For the past six months, it’s been anything but business-as-usual for me, and here’s why. In March of this year, my attention got swept away by a development that originated in Bentonville, Arkansas.
My friend, and now business partner, Donna Pahel, who has been a bigSTORY client at her previous two companies, hosted a party at the end of March at her house in Bentonville. Donna throws the kinds of parties worth traveling a day to attend. Plus we were going to talk business. I had a double reason for going.
While she was effortlessly whipping up a magnificent feast for 20 people who’d be attending the party that evening, I sat at her kitchen counter and walked her through a dossier of storytelling concepts, aspects of my work that I’d developed and honed since she and I last had a meaningful meeting.
20 minutes into our conversation, she told me about a company she’d been advising back in Pittsburgh, her hometown. A tech company building a platform she thought was perfect to implement bigSTORY at enterprise scale. “We have to go to Pittsburgh and meet with those guys,” she said.
This was music to my ears. As my colleagues will tell you, for the past three years I’ve been mapping a tool for scaling our work. ‘The Dashboard’ I called it, and defined it as “a way for an organization’s leaders to monitor and direct the story activities of the enterprise.”
Or we sometimes referred to it ‘The Magic Compass,’ which we described as “a technology that would give a group direction based on where they are in their journey.”
I went into this rap with Donna. She waved her hand dismissively [but not arrogantly]. “Dashboard, smashboard!” she said [or words to that effect]. “Yes, there’s a dashboard [in the Pittsburghers’ platform]. But that’s not the important part. The important part is the inputs. Where does that data come from?”
I was gobsmacked. I was Everlasting Gobstoppered! The inputs! Of course! It was a classic cinematic reversal. I’d been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Been on the wrong side of the looking glass. The magic would happen on the other side of the looking glass–the side with the inputs would be our focus. Our playful space. Our ‘Wonderland.’
Two weeks later, Donna and I were in Pittsburgh to meet with her friend, today our business partner, Joe Stafura, and his team of engineers and behavioral scientists at Thrive, the small start-up she’d been advising.
She led a group of 8 of us in a one-day session focused on the feasibility of our collaboration. It all seemed feasible. To all of us.
There was just one thing that, for me, was still a question. A hiccup. The 21-day duration Donna was recommending as the optimal time frame for our enterprise storytelling platform? I wasn’t quite seeing it.
NEXT: How I came to believe that 21 days was the perfect time frame for our new product.
