Story-Colored Glasses – Page 3 – A blog about organizational and community narrative

2021-05-20

Confluence: The Book

It’s done. The new book is ready for you to read. It has an Amazon page with print and Kindle versions, plus a web site (at cfkurtz.com/confluence) with downloadable excerpts and exercise materials. You should also be able to order the book at your local book store (ISBN: 978-0-9913694-1-6). Confluence is about the ways in Read more
2021-01-18

Introducing the Participatory Narrative Practitioner Network

Today I want to talk to you about the PNI Institute, its history, its ending, and its successor. (Book update: I am still working on the last chapter. It is shaping up well, though more slowly than expected. I hope to be ready to send the book to my early readers in the next 3-4 Read more
2020-10-06

Questions for you, questions for me

Two posts in a row! Hooray! To be honest, I miss writing in the blog. It was fun. I’ll see if I can start doing it at least once a month again. However, I will need to hold myself back from writing those long essays that took up weeks of my time. Must not get Read more
2020-09-28

What I have been up to

Hello people. It has been increasingly bothering me that my last blog post was over a year ago. I wonder if people might think I have vanished off the face of the earth! Not yet. I have been working on a book. I have been working on it harder and more exclusively than I usually Read more
2019-09-04

Even more NarraFirma

I have just finished another NarraFirma release, again based on commissions, with more new features. Chiefly this: I am calling it a “correlation map.” It shows relationships among all the scale questions in your project in one graph. When you hover over a link you can see the scatterplot of combined values (as in this Read more
2019-05-18

NarraFirma keeps getting better

Last month I received some more development commissions to improve NarraFirma, so I have been working on it again, and I released a new version today. The focus of this release has been on improving the flexibility and usability of the catalysis process. You can review the full list of changes at the NarraFirma blog. Read more
2019-04-10

Mail bag: Stepping stones

Hello readers. I have been very busy in the past few months with paying projects. This has been a wonderful thing for my prospects of continuing to do this work! But it has led to the neglect of this blog, and of the book project. I have a few partially written blog posts in development, Read more
2019-01-14

More Better NarraFirma

NarraFirma has been getting some attention lately. I received development commissions from several NarraFirma users, so I’ve been working on the software since early November, and I’ve bundled together all the things people wanted into a new version, 1.2.0. The blog post on the NarraFirma web site goes into great detail about all the new Read more
2018-12-28

A little bit of history repeating

This blog post has been moved to (and revised for) The Working with Stories Miscellany. You can find it in Chapter 19. Read more
2018-10-25

Guest post – Before anything, storytelling is a conversation

Readers: I don’t think I’ve ever done this before, but I’d like to do it more often. This post was written by Juan Manuel Rodríguez Bocanegra of the Haki Storytelling blog. I am sure that you will find Juan Manuel’s insights valuable. Last year, I contacted Cynthia Kurtz and asked her to be a guest Read more
2018-10-10

Writing here and there

Lately I’ve been writing less here because I’ve been writing more there. On the PNI Institute blog, that is. So right now, if you want to read the new stuff I’m writing, go there. Why am I writing more there? This year, in our monthly Zoom calls, we’ve been going through the purposes of participatory Read more
2018-08-27

Story the Future summit Sept 10-30

So a while ago I got an invitation from David Hutchens, who wrote Circle of the 9 Muses, to take part in an online summit he and some others were putting together on the future of story work. It seemed like a good thing, so I said yes. Then he asked me to tell you Read more
2018-08-09

Works in progress

This is not a here’s-something-to-think-about blog post; it’s a why-hasn’t-she-been-posting-anything blog post. Just so you know going in. Store-bought stories (yes, still) In between other things, I’ve been working towards finishing the book of essays I started writing almost ten years ago about how we don’t tell everyday stories as much as we used to. Read more
2018-05-28

Underbutterflies are free

About a year ago I cleaned up my old “butterflies” blog post (one of the most popular) and submitted it to the Journal on Policy and Complex Systems. After acceptance, review, and revision, the journal volume is now out, and you can read and download the improved version of the paper (or read the stand-alone Read more
2018-05-10

Mail bag: On transcribing storytelling

I’m deep in some intense (and fascinating) reading as I work on the last essays in the “Store Bought Stories” book. But the blog is hungry, so I went looking in my mail bag again. Here’s an anonymized (names and details changed) excerpt from some emails I sent recently to somebody who was working on Read more
2018-03-07

Stories, narratives, and hasty generalizations

This blog post has been moved to (and revised for) The Working with Stories Miscellany. You can find it in Chapter 16. Read more
2018-02-13

Narratopia in Dutch!

Narratopia is now available in Dutch, in both boxed (ready to play) and print-and-play versions. The game was translated by Annemijn van Garderen with help from her dad, Harold. Many thanks to both of them for making it happen. If you are interested in helping me translate Narratopia to a language you know well, send Read more
2018-01-31

Mail bag: Dimensional axes for sensemaking

I get emails pretty regularly from people looking for a bit of focused advice on some aspect of PNI work they are doing. I almost always respond (though usually not immediately). It occurred to me the other day that most of these responses would make good blog posts. So: this is the start of a Read more
2018-01-12

Here I am talking about NarraFirma

I finally managed to update the NarraFirma introduction video. I’m sure I’ll hate it in a year’s time, but for now, this is as good as it’s going to get. If you have any questions about NarraFirma, be sure to send them along. Read more
2017-12-08

NarraFirma 1.0

I am finally ready to announce the release of NarraFirma 1.0. I’ve been working on it since the summer. I was able to give the software a nice solid overhaul in functionality and usability. The blog post on the NarraFirma web site describes the changes in detail. I’ll summarize just a few of the major Read more