Sharpen your story!
Story Sprint is a unique storytelling training workshop for business & corporate teams, led by Jordan Bower.
Jordan Bower is a transformative facilitator and a recognized thought leader in business storytelling.
trans·form·a·tive (adj.):
causing or able to cause a change. especially : causing someone's life to be different or better in some important way
Engaging business storytelling is accessible today.
Successful leadership storytelling is a mindset that can be learned and embedded into every company.
Jordan has worked with nearly 200 corporations, SMEs and governments, advising teams across their organizations—including executives, sales, marketing, product, finance, operations, HR, and many more.
Introducing Story Sprint
Story Sprint is a team storytelling training workshop that immediately improves your business communications skills, strategic mindsets and leadership impact.
Key Details: Story Sprint Storytelling Training for Teams
Standard Length: 1.5 days
Standard Format: In-Person Facilitated Workshop
Workshop includes: Structured business storytelling exercises, highly interactive “innovation process”, customized takeaways, expert facilitation from a strategic storytelling expert
Workshop focus: Immediately improving real team messaging selected and approved in advance
Ideal size: 12-50 participants.
Ideal team: Can be any organizational function. We’ve worked with executives, sales, marketing, product, finance, operations, cross-functional teams and many others.
Expert Facilitator: Every workshop is led by business storytelling expert, Jordan Bower.
It’s time to take a different approach to business storytelling.
If you want an easy solution to make your team sound like identical, corporate robots, then don’t bother with business storytelling. Close this website and just go straight to ChatGPT. 😝
In an AI world, it’s more important than ever to develop a human-centered approach to communication:
distilling your complex, data-driven ideas into clear, intelligent insights for your stakeholders
connecting with your audiences across silos, contexts, and levels of understanding
using compelling, creativ approaches to motivate others to believe and buy-in
employing intelligent, strategic and actionable storytelling tactics to drive business success
“Investing in the development of human capabilities doesn’t just build organizational resilience: It improves worker resilience, well-being, and mental health”
— 2024 Global Human Capital Trends, Deloitte
Jordan is an expert in guiding your team through change.
Jordan has led business storytelling training workshops for nearly 200 organizations, and 1000s of business and corporate professionals. By developing and applying the foundations of leadership storytelling—like creative problem solving, emotional intelligence, and audience analysis—Jordan will help your team:
Discover precisely which aspects of your messaging/narratives can be improved
Define new, outside-the-box mindsets and frameworks that improve your impact immediately
Develop individualized, creative solutions that bridge your current goals with new tactics and strategies
Deliver your new messaging to receive feedback from peers, powering the cycle of continuous learning
"If the strategic objectives of your business include developing innovative solutions, creating alignment around complex objectives, building support across cross-functional teams, and engaging your stakeholders with authentic and visionary leadership communication, then Jordan Bower’s work fits your needs.”
Jordan’s Story Sprint is a powerful storytelling training for business and corporate teams that will kickstart immediate improvement in your impact.
Here’s how:
OLD IDEA:
“Telling the story”:
Delivering a polished, structured message full of facts, features, and benefits that everyone repeats verbatim (whether they actually connect to the message or not).
NEW IDEA:
“Strategic Storytelling”:
Conveying strategic, data-driven messages in an authentic and emotionally meaningful format that changes for every speaker, context and audience.
Working with Jordan, your team will:
elevate your ability to engage stakeholders as a leader
become more helpful, dynamic and compelling
stop communicating in bullet points! 😝
improve how you inspire and motivate others
embed strategic storytelling into the DNA of your team!
Choose the Story Sprint that is right for your team!
Book Jordan Bower for a unique and sustainable learning experience in business storytelling!
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“Our Story Sprint led to immediate improvement in many aspects of our communications, from how we tell the story of our founders to how we express the value of our product to how we create buy-in for change.”
— Head of Revenue, King’s Hawaiian
About Your Story Sprint
Understanding Jordan’s creative vision for helping your team grow and change.
Jordan’s work starts with mindset change.
My approach is inspired by that famous Albert Einstein quote: “we can’t solve our problems at the same level of thinking we used when we created them.”
Before we can see a new way of communicating, we need to step outside of our old frame of reference, so we can re-evaluate the choices that are available.
To paraphrase Einstein—no big deal—we need to see differently so we can speak differently.
Story Sprint initiates this shift in mindset that will enable more innovative and effective communication, no matter whether your team is speaking to internal or external audiences.
Your Story Sprint In Detail:
Learn about our unique, highly-interactive corporate storytelling training workshop.
What is a “Sprint”?
A “sprint” is a short, time-boxed period where a business team works collaboratively to complete a set amount of work.
Popularized in the field of technology project management, a sprint provides teams with a clear, structured process to navigate complex challenges that involve variability and uncertainty. Sprints include multiple stages, including planning, production, review and—most importantly—learning by doing.
How the “Sprint” idea applies to your messaging:
Every team creates “messaging”, whether that means the reports you send, the presentations you deliver, or the way you market your product. Messaging can be oral, written, visual, or storytelling with data. It might include PPTs, PDFs, or infographics.
The goal of a Sprint is to see this messaging from a new perspective or mindset. By looking at your current messaging in a new way, you will be able to see simple, actionable and, often, outside-the-box approaches to communicating more effectively.
The focus of your Sprint is learning to communicate in a way that you think is better, instead of copying what we (or ChatGPT) thinks. That means that Story Sprint is applicable to every business team—no matter whether you are speaking to internal or external stakheolders.
How your Story Sprint workshop works:
Forget about plots, characters and Hero’s Journeys—Story Sprint is about much more than simply learning “how to tell a story”. (You can save that for Toastmasters.)
Instead, in your Story Sprint, your team will dig deep to ask the important strategic questions that will make your real communications more effective immediately.
Who are you trying to reach? How can you speak their language more effectively? What is the core of your message? How to make it interesting and creative? Questions like these will help you approach your real goals in a smarter, more effective way.
You’ll apply these questions to real examples of your messaging—with the goal of improving your real ability to communicate and influence your real stakeholders.
What your team will do in a Story Sprint
Story Sprint is structured around a 5-step innovation process. Working together with your team, you will move through a series of structured exercises that will guide you to make intelligent, targeted and tailored improvements to your communications tactics:
Discover: what needs to change about your communication in order to achieve the goals and impact you want
Define: how your team can address a specific, actionable improvement by using innovative thinking and creative problem solving
Develop: collaborative, outside-the-box solutions that will immediately step up your effectiveness
Deliver: your new solutions to one another, receiving peer feedback and working to incorporate your insights
Reflect: on the overall process and, together with your team, design and commit to your own actionable next steps
“Our Story Sprint brought us together to co-design creative solutions to our real communications challenges. We came into the room with a complex product that we were struggling to talk about—even internally. We walked away knowing exactly which stories to tell and why.”
— Head of Product, Unbounce
Introducing Your Facilitator
Jordan Bower is a dynamic creative thinker who has facilitated storytelling trainings & workshops for nearly 200 business and corporate clients.
Meet Jordan Bower. (That’s me! 😝)
A dynamic creative thinker, expert group facilitator and accomplished business storyteller, Jordan Bower has been teaching the art, craft and science of strategic storytelling in business for nearly fifteen years.
Jordan has delivered more than 150 storytelling workshops to organizational clients, including tech companies like Autodesk and Mozilla, large scale corporations like King’s Hawaiian and Canadian Tire, as well as many groups across small and medium-sized business, non-profits and the public sector. As a keynote speaker, he has delivered talks and workshops at conferences and events in North America, Europe and Asia.
Jordan often supplements his workshops with transformational coaching, consulting and advisory engagements. He is based in Vancouver, Canada.
Story Sprint Phases
Working together with your team, you’ll move through this innovation journey over a day-and-a-half—generating your own new insights you can implement immediately.
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In this essential first step, we will interview selected members of your team and guide you to find the right focus for your Sprint. We’ll also review a sampling of the messaging/collateral that you currently create, including PPT decks, strategy documents, videos, presentations, pitches or any other communications produced by your team.
This first step allows us to assess your team’s current skills, find an appropriate focus for your Sprint—and set an achievable goal and expectations. Establishing this focus will help your team understand how to sustain your learning after your storytelling workshop is done.
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Every Sprint begins by setting the context for the workshop and establishing the why. In this highly interactive opening session, you will discuss:
how leadership communications is changing
best practices used by today’s most effective leaders
the foundations of effective “business storytelling”: clarity, connection, creativity and context
Together, in pairs and in small groups, you will work through highly interactive storytelling exercises—learning foundational principles, discussing your learning and establishing specifically how your team might apply your insights.
This interactive and disruptive introduction will shift your team’s perspective on what it means to be an effective communicator at work.
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Next, your team will work together to define your “How Might We’s”. This exercise—a fundamental part of the Design Thinking process—will help your team frame your communications challenges in the right way, so you can set yourself up to find innovative solutions.
Together, you will:
find common themes behind your existing communications challenges
reframe your insights to create opportunities for innovation
focus your problem solving so you can discover applicable and actionable solutions immediately
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In Phase 1, you discovered a new perspective on your challenge. In Phase 2, you defined the problem in terms of a clear question that you’re now ready to solve.
In Phase 3, you and your team will collaborate on developing outside-the-box solutions—improving your communications by considering all aspects, including the verbal, non-verbal, structural and emotional elements
Deepen your understanding of your audiences/stakeholders
Improve how you present information and data
Gather insights and feedback from your peers
Work on real solutions that you can implement immediately
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Ultimately, your Story Sprint will teach your team to be more creative. Together, you’ll reimagine old mindsets and habits—and have a lot of fun along the way.
In the final chapter, you’ll reflect on your learning and establish next steps:
Find “15% solutions” that can be implemented with minimal resources
Make commitments to sustain your learning
Define and align upon overall next steps as individuals and a team
You’ll leave your Story Sprint with new tools, ideas, insights, motivation, creativity and excitement—not bad for just 1.5 days of learning!
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Led by a world class leadership storytelling facilitator, your Story Sprint is much more than a training. With Jordan’s expert guidance, your team will zoom out to think big picture about effective communication—what it is, how to do it well, and, what might currently be getting in the way—and then zoom back into the specific tangible and actionable steps you’ll need to take next.
Once your Sprint is done, you’ll meet one final time with Jordan. He’ll help you interpret the learning experience from an outside, expert perspective and provide you with customized recommendations about how you can sustain your learning—and level up your team’s overall impact.
FAQs
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Very! We keep the energy up with real world examples of effective business storytelling, dynamic content and facilitation style, and plenty of structured exercises in pairs and peer learning groups.
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This training takes a principle-based approach to business storytelling. That means the principles can be applied broadly to any kind of business communication.
We address written and verbal communication in emails, reports, Powerpoint decks, presentations, videos, social media and much, much more.
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Yes! The principles learned in this workshop apply to storytelling with data and other visuals. Participants learn how to clarify their message, find the emotional core and relate it to their stakeholders or other audiences. Then, they practice applying these ideas to real examples of their workplace messaging.
However, this storytelling training is not a detailed focus on infographic design. If you’re looking for something like that, we highly recommend Storytelling with Data.
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Yes! Before every storytelling training, we conduct research that allows us to customize content and examples to your group. These examples may include reports, documents, Powerpoint deck, or other relevant “stories”.
We always get your approval in advance!
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Yes! We love working with our clients to maximize the value they get from our corporate storytelling training. Just send us a message!
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No! The workshop uses a mix of structured exercises, peer-learning groups and large group sessions to introduce and learn the material. Your team will participate in exercises in pairs and groups of four, but no one will be obligated to present anything in front of the entire group.
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Yes! I have custom designed the content, and I deliver it in a tailored way to every group. I have successfully delivered nearly 200 storytelling workshops!
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Yes! Your team will receive additional materials, recommended readings, and tools to continue developing their storytelling skills after the workshop.
Additionally, I will meet with your leadership after the workshop to reflect on the learning experience and to recommend customized next steps.
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This storytelling training is often the first step in a change initiative. Transformation is my speciality! I will be happy to discuss a longer journey if you like, after the training. For more info, check out my homepage.
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This content is presented as a workshop, rather than a storytelling training for business, because participants will “workshop” real examples of their mesaging. The workshop is highly engaging and interactive, focusing on developing storytellers rather than “training” them.
Resources
Want to run a Story Sprint yourself? Here’s a collection of resources that have been incorporated into the Story Sprint Design process.
Innovation Processes
Facilitation Tools/Exercises
Storytelling Frameworks
Business/Leadership Storytelling Examples