Enterprise Design Patterns | Creations Patterns
#28: Captured Stories
"If we want to understand the world, we do it best through stories."
- Jeanne Ross
Related Patterns:
#20: Outside Inspiration, #30: Depicting Shared Understanding, #34: Tangible Futures
You want to capture the collective intelligence generated in the Enterprise Design process and make it readily available for later use.
In this context:
Your work with your co-creators generates more ideas and concepts than will be used in your current initiative. When you revisit that earlier wisdom, the lack of context about how it was created makes it difficult to interpret. Over time, the potential value of these unused ideas becomes increasingly harder to tap into.
Therefore:
You constantly scout for promising concepts and ideas and capture them in a narrative form. To make them accessible for future use you:
- Capture all creative and conceptual input, even while you are still in exploratory or research-oriented mode;
- Give people the time and space to present their concepts and ideas when they arise;
- Provide captured ideas and concepts with a background story including the context in which they arose, such as a short video clip, annotated pictures or another form of narration;
- Share these stories across the enterprise in an accessible form;
- Regularly revisit unused ideas to reconsider using them as your initiative develops;
- Encourage co-creators to pursue unused ideas outside their original context.
Consequently:
Collective creativity is preserved in a format that is relatable for everyone. Original but unused ideas can easily be "woven back" into the larger story of your proposed change and given renewed relevance. Co-creators can get in touch with the originators and choose to pursue their ideas at a later point.