Circle of the 9 Muses

Chapter 13

Use this exercise to find the buried patterns and recurring themes that are threaded across the many stories in your team or organization.

For this exercise you will need:

• A group of stories to analyze
• Large-sized sticky notes of differing colors
• A lot of wall space for posting and rearranging the stickies. This may be a large whiteboard, multiple flip charts, or a very long sheet of butcher paper taped to a wall.

Every story you hear is packed with meaning. They're like those clown suitcases, where the clown pops it open and starts pulling out a ridiculous amount of content: Clothing! A vase! An extension ladder! Another clown!

Amazing how so much meaning can be packed into such an efficient, little package that is a single story.

And that's just one story! When you have a bunch of story suitcases, they collectively hold deep wisdom about the team and the organization. With a little bit of thought and an elegant process, your team can begin to mine those stories for gold.

As we explored in Chapter 6, “Summoning the Muse,” the great opportunity of story work is to build your and your team's capacity for meaning making. Here is a simple process for hearing the deep wisdom that your organization's stories is waiting to release to you.

First we will look at a simple version, and then a more robust process that can dig even deeper into a large pool of stories. ...