Story Telling, Oracle and Diving - #JoelKallmanDay

When my beloved Tim reached out for contributions to the Joel Kallman day, he suggested that personal topics were welcome. So I thought I would combine my 2025 diving odyssey and the work I do in the Oracle space as a storyteller.

I have been an Oracle partner for approaching 30 years and one of my skills is taking the facts of an implementation or project and telling it as a story that resonates with other customers. Not simply 'we implemented fusion cloud for customer X', but what is their business model, how do they interact with their customers and staff and what were the challenges they were looking to overcome with the implementation and then add a heavy dose of project highlights and low lights to make it real. I think I do it well and have had a good career on this basis. The question I asked repeatedly when building a story is "why? why? why?".

 

But this week I have learned more about storytelling from a real master Steve Backshall, who is a famous TV documentary maker for the BBC and his highlight show is Deadly 60 which is aimed at children, a real adventure program.

I had the privilege of meeting Steve earlier this year when he came to the same remote part of Indonesia where I was diving. He was actually trying to film a sugar glider that had the worst case of stage fright I've ever seen. Steve and his team had spent the previous week in Lembeh Straits where I was going the following week to learn to muck dive and his team had also filmed the whale sharks the day before that I and the group I was with did the next day.

Steve about to give up

We were asked not to talk on social media about the show until it was released and this happened just a couple of weeks ago and last night I sat down to watch the two episodes of Deadly 60 (series 6, episode s 2&3) that covered this.

 

The sugar guilder never got a look in, obviously not enough footage but part of the episode on sharks included the whale shark and a wobbegong and then there was a whole episode on oddball creatures which was the muck diving in lembeh.

I saw each and every one of those animals an ornate woebegone, the whale sharks and if you look at my photo of the whale shark right down by the tail, that speck diver is me. In Lembeh I saw the flamboyant cuttlefish, the mimic octopus, the bobbit worm, the hairy frogfish and my favourite the coconut octopus. I too went diving with Ben their guide. In fact Ben is the resort photographer and will help anybody who dives there, improve their photo skills regardless of what equipment they have.  

These are my efforts:

coconut octopus

Bobbit Worm

Woebegone Shark

Hairy Frogfish

Flamboyant Cuttlefish

Mimic Octopus

The two episodes which are on BBC iPlayer which you can easily download them in the UK and they will eventually turn up on their Youtube channel for those outside of the UK.  Having watched his episodes the way he told those stories to appeal to his audience of children and excite them by the wild world in which we live, reminded me that is not my story or the story of my customers and their projects I need to tell, but it's the story that engages those new customers and potential customers need to hear, what particularly are they looking for and where can I find something in one of my story books that will resonate with them.

 

I know this is not quite the Oracle blog that you might have been expecting but one about the soft skills I use in my job every day and a chance to share some of the photographs from my amazing trip this year. I am such a lucky person and this was all about my passion and going back to Joel community was his passion.

 

Happy Joel Kallman day