Professions | Center for Story Thinking

If a leader is not leading change, then what are they leading? In leading change, leaders are storytellers whether they plan to be or not. Every change effort asks people to leave one story and enter another. Story Thinking helps leaders effectively use data to formulate and communicate their story. And leaders can see their strengths and challenges within individuals and teams related to the entire change cycle.

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Leadership measurements within six phases of the story thinking cycle.

Visualizing data storytelling within six phases of the story thinking cycle.

Story Thinking for Leadership, Innovation, Healthcare, and AI

Leadership

Most organizations are good at fixing problems and less practiced at designing new solutions. Story Thinking shows the difference: fixing stops after Recognize and Analyze, while innovation goes on to Theorize, Design, Develop, Test, and Deploy. If your organization already uses a change or innovation model, Story Thinking can sit alongside it.

Story Thinking has been compared with 50 innovation and change models in a paper published in the Journal of Innovation Management.

Download the paper (PDF) from the Journal of Innovation Management, or view the summary video below:

Innovation

Get Certified in Innovation Management at the Knowledge Management Institute.

Healthcare

Patients live their illness as a story. Clinicians work through their own cycle of noticing, diagnosing, explaining, and testing. Story Thinking gives healthcare teams a shared map for both, so that care can respond to the person and not only to the problem.

Professionals within healthcare learn about their field, communicate with each other, and document patient interactions using the SOAP format: Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan. The problem is that this model was never intended to be used this way. Over a half century ago, when Lawrence Weed saw the need for more structured documentation and thinking within healthcare, his focus in creating SOAP was on what he called the “first” phase: “Among physicians there has been uncritical adherence to tradition in the first phase of medical action, which is the collection of data, upon which complete formulation and management of all the patient’s problems depends”. SOAP was not intended to be a comprehensive clinical process model. The visualization within Story Thinking allows us to recognize that the PLAN occurs within Ideation, and allows us to map out a complete patient interaction model.

Healthcare clinical process model based on story thinking (SSOAP STEPS).

Healthcare SOAP steps within six phases of the story thinking cycle.

AI tools are good at fast pattern-matching. People bring meaning, judgment, and the ability to ask a better question. Story Thinking assigns AI and people to the phases where each works best, with a human in the loop at every step.

Artificial Intelligence

Our phase-bot team uses a set of AI assistants, each tied to one phase of the story cycle, with a person reviewing and guiding the work. The LLM is no longer a black box. Humans can monitor the communication between the thinking happening within each story phase. This approach produces explainable AI, with a human in the loop, and a memory for reference and for future work.

Center for Story Thinking is a project of Explanation Age LLC.