This book (to which I have contributed) includes over 80 story-based activities to engage people with the power of story. The book is a terrific resource for consultants, facilitators, educators, change makers and leaders who want to harness the power of story to create positive change in individuals, organisations and communities. The book provides a collection of ‘recipes’ that can be used as interventions in a range of contexts for a range of purposes. They all encourage a process of reflection and learning through story. Each activity comes with some guidelines for how to use it: how many participants; how much time it takes; the level of energy involved; the purpose and rationale for the activity; instructions on how to facilitate the activity; debriefing notes; variations and additional resources and readings.
One of my contributions to the book is an activity that I call “Choose your own adventure” inspired by the books I loved as a child, in which at certain points you were asked to make a choice about where they story should go next, and those choices led to a different version of the story. In the activity, participants are asked to choose a story relevant to the context in which they are working, and to identify one or more points in the story in which the storyline could have gone in a different direction. Participants are asked to re-tell the story, imagining what might have happened if the story had taken that different turn. This can be a fun and powerful reflection on past events, but also useful as a future focused activity.
