The Storyboard Challenge

Stories have a way of making the complex clear. When narrated as a story interspersed with anecdotes, metaphors and analogy – lifeless data springs to life and teams are moved to action. The stickiness of stories and their potency in getting a message across can be fathomed by the fact that though few would have read the voluminous Ramayana, the message it delivers that “Good always overcomes evil” is crystal clear in the minds of most Indians!

While conveying a message or a story as the timeless insight tells us – a picture speaks a thousand words! The Storyboard Challenge puts both these insights together – the power of stories and the strength of the visual medium to offer a unique challenge to teams.

Can they tell a story through images that they will paint?

The challenge starts off with teams being broken up into smaller units. Each team is handed over a canvas with all the related paraphernalia like acrylic paints, aprons, pencils, sketches, brushes, rubbers and scales. The challenge posed to the team is this: To tell one coherent story – that is broken across several panels – as team.

Unlike The Pixel Challenge – where the challenge teams face is largely to replicate smaller images given to them, The Storyboard Challenge is two levels tougher. No readymade image is handed to the team. It calls for teams to come together and first decide a storyline, then decide which team represents what on their respective panels and then comes the creative task of actually representing it on their canvas. When all is said and done – the canvases need to come together to create a large storyboard. The story then follows……

Is the Storyboard Challenge right for your team?

This is an interesting challenge that calls for multiple skills from team members to succeed. Collaborating across teams, creativity in coming up with coherent storylines, skills in sketching, painting and finally storytelling. The challenge brings out in a subtle way the power of stories and storytelling – and nudges participants to explore the same in their daily work back at office.

The activity can be done indoor or outdoor and roughly takes around 2-3 hours. The activity can be used in different contexts:

• Value cascading – where you want your teams to engage with organizational or team values
• Journey Mapping – where you want to tell the story of the team- “A day in the life of….”
• Visioning – when you want your team to together envision a shared future
• And many more…..

If you are looking at a fairly challenging intervention for the team that stretches everyone in the team and also lands significant messages around learning – FocusU invites you to explore The Storyboard Challenge!