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Experiments in Story and Dialogue

October 16, 2012 by Nabil Leave a Comment

Over the last few months I’ve been working on an experiment: at a time when the national discourse in America seems polarized, how can we bring together people from across the political spectrum and spark deeper dialogue?

My main tool for sparking deeper dialogue has been storytelling, i.e. using the process of story coaching to surface values, and story telling to help others, with different perspectives, to see and hold them.

In August I held my first event, featuring five activists from Boston-Area Tea Party groups who volunteered to step up and share stories focused not on their politics, but rather their values and the life experiences that helped shape them. This Thursday we’re holding our second event and will be bringing together, on one stage, supporters of Occupy Boston, the Tea Party, and the GOP.

At this stage our events are less of a fixed process and more of an experimental laboratory of dialogue and story. I’m still in the process of understanding what it is that we’re creating, and what value it creates and for whom. And I’m hopeful that this will be a good learning opportunity for me and those involved, and if we’re lucky contribute to the intention of bringing together communities at a time when they seem to be divided.

For info on Thursday’s event, check out our Facebook event page. For updates / future announcements / blog posts specifically related to this initiative (The Mantle Project), please sign up for the mailing list at http://eepurl.com/p3VAj. Thanks.

Citizen Storytelling

July 17, 2011 by Nabil Leave a Comment

How do we enable people to tell their stories while preserving values such as freedom of information and privacy? I joined others in sharing our thoughts to promote the Citizen Media competition organized by Ashoka and Google. Their editors created this neat video.

After Spring, Comes Summer

May 26, 2011 by Nabil Leave a Comment

How does an unemployed youth — disenfranchised under a corrupt dictatorship — find voice and purpose in the months after a popular revolt? What does a community learn about itself – and those around it – as it engages in direct and honest conversation for the first time? How does a government negotiate letting its citizens speak their mind, and create a stable and functioning society?

In the wake of the Arab world’s first successful overthrow of a dictator, and through the personal narratives of strangers I have yet to meet, I’ve arrived in Tunisia to find out. Over the next three months I hope to share a few stories from the wake of the Arab Spring — that hot, foggy space between revolutions and institutions.

Also filed on Twitter under #arabsummer.

d.School Bootcamp Bootleg

January 3, 2011 by Nabil Leave a Comment

For fellow ethnographers (and design enthusiasts in general), one of the best design references I’ve seen. A bootleg of Stanford d.school‘s “Design Bootcamp,” a course which serves as the foundation of their curriculum. A great overview of design thinking and related exercises, as published (click here) by the d.school itself under the Creative Commons license.

Amazon & Wikileaks: Sorting Out the Controversy

December 6, 2010 by Nabil 1 Comment

Amazon’s recent decision to pull Wikileaks from of its servers has sparked a heated debate. I think one of the main points that’s been confused is Amazon’s legal versus ethical obligations. Here’s my attempt to sort these out:

Legally the argument is simple. Amazon forbids the hosting of documents that a client does not “own or otherwise control all of the rights to.” Wikileaks did not (or so let’s hope) write the Department of State diplomatic cables and so they’ve clearly violated the Terms of Service (TOS) to which they agreed when they signed up for an account. A clear TOS violation. Suspend the account. End of story.

Ethically the argument falls into a gray area, and I think your opinion on the matter is intrinsically tied to the value you put on the cables. If you consider the cables nothing more than someone’s stolen personal property, then again Amazon is right not to be an accessory to theft. On the other hand, if you consider the cables as information that’s illuminating a greater social injustice, then the argument gets trickier.

Say, for example, a North Korean soldier leaks stolen government documents detailing a network of heretofore unknown hard labor camps, and posts these docs on Amazon’s server. Some would argue that for Amazon to take down his site out of respect for the property rights of the North Korean regime would be at best, ethically questionable and at worst, aiding and abetting a large social injustice.

Now whether you believe the Wikileaks documents illuminate any social injustice well, that opinion’s yours to form ;)

Chick-Fil-A and the Business of Story Listening

November 12, 2010 by Nabil Leave a Comment

As discussed in Evan Baehr’s insightful post, the fast-food restaurant Chick-fil-A is thinking deeply about how to use story to create better experiences for its clients. The following ethnographic piece captures its intentions around story impactfully, as it parses through the different pathways that each customer took to visit this one Chick-Fil-A restaurant.

On Purpose

August 11, 2010 by Nabil 5 Comments

As my description of my self-designed MBA internship faded into the walls, a pregnant pause filled the room. And as I looked at Professor Pitts-Wiley’s giant and gentle face, I saw a thoughtful grimace appear, and spread across the surface of his vast dome to include his prodigious ears, his salt-and-pepper mustache, and the whites of his heavy, purposeful eyes. And as that moment gave way the Professor leaned his massive torso onto a black-lacquered desk, set his large brown eyes on mine and posed, gravely: Are you on a journey? Or are you wandering?

A journey, he would go on to explain, has purpose, whereas wandering does not.

It’s been four months since my meeting in Professor Pitts-Wiley’s office in April, the same month that I decided that I was going to create my own summer internship as a storyteller. And in that time I feel that I’ve learned a lot about my purpose. From coffee chats with designers to interviews with retirees in New Mexico, I’ve found that my passion lies in what I call “performance ethnography.” I define performance ethnography as the act of extracting stories from my environment, through interviews and observation, and sharing them with others in a compelling way, through film and public speaking.

And yet I have my moments of self-doubt. As I face the coming year I’m struggling with basic questions: do I practice performance by continuing my stand-up comedy or by being the spokesmen for a social movement? Do I practice ethnography through self-funded interviews or within the context of a private company? And even more pressing, as I read an invite for a welcome-back party on campus, how does my MBA education serve my passion?

As I struggle with these questions at the tail end of my summer internship, I think to advice that my sister once gave me: make your decisions from a place of confidence, not fear. And as I visualize my career in performance ethnography in front of me, one thing that is clear is that the most purposeful path leads through a period of practice, of creating content, and of immersing myself in its form.

And so in the following year I will take a leave of absence from MIT Sloan and delve into my craft. And as I find a part time job to finance my creative ambitions and create a community of similarly inspired folks, I feel nervous, but also confident. Confident that I’m one step closer to the moment when I can lean in over that black-lacquer desk, look Professor Pitts-Wiley squarely in the eyes, and reply with all of the conviction in the world: I’m on a journey.

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