 Hello everyone, my name is Paul Goddard and welcome to episode 92 of The Agile Pubgust. 92, can you believe that? Yes, we're still in lockdown. Yes, we're not in the pub when we should be, but we had to have a few drinks in our own homes this weekend. So we hope you like this episode. In this episode, we're talking about stories and storytelling because it's task number two of the Scrum Mastery Challenge lockdown edition. Yes, seven of our global contestants had to submit a 60-second video of telling a story to me and Jeff. And then we were going to give points for the best stories. So we hope you like the episode. We hope you're doing well back at home. We hope you're subscribed by now. You really should be. We hope if you can to give us a nice review on iTunes because apparently that helps. And why don't you tell a friend about the pubcast? Invite one of the people you work with to have a listen to one of these episodes and you never know, they might get hooked. So on with the show, enough of me rambling, let's play the jingle. Cheers. Cheers. Can't you see in you here? I know another lockdown pipe on a very murky evening in the UK or in my part of the UK. It was terrestrial. Here we had thunder, lightning and flash floods and everything. Did you? Flash floods? Yeah, yeah. People's houses were flooded. So much came down in such a short amount of time. People's garages were flooded and yeah. Wow. Not here. We had rain. We had claps of thunder. We had that lovely smell. You know when you open the window, it's been a bit dry and a lovely fresh rain smell. Do you like that? Get an old mate. What are you drinking, my friend? What's that cloud? It's like a cloudy pint. This is a bitter. It's from a local brewery by me, Daya Brewery. They're doing very well for themselves apparently. This one's called Best Foot Forward. It's a bitter and it's so much so I think maybe it should be perhaps more room temperature. I've had it in the fridge. It feels like something you'd get from a pump and it would be a nice room temperature, English bitter. Didn't soup be in the fridge then? It's fine. It's absolutely fine and I will be one of those heathens who actually will happily drink room temperature at fridge temperature. It's not carbonated. It's not like a lager or anything. A little bit of fruit flavour, a little bit of what they call here barley biscuity flavour, which you could eat that with a bit of cake in the afternoon. You had me a biscuit and you had me a cake. So anything like that probably will do. From my side of things, mate, there's only the mysterious, we think it's number seven, but it could be number six. It's either lucky number six. It's in the middle of the box basically. So I was hoping this would be my last lockdown tider but it doesn't look like it's going to be the case. Oh, this is Burrow Hill. Burrow Hill Somerset. I've been drinking recently on the weekends. Burrow Hill Perry. So this is a familiar brand to me. Okay. So yeah, this is local stuff. This is Shep's Shep's Amali, I think. Yeah, so six percent. Standards. Yeah. It's a blend of at least 11 vintage cider apples, Geoff. Vintage medium. Blend of 11 means any old apples. Off the orchard floor. Yeah. But it's quite, it's certainly very clear. Put a fair bit of fizz to it. Yeah, so it's a cheers to you mate and good health. Cheers. Yeah. Happy birthday. Oh, in my lad. So I've eaten too much today. We've got a cake and we've had a massive, my someone did a takeaway curry for his birthday tea. So we had a takeaway curry cake and now a nice calorific cider just to finish all off. So I'm extra notch on the belt tonight, I think. Yeah. That's right. It just tastes like apples to me. That's fine by me. Fair enough. All right. Yeah, crack on, shall we? We need to review some entries, some competition entries. Scrum Master Challenge Lockdown Edition, task two. Challenge two, yeah. So for everybody else's benefit, the contestants were challenged to write a story this week and they were given one picture as inspiration. It was a photograph. When I looked at it, I thought maybe French cobbled street, sort of black and white photo, oldish bike with a basket and that was it. They were to use that picture as inspiration to tell the story. In 60 seconds. 60 seconds was all that, yeah. And through them, of course, out by breaking the time box last week and the metaphorical wrist slap, I think worked. No one broke the time box this week, did they? So just to cover that, across all submissions this week, there were no time issues that I need to report. Excellent. Excellent. Any other judicial verdicts needed? No, I think everyone was in within the constraints, certainly they're all videos all submitted on time, I believe, and certainly time constraints were followed, so that was great. No penalty points for that element as such at the moment, All right, okay. Where should we start then? First on my list is Jags. Jags, representing Team UK. So we will play a little bit of a clip here. When I was 10, I had my first job, a pepper boy. Me and my bike look a budget once. We had to deliver about 40 kilograms of newspapers every day. So there, yeah, there you go. So talking about his old, his first job and his little bike with a name, Budgie. I don't think I did ever name my bike, no. But for me, that made it a little bit more personal. So it was, it made it, I've got some of my notes down here, seems very genuine and kind of it's, it didn't seem in any way fictitious, it didn't seem in any way unauthentic, inauthentic, that's the word. Yeah, I think he saw that, he saw that picture and that memory came flooding back. It was, it was clear he was remembering. You could see he was, he was looking off to the side looking wistful. You almost imagine him going out and delivering a few papers. He was quite specific as well, wasn't he? So he was, he was the weight of the papers, the time of day of his paper ran, very specific details that he brought into his story. And that helps. So that helps the listener to put themselves in that, you know, to build empathy to be specific, something that certainly from my improv workshops and things like that. I've been told by improv teachers is to be specific, one of Mike Myers's big, big learning points is he talks about specifics, the more specific you can make something, the more people will be there with you. Yeah. So that was good. Oh, I've got here one thing on a slight, this is one of the slight negative here is a lack, a bit of a lack of emotion. I felt there could have been a bit more of an explanation about how he was feeling and about how that paper round made him the emotions that he felt at the time or the emotions he's feeling now. So it's quite factual, as opposed to quite more emotional. Okay, because I got, I seems to remember him saying he loved it. Mentioned all the seasons, really enjoyed it. So I think I got the feeling of emotion. So the fact that you didn't meant it maybe connected more. Did you have a paper round? Yep, you did. Maybe it's because I hated my paper round. So I've got a lot of bad memories of my paper round. That's interesting, isn't it? So I've got a bias there. Yeah, maybe. Was it a story that that's the question I had for you as a referee? Was it technically a story? It was just sort of a memory? Well, this is something we need to discuss, whether there's a few examples of this across. Whilst I don't break any rules as such, do they follow the intention and follow the? Is there a definition of what a story is or what's needed to make something a story, Mr. Referee? Well, a story from my perspective is something that has a character or a protagonist to some kind of feature. It has a dramatic arc, Jack, some kind of establishment of current beginning, maybe some kind of drama to build in towards a climax or some kind of middle, and then some kind of resolution, some kind of new reality that's formed an end. That's the kind of classic Hollywood definition of story. So was there a dramatic arc, Jack? Not really, from my perspective, not really. It was quite, it was a description of a memory. It's a tough ask to tell a story in 60 seconds, but to me that was like a flashback inner story. Yeah. And I liked the, it definitely pinged off some emotions, positive for me, not so positive for you, but that's art. And you can't help that. But just to play devil's advocate here, I would also classify stories. We tell stories about ourselves and about our past. So I'm telling a story for nostalgia purposes, but this is the thing. I would probably tell different stories to my friends than I would do to an audience, maybe. So if I was trying to sell a screenplay or trying to write the next novel, I might tell different stories. So is a novel an autobiography? Absolutely not. So it's a different thing, they're different audiences, and maybe they're hitting on different, they're different structures, I think. Okay. They're not necessarily monologues, but there's a memory can be, I think you can still tell memories in a storytelling passion. You can still create drama in a memory and some of my best friends from school, I won't name them, but they know who they are. One of them is a superb storyteller, and he can tell a memory in a very memorable way. And another one, there was a terrible storyteller, and he tells the same story in a very deadpan kind of uninteresting way. So storytelling is something that, we'll get onto that a bit later, but yeah, somebody's coming through better as storytellers, I think, than the stories themselves. So there was a lot I liked about Jax's effort. In my head, I'm not sure it was really a story. I think he could have made more of a story, picked a particular day in his paper round, for example, or something that happened that was different or that was out of the ordinary for someone on a paper round. Yeah. He tried to link it to the Agile concept of autonomy. I thought there was an effort to make the link there. Yeah, I can see that. I think autonomy is a little bit challenged to the paper round. You have a certain number of houses to do, you have a certain number of variables to play with, but he enjoyed being out on his own and working out which order to do them in and things like that. Okay, where should we go next? Next on my list is Vikash. Vikash, okay. So we'll play a little clip of Vikash. Hello, this is my story. The bicycle reminds me of the days before lockdown. When I used to commute to office on this bicycle, while riding my bicycle and think of the ways to approach the resolution of the problems that the team is facing and back in the office. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. He put it together well. I loved the sound effects. I felt. So he was, I think he was the only submission that used music. Am I right? Yeah, this time. Yeah, for this, using, so that's an interesting thing, creating mood and creating drama through music, through a soundtrack. Yeah, only one. So I think there's a little bit of kudos there for, particularly in storytelling terms, you can create atmosphere through sound. Yeah, he kept me, he kept me intrigued. I was trying to work out whether the sound effects were in the background or actually part of the story. Yeah, that was a little bit confusing. Yeah. And then there was a twist at the end. Yes. For me. And so was it real? And I was thinking, I want to know what's next. I've got questions to be answered. A little bit enigmatic. I like that. Yeah. And again, so I think that's an interesting, subjective view. So for me personally, I don't like being left for questions. So I got that sense that left me a little bit, a little bit too much stress. Stress hormone was stimulated there. Okay. Like the classic, the end of the EastEnders, I need to take a look. Which won't give it a global audience, but there you go. So I don't, I'm not a massive fan of cliffhangers. I'm not a massive fan of unexplained endings. And I like, again, a good description of a story for me is closure is something that does have a sense of resolution. So I was left a little bit confused, I think, by the end of the video, as to what happened. I like that. Yeah. I liked, I liked that he used his body in this storytelling. I use very much props, use props using a phone, using things like that. Yeah. Yeah. And he managed to weave in a link to Agile as well in terms of pushing teams to deliver more. And why do they want to do that? And what's really going on? But again, on the semifinal, the semifinal thing to Jack's, was it a story or was it a day in his life? Was it a, whether it was fictitious or not? I don't know. But was it actually something that's happened? Was it just something that's happened to him? Or was it completely imagined from his own point? I don't know. I think it was meta. I think he started off telling a story about something that had happened. And then the story became now. I thought, I thought it was really clever. Okay. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I liked it. Let's move on. Next on my list is Team USA, sorry, Faye and Rob. Okay, Faye and Rob. So we'll play this one. Well, let me look at this photo. I see an older bicycle that looks kind of like a hodgepodge of older parts put together at different times. So I think about the team that I'm supporting right now. And they're really at an inflection point where they are looking at what served them in the past, the vehicle that got them to where they are, and then what they need to go forward. So what kind of vehicle do they need to go forward and be successful in the future? So there, a very different approach? Yeah. Is that a story? No, I don't, I, I was left wanting them to think, oh, I wish you'd done this. I wish you'd, oh, I wish you'd done that. It felt a little bit like an interview, like, I know because they were working as a pair, which is a slightly different. But they could have done so much more with a pair. They could have had a, they could have had dialogue and they could have had the dialogue could have been the story. They could have been the, the actors in that story themselves rather than it felt like an interview of someone who was, who had a story to tell. Did you have, did you have in your mind before you watched the clip what you were expecting? Were you expecting to see? No, no, not necessarily. Okay. But I was, I was hoping that they would not necessarily act, but certainly script, use, use dialogue. Okay. To become two characters and have that ability to play off each other. Maybe not in physical terms, but certainly in terms of Impression that you had a preconception about what a pair should do in this task. Yeah. Maybe. Again, that's my bias, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But I thought it was a clever approach. So, you know, effectively one person acting as the other person's coach. And, you know, I've used random images in between retrospectives before or in one to one coaching sessions just as an abstract tool to let people play and go where their minds going without boundaries really. So I could see a clear link to work there. And although they didn't bring this out here, I think it's something that we sort of mentioned is that people when they look at the same image will see a different thing because of the lens that they have and whatever else it rings for them. And the other thing that stood out for me was the metaphor side of things. So it's a film with this clear view of, you know, what kind of vehicle did the team need going forward? And I'm a big fan of metaphor. I know you are. I think my only thing was, was it a story? No. It was, and I've written down here, it was a metaphor, not a story. So it was a coaching tool. They used it as a coaching tool as a technique and absolutely right, as you just said. But for me, it didn't necessarily use that 60 seconds to tell, to capture the imagination, my imagination through story. The other thing I've written down here, I can, I'm probably being too critical today. You've got the grumpy poor persona on today. As long as you're going to apply it consistently. As long as it's consistent, right? So I can just say all the bad things. Grumpy poor, that's fine. But I'm sorry, but 15 seconds, I counted at the beginning. The first 15 seconds of a 60 second story has got to capture people. It's got to get people's attention. It's got to make an impact. Okay. And I think it took them 15 seconds to actually start their conversation. Right. And I can't, I can't remember the exact wordings of what was used and we'll play it back. But it just, I've written down here, they could have made so much more of an impact as a pair in the first 15 seconds. It's the same if you're a product toner in a sprint planning session. If you, if quite that to two hours in that first 50, in that first 15 minutes, you've got to capture the imagination of your development team in that first 15 minutes, get them in the room, get them in the room. And I felt that was an opportunity missed. That's a fair point. Yeah. Hook people in quickly. Get their, get their attention, get their curiosity. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. Good. Next. Who's next? Next on my list is Anshul. Anshul. Okay. So here is Anshul's story in Singapore. There was once a little boy who got badly hurt in an embarrassing incident by learning how to ride a bike. He was so angry that he declared to his friends that he's never going to ride a bike again. I like that. Yeah. It was good. I think Anshul could, could read me a story before we go to bed. Yeah. So I've written down here. I counted them up because it made an impact. I counted them up. I counted emotions. Okay. Embarrassed, angry, proud, terrible. So terrible, probably not really an emotion, but certainly those are words which I connected with and I that helped build, build the story, build the empathy for me. There was a twist. Yeah. So again, a similar. So I'm, I shall, whatever his name is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't see, I'm terrible at this notoriously bad for not spotting twists in stories. Right. So um, Shawshank redemption. Never seen it. But, but generally I'm, my friends that I go to the cinema, I'll make them, I say they'll crack up it then because I didn't see that coming. And everyone, you must have seen that coming. The most obvious twist ever. But no, just I generally let that twist hit me. And that was a good example of that. Didn't see it. The twist. I don't want to spoil it because we're going to put these on YouTube, right? So, so. But there's no guarantee that the twist you think happened is a twist. What do you mean? It's explicit. No, he hasn't explicitly spelled out what you're thinking he's implying. But that's what I think makes it good. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good twist. And we'll come to this later again. I don't, I think a good twist doesn't have to be explained. It doesn't have to be random. Yeah. Random your throat. I think it should be something that people can go. Yeah, like that. So that's that kind of, again, that's a harder part of the dramatic arc to bring out because it effectively changes the audience. Yeah. So the audience, you can, you can, with a twist that doesn't make sense, you can lose an audience, but a twist that leaves more questions, generally in focus engagement. So that was good. Clear. And again, sorry. Clear dramatic arc. Yeah. Yeah. There was a start resolution. There was a road. Yeah, exactly. The only thing, again, I'm being misnegative here, being a referee. I know. But if I'm trying to create a balanced argument, something to improve on is that he could have made himself. And what I mean himself, I mean his body and his voice, his range, his, his tone, his volume, he could have told the story. I think he could have ramped up to an even bigger level and create, he could have created my body with movement and something that Vikash didn't create movement, hand gestures, and eye contact, facial recognition, all these types of stuff that we were honed into, especially through video. They could have made more of that, I think. But that's a minor point. Yeah. I liked the, from a, from an agile perspective, from a work perspective, big link to resilience, trial, inspecting, adapting. Yeah. And so I liked that. Yeah. Very calm. Good story. It's good. Okay. Who's next? Stefan. Okay. In Germany. I should tell you a story about an inspiring image, but when I saw the picture of a bicycle, my first reaction was more like, so no story about bikes from my side today. So there you go. Okay. Referee. Okay. So not really a story? No. And, but I think Stefan was almost quite explicit about that, that he wasn't particularly inspired by the image and didn't really see, want to, want to tell, want to go down the storytelling route. What was interesting for me was that he, obviously the bike is the biggest object and it's, it's, it's central in the image. So your eye is drawn to it, but it's not the only thing. It's not the only part of the image. And we wouldn't say, tell us a story about a bike. There was, there was no need for him to include the bike at all. Or he could have told us a story about why he doesn't like bikes. But he decided not to tell us a story. It was, it was educational. Yeah. I've got here educational, but not in a, not really emotional. So there was, again, it was quite informative for me. And I certainly learned about it from, from it in terms of how the brain works. That itself was quite interesting, but Well, ironic in a way. Yeah. In that he was talking about the different parts of the logical and the emotional parts of the brain and focused on the logic whilst being the emotional side is the one that processes quicker. I think he said at the beginning that the bike and the picture makes me feel, and he did something. He came with a great facial kind of reaction, which I think again, so that, that in itself was quite interesting. It could have been explained through words even more, why it made, why, why it didn't connect with him. Yeah. But as a referee, they're kind of almost a little bit of disdain for the actual challenge itself. Are you disqualifying him? You're disqualifying him, right? I'm not going to disqualify him, but I kind of, if I referee kind of raising an eyebrow. Okay. Okay. All right. Maybe for that one. Two left. Two left. Next one on my list is Mike. Mike. Okay. Here's Mike's story. Every time I see a picture of bike, it reminds me of when I was a kid. I didn't have a lot of money. My mum saved up for three years to buy me a bike. It was a grifter. I loved it. It was a great bike. Another memory. Yeah. It was, it was interesting. I liked, I could relate to it. Yeah. Would everyone be able to relate to it? Maybe not. That's the risk. I don't think, I don't think anyone could relate to it as much as me because I had a grifter as well. I had exactly the same bike as my friend. But yeah. Yeah. And you can, yeah. So there's probably a strong connection there in terms of, maybe that's a good thing because he knew that you were the audience. Maybe he was making a, you could have known I had a grifter. Well, you never know. But certainly playing on emotions. So creating that character, that character had a backstory for the character with himself. Not having any money. And I think that was mentioned a couple of times. So kind of increasing the empathy there and almost to the point of maybe a bit of sympathy for him as a child. So that creates a bit of more connection, a bit more engagement based on real life, based on real memories. The bike is, so again, we could start to, if you weren't, even if you didn't know what a grifter bike was, he did a quite a good description about how it was unconventional for a bike in modern day terms. And certainly you could relate to that. Yeah. I like the creativity and the innovation. So that's, as well as the fact that he had a grifter, that's my sort of takeaway memory of not so much the bike, but the fact that he made lights out of candles and jam jars. That innovation, that art of the possible. And yeah, that not feeling sorry for yourself or giving up or whatever. He just got on with it and made the best of it and had a great time and it's got good memories for him. And that's something which sometimes can make a story more intriguing is something unusual. I'd never even considered the idea that you could make bike lights out. It doesn't seem feasible, does it, in terms of wind and kind of, yeah, kind of, but I suppose if you put the jam jars kind of that way. Give it a try. Yeah. It's like scientifically it's like, is that even possible? But it must be because he's done it unless he's waking up. You've got to trust a man without mustache. Yeah. All right. But again, finally, Greg, Greg. Once upon a time, there was a person called Renee who lived down Scrum Mastery Lane. Renee inherited a bike which she didn't really like. Okay. So I'm not sure who was intentional, but there was some rhyme in there. Yeah, I saw it. Yes, I noticed that. But I don't know. So only Greg would be able to answer this is, was it written, was it, was it the intention that it would rhyme? Because I think I only spotted one rhyme. I thought there were two. Was there two rhymes? But it was both at the start and I need to check it out. But then I thought, oh, then it, then he left it. Yeah. If he had carried on rhyming, I think it would, especially as the cat in the hat hat on. Yeah. And I thought, this is going down that, yeah, adopt a zoos root. And I thought, yes, he's got this. And then I kind of got lost in expecting the rhyme to appear, but I couldn't spot another one. So again, so described, there was a, it was a story. There was a story. There was a journey. There was a character. There was a beginning, middle end. There was a, there was a narrative. But a bit of the backstory as well. Family history. Yes. So we said, he said, just, he said a person called Renee, which again, could have, he could have embellished that a bit more instead of saying a bit more about Renee, about the type of person she was. So, but yeah, could have told us a bit more about her in that case. And then there's, can we come to this idea of the moral? So for the better people, people haven't heard the whole tape. Greg pretty much spells out the moral of the story at the end, I think. And my question here is, should a moral have to be explained at the end of a story? I think it's good having a moral to the story. I think, I think it's, it creates more impact if people can see a deeper meaning behind the story. But you think it could be self-evident? I think, and I think there's an element there of, it becomes something to engage, much more connect with me personally. If I have to think to myself, what is that, what, what is that telling about? What is that story telling something about me or about my, my, my reality and my, my personality or my connection? It narrows down the interpretation, which could be a good thing if you want everybody to have the same message, but it becomes less personal then because I'm not really mapping it on to through my level. But I think, I think it makes more of an impact for me personally, if I've come to that myself and I've realized that moral for myself and seen it myself. If you don't see it coming, because you don't see things coming in stories. No. What if you miss it? I don't see twists. I think I see morals. I think, I think that's a bit more obvious to me. Okay. I can't, I can't actually remember what the moral was, but I'm left with the feeling that it was positive. And I was surprised. I didn't, the twist was a surprise. I wasn't expecting them to be a YouTuber. No. I thought, yeah, it was a story. I thought the story aspect could have been a bit tighter and a bit more fluent. And if you'd have carried on with the rhyme, you'd have run away with it, I think. Yeah, I think the rhyme would have won it. But just knowing how you, how you work as a, as a, as a, as a judge here, Jeff, I think you would have been sold on rhyme. Yeah. The thing I've mentioned here as well is eye contact. So I don't know if you picked up on it as well, but just as a storyteller. And I know it's very artificial doing it onto a phone or onto a device, however you are recording this, but it's harder to engage an audience if you can't see them, especially if you're just looking at a lens. But if you think about even like Jack and Ori, which is a story that, a program that you must have succeeded in your youth, Jeff. Yeah, no idea. If you've got no idea what I'm talking about. No, I do. Jack and Ori kids TV, they're telling a story, but they're telling it to the, to a camera. So you still can engage through eye contact with, with the lens on your screen. If you've just got to hold it for 60 seconds, you can still do that. So for me, there's a little bit of disconnect with the story and with the telling because, because of the lack of eye contact. And I think that's something that anyone, regardless of whether you're a product owner or a scrum master, whatever it is eye contact can be the, can be the difference between you being authentic as a storyteller and not be. Yeah. Okay. All right. So should we talk a little bit more about stories, or should we do the scoring first? Well, let's do just a little bit of a general debrief on what we, how we see value in stories and storytelling. I mean, there's the, there's the obvious in terms of product backlog items and trying to create, you know, that's where the idea of user stories came from, to create some empathy. We, we're big fans of, of sprints being, you know, chapter in the product development being tied together with, with a kind of sprint goal, which can be a nice story. I think everybody's got their own stories to tell within a team. And being prepared to share that story, as you've said a few times, just, just brings that sense of connection, trust, commonality, normalization. And then for me, the other, the other aspect of this is that if we're part of a team, then we're all characters in a story, we're all playing a part. I'm not just talking about playing a particular role here, but we are all playing a part in, in creating something together. We're evolving something together. Yeah. Absolutely. Product ownership for me, this is the biggest and the strongest connection I see with storytelling in agile terms is through product management, product leadership, product ownership. And I make much more of an emphasis when I'm teaching and coaching product owners that this is something they need to be comfortable with, even if they don't. So if a team can tell, they don't believe the story they're telling, the team won't, team won't follow them on that journey. So it can be a really crap story, but you can still tell it in a, in an engaging way. You can still create engagement, intrigue and connection by how you tell a crap story. Yeah. Obviously, what's even better is if the story's compelling. So great storytellers who are telling great stories, that's your perfect kind of cocktail there because you're engaging much more parts of your brain as listeners. But yeah, you're right. On a meta level, we're all engaged, we're all involved in a personal story, our personal narrative. So being able to transfer that and to bring people into that, that reality is an important part of us as humans. So it's a skill we'll go all about to cave when we were writing stories in caves. It's the same type of thing. Telling stories around a fire, we are effectively sharing our stories and telling stories to keep people engaged with us as human beings. At a less grand level, I suppose. Yeah. For a more day-to-day level. I mean, I do most of my work these days, sort of organizational leadership and change and culture. And for me, culture is basically the stories that we tell about our organization. Earth on a good day. The jokes that we tell about ourselves, the failure stories that we tell about ourselves. And when we go home after a bad day and meet our friends in the pub and bitch about our organization, those stories that we tell, that's part of our culture as well. And we're creating new ones and we're reinforcing old ones all the time. And it's how messages get spread and it's how messages endure. That's why a lot of the stories we tell our kids have been told for hundreds, if not longer, of years. Yeah, they have a longer lifespan. You think about the same... I've got friends I went to school with. What was it now? More than 20 years ago. We tell the same old shitty stories to each other every time we go to the pub. And they don't get old. That's the thing that's interesting is the stories and organizationally, they stay the same. And that's what keeps people together. That's what keeps a group of friends together. It's not necessarily what's coming up, but it's about what's happened in the past, what's connected to you in the past, and what's kept you together in the past. And some of it's great and some of it needs to stay. But for me, a lot of my work is helping leaders of organizations work out which stories need to be replaced. And what new stories we need to start creating. I'm not talking about manufacturing them. I'm not making them up, but actually creating the conditions for new stories with new morals around new behaviors that we need to start telling and reinforcing and recognizing, rewarding so that our culture can shift to become a little bit more conducive to the kind of organization we need to be to survive in the environment and the market that we're now facing. And while it seems a very childish activity, you know, from one of the first things you were told to do at school was write me a story. It seems a very childish thing. But it's actually an incredibly important part of adult life, of business life, of politics, of everything, because it's so core to us as human beings, as you've said. Yeah, as a nice, I've just, and again, locked down story in itself. My son Owen is just, he's just had a story writing task as part of his home learning, sent by his school teacher. And it was to write a story in 15 words. Okay. And he loved that. Yeah, mainly because it was short, because he knew he wouldn't have to write many words down. Yeah. But when what we found was, we said, okay, so now you've done that, Owen, you've written a, and it was a story about a pigeon. I think it was a pigeon or is a bird. Probably pigeons based on the family. Yeah. But this bird woke up, I think the basic 15 words was bird wakes up, steals some bread from Sainsbury's, gets chased by the police and goes home. That's it. That's the basics of his story, right? That's the 15 words. But once he'd had that, once he was, his imagination was captured by that. We said, well, I mean, I wonder if you can now write that story, the same story that we're writing in 50 words. Okay. Do you know how many words he ended up writing? I'm going to guess more than 50. Yeah, about 200 words. Wow. Because he was, and Owen hates writing. He hates, he hates English, he hates storytelling. But he was captured by those, that narrative of 15 words, and he found it easier than to write more. That's exactly the same with product tones, with telling stories. Better stories are usually shorter stories. The famous one, isn't it? I'm ranting a bit, Jeff, so about half a bite of cider. That's what I meant. You heard the Hermes Ernest Hammingway story. Something to do with shoes. Yeah. So he was, again, I don't know if it's a mythical story or whether it was actually happened, but the story goes that he was challenged by his friends whilst in a restaurant to write a story on a napkin in five words. And yeah, for $100 or something, some kind of bet. And he wrote foresail, is it five words or six words? Foresail, baby shoes, never worn. That's the story in six words. And it's kind of gone down history. But you can make your imagination wonders within that as to where there's so many untold elements of that story that you're mind. And that's for me what does capture a great story. And you think about films that you haven't seen, Jeff. It's like Jaws, right? Great story. But in essence, you could sum up in six words. Killer shark, you know, creates havoc on a beach. That's what it basically is. It's just a big shark killing people. The famous strap line from Alien, isn't it, is Jaws in Space. That's what they basically stole the film Alien as is Jaws in Space. So it doesn't have to be a complex story. It doesn't have to have multiple plot points. But you can make that simple story a heck of a lot more engaging through the telling. Hmm. One of my favorite Twitter accounts is a small fiction. So basically, it's a story in a tweet. Well, I just thought I'd see if I can find one. Yeah, here's one. Here's one at random. It got lonely haunting an empty house. The ghosts did their best to keep each other's spirits up, rattling door knobs, opening cabinets. They took turns acting surprised. That's it. Yeah, it's enough. My mind can go off with that. I could create something out of that. But there's again, we could point people to some lovely Ted talks around this stuff, around storytelling and how you can just using your voice, using effectively tone, volume, pace, pitch, pause, all those things of using a bit of silence that actually creates atmosphere through how you tell something. You can do it at home, but these things, a lot of things still do apply in the office as well. So it's a valuable story. It's a valuable skill. The valuable skill regardless of your role, I think. And just practicing it, I think, I think he's good. We all enjoy a good story. So if nothing else, you don't get any other benefit out of it, you just get to escape a little bit, don't you? But there are so many personal, team, organisational, societal, familial benefits to gain from stories. Yeah, I like this challenge. Good stuff. So we should probably wrap it up with scores, Jeff. We need to update the scores for this. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So where should we start? I am going to be a bit harsh on Stefan because he didn't really get into the whole storytelling thing. I enjoyed learning something, but I'm going to give him one point. My winner, I'm going to go from last to first. Winner for me is Anshil. Lovely, lovely voice, dramatic arc, great message, great twist. Yeah. So seven points for Anshil. I'm giving Vikas second place. Six points? Yeah, six points to Vikas. There was a good link, good twist. Bit of music in there. Music of different aspects. And then a bit like last time, the other four, I'm kind of grouping together for different reasons, but, and I'm the Game Master, so no one can, no one can. That was a good question, you can go with whatever score you want. So I'm going to actually pull Greg slightly out of it simply because he had more of a story, a little bit of rhyme and a hat. So I'm going to put Greg in third place. With five? Yeah. And then I want to split the rest of the points across the other three. So for me, they weren't quite stories. They all had their benefits, but they weren't quite enough stories for me. So that would be two, three, four, nine, so three points each. Okay. So three points for Greg, three points for Fein, Rob and three points for Mike. Yep. So in seventh place, we have Stefan with four points and going up the table, Rob with six, Greg with seven, sorry, Rob and Fein with six, Greg with seven, Jags with eight, joint third place with Mike with eight points, Vikash in second place with nine points and Anshil way out of the lead at the moment with 14 points. Two wins out of two. Yes. He's the player to catch at the moment. To be adopted Singaporean. Yes, Team Singapore. Yeah, good show, good show. And just like last time, we'd like to challenge our listeners to tell us some stories. If you like, well, can we put the picture in the pub guys? Normally we do, don't we? We can certainly, if you check Twitter and LinkedIn, we will tweet the picture of the inspiration image that we use for these stories. Yeah, we'll send it out and then just reply to that tweet or that LinkedIn post with some of your stories. Yeah. All right. Any other news? That's the type of thing I say to my parents when I'm trying to finish on the phone with them. Oh, is it? Yeah. Anything else we need to talk about because we're about to go? Anything else on the out on the agenda? Any other items? Any other business? Any other business? No, I think that's it, mate. I'm out of lockdowns. Sorry, there's no, so I need to rethink. Maybe that's it. Maybe we just pubcast on shop down. That's it. I think you're right to Boris and tell him I'm out of cider now. So you have to see what happens next. Open the pubs, please. Yeah. Next month, maybe that's what they're saying. And then next month, July. Those famous people, them. That's what they're saying. All right, mate. Well, I think you're in a less negative mood tomorrow. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm so full of contestants who've caught me on a Tuesday night after a busy day. Yeah, sorry about that. All right, mate. I'll let you go and we will catch up again soon. Thanks for listening, everybody. And yeah, see you soon. Take care. See you next week. Bye.