Welcome to Operational Storytelling
Whether you’re a shift manager, a dev lead, an ops VP, or the head of a company, you’re a leader. And being a leader, particularly the kind of leader who wants to make sure your people are getting more out of their work than a paycheck, is more difficult right now than it’s been in any of our lifetimes. We are living through profound technological, economic, cultural, and political upheavals all at once.
You worked hard to get where you are, and you want to move forward while maintaining your integrity, while doing the right thing. But everywhere around you is fear, uncerttainty, doubt, and bullshit. The only way out of all this is through it. And one of the best tools in your toolbox is the art of Operational Storytelling.
Story is how we humans learn best, it’s how we come together to tackle common goals, and it helps us find meaning in what we do. Operational Storytelling is my term for using the power of story in our lives, with integrity. It can be applied across every domain of your work, and not only can it be effective, it can help you feel better about the work you do.
And who am I to be telling you this?
Good question. My name is Erik Schmidt. I’m not an author or screenwriter, but I am a student of how story is applied in everyday life. My career has been unpredictable, to say the least. Among other things, I’ve been a US Army officer, a technical analyst at DARPA, the manager of a nonprofit for disadvantaged kids, a webmaster (back when that was a thing), a law student, cofounder of a tech startup, a software product manager, and a tech transformation consultant.
In all those roles, across all those domains, storytelling has just kept popping up. It’s how we planned missions in the Army and it framed how we evaluated technology at DARPA. It guided all our work with kids and families at the “I Have A Dream” Foundation, and it helped me explain a whole new form of publishing to my government bosses. I use it every day in helping clients build products and navigate change.
Storytelling is the water we fish swim in — it’s so pervasive that we often don’t even realize it’s there. But when we do tune into it and work to get better at using it not just effectively, but ethically, it can become a superpower.
I’ll be posting things I’ve learned about Operational Storytelling, showcasing examples of storytelling that works, and dissecting where storytelling can go wrong. Please reach out to give feedback, and if you’re so inclined, to share your own stories about storytelling (yes, this can get pretty meta pretty quickly).
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