Bob Dickman, who wrote Elements of Persausion, just sent me this note that has this thought provoking story in it which I though you would like. If you are in California you might like to attend his storytelling workshop.

I've just returned from visiting some friends of mine in Maui. They told me an amazing story.

800 miles off the Hawaiian coast, an oil tanker caught on fire, and the blaze moved so quickly that the captain didn’t have time to radio for help. Fortunately an American cruise ship was nearby, and the entire crew was rescued. But as the cruise ship began sailing away, someone heard barking coming from the tanker. The tanker's captain realized that his dog, a small brown and white terrier named Hokget, had been left on board. When the cruise reached port, passengers immediately alerted the Humane Society about the missing dog. Soon the news media was winging the story all around the world, and checks began pouring in. One check was for $5,000. Public pressure was so great that the US Navy and Coast Guard sent ships and planes to find Hokget. Eventually he was rescued alive and returned safely to Hawaii. It has been estimated that millions of dollars were spent in recovering that one little terrier.

What happened? Why did this dog capture the imagination and resources of all these people? After all, we live in a world where millions of children (as well as countless dogs and cats) go hungry every day. This little terrier had a name and his plight was told as a story rather than a statistic. People responded because they felt something immediate and visceral. They were moved to take action. Statistics and abstractions don’t make people act, stories do.

When facts and emotion combine to produce a story, people will act. Facts alone are too distant and cold. They produce indifference.

Are you differentiating yourself from your competition using facts alone? What stories are you telling about your business? Are they abstract and distant, or do they engage people and get them excited about your new business ideas, products and services?

Come to the August 21st workshop with author and master storyteller Bob Dickman. Work on your story in a positive, engaging and creative environment. Practice and improve your story making abilities. Turn indifference into action.

There are four spaces left for the August Workshop.

Thanks,
Bob

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Last week I was driving to basketball with my daughter listening to Hamish and Andy on the radio. Richard Branson was up next to talk about the launch of Virgin Money and this is what he said (perhaps not word perfect but how I remember it):

Andy: so tell us about this new venture Sir Richard

I can see this little story having an impact for three reasons:

• it's told as a story where the little guy is up against the four big, bad guys (we like a challenge story)
• it reminds us of how Branson introduced Virgin Blue and how flight costs tumbled
• it's a story so can be easily remembered and retold

Have you heard other CEOs launch products or a company with a story/

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Last year Terrence Gargiulo and I delivered a webinar in the triple threat of storytelling. It was really popular and we had a great time doing it.

Well we're back for another webinar, this time we're exploring how to become a better storyteller by applying some specific and deliberate practices.

Here is our little marketing blurb. Sign up details are at the bottom of this post.

Have you wondered why you are not making better progress at becoming a storyteller at work? Are you finding it difficult to find good stories to tell? Are your stories relevant to your colleagues or do they look at you blankly wondering what planet you're on?

Spend 45 minutes with master business story practitioners Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Terrence Gargiulo of MAKINGSTORIES.net as they share deliberate practices you can employ today to be a better storyteller.

We will conduct the session as a conversation involving everyone. Yippee!

We expect you'll walk away with three things from this session:

• Three practices to deepen your storytelling skills
• Ideas from other attendees of how they improve their skills or what works for them...what works in their organisation
• Some specific resources for finding good stories

We're doing this webinar twice, one timed for Asia Pacific and the other for the Americas. Just click on the link of the webinar you want to attend and fill in your details.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Aust. EST  

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM USA PDT

Looking forward to chatting with you on the call.

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In a fast paced workplace dominated by tasked focussed folk hell bent on ticking boxes and creating outputs, it can be difficult to get your story heard. The conversation can go something like this:

"OK, what's the next item on the agenda?"

The preceding conversation reminded Jean-Pierre of something they should really avoid that happened last year. "You know getting this job done really reminds me of what happened last year. Do you remember how Gary pulled together everyone from budget and wholesale and we had that crazy time creating the budget report?"

"We probably don't have time to reminisce. Trish, would you like to report your planned next actions."

There's a misconception that stories must be long-winded and don't add much value to a "business" conversation. Of course the very opposite is true. We've listed a few reasons on why stories are important to business but in this case stories provide concrete examples of what to do or what to avoid. Examples that people could put into practice. But before they will listen to your story they need to answer a couple of questions in the positive: is it relevant? is it plausible?

With these requirements in mind, here are 4 tips to get your story heard at work.

1. Preface your story with a relevance statement (a sentence or two) that highlights why the group should listen. "We don't want to make the disastrous mistake Gary and the team made last year," should get people in the previous example interested in the story.
2. Keep your story short. You can say a lot in 90 seconds so you should aim for a story that's about that length.
3. Avoid the 's' word. Steer clear of the terms 'stories' and 'storytelling' because they trigger the wrong mindsets in your listeners, ie. probably made up, for entertainment, unbusinesslike. Instead talk about real life experiences, things that happened, case studies or just launch into the telling (after your relevance statement) with a time marker (which clearly implies you are telling a story anyway) such as last year, in 2007, last week, on Tuesday etc.
4. Or course your story hasn't really been heard until people reflect on what was said so finish your story with a question to get your listeners talking about the story. You might ask, "I wonder what we can learn from that experience?" or "What do you think are some of the significant lessons?"

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When you go hunting for a story, for say a presentation you're about to give, you're taking something that normally lives and breathes in an informal environment and transporting it to a more formal organisational setting. It's OK to do this of course as long as you understand what this beast is like in its natural setting. Don't take a tiger and put it in a concrete cage. It's inhumane. Instead add the right foliage, give it plenty of water to play in and lots of room to move. It wont be exactly the same as seeing that tiger in the wild but you will be able to appreciate its beauty.

What do stories in the wild look like?

Imagine you've caught up with some work friends and a manager has been giving you a hard time. Today he waltzed over to your cubicle and announced to you and everyone else who could hear it that your missed your targets. You tell this story and your friends listen and respond by showing sympathy and then they start to analyse his motives and what he might do next. You start talking about what you should do and you tell another story of what you did in the past and how that turned out. Your friends help you interpret that experience and recount their own stories.

It's improv, messy, it flows, you move back and forth between story and interpretation and no one notices. No one (except story geeks like me) is thinking, wow look at the stories that are being told and how it's such a social process. It's invisible to us.

Now contrast that with how we use stories in a business setting. You might start by thinking, "I have a presentation I need to give next week to my staff and while they're doing pretty well I'd love to inspire them to even higher performance. I know stories are powerful. I wonder if I can find a story that's inspirational and relevant? Let's have a look at all my business books. They're packed with stories. Beauty, got one. OK, I can tell this. I'm all set for next week.

Did you see what's missing? When we take our stories out of the informal setting we can lose the back and forth interpretation that comes from our colleagues. This chit chat is how we make sense of our experiences (as told as stories). So when we use stories formally we need to put back the chit chat.

Mark and I do this all the time. For instance, just today Mark called and launched straight into a story. I knew immediately he was giving a story a test run (I hope he retells it in full here). It was about a CEO who was trying to explain why his company had changed strategy and this CEO was having problems convincing his audience. At the end of the story Mark says, "so, what do you think that story was about?" I told him and my interpretation was different to Mark's. Mark felt the story was about the difficulty the CEO was having convincing his audience. I said if that's the case, and we both agreed there were lots of possible points to this story, Mark needed to expand that part of the story.

Our conversation brought back some informality, and interpretation, to the storytelling process but with the view of telling this story in more formal circumstances.

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Are you tired of reading blog posts? For a change how about just listening about storytelling? Makes sense really.

I recorded this podcast for a group of executives in New York and thought you might also enjoy it. It describes why I think storytelling is an important leadership skills, why stories have impact, provides a couple of tips on becoming a better storyteller, describes what we mean by strategic stories and shows how story work can be much more than merely telling tales.

Here's the link to the audio file.

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I'm sitting in a cafe thinking about what makes a great listener. I can see a few. They're leaning forward, nodding, smiling, asking questions. You can tell they want to be there and that they care about the person they are listening to. They're not glancing at their watch, their phones and there're no computer screens to distract them. They take turns telling their stories and sharing their thoughts but when they're listening they're engrossed in what the other person is saying and they're not interrupting. It's impossible for me to say for sure but I'm imagining that when they're listening they're not working out the next thing they're going to say to impress their friend, to knock down their argument, to win the point. It's a natural flow, improvisation style.

Most of know how to listen but why does it seem to evaporate in the workplace?

I suspect we've created workplace cultures that emphasise problem solving and getting the job done quickly and getting through the work. When someone asks a question people are clamouring to answer it and show that they are the fixer, the can-do person. Or they enter into interrogation mode to get the information so they can fix the problem.

And there are distractions galore. Phone beeping, computers beeping, colleagues bleating, all competing for our attention.

Yet there are many important times when deep listening is essential. One particular type of conversation which is top of mind for me at the moment is mentoring.

When someone you're mentoring pops into your office and says, "I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this thing I'm grappling with," then it's time to go into deep listening mode. Can you be like the people in the cafe?

A couple of ideas.

First, remove distractions. Put your mobile out of site, put your phone on silent and if your computer screen is on a swivel arm move it so it's also out of sight. Better still come around the to the other side of your desk and sit next to them with your distractions out of eye shot. I have one client who has to put his back to the glass wall of his office so he can't see the stream of people who wander past and want to speak with him.

Second, ask good questions. You want them to open up and explore the issue. Hopefully they will get a new perspective and some possible options. So you need to listen carefully to ask good questions. As a general rule, 'why' questions will get to the bigger purpose. 'How' and 'what' questions will get the detail of how things work and what might be done. And my favourites, 'when' and 'where' questions often get you stories.

Third, tell stories. You would think that listening is about just shutting up but it would be pretty weird to sit quietly and not say a peep. So to avoid just solving their problem, a strong urge for Type A's, recount some of your experiences to get them thinking of what's possible without telling them what to do.

Fourth, show that you are listening. How you look, how you respond, what you say, all indicate whether you really care and are listening. I'm not a big fan of summarising everything someone says in the form "so what I'm hearing you say is ..." I reckon that's distracting and merely a rote response. A better way is to try and predict a consequence of what they are saying and test it. "Wow, that must have been hard to take?" This way you are adding to the conversation. Body language is the other way to show you're listening. You know what to do. I find it fascinating to watch body language in our workshops. When we are sharing opinions people lean back and have that "prove it to me" look on their faces, but when are sharing stories everyone leans forward.

I'd love to know more about how to help people be better listeners. Any thoughts would be welcomed. One great source on the web is my friend Jill Chivers who has a business called I'm Listening. She has a video-based program you can take and learn to be a better listener. Note to self: must go on it.

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Troy White has just posted a blog which I think is both very good because it encourages people who don't think they are storytellers to have a go and practice, yet I feel doesn't go far enough because there is a chance readers will not get to a story based on his list of triggers. Mind you I think Troy's story prompters are a great place to start. I would like, however, to make some additions to each one to make doubly sure people tell a story rather than just express their opinion. My additions are in red.

• Pet Peeves and when was the last time you felt peeved by them
• Physical Characteristics (Uniqueness) and the times they helped or hindered
• Core Beliefs and how they unfold in practice
• Politics - when have you felt angry, let down or felt like giving them a standing ovation?
• Birthplace - how did you end up being born there?
• What Are You Pathological About? And where do they emerge? What happened last time?
• Religion - has there ever been a time or moment where you were truly thankful for your beliefs?
• Significant Childhood Events
• Beliefs - have they ever got you in trouble?
• Hobbies - when have you felt proudest of your hobbies?
• Education - has your education made a big difference? What happened?
• Skills - Have you ever had a moment when you were surprised by the skills you have or dismally lack?
• Interests - What's your most boring interest and when have you really bored someone with it?
• Family - What are you most fond of about your family? What's an example?
• Talents - Has a talent ever really made a real difference? What happened?
• Life Events You Remember Most
• Adventures You Will Never Forget
• Incompetence At? Share a time when you were a real klutz.
• Anything You Are A Legend Of? When did your legendom shine?
• Successes - What are the three most memorable successes you remember? Take us through what happened.
• Likes - Tell us the last time one of your real likes jumped out and grabbed you?
• Curiosities - What is the weirdest thing you have ever heard happening?
• Failures - What's your biggest stuff up?
• Dislikes - Have you ever felt repulsed by a dislike? Tell us about it.
• Are People Amazed By Anything You Do Or About You? If yes, what happened?
• What Are You Ambitious About? What Fires You Up? When have you been really fired up? What got you going?
• Self Disciplined About? When have you displayed a monk-like discipline.
• People Are Envious Of You Because _______? When has someone been envious of you?
• Do People Desire What You Have? When have people desired what you have?

To get to a story you need to get to a time and a place. When and where questions are good. Asking what happened works. Just asking for an example can work if you can get people to provide a detailed example. Troy's prompters point us in the right direction for finding our own stories. My additions hopefully will increase the chances that a story will be told.

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Why do you remember some people and completely forget others?

It really reinforced in me a quote by Terrence Gargiulo:

A story is the shortest distance between two people

So, if you want people to remember you, tell them a story.

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The conversation didn't need to be held that way. We could have just talked and I would have learned that there is a process I needed to follow. I had no idea, but I should have guessed. It just reinforced in me that I can't stand bullying behaviour and, quite frankly, managers who are arseholes.

As such at Anecdote we have long held the "no arsehole rule" made famous by the Stanford professor, Bob Sutton. Adopting this rule has resulting in us firing a client and vowing to never work with someone who was a partner.

What amazes me however is just how these workplace arseholes continue to thrive in organisations. One view is that they have to work somewhere but surely we can create working environments that reflect a humane and reasonable work ethic.

I feel this mentoring program we designed and are delivering for a client is helping to increase humanity to the workplace. We've taken an informal approach to mentoring and have avoided the arranged marriage approach where someone in HR matches mentors and mentees (we've called the mentee the kouhai, a Japanese word with a similar meaning but doesn't sound like the tasty peppermint Mintie). In fact the informality goes further because we are advocating not even asking someone to be your mentor, which can create a rather awkward moment, rather we want people to just ask colleagues they respect and want a mentoring relationship for their view or guidance on a issue. We are focussing on the verb 'mentoring' above the noun, 'mentor.'

This approach fails however unless the potential mentor is mindful that these approaches will happen and when they do they can switch themselves into mentoring mode. We call this 5-minute mentoring and the mentor knows (because they have experienced a range of stories from their workplace illustrating good mentoring behaviour) that they need to focus on the interests of the kouhai above, say, the interests of the company.

If enough people experience narrative-based mentoring program we believe the behaviour of managers changes and humanity increases. We have seen this happen in our narrative leadership programs with simple behaviour changes such as giving someone your full attention when they enter your office.

Let's rid our workplace of arsehole behaviour. And the quicker we do it the better we will all be for it.

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The Origins Asia Pacific Business Narrative Conference is a part of the Singapore International Storytelling Festival and is organised by The National Book Development Council of Singapore, with Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge.

The aim of Origins is to foster the practice of business storytelling and narrative techniques in the Asia Pacific region and to build awareness among government agencies and corporations of the power of storytelling and narrative for business.

The conference has three objectives

• To build a network of practitioners to deepen the practice of storytelling and story use in organizations.
• To create awareness of the broad utility of narrative techniques for dealing with business issues, their capacity to humanise the workplace, and to help organisations deal with complexity and uncertainty.
• To inspire leaders to take the first steps in applying narrative techniques in their businesses.

Why participate?

Narrative methods are beginning to have a substantial impact on businesses, particularly in the following areas:

• leadership
• communication
• staff engagement
• strategy alignment and execution
• issues characterised by complexity
• change management
• understanding cultural and attitudinal differences
• learning lessons
• building a collaborative work environment
• communicating tacit knowledge

Who should participate?

• Leaders of organisations, teams and projects
• Corporate planning and strategic planning roles
• Change managers and change activists
• Managers in knowledge management, organisational development and organisation learning roles
• People in training, instructional design, coaching and mentoring roles
• Corporate communications and internal communications roles
• Branding, marketing and sales roles

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Here is a nice little story from CEO of Nike, Mark Parker.

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We start most of our projects by collecting stories. We collect stories in groups (using anecdote circles) and one-on-one. We've learned a lot about getting people comfortable, building trust and asking questions that elicit stories. There's still a lot to learn. A couple of weeks ago something happened while filming stories for a mentoring program we're creating for a client. And since we had a camera at the time we filmed my recollection of what happened.

Time is important and so is your intent.

Paul Cooper over at SMS Consulting Group shared with me this simple way of thinkng about trust.

TRUST = (credibility + reliability + intimacy) / intent

I like it. For one thing, I can remember it and after all the trust-related literature I've read over the years I think it describes the important elements (btw when I first saw the formula depiction I initially recoiled. "Trust can't be a simple formula." I got over it.)

When collecting stories you need to start with a warm up. Back in 2004 I described what the warm up looks like when collecting stories. All those ideas still hold true but I would like to emphasise INTENT. Your storyteller must know you have a good intent and that you will safeguard the stories and the storytellers. . When we collect stories we make it clear how we intend to retell the stories and whether we have their permission.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a teleconference with Doug Lipman on story elicitation (he's running some courses on this topic too). He's also noticed that business books that talk about the importance of questions often neglect story-eliciting questions. There are a few good places to find story-eliciting questions. You can check out our Questions category on this blog. And just yesterday I was reminded by @AmandaFenton about StoryCorps' story collection guide.

Doug's talk cover the 7 things not to do when collecting stories.

1. Don't compromise safety.

Ensure the storyteller understands your goals and how the stories will be used. I've had times when a storyteller has revealed something that could be career-limiting an we have removed the story at their request.

2. Don't show delight

You must be interested in the stories they are telling. If they think you are not interested you end up getting high-level, shortened versions just so they can get it all done and get out of their.

3. Don't enter the imagined world they are creating for you in the story

Your interest and delight will be a function of how much you let the story transport you to the experience they are recounting.

4. Don't be a slave to your questions

Often someone will tell you a story which will prompt new questions and avenues of investigation. You need to listen carefully too because there is nothing worse that asking a question that has already been answered in a previous story.

5. Fail to pursue scenes

The best stories have details. Details create imagery that creates context, adds authenticity and makes the story memorable. So as the interviewer it's important to pursue these specific scenes: one day, in one place, one person, did one thing (OK, that's an exaggeration but you get my drift).

6. To not hypothesise the storyline

I think what Doug meant here is to ask follow up questions in the pursuit of details such as "so that was adversely effecting your relationship?" If that is not the case then your hypothesis was wrong and the storyteller can correct you.

7. Hijacking the story

Taking over the story and telling it your way. I think some trained journalists do this. I was speaking at a conference this year and the facilitator quickly interviewed me so she could introduce me. What I said and then the story she told didn't match in my mind. When this happens the storyteller loses control and is no longer a collaborator in the process.

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We've just refreshed our materials for our popular Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop. We offer this workshop to organisations who are looking to build their internal communication and influence skills. We run it regularly for a variety of companies such as NAB, Jemena, BAE, and IBM and it forms part of our overall programme of Making Strategies Stick.

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Dave Bruebeck, the jazz virtuoso, once said "there is no mistake if you can resolve it."

I was reminded of this quote when Steve Hopkins told me this story about what happened at World Vision around the time of the Haiti earthquakes.

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Every company wants to tell a compelling story that conveys the essence of what they're about. If it's a success their customers and employees will know where they have come from and where they are going and what makes them unique and worthwhile. And with this knowledge they become attracted to what they are offering. Stories are great for answering the question, 'why?' Why are we investing in this equipment? Why are we hiring these type of people? Why are we spending so much time with our new employees? Why? Why? Why?

I've a treat for you (thanks @vivmcw for the link). A superb example of an company telling a series of stories to explain what makes them tick. But before you feast your eyes on some terrific storytelling keep the following in mind: while it can be important to share your company story to a mass audience with the artistry only a Madison Avenue ad firm can deliver, it's more important your leaders can tell your organisation's story, without notes, to everyone they work with. And from my experience helping executive teams craft and tell their strategic story, the process of working it out is as important as telling the strategic story.

Did you enjoy that? What I really enjoyed was how the narrator (company founder Kihachiro Onitsuka--or perhaps an actor playing him) recounted a series of anecdotes describing key events in the history of ASICS so that we inferred a bunch of things that are not actually said explicitly in the video. For example I felt that ASICS was continually innovating, that they had a long a proud history, they invested in state of the art technology, and they were willing to destroy the past to create the future.

Can your leaders tell your strategic story?

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I've just found Garr Reynold's recent post on stories and experience. He makes the good point that people remember stories because they convey emotions, which is very true. We remember what we feel. In this post I would like to briefly explore another reason why we remember stories and touch on the types of stories which are most memorable. Let's take the last point first.

Garr tells us that he visited Haleakala National Park in Japan The park has beautiful but dangerous water falls and sign-posts warn visitors to be careful. Garr noticed that one of the sign-posts seemed more effective that the others because it included actual news clippings of people who had lost their lives. These tragic incidents were told as stories.

Apart from the obvious emotion these stories generated what else might be drawing our attention to these stories? One possibility comes from taking a human evolution and natural selection perspective. Over the 10,000s of years our species has been evolving we've been preoccupied by our own survival (avoiding death), the survival of our children (continuing the species) and sex (creating the next generation). Consequently we care deeply about death, sex and the safety of our children. Any story that feature these topics gains our attention. It helps explain the proliferation of hospital and police dramas on our TVs. So stories of death are hard for us to resist and warning signs that contain these types of stories are attention magnets.

It's true that we remember what we feel but we also remember what we conjure for ourselves. To illustrate this point would you please read this story. I have some questions at the end.

OK, as you were reading this story what could you see in your mind's eye? Could you see the mother and son having dinner? Did you see them walking arm in arm? Did you see him ring his mother? Did you see the envelop and the receipt it contained?

People see stories. We literally re-experience the story with the person telling it and this act of re-creation make the story our own. We remember what we can see and experience.

OK, what about this.

• Stories are memorable because they evoke emotion.
• We remember stories because we visualise what's happening and create our own personal version of the story
• Three of the most memorable types of stories feature death, sex and the safety of children.

What did you see? If you are like me you didn't see a thing. Dots points and opinions don't create imagery and therefore don't conjure emotions and are mostly forgettable.

The story was posted to PassionHR list 16/3/10 by Mannish Aggarwal

Hat tip to David Zinger's post 23 Employee Engagement Eclectic Resource Zingers (No. 13) for the link to Garr's post.

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part of The Singapore International Storytelling Festival

6-8 September, Singapore

Call for Case Studies

In early 2009 we (Patrick Lambe and I) wanted to see if we could put together a conference on storytelling for business. Our concept was for a very practical, workshop-focused conference, designed to help Asia Pacific business people apply story approaches to boost business performance. But we weren’t sure if anyone would come!

So we organised a two-day masterclass on business narrative as part of The Singapore International Storytelling Festival, and the festival did a terrific job in telling people about the event. We waited anxiously to see if anyone would register. Did Asia Pacific organisations really value storytelling as a legitimate and effective business technique? Patrick called me in Melbourne a couple of weeks after we announced the event: registrations were coming in fast. We were booked out months in advance.

This year we want to build on that success and focus on the many story practitioners in our region to create an event where we can learn from each other while also expanding the awareness of narrative approaches among the region's organisations. We’re looking for proposals for case study presentations from within the Asia Pacific region to share what you have done and what you have learned.

The conference has three objectives

• To build a network of practitioners to deepen the practice of storytelling and story use in organizations.
• To create awareness of the broad utility of narrative techniques for dealing with business issues, their capacity to humanise the workplace, and to help organisations deal with complexity and uncertainty.
• To inspire leaders to take the first steps in applying narrative techniques in their businesses.

Conference design

The event will have three parts:

Day 1 will be a closed practitioner's forum for the conference speakers and case study presenters only. We will spend the day sharing what we have learned from a practitioner's perspective. The day will be designed for dialogue rather than presentations.

Day 2 will be a public conference where practitioners will present case studies that illustrate the effectiveness of story-work; and

Day 3 will consist of a set of 1/2 day workshops to enable attendees to build their business story skills in specific areas such as coaching, organisational change, leadership development and communication.

Do you have a case study to share?

We are seeking expressions of interest to share a case study at the conference. We are particularly interested in stories of working with narrative in organizations, across private, public and non-profit sectors. They should clearly illustrate the value of how stories and storytelling can be used to meet the organisation's business needs.

Case presenters will:

• Participate in the closed practitioners’ forum on 6 September
• Share their case study in round table discussions in the morning of 7 September
• Offer to share a technique they have successfully used in a “techniques marketplace” session in the afternoon of 7 September

How we will select the case studies

We will select case studies based on:

• richness of the case for learning
• transferability of the lessons
• demonstrated impact
• innovative approaches
• geographic representation
• representation of different kinds of organization

Please send a short description (a couple of paragraphs) to both Patrick Lambe (plambe@straitsknowledge.com) and Shawn Callahan (shawn@anecdote.com.au) before 22nd March. We’re also happy to trade ideas by email or Skype if you want to develop an idea before you decide to put a more formal description together.

Shawn Callahan

Patrick Lambe

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Here are my two suggestions. Love to hear yours in the comments.

Personal motivation initiative: we are creating a one-page handout describing why the team manager is an important role and listing four things every manager must do to be great at the job. The first on the list is to collect registration fees on time. I did think we should include a short story of how a manager did one of these tasks (more on this idea below).

Social motivation initiative: For the next four months we will share with all the team managers the overall percentage of teams that are all paid up and either congratulating them of getting all their fees in or encouraging to be as good as the rest. The overall percentage at the outset will be large which will send the message that most people are paying (social proof).

To add to this thinking I discovered this morning some important influence research which shows how stories can be added to this mix with tremendous effect. Over at the Inside Influence Report Noah Goldstein reports on Adam Grant's research showing that reminding people of the meaning and significance of their work can double their productivity. And he did this by simply sharing stories from those people who benefited from the call centre worker's hard work: in this case benefactors of a fundraising organisation.

Here is how Grant ran his experiment.

So my question is who's story does the team managers need to hear? I can't imagine hearing a story from the committee of how getting the money in on time will motivate anyone. Perhaps it needs to be a story from one of the players that received a scholarship or from a parent in the under eights who gets reduced fees to get them started. Or maybe it is a story from one of the coaches who all just received new coaches tops.

Grant, A. M. (2008). The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary conditions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 108-124.

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Anecdote helps you harness the natural power of stories to bring your strategy to life. We help you tell your strategic story and then engage your employees in the strategic process so everyone has a hand in creating it. The result is a strategy everyone understands in concrete, specific terms where the level of commitment to its achievement is vastly increased.

We help our clients be more effective and resilient through developing their capabilities to work collaboratively, in teams, in communities of people with shared interest and expertise, and across diverse networks.

Contact Us

NB: For our regular readers you might be wondering why we are explaining what we do in a blog post. We just wanted to make sure people could find our services around making strategies stick and our four speciality areas.

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Anecdote helps you harness the natural power of stories to bring your strategy to life. We help you tell your strategic story and then engage your employees in the strategic process so everyone has a hand in creating it. The result is a strategy everyone understands in concrete, specific terms where the level of commitment to its achievement is vastly increased.

We help our clients be more effective and resilient through developing their capabilities to work collaboratively, in teams, in communities of people with shared interest and expertise, and across diverse networks.

Contact Us

NB: For our regular readers you might be wondering why we are explaining what we do in a blog post. We just wanted to make sure people could find our services around making strategies stick and our four speciality areas.

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It was going to be difficult to surpass their last book, Made to Stick, where they showed us that people wont pay attention unless our message is simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and a story. And it was going to be even harder practising what they preached to make Switch stick. But I'm delighted to report that they've pulled it off and have created an engaging and useful work on how to change things when change is hard.

Switch is arranged around an analogy (immediately visual and sticky). When we are making a decision we're often torn between our rational, logical reasons and our emotional, intuitive feelings. Chip and Dan ask us to imagine an Elephant and its Rider (the mahout). The Rider represents the rational and logical. Tell the Rider what to do, provide a good argument and the Rider will do it. The Elephant, on the other hand, represents our emotions, our gut response. The Rider might like to avoid that hamburger and chips but there is very little the Rider can do if the Elephant really wants it (OK, so I'm telling you what happened last night). To complete their analogy they include the Path they are travelling along. If the Rider can direct the Elephant down a well prepared Path then there is a good chance for change. The Path might represent, for example, access to user friendly technology or effective office space design. Switch is arranged in three parts: Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant and Shape the Path.

On Saturday in 2000 ... In 1990 ... A doctor was asked ... Crystal Jones joined Teach for America in 2003 ... These are the first few words of the first four chapters and apart from the last chapter each starts with a story. And within each chapter are more stories. These stories are well chosen and illustrate the behaviours we need to adopt to effect change. The whole book is focussed on behaviours and rightly makes the point that change comes from changing people's behaviour. That's the level you need to take. A leader cannot afford to stay aloof. For change to occur they need to get into the detail as well as stay strategic.

As a business storyteller Switch is a treasure trove of stories to be retold in organisations. Last week I was running a strategy workshop and I wanted the group to identify a set of guiding principles for their organisation. So I told them the story of the Brazilian railway that was going broke and how Alexandre Behring and his CFO created four rules to guide everyone's spending behaviour to get them out of debt. I shared the rules with the participants and they knew exactly what I meant and were able to easily create their own guiding principles. Strategy execution is a change initiative and Chip and Dan advise us to script the critical moves.

Here is the structure of the book. Notice how each section is a pointer to behaviour.

Direct the Rider: Find the bright spots; Script the critical moves; Point to the destination

Motivate the Elephant: Find the feeling; Shrink the Change; Grow your people

Shape the Path: Tweak the environment; Build habits; Rally the herd

On page 58 we encounter our first clinic and I must admit I groaned slightly when I bumped into it. Getting me to do exercises while I'm reading is normally a pain. I was going to just skip the clinic but decided to have a read and the thing I noticed was that the repetition of the ideas in another context was really helping me to remember. I knew repetition is important but I guess the story approach sucked me in and reinforced it.

One the first things I check when I get a book like Switch is to see whether it is comprehensively referenced and what type of studies are being referred to (if any). Switch passed with flying colours. The endnotes are expansive and they share a swag of evidence for each point they make and often used the psychological experiments as stories rather than just presenting the facts.

Switch is a book that will be read by senior leaders. It's engaging, well written, funny in parts and insightful. If you're an change practitioner in an organisation I recommend you buy a handful of copies and give them to your leaders. In my experience they wont read it right away but then they'll jump on a flight and start and wont stop. At this point you'll not only have a supporter but someone who will compel your involvement. Malcolm Gladwell has served me well in the past and Switch is in the same league.

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A few nights ago I watch Changeling starring Angelina Jolie. It's directed by Clint Eastwood (has he ever directed a dud movie?) and I was fascinated by a short documentary we found in the DVD extras where Clint explained why he never calls out 'Action' when directing a scene. As an actor Clint found a director's call to 'Action' off putting. He was immediately reminded that he was an actor, acting and his performance suffered. Instead Clint calmly and quietly says things like, "OK, in your own time ..." or "when you are ready ..."

I'll add that advice to my repertoire of tips for getting people to tell their stories on video. I like to use my Flip Video to make rough and ready clips. Here are the seven things I keep in mind when filming:

1. Sit the person in front of plain background--you don't want to be distracted by what's behind the storyteller
2. Have light come in from the side (sit them next to a window) to give their face more depth. But not in direct sunlight.
3. Hold the camera as still as I can.
4. Start filming well before you ask the person to recount their experience and engage them in some idle chit chat. This gets them used to being filmed.
5. Keep the camera as close to my face as possible and tell the storyteller to tell me, not the camera, the story. Ask them to look me in the eye. With the camera close by it will look like they are looking at the camera.
6. Keep filming after they finish their story. You never know what they will say after they relax and then there is plenty of space to edit the ending.
7. Try to avoid making noise and nodding while they are telling their story (hard to do). Otherwise your sounds and movement also get captured.

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On a recent trip to Canberra I was lining up to board the plane. Behind me was a young family. Their young son, probably four or five, was quizzing his dad.

The boy said: "Why are we in the line?"

"Because we are getting on the plane," his dad replied.

"Why are we getting on the plane?"

"Because we are visiting Grandma in Canberra.," says dad.

"Why are we visiting Grandma?"

"Because we love Grandma and she likes us to visit."

Our urge to know 'why' is deeply embedded in our psyche. From an early age we want to know the reason things happen. It helps us predict what might happen in the future and makes us feel safe.

The desire to know why doesn't diminish with age. If a CEO announces that the company is shifting direction to concentrate on customer service, everyone in the company will want to know why.

And if they haven't been told the story of how the shift came about, they will create their own story.

Imagine two colleagues chatting after the CEO announcement to focus on customer service.

"After all these years banging on about innovation, now it's customer service. What's that about?" says Paul

"Well, I heard the new chairman is a zealot for customer service and at his last position there was a dramatic improvement when they focussed on their customers. He must have twisted the CEO's arm," says David

"Good to know the CEO can think for himself," Paul chuckles rolling his eyes.

If leaders don't tell the story that explains important decisions then employees will use the best information they have to create their own story. At best this only confuses everyone and stalls action. At worse the new direction is actively undermined by the competing stories.

You might be thinking, "so do the senior leaders simply spin a story that's serves their purpose?" You could try but employees are too smart to believe a porky pie. It's in everyone's interest for the leaders to tell what really happen to prompt the change. There are two things someone hearing the story will ask themselves before they will really listen to what's being said: is it relevant? and, is it plausible? Fail these two tests and you may as well be telling the stationery cupboard. With something as important as a new strategic direction it's vital that all the leaders want and can tell this story.

We call this type of story a strategic story and we've been having fun helping some interesting companies find and tell their strategic story.

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We often get asked whether we are running any public courses on our techniques but for the last couple of years we have reserved these courses for our clients.

But this February and March we are running one workshop on influencing change with stories in collaboration with Kevin Bishop, most recently the Royal Bank of Scotland's change manager in the UK.

If you would like to attend here are all the details.

We only have limited places so please let us know as soon as you can to secure a spot.

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Seth Godin has a new ebook out called What Matters Now. It consists of 80 or so thought leaders each with a page to talk about an idea that matters to them. Each idea is summed up in a single word such as Dignity, Autonomy, Attention, Difference. You can download the ebook here.

Dan and Chip Heath have a page with the title, Change. They incorporate three ideas in their one-pager that is dear to our work: stories, positive deviance and changing behaviour. Here is what they wrote.

We’re wired to focus on what’s not working. But Murphy asked, “What IS working, today, and how can we do more of it?”

You’re probably trying to change things at home or at work. Stop agonizing about what’s not working. Instead, ask yourself, “What’s working well, right now, and how can I do more of it?”

Chip and Dan Heath are the authors of Made to Stick and the soon-to-be-released book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard.

It's not a coincidence that the Heath brothers decided to tell a story to illustrate their idea and try and persuade the reader to adopt a different approach to change. They dedicate a chapter to the power of stories in their book, Made to Stick and conclude the book saying that most of the other effects described in the other chapters are encapsulated in stories. So let's look at some of the features of this story and why it might be effective.

The simple story structure creates an image for us of both Bobby and Murphy (and let's not forget Ms. Smith). I can see Bobby sitting on a swivel chair restless and bored. If the story creates vivid images for us there is a good chance it will grab our attention and we will remember it. We've all seen Bobbys in our life, so it's easy to picture him in this story.

Names are important. Humans care about other humans. We want to know the names. Case studies often lack names and suffer for it. Again it creates attention through authenticity and empathy for people.

Also notice how they start with the story and then provide the advice. They didn't want the reader to slip into a confirmation bias where we automatically discount suggestions as our first instinct. The story first allows us to pull the idea to us, own the idea ourselves before a suggestion is made by the experts.

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In my hands is a corporate strategy. It’s a glossy six-page document designed for every employee to memorise and enact. There are seven themes each with three sub-themes. There are also seven values. All the information is presented as dot points well set out with lots of white space for easy reading. Sadly this strategy is unlikely to stick. Perversely, it could even cause the exact opposite behaviour the leaders desire. Here are three reasons for my statement.

1. It’s hard to remember a set of ideas without an organising schema. Neuroscientist John Medina reminds us that we need to get the overall gist of something before we can attend to the details. Watch this video for an example of what he means.

One way to provide the overall context for a strategy is to create a strategic story that places the company’s directions within a schema. That way people get the gist of the strategy and can then attach more and more meaning.

2. Too many things on our mind diminishes our willpower. Implementing a strategy requires willpower and as a recent Wall Street Journal article describes it only takes a moderate cognitive load before we succumb to temptation. In my opening example here are at least 28 things to remember about the corporate strategy which will definitely overload our ability to remember it but more importantly it could be sapping our will to stay the new strategic course.

In applying this idea we would be better off introducing parts of the strategy over time so people can concentrate on one or two changes at a time, perhaps over a 90 day period, before introducing the next part.

3. We remember what we see. In a corollary to the aphorism, 'we remember was we feel,' it is also true that we much more likely to recognise and recall something when we can see it. As John Medina puts it, “The phenomenon is so pervasive, it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect.”

This idea immediately gets us thinking of the splendid pictures we can include with our strategies, those striking images that conjure the essence of what our company is all about. This is the standard approach but there are two other types of images you should consider back-of-the-napkin drawings and the images created by stories.

Dan Roam has created a business from helping people sketch out their thinking, back-of-a-napkin style. In his book with the unsurprising title, The Back of the Napkin, Roam illustrates the power of a simple diagram to share an idea. If you can’t sketch it on a napkin, forget it, it’s too complicated. So ensure everyone can tell your company’s strategic story with the aid of some simple sketches.

Effective stories paint pictures for us as well. When someone recounts a compelling story we visualise what’s happening. And because we are playing out the action in our mind’s eye the story becomes memorable for us. If we tell the story a number of times it becomes embedding in what we know. As the story researcher Roger Schank said, “To tell a story is to remember.”

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Everyday we tell those closest to us (our family, friends, colleagues) about what happened to us: today, yesterday, last week. Occasionally we'll reminisce about the old days but for those we know well what's worth recounting, what's remarkable, is happening on a daily basis. We don't even need to tell the whole story because the people we know well have much of the background. We tell the smaller details that wouldn't make sense or be interesting to someone we didn't know that well. The storytelling is gradual.

Imagine you grew up without knowing anything about restaurants. You've never heard of them, never seen them and have never had an experience, apart from eating a meal at home, that is anything like going to a restaurant. Then one day a friend takes you to one and you can't believe that you can just order your meal, that waiters bring your meal and clear away all the dirty dishes. For you this is truly remarkable and if someone ask you to share your experience you could do it without hesitation.

For those people who go to restaurants regularly much of the experience is invisible. We're not surprised by waiters, menus, asking for the bill, etc.. We have developed a script for what a restaurant experience will be like and we will only notice things if something unexpected happens. These scripts are important. Without them we would have to think through everything. It would be exhausting.

Important knowledge, however, resides in the scripts. It's difficult to recount stories for someone who is not close about what you do day-in, day-out. You're not sure they care about the small stories you tell to those people who see you every day. There is an art to collecting stories, especially the small ones.

I mention this conumdrum because just knowing that stories can get converted to scripts will help anyone who is trying to elicit stories to go beyond what's remarkable to a stranger. For a long time I was flummoxed at times during an anecdote circle when the participants could only give you broad illustrations of what they did at work rather than specific anecdotes. It didn't happen often but when it did I couldn't explain it. With this explanation I do three things to find the small stories.

1. be truly interested in every detail. Curiosity must exude from your pores
2. use memory triggers: timelines, artefacts, pictures
3. get peers together in the anecdote circle

The next frontier for me will be cognitive task analysis. I have Crandall, Klein and Hoffman's book, Working Minds and I'm looking forward to learning more about the techniques.

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Most organisations I know have a set of stated values. You know what I mean, things like integrity, professionalism, respect for the individual. And in most cases they've been developed for the wrong reasons. And when developed for the right reasons, most employees don't understand what the values mean anyway. Let me explain.

Often the starting question for establishing a set of organisational values is, "Which values should we hold each and everyone accountable for so our organisation thrives?" This gets translated to "What values do our stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers) expect us to hold?" The list is then drawn up and the result is a moribund list of words.

I was reading a paper by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras and they suggest an alternative set of questions (in my words): "What values do we deeply hold that reflect the essence of our company?" and "Would we still hold these values if they created a disadvantage for us if things changed?" If you can answer these two questions in the positive then you've identified your core values. What I found really interesting was looking at some examples Collins and Porras gave and noticed how each company held a different set in that the usual suspects weren't repeated: they didn't all have to value innovation, or customer service, or integrity. The lists I'm seeing are starting to look the same.

Sony

• Elevation of the Japanese culture and national status
• Being a pioneer - not following others; doing the impossible
• Encouraging individual ability and creativity

Merck

• Corporate social responsibility
• Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company
• Science-based innovation
• Honesty and integrity
• Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity

Walt Disney

• No cynicism
• Nurturing and promulgation of "wholesome American values"
• Creativity, dreams, and imagination
• Fanatical attention to consistency and detail
• Preservation and control of the Disney magic

Collins and Porras' research shows that companies who have enduring values and a clear purpose out perform their competitors. But here's the thing, their core values are not chosen because they think they will be competitive advantages, rather they are chosen because they are held deeply by the core group. Art Kleiner, who wrote a terrific book on core group theory, makes the good point that "The organisation goes wherever its people perceive that the Core Group needs and wants to go. The organisation becomes whatever its people perceive and want to become." And this is double true for organisational values.

Values and meaning

When I worked at SMS (Australian consulting company) in the 90s we had three values: add value, maintain unity, enhance reputation. I knew what the 2nd and 3rd values meant but 'add value' was a bit fuzzy for me. Value fuzziness is a common problem. And you've probably guessed what I'm going to suggest as a way to provide meaning: that's right, STORIES.

Imagine if for every value everyone can tell one or more stories to illustrate what that values means. I often ask people to give me an example to illustrate a value and in many cases all I get is a very intense look of someone desperately trying to remember a story to tell. I've said it before but if a company values [insert value] then it should be teeming with [insert value] stories.

Tyco has worked this one out. Tyco is a global business involved in fire safety, security and manufacturing. A few years back they released a booklet called Doing the Right Thing: The Tyco Guide to Ethical Conduct . For each ethical guideline they included one or more stories that either illustrated what the ethical value means when it's working or what it looks liked when it is broken. For example, Tyco values safety and a healthy work environment and here are their stories of that value when it's broken.

At Anecdote we do a lot of work helping organisations find and tell the stories that illustrate their values and also help design systematic ways to embed those values throughout the consciousness of everyone in the organisation. It is only by working at this level of values and purpose can people make the best decision possible in a complex and dynamic environment. Rules don't cut it. And if we think about what really makes an organisation it's those thousands and thousands of decisions are made each and every day, each one guides by the values in action.

Collins, J.C. & Porras, J.I. 1996, 'Building Your Company's Vision', Harvard Business Review, vol. September-October, pp. 65-77.

Kleiner, A. 2003, Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success, Currency Doubleday, New York.

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I'm sitting here watching the sun peak up over the trees and bushes that define the boundary of our backyard thinking about the enjoyable conference I attended last week. It was called Celebrating Story and it was held at the Abbotsford Convent. Andrew and Sasha Rixon did a tremendous job organising the event. They created a lovely atmosphere that encouraged everyone to open up and share what they knew.

There were a few aha moments for me at the conference. The first came chatting to David Drake. Actually it all started listening to his presentation where he mentioned that some story practitioners dealt with stories as commodities. This made me bristle a little so I asked David after the session what he meant. What I learned from this conversation was something I knew from my knowledge management interests but never thought to apply it to stories. If you view a story as a thing then you will focus on the story structure, its impact, the lessons that can be drawn from it etc. and you will have a tremendous urge to capture it and store it in a database. If you view storytelling as a process you'll focus on the people involved in the moment, the narrator, the listener, the context and the environment and will probably look for ways to create these types of experiences. One view is neither better nor worse than the other, you need both. But it is worthwhile pulling yourself up now and then and being mindful of your perspective.

Have you seen playback theatre? It is when a troupe of improv actors act out, at a drop of a hat, a story contributed by the audience. Melbourne's Playback Theatre were a feature of the conference and I learned some valuable lessons from them.

Here is little technique the playback folk used which I think is great. I can see myself using it to help people enrich their visual palette when telling a story. Pair people up: a storyteller and a listener. The storyteller has to start their story by describing the place where the story begins: It all started in a tiny red brick house on the upside of the street. The poplar trees were blowing in the wind and my Dad was sitting on the front steps ... That sort of thing. The listener then has the job of interrupting the story at anytime to get more description. "Popular tree?" they might ask, at which point the teller needs to say more about the popular trees until the listener says "continue." The storyteller then just keeps telling their story from that point on. One of the variations they had us do is then walk side by side and reflect on our stories. There is something about strolling which improves the conversation. I'm sure Jane Austen would have had something to say about this phenomenon.

The other thing that was a little bit confronting for me, but highly valuable, was when the playback performers facilitated a large group to break down and respond to a story I told. They essentially played back the story and then yelled out the feelings they had when listening to the story. It was surprising what people felt really passionate about and helped me understand some of the really important things that were in that story.

My last discovery was fairytales. Andrew Rixon has been trying to convince me of the importance of fairytales in a business context and I must admit I dismissed them as too 'out there' for my business clients. But Andrew ran a session where the group explored a single issue (getting unstuck) and then in small groups we had to create a fairytale that illustrated elements of that issue. Ours was 'awareness and options' and we had no problem coming up with a dragon-killing knight and his inability to see what was really happening around him. The fairytale structure is a ready made collection of metaphors that any group can use to explore organisational issues.

My presentation was on our leadership development program where we use stories from the organisation to illustrate good and bad management behaviours. I also used the opportunity with a room full of story practitioners to explore some of the challenges we face in our work. The two I shared were the general inability for many people to identify a story because we interpret many things as stories and so find it difficult to differentiate a story from opinions; and how using the term 'storytelling' on a corporate setting can make people uncomfortable and how other language can be used.

Well done to Andrew and all the other people involved in organising the event. It was great fun.

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Some great advice from Scott Simon.

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Stories are our natural way to plan. We imagine how things are going to work out, who are the players, what incidents might befall us and what we’re going to do to avoid these traps. We remember what happened last time and what we must steer clear of. We think about those good bits we want happening everywhere in our company. We envisage the opportunities and understand the sequence of events we believe are necessary to make it happen. And then, if we are like most executives, we encapsulate our strategy in a set of dot points that immediately strips it of most of its meaning. It becomes a shell of its former self, a strategic skeleton.

What often happens next involves dangling these strategic bones at one or more major gatherings of the company. We launch our strategies and leaders say things like, “This new strategy will guide our actions and decisions for the next period of growth”. But the context is missing. Employees find it hard to understand, and remember. What’s the significance? What does it look like in practice? And as a result they find it difficult to see their place in the strategy. They also find it hard to see the strategy in their own workplace. “What do we actually do?” they say. There’s little to connect their own story to the company’s mission.

It doesn’t need to be like this.

Anecdote’s program keeps the stories in your strategy so that employees understand its meaning and significance while encouraging everyone to actively participate in the strategic process. Our aim is to harness the natural power of stories to bring your strategy to life. The primary objective is to help everyone in the company identify the vital behaviours that must be in place for the strategy to succeed. And then we help create the opportunities to design and implement small changes to bring those behaviours about. And in doing so really making your strategy stick.

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Dan Pink TED talk has an important message: what scientists know about the detrimental effects of incentives remains largely unknown and unpractised by managers. He argues, which I totally agree, that we need to create workplaces which provide autonomy, possibility for mastery and purpose. These factors truly motivate us.

The video, see below, is also interesting for how Dan users stories. Take a look first then I will make some comments below.

Dan is very aware of the power of stories. In his book, A Whole New Mind, he dedicates a chapter to how important storytelling is as a skill. But he also knows that business people are scared by the term and when they hear the word 'story' they assume what is being said is made up, fluffy, unbusiness-like. So Dan frames his presentation as a legal case, focussed on the evidence, with the full persuasive power of the best legal minds (mind you he does some lovely self-deprecation at the start of the talk to connect with the audience).

Dan even goes as far as saying, "this is not a story, it is a fact ..."

But here's the thing. Dan's talk is full of stories. In fact he employs one of my favourite story patterns: the scientific experiment. Scientific experiments are great because to explain them you have to tell what the scientist did and when and the best ones of some unanticipated result--terrific elements for a story.

I counted 7 stories in Dan's presentation (one every 2. minutes or so). Quite a few for someone is telling the audience that he is not telling a story.

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These moments, beautifully depicted in this video, are the stuff of anecdotes, all those little stories we tell everyday that form the chatter that keeps us connected.

via The Obvious

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There's a perception in business that stories are long and time consuming. "I don't have time to tell a story. I'm just going to give them the facts," I hear business folk say.

The reality is quite different. Every month or so I run a storytelling for leaders workshop. One of the first activities I often run is a jumpstart storytelling session. Each person has 90 seconds to tell their story and from my observation most people finish within a minute or even less. It doesn't take very long to tell a story. See for yourself. Check out the stories we've published here over the years, read them aloud and see how long they take.

Sure, there are the epic stories told by professional storytellers than can last for hours but business stories are mostly short.

This Johnnie Walker ad is a good example of a longer story you might hear in an organisation when someone is recounting the story of a project, a team or in this case, a company. Note how Robert Carlyle gives us the names of the people involved. We are interested in this type of detail and it's often omitted in business stories.

BTW, what did you think of the props? Did they distract you from the story or help build the picture?

Thanks to Terrence Garguilo and Kathy Hansen for finding the video

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Just spent a fabulous day at NAB's new Academy running our storytelling program. Wow, what a venue. We were in the Scribbler room: wall-to-wall whiteboards, pin boards and butchers paper. A facilitator's dream.

After arriving home, and relaxing with a glass of wine in hand, I was chatting to Sheen about her day. She's learned heaps of new ways to teach her 4-7 year olds at her new primary school. In particular the school's emphasis on whole language has enabled Sheen to put these ideas into practice. I asked how she learned these new techniques. "By watching and listening to my colleagues and then giving it go myself," she said.

Makes sense. It's an approach we can all use to develop our business storytelling skills. The pre-requisite is to be able to identify stories when they are being told, but with that skill under your belt it's time to don your ethnographer hat and watch your fellow storytelling colleagues in action.

In particular keep an eye on when they tell stories, and when they don't. How do they move into telling a story? What type of stories do they tell? Are their stories designed to teach, illustrate values, spark action, convey a vision? Where do they tell stories (one on one, informal gatherings, meeting, presentations)? And most importantly watch those people who are listening. What is the response?

By reflecting on what you observe you can then have a crack yourself. And don't forget to set some time aside to reflect on what happens. Then rinse and repeat.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 :-)

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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.

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Something got me thinking about City of Port Phillip's Non Crime Hotline this morning. They have a phone number you call to report good news stories. I rang the council and found that Peter Strecker was now in charge of this initiative and he told me that it was in hibernation. It turned out that they got very few calls. There received some great stories,

But there wasn't enough to sustain the program. So why are we reluctant to share positive stories?

Perhaps part of the reason is that it's hard to see the impact sharing a positive story might have. When we tell the busker story we can see it's amusing and uplifting but perhaps not that instructional unless you're a busker. Whereas a negative story gives us a warning on what to avoid. Consequently we are only willing to exert a small effort to pass on positive stories and ringing a hotline and listening to a recorded message might be too much of an impost. If we were aggrieved in some way (a negative story) we probably have more energy to have our story heard and therefore more willing to jump through some hoops.

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Just a quick note to say it is just over 4 weeks before we get together in London for our two workshops (24 & 25 June). Looks like we have a good turn out but if you are thinking of coming along I need to get all the registrations complete in the next two weeks.

Send me an email if you want a registration form and here is the description of the two narrative based workshops.

And just to get a bit of a flavour for my approach you might like to check out this presentation I did this week.

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Thanks to all my Twitter friends who helped me refine this article. It was a fun process that reinforces for me the strength of social computing approaches for collaboration.

The main purpose of this whitepaper is to introduce senior leaders to the idea of business storytelling and demonstrate its importance, especially in the increasingly complex and unpredictable world we live in. It also provides some approaches to how you find and recount your experiences in a business context.

I encourage you to send a copy to your CEO, or better still your CFO and CIO, and help them realise that people only remember what they feel and despite the painful sounding name, people don't feel bullet points.

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A couple of week ago a 28 year old naval engineer delivered his baby son based on watching some DIY YouTube videos. When I heard this news I realised that the DIY video's time had come and it wouldn't be too long before we see its wide adoption in organisations.

I've been a long-time user of screencasting technology such as ScreenFlow as a way of recording how to do things on your computer. As an example here is a 3 minute guide on how to establish a cash flow schedule in Salesforce.com.

How to establish a schedule in Salesforce from Shawn Callahan on Vimeo.

Notice how I've preceded the instructions with a story that conveys why it's important to go through these steps.

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1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

If you don't know what TED is, you don't know what you are missing. You can see some of my favourite TED videos here.

This list is from Presentation Zen.

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My friend Terrence Gargiulo and I were chatting last week about the role storytelling plays for leaders and we agreed that the leadership-storytelling triple-threat was the ability to elicit stories, tell stories and trigger stories. When we say trigger stories we mean that a leader does something that's remarkable so people tell the story of what happened. So on this theme I was tickled pink to receive this video from Victoria Ward. A terrific example of a leader triggering stories.

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So it's Friday and here we are at the end of Story Week. Many thanks to all of you who contributed and here is our final story - something serious...

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Our fourth story for Story Week is from the UK - please tell us what you think.

No red signal when minister plays with train set by Adam Sherwin (From Times UK Online)

All aboard the Adonis Express. Frustrated commuters will get direct access to the Transport Minister next week when Lord Adonis embarks upon a railway voyage to criss-cross Britain in six days.

The Minister will board the Paddington to Truro sleeper service on Easter Monday, just one man, his laptop and a £375 standard class Rail Rover ticket. On Saturday he will arrive in York after a 1,500-mile Michael Palin-style trip, involving 45 trains and extensive knowledge of the timetable. He will speed (hopefully) through Cornwall, East Anglia, the West Midlands and up to Aberdeen, before arriving in North Yorkshire to a hero’s welcome. Any signs of cabin fever will be logged on a Times Online blog.

A spokesman said: “Andrew is travelling solo and is happy for commuters to chat to him.”

Lord Adonis tells us: “My plan is to get to railway lines I have rarely or never used. Nothing beats first-hand experience when you are responsible for a major public service.”

Network Rail is advised to clear the line of engineering works.

A prize for the best picture of Lord Adonis captured on the rattlers.

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Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to Story Week so far. Continuing with our theme of "leadership", today we are featuring a story from Dr Fiona Wood, who was recognised as "Australian of the Year" for her work after the Bali Bombings. And we'd still like to hear your ideas for Friday's story.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/talkingheads/txt/s1711934.htm

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Day 2 of Story Week is here. Yesterday we had a video with a big Story. Today we have a snippet, a small story of a day-to-day interaction in a workplace. Our theme for the week is leadership, so look at the story in this light. Think how you would feel in the same circumstances. And of course, please pass this on to your networks and encourage them to join the fun. The more, the merrier. N.B. We have yet to finalise a story for Friday - is there a video of a story on the theme of leadership (preferably involving a woman) that you'd like to suggest?

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The Story Week is here! Over the next 5 days, we'll be offering you 5 stories - some momentous, some more low-key - and we're inviting you to tell us what you think of them. After you have viewed, read or heard the story, we'd like you to fill out the form below and maybe tell us a story of your own. We will be publishing (under a creative commons license) the aggregate results from this little experiment and also some of the stories that you tell us. So without further ado...

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Anecdote, Sparknow and Innotecture have been working together for a little while now to find out a bit more about what stories have influence and impact. We've found quite a difference in views, even among ourselves. So we're inviting our combined readership and their networks (and their networks) to participate in Story Week (starting May 4th) Over 5 days we're going to show you 5 stories from different people in different formats, intended for very different audiences and settings. You're going to tell us how you respond to them. We'll tell you what you collectively told us. We'll all learn something in the process. Oh, and it will be fun, too.

Watch this space...

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The authors of Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath, point out that there are three story plots we humans dearly love:

• the creativity plot where the protagonist solves one or more puzzles through shear ingenuity, persistence and always with a dash of dumb luck. The DaVinci Code is an example.
• the connection plot where people come together from different walks of life: different race, class, affluence, nationality, power. This week Sheen and I re-watched the movie Notting Hill which is definitely an example of a connection plot: famous celebrity connects with impoverished book store owner.
• the challenge plot where the protagonist faces a daunting challenge, everyone is sceptical whether is can be done, and especially by our hero, but in the end she triumphs. You might not have heard of Susan Boyle but this video is a classic example of a challenge plot told in 7 minutes.

Now you might be thinking, "how does all this relate to stories in a business context?"

Successful leaders are people who are able to change the minds, feelings and ultimately the actions of people who follow their lead. And stories play a fundamental role in helping people change their minds. Don't just take my word for it. Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist and author of Changing Minds wrote: "The principle vehicle of leadership is the story: The leader affects individual behavior, thought, and feelings through the stories that he and she tells."

So to succeed as a leader it's important to build your repertoire of stories but you don't want to recount just any story. You want to be mindful of the things that happen in your life that others will find interesting, inspiring and meaningful and by knowing these three plot types you can be on the lookout for these experiences. Let me finish with another quote from Gardner: "One of the most powerful weapons in the possession of leader-storytellers is the lives that they lead. To the extent that leaders embody the stories that they tell, the leaders' examples will increase in power."

Gardner, H. (1999). "The vehicle and the vehicles of leadership." American Behavioral Scientist 42(6): 1009-1023.

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In 1993, as the co-founder of photographic library startup, I travelled to Los Angeles to check out one of America’s largest commercial photographic collections. Remarkably they were well under way converting their film stock to Kodak PhotoCD, a proprietary digital format launched the year before. We were impressed with Eastman Kodak because it looked like they were taking digital photography seriously. The shift to digital was really happening. It was an exciting time. So we began to furiously scan our 100,000 images. At the time it seemed that Kodak was riding the digital wave. They were a digital camera pioneer building the first digital camera in 1975. This 110 year old manufacturing giant, however, missed the digital boat. Their share price today is less that what it was for them in the 1950s. So why did Eastman Kodak falter? Why did it take them so long to really adopt a digital approach to their products and services? What held them back?

Perhaps Kodak reached their goals in the early ‘90s and was struggling to set new ones. Kodak was the predominant force in the photographic industry. It had succeeded through its many advances in chemical processing and manufacturing streamlining. At the same time it was more than aware of the new digital technologies yet profits were coming from its established business lines. In the minds of their leaders they knew how to succeed. They had done it for so long. So don’t fix what’s not broken.

We see this ‘I know what’s right’ mentality in our leadership programs. Just last week Mark was running a leadership program in Sydney and the most senior person in the room approached Mark and said, “I really just wanted to come to see what the troops were learning and keep an eye on things.” He had been with the company for 20 years and believed he’d seen everything and didn’t need to learn anything new. He told himself a story along the following lines: “I’ve been in the business for 20 years now and I have seen it at its best and its worst and I have survived and thrived. So I pretty much know what I’m doing and that it works.”

Our stories, collectively and individually, have a profound affect on what we believe is possible. Therefore the challenge for leaders is to both understand the stories affecting individuals and groups and then know how to define and tell (ideally through wide participation) new stories that set the direction for the company. But that’s not all. The greatest challenge is to help people hear, remember and believe where the company is headed and then inspire people to act in line with that belief.

Whether the leadership team at Kodak had seen the need to redirect towards a digital future in time is hard to say. But even if there was a resolve to go digital, were the leaders equipped with the skills to create the new stories and have them stick in a meaningful way?

Aligning everyone’s actions to the company’s strategy is equivalent of finding the corporate Shangri-la. It can be done. Take IBM’s turnaround for example.

This post is the beginning of a series I have planned that looks at why storytelling is a vital leadership skill. Some of the topics I will cover include how stories are memorable, how they show commitment, how they inspire people to take action, how they reduce anxiety, how they share lessons, how they convey values and how they change minds.

References

Gerstner, L. V. (2002). Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround. New York, Harper Collins.

Turner, T. (2008). Call Me Ted: The Autobiograhy of the Extraordinary Business Leader and Founder of CNN. London, Sphere.

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To paraphrase Annette Simmons, "People wont listen to you until they know who you are and what you want." And one of the best ways to introduce yourself and answer these two questions is to tell a story that reveals something about your character and experience.

The challenge for many people, however, is to find and tell a story that doesn't sound like you are just blowing your own trumpet. One approach is to take the spotlight off yourself and make someone else the lead. You can then play the supporting role.

When I introduce myself to a new audience I often tell the story of how I got started in storytelling by meeting Dave Snowden. Dave is a world leader in knowledge management and narrative techniques and is an impressive speaker and storyteller.

At this point you might want to have a look at this video where I tell the story of how I met Dave. After you've watched the video, and before you read on, please jot down what you inferred about me after hearing the story and pop your answer in the comments. This will help illustrate a key point to this approach.

For those of you that didn't watch the video, here's the basic plot. Dave comes to Canberra and presents at a seminar I organise. He captivates the audience for the whole day with stories and new ways of seeing the world. I'm so taken with the performance that I resolve to do similar work one day and that night write a story and send it to Dave. He admonishes me for missing the whole point of his work, which is to help organisations make sense of their own stories, not to craft stories. We become friends and I join to lead his research centre on complexity in Australia and New Zealand. Then I leave IBM to set up Anecdote in 2004.

So Dave is front and centre in this story. He is the star but I play a significant supporting role.

When I ask the participants of our storytelling for business leaders workshops (which I'm giving in London in June) about what they infer about me after hearing this story (I tell the story at the beginning of the day and ask for their feedback in the afternoon), they say the following:

• you are passionate about storytelling
• you are willing to take risks
• you have large organisation experience
• you've worked for a highly respected company
• you are confident to share your mistakes
• you are experienced in storytelling

I never get the sense that they think I'm a poser (mind you, that might not be saying). To the contrary, it feels like we make a connection quickly and the workshop is off to a good start.

So think about those times when you'd lent a helping hand, where you'd help create the conditions for others to succeed, and tell these stories to introduce yourself and build rapport. These stories speak volumes about who you are, what drives you and they reveal your character; the pre-requisites for trusting collaborations.

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Yesterday I popped out for a meeting at the National Australia Bank. They have a new CEO, Cameron Clyne, and last week he announced a restructure that has substantially flattened the organisation. While the restructure has been the topic of lots of conversations and stories inside and outside the bank, Cameron has done two other things that has got employees talking.

Now these stories might not be 100% factual. But as story guru Robert McKee points out, "What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens." These are the stories some staff are telling about the new CEO and they view his actions as exciting and energising. In their mind a wonderful change is going on.

Then something interesting happened in the meeting. The person I was talking to said it was incredibly difficult to gain direct access to the CEO. That he had a coterie of minders that he brought from New Zealand with him that intercept any approach. And that this is how it should be because he is an incredibly busy man with tremendous responsibilities.

It's interesting that the positive stories created by the meeting room and bubble change seemed to create a positive aura over other activities involving the CEO.

A lesson for leaders is that in addition to be able to find and tell your own stories, it's also important to do things that create positive stories in the organisation. Be remarkable so people remark on your behaviour. But also listen to what stories you create and what people infer from them.

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I'm working with Victoria Ward and her colleagues over at Sparknow at the moment evaluating a set of stories for their likely impact. We do a lot of story impact assessment at Anecdote because when we collect stories we always end up with too many to use in a workshop and therefore must select a sub-set. Sometimes culling is done by our clients, sometimes by us. But regardless of who does it you need a set of criteria to make the selection.

So here's our assessment criteria for likely impact. I should say, however, that it can only be an assessment of likely impact because people are affected more or less by stories based on their experience. I've told the one armed karate kid story many times and mostly people find it amusing and insightful. On one occasion, however, a woman who was listening to the story teared up.   

• Clarity—you hear or read the story once and you get it. It's simple, clear and has a good narrative structure (time markers, characters, begin-middle-end). That structure components don't have to be too sophisticated. We have found some of the most powerful organisational stories would past a screenwriters test or have the hero's journey structure, for example.
• Emotional—it gets you in the gut. It doesn't matter what emotion it evokes but impactful stories evoke at least one strong emotion.
• Believable—it doesn't sound like bullshit. Facts and figures help but not too many. Details help with real people's names and specific dates and times.
• Transport—it transports you to relive the experience. You can see, hear, touch, smell and taste the experience.
• Surprising—it throws you a curve ball that you weren't expecting.
• Relevant—does it talk to the topic under investigation

If your story rates well on all these criteria there is a good chance it will be memorable and persuasive which means it's likely to be retold. And when that happens then the story has real impact.

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When I teach storytelling techniques I'm often asked, "So how do I insert my story into the conversation?" The funny thing is we are all doing it all the time. We are mostly telling each other stories about what happened or what will happen. It's only when we become self-conscious of our storytelling efforts that we freeze and it feels abnormal. To get past this paralysis the first step is to forget about stories and only think of examples and experiences. You have an example or you are recounting an experience. It's simple. It's natural.

Today I spent the afternoon with Viv McWaters and had a lovely time talking about ways to get people to experience business storytelling in a workshop environment. More on that later. But we also talked about the ways people segue into a story. Here are some ways people do it:

• Let me tell you about a time when ...
• Here's an example that really illustrates my point ...
• I've seen this work over there ...
• I remember when ...
• Let me tell you about a group who ...

Of course an effective way is just to launch into your story but avoid prefacing it with, "I've got this great story to tell you ..."

Can you suggest other ways to move from facts and opinions into a story in a business context?

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Jack Dalton (Raven Feathers) is a professional storyteller from Alaska. I was fortunate to see him perform a traditional Yup'ik story on Wednesday as part of the National Multicultural Festival here in Canberra. The 'Creation Story' was about how Raven (a magical and mischievous character in Yup'ik folklore) created man and tried to show him 'the way': essentially using no more from the environment that he needed, and how man repeatedly failed to heed this message. Very relevant to the sustainability challenges we are currently facing.

Chandni and I had a great conversation with Jack over coffee about the differences and similarities between using story to keep folkloric knowledge alive (Jack) and using storytelling in the world of business (Anecdote).

If you are in Canberra, the festival is hosting the 'Canberra Cares' concert on Saturday to raise funds for the families affected by the devastating bushfires in Victoria. It will be a great afternoon of Latin music and dance, so get on down and enjoy the cool weather and hot acts!

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In the previous two posts (Shawn's on his forthcoming presentation and Chandni's about collaboration between Google and P&G) have used specific examples to illustrate how collaborative practices can add value to an organisation.

In many cases, the value of collaboration is difficult to articulate using numbers. We (not surprisingly I guess) strongly advocate that organisations systematically identify, collect and communicate their collaboration 'success stories'. Our experience is that these stories are critically important when the inevitable question gets asked about why we are investing in collaboration. We have developed a CoP Health Check and stories are a key part of this process.

A recent article in the Washington post (via Seth Kahn and the Working Stories list) describes how an Indian company has a 'chief belief officer' who uses mythology to help managers make meaning of their roles. A quote from the article is very relevant given the way many companies are reacting to the global financial crisis

He likens layoffs to the slaughter of cows, which Hindus revere as symbolizing life. "The standard Western management principle is 'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it,' " Pattanaik said. "In our ethos, 'if you measure it, you destroy it.' "

We have blogged previously about the fallacy of the 'if you can't measure it ..." mindset previously. But for those with roles related to collaboration etc this can be a nervous time as companies look to shed staff to save money. Word on the street is that some of our friends have already been 'made redundant'. It might look good on the P&L, but it can also be like draining the life-blood out of organisations.

Stories help us communicate value when things can't be measured, and they are powerful tools in persuading people and changing their minds. As an example, some time ago, Rio Tinto produced a video on one of their success stories and made it publicly available (I notice it is now available on YouTube). We have used this video extensively as it provides a concrete example of how collaboration creates value and how communities of practice can operate. In late November, I met with a CEO who had been tolerating the creation of communities of practice in his professional services firm. I showed him the Rio Tinto video and his face lit up and he said "I get it. That's what I want. Why didn't I get shown this video years ago?"

So, if you have lots of metrics but not many examples it might be time to sniff out and articulate a few success stories.

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More people will be looking for jobs this year. Sadly unemployment is rising. Getting a job interview will be tough so it will be doubly important to make the best possible impression as the interviewer pokes and probes to get an idea of who you are and whether you’ll fit in.

Job interviewers these days know the importance of stories. They know that stories give a good insight into your capabilities and experience. They call it behavioural interview technique, which is just a fancy title for collecting stories from you. So you’d better have some stories to tell that reveal your character, skills and attitude to life.

Many people talk about stories but I’m continuously surprised how many of these people can’t differentiate between a story and an opinion. This is important because you need to know what a story is so you know what you are looking for.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb for identifying stories: if what you are saying starts with a time marker such as, “In 2003 ...” or “Three months ago ...,” then there is a good chance you're telling a story. If after that time marker you recount a series of events, one connected to the next, then you are telling a story.

The previous 4 paragraphs do not contain a single story. Here is an example of a story (personal experience, an anecdote):

I ran my first anecdote circle in 2000 while working for IBM. I was helping Land and Water Australia develop their knowledge strategy and my first session was with a group of CSIRO scientists. Before the session I remembered the advice given to me by my colleague, Sharon Darwent. She said: “Just be comfortable with any silences and when someone provides an opinion ask for an example.” So I started the session and ask my first question. Everyone just looked at each other in complete silence. I held my nerve for what seemed liked an eternity and eventually one of the scientists spoke up with a sigh, “OK, I’ll go first ...” After that the stories flowed. They went for a couple of hours non-stop.

You can see the video version of me telling this story on YouTube.

Finding our own stories

There are two ways we remember our experiences: attached to emotions or attached to imagery. Therefore we need to use both to recount what we know.

Start by drawing a timeline of your career. Plot the significant events (work and personal) and jot down next to the events how you remember feeling: excited, angry, pumped, disappointed.

When an event springs to mind recount it out loud to yourself, or even better, tell it to someone. Avoid writing these recollections down verbatim. Just right some rough notes. Otherwise the temptation is to recount the experience they way you’ve written it which will sound unnatural.

You should have 4 or 5 stories now. Let’s switch to visual queues to remember some more. Head over to flickr or iStockphoto and select 30 images at random. Look at each one and see if any experiences spring to mind. Again recount them and jot down some rough notes.

One of the best ways to remember your own stories is to hear others. Find a couple of colleagues, friends and just get reminiscing about the good old days. Make notes about any anecdote that springs to mind about your own experiences at work focusing on the ones that set you apart. In fact you should always carry a story notebook to jot them down because they often creep up on you by surprise and I will guarantee you will forget it instantly if you don’t either write it down of have the opportunity to tell the story a couple of times.

Practising and improving your stories

Your first retellings will tend to be rambling and, quite frankly, boring. The rambling nature of the story, however, is often reduced by telling the story to people and watching their response. Getting feedback in the form of their response to your story (facial expressions, comments - nothing formal) will tell you what to keep and what to jettison. But you can do more.

You can increase the impact of any story in three ways:

1. be specific and avoid generalisations. Instead of saying, “I once worked for company that sold database software.” Say, “While the pre-sales manager at Oracle Systems ...”
2. the story has to about a specific individual trying to achieve something, ideally with some obstacle that they eventually overcame. Avoid stories about companies, departments and even teams. Tell stories about people who have names. Instead of saying, “In 2004 the risk assessment team was facing a problem ...,” say “Charles Kleiner in risk assessment was facing a problem.” And of course you were instrumental in helping Charles overcome this obstacle.
3. help people visualise what’s happening. The best stories are ones that the listener can picture vividly in their mind’s eye. Instead of of saying, “We drove up to the vineyard ...,” say “We drove up to an adobe-style vineyard with acres of vines all around us ...”

Every story we tell gives people an insight into who we are. They are quite revealing. So before you tell them to an interviewer it’s a good idea to tell your stories to a friend and ask them about the qualities they inferred about you based on the story. Is it resilience, courage, persistence, creativity etc.? You will surprised to find that a story which you thought, for example, was about persistence, comes across to the listener as arrogance. You will want to avoid those ones.

Speaking of things to avoid, no one want to hear your life story. They can read that in your resume. They want to hear about the specific moments in your life where you made a difference. Use your stories.

Now you should have a dozen good stories to tell at the interview. Practise them whenever you can. In casual conversations, when the time is right, say something like, “Yes, that reminds me of ...” By practising your stories in natural, conversational settings you will be in a better position to repeat your story in this natural way at the interview which will convey tremendous confidence.

Good luck with the job hunt and let me know whether your storytelling efforts made a difference.

I would like to thank Michael Specht from our Jelly coworking group who pointed out to me the increase need for job hunters to be able to better find and tell their stories.

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Many posts ago, we shared the example of the Ritz Carlton demonstrating that 'A company that values customer service should be teeming with customer service stories'.

Here's another living example: Sparkspace
They have created a dedicated blog to record remarkable customer service. This is how they started with the idea.

We've challenged our company to create 100 customer service "sparks" over 100 days. The sparks can be simple gestures or grand WOW experiences. The catch is that they must be something we may not have done before this challenge.

Isn't it just a wonderful way to engage staff in doing the right thing and inspiring good action (through stories of their colleagues). And this can be so easy to implement.

Not a bad challenge to start the new year with!

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We are running two workshops in London this June:

• Narrative techniques for business (story-listening)--24th June 09
  
  RSA House
  8 John Adam Street
  London
  
  
• Storytelling for business leaders (storytelling)--25th June 09
  
  School of Oriental and African Studies
  University of London
  Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
  London

The cost for each workshop is £350

Email us for a registration form.

These two methods are inextricably linked, which we've attempted to illustrate in this diagram.

If you want to learn about these methods and you live near London, here's your chance. Just email me and I will send out a registration form.

Below is a full description of each workshop.

Narrative Techniques for Business

• What's really going on in your organisation?
• What are the touch points where small changes can transform behaviour and morale?
• How can you develop a common understanding of what needs to be done and generate the resolve to do it?

Surveys and metrics can uncover trouble in an organisation, but they usually don't help you identify the reasons for dysfunctions, let alone generate the resolve to springboard people into action. Instead, learn to use stories as listening posts and tap into the emotion to spark action. From time immemorial, stories have contained collective lessons in condensed form. When gathered and examined, stories that are told in your organisation reveal important themes and patterns that in turn indicate effective solutions.

This one-day workshop, led by Australia's leading experts in story listening, teaches you to gather and make sense of stories so as to see revealing patterns and use them to gain traction on solving messy organisational problems or reaching complex goals.

After a full day of instruction, practice and feedback, you will have the confidence and knowledge to apply these powerful techniques within your organisation.

Who should attend?

Anyone struggling with thorny human problems or complex goals such as the following will gain value from this workshop:

• creating culture change
• building trust
• making mergers and acquisitions successful
• capturing the knowledge of retiring employees
• extracting lessons from projects
• improving occupational health and safety
• managing risk

The instruction is grounded in insights from organisational development and the science of complexity as well as in years of hands-on work with a wide range of organisations.

Practical, hands-on training

Story listening is not something you can learn from a manual. This workshop teaches how to find and collect stories, how to make sense of the stories and then how to design interventions that improve how things work. Participants practice each step in the process with one another and receive feedback that improves their understanding and ability to work with organisational stories.

Workshop topics covered include:

• when narrative approaches make sense and when to use other techniques
• how many participants to involve in story gathering and the characteristics you should look for in selecting them
• two techniques that effectively elicit stories from just about anyone
• which media to use for preserving and analyzing stories
• ways to extract meaning from a large volume of stories
• how to formulate ways of tackling truly complex problems based on lessons from the stories

By the end of the day, you will be prepared to run a story listening project using the narrative techniques you have learned and practised. This might aim at collecting lessons learned from a large project, improving employee satisfaction, smoothing the way for massive organisational change or enhancing occupational health and safety.

Here's what previous participants have said

"Anecdote is a great concept, and delivered with very high quality. Honest, thoughtful, valuable. The staff are very generous with their expertise and resources. They are open and approachable, acknowledging both their achievements and how they learned from their mistakes. These people are the real thing. You get a strong sense of how these processes can be applied in business settings. A really great workshop." Ian Colley, MakeStuffHappen

"We were looking for a fresh approach to get the business involved in cultural development. So instead of telling employees the results of our cultural survey and getting them to fix it, we wanted it to be owned by the business and have them discover for themselves the underlying reason why things are the way they are, in a new, explorative and interesting way. So we used Anecdote. It's the narrative discovery approach that provided such rich information about our culture. We would have never been able to get these insights without it. Plus the subsequent cultural initiatives would have missed the mark completely." Andrew Petersen, Challenger Financial Services

Storytelling for Business Leaders

We all need better ways to persuade, share what we know and help those around us make sense of the complex world we live in. Developing our innate storytelling skills helps build confidence, convey ideas clearly and effectively, and probably most importantly, present to our colleagues our humanity.

We all want to convey our ideas with impact, yet eyes instantly glaze the moment you beam your PowerPoint presentation laden with slide after slide of dot points. We know informally that stories are engaging; we tell them at dinner parties and people listen and they 'get it'. Yet few leaders systematically harness storytelling to communicate ideas, convey the organisation`s values or inspire and motivate people.

What the one day workshop is all about

Telling business stories is not about concocting events and delivering your tale to an enraptured audience. Rather, it relies on people retelling their own experiences in an authentic and empathetic way. Anecdote has developed a three-step process to guide you.

Prospecting

Everyone has stories to tell, but in many cases we are unaware of them. Prospecting involves creating a conducive environment for people to remember their stories. This might involve one-on-one interview techniques or group processes.

Patterns

We can improve the way we tell our stories by understanding the story structures and patterns appropriate for the task. During the workshop, we will explore a few key patterns and help participants re-craft their stories based on these story patterns.

Performance

Effective storytelling comes from a belief that the story is authentic. People judge authenticity on how the storyteller delivers their story. Participants will learn ways to develop a comfortable delivery style and feel at ease at telling stories regardless of the setting. This workshop is for anyone wanting to improve their ability to find and tell their own stories within a business context.

Who should attend

This workshop is for anyone wanting to improve their ability to find and tell their own stories within a business context. It is also for people wishing to improve their leaders’ ability to communicate ideas and engage staff in developing new behaviours.

You should attend this course if you are interested in:

• communicating your organisation`s mission, vision and values
• helping leaders motivate and inspire
• conveying desirable behaviours
• sharing knowledge
• becoming a more effective leader
• sparking action
• having people really listening to your ideas.

What you will learn and leave with

• a better understanding of what makes an effective story in a business context
• a newly discovered story- re-crafted story from your own experience
• understanding of how to best craft questions to discover stories
• ways to interview people for stories and facilitate anecdote circles
• when to use what story pattern - build confidence in telling your story.

What attendees have said

'Shawn has a most honest, open and engaging approach which is what is shown to work best with this technique and creates an enjoyable workshop.'

'The workshop covered a lot of territory in a way that combined analytical rigour with a clear and informal delivery. I recommend it without reservation.'

'There's loads of value in the Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop, and it's been a useful part of my leadership development activities.

In my role as Chief Sustainability Officer I'm often using stories about how our clients thinking has shifted around sustainability... they're often very powerful. The workshop has given me ideas and tools on how to actively include stories into presentations to give a better sense to people of who I am and what I stand for, as well as to illustrate key messages. I know they're having effect because of the feedback I receive - that they reflect an authenticity that is engaging - and because I hear people sharing these same stories.'

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If you were wondering how you might attend one of our Storytelling for Business Leaders workshops when we've discontinued our public program, I have some good news. I'll be delivering it at Ark's Strategic Internal Communication conference on the 19th of February. The other place you'll be able to attend this course will be in London in the last week of June. Just send me an email if you are interested in attending the London workshop.

I'm also giving a presentation at the conference on communities of practice, based on our CoP projects this year.

Ark is offering a 20% discount for readers of the Anecdote blog. Just quote "AG-ANEC" when you register.

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I was in Singapore last week helping a group of leaders learn how to find and tell their own stories. No templates, no recipes, just helping them become mindful of their own stories and showing that storytelling is a visual practice. Don't try and remember the words of a story, remember the pictures.

Like many of these sessions some people were naturals and others found it difficult to move from a didactic approach to communicating. There was one gentleman from India who I could tell was struggling. Luckily he was teamed up with a woman from Japan who really understood the idea of personal stories. At the end of the workshop he came up to me and thanked me for the day and said, "I can see how important telling your stories is because I have just seen you change the mood of the group and build a rapport with all of us by simply telling your stories. That's what I will take away with me today."

I was reminded of last week's workshop (stories beget stories) watching this short video of Barack Obama out on the hustings. He tells the story of how he came to use the chant: Fired up; ready to go. To key to good storytelling is detail, detail, detail and painting pictures for the audience's minds eye. How do you feel at the end of this story?

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Doctors can easily get into the pattern of treating their patients like a slab of meat to be fixed. Anyone who's spent some time in hospitals have seen doctors waltz into the room, grab the chart from the end of the bed, mumble a few things to themselves, say a word or two to the patient and disappear as quickly as they arrived.

So it was heartening to see that there is a movement building called narrative medicine where doctors read and discuss stories about patients, literary stories and poems. This New York Times article is well worth the two-page read to see what some doctors are doing to engage the emotions of their interns and ensure humanity is returned to the doctor-patient relationship. By reading stories such as Empty Pockets and discussing what it means to the doctors they are creating a space for valuable conversation. This is similar to the Ritz Carlton example. And when asked about the time commitment:

And the time commitment? “It does get pretty busy,” Dr. Kaplan conceded. “But if you want to make time for it, you can. Spending a half hour a day to remember that we are all human, not just doctors or pharmacists or nurses or patients, is important enough that I think you should do it.

via Stephanie West Allen on Working Stories

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Today we've set the date for our Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop to be held in London. I'm looking forward to this trip and catching up with all the good folk in that part of the world who have kept up an interest in our work here in Australia. Please drop me a note if you would like to meet up while I'm there. And we would greatly appreciate your help passing on this message about my visit.

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I was amazed when I watched this presentation about the history of banking. I had no idea that banks could conjure money from nowhere and loan it to you. Thanks to Euan Semple for the link.

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Most organisations have a set of values statements. Many of these do not reflect reality as displayed in the behaviours of people within the organisation. For example...'we value working collaboratively' is displayed on the wall but people are told "do it my way or else" by managers; deriding other areas of the business is effectively endorsed when people are not 'called' on the behaviour.

We had a fun day on Thursday running our 'Storytelling for Business Leaders' workshop in Sydney. The group chose 'values in action' as one of the story patterns they wanted to examine in detail. We came up with four questions you can ask to help identify the values at work in organisations:

• Think about a time when a manager made a tough decision, and did 'the right thing rather than the easy thing'. What happened?
• When have you seen someone 'cross the line' and they were 'called' on it. Alternatively, have you seen people 'cross the line' without being called.
• When have you felt uncomfortable about something your boss has done?
• When have you felt proud to work for this company?

Can you think of other questions that could help explore an organisation's values?

I also related an example of a values in action story from our workshop in Brisbane in August.

A company introduced a new health and safety policy for mobile phone use while driving. The policy was "engine on, phone off". Some time after the policy was introduced the company did a random call-around of about 50 employees. A senior manager answered his phone while driving. The response was "turn around, return your vehicle, give the keys to reception and clear your desk. Your employment with this company is over". The rationale was that the manager could not help enforce a policy that he was abusing himself.

For me this story says very clearly 'we value health and safety'. However, the story didn't seem to be well received by the workshop participants, possibly because firing the manager seemed a little draconian. What do you think?

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Examples, especially in the form of stories, help us make sense of what someone is saying. This is partly because when we listen to an example we are using our natural pattern matching abilities (something our brain has evolved to excel in) to link the example with our own experience. We then adjust our understanding based on the new input.

So it makes sense that examples also increase our ability to remember the main idea they illustrate.

Researchers at the University of Nebraska put this idea to the test. They asked 22 students to read an essay about a fictitious African country. The essay consisted of 32 paragraphs, each paragraph with a single, main idea sentence followed by none to three one-sentence examples. Here is an example paragraph from the essay.

Virtually all social reforms of the early 20th Century were the personal responsibility of King Manual. A state run medical service was established by King Manual in 1900. A system of primary education was created under Manual's direction in 1920. The forceable recruitment of native workers was stopped by Manual in 1915.

When they were done the researchers asked the students to recall the main ideas.

The result: the more examples (at least up to three), the better the recall of the main idea. The researchers suggest that the laws of diminishing returns must set in at some point. The likelihood of nine examples being more effective than eight is slight.

So why don't we see many examples in the things we read, especially in business writing?

I suspect it takes more time to find an example and it's much easier to espouse an opinion.

For example, I'm writing a client report at the moment and I've asked my client to send me a couple of examples illustratinh how their information system has been used to have a bottom-line and positive impact on the business. I also asked for examples of when the system had been misused or failed the organisation. My client could immediately think of examples of the latter and is still looking for our positive examples.

So maybe it's harder to find the positive stories and business report writers have a tendency to want to show strength and a positive outlook, and this is more easily done, especially with time pressures, with opinions. The problem is, we are creating a false intellectual economy because without the examples your readers don't know what you really mean and instantly forget the main ideas.

Palmere, M., S. L. Benton, et al. (1983). "Elaboration and Recall of Main Ideas in Prose." Journal of Educational Psychology 75(6): 898-907.

I discovered this research reading John Medina's Brain Rules.

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Here is my test for whether a skill is manipulative: “Would it lose its power if people knew exactly what you were doing and why?” If the answer is yes, if the technique loses its power in the light of day, then it’s manipulative and I don’t want any part of it. - David Maxfield

This definition works for me.

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Marketing folk confuse me sometimes. For example, they talk about brand stories yet they forget the story bit.

For example, if you Google the phrase "brand story" the top hit is a blog post by Mark Thomson. Reading his post you'd be forgiven for thinking stories are superfluous to crafting a brand story because while he uses the word 'story,' often actually, he doesn't explain what he means by a story nor give any examples of brand stories. His advice is to be clear, consistent and give it a bit a flair. A nicely formatted set of dot points could meet his criteria for a brand story.

Let me show you a brand story and then I'll share with you why so many marketers, journalists, and political spin doctors talk about narrative but don't appear to really get it.

At a minimum stories are set in a time (at the turn of the century, three months ago, in 1996, when I visited Grandma, a long, long time ago—you get the idea) and events happen which are linked together inferring causes and effects. If you haven't got these two basic features—a time when things happened and things actually happening—you don't have a story. And these features are merely the pre-requisite. Having them certainly doesn't guarantee a compelling story.

I'm surprised how many people talk about stories yet can't actually determine whether stories are present or missing. I'd say about half of the people attending our storytelling courses are confused about what a story actually is and it's one of the things we spend a good amount of time to ensure everyone's got it. Without this understanding you can't work with stories.

Even our very best political journalists seem confused. Here's Michelle Gratton, political editor for The Age newspaper said recently:

Having a "narrative" — which is just a sexy and fashionable way of saying a government should present what it is up to in an overall framework — gives people the feeling their leaders know what they're doing, and that the ends of policy are both worthwhile and consistent with the means. (That is, of course, provided the narrative is convincing.)

And here's ANZ's chief economist, Saul Eslake, suggested narrative (according to Michelle) for the Rudd government.

"If I were advising the Government, I'd be trying to say that there are some downside risks as a result of global factors; that because of this inflation is likely to fade away; that the budget had got the balance right; that if things got worse, it has the funds to ease fiscal policy," Eslake says.

"It could also say that Australians are exposed to the international credit crunch not because banks are up to their gills in dodgy mortgages, as in the US and Europe, but because we have a huge current account deficit — and that we want to address that through better productivity, skills and other reforms including tax reform."

Saul's suggested narrative are merely a string of ideas. You could craft a story from Saul's ideas but in themselves are far from a narrative.

When someone asks me about Anecdote I tell versions of this story.

Ever since Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 people have viewed the world around them as measured, predictable and conforming to defined laws of physics. The world is a machine and we only need to understand how that machine works so we can optimise each part.

Fredrick Taylor introduced Newton’s mechanical perspective to business in the 1880s and 90s. Taylor strongly believed that well defined procedures executed with precision was the best way to run a business. His ideas took off and this mechanical view of the firm dominated business thinking for the last 120 years. It worked remarkably well.

Since the industrial revolution we have seen things speed up and the information revolution has seen the world become more connected with changes accelerating every day. The 21st century, however, marks a tipping point where the mechanical view begins to falter. We need new ways to conceive the way businesses work that reflect their complexity and their essential human nature.

In 2004 we started Anecdote in the belief there was a new way to conceive of work that was organic, human-centred and reflected the complexity every business experiences in the 21st century. So we set about developing techniques and tools based on stories, a uniquely human faculty, designed to facilitate change more effectively, foster learning and collaboration and advance the natural leadership capabilities that exists in every organisation.

We believe this human-centred approach marks the future of organisations. There is still a long way to go because the majority of businesses still work on the basis that they are a machine with levers to pull, wheels to turn and cogs to grease.

The thing is, it's not the only story we tell that helps people understand who we are and what we stand for. There isn't a single brand story rather organisations should have a repertoire of brand stories that everyone knows and can tell.

My guess is that marketers, advertising agents and political Hollowmen use the term 'story' and 'narrative' so often that there is a belief that everyone knows what it means but only a subset of the group actually get it and the rest are too frightened to admit their ignorance.

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The world's been carefully watching Obama vs McCain. It's interesting to see how the media are comparing their stories: Obama's parents' American dream, McCain's journey in Vietnam, Sarah Palin's hockey mom experiences, and Joe Biddin's childhood struggles. Who tells the best stories? Whose stories make the most impact?

While politicians have mastered the art of storytelling, the world of business if far behind. Carmine Gallo points out two reasons why Business Leaders don't use narrative to present their ideas:

• Most presenters are afraid of opening themselves up in a business context.
• Many deliver presentations created by folks with whom they have had little personal interaction.

Most people accept that stories convey more meaning to the listener than any amount of data or analysis. Yet we don't see narrative complementing data as much as we'd like to.

Telling stories is not difficult. It's actually quite easy once you give it a little practice. The hard bit (in a business context) is opening up to the idea of tapping into our experiences and sharing them.

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A few posts ago I described one of the reasons why stories are memorable: they evoke emotion.

But stories are also memoriable because they create a framework for us to hang ideas, facts and concepts from.

Thanks to Daryl Cook and the magic of delicious I read this post on how to use storytelling to remember your what you have just learned in a lecture.

• After each class, tell a “story” about the material covered—a five minute summary of the concepts that drove the lecture.
• Don’t bother writing it down. Instead, just say it to yourself while walking to your next class. Treat it like you’re a literary agent or movie producer pitching the lecture at an important meeting.
• Cover the big picture flow of ideas, not the small details. Answer the question “why was this lecture important?”, not all the information it contained. Play up the flashy or unexpected.

Read the rest of Cal's post for good examples and the full reasoning.

This is also relevant for those of us in the workplace who attend conferences, seminars or just have to bone up on a new topic for, say, a new job.

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Tell stories to hear stories

Listen to stories to remember your stories

Mark and I penned these observations while developing our course on storytelling. The first one, "tell stories to hear stories," reminds us that a good way to find stories is to tell some yourself. Here's an example. When I see my teenage daughter after school I would often ask how her day went, whether anything interesting happened at school, and the standard response is often monosyllabic: yep, nup. In fact the more questions I'd ask the shorter the answers. So I changed tack and rather than ask questions I simply recounted something that happened in my day. I would launch into something like, "I met a bearded lady today. This morning I drove down to Fitzroy to run an anecdote circle for ..." and immediately my daughter would respond with an encounter from her day. A conversation starts and it's delightful.

Our second reminder is the flip-side to the first. If you want to remember your own stories go listen to other people's stories and then don't forget to jot your anecdotes down. Many of our stories are ephemeral, flooding our memory banks when the conditions are right and evaporating just as quickly. Often a story will come to mind and you will have no idea why you would ever retell it but make a note anyway. Just being aware of our stories is an important first step in the effective application of business narrative.

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This workshop has turned out to be one of our most popular offerings. In the last few months we have delivered it to sales people in IBM, engineers in Allinta and have just received word we have been selected to deliver it to NAB leaders throughout the bank.

The great news is that you can attend this workshop in Melbourne in a few weeks time. It's all about using storytelling techniques in a business context to improve communication and staff engagement.

We focus on three areas in the one day workshop:

1. helping people find stories to retell. We call this prospecting for stories
2. learning about different story patterns and when to use them. What is a vision story? What is a sparking action story? How to use a values in action story?
3. practising retelling your experiences in an engaging and memorable way that suits the context

If you're interested, just email us and we will send you a registration form.

The cost is $495.
It will be held in Brunswick
Starts at 8.30 and finishes at 5.00pm

If you want to learn more check out the workshop blurb.

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Do you remember where you were when you first saw the those two jumbo jets plunge into the World Trade Center? How well do you remember what you were doing when you saw it? Can you remember the room you were in, the people in the room with you, what you said, what you thought?

When strong emotions surge through us our bodies respond by pumping adrenalin into our blood stream. In addition to preparing us to run or fight, adrenalin enhances our memories of what was happening when the emotion hit. This biological response was probably a very good feature of our species in times past because you want to remember exactly where that T-rex, that scared the bejesus out of you, hangs out.

Stories create emotions too and therefore there's no surprise that we remember the best stories, they ones that touch our hearts, make us laugh or even just create a feeling of puzzlement.

Last week I was teaching our storytelling for business leaders workshop to an energy company and I started the day with a Jumpstart Storytelling session. One of the most popular stories was this one which was originally told by a CEO many years ago but remembered clearly by the participant.

In prehistoric times there was this family that lived in a cave. They were very happy in their cave. They led a good life but one day they noticed across the valley another cave that looked pretty good. So after many weeks of discussion they made their mind up to move to the new cave. As they crossed the valley they noticed just how rich the soil was and thought it would be even better to settle there and till the soil. Which they did.

The CEO never explained the story nor mentioned it again, but the discussion it started about what it meant continued for years.

Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman say stories are facts wrapped up in context and delivered with emotion. The three factors are equally important: fact, context, emotion. But emotion is often set aside in a business context and we are only now seeing its inclusion as a legitimate factor to consider.

The relationship between emotion and memory was first brought to me attention in Maxwell and Dickman's book, The Elements of Persuasion

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My friend Jackie hated having Nancy as her manager. She thought her to be cold, insensitive and overbearing and had, in the past, tried twice to get transferred to another department, but to no avail. Nancy was apparently a favorite with her employers, and since Jackie was both new to the area and the job, she felt she had no strings to pull. This only served to irritate her more.

Then one evening while she was working late to finish up a quarterly report, Jackie felt suddenly sick to her stomach and was on her way to the restroom when she collapsed in the hall. The next thing she knew she was being placed on a gurney and wheeled out to a waiting ambulance. In the sea of faces hovering over her, the only one she recognized was Nancy's, and in the blur of activity, she could feel Nancy squeeze her hand and hear her say, "Don't worry, Jackie, I'm here. I won't leave you."

It was a promise Nancy kept. Over the next few days as Jackie, a newly divorced mother of two, lay in a hospital bed, coming to terms with the damage done by the stroke she had suffered. Nancy not only stopped by to see her two and three times a day, offering never-ending words of encouragement and bringing mail and get-well messages from co-workers, but also stepped in to see that Jackie's two daughters were cared for and that every aspect of Jackie's life was kept running as smoothly as possible in her absence.

When it was necessary for Jackie to leave the hospital and be placed in a rehabilitation facility, Nancy again made all of the arrangements and visited daily, and when Jackie was finally allowed to go home, it was Nancy who made it possible for her to travel to and from physical therapy each day until she was, at last, fully recovered and able to return to work.

By the time I met the two women, over a decade had passed. They still worked for the same company, though Nancy was about to retire, and Jackie was now the manager of her own department, a promotion she had earned the year following her life-changing stroke. It was obvious to everyone that the two women were the best of friends. I was a new hire for the company and learned about their history together when they invited me to lunch.

At Nancy's retirement party a couple of weeks later, I was standing next to Jackie as her dear friend was receiving accolades from the rest of her co-workers. Jackie looked at her and then whispered to me, "Can you believe I used to hate that woman? And if it wasn't for her, I'd probably be dead. Goes to show we never know who among us is an angel, doesn't it?"

None of us really knows about the people we decide to hate. We label them wrong and ourselves right and in so doing never realize that we are building a wall of separation that only grows stronger with time. We truly do block the angels from our midst. It is not until circumstance throws us together, as it did Jackie and Nancy, that we realize how very much we need one another and how very alike we truly are.

As a young girl living with my grandmother, any time I criticized another person in her presence, she would ask to see whose shoes I was wearing, a blunt reminder that unless I'd walked in that person's shoes, I had no right to judge. It was also a signal that I should stop talking and start thinking differently.

Even today, I sometimes catch myself looking down at my feet when I feel tempted to criticize. "Who am I to judge?" I'll ask myself in the next breath, realizing as I do that I have no idea what the target of my critical focus is really going through.

Of course, that doesn't always stop me, and sometimes the judgment tumbles into my thoughts or words and takes up residence before I even notice. But through my own self-experimenting, I have noticed that when I succeed in suspending judgment and allowing myself to look at others from another perspective, my joy increases. Judging others, I have discovered, does not let joy in. Stepping away from judgment does.

In the long run, all judging others really does is bring pain and block us from our ability to offer love. We were born to give, to bless, and to be a blessing, but when we are sitting in judgment, we can't. As Mother Teresa pointed out, when we are judging others, we have no time to love them. It is only in suspending judgment that we open our hearts to unconditional love and empower ourselves and each other to be the best that we can be.

An Excerpt from "May You Be Blessed"" by Kate Nowak

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Gossip is badly maligned in business, but that's because most of us only have a limited understanding of the concept. For example, gossip is merely anything we say about someone when they are not there to hear it. And it turns out we spend 65% of our talking time recounting who has done what to whom—gossiping. Business leaders will be pleased to hear that only a small percentage of this time (about 5%) is focussed on maligning our colleagues. So what are we doing in the other 95% and why should we care?

Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary biologist best known for Dunbar's number of 150, which is the maximum number of people we can get our minds around in a social network, argues that this substantial gossip time is akin to primates grooming each building their social bonds. Primates do it with their hands, humans groom each other with language. Does this sort of exchange sound familiar?

"Did ya hear about Marcus smashing his quota a month before quarter end? How does he do it?" said Amy.

"He's a freak. I hear he's big on lead generation and knows the marketing guys really well. Last week I saw him over there with chocolates. He's pretty friendly with Fiona. By the way are you going to Friday drinks?" said Pete.

Well, this is the type of thing we spend about 65% of our talking time saying. Interestingly Dunbar and his colleagues note that both men and woman spent the same timing gossiping and talked about similar things (experiences and relationships) with two exceptions:

1. When men were with woman, men gossiped less (less about who did what with whom) yet spoke more. Men became more authoritative, factual and attempted to be more entertaining.
2. Woman spend 2/3rds or the time talking about other people's social experiences whereas men spend 2/3rds of the time talking about their own experiences

Dunbar puts these differences down to our evolutionary needs for men to impress woman to find a mate and for woman to be good at building social networks to support the raising of children. Our evolutionary development, of course, is way behind our social situations in the 21st century, but it stills affects how we behave.

Finally we should be aware that most gossip is in the form of storytelling. It's people recounting events. It's not what I call big 'S' storytelling (well crafted plots, legends, fairy-tales) but the type of storytelling we are involved in much of our talking hours. This type of small, almost invisible storytelling has the greatest impact on who we are, how people view us (our reputation) and how we see this world.

Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press.

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By popular demand, we've just added three more Storytelling for Leaders workshops. They'll be held in these Australian cities:

Melbourne, 23 September 2008

Sydney, 2 October 2008

Canberra, 20 October 2008

And we haven't forgotten Brisbane because our next Storytelling for Leaders workshop in that fine city is on the 27th August.

Here is the link to the full blurb and instructions on how to enrol.

One of the things I've learnt running this workshop is that many people think they know what a story is up till the point where they have to identify one. We use of a range of videos of people telling stories and use them to hone your skills in knowing what a story really is and what it is not. It's a kind of a curse really because after this workshop you can't help but notice the stories all around you. But without this knowledge it's impossible to find and tell effective stories.

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A company that values customer service should be teeming with customer service stories. But what do you do if this is not the case? The Ritz-Carlton has developed a narrative-based approach for ensuring customer service is in the minds of all their people. It was described in this Business Week article but I first discovered it reading Maxwell and Dickman's The Elements of Persuasion. This is what the Ritz-Carlton has done.

Everyone in the company is encouraged to submit stories of RC people going above and beyond. Each week a story is selected and sent out to all the RC hotels around the world and this story is read out at the Line Up meetings, the gathering of staff before starting a shift. Here's an example of one of these stories as told by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman, which RC call their WOW stories.

Like a lot of good stories, it starts on a dark and windy night. In this case, a blustery February when the downstairs bar that Fran tends was largely deserted. "The only one in the room was an older gentlemen, the sort of executive that has been drinking the same scotch for the last fifty years." A young, good-looking couple--we'll call them Dick and Jane-- came in dressed in laua shirts despite the weather and ordered mai tais. They seemed a little morose, but Fran is the sort of bartender who can get anyone to open up, and soon they told their story. Dick and Jane had just been married. They had always planned to honeymoon at the Ritz-Carlton in Kapalua, Hawaii. In fact, they had a reservation already booked for six months in the future, but Dick had just been diagnosed with cancer--a particularly nasty form of Hodgkin's lymphoma--so they pushed the date forward and were in L.A. for chemotherapy. This might be as close to Hawaii as they ever got, so they were bravely trying to make the most of it. When Fran tells the story, at this point her eyes take on that slightly stunned look that comes to cancer patients as they struggle to find the right balance between hope and denial. Obviously, the couple's story touched her deeply.

Fran got someone to cover the bar and sprang into action. She found Don Quimby, the manager on duty and together they went to the banquet hall prop room and collected anything that reminded them of Hawaii--a fishing net, a collection of starfish and seashells, a poster of Hawaiian hula dancers at a luau--and quickly gave the couple's room a make over. They even filled a cooler with sand and stuck in a sign that read "Dick and Jane's Private Beach." Then Don found an electronic key from the Ritz at Kapalua that a previous guest had left behind by mistake and reprogrammed it so it worked on Dick and Jane's room door. Don put on a Hawaiian shirt and went out to deliver this new key to them. He led them to their "new Hawaiian Honeymoon Suite," where a complimentary bottle of Champaign was waiting. And for the next three days staff of the hotel did everything it could think of to make the couple feel like they were on a Hawaiian honeymoon of a lifetime.

Three times a week staff recount WOW stories in the Line Ups, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Each time a WOW story is told it triggers a conversation about what everyone sees as significant in the story and often prompts the retelling of other stories of things that have happened in their own hotel. So rather than receive a corporate directive on how to behave staff vicariously experience behaviour that everyone recognises as exemplary.

You receive a $100 if your story is selected and at the end of the year there is a competition to select the top 10 stories.

This approach has many of the features of Most Significant Change except that the conversation around the stories happens at the coal face rather than among the decision makers. Mind you, someone in HQ is selecting the stories and this process could be expanded to include a MSC style selection process with the decision makers.

If done well your organisation would definitely be teeming with values in action stories.

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Rather than give a lecture to his fellow comedian, Jerry Seinfeld tells a story to convey his message. This clip is from Jerry's documentary, Comedian, about his time on the road doing stand-up after Seinfeld. I've just ordered it.

Hat tip to Garr Reynolds

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I was excited to see the current issue of Scientific America has an article on storytelling called The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn. Perhaps a whole new audience for story work will emerge among the world's scientists.

But it got me thinking. When people first encounter storytelling they often are directed to storytelling with a capital 'S'. You know, the storytelling of epics, sagas, legends, myths and storybooks. They are told stories are everywhere and due to their theatrical introduction they believe its these big stories that constitute our omnipresent narratives. Sadly, they are mistaken. The vast majority of stories we tell and hear are small 's' stories: the anecdotes, recounts, gossip, story fragments, war stories and one about the fish that got away.

If the Scientific America article is your introduction to storytelling you could be forgiven for thinking that storytelling is important and you should start reading more literature, going to more plays and watching more epic movies. I would have preferred readers to conclude from the article that they should be more mindful of all the stories being told around them and to wonder about how the stories they tell impact others.

The article is a hotchpotch of tangentially related research that jumped around leaving the reader feeling dizzy and disoriented. It's interesting, however, that one of the quotes is this:

"Indeed, to this day people spend most of their conversations telling personal stories and gossiping. A 1997 study by anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar, then at the University of Liverpool in England, found that social topics accounted for 65 percent of speaking time among people in public places, regardless of age or gender."

Yet these conversational narratives only receive a sentence or two in the four page article.

I'm in two minds about this article. One the one hand a new audience might be left with the residual thought that storytelling is important. That's a good thing for our discipline. But it also might give storytelling a bad name among scientists and leave them with the wrong impression of where story is really having the greatest impact: among the billions of tiny story moments happening everywhere, all the time.

Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for the pointer to this article.

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It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk
Cried, "Ho! what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up he spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope.
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

by American poet, John Godfrey Saxe (1816-97)

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Here is one of the stories I heard at KM Australia as told by John Girard.

On a foggy autumn day nearly 800 years ago a traveller happened upon a large group of workers adjacent to the River Avon. Despite being tardy for an important rendezvous curiosity convinced the traveller that he should inquire about their work. With a slight detour he moved toward the first of the three tradesmen and said “my dear fellow what is it that you are doing?” The man continued his work and grumbled, “I am cutting stones.” Realising that the mason did not wish to engage in a conversation the traveller moved toward the second of the three and repeated the question. To the traveller’s delight this time the man stopped his work, ever so briefly, and stated that he was a stonecutter. He then added “I came to Salisbury from the north to work but as soon as I earn ten quid I will return home.” The traveller thanked the second mason, wished him a safe journey home and began to head to the third of the trio.

When he reached the third worker he once again asked the original question. This time the worker paused, glanced at the traveller until they made eye contact and then looked skyward drawing the traveller’s eyes upward. The third mason replied, “I am a mason and I am building a cathedral.” He continued, “I have journeyed many miles to be part of the team that is constructing this magnificent cathedral. I have spent many months away from my family and I miss them dearly. However, I know how important Salisbury Cathedral will be one day and I know how many people will find sanctuary and solace here. I know this because the Bishop once told me his vision for this great place. He described how people would come from all parts to worship here. He also told that the Cathedral would not be completed in our days but that the future depends on our hard work.” He paused and then said, “So I am prepared to be away from my family because I know it is the right thing to do. I hope that one day my son will continue in my footsteps and perhaps even his son if need be.”

Girard J.P. and Lambert S (2007) “The Story of Knowledge: Writing Stories that Guide Organisations into the Future” The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 5 Issue 2, pp 161-172.

In the topic of writing future stories my personal preference is to help people find real stories that reflect where they would like to be in the future. I find that when people write fictitious future stories there is excitement and engagement while they write them, which is a good thing, but when the stories are revisited weeks later people look at each other askance and wonder what drugs people were on.

This type of story is in another category. It's one that might help to break a mindset and get a group thinking more aspirationally.

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Jonathan Harris loves playing around with stories and in this 20 minute presentation at the 2007 TED he gives three examples of his work. He seems facinated with how you can collect stories and them represent then using computer graphics.

The project I found most interesting, and it was reminiscent of Cognitive Edge's ground-breaking work in graphically representing stories (check out their Sensemaker software), is his Whale Hunt project. Jonathan describes the Whale Hunt 5:50 min from the start of this video. On a 9-day visit to the Arctic he takes a photo every 5 minutes, day and night, and then displays these photos in a variety of ways (http://thewhalehunt.org/).

I'm certain you will enjoy this video. I also loved the third project exploring happiness in Bhutan.

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I think one of the first books I read on storytelling was Story by Robert McKee. It's written from the perspective of a screenwriter and conveys a tremendous understanding of story structure. Today I noticed Presentation Zen blogged a long post reviewing a Harvard Business Review article by McKee, some video interviews and a myriad of other resources you might find interesting.

While Garr is mainly focussed on storytelling in this quote, we have found a similar phenomenon in our story-listening work.

The most common way to persuade people, says McKee, is with conventional rhetoric and an intellectual process that in the business world "...usually consists of a PowerPoint presentation" in which leaders build their case with statistics and quotes, etc. McKee says rhetoric is problematic because while we are making our case others are arguing with us in their heads using their own statistics and sources. Even if you do persuade through argument, says McKee, this is not good enough because "...people are not inspired to act on reason alone." The key, then, is to aim to unite an idea with an emotion, which is best done through story. "In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener's emotion and energy." (emphasis added)

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The story goes that Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a cafe in Vienna (as all good psychologists do) and noticed that the waiters were able to remember long and complicated orders up to the point where the orders were delivered to the table and placed in front of the correct patron. After this point the order was completely forgotten. This simple observation triggered a series of experiments where Bluma found that if something is left incomplete it creates a psychic tension which makes a person more mindful and open to learning. It's now called the Zeigarnik Effect. Or perhaps more simply, suspense.

I heard a story-based example of the Zeigarnik effect this week. A presenter started their talk with a story and stopped just as it was getting interesting, creating psychic tension and probably some considerable annoyance. He then proceeded with the rest of his talk and completed the story at the end of the presentation. People were on the edge of their seats throughout I'm told. I've gotta give this a go.

This effect reminds me that you can use this desire for completion in other ways:

If you want to come up with a list of ideas write, "There are five things to consider:" and jot down 5 dots points (just the dots) and you will be surprised how easy it is to come up with the 5 ideas.

Thanks to Jay Cross for introducing me to this phenomenon.

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This morning Madelyn and I met Matt Moore on Skype to chat about story work. Matt's a fast worker and has already posted the podcast. Here are the show notes:

00:00 - Introductions: Madelyn & Shawn's first introduction to storywork.

04:00 - Stories that stick in your mind: Madelyn's story of the Swedish ambassador, the mosque & the stone.

06:00 - Shawn distinguishes between storylistening & storytelling.

08:30 - "Storytelling" as a bit overwhelming vs things that you do everyday.

11:15 - The use of objects in storytelling - Madelyn applies this to mission statements.

13:00 - The importance of context & duckus duckus.

16:00 - Getting different groups to talk.

18:10 - Scientific papers as mystery stories.

And if you are interested in how to use mystery story format to write scientific papers (or any persuasive communication) then check out this post.

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A few weeks back, Alex Manchester from Melcrum interviewed me on various issues around storytelling. He approached me following the large amount of interest in storytelling shown at the Employee Engagement conference in late May. The interview is available as a podcast if you are interested.

The use of narrative for exploring issues around employee engagement has been expanding of late, with several organisations approaching us to help get a deeper understanding of what the results of their employee engagement surveys really mean and what they can do to positively influence engagement. I will post a longer piece on this in the coming days.

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It's obvious to most people that good leaders are good storytellers. Stories help inspire action because they transport the listener to experience the events recounted in the story in a way that conveys emotion, context and a picture of what happened, and why is happened. We remember these stories. They help change our minds and in doing so, change our behaviours. Storytelling is an important skill for leaders.

But it's not the only way to use stories to help leaders improve their capabilities.

18 months ago we started a narrative-based leadership development program for a global pharmaceutical company. We collected 150 stories of good and bad management behaviour from the staff and then use these stories in a two day program. Twelve managers attend every month and one of the activities we do with them is to facilitate a conversation around the question, which stories are most significant?

One of the stories often selected as significant is a seemingly simple account of a woman whose manager stops whatever he was doing whenever she visited his office, moves to a table in the middle of the room and invites her to sit down and then totally focusses on her. She felt that she was being listened to and her ideas were important. It was remarkable for this woman because other managers didn't do that. The leaders in the program often choose this story as significant because they feel that if only they could get more managers doing this it would create a groundswell of change.

A few weeks ago we refreshed the stories for this company in preparation for a new phase of leadership development, and lo and behold, staff told stories of how their manager, whenever they knock on their office door, he or she stops what they’re doing, comes out from behind their desk and… you guessed it… focuses totally on them and their issues.

Imagine if we conducted the leadership development program by listing the behaviours a good leader displays and then tried to persuade them with logic and reasoning. Change is unlikely. But in this case the leaders worked things out for themselves and inspired themselves to change.

Both approaches to using stories to enhance leadership capabilities are important.

If you want to help your leaders be better storytellers, then get them along to our Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop or we can bring it to your organisation.

If you want to learn how to collect and make sense of stories as a way to change behaviours them come along to our Business Narrative workshop.

We run these workshops in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, or anywhere else in Australia or the world for that matter :-)

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Collaborative conversations are characterised by people building on each other's ideas, one idea sparking another. I saw a good example last week while helping a group design some small interventions they could experiment with in their organisation to improve communications. The conversation went something like this:

"We could do a 10 minute spot at the Friday afternoon drinks."

"Yeh, good idea. Could we do that in Melbourne and Hobart?"

"They don't really do drinks like the Sydney guys."

"Perhaps we could video the presentation."

"And then we could put that on our intranet. Everyone could see it then."

"In fact there are lots of things we could video. What about the CEO's blurb at the induction."

So what started out as a presentation at Friday night drinks ended up being an initiative to collect useful things for people to watch on video on the intranet. And this idea is destined to evolve as they try it out and adapt. This is the essence of making progress in complexity.

But collaborative conversations can run into a brick wall. When ideas dry up we need a new way of thinking about the topic at hand. This is where analogies (and metaphors) come in handy.

First a quick reminder of what we mean by an analogy. An analogy is when we say something is like something else. For example, this organisation is like a summer holiday, everyone is relaxed and has fun (I have to admit to never having the opportunity to use this analogy). A metaphor is when you infer a comparison by describing something else. This organisation is a summer holiday is a basic example. Saying a conversation hit a brick wall is another example of a metaphor.

In collaborative conversations an analogy provides a new frame for thinking about a problem. Take our mini conversation about videoing things to put on the intranet. Someone might say the idea is a bit like a short film festival (an analogy) which in turn might get the group thinking about showings in multiple venues, judging panels, film genres, producers and directors. All these features of a short film festival can provide new ideas for the intervention.

So to be a good collaborator we need to have a repertoire of analogies at our disposal. So how do we do it?

The first thing is to increase the variety of experiences you have. A short film festival analogy will lack richness or might not even occur to you if you've never been to one. But simply doing heaps of new things is not enough because you can't do everything. So the second best way to is to hear, read, experience stories. History is full of great analogous source material. Business models and ways of doing things in other industries is another tremendous source. I guess the simple advice is to be interesting. Russell Davies has some good ideas.

But you can't stop there. Experience without some form of mindfulness is unlikely to stick with you in a way that you might remember when grasping for an apt analogy. If you want to remember something, tell yourself a story about it that you can picture in your mind, smell, taste and hear.

This idea of an analogy repertoire is a new thought for me and I'm still working out how one might expand this capability. Any suggestions out there?

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Many business audiences like to hear stories that are directly relevant. So if you are a civil engineer, for example, it's likely you're not that interested in stories about electrical engineers. But sometimes (actually quite often in the case of innovation) there are great lessons to be learned from another discipline. In these cases it might find be useful to tell a “I know what you are thinking" story to prepare the audience to hear what you have to say.

For example, with our engineers you might like to tell them a story of how a concrete swimming pool was incorrectly installed putting the installers in harm’s way. These engineers are unlikely to see the relevance of a swimming pool story in the first instance so get them ready to hear it by telling a “I know what you are thinking" story. The first step is to find an instance where one discipline was inspired by the practices of another (check out the Medici Effect for examples). It might be something like a group of engineers who heard about the practices of a plastic surgeon and at first you couldn’t imagine there was any relevance, but the surgeon story gave them the idea that totally revolutionised a key aspect of their work. Once this story is told you can start on the story you wanted to tell at the outset, which might on the surface seemed irrelevant to the audience.

The idea of a "I know what you are thinking" story is from Annette Simmons' new book, Whoever Tells The Best Story Wins. Annette describes six storytelling patterns.

Thanks to Seb Fajzullin for asking me the question on how you might tackle this situation with stories.

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Contrary to popular belief, new research is showing that woman don't talk more than men (see here and here). They do, however, recall more of what was said than blokes when asked to recount their experiences. We must have plenty of examples or these verbatim recollections in the stories we've collected over the years.

Richard Ely and Elizabeth Ryan have just published their findings and have also surmised,

" ... women may recall more speech than men because of differences in the way boys and girls are spoken to by their parents. "Parents are more elaborative and more emotional when conversing with daughters than with sons."

Christian Jarrett reports this news at the Research Digest blog and also notes that the researchers also discovered that emotional events were more likely to be remembered with what was actually said.

Take this example, in which a participant recounted the time he accidentally injured a team-mate in baseball, and went to see if he was okay: "The coach just turns to me and says 'Get out of here you little bastard, you have done enough.' I didn't play baseball for five years after that."

This reminds me of the story Miriam Margolyes tells on Andrew Denton's show when the Queen tells her to "be quiet." It's a terrific story told by a consummate storyteller.

Ely, R., Ryan, E. (2008). Remembering talk: Individual and gender differences in reported speech. Memory, 16(4), 395-409. DOI: 10.1080/09658210801949869

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There was a boy who was born without a right arm. On his ninth birthday he asked his parents if he could join a karate club. They were delighted by the idea and the boy quickly became a regular at the local dojo. The boy wanted to compete in a tournament and asked his master if this was possible. The master said he could but only if he listened carefully to his master and trusted him.

The master taught the boy one move and one move only. The boy practised it diligently but after a while he was worried that the other boys were learning a range of moves and he only had one. He asked the master to teach him other moves but the master said no. The master just urged the boy to keep practising that one move.

The boy won the first round of the tournament and then the next round and the one after that until he found himself winning the entire tournament. The boy was baffled. How did he do it? He asked the master how a boy with only one arm and only one move could win a karate tournament against these other boys. The master smiled and told the boy that there is only one defence against the move the boy learned and that defence involves grabbing the attacker by the right arm.

I believe this is a Zen teaching story. It was told to me by Pavan Choudary. I spent two days with Pavan and a terrific group of creative people at Conversations that Create. Pavan has recently launched his book, When you are sinking, become a submarine. Pavan is an inspirational and fascinating fellow and if his book is anything like the wonderful conversations we had, it will be well worth getting a copy.

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My friend Madelyn Blair is busily preparing for two great storytelling events in Washington that start on the 9 May. I believe there are 30 seats left now so you still register to attend

For Goldenfleece Day08 go to http://www.goldenfleececon.org

For Smithsonian Event, May 9 go to http://residentassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=87387

I wish I could make it because I know there will be terrific conversations about storytelling in business context and I would get to meet many of the people I Skype such as Victoria Ward, Madelyn, and Steve Denning.

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Imagine presenting without PowerPoint. No slides, no bullet points - just a persuasive message that changes opinion and makes an impact.

The PowerPoint alternative is simple - stories. Whenever you present or communicate, your stories will help you communicate your ideas more meaningfully. That's why global brands such as AXA, Harley Davidson and Nike are utilising their power.

Never submit another audience to death by PowerPoint. Join our Storytelling for Business Leaders Workshop and develop your innate storytelling skills to convey ideas clearly and effectively. Most importantly, you'll learn to build a rapport that stimulates trust and a sense of connection with your colleagues and clients alike.

"Shawn's presentation to our technical sales forum was right on the money. The story telling tactics and skills passed on have been immediately adopted, and are producing higher quality presentations by our team to our clients. We look forward to continuing to develop our skills in this area, which will support the business objectives of our organisation and our customers." — IBM

The workshop will teach you how to find your own stories, understand story patterns and how to share your stories with maximum impact. We'll talk about the six different types of stories and much more ...

Download the Registration Form

We look forward to seeing you there!.

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Recently we've been helping people find stories from their life that help give others an insight into the type of person they are. Annette Simmons calls these stories, 'Who am I?' and 'Why am I here?' stories. They are most useful when you meet people for the first time because the two questions they're likely yo have in their mind are, 'Who are you?' and 'Why are you here?' Without answering these two questions it's unlikely they will take in much else of what you say.

The 'Who am I?' story reveals character whereas 'Why am I here?' reveals motivation. I was flicking through Robert McKee's book, Story, and noticed a section on the difference between character and characterisation and I wanted to share this scenario McKee paints for us that graphically depicts how character is revealed.

Consider this scene: Two cars motor down a high way. One is a rusted-out station wagon with buckets, mops, and brooms in the back. Driving it is an illegal alien—a quiet, shy woman working as a domestic for under-the-table cash, sole support of her family. Alongside her is a glistening new Porsche driven by a brilliant and wealthy neurosurgeon. Two people who have utterly different backgrounds, beliefs, personalities, languages—in every way imaginable their characterizations are the opposite of each other.

Suddenly, in front of them, a school bus full of children flips out of control, smashes against an underpass, bursting into flames, trapping the children inside. Now, under this terrible pressure, we'll find out who these people really are.

Who chooses to stop? Who chooses to drive by? Each has rationalizations for driving by. The domestic worries that if she gets caught up in this, the police might question her, find out she's an illegal, throw her back across the border, and her family will starve. The surgeon fears that if he's injured and his hands burned, hands that perform miraculous microsurgeries, the lives of thousands of future patients will be lost. But let's say they both hit the brakes and stop.

This choice gives us a clue to character, but who is stopping to help, and who's become too hysterical to drive any farther? Let's say they both choose to help. This tells us more. But who chooses to help by calling for an ambulance and waiting? Who chooses to help by dashing into the burning bus? Let's say they both rush for the bus—a choice that reveals character in even greater depth.

Now doctor and housekeeper smash windows, crawl inside the blazing bus, grab screaming children, and push them to safety. But their choices aren't over. Soon the flames surge into a blistering inferno, skin peels from their faces. They can't take another breath without searing their lungs. In the midst of this horror each realizes there's only a second left to rescue one of the many children still inside. How does the doctor react? In a sudden reflex does he reach for a white kid or the black child closer to him? Which way do the housekeeper's instincts take her? Does she save the little boy? Or the little girl cowering at her feet? How does she make Sophie's choice?

I would never wish this level of drama upon anyone in real life—remember, McKee is advising screenwriters— but it demonstrates that character is revealed under pressure. It's probably one of the reasons we intuitively watch our leaders when a crises occurs to see what they do because their actions reflect under pressure their character.

When looking for 'Who am I?' stories you will need to seek out those times when you were under the pump, or it didn't go the way you expected. What did you do? Alternatively find stories of when others were under pressure and you admired how they acted.

I'm in the process of writing a new anecdote for the back of my business card. I want it to be a 'Who am I?' story. It's far less dramatic than the burning bus scenario but I would like you opinion. What do you think? What character/s are revealed in this story?

In 1996 I helped the Australian Geological Survey Organisation document their scientific datasets. We put a heap of effort into designing the database and then went to the scientists and asked them to describe their datasets. They scoffed at the suggestion, reminding us that they had a mountain of data and little motivation to do anything with it apart from publishing papers. We were stumped until we cottoned on to the fact that their culture was defined by the imperative to publish or perish. We revisited our project design and created the idea of a published dataset. It was linked to their performance management systems but most importantly each published dataset could be officially cited in their personal bibliographies. We went back to the scientists and asked whether they would like to publish their datasets and there was an instant line up.

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The Australia 2020 Summit promises to bring together the nation’s best and brightest brains in a bid to discover new ideas to take the country forward. For those attending it will be an opportunity to make their mark. The Summit is a big event, full of big IQs and bigger egos – it’s tough to stand out from the crowd. My advice for summiteers: make an impact by reaching people’s emotions. Statistics don’t do that – but stories do.

For example, the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is someone who understands the power of a story. One of his first television commercials as Prime Ministerial aspirant used his personal story as the basis for his plan to reform education: http://www.alp.org.au/labortv/6FiTQAgNy6

Stories work because they get people’s attention and people develop a resolve to act when their emotions are triggered. My tips for our 1000 brightest minds if they want to stand out from the other 999 Summiteers:

1. Grab your audience’s attention with a story of how’s things are failing and tell it with detail, empathy and authenticity. Humans are psychologically attuned to take notice of tales of woe because we have evolved to notice and avoid danger.

2. Paint a picture of what it could be like with a story of hope illustrating that good things are already happening. As celebrated sci-fi writer William Gibson noted, “the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.” Hopeful stories generate resolve to take action.

3. Find real stories and never embellish, fabricate or tell half the story for effect. One untruthful story will erode all your good work.

Forget the dreaded PowerPoint presentation and, instead, use stories to leave a longer lasting impression. As conference veterans know too well, the chances of meaningful discourse are slim at best when bombarded with one slide after the next jam packed with enough bullets to deplete Cadbury’s licorice supplies.

If the aim is to generate conversations so leaders are not only exposed to new thinking but also remember and adopt new ideas then a combination of stories and reasoned argument is essential. And always lead with the stories because trying to change someone’s mind with hard, cold facts only results in people with convictions to dig their heels in even further.

Anecdote’s “business narrative” techniques are becoming more and more mainstream as people realize the limitations that come with statistics and surveys to tackle and solve problems and implement change. Stories often get to the heart of the matter because they represent the natural way people share what they know.

Here my interview with Richard Aedy from the Life Matters program on ABC Radio National. Here's the audio (approx. 8 minutes).

Or check out our latest storytelling for leaders workshop.

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Andrew Leigh went to the 2020 summit warm up yesterday in Canberra. It was the ACT 2020 summit and the lesson he will be taking to the big event on the 19-20th this month is, "... any idea with less than 90% support on Day 1 is going to get killed." I can just imagine it, 300 people clamouring for their big ideas to be heard by 299 others and only 16 ideas making it to the end of the day. This is idea decimation in the original Roman sense of the word.

How did the successful ideas emerge? Were these successful ideas merely part of the community zeitgeist and would have survived regardless of what the participants did? How many were presented as a list of facts, a presentation of the evidence? I would be willing to bet many of the successful ideas were presented as a story illustrating the idea in a way that helped it stick in the minds of the participants. Once the idea took hold, it grew.

I worry about the upcoming 2020 summit. I want it to be a tremendous success but I can see 10 groups of 100 egos clashing and the largest voices smothering the quieter best and brightest. The success will depend on two factors: how the event is facilitated; and whether participants can tell stories to engage their fellow summiteers.

Facilitation, techniques and physical space

From what I can tell the summit organisers plan to run small group sessions and large plenary presentations. The warning bells should sound if we see rooms arrange in seminar seating styles, the favoured arrangement for one-way information transmission. I'm hopeful that the organisers know about techniques like open space, world cafe, or even something like jump-start storytelling to help the group be more collaborative. But maybe my hope is misplaced. These techniques foster real dialogue when in fact these two days will be a gladiatorial contest of whose ideas win. Physical space and technique are important but both are trumped by the skill and attitude of the facilitators. At one end of the spectrum is the facilitator who already has in their mind a picture of what good looks like and regardless of what's been said this person hears their version and heads the group in that direction. At the other end of the spectrum is the facilitator who is totally focussed on process and helps people be heard. I'm hoping the 2020 team of facilitators fits in this last category.

Storytelling

Each participant will have very little time to engage the group in their idea. Cognitive science show that if someone has a strong opinion on a topic and you provide an alternative opinion, it only serves to reinforce the person's original strong opinion. It's called a cognitive bias.¹ However if we tell a negative story to grab attention then a positive story to illustrate what's possible, we have a much greater chance of changing someone's mind and engaging people.^2,3 It's only after hearing the stories are people open to hearing the reasoning and evidence.

There are three reasons why these stories work:

1. stories are memorable and can be retold. This is powerful if your story embodies your big idea and is the told and retold at the Summit.
2. stories convey emotion and, regardless of what all the hard-headed rationalists would have you think, we make decisions based on the emotions we feel
3. stories provide context and therefore are more meaningful than disembodied facts and figures. Of course some of the best stories are laden with facts and figures.

Summiteers need to find their negative and positive stories this week and resist the urge to start with facts followed by examples and flip their sequence starting with the stories followed by reasoning. The people who can will increase their chances to be heard and understood. And perhaps more importantly telling stories will help relationships form among this elite group and hopefully is followed by collaborations that will make a difference to Australia.

Kevin Rudd understands the value of story. We have seen it in his election campaign and on Sorry Day. And on reading some of the background papers for the Summit I found this warning:

"These background materials aim to tell an evidence-based story about how Australia is faring. They are not intended to be definitive or comprehensive, but were put together to stimulate discussion on the main challenges and opportunities facing the country and the choices to be made in addressing them. They do not representgovernment policy."

The summit organisers understand the power of stories. Now it's time for the participants to embrace this big idea.

Why not join one of our storytelling for leaders workshops.

^1. D. Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007).

^2. S. Denning, The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (San Francisco: John Wiley & Son, 2007).

^3. H. Gardner, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

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Robert Cialdini discovered a secret to learning in 2005. As a world-leading psychologist he was surprised he didn’t already know this secret but now swears by it. He was researching a new psychology book he wanted to write for a general audience and wanted to know the characteristics of effective science writing for an informed public readership. Most of his review confirmed what he already knew: must have a clear and focussed point, well written, concrete examples. The big surprise for Robert was that the best examples where written in the format of a mystery story.

Robert’s laboratory is his classroom so he tried out the approach there. A typical lecture, before using the mystery story format, would end with his students starting to pack up five minutes before the lecture’s scheduled finishing time. When he presented the same information as a mystery story, and he was yet to reveal the who’d dunnit, the students remained totally engaged and didn’t move, even after the lecture was supposed to have finished. It was like magic.

So here is the structure Cialdini discovered in his review and then wrote up in volume 24 of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

• Pose the mystery
• Deepen the mystery
• Home in on the proper explanation by considering (and offering evidence against) alternative explanations
• Provide a clue to the proper explanation
• Resolve the mystery
• Draw the implications for the phenomenon under study

To test this out I wrote a blog post using the mystery format called ‘What is happening to Melbourne's trains?’ I would be grateful to receive your feedback. Just leave comments on the blog post.

Cialdini, R. B. (2005). “What’s The Best Secret Device for Engaging Student Interest? The Answer Is In The Title.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24(1): 22-29.

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We can all tell stories about our childhood quite easily.

What about our work, our workplace, our business? That seems far from easy. People tend to use PowerPoint over PowerPoint to convey their ideas.

At Anecdote, we're always finding ways to help people bring back stories to the workplace. Here's some areas of storytelling that we'll be discussing on April 16.

▪ How does one tell a story?
▪ How can you find stories to tell at work?
▪ What stories should one tell when one wants to communicate values?
▪ What stories can help you introduce yourself to an audience?
▪ How can you build trust by telling stories?
▪ How can you help people see 'the big picture' through stories?
▪ How can you use stories to make a difference?

Join us in Sydney for a workshop on Storytelling for Business Leaders. Download registration form

It'll be fun and you'll discover stories you can share about yourself and your work!

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When we start on a major change project we will often run a number of workshops with the leadership team to really get them to own and define the project. A big part of this activity is getting this group to collaborate and work as a team. In the past we have run sociometry exercises, anecdote circles and future backwards activities to get this group to gel. But I have a much better way now thanks to Seth Kahan's jumpstart storytelling technique.

How to run a jumpstart storytelling session

• Divide the participants into groups of 6
• Ask everyone to provide a concrete and specific example in response to a story eliciting question that is related to the objective of the workshop or project. Most recently I ask a workshop participants to recall when they have been proudest of the work they or their colleagues have done?
• Each person gets 90 seconds to tell their story.
• When everyone in the group has told one story ask the participants to remember the story that was most powerful for them; what resonated the most. And ask them to remember who told that story.
• Get everyone to switch groups to there is as many new faces as possible in their new group.
• Ask everyone to retell their story they have just told. Because this will feel a little weird I suggested they observe how their story changes and improves in the retelling. Again 90 seconds per story. At the end of everyone retelling their story reassess which story you think is most powerful and remember the storyteller.
• Depending on the size of the group you can switch groups again.
• Now the fun begins. Ask everyone to remember the person who told the most powerful, relevant, engaging story and go over to them and place your hand on their shoulder and keep it there. After a while a network of people forms and clusters appear revealing the high impact stories. Invite the people the group chose to retell their story to the whole group. Lead the applause at the end of each telling.

The energy goes through the roof with this technique and people get to hear stories they have never heard before. Most importantly the group gets to know each other at a deeper level. There is one more advantage as well if your project is narrative based: the leaders experience the power of narrative in the first 5 minutes of the project.

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Yesterday my family and I spent the day at Movie World. At the end of the day we went to an Irish pub for dinner and talked about our favourite rides. The Superman and Batman rides were our favourites and we all agreed that the back story was an important factor. The Superman ride (rollercoaster style) starts with us being train commuters and as we wind our way through the tube an earthquake hits and the tunnel is about to collapse. Superman arrives on the scene and saves us by whisking the train into the air propelling us from 0 to 100 kph in 2 seconds and to safety.

The power of story is appearing everywhere.

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It's said that stories create cultures; they propagate the assumptions and beliefs throughout the group in question. But it is specifically stories that create culture or is it something else?

Before we answer this question it's useful to have a definition of what we mean by 'a story'. Here's a definition I like from Annette Simmons latest book, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins.

"Story is a reimagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listeners' imaginations to experience it as real."

Hearing a story is the second-best way to gain experience and in many cases it's the only available option. Sometimes it's too dangerous to gain first hand experience or the opportunity to gain first hand experience never presents itself. So the idea that a story is reimagined experience is important and useful. And the impact of a story is heightened the more real it seems.

So imagine the following:

A group of colleagues gather around a meeting room table. The meeting hasn't started and everyone is laughing and joking. Billy, a seasoned salesman, bursts into the room with a huge grin of his face.

"I've just come from the Sam Cook meeting [the CIO of a large government department]. They signed on the original price--they didn't screw us down. We will make out quota," Billy said. "And all we had to do was offer a service they were going to get anyway.... What they don't know wont kill them right?"

The group cheers while slapping Billy on the back in congratulations.

What just happened here?

Was it the story that created the culture? Did Billy's retelling of what happened with Sam create or reinforce the culture?

No, in this case the story is the trigger, but it's the response to the story that shows everyone how we behave around here.

This is an important point for leaders. Leaders must be poised to lead a response to stories told. To disrupt a response if necessary. For leaders this is about self awareness and being aware of the stories being told (which means being able to identify stories) and observing how people respond--and being ready and willing to intervene.

In a complex environment it's important to reinforce the behaviours you want and disrupt what's unfavourable and if you want to change the culture of a group, start by changing the response to the stories being told.

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My friend, Alison Spencer, suggested I get a copy of James Harlow Brown's book, Dangerous Undertaken, and I have to say it's been one of my best Amazon purchases in some time. It's a book about personal and organisational transformation written as a dialogue between a hot shot executive and a wise mentor he happened to meet on a flight to Sydney. Full of stories within stories. It's a wonderful example of how leaders might tell stories to help people (and themselves) to change.

I contacted James (Jm to his friends) and we talked a little about metaphors—his book is full of them. Here is paragraph from one of his emails that he said I could blog.

Metaphors are the way that human beings see and create language for things that we cannot otherwise describe, either because we haven't seen such things before or they are, in effect, beyond description. Storytelling uses metaphors in two primary ways. First, as a major "sticky" element or tag to make the story memorable. A good example is the Holy Grail, which not only represents a precious cup but also the altar cup (to Christians) that holds the holy sacrament. Because of this metaphor, the myth of the Holy Grail points to something that transcends ordinary experience when we unpack this metaphor. Second, stories themselves are metaphors, which lead us to explore deeper meaning. The story of the search for the Holy Grail becomes every person's search for transformation as they seek that which is most precious in life. Because of this dual use of metaphor, stories like the Holy Grail myth stay in human consciousness for extremely long times, far beyond their telling. The question is can professional storytellers construct stories as memorable as the Holy Grail myth through the skillful use of metaphor -- or is there something else at work in enduring myths like the Holy Grail beyond the skillful use of metaphor?

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The January '08 cover of CIO magazine provokes an interesting thought about managing people: There's so much to be done to bring and retain people in an organization.

Hidden within these 23 points is a learning curve that the employee is expected to leap across. So what is the best way to 'hang on to them'?
To make the work experience interesting and engaging for staff, managers could dig out stories from their workplace.

These stories are simply examples of things that worked well. Here's four examples to seek out:

1. How a training opportunity made a difference
2. When a manager was a good listener
3. How a bunch of helpful colleagues made life easier
4. When good work was recognized

These stories are a great resource for staff induction. What other stories themes can you think of?

PS: If you're keen to find such stories in your workplace, come along for our Narrative Techniques for Business Workshop to learn how to elicit stories.

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Ford Harding has just posted two versions of the same anecdote. The first paints the consultant as the hero while the second focuses on the effort of the client. Ford wants us to consider which version would we tell and why.

Version #1

Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning. Not long ago, a major power company was sued for breach of a twenty-year power contract. The plaintiffs were asking for damages in excess of one billion dollars, the value of the damages hinging on the discount rate used in their calculation.
Multiple experts offered the defendant ways to calculate the rate. We spent many hours educating the general counsel on the credibility of the alternative ways to calculate a discount rate and persuaded him of the intellectual superiority of our approach. When the arbitrators compared our estimation of the discount rate with the one provided by the plaintiff’s expert, they found ours more credible. The power company ended up paying the plaintiff only $115 million, far less than they would have had to pay if the plaintiffs had won or one of the other experts’ calculations of the discount rate had been presented.

Version #2

Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning. Not long ago, a major power company was sued for breach of a twenty-year power contract. The plaintiffs were asking for damages in excess of one billion dollars, the value of the damages hinging on the discount rate used in their calculation.

The attorney representing the company asked several experts to calculate the rate. He spent many hours with the power company’s general counsel evaluating the credibility of the alternative ways to calculate a rate, and selected our experts’ approach. When he took the case before arbitrators, they found his arguments both intellectually superior and more compellingly presented than those provided by the plaintiff’s attorney. The power company ended up paying the plaintiff only $115 million, far less than they would have had to pay if the plaintiffs had won or one of the other experts’ calculations of the discount rate had been presented.

There are a couple of other interesting features these stories display that are worth talking about. Each one is prefaced by a statement summarising the moral of the story. It's an effective approach which I've noted in the work of Victor Frankl. It's conversational and creates a mystery of sorts because we want to understand what is meant by the statement.

Both stories are without real people's names. It's the sort of story written up in case studies that gently washes an element of truth from what's been said. It's harder to check these stories out. Did it really happen? People love details and the best stories have the names of the characters. I understand what this type of business story lacks names in its written form: people are uncomfortable talking about what happens inside organisations. But when told orally names are important.

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I run a meetup group in Melbourne call Emergence and we get together for drinks and dinner each month. Our next meeting is on the 13th March at 6pm. For full details and to RSVP go to here. It very informal and just a good way to catch up with new people and talk about things that interest us. Everyone is welcome.

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Expect any anecdote you tell to be tested and retested, especially if you are a politician. Barrack Obama is a storyteller par excellence and so when he recounts a story you can bet there is an army of doubters checking out its validity. Here is the anecdote in question reported in the New Republic.

"You know, I've heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon--supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn't have enough ammunition, they didn't have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief."

The same is true for organisational leaders. Don't get lazy. Don't think you can slip one past without employees noticing that you are garnishing the facts. Good stories are retold and good stories are checked out. Authenticity is the key.

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Thanks to ken (one of our favourite Anecdote blog commentors) for this link of Malcolm Gladwell doing what he does best: telling a story which helps us understand something new—this time it's spaghetti sauce. The story is about Howard Moskowitz and how he transformed our views of retail choice and explains why we have so many varieties of mustard, soft drinks and practically anything else you can buy from the supermarket. But more importantly we learn that looking for the single correct answer might not be the best solution.

I won't spoil the story but watch out for how Gladwell introduces his character and how story comes before reason or interpretation. And see how he creates mystery from the outset and gradually reveals the culprit.

Gladwell's essay covering the same topic is here.

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I was pleased to read the findings of a recent survey on employee engagement.

▪ 81% of organizations surveyed worldwide have an employee
engagement practice
▪ 49% use storytelling techniques to engage their employees

Although only a few organizations have employee engagement formally defined on their agenda, the survey suggests an increasing trend in the number of programs introduced over the past three years. It's great to see organizations sharpening the people focus to their business and using the power of narratives to assess their health. We have noticed that trend in our work too, with more organizations wanting to use stories to encourage the right leadership and knowledge–sharing behaviors. It’s strategic and becoming imperative.

If you’re thinking of ways to engage your employees using stories, here are two simple ways to get started:

1. Story wall – create spaces for employees to put up pictures of major team events or just their time at work. It helps to reinforce what’s good about the workplace and works as a great trigger for an interesting story.

2. Story booklet – run an anecdote circle with staff to collect stories about their most enjoyable time at work or things (events) that improved the way they work. You can then compile these stories into a storytelling booklet that you can share with new employees.

The most important thing is to start somewhere.

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Late last year I teamed up with Madelyn Blair, Terrence Gargiulo, Michael Margolis, Limor Shiponi, and Karen Dietz to start a new community of practice called Worldwide Story Work. We created a Ning workspace to conduct our online conversations and I see we now have 88 members. If you care about story work in organisations please come and join us. It's still the early days and there are many unanswered questions, but if you are willing to be helpful and supportive this group is a welcoming one.

I also wanted to show you this video (6 minutes) which documents a story event in Copenhagan run by GoldenFleece. It features my good friend Mary Alice Arthur who helped facilitate the event. You will also see short interviews with Madelyn Blair and Steve Denning. I'm not sure if you need to become a member of Worldwide Story Work to see the video, but give it a try.

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2008 marks a busy year for Anecdote and this graphic gives you an idea of our workshop schedule. Storytelling is represented with bears, business narrative with fish and communities of practice with balloons. As you can see we are running workshops in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth. Here is the full, printable version of the schedule you can download and put on your wall. Alternatively, pop over to our workshops page and register your interest in attending via the web.

By the way, we can also run these workshops internally within your organisation.

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People vote for politicians based on the emotions they generate not the intellectual merits of their policies.¹ And emotion is generated by the stories we are told and the stories we tell ourselves. We watch the candidates and observe what they do and tell ourselves a story about the type of person they are and what they stand for. The Rudd campaign understood this fact.

Kevin Rudd's campaign was effective in telling three types of stories which helped to create positive emotions towards him and the ALP. These three types of stories are: Who am I? Why am I here? and My vision story.²

Kevin Rudd's first television commercials contained his 'Who am I?' story. We learned how Kevin grew up in outback Queensland, how his parents didn't even get a high school education and how he enjoyed going back to his home town and talking with the residents about what they wanted for the future. For many people in the electorate Kevin was just like us.

Kevin's 'Why am I here?' stories revolved around his focus areas of an education revolution, being a economic conservative, getting rid of work choices, ratifying the Kyoto protocol, and providing new leadership. And in talking about these focus areas Rudd set out his vision for the future--his vision story.

Rudd's campaign mastered the master narratives required to create the right emotions in the electorate. Interesting, however, both Rudd and Howard avoided recounting anecdotes of specific events and encounters as a way to illustrate what the candidates really value. I have been told by one political insider that both Rudd and Howard are worried the media will crucify them for using anecdotes as a mere trick to spin a particular message.

But we saw on election night how storytelling can be done with authenticity and impact when Maxine McKew gave a short speech on the news that she look like winning the seat of Bennelong. Maxine started by saying some general statements about the contest for Bennelong being on a knife edge, and how the seat will never be taken for granted again. Then she moved into storytelling mode, first remembering how she was at this town hall only a few months before and then recalling the many interviews she had done over the years and that some of the very special people she has ever met were actually in Bennelong, and this is where the mood changed as Maxine told three anecdotes.

I'm thinking of the 90-year old Sister Louise who's at St Catherines who I met just a couple of weeks ago. She's blind. But the day I talked to her she said, "Nobody is blind in heaven."

And I'm thinking of 6 year old Emily at Denniston East. She told me that she told her parents to vote for Kevin Rudd because Kevin Rudd would be a great Prime Minister for children. And you know, ... we need a great Prime Minister for children.

And I'm thinking as well of a boy called Ali who only recently completed his HSC exams, who—maybe Ali you are here tonight—who a few years ago was in a Pakistani refugee camp waiting for passage out, and Ali has found a safe home, and a welcome here in Australia ...

I'm sure many people felt goosebumps at the end of this speech--emotions were created.

We help leaders tell these types of stories, first by helping leaders learn how to find their stories (of course Maxine is an expert at this but we all can do it), then help them learn how to tell these stories and ensure at all times there is authenticity in what you say.

1. Westen, Drew. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007.

2. Simmons, Annette. The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling. Revised edition ed. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

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Here's a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald making the case for storytelling as a key factor in Kevin Rudd's success.

Kevin Rudd's campaign was successful in crafting such a narrative. First, he got the audience's attention because he was new. This allowed him to play the future card and frame the Coalition as backward-looking. He went on the front foot and used climate change and broadband to champion his future credentials.

Thanks to Seth Kahan for the pointer.

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Mark and I love speaking to audiences of all shapes and sizes and we have had the privilege over the years to give seminars and workshops to large and small groups. Our clients seem to enjoy our talks (sometimes they are more like workshops) and report significant impacts as a result of our presentations and follow up coaching. Recently I have been enjoying presenting on how we are helping leaders to be more memorable and persausive using organisatonal storytelling techniques.

So we've set up a page on our website describing some of the speaking topics we are delivering to our clients.

Here are a couple of quotes from our clients from recent speaking engagements.

The Churchill Club promotes entrepreneurial conversations without the hype and Shawn delivered that in spades at our recent session on business storytelling. He's tremendously engaging, has deep knowledge and passion for business narrative and can connect the dots between an esoteric subject and tangible business outcomes. Brendan Lewis, Executive Director, The Churchill Club.

Shawn’s presentation to our technical sales forum was right on the money. The story telling tactics and skills passed on have been immediately adopted, and are producing higher quality presentations by our team to our clients. We look forward to continuing to develop our skills in this area, which will support the business objectives of our organisation and our customers. Senior Manager, IBM Australia.

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Larry Lessig has a presentation style named after him. You guessed it, the Lessig Method. Professor Lessig is a copyright expert and champion of creative commons. And in this presentation he demonstrates the power of presenting stories before presenting his argument. Steve Denning makes the point in his latest book, The Secret Language of Leadership, that if someone has a strong opinion and you present them with an argument to change their mind, it only serves to reinforce their strong opinion, regardless of how good your argument is. However if we are presented with a story illustrating the failures of the current situation followed by an aspirational story, then the person is more likely to take notice of a following new point of view. Enjoy this 18 minute video.

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Last week the Churchill Club hosted a conversation titled, What's Your Story? Leon Gettler (journalist at The Age), Andrea Lemon (scriptwriter, author, theatre director and circus ethnographer) and I formed the panel. Brendan Lewis, the club's executive director, recorded the session and here it is. Download the mp3 to your iPod and listen when you next walk your dog.

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Brandweek reports that the Advertising Research Foundation has just completed a three year study on the effectiveness of TV advertisements in the USA and found that storytelling was the top factor for a successful commercial.

The report contends that in many ways, advertising is stuck in the past. The 20th century was dominated by a one-way transactional focus where ads were pushed at consumers. Today, consumers interact with ads to "co-create" meaning that is powered by emotion and rich narrative. "Advertising has been standing on the sidelines, stuck on the language of positioning," said Randall Ringer, managing director and co-founder, Verse Group, New York. "Telling a story about the brand is more engaging, memorable and compelling than telling a bunch of facts. What worked 30 years ago with a 30-second spot doesn't work today."

[thanks to Dan Heath for the link]

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I have been listening carefully to the politcians on both sides of the Australian political fence in the run up to our election day on the 24th of November. And surprisingly I can't remember a single anecdote or story from either of the leaders or or that matter from their team members. Mind you I have only heard them on TV or the radio and maybe they keep all their stories for the campaign trail. This is surprising because books like The Political Brain and Steve Denning's latest, The Secret Language of Leadership, make it clear that voters make their decision on who they vote for based on the emotion they feel for a candidate, not the policies or promises they make. And we all know that emotion is best communicated with a story or anecdote.

Barack Obama knows how to create emotion with a simple anecdote. Here's how the UK Telegraph reports the way he finished a recent speech.

Mr Obama finished with an anecdote about visiting a town for a political meeting where he sat bemused as one woman kept chanting: "Fire it up! Are you ready to go?"
"I didn't know what to make of it," he said. "But here's the thing: after a minute or two, I'm feeling pretty fired up. It goes to show, one voice can change a room.

"Are you fired up? Are you ready to go?" he asked the crowd. Not one voice was silent as they loudly shouted their affirmation.

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The guys at Cogdogroo have documented 50 web2.0 applications you can use to tell a story.

http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools

It's a wiki so you can help them improve their resource.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

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We have blogged previously about 50 Lessons, a site featuring over 500 short videos of business leaders describing some of their key learnings. There are two videos here that describe why stories are powerful. Well worth a look.

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Given my publicly confessed reluctance to begin blogging you might be surprised to find me a strong supporter of the written word. The pleasure for me in creating elaborate photo albums for my family lies in the extensive journalling that accompanies the pictures on the page. My frustration with the pile of black and white photos I inherited from my mother was a direct result of finding no clue as to who is in the photo or where it was taken. Worse still was finding a tiny scrap of information in the cryptic words "Our Alf, 1944" or " John's baptism, 1951". So I've overcompensated by making sure that I have told as many of our family stories as possible. Just not in public.

But it might not be privacy issues that keep you from writing. Kerry Patterson, one of the authors of "Crucial conversations: tools for talking when stakes are high", addresses the Power of the Pen in his August newsletter. You can also download it as an MP3 or podcast.

Maybe we're reluctant to express ourselves in writing because our first attempts to capture our thoughts and dreams typically fell under the chilling gaze of the grammarians who accused us of dangling our modifiers and splitting our infinitives when all we really wanted to do was tell our story and have someone read it.

He contends that writing is simply not our medium of choice any more and that's a pity because it is still a powerful tool for influence. His article is worth reading for the powerful story he tells of how quickly and well the Maya people, an indigenous people of Central America, understood the value of the written word once it became available to them.

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The Anecdote website is all about storytelling in organisations. You can get an idea of how we use business narrative by checking out how we help organisations use business narrative. But to get you started with some ideas, here are a few links to posts other people have found useful (based in del.icio.us).

• Questions to elicit stories
• Finding success stories
• 10 reflections on storytelling