A Story Bank recipe using Workshop Tactics and Storyteller Tactics Decks by Pip Decks

Organizations like Microsoft and Nasa have joined the likes of National Geographic and The New York Times in understanding the value of collecting and presenting a range of stories about their work and its impact, but how do you really do it? A member of the Pip Decks Slack recently was looking for resources on building a story bank – a library of stories that your organization can draw from over time – and was interested in two things: a way to gather stories and a way to store them for easy retrieval.

Hold on for some story database management tools at the end, as well as some examples of organizations that are known for their deep story banks. First, I should explain what Pip Decks are and how the Storyteller Tactics deck and Workshop Tactics decks are generally used.

Pip Decks are creative, collaborative and managerial recipe cards that are sorted by color into various categories that help you find your challenge, create buy in, empower a team or establish the character of your company and each of your customer profiles.

As I was thinking about the scale some story banks take, and the number of people involved in capturing story snippets that can become stories, I started considering how many of the workshop tactics can help an organization frame and execute the cross-teamwork necessary to identify and capture interesting story moments in a vast organization. I had already been thinking about the many story tactics cards that could serve story leaders in a large organization as they train and develop buy-in from their peers across the organization.

I put together the following example of how a team can draw ideas from two methods: one generally owned by “creative” departments, and another, generally utilized by management (those departments commonly considered “business” oriented). When creative and managerial processes intermix appropriately, the results can be magic, resulting in an organized process  that doesn’t squelch the organic emergence of ideas common in creative practice.

A simple Storyteller Tactics/Workshop Tactics recipe could look like this:

Workshop tactics: Start with the “team time” card. This recipe helps get everyone on board and focused on the topic. You might have some engineers or programmers who prefer to work on technical details and might have some trepidation about how they might make stories that can communicate their work to a less technical audience. This card helps teams share skills and chart where they are headed.

Story Tactics: During the session, use the Icebreaker Stories or Drive Stories recipe cards to get into the story mindset and to showcase what motivates them. Include a notetaker to capture plot lines that can go deeper.

Story Team members could take some ‘homework’ to create a journey map of a story that came up for them during the workshop. The “story bank facilitator” could follow up with each person on the team to figure out which story approach makes sense – are they fighting off internal and external threats to protect the company or client? Are they working through complex data to discover insights? The storyteller Tactics cards provide a shorthand the story bank facilitator can use with each team member.

When the story team reconvenes, they can utilize a Team Tactics technique card like “T-Bar” to create a simple theme and introduction to their story. The group can then use the Theme Sort technique to organize stories into categories.

The T bar format uses a theme, title, summary format that is easy to put into a spreadsheet or database. One goal of a story bank is to make the stories discoverable within a database so your organization can call them up when needed. Theme sorting can help you establish tags to make your database searchable.

Within two sessions and a little touch-base work, an organization can create an initial framework for storytelling. By including someone from each organizational vertical and workgroup, you’ll be off to a company-wide database of internal stories in very short order. The decks include many more tools and recipes your team will use as they draw out stories from across your organization.