About StoryForward
Framework, Process, and Results
The StoryForward framework uses story as a lens to improve self-awareness, bolster team communications, and unblock creativity.
Storytelling is a meaningful and generative process. While developing a resonant, useful story is a key result, collaborating on a story leads to other significant results, including:
More productive team conversations
Development of a strong and authentic voice
A clearer articulation of values
Greater alignment within teams
Stronger creative collaboration
Overcoming creative roadblock
A more inclusive environment
More invested team members
The process of storytelling has both internal and external benefits. Internally, working collaboratively on a product or organization’s story helps create better, more invested teams. Externally, excellent storytelling means that your stakeholders, customers, or audience know exactly what you are offering.
The better the story, the closer you are to articulating your values.
Interdisciplinary Approach
Through my work with academics, business leaders, foundations, museum curators, writers, and artists, I’ve developed the StoryForward framework to help individuals and teams more quickly identify creative opportunities, as well as “dead zones” that block forward momentum.
StoryForward synthesizes the insights from several fields and methodologies, including design thinking, improvised comedy, conversation design and active listening.
Corporate Teams and Individuals
I work with both organizational teams and individuals, helping clients move toward their goals through classes, group workshops, and/or individual sessions:
For teams, I lead customized and highly-interactive workshops. Each StoryForward workshop is tailored for the client, drawing from a toolkit that includes:
Story Structure and Narrative Strategy
Dialogue, Listening and Conversation Design
Improvisation + Thinking On Your Feet
Team-building and Values
For individuals, I provide a deeper dive into the above topics, with coaching focused on unlocking your unique creative and storytelling potential.
If you are interested in working together in either capacity, send me a message.
Artistic, Literary, and Academic Storytellers
I work with non-corporate clients as well – including artists, authors, and academics. As you envision, create, and share your ideas across the artistic and scholarly landscape, collaborate with me to:
Discover what is holding your creative process back
Sharpen your sense of a project’s goals and audience
Truly and finally finish the work that only you can make happen
Meet Dan Schifrin
Over the past few decades, I’ve worked with many organizations, across many platforms, to help them move their programs and projects forward. Often times I wondered — as I moved between helping a tech CEO write their memoir, or interviewing an author for City Arts & Lectures on KQED, or teaching architecture students at UC Berkeley how to find the narrative inside a marbled lobby — how these disparate conversations were connected.
The answer was story, and the way storytelling (and storylistening) brought out the best in me, and created a flexible framework for those I worked with.
My journey to this insight, and how story functions as both our workshop and our tool, is told in my one-person-show “String Theory” (hopefully back on stage Post-Covid). The ways that stories connect us, and sometimes repel us, are manifested in the plays, fiction, essays, and public conversations found at danschifrin.com.
The communication models I use were also developed through the classes I’ve taught with Stanford Continuing Studies, including “Think on Your Feet: An Improviser’s Guide to Business Communications” (with my sister Debra Schifrin, who developed a similar course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business), and “Speakeasy: The Pleasures of Writing Good Dialogue,” a creative writing course focused on dialogue.