Why collect Oral and Video histories?

We get asked this all the time in our Cisco Heritage project, along with "What is the output?"

We describe four elements of the procedure that we use -- IDENTIFY, CAPTURE, PRESERVE, and INTERPRET.  The overall purpose is to CAPTURE YOUR STORIES BEFORE THEY ARE LOST

Turns out, we're lucky re the technology, businesses, and organizations of the past fifty years--years that have spawned stunning sweeping changes in civilization that we still scarcely can appreciate--because many of the people who made it happen are still alive.

Interestingly, historians have traditionally focused on OLD THINGS, viewing recent events and trends as POLITICAL SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY, or worse.

We couldn't disagree more.  Professionally produced oral and video histories are a valuable asset for the group (whether company, organization, or groups of friends)  that commissions them.  For the organization itself, much value accrues via advertising content and public relations activities.  As a motivator for employees, these are powerful stories connecting a past to the present and future.

More broadly, though, such interviews capture and preserve lessons that span multipole groups, both inside and outside the sponsoring organization--they are an impressive investment in the future, for understanding the origins, the decisions, the conflicts, and the successes.

InnovaScapes interviewers are practiced in these techniques, with significant work in major corporations and organizations over the past twenty-five years.  Sometimes the work results in interpretive assets (e.g. "The Return Map" (Harvard Business Review), THE HP PHENOMENON or SERIAL INNOVATORS (Stanford Press); frequently it is a compendium available for many researchers to glean important insights for their own themes and perspectives.

We bring both contextual understanding and an empathetic style to each interview, resulting in a conversational tone that relaxes the interviewee, promoting more reflective and candid appraisals.  It is an engaging and open process, which concludes with a transcript that the interviewee can review and approve before committing it to the preservation file.  Cross-interviewing with multiple folk later allows an important ingredient--fact-checking, or memory enhancement as we call it.  "Oh, yes, George, I'd forgotten your key role in this project..."

InnovaScapes has several projects underway at the moment; contact us us if you'd be interested in knowing more about the process or the impact of these activities.