My Grandfather has been a lot of things in his life, a teacher, a business man, a family man, an explorer, and more. But, when I think of my Grandfather, I always remember him as a story teller.
Stories are interesting thing, we all generally remember stories and when we imagine our ancestors, many of us think about people sitting around a camp fire telling stories. We can see how stories have moved from generation to generations, changing slightly with culture and time, but help to bring lessons forward with us. However, why is it so often that when we try to communicate information to someone else, we list facts and points?
I found myself doing exactly this recently. I have a vision for how I want our planning process to be structured. I quickly built out our tools, wrote out a rough process, and implemented the checkpoints. It probably does not come as a shock that almost every person in the organization looked at the processes and documents and walked away with a slightly different interoperation. To many the parts became just a checklist that each person was trying to hit and expecting if they did so the benefits would occur without any understanding of why causing the bigger picture to be lost.
After the royal mess that I created, I started to make the rounds again, this time talking about the process using stories. My Stories included examples of how if we want to accomplish a new Login system, we simply create a high level task called Login with a product and technical owner assigned to it, from there we can work to break down that work into slightly small tasks that can be assigned to teams, and the teams can continue to break down work as they needed, but anyone can look at the chain on a task and see the original goal. These mid and high level tasks can be attached to milestones giving us a rough understanding if the project is on track and checkpoints to determine what the project should do next. When focusing on the story, instead of the technical bits, the team was able to understand what it was they were doing and the technical points they had to hit became a side effect of them working to the over all goal.
Tell a story, and be ready to tell it many times over to different people. I laughed at a comment one of my old partners gave me after listening into one of my work days: “All you do is listen to other people or tell the same story over-and-over again, how is that productive?”