New Working with Stories books; New PNI Practicum courses

I am happy to announce that all four books in the new Working with Stories series are finished and published and accessible in three formats:

• As PDF documents on the workingwithstories.org website (free to read, print, and share)
• As paperback books on amazon.com
• As Kindle books (or EPUB e-book downloads) on amazon.com 

If you think these books are useful, and if you can afford it, please consider buying at least one print or Kindle book or making a donation. I did not have the money to do this book project, but I did it anyway because I think the world needs it. If you agree, please help me pay for it.

I am also restarting my PNI Practicum online courses. More on that below. 

Please note: The detail pages for the Kindle and paperback versions of Working with Stories (the main book) are not yet properly linked on Amazon.com. (They were linked, but I tweaked the paperback description, not realizing it would break the link.) Amazon says the situation will be resolved in a few days. 

Why I wrote four new books

In early 2024, I decided to stop trying to be a contract consultant (which has never paid very well or consistently) and look for a "real job" with benefits. I wanted to do something that was at least similar to what I have been doing for the last 25 years. However, after four months of full-time job-search effort, I realized that I would have to cast a wider net and look for a job that was unrelated to the work I had been doing.

But I worried that if I changed careers again, I would forget everything I knew about PNI, and that knowledge would be lost to the world. So I decided to spend a few months updating Working with Stories before I made the change. That few months turned into nearly two years. But the project is finally done, and I'm glad I did it. (If I had a nickel for every time I've said that on this blog...)

What I've done and why

In updating Working with Stories, I wanted to write a book that was shorter, better, and more complete.

A shorter book

I knew that for many of my readers, the third edition of Working with Stories was too long and too dense to be useful. To address this problem, I did two things:

1. I went carefully through WWS3 and trimmed down every chapter, section, and paragraph. The fourth edition of WWS is only about 100 pages shorter than the third edition, but that's because I was more concerned with improving the book's readability than I was with reducing its absolute page count. I got rid of the two-column format, added more white space, and converted many long paragraphs to tables and bulleted lists. All of those changes make for a simpler and faster reading experience, even though the book is still pretty long.
2. I wrote Working with Stories Simplified, which at 165 pages offers an abridged version of every chapter and section in WWS. Simplified is not a dumbed-down version of PNI; everything you need to do PNI is in there. It just leaves out many nuances and extra options you can seek out later, when you're ready for them. I also think people might want to use Simplified as a cheat-sheet reference to the longer book.

A better book

Most of my consulting work since WWS3 came out has been coaching, so I have learned a lot (more) about the obstacles people face in their first PNI projects. This new source of insight led to some new developments:

1. I added a lot more getting-started advice to WWS4, including more cautionary tales of things that can go wrong and some exciting new ideas to provide energy.
2. I added some new story-sharing and sensemaking exercises. These have been on my website for years, but most people didn't notice them because they were not in WWS3.
3. I wrote 50 new "starter" question sets to give people more ideas for questions they can ask in their projects. You can find these in The Working with Stories Sourcebook.

A more complete book (series)

I wanted to tie up the loose ends of my work on PNI, to begin the process of handing it over to a new generation of scholars and practitioners. 

1. I added new sections to WWS4 on ethics, the history of PNI, and connections between PNI and other fields. I also hinted (more than before) at what I hope PNI will become in the future, beyond my involvement in it.
2. I built a library of 50 brief case studies, and with the help of some amazing colleagues, I brought the number of case studies from other PNI practitioners up from 4 to 10.  You can find these 60 case studies in the new Sourcebook.
3. My old catch-all book More Work with Stories had been sitting on my website and nagging at me for a decade. I went back to it, threw some of it away, and cleaned up the rest of it as The Working with Stories Miscellany. The miscellany was also a good place to put the too-long sections I took out of Working with Stories, as well as some of my favorite blog posts.

Letting go

Somebody once said that writers never finish books; they just have books taken away from them. That's so true. I'm so glad to have finally finished these books, but at the same time, it's a bittersweet feeling. Working with Stories has been a friend since I first sat down to write it in the spring of 2008.

I'm sure there must still be a few more typographical errors and imperfect sentences I did not find in the four books, even though I read them all many times. I took this photo to show you how many proof copies I reviewed of each book. 

I didn't read all of these copies in detail; some of them were to test cover designs or to (attempt to) fix printing problems. But I did read each book in full three times in print. I also hired an editor to read all of the books. So the books are as free of errors as I can reasonably make them.

From now on, I will only be able to "fix" any newfound errors on the workingwithstories.org Errata list (on the "More" page). I have had to list a few errors there already. They are small issues with the Kindle Direct Publishing process that I could not figure out how to fix. Hopefully they will not bother anyone very much.

I would like to thank everyone who has encouraged and/or helped me to work on my books over the past few years. You know who you are, and you know how grateful I am for your help. 

Next step: Restarting the PNI Practicum!

So here I am, done with the book project and ready for my next big thing. 

I've been keeping an eye on the job market as I have been working on the books. It looks like spending more time looking for a job would be another waste of time, even if I follow through on my plans to step away from PNI and find something else to do. For people who do the things I know how to do, this job market is the worst I've ever seen.

So I feel that at this point, I have no choice but to make another attempt at giving my PNI Practicum online courses. I did like giving the courses! I love helping people work their way through their first PNI projects. I only gave up on the courses because I didn't get as many sign-ups as I had hoped to get. 

But I aim to try again. This time I plan to commit to giving the courses until they succeed, even if it takes a few years for them to ramp up. 

To be clear, the PNI Practicum course materials will still (and will always) be available for free to anyone who wants to take a course on their own (without my help). When people take one of my paid courses, they will be paying for my time and attention, not for the course materials. 

By the way, anyone who wants to use my course materials to offer a paid course of their own (e.g., to their clients) can do so if they pay me a (relatively modest) licensing fee (for which I will grant them a special time-limited license).  

What the new PNI Practicum courses will be like 

I do not plan to change much about the courses. Most importantly, they will still (and will always) be practicum courses, project-based and hands-on. That is, each student will carry out a real PNI project with real participants. In the shortest course (the Prelude), the entire class cohort will work together on a single shared project. In the two longer courses, each student will carry out their own project (though pairs or trios can share a project).

As before, the courses will use a "flipped classroom" model, with readings but no lectures. All class time will be dedicated to project-progress discussions and facilitated group activities. I will run each meeting and provide ongoing facilitation, advice, and support. The longer courses will also include opportunities for one-on-one coaching.

When the new courses will happen 

This is my tentative plan:

1. The Level 0 (Prelude) course will include four three-hour weekly calls, run five times a year, and cost US$700 per student.
2. The Level 1 (Smaller-scale) course will include 12 two-hour weekly calls, run three times a year, and cost US$1400.
3. The Level II (Larger-scale) course will include 20 two-hour weekly calls, run only once per year, and cost US$2100.

The weekly meetings for each course will happen on this (tentative) schedule. 

 

Some notes on this schedule:

• The listed times are all in my (New York) time (with daylight savings time). When I publish the schedule on the website, I will add UTC times to it (for each month) as well.
• Each course will have a six-person minimum. This is to provide adequate discussion and peer support, and to run group exercises that require two three-person groups. Courses that do not fill up before their start dates will not run. 
• The upper limit for the Level 0 course will be 12 students. For the longer courses, the upper limit will depend on how many people will be sharing projects, since we will be discussing each project in our project-progress meetings. If nobody will be sharing projects, the upper limit will be 8 students. Otherwise it will be higher.
• Each course will meet at only one time of day. The last time I gave the courses, I dealt with the time zone issue by having multiple weekly meetings at different times of the (same) day. That took up a lot of my time, and it was confusing to people, and it resulted in some meetings having few people in them. This time I will only do that for the Level II course, which will be split into two time-zone cohorts (each of which will meet at only one time of day). For the other courses, I have set a single day and time for each repetition of the course. I have spread out the days and times so everyone can find a day and time (within the year) that they can manage.
• I have placed no courses in January, August, or December. That's because I think few people will want to take courses in those months. If I find out that people do want to take courses in those months, I can add more courses. For example, I would like to offer a second Level-II course in the fall, but it will require people to meet either in August and December or in December and January. 
• I would love to be able to offer sliding-scale prices (for varying incomes and locations), but I won't be able to do that unless enough money comes in from book sales, course fees, donations, and consulting gigs. (Who knows, it could happen someday...)
• I will probably offer multi-student discounts, like I did the last time. I may also set up a mailing list for people who want to receive last-minute discounts to fill up nearly-full cohorts.

Once the course schedule is finalized, I plan to keep it the same for a long time so people can make their plans months (or even years) into the future. (So if you have any suggestions, tell me now!)

What's left to do before we can start

I have a few things to do before I will be ready to give the courses again:

1. I need to finalize the course schedule. (This is probably it, but if anyone makes a good suggestion I could still change it.)
2. I need to update the course materials for changes in the WWS books. 
3. I need to bring the mid-level course down from 16 weeks to 12, to make it a better mid-point between the introductory (4 weeks) and in-depth (20 weeks) courses.
4. I will be using a new course-giving platform, so I need to get that set up. 
5. I need to update the PNI Practicum website for the new course schedule, new sign-up buttons, and new course materials.

I will not be ready to give the scheduled Level I course in February, but I will be ready to give the Level 0 and Level II courses in March. If you would like to sign up for one of those courses, keep an eye on this blog and on the PNI Practicum website for updates -- or send me an email, and I'll tell you when I'm ready for signups.

If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, or requests, you can send me an email (cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com).