This one is not in the manual I gave you:

To sit in solemn silence
In a damp dark dock
Of a pestilential prison
With a life long lock

Awaiting the sensation
of a short sharp shock
From a cheap and chippy chopper
On a big black block

Let me know how you are doing and how the practicing is going.

A story usually begins with someone in some situation that is for some reason unstable. The context in which a story starts is usually too good to be true or too unbearable to endure. Either way, there is always an undercurrent of pending imbalance. This underlying dramatic tension will feed the story and propel it forward.

For little Red Riding Hood the imbalance is illustrated by the fact that she always wore her red riding hood – so much so that people forgot her real name and called her Little Red Riding Hood. There is the hint of an undercurrent that says to the reader/listener: This situation can not last long, something must change…

In our story class this week we created 4 very promising characters:

1. Lady Mariana who hates violence and has managed to keep peace in her land with the help of her magic sword. But now she longs for purpose and meaning. She has her peace, now what?

2. Lord Charles the can’t-sit-stiller, who loves adventure and action, but has never really felt like he had done something worthwhile. He itches for something full of action and risk, but also meaningful so that he can feel he deserves some rest. Until then, he feels, he can not ever sit still.

3. Queen Elizabeth, the control freak, who reigns her kingdom with a strict hand and a clear understanding of what is right and proper. Yet, she is lonely and longs for a companion to share the responsibility so that maybe for a moment she could let her hair down and have a minute of fun.

4. Gemima the extravagant drag queen who loves beautiful expensive things and who knows how to have a good time. She is popular and successful on the outside, but longs for a lost love from a long time ago whom she cannot pursue. She is also aging and she knows her moments in the spotlight are counted.

There is great potential for character development and transformation for all four these characters. Our challenge for the coming week is to present them with a Call to Adventure that will focus their energy and propel them into their journeys.

It may be helpful to think about a last straw kind of experience. This is an event or opportunity that grabs the attention of the character and forces them to take action of some kind.

Ideas we have already mentioned are:

1. Queen Elizabeth organises a big celebration in her palace to which she invites all manner of performers to come and entertain her guests. Gemima is one of the first to respond…

Questions:

- What is the occasion that warrants such a celebration?

- What does this opportunity offer Gemima that she is so keen to jump for it?

2. A huge battle breaks out in the Land of Isle (where our story takes place) and pulls in both Lord Charles and Lady Mariana.

Questions:

- Who started the fight and why?

- Why is Lord Charles involved? What is at stake for him and why is it so important?

- Why is Lady Mariana involved and again what is at stake for her and why is it so important?

3. The very same battle happens to interrupt the Queen’s celebrations and she is forced to break her her routines and change her plans.

Questions:

- How did the battle come to involve her?

- Why was she unaware or unmoved by it at first?

Idea: Was this perhaps the Queen’s battle and she was already celebrating her victory when she met unexpected resistence…?

With all this in mind, please finish your stories for the coming week using the following as a guideline. Always remember that the formula or template I offer is just to spark your thinking. Use it to make sure all the elements are there, but don’t necessarily follow it to the letter.

The first stage of your story needs three elements:

1. Protagonist: The main character is introduced and the scene is set.

Once upon a time there was… (someone somewhere in some situation)

2. Ordinary World: All is well, but there is an underlying problem. Usually the protagonist does not see the problem, but can experience some sense of dissatisfaction. They are either stuck in something too idyllic too last (Lady Mariana) or in a situation that is becoming unbearable (Jamima).

Everyday he/she/they would…(they do something that shows who they are now, but with underlying dramatic tension)

3. Call to adventure: The hero (protagonist) becomes aware of the problem and is asked to address it somehow. The enemy or antagonist often shows up in this scene.

Then one day…(a crisis calls them to action and potentially change. They may meet an enemy).

Looking forward to next week!

Petro

• Story structure: the five stages of a hero’s journey.
• Essential archetypes: the 4 forces needed for plot development
• Building character: the 3 levels of character growth.

What can you do with this information?

1. Write stories: you can use it to create fictional stories with transformational power.
2. Personal growth: you can use it to understand and design your own life story.
3. Teaching, training and mentoring:. If you are a teacher, facilitator, parent or manager, you can use it to structure other people’s stories: classes, workshops, programmes, events etc.
4. Marketing and presentations: You can use it to structure material and content for talks, presentations and marketing material.

Playing Mantis has a product for each of these applications:

Story Course: To play with fictional story so that you can learn to write your own.

Your Present success Story: using story for personal growth amd engineering your own success story.

Leading for Transformation: Training to help you impact the lives of others and instigate change.

Structuring your story: A presentation skills workshop to help you use story in structuring talks, presentations and marketing material.

Why is story structure such a powerful tool?

There is a mythic structure underlying almost all stories. It serves the purpose of taking the main character in the story on a journey of self discovery and personal growth. If you have read the Bible, or studied Greek mythology, or heard fairy tales from your grandmother, studied some Shakespeare at school, or just seen a few Hollywood films, you would recognize this structure right away.

Knowing this structure is useful because our personal cycles of growth and learning take the same shape. This applies to individuals and to groups. Story tellers through the ages have tried to first explain and then to instigate change. Story is the toll they use to do both.

The personal growth of a fictional hero mirrors the pattern of personal growth for you and the people around you. If you understand the structure and are able to wield it, you can understand how and why people change and grow and you can use it to instigate change and growth.

The problem is that change and growth is uncomfortable. Stories make the pain more bearable. Stories makes concrete that which is abstract. It simplifies things that are painfully complex and they give us perspective on what we see as our struggles. Stories allow us to come out of our lives for a moment and get a little safe distance so that we have renewed energy to get back in there and live the lives we were meant to live.

How do you want to use story structure now where you are in your journey?

To play with and create fictional stories? then the Story course is for you. Personal growth will be a welcome side effect, but is not the main aim.

To undergo personal growth? The Present Success Story Workshop is for you. It involves you and your life story.
To lead and teach others? Leading for Transformation is your thing and you will experience personal growth as a necessary component.

To structure presentations, talks and marketing material: Structure your Story is the product for you.

I think I made too many assumptions about you last night. I assumed that you knew it was about creating and playing with fictional stories that has transformational power. I apologize for the confusion and the uncertainty. Thank you for your grace and generosity. Think carefully what you want right now in your life, where do you want to take this?

I will call each of you for a conversation on where you are and what you want right now.

Stories and story structure are tools for guided and cushioned change. If you do not want change, or transformation right now, you do not need any of our courses. You are in a place where you need to rest and gather yourself. Honour that. But if you want to experience something different, create something different and live a different life, walk the road with Playing Mantis.

Dr. Petro Janse van Vuuren

Last night I talked for almost 2 hours on Skype with a Spanish PhD student who interviewed me for her thesis on using the ‘symbolic frame’ for creating lasting transformation in people. I told her about our process and some of the shifts we had noticed. She asked me how I know that these shifts are lasting and did not just occur on a superficial cognitive level.

How lasting is the happy ever after?

I had my own ideas about this, but I thought I would give it back to you and allow you yourselves to comment on the short term benefits you experienced during the course as well as the lasting value it has for you. Feel free to comment on how lasting you think the shifts are. What does ‘happy ever after’ mean to you in this sense?

Your comments will be invaluable for everyone interested in trying out one of our story workshops as well as for me to somehow capture the impact of the work.

Thank you for taking the time to reflect and share your thoughts, I am looking forward to your comments.

You must ask for what you truly want…
Don’t go back to sleep…

People are passing …back and forth
Across the threshold,
where the two worlds meet…
Don’t go back to sleep…

The door is big and round…
Don’t go back to sleep!

                       -          Rumi

Thank you Margaret for this lovely quote! I will use it more often. It is so apt.

Thank you to the rest of you for a most memorable story evening. The kind of un structured improvisation I used last night is one of the most difficult things to master and all of you did extremely well. Although some of you were out of your depth at times, you allowed the story and the other characters to carry you until you were able to contribute again. I was most amazed.

Who knew Friar Charles would sacrifice himself for the triplets?

Who knew old Bluh could be a baby minder?

Who knew Lady Ishtar could let her betrothed be with the women he truly loved?

Or that Ereshkigar was so ravenous as to lose herself in the face of nourishment – she who seemed to have it all?

As promised, here are the template points for the last stage of the journey: The Return with the elixir:

The last stage of the journey starts with the hero’s resolve to cross the threshold back to her own world, although sometimes she is chased across it. Often she experiences setbacks on her return which threaten to rekindle the flaw, addiction or desire that she had supposedly overcome in the ordeal.

 The lesson learned in the ordeal will be put to the final test as the hero faces death and Resurrection.  The hero must provide external proof of the change in her character by her behaviour or appearance.  It is one thing to learn something of oneself in the Special World; it is another to apply that knowledge back home in the ordinary world.  This is like Ishtar allowing Tamuz and Evelyn to raise their children together and giving up her betrothal.

  Having provided proof of growth, the hero may now Return with the Elixir, the item or the wisdom that can heal her wound and perhaps that of her world.  The story may end neatly with all loose ends tied or it may have an open ending.  Either way the hero gives her world and/or the audience a new perspective. Clearly the triplets are the Elixir of our story.

 The above is an excerpt from an article I wrote on story structure and you can use it for the completion of your story for next week.

Just remember the golden rule: the template is just a way into the story, but once the story flows it leads the way, not the template. Always trust the spontaneous flow over the analytical temptation of the template.

Also, as you complete your story, remember that different characters may have experienced certain moments of their journeys in different places in relation to the others. This is art, not science – let the gentle breezes of dawn and dusk lead you.

Next week I would like to spend some time looking at your personal story.  How will your story end? Will your story carry beyond the boundaries of your life to the lives of others?

I arrived at the class this week, knowing that lollie the dancer would not be present and I have made room for her absence in the planning. Just then 2 more participants excused themselves. So we started our journey to the Underworld with only 3 people, one of whom was not present last week.

How does a facilitator respond to absenteeism? This question is crucial because life happens and you need to be adaptable. This does not mean there is no cost  to all involved. I thought it may be useful for myself as well as for the participants and everyone else in similar circumstances to see why we miss absent people so much.  What is the cost of absenteeism for all sides and what the responsibility of each agent is to minimize this cost.

Let me clarify the context in which these costs are applicable: Learning situations that

1. are collaborative and rely on team work
2. seek to ignite creative thinking and problem solving
3. are designed over a period of time to build one on top the other towards a  particular desired outcome (not stand alone lessons)
4. employs experiential interactive methods where the learning is not found in notes and reading material.

For a soft ware company such a process could be a 2 day sprint for designing a particular piece of software. For a theatre company it could be rehearsing a play, for a business it could be strategic planning for the coming year.

People who excuse themselves from the process typically think they are the only ones paying a price and they weigh that cost and decide that they are willing to pay it. They are yusually unaware of other costs they are paying and the costs for the other agents:

Silenced voices

Absent participants silence their own voices which means they lose the chance to make choices that wilol impact them and may therefore lead to frustration when having to deal with others’ choices on your behalf. This means you also lose a sense of freedom and control.

Present participants lose the chance to learn how to integrate a large variety of different ideas (because some voices are silent). This means that one of the main objectives of the process i.e. learning to listen to diverse ideas and collaborating  is lost.

Yet, no one feels the high price of silenced voices as much as the facilitator to whom the inclusion of voices and the importance of the collaborative effort carries the  most value. The facilitator has probably spent years in training learning how to be a true facilitator that does not provide answers and does not influence the out come of the project with their own agenda. Facilitators typically have to unlearn the urge to be the saviour of the group and provide the answers and learn the ultimate value of only creating the space for participants to find their own voices and hear their own answers. Absenteeism therefore asks the facilitator a very hing price.

Trust

Absent participants lose a certain amount of trust from the present participants. Often this loss is very big and frustration can be very high. Other times, as in our case, participants are very forgiving and flow with what happens and still a small amount of trust is always sacrificed.

The facilitator therefore need to make provision for this loss of trust and find ways to mend the schism on top of having to rework the plan and make other adjustments.

Lost time

When next a participant who was absent rejoins a group, it will take 15 to 20 minutes to reintegrate the participant into the group. This usually is not a problem, because everyone takes that amount of time to get back into it and they enjoy the chance to share where they are with the member who was absent.

However, when half your group was not there, it will take 15-20 minutes for every absent member. In our case that amounts to 45-50 min i.e. more than half the class time. The reason for it taking so long is that for every extra participant the amount of relationships that need to be re-established after absence increases exponentially.

For the facilitator this creates more frustration than for the participants because she carries the responsibility of keeping the big picture and overall learning process in mind. Somehow, somewhere this lost time will have to be found.

Prescription instead of diversity

All the lost input impoverishes the final product making it less enriching, less inclusive and far less aesthetic. Overall, when voices are kept silent and group decisions are left to a few, the process becomes scripted by the present participants. And script leads to prescription and this in turn leads to a loss of diversity, colour and depth. The whole process looses levels of meaning and of beauty.

In our case this is especially true because one of the participants is working with an existing story in mind. This is not a problem so long as there are enough voices that force her to stretch the boundaries of her story. But with 3 people absent and only one friend who was also present the previous class, the story suddenly became the dominant voice and this raises red flags for me as the facilitator.

On one hand the facilitator is grateful for a participant with a strong idea of where they want the process to go. At the same time it creates a dominant culture that is hard to penetrate once the absent voices as back again.

Loss of transformational power

All the lost time accumulates toward the end of the programme and shortens the time for applying and integrating  the outcome into the real life situation it was designed for. This is probably the most important reason why you are missed when you are absent. Yet, only the facilitator is fully aware of this cost.

How many times have you attended a course or a workshop that left you with the question: So what? How do I use this in my everyday life?

Most processes are well designed around the climactic moment of insight and learning. Many processes fall short on the responsibility to help participants apply that insight and build it into a customised plan for their real life contexts. But if a process have that planned into it, absenteeism can greatly impact on the time set out for it towards the end.

In our case, we would feel the impact most on the second to last day when we are supposed to reflect on the journey and shape it into a tellable story. If there are too many loose ends this will create anxiety, frustration and possibly loss of closure and satisfaction. This means that the transformational power of the process is watered down because it is left unfinished.

IT also means that the transition back into one’s real life context is not cushioned with no buffer. This leaves the participant vulnerable to the very problems they came to the workshop to solve. I recently added 3 hours to my Personal Success Story workshop because the cushioning or return phase of the process was just not enough. Too many people left feeling vulnerable and without clarity as to the path ahead.

My solution for the story class:

Can everyone who was absent please come an hour earlier (6:30) tomorrow so that we can all be closer to the same page when the rest arrive?

This way the only cost is to the absent participants in terms of time and inconvenience and myself as facilitator. But this cost is minimal since I score in contact time and in regaining the momentum of the story.

Five Stages of story structure:

1. The Call to Adventure

 Example: Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived at the edge of a forest. She always wore a red riding hood that her grandmother had made for her. One day her mother called her: ‘Little Red, would you take this basket of goodies to your sick gran on the other side of the woods?”

2. Debate and preparation

“Sure, Mom,” she replied and set off.
Her mom called after her: “Just remember Rad, there is a wolf in the woods, so stay on the path and do not stray.”

3. The Journey (tasks and team)

Little Red skips into the woods singing to herself. She is tempted to pick flowers for her gran. She hears mom’s voice in her head, but she picks them anyway. She meets the wolf and innocently tells him where she is going. She follows his advice and take the wrong path…

4. Ordeal and reward

Little Red and the Wolf

When Little Red gets to Grandma’s house…all is not well. Gran looks very ill indeed. “Gran, why are your eyes so big? Your ears? Your mouth?” So much the better to see you with, hear you with, SWALLOW YOU WITH…

5. Return

A wood cutter hears a disturbing snoring sound from grandma’s house. He finds the wolf, cuts him open and sets the two women free. Yes, Little Red is no longer that little and she never wore the red hood again…

Four Forces for change

1. The hero with the goal: Little Red Riding Hood with a basket for Grandma.

2. The guide who supports: Mom with her advice

3. The obstacles which tempts and distracts: The sick grandma who may like flowers, who must be reached asap…

4. The enemy who opposes: The hungry wolf

Three levels of character

1. Action that can be seen from the outside: Little Red wheres her riding hood everyday, she accepts the challenge without hesitating and she skips into the forest.

2. Attitude that reveals internal motivation: She is eager, innocent and full of energy, motivated by fun and adventure.

3. Awareness that comes from seeing the big picture: she learns about making mistakes and failure, but also about strength and courage. She is now more grown up and far less naieve.

These work together throughout the story in a certain sequence. In the first class last night we played with Little Red Riding Hood. Above is an analysis of the story according to the elements of story structure. What you will not find here is the depth and meaning we each gained from the experience for our individual lives. For that you need to join us next week when we deal with the story of Jona in the belly of the whale!

Here is more info on our story class

Alternatively, whach this blog as we play with the questions :

What stage of the story are you in right now?

What forces work to help you transform your life?

What really drives you as hero of your life story?

How can you use all this in helping others be their own hero’s?

Dr. Petro Janse van Vuuren

Relationship

How to build team relationships that promote innovation.

The relationships between the members of an innovative team are based on trust and support. Your responsibility towards yourself is to be trusting and trustworthy, whilst your responsibility towards the rest of the team is to support them. The phrase we use in Improvisation to describe this element is “make your partner look good”. When everyone in the team is out to make the rest of the team look good it creates a safe environment where everyone feels safe to share new ideas. We are so used to just making our selves look good, but if you know that everyone in your team is out to make you look good it takes a lot of pressure from your shoulders and it builds trust between you and the rest of the team. Besides ,everyone in the team will look amazing if there are 10 others making them look good instead of everyone just trying to make themselves look better than the rest.

Quick exercise:

Here is a fun game from improvisation theatre that illustrates the “make your partner look good” concept very well. The game is called “Yes lets!” For this exercise you need enough space for everyone to move around. The game starts with anyone in the group making a suggestion for an action such as “Let’s climb a tree!” or “lets bake a cake!” Everyone then replies with the words “Yes lets!”, and mimes the action with enthusiasm. At any point someone else can make a new suggestion and everyone replies again with “Yes lets!”

The best way to make your team members look good is by accepting their suggestions and doing the action with enthusiasm. If someone said something like “let’s roar like lions” and just did it by himself, he would look like a fool and probably feel like one as well. What I love about this game is that you don’t just say yes I like your idea; you actually have to accept the idea by doing something with commitment. Often we will say we accept someone’s ideas but it’s just lip service, because we don’t actually take any action. The safety, trust and support that is generated when everyone in the team is committed to making the rest of the team look good, creates a energetic atmosphere in which innovation can thrive.

Make your partner look good story

Last night my wife told me a beautiful story about how a family made their mother look good by accepting an offer and doing something with it. In this story the offer the mother made wasn’t an idea; it was a reality that was imposed on her without her choice. She was diagnosed with throat cancer. In her final week her last wish was to have a meal with her family, since she loved cooking and sharing dinner with her loved ones. She couldn’t swallow the food because of the cancer and therefore had to spit it out after chewing it. Seeing this, her family also spat out their food after chewing. They made her look good by accepting her reality and doing it with her. Accepting other’s reality, whether it is their creativity, personality or hardship and doing something with it is how you show real acceptance and that is how you build trust in your relationships with others.

More on trust

People often tell me that they can’t trust others because the others aren’t trustworthy. What comes first, trust or trustworthiness? People will say others must earn their trust. Does that mean you treat them untrustworthy until they have earned your trust? People will react in the way that you treat them. If you treat someone as untrustworthy, they will act untrustworthy. But what if you trust someone and they disappoint you? That is where grace comes in, because you know you are also not perfect and also not always 100% trustworthy. Accept the mistake and do something with it. The more trusting you are going to be the more trustworthy the people in your team will become.