It's been a while, but I am back. For a while wasn't sure I had anything new to say to the world, at least that wasn't based on proprietary research. Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about innovation (hey it's my job), new media and so-called "social networks" in the work environment. Lots of interesting things happening in all these spaces, and I realized that blogging would be a good way to work out my own thoughts on the subjects, and hopefully get insights from others as well.
A couple of years ago I organized a conference session on storytelling as a means to communicate anthropological findings in non-academic environments. Storytelling is central to anthropology as a discipline—not only do we all study some aspect of human story, the stories of the cultures we study are key to our understanding of them. Stories become mechanisms for collaboration and change, as well as carriers of history. But we don’t always stop to think about the stories we tell, even though anthropologists regularly use storytelling as a communication device. In order to be relevant in settings dominated by non-anthropologists, we must not only pass on the data we have gathered, but convey its importance and convince decision makers in business, design, development, public policy, environment, and a myriad of other fields. Constructing these stories involves editing and carefully choosing what to relay to our audience. Delivering the stories involves performance on many scal...
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