstrom length scales I gradually move up to the nanometers of (mass-fractal) materials science, the sub-micrometer scale of toner and finally entered the human/social domain as a service innovation researcher. In 2010 I founded www.storyConnect.nl.
So emergence, complexity and creation have been the constant factor for me in the last 30 years. Andy hopefully the next 30 too.
For more information contact Lab Director Harold van Garderen.
Website: www.storyconnect.nl
