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"Babette Wagenvoort":http://www.babettewagenvoort.com/ illustrated the Story Guide for us, as well as work with the DTI and the BBC.
This Guide, and the Flyer that goes with it, are two of the major assets which resulted from a 5 year partnership (their choice of word) with SDC, the Swiss Aid Agency. We tried out different aspects of story as an instrument of knowledge exchange. It majors on the development of professional practice and facilitation in face to face settings, but also has some interesting exploratory references to what SDC calls the capitalisation of experience. In essence, how do you convert the baggy raw materials that might result from workshops and other sessions, into condensed final products, fit for distribution.
In work after this Guide was finished, the term intermediate products was coined to capture the idea of this iterative challenge, when working with Intercooperation on a project, now know as Water, Land & People. This project seeks to consolidate the lessons from water table management in different countries around the world, and SDC expressly asked Intercooperation to use story techniques to elicit, condense and re-present these lessons.
German, French and Spanish versions of the Guide and the flyer can be found on the SDC Process and methodic competencies research pages which describe it thus:
“Stories are an easy way of addressing the emotions and analytical understanding at the same time, thus promoting awareness. The Guide is designed to create story-telling skills and confidence. First, it contains instruments and model approaches for recalling and conjuring up mental images of experiences. Second, it suggests ways of structuring stories to make them interesting and intelligible. And third, it provides ideas about development cooperation contexts in which stories can be an effective communication tool.”
I also want to namecheck Jeannine Brutschin, now at the Novartis Foundation. Withour her velvet-gloved determination, the sprawling incoherence of the first Guide (some 300 pages in length) would never have found it’s way to this elegance and distillation. Thanks Jeannine.
