I would impose some guardrails so that the contributors don’t take the story too far from my vision. I’m sure I would reserve the right to reject changes, but I haven’t figured out how much poetic license I would give to contributors for the sake of the experiment.

A part of me recoils at the thought of putting myself out there over and over again. On the other hand, in the more traditional approach, I put years of blood and sweat on the line with just a handful of book editors. Do I want to be crushed all at once by experts, or tortured drip, drip, drip by readers? At least I would have readers.

In town only four days, she serendipitously had met the hostess of the Yoga Day USA open house just hours before. Now she stood in the suburban basement, surrounded by strangers sitting cross-legged on mats, and talked about her lineage.

She is a descendant of ancient Jewish high priests and of Dakota Sioux. She told us she could tell we had peace in our hearts and that we sought healing and happiness. A Kabbalist Shaman, she said she possessed energy given to the high priests and conserved over the centuries through her lineage. We will need it. The earth is unsettled, and 2012 is only two years away.

John’s story

A child of the ’60s, silver-haired John talks about the brilliance of Bob Dylan during a break between yoga sessions. “How many times must the cannon balls fly?” he asks. “It took just one war to move us to action back then. Now, we send our children to war after war and we’re proud when they’re killed.”

Things are getting bad. “We’re the frogs in the boiling water, not noticing the gradual increase in heat until it’s too late.” Architects and engineers know that jet fuel alone could not have brought the towers down. Cash for clunkers is likely a plot to get the old cars off the road so electronics-jamming attacks are made more effective. And how can we allow all the cell phone waves to go passing through our heads?

My story

This Yoga Day open house attracted people who sense something is wrong. We’re nervous rabbits before an earthquake; frogs who have noticed  it’s getting a bit hot. Some of us have created elaborate narratives to make sense of how we got here and to map a way out.

I don’t think the narrative need be complicated at all. The bus has no brakes and it’s barreling down the hill. The passengers who are partying have to stop and look ahead; the passengers who are sleeping have to wake up. And if that takes a Kabbalist Shaman, I’m OK with that.

Diane Gage-Lofgren, our national VP of communications and PR, had asked a poet/performance artist  to bring life to our communication team’s new vision statement. A stroke of genius. I will forever have a visual and resonant image to add soul to our vision: To be a model for communication excellence as Kaiser Permanente is a model for the future of health care.

How did Sekou Andrews do it? By story, of course. He became Health Care. He was big, powerful, essential. He was the most important issue of our day. “But no one seems to be impressed with all this,” he said. “Because to the average American I am intimidating, extraneous, inaccessible and even bewildering.”

And he himself had no voice. He needed us to tell his story. He needed us to tell it in 140 characters, in video, in wikis — whatever it took and wherever the audience. And we communicators at KP have the special responsibility and opportunity to tell his story on behalf of an organization that is “offering a solution to the leader of the Free World.

I could see myself in the story — as the hero, of course. “Not observers. I need visionaries who can see as far as I can reach.” He needs me. I’m in.

And that’s how leadership storytelling works.

By comparison, my job as an organizational communicator is easy. Still, I have a well-drawn gameplan, thanks to Guber’s article in the December 2007 Harvard Business Review (you can search for it on my public Evernote folder). His four key principles:

The story must be true to the storyteller, reflecting his/her core values:

“He must enter the hearts of his listeners, where their emotions live, even as the information he seeks to convey rents space in their brains. Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. So although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s-eye. To reach it, the visionary manager crafting his story must first display his own open heart.”

The story must be true to the audience:

Every storyteller is in the expectations-management business and must take responsibility for leading listeners effectively through the story experience, incorporating both surprise and fulfillment. At the end of the story, listeners should think, “We never expected that – but somehow, it makes perfect sense.”

The story must adapt to the moment:

Intensive preparation and improvising are two sides of the same coin. If you know your story well, you can riff on it without losing the thread or the focus.

The story must elevate:

Even in today’s cynical, self-centered age, people are desperate to believe in something bigger than themselves. The storyteller plays a vital role by providing them with a mission they can believe in and devote themselves to.

Tellingly, the guy from Hollywood says the story has its own power, regardless the medium:

It isn’t special effects or the 0′s and 1′s of the digital revolution that matter most – it’s the oohs and aahs that the storyteller evokes from an audience. State-of-the-art technology is a great tool for capturing and transmitting words, images, and ideas, but the power of storytelling resides most fundamentally in “state-of-the-heart” technology.

This video by Maya Lin (creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) helped me grasp the enormity of the statistic. The haunting melody by Brian Eno also transfixed me. Others who have blogged/tweeted about this also mention the tune. About the 20th time today that I’ve been reminded that the key to a good video is good sound.

Maya Lin – Unchopping A Tree from Unchop A Tree on Vimeo.

Kai gives Granny a knitting lesson from Steve Krizman on Vimeo.

What I’ve learned so far:

• Video is not as forgiving as written storytelling. If you don’t get the beginning, middle and end captured in video, your story will stink. You either have to stage a reenactment, or you resort to a silly text card.
• Sound is the most important part of video. I’ve had decent visual, but lousy sound. Nothing you can do with that. Conversely, with good sound you can get by in editing.
• On the scene, you have to work harder on a video story than on a written story. You snooze, you lose the one piece of action that would make the whole story.

I uploaded several months’ worth of video capture to my Vimeo account today. Rather than use the feature-filled, but molasses-slow CyberLink software, I slapped segments together using FlipShare. I am satisfied with the FlipShare results — the editing quality matches the Flip capture quality. We’re not talking Cannes here.

The video I chose to embed in this post is my favorite from a video storytelling standpoint — a finger knitting session between my Mom and my 9-year-old daughter. No written word can match the close-up of my Mom’s gnarled fingers, or the quiet exasperation on Kai’s face, or the poignant moment between Mom and my wife Karen, or Kai’s feet-kicking thrill when Granny thanks her for the help. It doesn’t cover a lot of territory, but it is a hint at the special power of video storytelling.

The stories are more compelling: We all know someone whose breast cancer was caught early. That one life is real to us. The hundreds of false-positives are not. Even if we know an individual who got a clean bill of health after a suspicious mammogram, we don’t question her decision to get a mammogram in the first place.

The stories have and will prevail over the facts, and that is an important lesson for any of us who ever want to change someone’s mind. You want to improve service at work? Get your kid to drive safely? Pass a health care reform bill? Find yourself stories that resonate with the people you want to convince.

Did Jacqueline Kennedy and a fawning press create the myth? Kass makes a pretty good case for that. But no matter how it started, the myth caught on and remains alive today because it speaks to many of us who believe an individual can make a difference. It is a myth that empowers all who believe our country stands above all for justice and equality. JFK was president for only three years, but the new narrative he launched for the country resulted in civil rights reforms after his death. Bobby’s murder, as horrible as it was, served to add to the heroic inspiration of the myth. Rather than scare us away from the cause, Bobby’s assasination emboldened many, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Teddy tarnished the myth with Chappaquiddick and his narcisism. Only in his later years did I begin to forgive Teddy and allow him into the story. His rebuke of Senators who refused to raise the minimum wage — “What more do you want from the working men and women of this country,” he bellowed — demonstrated a deep-seated commitment to the ideals of equality and justice.

I spent the last week watching Teddy speaches and learned that his ideals were there, even as he hypocritcally leveraged the life of privilege. Days after Martin Luther King Junior’s murder, he urged Americans to look inside themselves for the seeds of such tragedy. His message: Apathy allows people to think it’s OK to kill and OK to burn down cities in response. His eulogy at Bobby’s funeral was artflully put to a slide show in a 2008 YouTube video. The images of suffering in Iraq and New Orleans set against words spoken 40 years earlier depressed me. Has anything changed?

Kass’ column brought me up from that funk, though. The myth hasn’t changed. As long as it endures, I know that it is being kept alive by people who will continue the journey toward peace, equality and justice.

Jim proposes that someone — internet service providers, perhaps — collect a small fee from Internet users, who then can swap digital music files without barrier and annoying security/tracking codes. This pool of cash then would be divided among labels and artists (much, much easier said than done). His Choruss idea, a skunk works project within Warner Music Group, will pilot the idea at a handful of universities next school year.

Jim’s narrative uses a learn-from-history trope.

In 1847, composer Ernest Bourget sipped coffee in a trendy Paris cafe, Les Ambassadeurs, and listened as one of his pieces was performed. He left without paying the tab, telling the manager, “you did not pay me for the performance of my music, I will not pay you for my meal.’ A court battle ensued, leading to creation of SACEM, the first agency to collect royalties for artists.

The Bourget story is a bit of jujitsu that allows Jim to portray a free and open Net as a nice place, like Les Ambassadeurs, but not so nice for the Bourgets of the world. His use of story is ingenious and ironic, given that the tactic of re-storying a prevailing narrative usually is employed by the little guy (see indigenous people and the Columbus myth).

A detractor all steamed up about corporate greed can glibly dismiss Choruss as a money-grab. But by turning the David-v-Goliath trope on its head and by siding with technology, Jim has brought the debate to a more substantive plane. A recent post by Mike Masnick at techdirt  is an excellent example. Mike gives Jim his due and then turns Jim’s story back on him, saying he is applying a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem. Touche.

Jim and I discovered we both are newspaper refugees and have an editor in common (a good one, Wayne Ezell, now at the Times-Union in Jacksonville).  Jim’s take on the music industry seemed transferrable to print journalism. We both have been watching Steven Brill’s plan to aggregate newspaper content so that readers can be offered to pay for “premium” content beyond that which is found on the newspaper Web sites. I wonder if something similar can be applied at the local newspaper level. Might the Denver Post sell some of its most desirable content, with proceeds subsidizing general coverage and the more granular reporting that will never generate a sustainable market income on its own?

Leonard Shlain argues that in the mists of time, the masculine / left-brained / inventors of the alphabet staged a coup over the feminine / right-brained / painters of the pictograph. In his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Shlain combs the arc of human history for proof of the victory of word over image. To Shlain, a cardiologist by day and anthropologist on the side, the fall of the Egyptian queen, the rise of the male cleric, and the sanctity of deterministic science are among the results of this shift from image to word. He believes the pendulum is swinging back as screens grab territory from paper.

Shlain’s thesis came to mind this week while having my recurring “I’m a word guy and you’re a visual guy” conversation with freelance videographer Tom Cherrey. Tom suggested that there are more limitations on video storytelling than on word storytelling. I bought the point at the time, primarily because my fledgling attempts at video storytelling are shining examples of these limitations — you can’t re-create what you failed to capture, your canvass is more restricted (time, viewing frame, technology), and the camera doesn’t lie.

But later I read Kathy Hansen’s compilation of online video stories and followed the links. Some the of the videos are head-scratchers (just as a lot of poems escape me), but I viewed several that demonstrate visual advantages over text. Forever’s Not So Long  is a short story in video. The characters’ emotions and the practical implications of Armageddon are efficiently keenly channelled in 13 minutes of cleverly edited imagery and dialogue. Gary tells the story of a young boy conquering desire and does it so well that monolingual me could understand it, even though the dialogue is in French.

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess came to mind again while watching Sir Ken Robinson say that educational systems around the world have been built to create industrial workers who need math, science, and language skills, but not creative ones. His TED talk includes a story about Gillian Lynne, who broke out of the public education mold to become the successful choreographer of Cats. Gillian would have been diagnosed with ADHD, given medication, and told to conform if she was in public school today. But conformity would have smothered her genius. How many others are thus smothered by a system that nurtures only a certain kind of intelligence?

This brings me (finally) to my 8-year-old daughter. She is more a goddess than a scientist, that’s for sure. She is bright, witty, and creative (in a Jackson Pollack sort of way). But she does not read well. Ideas and words do not live in tidy file drawers in her brain. They are scattered about and she accesses them in her own artful, experiential way. Yet we have her on medication because we cannot bear to see her struggle in the traditional classroom and her parents’ alphabet-oriented view of the world cannot see her happy if she does not read or write well.

But maybe Slain is right and the goddess is rising. I am as alarmed as any writer by the drastic decline in reading, but who’s to say that our journey on this planet is any less enjoyable and meaningful if we communicate more through feature films, documentaries, slide shows, music vids, and yes, even video games?