When was the last time you heard one of those rambling stories that seem to go on and on and quite frankly you couldn't see the point? Is there someone in your organisation renowned for these types of tales? Sadly these people are labelled bores and often ignored.

There is one important thing you can do to ensure you stories are not boring.

Know the point of your story

Doug Lipman says we need to know the most important thing about our story. What does the story mean to you? What do you love about it? Why is it important? Once you're clear about what it means to you it will change how you tell the story: you can remove the extraneous (listeners in organisations value brevity); and you can emphasis the important.

As soon as you start telling a story your audience will most often than not give you the time to complete it (this is a valuable characteristic of stories) but at the same time they are also evaluating its relevance. Stories are our main conduit for sharing social information about the people and situations that effect us. So does this story tell me something new that will help me to act more effectively?

So that your audience gets where you are coming from from the outset, it can be useful to make a short statement before the story starts to give the listener a hint about the story's content and possible relevance. For example, in a meeting I might say something like:

You know what, sometimes small things can make a big difference. Just three weeks ago ...

There are other times when you want the meaning of the story to emerge slowly, you want the audience to let the story wash over them and let them discern the meaning entirely for themselves. Shock, horror! The meaning a listener takes away from a story can be different from the one you intended. This feature of stories scares the pants off folk in organisations. Of course the same is true of any communication but we think we are more control when we are telling our audience what to think--but we're not. I suggest we all recount our stories to trusted advisors and ask them what they draw from it and see if it coincides with your own meaning.

All our stories will benefit from knowing their main point as well as the other sub-points that lie beneath the surface. Part of our practice in becoming business storytellers is to take the time to discover and understand the meaning of our stories.

Terrence Gargiulo and I are conducting two webinars in August where we will talk about some of the important lessons we've learned while helping leaders become better storytellers. It's going to be an interactive format where you'll be able to ask questions. The sessions are 45 minutes. Just click on the session that suits you best to register.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM Australian EST - click here to register

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM US PDT - click here to register

Here is our little marketing blurb about the events.

Are your leaders great storytellers? And, why should you care anyway?

With over forty years of combined experience, two of the world’s leading narrative consultants divulge some of what they have learned. Join Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Terrence Gargiulo of MAKINGSTORIES.net for a 45-minute rousing interactive discussion rich with examples and practical tools.

I wonder…

Will you be as surprised as we were when we discovered the “Triple Threat,” of storytelling for leaders?

Find out the answers to the three questions we get asked the most. Prior to the event we'll share a white paper on leadership and storytelling. Following the webinar we'll send you a job aid that we use in our work. So give us the pleasure of your company and interact with your peers to take a nuanced but deep dive into the art and science of leadership through narrative.

Court cases are decided on the basis of the facts and evidence presented. Or are they?

I have long believed that court cases are essentially a battle of stories, and whoever tells the most plausible and persuasive story wins. This article might change your mind as well: The Arsenal of Persuasion: Make your closing argument a really good story. The article has some great examples of the persuasive power of stories.

Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for the link via the WorkingStories list.

There are lots of good comments on my post, The importance of deliberate practice and I was prompted to write this one based on Tony Karrer's observation that many people are thrust into jobs where they must get up to speed quickly. Tony was wondering whether deliberate practice makes sense in these cases. Do we have time to be experts?

The principles of deliberate practice make sense in any situation. It is just a matter of degree. If deliberate practice is an ongoing and designed set of activities where you apply your skill in a domain of expertise, such as storytelling, then reflect on your efforts, get feedback (coach, peers, yourself), modify your practice based on this reflection, then do it again, and again and again then this process is similar to Kolb's experiential learning cycle and we know it works when we are trying to improve our ability to do things well. I've emphasised the doing because deliberate practice is all about doing rather than merely being able to answer questions. Much of our vital knowledge can't be written down and we build this intuitive know-how through reflective experience (without the reflection you are condemned to repeating the past). While social networks are great for the quick answer it doesn't help you with the class of question that only experience can provide (unless of course you convince the expert to get involved in doing the project with you), such what is the best design for a circuit board? how should I emphasise aspects of this CAD design so the fitters will know what to do? How should I lead my team?

It's true that it's harder to be the most outstanding expert. Stephen Jay Gould has written on this topic using baseball statistics and shows that the normal distribution of batter performance has changed shape since Babe Ruth's time. In his day the tails at both ends were long: there were many good batters and quite a few bad ones. But with professionalism the distribution has been squashed shortening the tails and making the centre hold most of the players. It's hard to be the very best. But who cares about being the very best. We just need to be bloody good and to be that requires practice.

To put the effort in to be bloody good requires time and dedication. Consequently we need to pick our desired expertise carefully. Here are some things to consider:

• do you love the skill that much that it doesn't seem like work to you?
• is it a skill you can use in any job?
• will people value and recognise your expertise and therefore motivate your ongoing efforts?
• can practice feel like play? If so then there is much more chance you will keep practising.

We will always need content experts. Your social network should help you connect to these valuable folk. What will also need are people who can thrive in complexity and the skills we'll need to deliberately practice will include designing, leading, managing, innovating, storytelling, strategizing, implementing, sensemaking, and engaging (I'm sure you can think of others). These skills will be helpful in any job and so feel free to dedicate 10,000+ hours to any one of them and know you haven't wasted your time.

Last week I gave a presentation to the Canberra Pecha Kucha group on complexity. I subsequently recorded the presentation and loaded it to youtube.

Pecha Kucha (explained in a you tube video here) is a presentation format where you have 20 slides and each slide is visible for 20 seconds. Putting the presentation together highlighted a number of things, the most important of which is that it reminded me that organisations and governments still have a long way to go to be able to make effective progress with complex problems. I am hoping the youtube video will help raise awareness of this issue.

The Pecha Kucha format was very useful in helping to really focus the message. All of the presentations last week were excellent, one in particular was very moving. Having seen a range of quite bad Pecha Kucha presentations previously, my conclusion is that you need to practice the Pecha Kucha a few times for it to work.

My thanks go to Scott Sharpe for following up a conversation on the night where I attributed the quote "I have written you a long letter as I didn't have time to write a short one" to Mark Twain. Scott did some checking and it turns out that this quote is often mistakenly attributed to Twain. It is actually Blaise Pascal's and the correct quote is "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter." Thanks Scott.

I just noticed that Fast Company expert blogger Thomas Clifford has listed Shawn as one of 7 interesting storytellers to follow on Twitter. I better start following him :-)

It took me a little while to work out what was happening. I snapped my first photo of the motor scooter with clip board attached in Soho but I only got a fleeting glance and then he was gone.

But my next sighting was far more informative. This time the motorcyclist was parked so I asked about the clipboard and what he was doing. It turned out he was learning to become a London taxi driver; he was learning was they call, "the knowledge."

It takes between 2 and 4 years to learn the 320 routes (they call them runs) required to pass the tests. The student is given 20 runs at a time to memorise and they ride their scooters along the routes remembering the vagaries of one-way streets and where the traffic jams happen, as well as the notable sights a tourist might want to see. The guy I was chatting to said the first 20 runs seem like a jumble but when you learn the next set of 20 patterns begin to emerge as one run partially coincides with another.

I've just finished reading Geoff Colvin's book, Talent is Overrated. His central theme (which I believe is shared by Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I haven't read yet), is that high performers are not merely naturally talented (and perhaps talent has little to do with it), but they also engage in deliberate practice. That is, they design and perform a program of activities focussed on developing specific skills. For these future black cabbies they were deliberately developing their navigation skills in the pursuit of passing a test and at the same time actually enlarging part of their brain.

In Colvin's book I was taken with the story of how Benjamin Franklin developed himself a program for improving his writing skills.

This has got me thinking about what would a program of deliberate practice for developing your storytelling skills look like. Any suggestions?

Three weeks ago I arrived in London for a couple of weeks work and a couple weeks holiday. One of my must-see destinations was the water pump in Broadwick Street, Soho, which was the main contamination source for the 1854 cholera outbreak (my family think I'm crazy). This pump is also the star attraction on John Snow's famous map showing the geographic distribution of deaths from the cholera outbreak and is one of the earliest example of epidemiology (in case you were wondering, I studied geography at uni). So imagine my surprise when I arrived at the pump to find it was also a community of practice meeting spot for Soho cycle couriers.

I wandered about the pump for a while taking photos (to the cyclists' amusement) and listened to their conversation, which of course consisted of telling stories of what happened in the morning and over the week. Nothing written down, no social software, just oral storytelling.

Finding or creating these places for community in organisations is an important step is supporting communities of practice. Ideally they should be somewhere you can eat, chat informally and know that when you arrive, there will be other people just like you to share your stories with.

You might be thinking, but what if my organisation is distributed and we can't get everyone in one place? Well, do what the London taxi drivers do, form clusters across the network to tell your stories. Here's a photo of one group of taxi drivers who meet on Russell Square (there is a little group of them behind the silver taxi).

To link across the small groupings the taxi drivers use technology: blogs, newspapers, websites, radio.

Meeting in small clusters for oral storytelling and linking across these clusters for wider knowledge sharing might be a useful pattern to adopt in organisations.

I can't remember who first said to me "you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion" but it is one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received. Also, when working in many organisations, I notice it is not applied that widely. Shawn and I have come across two examples earlier this year where 'listeners' were let go and noisy and opinionated people were never considered to be candidates for retrenchment because of their 'visible contribution' to the organisation (it was probably more their 'audible contribution'). These sorts of decisions further undermine an organisation's capability to make progress with complex problems.

Listening has a vital role in tackling complex problems, such as any change initiative, either social or organisational. We use our Narrative Insight (story listening) techniques to explore and help make sense of the patterns relating to these complex issues. The following excerpt from The McKinsey Quarterly emphasizes why we should put more effort into listening and less into telling:

The lesson is clear - you need to listen to and act on the needs and perspectives of the stakeholders. Even if you don't like what they are saying. People value what they have a sense of ownership in and you need to listen to find out what that is. And where there is anger, resentment etc around an issue I have found the advice of Professor Brenda Dervin to be spot on.."anger dissipates when people are listened to".

If you happen to know of the original research referred to in the McKinsey article we would love to hear about it.

Reference: 1. The McKinsey Quarterly 2009 Number 2, pages 101-109