Step Five: Explicit Walkthrough
Learn the explicit walkthrough step of the big picture EventStorming.
This is the step where we check our work by reading aloud the events as a story. Different participants will take turns walking through portions of the timeline. We do not want to have the events read verbatim from the timeline but to have the participant become a storyteller and narrate a story for the group using the events as their outline. The point of reading the events as a story is that it will force the storyteller to think about how the events connect. When that becomes impossible or difficult, then we might have discovered a plot hole or a missing or misplaced event. The audience participates in the process as well by pointing out the problems in the story.
This step will ask a lot from the participant doing the storytelling. Not only will they need to repeat portions of their story when corrections have been made, but they will be interrupted constantly. They will need to add and move events or rewrite them when the ubiquitous language or narrative of their story is being lost. The facilitator can help with the events, and changing the participant at pivotal events or flows can allow them to rest.
Storytelling will take a large amount of time to get through, and it could become the longest session of the workshop, so it is something to keep in mind when planning your session schedule. The storyteller has two tasks: the first is to tell their story aloud, and the second is to put one of their hands onto an event that becomes relevant to the story as it progresses. Combining these two tasks to reveal problems such as missing, out-of-place, or erroneous events is well worth the effort.
When telling the story, it is possible to overlook a significant event. During storytelling, we are connecting a target event with the ones that come after it, and we may not give any thought to the events that must occur directly before the target event. To do that, we can use an additional storytelling technique.
Reverse narrative—storytelling in reverse
We focus on events flowing seamlessly ...