Because Vision and Values are Nothing Without Stories

Story Wise for Organisations

Culture, Vision & Skills

Story, in its many forms and faces is a simple yet powerful tool for building trust, organisational culture, shared purpose and vision and deep organisational humanity.

Story Wise has a range of processes that will use story to capture knowledge and simultaneously build connection within organisations.

The processes fall into two main categories, Catching and Collating – where we work with groups to enable story sharing for a number of purposes, and Learning and Leading – where we focus on developing skills for public speaking, storytelling and group facilitation.  

All Story Wise work is bespoke, adapted and developed in collaboration with you, to fit your circumstances, your organisation and your purpose.  To discuss your situation, and get advice on your approach call Kate on 0402 080 455 or schedule a 20 minute Story Call. 

Ask, Listen, Collect & Shape

This is a series of carefully designed gatherings, for a group, team or organisation, where powerful questions and deepening exploration generates a rich tapestry of experiences and reflections from participants. 

The simple but skilled art of holding space and listening, can be implemented to provide a range of intentional outcomes. The process will also inevitably work in a multi layered way to reveal the complexity of human nature for a range of emergent outcomes.

Potential Outcomes:

• The experiences participants share provides an opportunity to understand and collect organisational intelligence. 
• The material gathered can be collated into a documented story about the collective experience of a particular issue or event, and reflected back, and used to make decisions.
• Group communication, understanding and effectiveness is developed through shared stories.  It is also one of the best ways to create a peer support group for leadership teams.
• Culture, purpose, vision and values can all be developed in meaningful and engaging ways, that envision at the same time as embody.
• Difficult events can be processed and ensure participants feel heard by each other as well as leadership. 
• Smouldering unseen but destructive issues can be surfaced, sometimes creating disruption and discomfort in the short term, but enabling forward movement in the longer term.  

Workshop and facilitation topics

Story Wise offers workshops in a range of topics in from two main areas –

1. Storytelling & Public Speaking
2. Facilitation  and Participatory Group Processes
3. Wholeness at Work

Storytelling

 Story with a capital ’S” is story that is crafted and shaped, reflected upon and told with meaning and purpose in a deliberate and conscious way.  It is a skill that can be learned and developed from our natural inclination to tell and listen to stories throughout our lives. It is a skill and a literacy that when developed becomes a finely tuned ear for story and an awareness of when story needs to be surfaced, heard and with permission, used for a range of purposes.  

Workshop topics in this area include:

• Storytelling Skills
• Developing a Storytelling Culture
• Public Speaking

Potential Outcomes: Storytelling performance and public speaking skills, greater engagement in presentation and communications, group connection and community, knowledge sharing, storytelling community, emotional expression. 

Participatory Group Processes

How we engage with each other in meetings, be they small team catch ups, or large department meetings, has a huge impact on how we enable the participation, engagement and therefore commitment of our colleagues.  Direct line orders under a heirarchy are useful in war and natural disasters, but for regular working life they are disempowering, unsatisfying and build resentment. While full democratic participation can be time consuming, with a bit of faith and commitment, simple but clear and powerful participatory processes can be implemented with a little training.  

Workshop topics in this area include:

• Participatory Group Processes

Potential Outcomes:  Empowerment, engagement and participation, greater group input resulting in better decisions, better team connection,  greater collaboration.  

Wholeness at Work

Wholeness at work is a combination of circle and workshop, to introduce ideas and practices that can expand our selves in the workplace, and expand the workplace to hold all of us.  It combines personal well being practices like mindfulness and meditation, as well as story sharing, emotional expression and the power of peer circle connection. 

• Making Work Meaningful
• Emotional Expression at Work

Potential Outcomes: Greater engagement! More committed, happier and more productive workers, greater worker retention, improved culture, improved teamwork and collaboration.

Call Kate now on 0402 080 455, or

Book a Free 20 minute Story Call to Talk Through Your Best Approach

Why work with Kate Lawrence?

Kate has an exceptional ability to listen for and perceive human motivations and to sense-make. She holds her impressions lightly – guiding and being guided in equal measure.  She has many years experience facilitating, writing, and storying, for understanding, messaging, reflecting back and preserving history.

From small community legal centres, big city law firms, several local councils through to large government corporations like the CFA, Kate has a broad range of experience as an employee and leader within organisations. 

Nearly two decades in law, listening, presenting and persuading; two decades creating logic out of mess, creating flow and order where there was none, shaping stories to persuade and make sense, are all available to you when you work with Kate. 

Whether you want to introduce people to learning the art of storytelling, or to draw out of human experiences an overarching organisational story, Kate will bring a wise, intuitive and experienced hand to the process and outcome,  based on a foundation of the humanity of all involved.