You may have heard the old English proverb: “Two heads are better than one.” Journey Group specializes in putting heads together (especially in tall, frosty glasses). Our goal is to help our clients tell their stories even better than they could tell them alone. You could say that collaborative storytelling is in our blood.

In that spirit (and in the few spare moments we could find between telling clients’ stories), we’ve been having a little fun with that idea of collaborative storytelling.

Three-Legged Stories started as the brainchild of our colleagues and brothers Zack and Josh Bryant. Here’s what Josh, one of our web developers, told me about this experiment.

Hope: So, how did this all start, and where does the name come from?

Josh: After participating in Fourth Story Media’s The Future of the Story, Zack and I were intrigued by the possibilities of using Twitter to create collaborative stories online. So we devised a scheme for prototyping the experience with paper stories, and Journey held a company-wide, Three-Legged Stories competition.

We picked that name because, like a three-legged race, each participant is both limited and enhanced by his or her partner. Writing a good story requires the same quality of teamwork as a three-legged race . . . or as a magazine or website.

Hope: Tell us how it worked.

Josh: The goal was for two people to co-author an entertaining short story without consulting each other regarding plot or characters. We created blank booklets that we scattered around the office, inviting anyone to pick one up and start a story. Once you’d added the first sentence of your story, you placed the booklet somewhere else in the office in hopes that another person would pick it up and become your partner in storytelling.

The complete story was limited to 12 sentences (six from each player). Once a story was complete, it was added to a pool of other collaboratively-created short stories, then voted on.

Hope: How did it go?

Josh: Everyone was invited to participate, from those who play with words all day to those who spend most of their time with numbers. The story submissions were quite mixed. Turns out we’d created some really great short stories and some pretty terrible ones too.

After several wordsy people had narrowed the competition to the best 12, the entire company voted for the top story. We had expected to enjoy the gifts of our content team (Journey’s wordsy types), and we weren’t let down. But we were also pleasantly surprised to discover some hidden literary talent, including our winners: an account manager and a strategist. Most importantly, we all had great fun and a couple of laughs reading each other’s creations.