OK, back, so let's continue.
Now I'm going to talk about the technique that I usually do use when I'm performing conceptual modeling
exercises and workshops, it's a kind of storytelling.
So storytelling is a general term that can be used in many types of situations where you can use it
as a marketing tool and and also when you're trying to create a culture for the whole company.
But it is also a powerful technique to have as a as a basic technique.
When you're doing workshops like this, both process modeling and conceptual modeling.
I would say so.
Storytelling is about telling stories, right.
So once upon a time.
So it's a very powerful way of how we acquire knowledge by actually letting people tell stories for
you.
Let let me take an example.
So if I'm showing you this picture and then I'm showing you that picture and maybe already start to
feel that you have.
Yeah, you might understand where we're going here.
And then I'm showing you that picture and that I'm showing that picture.
I think that most of you already now think where I'm heading.
So I'm talking about Little Red Riding a ride.
So why is that so easy for you to see?
So you have connections between those concepts that you have gotten when when you got the story of Little
Red Riding Hood told for you the first times.
So it's a story about this little girl who have a grandma that she would like to go to with some food
because the government needs some food.
But she bumps into a wolf and the wolf tricks the Little Red Riding Hood and actually goes ahead before
her to the grandma and actually eats to grandma up because she will.
The food, the wolf also would like to have the food while a little Red Riding Hood comes to grandma's
place as an awful story.
Right.
But the interesting thing here is all the connections between those concepts.
They were made by getting that story.
And that is the kind of the powerful way or how storytelling works.
It helps you organize knowledge.
So kind of the magic words here are let me tell you a story now.
What happens when people actually start telling stories for you so people actually immediately start.
Listen.
Interesting the story.
Yeah.
I think I need to hear this.
Yeah.
And a new entity is actually created here.
So you immediately accept that a story is the context within which you are going to hear of something
now.
And listeners then also get kind of emotional involved in this story, they would like to hear the end
of this they're interesting, was what is said in the context of this new entity, the story.
And when they're emotionally involved, you actually get more persistent knowledge.
So then you are all away from the root learning that we talk about in the in the Cognitive Science Foundation
for this.
And you're more into actually tying this into an emotional state, which means that it will be more
persistent for you.
It would actually foster the shared understanding as well of this, because the number of people is
listening to this story at the same time or trying to make the same connections.
And you can actually see how they react, how they understand it in just her body language or the questions
their place maybe is using.
Since we kind of then are digging up the concept and we are trying to understand this story, we are
kind of activating the knowledge network that we have.
And since we are activating the knowledge network, it's more likely that we are starting to actually
make collective creative leaps, so to speak, between our different networks that we that we that we
already have prior to the story.
So there is a lot of very interesting stuff going on.
Just when a person is saying the major words like Lepanto, the story this when they are just saying
the words like, let me tell you a story.
So how could you utilize this when you're doing conceptual modeling?
Yeah, I usually use it like this.
So if you're the facilitator, you're not a storyteller.
So you're really here to say that today you that's the participants in the workshop.
You're going to tell me some stories.
Right.
However, and there's not we're not just talking about any stories.
The facilitator probably prepared a couple of stories they would like to hear more about.
So saying that it's not just any story here.
I'm interested in what happens when a payment for a sent invoices receipt, for example.
So you should ask a facilitator what kind of prepared you can call those stories, who can call in scenarios,
who can call them processes or whatever.
But you have prepared a couple of scenarios that you would like to hear about.
And then you ask them, can you tell them it is?
And then you listen and listen and listen very carefully and try to in real time.
I usually do.
So I usually sit in the tool and have it on on a slide so you can see much of it on the monitor and
then everybody can see how the model evolves, why the people are actually talking.
And I might be then pausing and placing questions.
So that's what we need to talk about here.
So let's say here's one of the participants.
Yeah, sure.
I can tell you a story about this.
So payments are received to our bank accounts twice per day.
Every payment has a reference text, which we use to figure out which invoice the payments relate to.
And maybe they tell more and more stuff here.
But let's say that this is kind of the first part.
This is the first step in his story.
OK, so use the facilities that aggregate.
Can we just take a short break in our story here and recap to see if I got it right?
Because during when he said this and maybe he just you know, this was a very short version of it,
maybe talk to you for a couple of minutes.
Then during that time, you will actually have already popped up some boxes on your diagram and tried
to connect them to second.
You just have a short pause here and see if I understand correctly.
So a payment for Nimoy's is made by Paey and includes a payment reference.
The payment is received at a bank account, is that right?
So we have this payment that pays one invoice, OK?
And an invoice could be paid by one or zero invoices, sorry.
And an invoice could be paid by one or zero payments at a given point.
And a payment is made by AP and it includes the payment reference, you're saying.
And it's received in a bank account.
Yeah, but so here's the story then continues.
The pay could in practice write whatever we like in the reference field and in many cases of payment
should be able to pay multiple or only parts of an invoice.
We allocate the payment per invoice line.
All right.
OK, so it looks like this, right?
So then you have changed them all during when he now started to detailing himself in his story here.
You said that.
OK, so it's not exactly as I wrote first, it's more like this.
So we have an invoice and an invoice.
Lying contains invoice.
So an invoice contains invoice lines.
And then you are allocating a payment to the invoice lines so a payment could actually have multiple
payment allocations, but each payment allocation is per invoice line.
Correct.
Yeah, nice.
And you said you figure out which invoice.
How do you do that?
So then the story continues again.
Yeah, the system tries to find a match for us, but if it does not, then the payment will be put on
either agreement, customer or general suspense to be handled manually by US cash officers.
OK, and let me see if I got that right, too.
So a payment can also be allocated to one of three types of suspense accounts, depending on the knowledge
you have acquired about the payment.
So we saying here that actually the payment allocation could be done either if we find the invoice match,
then we allocate one or more invoice lines and have one or more allocations.
But if we don't find the Nimoy's line because the reference might not be pointing to one particular
invoice line, then it will end up in this suspense account.
And there are three types of suspense accounts as general suspends customer suspense and agreement,
suspense and the agreement suspense is tied to an agreement that was the origin originating entity for
actually producing the invoice, and it could be on the customer.
So a customer could have multiple agreements and we might not even find which agreement we're talking
about.
And then it will be put on the customer's suspense.
Or if we not even find the customer, we actually will have it on general suspense.
That's almost 100 percent correct.
However, it doesn't have to be the customer who receives the invoice and so on.
So here's the kind of story goes on.
I think it can see how the pattern evolves here.
So they are starting talking about a specific story that you wanted to hear about.
And once they have done a couple of steps in it, then you posten in trying to see does this look correct?
Or and you try to kind of recent questions based on what your model and you get them their answer and
then they will continue and but remember here so you are not the expert, as I already said.
Hence you should be asking the questions here.
So one thing here you can do a type of question is like a parable.
So if you have similar situations going on, so you maybe have experienced a similar situation, a completely
different workshop or during this workshop, then you can try to see whether this similar situation
have something in common, what you need now here.
So would it be possible to treat this ex, whatever it is you're modeling right now as a type of contract?
That could be a question.
Yeah, and if it is like a contract, who is then the buyer and what is bought, actually?
So then you can start kind of making issue.
If it is like a contract, then it might have the same structure of contracts that you have gained knowledge
about before.
And IT contracts usually have a buyer and you have a product that you're buying and so on.
So that's one way of trying to make inferences with other similar situations that you might have bumped
into.
Another thing is, of course, that question the current stated model.
So is it really true?
So let's say that you model something here.
Is it really true that you can only apply for one product in each application or can you have multiple?
You said one, but I just want to make sure.
So you kind of go and make so make specific questions about what you explicitly have model because they
might just have told you one scenario out of five scenarios or something.
And, of course, very stupid questions, so play the role of the donkey here, so I thought I might
have might be a bit stupid here, but could anyone tell me actually what exactly a train is?
So I don't know if you have done logistic models and logistics and marshalling yards are going to have
an example about that later on.
But trains is actually something that is quite complex when it comes to that.
You might have a very general notion about what train is, but ask a person that is working in and the
logistics, you will have a completely different answer.
And you can state implications, as I said, from the current model, so can you verify this statement?
All product process must be overridden and connected to an agreement price.
So that could be.
So you're using the model that you'd found out so far because you are very much more skilled in reading
models than the participants are.
Then you can use what you're modeling to kind of raise some trick questions and implications on the
model that they might have not as foreseen yet.
And then that will also lead into even more understanding in the story and then they usually continue
to tell you more about it.
Another thing is to involve yourself as an actor in the actual story, so if you're getting stuck on
a on a situation, then you say something.
Let's say that I'm the employee here at a collaboration partner of ours and a customer comes in and
wants to find out about what do I do.
So you're kind of involving yourself in the in this role play saying that you are taking on a specific
role when you ask them as a director, what's a natural thing for me to do here?
So, for example, you will fill in the basic credit terms, request a calculation and give the quote
to the customer.
So just that sentence gave us kind of four new things that we needed to delve into.
OK, credit terms to say, what's that?
And a calculation.
What's that?
A quote.
Oh, OK, complete any word and so on.
Is that connected to customer and so on.
So maybe you're seeing the process here.
I'm trying to to get here is nuts.
And as I said, this is the kind of a usual type of process I use.
So it's a very iterate in its nature.
During the workshop, you start the workshop by defining which stories you would like to cover in this
specific workshop.
Then you ask the participants to start telling the stories and maybe you name a particular person or
you ask them who would like to start?
Kind of.
Then they start telling the story and in parallel for when they are talking to them, then you're modeling.
So that's also why you need to be quite skilled in actually joined diagrams.
So in if you haven't done this for 10 or 15 years that I've been doing, then you could have a roll
of a document or in the workshop as well is actually documenting when you are facilitating.
So that's depending on how how comfortable you think you are in actually modeling and listening at the
same time.
So if you're not feeling comfortable, if it's very beginning, then have a documentary that is doing
the modelling, but also that everybody needs to see it the whole time.
You could use yellow sticky notes if you like.
The problem with that is that it tends to be a large model and you tend to would like to shift it around
all the time during the workshop.
So I think it's actually better to use some type of of a tool for this.
And there are a number of different tools to do the animal models.
And
one good actually Web based tool is called Griffy.
You can check that out.
I think that's very it's a very good tool.
So you model the concept at the same time you're hearing the story and then you are pausing them because
you have done a couple of new concepts, maybe you're done a couple of new association between existing
concepts and then you start racing control questions, maybe do some role playing and maybe derive and
implicate knowledge from the model and ask them whether it's true or false.
And then based on their answers, you kind of then corrected.
And once you've done that, you say, OK, even they either they start actually then continuing the
story naturally, of course, or then you maybe have to recite to see here's where we stop when we paused
and could we then start again?
What happened?
What's the next step?
Now we done this.
What's the next step in the story?
And then basically you do this in iterations until you're more or less done.
We run out of time or whatever it is or the stories, and you continue with the next story.
So that's basically how you do perform it in the workshop.
So now it's just to begin.
And as I said, this is a practice that you need to learn.
So you actually need to run workshops and workshops and workshops and works.
And I run literally hundreds of these kind of workshops on the unfortunately, the the the trick here
is to just do it, go out and do it, because you need to be comfortable in being the facilitator and
know that you can actually pull this off and that you can handle a group of maybe 10 people that could
be kind of quite senior in the role in an organization and to get a result that everybody is actually
think is very valuable.
So start practicing, practicing, practicing, practicing, take small areas where you can just do
a very narrow maybe analysis with just a couple of people and then you grow from that.
But this is not the end lecture.
Of course.
This is just the first lecture where we talked about, like, how you can apply storytelling.
Now I'm going to go into more tricks of the trade, so to speak, that you also use during the workshops.
Great.
See you there.