Enabling Innovation
Through Storytelling and Brainstorming

Nahum Gershon
Schmooz Productions

Bethesda, MD, USA

It takes time to build or change castles.
Rome wan not built or changed in a day.
A Modified Irish Proverb.

The Internet and information technology have allowed information to literally reach any corner of the world.  These technological breakthroughs and their applications have also enabled us to get information faster than ever before.  These continuously changing streams of information have not gone unnoticed- they have tremendously increased the pace of our personal lives. Organizations are affected too.  To be able to cope with these significant changes, organizations need to develop new ways to get, assimilate, and present information.

To enable coping with these changes, organizations need to change the way they have been doing things and even change their culture. Changes are not easy and they does not happen in one lecture and certainly not overnight.  This session will teach the audience how to go about establishing processes that will assist both business and public organizations to cope with this new world order. These processes involve new ways to conduct both storytelling and brainstorming and how to incorporate them in organizational daily activities.  Practice is essential!

Storytelling could be used in presenting information in an indirect but fast and effective way.  It can capture and represent complex relationships and arguments much better than a linear list of bullets on a slide. Storytelling is also an effective tool in developing strategic and tactical thinking, i.e., strategic plan of an organization.  Composing stories about appropriate situations could allow us to think about required next steps in solving organizational problems, and how the organization would best position itself to cope with new situations.  In the session, we will discuss and teach practical storytelling methods that could be used in organizational environments.

Brainstorming sessions are means to thinking about new solutions to problems and to improving existing solutions to old problems.  They could complement and enhance the storytelling process. This session will outline brainstorming techniques that could be used in a group or alone.  The session will go through group processes that enable to generate new ideas in a short time.

Both storytelling and brainstorming methods need practice. Through routine engagements with these processes, participants will be able to become more creative and increase the vitality and innovative power of their organizations.  We will outline ways to establish a process to make brainstorming and storytelling part of the organizational culture enhancing collaboration among other things. These activities are enjoyable too.

Nahum Gershon on Story Telling

The session will be conducted in an informal fashion allowing the audience to interact with each other and with the facilitator.

Language of tutorial: english.

Leader:
Nahum D. Gershon

He is a Principal Scientist at The MITRE Corporation. His work is concerned with data and information visualization, Web browsers, image processing, data organization, and analysis of medical, environmental, and other multidimensional data, as well as the role of narrative in human-computer interactions. He pursues research in the use of understanding of the perceptual system in improving the visualization process and dealing with information. Nahum has published extensively in the area of visualization and has organized and chaired seven SIGGRAPH panels. He served as a Co-Chair of the IEEE Visualization Conferences in 1994-1995 and co-organized the first Information Visualization Symposium in 1995. He served as a member of the Advisory Panel of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) and the Committee and was a member of the Focus Group on Visualization and Presentation of the White House's GLOBE Program. It is worth mentioning that for the last three years in July Nahum comes to Poland to look for his roots and to attend Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków.

Nahum grew up in a melting pot – a real one. This multi-lingual environment was cerebral but also literal and oral. So naturally, he desired, since he was a child, to be a scientist, an aspiration he fulfilled specializing in the areas of chemistry, physics, and biology.

Later in life, he discovered that humans cannot live on reason & linear thinking alone, so he went through years of personal transformation. Today, Nahum works on combining creative expressions like storytelling, film, and visual and interactive design with technology and strategic planning. He can still be logical (and very much so), but he does it only when appropriate.

In his free time, Nahum, among other things, participates in a number of national and international committees. He enjoys life.

For more information see also:
http://www.siggraph.org/publications/newsletter/v33n3/contributions/gershon.html
http://www.engr.udayton.edu/faculty/wsmari/cts05/luncheon.html