how to capture the story of one's work

this post is being written as i am falling asleep for the day.

the intent of this post is to be a draft of how to share the story of people’s work.

and yet, even as i try to write sentences down, it seems they make less sense typed out than they did when i tried to retrieve them from my mind.

i thought, if one were to attempt to tell a story about each year of working at an org, maybe that wouldn’t be so hard. take each calendar year and attempt to give it a theme (similar to chris gillebeau’s annual review theming). then tell the story of that year. or at least share highlights from that year. this should create a sketch of the most important parts of one’s work.

but then i thought, surely there must be reflection techniques to support this. even at orientation we gave out a reflective practice handbook to the new students: why not just use one of those techniques? at the very least, we could ask ceasar to come and run a critical moments process for us… hell, i’ve been a part of enough of them that i could probably facilitate it myself.

but maybe that was too much?

how else might we capture the stories of people’s work?

do we even need to?

yes.

but how has it not been done already? and what are the directions / categories / thrusts of the different collections of work? and have they remained consistent over time? maybe that’s a part of why collecting the stories has been so sporadic: there’s no consistency and surfacing that reality is painful, even detrimental to the org’s existence.

sleep.

words / writing / post-processing
281w / 10min / 3min