American Red Cross

We have been working with the American Red Cross for the past six months of so. Rick Stone has been the primary member of our team working with the Red Cross and he recently took a trip to Houston for the project. As his connecting flight was pulling away from the gate in Memphis last week, the pilot came on the intercom to inform everyone that weather in Houston was quite nasty, and that there was a distinct possibility that the flight might not be able to land. To be safe, they had to pull back in to the gate and top off the fuel tanks. The flight did make it down but it was about as rough a ride as Rick has ever experienced, and the weather only got worse from there. There were flood warnings and the Red Cross was considering opening shelters in parts of the city.

How ironic—Rick's there to work with them to help them better tell their story so folks like you and me who hear the Red Cross mentioned in almost any story that entails a disaster, but think nothing of it, will think twice and consider donating money to sustain the good work. The stats of their contributions to local, national, and international relief are staggering—in Houston alone they respond to over 700 house or apartment fires a year. That’s two a day. While the assistance they provide to families who have been devastated by the loss of everything in a fire is routine for them, the meaning and relevance of their help has monumental importance for the people they serve. Unfortunately, the Red Cross is not alone when it comes to not adequately telling their story. Nearly every nonprofit we have run into, from big organizations down to small endeavors, is deficient in preparing their staff and volunteers to effectively tell their story to the people that matter—their donor base. And the same is true of for-profit companies. It’s what we call the organization’s Narrative Assets—perhaps the most valuable thing in a company next to its people. So, are you capitalizing on your Narrative Assets and putting them to work to build greater support or sell your customers?

Denver Snowstorm and IDEAS

So, a colleague and friend of the company set us up to do a couple of speeches and a workshop at the National Association of School Boards Technology and Learning conference in Denver. Who knew an early season snowstorm would almost shut Denver down! Anyway, we accepted the invitation to speak and sent our owner and Chief Storytelling Officer Bob Allen and Kelly Pounds, VP, IDEAS Learning, to conduct the workshop and also take advantage of this collection of top level educational decision makers to talk-up our new TeacherStudio (www.teacherstudio.com) product.

The saga started at 4:45am on Wednesday the 28th as the United website said the dreaded words FLIGHT CANCELLED. By the time Bob & Kelly got on another flight that could get them to Denver, it was nip and tuck to make the first talk they were scheduled to give (one called “Pandora’s X-Box” about games, mixed reality and other virtual tools for learning). They got to the room 10 minutes late after a slushy cab-slide through the white out on I-25 but there was a sign posted on the room saying “Session cancelled due to inclement weather”. The day wasn’t lost though. They met with a potential collaborator for TeacherStudio content and Kelly worked the room positioning TeacherStudio with a number of potential district clients. Bob was up at 4:30am local time on Thursday re-working the talk for that day (STEM to TEAMS: Arts in the Science/Math effort). Bob had the privilege of presenting with Dr. David Thornburg who is a deity in this world. The man’s resume is unbelievable and he’s a brilliant and entertaining presenter. They had 12 minutes to synch their talks before showtime. The feed back was great! They didn’t throw rocks or tomatoes. We'll post another report after tomorrow’s workshop called “The Colorado Broadband Revolution”.

Audio A Construction

We've been doing a lot of Facebook and Twitter posts about the construction on our stage and Audio A but it's been a while since I wrote about it here. There has been a lot of progress. Actually, there's something new every day. Whether it's another layer of drywall, HVAC ducts going in, HVAC work on the roof or door framing there's something new to look at every day. We got over a big hurdle yesterday. There has been quite a bit of back and fourth between our designer and our HVAC contractor. The concern has been whether the HVAC unit will create too much noise in Audio A or the Stage. Not just coming out of the vents but the whole until coming from the roof above the ceiling in to the room. After, literally, weeks of conversations and drawings we all came to an agreement on where we are. Now just the final execution is needed. The sound attenuators arrived this morning for the duct work so those will be installed today & tomorrow, almost a week early.

All of the framing has been up for a couple weeks now. There's a total of 5 layers of drywall that make up the hard walls of the new Audio A. In most areas all 5 layers are up. It has been interesting to see how they do the layering so no seams match up. Making sure no seams line up is very important for the sound proofing aspect of the room. After the hard walls go in the final electric gets surface mounted on the most inside layer of drywall. It's amazing how important it is that there are no penetrations in the walls. The acoustic integrity of the room can be ruined by one small hole the size of a nail. If there is a penetration in any of the wall structure it effects how the sound bounces off walls and how sound is let in to the room. So all penetrations need to be in the far front of the room under where the mixing console will be.

Yesterday the platform for the front and back of the room were framed out. The back step/platform is interesting because the design plans were so precise about the curvature of the step. I wasn't out there with my protractor checking the angle but hopefully they followed.

Last week we picked the colors for the walls. All the soft walls have fabric so we had to choose the fabric colors. We're doing with black on most of the walls in front and a light gray in the back with a decent amount of red on the back wall. Then the ceiling is dark gray. Our old Audio A was a light green so as long as we stayed away from that we were good. And it was important to us to have more than just black & gray. Knowing we needed the black & gray in front so there's no reflection on the projection screen, we focused on the back wall for our color. We looked at a couple reds and blues and red won out. We're excited to see it.

On the stage side, we're learning more about how we're going to treat that space to get it to where we want. There's a lot of HVAC work going on in there and we have a number of acoustic treatments available to us so we're extremely confident that the stage will be great for VO recording, ADR, Foley and shooting.

So there's some detail on the construction process. We're posting pictures almost every day on our new home website http://www.ideasorlando.com/ideasnewhome/index.php and we've done 2 webisodes focusing only on the audio construction. The webisodes can also be seen on our new home website. It's been exciting, it's been exhausting but we can certainly see the light at the end of the tunnel (or hallway). It shouldn't be too long now.

Teachers Helping Teachers, A Way To Improve Education

We have a product that we have been developing for more than a year now. TeacherStudio™ (www.TeacherStudio.com), is a multimedia, research-driven, Web 2.0 site where teachers can see, hear, and collaborate with exemplary educators. This online professional learning community allows teachers across districts to come together anytime, anywhere to share ideas, receive mentoring and experience global best practices. Supporting each other, they can improve their skills in the classroom and build confidence.

Designed by our own instructional designers (former public school classroom teachers) and built by our design and programming department, TeacherStudio is currently being tested by teachers in Seminole County Public Schools (SCPS).

Diane Lewis, Director of Instructional Technology at SCPS says, “Teaching is a profession where, oftentimes, professionals don’t get to observe each other. A teacher knows teaching from their own experiences or from limited examples that they may have had during a peer teaching phase, but they don’t usually get to spend a lot of time going into classrooms and really studying master teachers and how they teach. What TeacherStudio offers us is a way to capture that master lesson and get teachers to feel as if they are in other classrooms, many classrooms, getting a lot of experiences and broadening their understanding of teaching and learning.”

TeacherStudio allows users to share teaching strategies via online videos. These videos demonstrate how strategies and techniques are incorporated into lessons and provide a true visual of what great teaching looks like. Via TeacherStudio, educators can participate in continual, non-disruptive professional development. It supports cross-district collaboration and mentoring and allows districts to focus on and promote what works best for student learning and achievement.

This is a product that we have a passion for. Our teachers are suffering, not just in Florida but throughout the United States. It's not just about money, it's about the lack of support they get. This product is a way a teacher in Florida can get and give support to a teacher in Wyoming. We are now looking for other innovative school districts to help us Pilot the product and provide feedback to guide further development and enhancements to TeacherStudio. If you’d like to learn more, visit www.TeacherStudio.com and drop us a line!

Enhancing the Patient Experience at the Naval Hospital - Jacksonville

We are commencing work this week with the Naval Hospital - Jacksonville on a number of fronts to enhance the patient experience throughout their system as well as identify ways to improve patient safety. In many ways it’s a classic example of the way we approach to culture change. We are beginning with extensive interviews of all of the leadership within the organization, both civilian and Navy. Following these interviews we will “embed” ourselves in the system—interviewing patients to discover their stories, extensively interviewing clinical and non-clinical staff to increase our understanding of the Naval Hospital’s culture vis-à-vis its impact on patients’ experience and the degree to which it supports various safety initiatives which have become fairly universal features of most hospitals’ attempts to improve their delivery of care.

The Naval Hospital is in many respects like any other community hospital, but it also has some unique challenges. At any one time 10 to 15 percent of their doctors and nurses rotate out of the hospital to medical facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. This destabilizing factor is not new to the military, but it tests the organization’s resilience and complicates the institutionalization of initiatives such as TeamSTEPPS—a program with its roots in the aviation industry that focuses on communication and teamwork, especially in the operating room. We will be examining how the Naval Hospital can continue to improve, ensuring that these initiatives remain viable and effective.

We’ll also be looking at how new staff are on-boarded. They currently have a 4-day orientation program, and they recognize that in addition to not being totally engaging, it’s not as effective a tool for quickly integrating these new staff into the fabric of the organization.

We’ll also be taking a hard look at the physical plant with regard to how it impacts the patient experience. It often comes down to simple things, like being sure that patients and family can find their way around - more in a few weeks as we learn more.

For more on our process in transforming culture visit http://www.ideasorlando.com/innovation/innovation_culture_transformation.php

YouTube Channel

So I think this You Tube thing is going to stick around a while. I know, I'm a genius for thinking that all by myself. But what I really meant was that creating our own IDEAS You Tube Channel is really going to help us. Here's the story. A couple months ago I got frustrated because any time we wanted to send a client a video to watch to learn more about us we needed to put it up on our FTP site, tell the client how to download it and then they could watch it. But even then we needed to get the file made, upload it and hope that the client could play the type of video we created (WMV, QT, MPEG, etc.). All of that takes time and once you do it once there's no telling if we'll remember where we put it for the next time.

Then the next option was to post it on our website but that required us to get the file to one of our programmers, have them compress it and build the page on our website. For that to happen the programmers would need to be available which would mean they were not working on a client project which is never a good thing.

So, someone made the suggestion to use You Tube and let me tell you how easy it was. We created our own channel then started posting away. A month, 60+ videos and hundreds of views later, I don't know why we didn't do this a long time ago. If we want to show a client a video we go to our site, find the video and copy the URL in to an e-mail or in a document and once the client clicks on it they go to our You Tube channel and can see that video and others. It has really helped our company's visibility. http://www.youtube.com/ideasorlando

Playshop for the Nat'l Assn of Tech Prep Leadership

IDEAS is always experimenting. We also have a long history of collecting fascinating colleagues and friends on the road of story. A few years back, we were doing some work with the Navy Learning Strategies Consortium and we were part of a discussion panel on “learning games”. The dialogue was, to shine it up a bit, “robust”. In the middle of the melee, we got to know a fascinating and passionate young man from Texas named Jim Brazell. Now, there are a lot of people who glom on to the label “Futurist”. Jim is the real deal. He has a handle on what is going to happen next, particularly in education and with a strong focus on how we can and MUST integrate the arts, science, math, engineering and technology so that we can HAVE a future.

Recently, Jim, Kelly Pounds (IDEAS’ VP of Learning) and Bob Allen spent a couple of days with two other wonderful thinkers-Mary Shenck-Ross and David Thornburg. What came out of it is a new co-venture called Radical Platypus. We’re a Platypus because we come from such diverse backgrounds and world experiences just like our namesake expresses a lot of different genetics. We’re Radical because we’re pooling our speaking, leadership and creative talents to help organizations-especially in education-change the future through playful investigation and strategic action.

Last week, Jim and Bob Allen had a chance to do what we’re calling a “Playshop” for the National Association of Tech Prep Leadership. For those of you who aren’t current in the lingo of education (as we weren’t), “Tech Prep” is the name today of what we used to call “vocational education” back in the day. Its also called “CTE” (Career Technical Education) and it is way cool. Jim set the stage with three stories about how CTE looks today, how it bears on jobs and how it may affect the future. Then Bob dug into our StoryJam arsenal and we facilitated several explorations that enabled about 100 educators to craft a revolutionary platform from which they will build their action plans for bringing TPE into its proper place. In the end, we got good feedback from our audience. One quote was “You and Jim complement each other in terms of styles and presentation skills. It was like the right brain and left brain processing the message and playshop.”

The Platypus is on the loose! We’ll keep you posted on where we’re playing.

Audio & Stage Moving Along

This past week was pretty much the midpoint of physical construction for our new post production audio mixing suite and our insert/Foley stage. All of the framing is completed (hard walls, closets, ceiling), doors are cut, rough electric has been run for Audio A. We should be obtaining final permits and inspection this week then it's off to the races. We made some final decisions Friday about how to handle the HVAC situation that will give us the best overall control and functionality for the various spaces. Last week we also obtained additional curtain track and curtain for the stage side. We will now have a black curtain running over 1/2 the wall space on the stage. This will obviously help the acoustics but more needed was additional flexibility in backdrops for shooting.

This past Friday we shot new interviews for our next Behind the Scenes webisode installment documenting the entire moving process that we've gone through the last 8+ months. The previous interviews have been in a controlled setting but for these we decided to shoot them in the middle of the construction site. We'll be editing this week and should be able to post the finished webisode before the end of the week. We also got our fabric samples last week for the soft walls in the audio mix room. Whatever we do we won't be picking a light green like our old Audio A or a mauve like our old Audio B & stage. We're thinking something in the gray area near the front of the room as to not distract or reflect color on the projection screen. Then towards the back we're hoping to include some red or burgundy. We'll see but it's exciting to have options.

We go tomorrow to get a full demo of the board we are buying for the mix room, an ICON console. The order is in but it's going to be nice to see a full working studio with the board we'll have. Renderings of the room are on our new home website: www.ideasorlando.com/ideasnewhome then go to the Pictures tab and click on 9-28-2009. You can also see the renderings on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ideas.orlando

Building Social Capital Through Storytelling

For a number of years an organization in Winston-Salem called ECHO has grappled with ways to build social capital in its community. In short, social capital refers to the richness of trusting relationships in a community—the premise is that the more these exist, the better a place it is to live and grow. Lots of communities around the country are grappling with how to break down barriers in their communities—ethnic groups living and working in isolation, often distrusting the other. Breaking down these barriers, some of which are more than relational (there’s a highway that runs through the heart of downtown Winston-Salem that is the literal divide between the historic African-American community and the rest of the predominantly white community). In addition, over the past years other ethnic groups have been moving into Winston-Salem, and they too have felt the sting of exclusion from the mainstream of business, commerce, and government. In many ways their voices are rarely heard when important decisions in the community are being made. And n many ways they are invisible to the white community—their only identity being associated with menial labor.

ECHO became convinced that perhaps the best way to tackle this issue was through the age-old art of storytelling. They began with a simple question: could people sharing their stories build bridges of understanding and compassion. It was a bold idea, and looking around for potential models for using storytelling, they became curious about the national StoryCorps initiative in which people come into a recording studio in pairs, share their story, and these stories are these shared out through NPR. How this would build social capital was unclear, but there was a large enough group of volunteers who were energized by this notion that they got seed funding and called their initiative Storyline. With a lot of sweat equity, they converted an old van used by the library to lend books to areas in the community into a decent traveling recording studio. This past April the van started showing up around town, and people showed up to tell their stories. Many of these have been edited down to 3 minutes in length, and a number of radio stations have even agreed to regularly air the stories.

Now that this milestone of regularly producing stories for airing and making them available on their website, the Storyline steering committee realized that as wonderful as many of these stories are, there was still a lot of ground to cover to get them to their goal—demonstrably increasing the social capital in their community. Moreover, they realized that they didn’t have a cohesive story that paints the vision of what they’re going to do to make a serious difference.

To that end, 30 people (including Winston-Salem’s mayor, representatives from a number of stakeholders in area organizations, community activists, business leaders, and many of the volunteers who have nurtured this effort) gathered today for an 8-hour conference to build that story, and imagine what else they could do with storytelling to achieve their goals. The material we generated in this short time frame was astounding.

Our next step is to analyze the breadth of stories that were developed for key themes, look for clear action steps, and build a cohesive story that can inform and clarify their mission and vision. Equally important, they will now have a compelling story they can take to potential funders to enlist their support.

As the project develops, I anticipate that we will be engaged to assist them further to build a scalable approach that can be replicated in communities across the country. For more on Storyline Project visit http://www.storylineproject.org/