The document summarizes a case study of a collaborative work session to create a visual storymap of the ideal future state of a province's private radio communication system. Representatives from a telecommunications company and various first responder groups participated. Omakase Group facilitated the session and produced the storymap output. Participants considered communication needs in a disaster scenario and the storymap evolved throughout the day as ideas were shared and added to post-it notes on the map in real time. The final storymap identified major actors and relationships to aid future presentations.

1. Case Study: Creating a Storymap
in Real Time as a Product of a
High Impact Collaborative Work
Session
Prepared by: Daniel Rose
Omakase Group
www.omakasegroup.com

2. Background
A major telecommunications company, together with
representatives from the Province of Alberta First Responders (ie
Fire department, Police department, EMS), came together for one
day in order to create the vision of the ideal future state of the
Province’s Private Radio Communication System.
The desired output of the collaborative work session was a visual
representation of this ideal future state.
Omakase Group was engaged to design and facilitate the
collaborative work and to produce the visual model as an output
of this work.

3. Session Design
Each represented stakeholder group was asked to
consider their communication needs from the perspective
of a future state table top disaster scenario.
Assignment 1: What would each First Responders team
need on site?
Assignment 2: How would the First Responders team wish
to communicate with the other First Responder teams?
Assignment 3: Complete the future picture.

4. Storymap Evolution
Working with the client in advance of the session to define the disaster scenario, we used this rough
sketch to provide context for the participants.

5. Storymap Evolution - Day 1
As participants shared their work, the facilitation team worked on identifying the essential
components of the storymap, transcribing them on sticky notes and placing them on the map in
real time.

6. Storymap Evolution - Day 1
Each subsequent report added more detail and richness to the map.

7. Storymap Evolution - Day 1
The final assignment of the day included the creation of “speaking points” to use when presenting the
storymap. Overarching themes as well as major actors and their relationships had been identified and
captured.

8. Storymap Evolution - Day 2

9. Why Visual Metaphors?
The function of a metaphor is to illuminate, clarify or explain a concept in a way that
cannot be done with literal language. 1
Metaphors are vivid and as such, reduce ambiguity and increase the likelihood that the
intent of the message is understood. 1
Metaphors can be used to increase the memorability of concepts since the participant
is forced to elaborate the topic and thus produce a stronger memory trace. 1
1 On Interpreting Statements as Metaphor or Irony: Contextual Heuristics and Cognitive Consequences:Albert Katz University of
Western Ontario

10. Benefits
The shared act of creating the metaphor as a common experience amongst the
participants results in deep, rapid understanding of complex concepts.

11. Benefits
Reduced down time between stages
Work Quality / Organizational Buy In
Radically decrease your
Facilitated Collaborative Work / Visual Modelling
project completion time while
simultaneously increasing
Ideation Implement
Design Iteration work quality and
organizational buy in.
Traditional Meetings, Conference Calls, Emails
Design
Ideation Implement Iteration
Elapsed Project Time