Interactive Storytelling

This article explores a type of training activity called interactive storytelling. Here’s the outline of this chapter:

  1. Ready-to-play instructions for an interactive storytelling activity called Arouse.

  2. Game plan showing the structure of the Arouse activity

  3. Suggestions for adapting Arouse to suit other training requirements

  4. Definition of interactive storytelling

  5. Brief summaries of 10 different interactive storytelling activities

Arouse

Most trainers tell stories to emphasize learning points. In this interactive storytelling exercise, we focus on how to arouse emotional outcomes during communication.

Purpose

To modify and tell a story to evoke one of these emotions among the listeners: happiness, anger, sadness, or fear.

Synopsis

Teams of participants select an emotion they want to evoke through telling a story. They modify the story and select a team member to tell it. The listeners identify the level of intensity of the emotion that the story aroused.

Players

Minimum: 4

Maximum: Any number, organized into groups of 3 to 7 players.

Best: 12 to 30

Time

30 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the number of teams.


Supplies

  • Small pieces of paper

  • Pens

  • Timer

  • Whistle

Room Set-up

Arrange seats around tables to permit group discussions.

Flow

Brief the participants. Explain that this activity involves telling a story to evoke one of the four primary emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, or fear. Notify that the participants will work in teams to modify the story and present it to evoke the selected emotion.

Specify a story. Identify a well-known folk tale and explain that all teams will tell their version of this story. Members of the team may modify their story in any way to invoke an emotion they selected.

Form teams. Organize the participants into teams of 3 to 7 players. Try to form 3 or 4 teams, making sure no team has more than 7 members. It does not matter if a team has one less or one more member than the other teams. Seat each team around a separate table to modify the story and plan for its presentation.

Specify an emotion to be elicited. Identify the four basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Invite each team to secretly select one of these emotions to elicit through the presentation of their story.

Prepare for storytelling. Announce a suitable time limit (of 5 to 10 minutes) for the members of each team to suitably doctor their story to arouse the selected emotion among the listeners. Also ask the teams to come up with suitable storytelling techniques to emphasize this emotion. Allow each team to work on its own.

Select a storyteller. A couple of minutes before the end of the time limit, ask the teams to select one of its members to be the storyteller.

Present the story. At the end of time limit, blow the whistle and select a random team. Ask the storyteller from this team to present the story. Ask all participants from the other teams to listen to story.

Conclude the storytelling. At the end of 3 minutes, blow the whistle to stop the presentation even if the story has not concluded. Thank the presenter and their team. Ask the storytelling team to identity the emotion they were attempting to arouse among the listeners.

Poll the listeners. Distribute small pieces of papers to the participants from the other teams. Ask each participant to independently to write a number between 1 and 5 to indicate how intensely the emotion was aroused.

Explain this scale:

  1. not aroused at all

  2. mildly aroused

  3. aroused

  4. clearly aroused

  5. intensely aroused

After a suitable pause, collect the folded pieces of polling numbers.

Continue the storytelling activity. Select different teams, one at a time, to present their version of the story to arouse their selected emotion. Repeat this procedure until all teams have had their chance. Collect the polling numbers at the end of each storytelling episode.

Conclude the activity. Announce the total storytelling poll scores for each team. Congratulate the highest scoring team as the champion storytellers.

The Structure of the Activity

Arouse can be used as a template for creating other training activities. The following game plan outlines the structure of this activity:

  1. Brief the participants.

What the facilitator does: Explain the format and the objectives of this activity.
What the participants do: Think about what would happen in the activity.

2. Specify a story.

What the facilitator does: Identify a commonly known story to be retold to arouse a specific emotion.

What the participants do: Recall and share details of the story.

3. Form teams.

What the facilitator does: Organize the participants into teams of 3 to 7 members.

What the participants do:Sit around a table and introduce yourself to teammates.

4. Specify an emotion.

What the facilitator does: Explain the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear.

What the participants do: Select one of the emotions to arouse through the story.

5. Prepare for storytelling.

What the facilitator does: Give instructions and a time limit.

What the participants do: Work as a team to modify the story and figure out strategies for arousing a specific emotion.

6. Select a storyteller.

What the facilitator does: Ask the teams to select its storyteller.

What the participants do:Select the most suitable team member to be the storyteller

7. Present the story.

What the facilitator does: Ask the storyteller from a randomly selected team to tell the story.

What the participants do:The storyteller tells the story, trying to arouse the selected emotion.

8. Conclude the story.

What the facilitator does: Stop the story after 3 minutes. Identify the emotion that the storyteller was trying to arouse.

What the participants do:Think about the story and the specified emotion.

9. Poll the listeners.

What the facilitator does:Ask each listener to give the story a score between 1 and 5.

What the participants do: Write the score on a piece of paper and give it to the facilitator.

10. Continue the storytelling activity.

What the facilitator does: Select different teams to tell their story.

What the participants do: Listen to other teams’ stories and score their performance.

11. Conclude the activity.

What the facilitator does: Announce the total storytelling scores for each team.

What the participants do: Congratulate the highest-scoring team.


Adapting Arouse to Suit Other Training Requirements


You can use the structure of Arouse as a template to explore other training topics and objectives. Here are some suggestions for doing this:

  • Don’t want to impose a story? Instead of specifying the story, permit the teams to come up with their own story.

  • Assign a specific emotion? Instead of letting each team select an emotion, assign the same emotion to all teams.

  • Want a wider choice of emotions? Include additional emotions such as disgust, enjoyment, love, amusement, pride, peace, compassion, and curiosity.

  • Want to work with business-related topics? Instead of using stories, select common activities from the workplace (such as satisfying customers, marketing products, or giving discounts). Ask the teams to describe what happens in the activity.

Interactive Storytelling


Arouse belongs to a type of training activity called Interactive storytelling.

Interactive stories are fictional narratives that involve the participants in a variety of ways:

  • The facilitator presents the story and discusses its significance through a debrief.

  • The facilitator pauses at critical junctures in the story and invites listeners to play the role of a character.

  • The participants rewrite the story by changing the beginning, ending, setting, characters, or point of view

  • The participants create and share stories that illustrate key concepts, principles, or procedures related to the training topic.

Ten More Interactive Storytelling Activities

In addition to Arouse, there are several other interactive storytelling activities. Here are brief summaries of 10 different interactive storytelling activities:

Appreciative Exchange

Objective: To appreciate positive outcomes in a specific type of encounter and to identify the factors that contribute to such an outcome.

Sample Training Topics: Cross-cultural communication, coaching, difficult conversations, motivating employees, selling a product, and problem solving.

Sample Topic for this Game: Suicide Prevention

Activity: Ask the participants to independently create personal anecdotes about achieving success in preventing a suicide. Form pairs of participants to exchange their positive stories. Repeat the pairing and sharing procedure. After several rounds of such exchanges, form teams of participants. Ask the members of each team to share their insights and identify the factors that contributed to the success of their encounters.

Case Analysis

Objective: To review, analyze, and mitigate one or more critical factors presented in a case.

Sample Training Topics: Team-building, critical thinking, creative problem solving, receiving feedback, conducting interviews, and conflict management.

Sample Topic for this Game: Strategic Decision-Making

Activity: Present a case in the form of a story. Also give a list of key questions related to the case. Ask the participants to individually analyze the case and answer the question. Later, form teams and have the participants share their answers and arrive at a consensus. Finally, conduct a whole-group discussion to share the perspectives of different teams and individuals.

Multiple Realities

Objective: To empathize the perceptions and feelings of different groups.

Sample Training Topics: Customer satisfaction, multicultural teams, communication, listening skills, coaching, and virtual teams.

Sample Topic for this Game: Empathy

Activity: Tell a story from the point of view of a key character. Ask teams of participants to rewrite the story from the points of view of other characters. Ask the teams to share their stories. Conduct a debriefing discussion to examine alternative perspectives.

Heroes and Villains

Objective: To identify desirable and undesirable qualities of people in leadership roles.

Sample Training Topics: Management, team facilitation, training, thought leaders, politicians, and coaches.
Sample Topic for this Game: Effective Managers

Sample Topic for this Game: Effective management

Activity: Discuss the characteristics of managers. Ask teams of participants to create a profile of an effective manager who is a hero. Later, ask the teams to create a profile of an unsavory managers who is a villain. Reorganize the teams and ask them to list desirable and undesirable characteristics managers.

Unfinished Story

Objective: To create a logical sequence of predictable events in an unfinished narrative.

Sample Training Topics: Forecasting, investment, planning, coaching, motivating, collecting data, and researching.

Sample Topic for this Game: Team Development

Activity: Explain the four stages in the team development model. Tell a story about the experiences of a team working on a critical project. Include details of what happened during the forming, storming, and norming stages. Ask teams to write the final (performing) of the story in this team’s development.

Sequel and Prequel

Objective: To connect causes and effects across several events.

Sample Training Topics: Career development, mediation, life of a new hire, quitting a job, product development, and retirement.

Sample Topic for this Game:Project Management

Activity: Explain that every action is caused by some previous action. Also, every action causes some future action. After these explanations, present the outline of a story that involves a business reproject. Ask teams to create a sequel to the story, involving the same characters and settings. Later, return to the original story and ask the participants to create a prequel of the story, by portraying the same characters at an earlier time. Debrief the participants by tracking the connections among the events in the prequel, the story, and the sequel.

Happy Ending

Objective: To realistically analyze a failure to diminish its impact and to lower the probability of its future occurrence.

Sample Training Topics: Planning, organizational learning, faux pas, data collection, quitting a job, and rejection of a proposal.

Sample Topic for this Game: Downsizing

Activity: Ask teams of participants to write short stories featuring an employee being downsized. Exchange the stories among the teams. And ask each team to rewrite the story with a happy ending: a positive outcome instead of the original failure. Conduct a debriefing discussion about reframing perception of failures.

Story Prompts

Objective: To collaboratively create and present a story stimulated by a random photograph and related to a specific topic.

Sample Training Topics: Visual thinking, graphic prompts, topical exploration, lateral thinking, and communication.

Sample Topic for this Game: Creativity

Activity:. Seat a team of participants around a large table. Briefly introduce the training topic. Turn over a random photo card. Invite the first participant to create and narrate the first few sentences of a story related to creativity and to the photograph. Invite the other participants to take turns to continue narration. Stop the narration after a convenient time period. Comment on aspects of the story related to creativity.

Think on Your Feet

Objective: To rapidly create and present a story that is related to the training topic.

Sample Training Topics: Any training topic.

Sample Topic for this Game: Storytelling

Activity: Organize the participants in triads. Ask one member of the triad to be the judge and to announce a training topic. The other two participants think silently for 30 seconds about the topic. At the end of this time, the judge takes one of the other participants aside and listens to their story. After a couple of minutes, they return to listen to the other participant’s story. At the end of this story, the judge decides whose story won this round. This procedure is repeated with each participant playing role of the judge.

Debriefed Story

Objective: To explore the similarities and differences between one’s personal behavior and the behaviors of the characters in a story.

Sample Training Topics: Communication, cultural norms, values, national differences, and emotional responses.

Sample Topic for this Game: Death and dying

Activity: Locate or write a story related to the training topic. (In our session, we used a story called “A Death in the Family”, about the death of a mother.) Distribute printed copies of the story to each participant. Assign a suitable time limit for reading the story. Conduct a debriefing discussion will the entire group. Ask questions about the differences between the behavior of people in your culture and the characters in the story.