New course schedule and other decisions

I've been working on getting my rebooted PNI Practicum courses ready to go, and I've made several decisions (and changes to my previous plans). If you are interested in taking one of the courses, you might want to hear what has been going on.

TL;DR - A new 4-week Prelude course will be starting on March 3, 2026 -- if I get at least six sign-ups for it. You can't sign up for it at this moment, but you will be able to sign up in another 1-2 weeks. Keep an eye on pnipracticum.com for details.

A platform decision

After reviewing many options, I've decided to use Zoho's TrainerCentral platform to advertise, sell, and deliver the courses. It has the features I want, it's within my price range, and so far I'm finding it pretty easy to use. 

A domain decision

The new paid courses will be hosted at a new domain, pnipracticum.com. At the moment the new TrainerCentral "academy" site exists, but is not yet live. I'm now in the process of moving most of my site and course content there.

I plan to keep the open-source version of the courses at cfkurtz.com/pnipracticum. I will simplify that page to include just a brief description of the open-source file downloads (which I am also working to update).

A pricing decision

I have decided to price my courses using the Purchasing Power Parity system. When you look at my course web site (after I finish getting it set up), the price you see will vary based on the country in which your IP address is located. 

I am not yet sure what these prices will be (there is a lot to learn about PPP), but depending on where you live, you might be eligible for a course discount of up to 50%. I will be entering these prices into TrainerCentral by hand, so I will enter the 20 or so countries I think are most likely to come up. If you live outside the US and see the US (default) price (instead of a price in your local currency), you can send me an email, and I will add your country to the list.

I am going to have to ask everyone not to abuse this system (because a person could use a VPN to seem to live in a different country than they actually do). Given the nature of my courses, I hope people will respect the request.

Why am I doing this? It's partly because I think it's the right thing to do, but it's also partly because my courses are cohort-based. If I can't find at least six people to take each course, I can't run the course at all. I was thinking of offering last-minute fill-up-the-cohort discounts, but (because of the time commitment) I don't think most people are going to want to take these courses on the spur of the moment. So I think PPP pricing could be a win-win solution for all of us.

I am not able to offer a sliding scale based on individual income at this time. If I get lots of full-price sign-ups, I may be able to offer a sliding scale in the future. I have thought of adding a donation button to help fund some course scholarships, but that will (also) have to wait until I get the courses set up and paying for themselves.

A time-of-day decision

I have been thinking a lot about the time of day for the courses. 

In my previous blog post, I said I planned to provide courses at alternating times (1pm and 7pm my time) throughout the year. But I've begun to worry about that approach. Historically, the great majority of my coaching and consulting clients (like 90%) have been located in the Americas and Europe. Classes that start at my 7pm would be best for people in Asia, but they might not fill up enough to run.

People say the best time to plan an international meeting is at 9am New York time. I would love to be able to do that. Sadly, I can't. I have always been a night owl, but more importantly, some of my days start with migraine headaches. You don't want to talk to me on those mornings.

So I have decided to hold all of my course meetings at my 2pm (year-round). That is 11am in California, 8pm in Europe, midnight in Mumbai, and 6am in Sydney. It's at 3am in Singapore and Perth and Shanghai, but it's the best I can do, at least for the time being.

A time-of-week decision

I love talking to people. At the same time, talking to people drains me. Part of what I am offering people in my courses is access to the un-drained version of me. So I need to make sure I can be present and friendly and capable of thought in each course meeting.

To make this possible, I have arranged my courses so that I will never meet with people on more than three days per week, and I will never meet with anyone on Fridays. I think that should preserve enough of my energy to provide a positive course experience for everyone.

The Level I and II courses do include some (optional) one-on-one coaching sessions. I will schedule those calls on the same days as the classes, and never on Friday.

A time-of-year decision

Right now I'm working to get the Prelude (Level 0) course ready for people to take in March (one month from now). I don't know if that course will fill up in time to run, but it's worth a try.

However, I don't think six people will want to take the scheduled Level II (Larger-scale) course in March. It's a 20-week course, with an 8-hour per week time commitment, and I don't think six people will be ready to make a commitment like that at such short notice. 

So I've been looking at my schedule to see how I could change the Level II course to give people more time to think about signing up for it. Thinking about that that led me to a new idea.

This new schedule brings January into the picture, which allows me to add one more Level 0 course (in January) and to schedule two Level II courses per year (a "winter" class from January through May, and a "summer" class from June through November).

Note that the summer Level II course has an August gap in which people can either continue to gather stories or take a break. The extra time should help out anyone who is having trouble getting enough stories for their projects. 

This new schedule also means that I don't have to get all three courses ready in the next few weeks. I only need to get one (the Prelude) set up and ready to go. I think I can finish that in another week or two. Wish me luck! And send any questions or comments to cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com.

 

New Working with Stories books; New PNI Practicum courses

I am happy to announce that all four books in the new Working with Stories series are finished and published and accessible in three formats:

• As PDF documents on the workingwithstories.org website (free to read, print, and share)
• As paperback books on amazon.com
• As Kindle books (or EPUB e-book downloads) on amazon.com 

If you think these books are useful, and if you can afford it, please consider buying at least one print or Kindle book or making a donation. I did not have the money to do this book project, but I did it anyway because I think the world needs it. If you agree, please help me pay for it.

I am also restarting my PNI Practicum online courses. More on that below. 

Why I wrote four new books

In early 2024, I decided to stop trying to be a contract consultant (which has never paid very well or consistently) and look for a "real job" with benefits. I wanted to do something that was at least similar to what I have been doing for the last 25 years. However, after four months of full-time job-search effort, I realized that I would have to cast a wider net and look for a job that was unrelated to the work I had been doing.

But I worried that if I changed careers again, I would forget everything I knew about PNI, and that knowledge would be lost to the world. So I decided to spend a few months updating Working with Stories before I made the change. That few months turned into nearly two years. But the project is finally done, and I'm glad I did it. (If I had a nickel for every time I've said that on this blog...)

What I've done and why

In updating Working with Stories, I wanted to write a book that was shorter, better, and more complete.

A shorter book

I knew that for many of my readers, the third edition of Working with Stories was too long and too dense to be useful. To address this problem, I did two things:

1. I went carefully through WWS3 and trimmed down every chapter, section, and paragraph. The fourth edition of WWS is only about 100 pages shorter than the third edition, but that's because I was more concerned with improving the book's readability than I was with reducing its absolute page count. I got rid of the two-column format, added more white space, and converted many long paragraphs to tables and bulleted lists. All of those changes make for a simpler and faster reading experience, even though the book is still pretty long.
2. I wrote Working with Stories Simplified, which at 165 pages offers an abridged version of every chapter and section in WWS. Simplified is not a dumbed-down version of PNI; everything you need to do PNI is in there. It just leaves out many nuances and extra options you can seek out later, when you're ready for them. I also think people might want to use Simplified as a cheat-sheet reference to the longer book.

A better book

Most of my consulting work since WWS3 came out has been coaching, so I have learned a lot (more) about the obstacles people face in their first PNI projects. This new source of insight led to some new developments:

1. I added a lot more getting-started advice to WWS4, including more cautionary tales of things that can go wrong and some exciting new ideas to provide energy.
2. I added some new story-sharing and sensemaking exercises. These have been on my website for years, but most people didn't notice them because they were not in WWS3.
3. I wrote 50 new "starter" question sets to give people more ideas for questions they can ask in their projects. You can find these in The Working with Stories Sourcebook.

A more complete book (series)

I wanted to tie up the loose ends of my work on PNI, to begin the process of handing it over to a new generation of scholars and practitioners. 

1. I added new sections to WWS4 on ethics, the history of PNI, and connections between PNI and other fields. I also hinted (more than before) at what I hope PNI will become in the future, beyond my involvement in it.
2. I built a library of 50 brief case studies, and with the help of some amazing colleagues, I brought the number of case studies from other PNI practitioners up from 4 to 10.  You can find these 60 case studies in the new Sourcebook.
3. My old catch-all book More Work with Stories had been sitting on my website and nagging at me for a decade. I went back to it, threw some of it away, and cleaned up the rest of it as The Working with Stories Miscellany. The miscellany was also a good place to put the too-long sections I took out of Working with Stories, as well as some of my favorite blog posts.

Letting go

Somebody once said that writers never finish books; they just have books taken away from them. That's so true. I'm so glad to have finally finished these books, but at the same time, it's a bittersweet feeling. Working with Stories has been a friend since I first sat down to write it in the spring of 2008.

I'm sure there must still be a few more typographical errors and imperfect sentences I did not find in the four books, even though I read them all many times. I took this photo to show you how many proof copies I reviewed of each book. 

I didn't read all of these copies in detail; some of them were to test cover designs or to (attempt to) fix printing problems. But I did read each book in full three times in print. I also hired an editor to read all of the books. So the books are as free of errors as I can reasonably make them.

From now on, I will only be able to "fix" any newfound errors on the workingwithstories.org Errata list (on the "More" page). I have had to list a few errors there already. They are small issues with the Kindle Direct Publishing process that I could not figure out how to fix. Hopefully they will not bother anyone very much.

I would like to thank everyone who has encouraged and/or helped me to work on my books over the past few years. You know who you are, and you know how grateful I am for your help. 

Next step: Restarting the PNI Practicum!

So here I am, done with the book project and ready for my next big thing. 

I've been keeping an eye on the job market as I have been working on the books. It looks like spending more time looking for a job would be another waste of time, even if I follow through on my plans to step away from PNI and find something else to do. For people who do the things I know how to do, this job market is the worst I've ever seen.

So I feel that at this point, I have no choice but to make another attempt at giving my PNI Practicum online courses. I did like giving the courses! I love helping people work their way through their first PNI projects. I only gave up on the courses because I didn't get as many sign-ups as I had hoped to get. 

But I aim to try again. This time I plan to commit to giving the courses until they succeed, even if it takes a few years for them to ramp up. 

To be clear, the PNI Practicum course materials will still (and will always) be available for free to anyone who wants to take a course on their own (without my help). When people take one of my paid courses, they will be paying for my time and attention, not for the course materials. 

By the way, anyone who wants to use my course materials to offer a paid course of their own (e.g., to their clients) can do so if they pay me a (relatively modest) licensing fee (for which I will grant them a special time-limited license).  

What the new PNI Practicum courses will be like 

I do not plan to change much about the courses. Most importantly, they will still (and will always) be practicum courses, project-based and hands-on. That is, each student will carry out a real PNI project with real participants. In the shortest course (the Prelude), the entire class cohort will work together on a single shared project. In the two longer courses, each student will carry out their own project (though pairs or trios can share a project).

As before, the courses will use a "flipped classroom" model, with readings but no lectures. All class time will be dedicated to project-progress discussions and facilitated group activities. I will run each meeting and provide ongoing facilitation, advice, and support. The longer courses will also include opportunities for one-on-one coaching.

When the new courses will happen 

This is my tentative plan:

1. The Level 0 (Prelude) course will include four three-hour weekly calls, run five times a year, and cost US$700 per student.
2. The Level 1 (Smaller-scale) course will include 12 two-hour weekly calls, run three times a year, and cost US$1400.
3. The Level II (Larger-scale) course will include 20 two-hour weekly calls, run only once per year, and cost US$2100.

The weekly meetings for each course will happen on this (tentative) schedule. 

 

Some notes on this schedule:

• The listed times are all in my (New York) time (with daylight savings time). When I publish the schedule on the website, I will add UTC times to it (for each month) as well.
• Each course will have a six-person minimum. This is to provide adequate discussion and peer support, and to run group exercises that require two three-person groups. Courses that do not fill up before their start dates will not run. 
• The upper limit for the Level 0 course will be 12 students. For the longer courses, the upper limit will depend on how many people will be sharing projects, since we will be discussing each project in our project-progress meetings. If nobody will be sharing projects, the upper limit will be 8 students. Otherwise it will be higher.
• Each course will meet at only one time of day. The last time I gave the courses, I dealt with the time zone issue by having multiple weekly meetings at different times of the (same) day. That took up a lot of my time, and it was confusing to people, and it resulted in some meetings having few people in them. This time I will only do that for the Level II course, which will be split into two time-zone cohorts (each of which will meet at only one time of day). For the other courses, I have set a single day and time for each repetition of the course. I have spread out the days and times so everyone can find a day and time (within the year) that they can manage.
• I have placed no courses in January, August, or December. That's because I think few people will want to take courses in those months. If I find out that people do want to take courses in those months, I can add more courses. For example, I would like to offer a second Level-II course in the fall, but it will require people to meet either in August and December or in December and January. 
• I would love to be able to offer sliding-scale prices (for varying incomes and locations), but I won't be able to do that unless enough money comes in from book sales, course fees, donations, and consulting gigs. (Who knows, it could happen someday...)
• I will probably offer multi-student discounts, like I did the last time. I may also set up a mailing list for people who want to receive last-minute discounts to fill up nearly-full cohorts.

Once the course schedule is finalized, I plan to keep it the same for a long time so people can make their plans months (or even years) into the future. (So if you have any suggestions, tell me now!)

What's left to do before we can start

I have a few things to do before I will be ready to give the courses again:

1. I need to finalize the course schedule. (This is probably it, but if anyone makes a good suggestion I could still change it.)
2. I need to update the course materials for changes in the WWS books. 
3. I need to bring the mid-level course down from 16 weeks to 12, to make it a better mid-point between the introductory (4 weeks) and in-depth (20 weeks) courses.
4. I will be using a new course-giving platform, so I need to get that set up. 
5. I need to update the PNI Practicum website for the new course schedule, new sign-up buttons, and new course materials.

I will not be ready to give the scheduled Level I course in February, but I will be ready to give the Level 0 and Level II courses in March. If you would like to sign up for one of those courses, keep an eye on this blog and on the PNI Practicum website for updates -- or send me an email, and I'll tell you when I'm ready for signups.

If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, or requests, you can send me an email (cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com).

 

 

 

 

Blurry

Hello all. Here's a little update on my progress finishing my new Working with Stories books. I have finished the indexes, and I've finished going through the hundreds of wonderfully useful comments and suggestions sent to me by "my" editor. Now I'm in the final proofreading stage, which is going . . . blurrily.

When I was finishing my previous two books, I had to read through the printed proof copies five times before I felt certain that I had found and fixed every error. Part of the reason I wanted to hire an editor this time was to reduce the length of that task. But this is four books, not one, and it's harder than it was the last time I did this. 

After I got through the editor's comments, I was so optimistic for my first print-proof reading that I decided to use sticky notes to mark the errors I found (rather than writing directly in the books). I figured I would go through one or two pads of sticky notes per book.

No such luck. I went through ten sticky-note pads in the first book, and I'm getting the same ratio in the other three books (about one error per page). I've been amazed to see how many little errors have crept in. I can see that I created some of the errors while I was fixing the errors the editor found. I suspect that this all has something to do with my eyes being older than they were the last time I did this.

As of this moment, I'm about 3/4 of the way through reading all four books (and marking and fixing every error). This has always been a difficult task for me because my eyes have a hard time switching between reading and computer-screen distances. (I first got bifocals when I was 20, and things have gotten worse ever since then.) My eyes start getting tired (and everything starts to get blurry) after about a half-hour of focus-switching. That makes for slow progress. But (for reasons I have never understood), I can find many more errors in print than I can on the screen. So I have to make my way through this task.

I have set up a reading station with a lighted magnifying glass, and I've increased the size of the fonts on my computer screen. All of this is helping (at least with the discomfort). Still, I am moving through these last readings more slowly than I thought I would. At this rate I will be glad if I can publish all four books before Christmas. 

Will I have to read these print proofs five times? I don't think so. I think I may be able to get by with two readings this time, which is still a big win (thank you editor). But the first print reading is taking so long that the net result will not be much faster.

So if you're wondering what's happening with me, that's what's happening: a lot of peering intently at words that keep getting blurry. But I will get there! When I order my second round of proof copies (sometime in the next two weeks), I plan to update all four PDF versions of the books on the website. They are a few months out of date at this point, and I have made some nice improvements to some of my explanations and diagrams.

My left pinky

It hurts. My left pinky hurts because I've hit the same keys a million times over while indexing three books. But I am happy to tell you that the indexing phase is finally over. (The Sourcebook doesn't need an index, given its already-organized structure.)

You know how they say that if women remembered the pain of childbirth every mother would have only one child? Writing books is like that too. The period of time after a book is written and before it is published is a lot like labor. It's painful and necessary and way too long.

Still, the work is moving along. Here's what I have left to do:

1. Review every change suggested by "my" editor, who is doing a wonderful job of carefully reading each book and finding many tiny errors. Of course I am making these changes with great care so as to not introduce any new bugs.
2. Finish all four book covers.
3. Read through printed proof copies of all four books just in case any errors slipped through.
4. Convert all four books to Kindle versions and test them (virtually) on all available Kindle formats.
5. Finish all four Amazon blurbs.
6. Publish all four books on Amazon. 
7. Update the web site with the final PDFs, new links, and ISBNs. 
8. Announce the release of all four books.

I would like to get all of this done by the end of October, but we'll see. Wish me luck! If you have any last-minute feedback, send it to me soon.

By the way, the reference in this title is to a blog post I wrote in 2015, My left ear. In that post I compared my left ear's persistent resistance to earrings to my possibly-ill-advised persistence in carrying out unpaid and under-appreciated work. I have an update on that situation. I stopped wearing earrings during Covid, and as a result, both earring holes had time to close up completely. By the time I started going out again, I would have had to have both ears re-pierced to wear earrings again, and it didn't seem worth the hassle. So in the end the rabble-rousing city of my left ear won their war against the invading menace and changed the course of the future for everyone. I take it as a metaphorical message of encouragement.

All four books are ready to read

Yesterday I uploaded the new workingwithstories.org web site with final pre-publication drafts of all four Working with Stories books. You can now read all four books in their entirety, typographical errors and all.

Four things still have to happen before the books are fully published.

1. All four books need to be proofread. I have hired a professional editor to help me with this. A few other people will be helping out as well.
2. All four books need to be indexed. I will be doing that myself.
3. All four books need to converted to the Kindle format. I will be doing that as well.
4. The last step will be to finalize all of the details with Kindle Direct Publishing to make the print and Kindle versions of all four books available for sale. As before, you will be able to order the books through Amazon or through your local bookseller.

I hope to have all four books available for purchase sometime in the fall. They will of course still be available for free in PDF format under a Creative Commons license.