Storytelling for Engineers 

Course Overview

Duration

2-day Public Training Course

Location

Egrove Park, Saїd Business School, Oxford, UK

Price

£1,200.00 (net VAT) no accommodation 

 £ 1400.00 (net VAT) plus 2 nights accommodation 

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Oxford TRIZ Live - Storytelling for Engineers

Storytelling for Engineers is an Oxford Creativity public training course which has been developed specially to teach Engineers to harness the power of storytelling to communicate well and write better business cases, proposals and presentations. 

What benefits does this course deliver?

• This engaging training will help you, communicate engagingly when presenting or writing (for example reports and business cases) and reveal and share existing relevant knowledge
• Understand the practice and logic of story telling, including how the brain functions when it hears a story and how to structure your narrative to excite and convince your readers
• Learn to communicate effectively, work well in teams and better collaborate across your entire organisation
• Become familiar with and comfortable using two different narrative methods to map out the narrative landscape of any given project, proposal, bid or initiative
• Learn the ten most important features of a successful proposal and how to apply them
• Find out how to create and use templates to explain a single idea, deliver a series of important messages and ultimately structure and build a long-form proposal or conference presentation on your idea

Course Materials

• All the methods, case studies and associated narrative based insights discussed in this course will be fully documented and packaged as a PDF for reference and future use.

What makes the course effective?

• Oxford Creativity’s courses are delivered by TRIZ experts in open, interactive workshops using unique collaborative, hands-on exercises specifically designed to reinforce learning
• Delivered by Ron Donaldson, who has twenty one years’ experience working with teams, communities and groups to work through a series of narrative methods and develop their own stories
• Includes case studies where teams have developed and submitted successful bids with completeness of content
• A highly stimulating, immersive and enjoyable learning experience
• Opportunities to take your own idea/bid/proposal through a guided selection of methods to transform and transition your initial possibility to probable success and suggestions to achieve almost certainty 

Course Details

This course is made up of 4 modules, delivered over 2 days. Each module includes a slide presentation and learning exercises followed by a review, feedback and, coaching session.

1. Story Work

This module covers the basics of working with stories, including why stories are the most effective way to make sense of a situation. It also explains how to make any session more participatory and collaborative and why it is important that the group themselves carry out their own inquiry into the patterns and implications of their stories.

The module also includes the traditional nature of story, how the talking stick can be an enabling constraint and the benefits of circles over triangles for a room layout.

Case studies through anecdote circles to improve a complex system, and give suggestions as to how you would then use any outputs to inform and guide a creativity or knowledge sharing workshop.

2. Narrative Landscape

Make the invisible visible. This module shows how you can get a group to map a landscape of stories such that they can make sense of the patterns and move towards a more desired future.

We will look at the method in detail and discuss the benefits of variety and how different perspectives can influence the outputs.

Case studies will illustrate the possibilities this method opens up and shows how this might be used for all reviews and even capturing the knowledge of a retiree. We will also look at associated and overlapping methods such as spark lines and the current excellent Transition Town book called ‘What Is? – What if?’.

3. Story Board

When you are storyboarding a creative idea or problem solving solution there are a number of tried and tested templates we can use. 

This module covers the best of these and will give clear instructions and an explanation of how to use Springboard Stories, Spark-Lines and Message maps to structure your information into a form that is most likely to gain buy-in and commitment from any listener.

We will also briefly look at cartoon storyboarding and s-curves as a way to tease out an action plan for a given project or initiative.

4. Story Telling

Using the insights and outputs generated by the first three modules we can begin to look at how these can be delivered as stories for maximum benefit.

Here we will look at the use of the personal pronoun, how we might 'storify' our own transition timeline and take a brief look at the difference between autobiography and memoir.

Finally, we will look at the many available templates for structuring a perfect story and will focus on how to maximise your impact in a 40-minute Conference or Board Presentation.

Who should book?

• Anyone who has to write bids, proposals or business cases 
• Those who struggle to remember the order and precise wording of presentations
• Those responsible for communications, both internal and external
• Engineers!