Circle of the 9 Muses

Chapter 9

Use this exercise when you want the team to explore future events that may disrupt the work—and then generate plans to be ready for those scenarios.

For this exercise you will need:

• Pencil and paper
• A slide or handout that shows team members the story spine structure

Stories are simulators. When we hear stories, we see—and feel—ourselves in the story, and it becomes a valuable way to test our reactions and mental models without those pesky real-world consequences.

At a primal level, story is a survival technique. In the classic The Uses of Enchantment, Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim says that some children showed high levels of resilience in concentration camps because of the fairy tales they had been told over and over, which had equipped their young psyches with rehearsal in chaos, fear, vulnerability, and survival. They had already met the wolf at the door.

In this exercise, you will similarly use stories to simulate possible future events and increase your team's capacity for agile responsiveness.

With connections to Pixar and Hollywood screenwriting, the classic story spine structure is a template delivered with a twist: You are using it to tell the story of a plausible event that hasn't happened yet, but could. This innovation of using the story spine for a future story comes from Kat Koppett, master of bringing improvisation-inspired learning to leadership ...