We help lots of organisations turn their strategies into memorable and concrete strategic stories. In doing so, a key factor is ensuring its not a 'Pollyanna' story'. You know the ones…everything is upbeat, previous successes are emphasised, failures are not mentioned. Theses stories might be politically correct but risk being viewed as inauthentic or not believable.

I recently watched this Steve Denning video of his TEDx talk in late 2011 on the topic of 'Leadership storytelling'. In it, Steve describes exactly the same concept in a very succinct way. He calls them 'Titanic Stories'…"700 people arrived safe and happy in New York after their voyage on the Titanic."

This story only works if two conditions are met: (1) listeners don't know about the 1500 people who died on the trip and (2) you can keep it that way. As soon as either condition is not met your story, your strategy and your credibility will plummet to the icy depths never to be recovered.

The golden rule in business storytelling is 'be authentic'.

Over the years I've had the pleasure of meeting and working with some terrific business story practitioners.

And because we love to know who are the really great story folk in our region, I thought I'd share who I think are the best story practitioners who are great to work with in the world today and where they are located. Would love to hear who YOU would add to the list. Just add a comment below.

Mary Alice Arthur - New Zealand - http://www.getsoaring.com/

Madelyn Blair - USA http://www.pelerei.com/about-pelerei/madelyn-blair.php

David Boje - USA http://peaceaware.com/vita/

Sean Buvala - USA - http://seantells.com/

Steve Denning - USA - http://www.stevedenning.com/site/Default.aspx

Bob Dickman - USA - http://www.first-voice.com/

Karen Dietz - USA - http://www.polaris-associates.com/AboutUs

Eva Snijders - Spain - http://evasnijders.com/

Terrence Gargiulo - USA - http://www.makingstories.net/

One Thousand and One - Australia - http://www.onethousandandone.com.au/

Limor Shiponi - Israel - http://www.limorshiponi.com/limor/

Tony Quilan - UK - http://narrate.typepad.com/about.html

Annette Simmons - USA - http://www.annettesimmons.com/

The Storytellers - UK - http://www.the-storytellers.com/

Story Worldwide - UK - Sarah Kelleher http://www.storyworldwide.com/profiles/sarah-kelleher/

Victoria Ward - UK http://www.sparknow.net/victoriaward.html

Sheila Wee - Singapore - http://storywise.com.sg/storytelling/

We've said often on this blog that you just don't get the benefits of storytelling (meaning, memory, caring) unless you are telling a story.

Over at the HBR blog last week Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin from DoSomething.org wrote a piece entitled A Data Scientist's Real Job: Storytelling.

Their point was simple. Data on its own is not enough. People have to make sense of it and stories can make a difference. Can't disagree with that.

But as you read through the article you notice that they don't give any examples of stories about data and then their three points of advice had nothing to do with stories.

A recent commenter on the piece, Nahum Gershon, nailed it when he said:

I think the article somewhat confuses storytelling with providing clear presentations of the essence of data and information.  Not all effective and rational explanations or scenarios constitute a story.  Using storytelling elements could make a representation more effective and it would be beneficial that data scientists learn the art of storytelling to make their presentations even more effective.

This is a common mistake. Everyone is talking about stories these days but when you ask them what they mean they are often can't really tell you a story.

So what could they have said which would help Big Data Scientists actually use stories? Well, I think they could have mentioned that stories have structure (and yes, there are variations). Here's a simple one that could help a scientist (or business leader) to tell a story about their data.

• In the past it was like this ...
• And then something happened (that we didn't expect or was remarkable) ...
• And as a result of that ...
• Until finally ...

The famed influence psychologist, Robert Cialdini, discovered another story-based way to present scientific data and wrote it up in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

Just reveal your big data as a mystery story. 

Here's the structure:

• 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 structure out a while back I wrote a blog post using the mystery format called ‘What is happening to Melbourne's trains?’

My advice to scientists, however, is don't write your stories, just tell them while presenting your data. A story told and a story written are worlds apart. But that's probably for another post.

The best stories contain data. To think "on the one hand is the story" and "on the other hand is the data" is just wrong headed. Now we need to help scientists find and tell the stories that bring their data to life.

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.

"Government managers secure the resources they need to operate not by selling products and services to individual customers, but by selling a story of public value creation to elected representatives of the people in legislatures and executive branch positions."1

Private sector leaders have it easy: they sell their products, they generate revenue, they manage their costs, and while they're making profits and creating value, they keep their jobs and stay in business.

Public sector leaders, on the other hand, obtain resources by gaining support and legitimacy from politicians, public opinion and a myriad of other invested institutions each pulling and pushing in their own directions. Then, as the work gets done, it's difficult measuring the impact it has made because the outcomes often emerge years after initiatives are implemented and working out what caused what is near on impossible. It's a tough gig.

According to Harvard Kennedy School Professor, Mark Moore, the strategic challenge for public sector leaders is "… the ability to imagine and articulate a vision of public value that can command legitimacy and support, and is operationally doable in the domain for which you have responsibility."1 Business storytelling has a role to play in each of the three elements of Moore's strategic challenge: public value, legitimacy and support, and operational capability.

Firstly, public sector leaders need to tell the story of the public value they intend to create. And like all good strategy this is best done by creating the story with your stakeholders rather than creating it alone and springing it on the unsuspecting. We call it a strategic story but don't think is merely a single story to be parroted throughout the organisation. Instead it's more like an original score where each leader composes their own arrangement and tells their own anecdotes to bring it to life. 

Legitimacy and support comes from both external and internal sources. Externally, politicians and leaders in other institutions must stand up for and support your vision of public value. And of equal importance, your leaders and managers inside your department must be engaged, believe and actively support the direction the department is taking. Time and attention are the valuable resources you need and storytelling and story-listening will help cut through the noise.

Lastly, you'll need the organisation capabilities to make your initiatives happen. Government is inherently noisy because, unlike private enterprise, unhappy customers just stop buying your products. Public sector stakeholders don't have that choice. So they get vocal. And in this noisy environment you need to be heard and you need to get your message to stick. Companies are starting to include storytelling as an essential skill for their leaders. Victorian Department of Treasury & Finance is a leader in this regard.

Storytelling has three characteristics that make it an effective technique for all three aspects of the public sector strategic challenge because stories are memorable, meaningful and emotional

Stories are Memorable

Attend a presentation and as we walk out the door we have already forgotten most of what was said. We only remember the gist and the feeling it leaves us. More often than not the only thing we will remember with clarity are the stories.

Stories are more memorable than facts alone or abstractions such as talking about "business transformation processes" because they create pictures in our minds--we can see it happening--and these pictures conjures up our own experiences helping us to judge the plausibility of what's happening. We get engaged in the story and because multiple neural pathways are activated (because of the detail in the story such as the places, the characters, the events) we remember it.

Researchers from Princeton have even found that when someone is listening to a story their brain lights up (in a MRI scanner) in the same way as the teller's. The two brain are synchronised. When the listener hears only opinions and viewpoints, activity is limited to just the language area of their brain. During a story, areas across the brain light up as the listener and teller relives the experience. For example, if the storyteller talks about kicking a ball, the parts of the brain associated with the mechanics of kicking a ball lights up. It's a whole brain experience. The most remarkable finding of their research was when they noticed there were times when the story listener's brain lit up before the storyteller; the listener was anticipating what came next and when this happened comprehension increased further.2

Stories are Meaningful

"What's the story here?" This is what we say when we are trying to make sense of something. We need to tell ourselves a story to give it order and meaning.

Stories provide the context and connections we need to place the information we are receiving into a bigger picture of the other things that are happening in the organisation and our own experience. When we hear a story things start to make sense.

A couple of years ago, a university library was preparing to move to a new, purpose-built, ultra-modern building. The move required a huge number of things to change, including the library's culture, and we were invited to help it with this aspect. The first thing we did was to collect stories from the library's employees which illustrated the current culture and values. Then we gathered everyone together for a workshop to identify the patterns in those stories.

At one point in the workshop, 10 librarians were looking at a set of anecdotes about their value of 'excellence'. After reviewing their cluster of post-it notes, they concluded that the key issue was that they needed more training. They refused to change this view despite our gentle prompting that there might be something going on at a deeper level. Then we suggested they use a story spine to tell the story of 'training' in the library.

The librarians then set about creating a story that explained what was happening in the organisation around training. The story they produced was about a woman named Sue (not an actual person but a character representative of a type of person in the library) and it went like this: ‘Sue had a bad habit of talking behind people's backs. She was always bitching about people on the one hand, but always said the right things to the right people on the other hand. Then, after Sue was promoted, people realised she couldn't do the job and they started bitching about her. One day, one of the staff, who had left because Sue was mean to him, ran over her in his BMW at some traffic lights. Many people danced and were happy’.

The librarians were shocked at this story. They looked at each other and, almost in unison, said: "We don't have a training problem in our library. We have a bitching problem." And right there and then they committed themselves to tackling bitching, which they ultimately did.

It's stories rather than logical arguments that convey meaning.

Stories convey Emotional and inspire action

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou

Stories make you feel something. And getting someone to take action is impossible without emotion. Leaders need to tell stories so people feel it, so people are inspire to take action. Sometimes it takes a story to change behaviour and to create the conditions for new stories to emerge.

Nick was standing in front of a wall of stories. Each A4 sheet of paper sported a single anonymous anecdote illustrating either a good or bad management behaviour, collected from Nick's company. One story had captured Nick's attention and made him agitated: "I can't believe this guy. Imagine answering a phone in an interview. My God, he even stepped out of his office to chat with someone who was just passing by."

His complaints caused others in the workshop to wander over to see what was going on. As Nick was spluttering his displeasure, Paul, one of his colleagues, jumped in: "That was my anecdote, Nick, and it was about you." Nick's faced turned red and before he could say anything, another colleague added: "It totally nails you Nick. It's spot on. You do it all the time." By now, everyone in the workshop was watching. It seemed the next few seconds would reveal Nick's true character.

Nick's face was ashen as he looked around the room. He gathered himself and then apologised to his colleagues, adding: "I can't promise you it won't happen again - I wasn't even aware I did this. But I can promise you that I'm going to make every effort to change my behaviour." And to Nick's credit, he did. At the time of the workshop, Nick was the head of sales and marketing at the company; he's now the CEO.

There was a big difference between what Nick thought he was doing and what he was actually doing. It took a story, and the willingness of his trusted colleagues to speak up, to make him aware of his poor behaviour. As a result, Nick's insight was both cognitive and emotional: cognitive in that he could rationally understand what he was doing wrong, and emotional in that he felt intense embarrassment at having discovered that the bad behaviour he had ridiculed only moments before was his own. This combination of insight and emotion created a powerful impetus in Nick to take action.

Government is difficult to manage and lead. There are many stakeholders involved and things are constantly shifting. Engagement, influence and persuasion are essential to impact those who provide legitimacy and support for government initiatives, both inside and outside the organisation, and storytelling techniques are an effective way to achieve this.

Dan and Chip Heath, in their best selling book Made to Stick, summarise their findings this way:

"Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they're simple--that they reflect your core message."3

1. Moore, M.H. & Khagram, S. 2004, On Creating Public Value: What Business Might Learn from Government about Strategic Management, Harvard.
2. Hasson, U., Ghazanfar, A.A., Galantucci, B., Garrod, S. & Keysers, C. 2012, 'Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world', Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 114-21.
3. Heath, C. & Heath, D. 2007, Made to stick : why some ideas survive and others die, Random House, New York.

Kevin shared this story with me the other day. It's too good not to retell.

A few years back, there was an ad agency called Allen Brady and Marsh (ABM). It was a very showbiz agency, and not very fashionable. They were pitching for the British Rail account against some very good agencies and to say they were considered 'underdogs' would be an understatement.

If they were to stand any chance of winning this account they had to find a way to prove they knew something the other, more fashionable agencies didn’t.

Apparently, on the day of the pitch, the top management team of British Rail turned up at the ABM offices. When they arrived at reception it was deserted.

The Chairman checked his watch, and they were on time.

He looked around, and there was no one in sight — just a very scruffy reception area littered with crumpled newspapers, food wrappers, cigarette butts, and cushions with holes burned in them.

It looked like the worst agency they’d ever been in.

Eventually, a scruffy woman appeared and sat behind the desk. She ignored them and started rummaging in a drawer. The Chairman coughed. She ignored him, so he coughed again.

Silence.

He said, “Excuse me, we’re here to see ...” The woman replied, “Be with you in a minute love.”

He said, “But we have an appointment ...” and she replied abruptly, “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

The Chairman was fuming. “This is outrageous" he said, "we’ve been waiting more than fifteen minutes.”

“Can’t help that love” the receptionist replied.

The Chairman had enough. “Right that’s it, we’re leaving” he declared, and the top management team of British Rail started to walk out.

At that very moment, a door opened and out stepped the agency creative director, Peter Marsh.

He’d been watching everything.

He shook the Chairman’s hand warmly and said, “Gentlemen, you’ve just experienced what the public’s impression of British Rail is. Now, if you’ll come this way, we’ll show you exactly how we’re going to turn that around.”

And he took the British Rail management team into the boardroom and went through their pitch about how bright the future could be, if ABM was their agency, which of course, it became.

This story is a great example of someone deliberately doing something remarkable (something people remark on) to make a real impact and to make people feel the need for change. It's these kind of actions that inevitably trigger stories, and positively influence others.

How might you use this aspect of story triggering in your change initiative to show people what is different, not just tell them? How can you make them 'feel' the need for change?

He looks the part; he knows all the right buzzwords; he can quote chapter-and-verse from all the best-known pundits and practitioners. But is it all just empty 'smart-talk'?

Smart-talk is information without understanding, theory without practice - 'all mouth and no trousers', as the old aphorism puts it. It's all too common amongst would-be 'experts' - and likewise amongst 'rising stars' in management and elsewhere.

Even if unintentional on their part, people who indulge in smart-talk can be genuinely dangerous. They'll seem plausible enough at first, but in reality they'll often know just enough to get everyone into real trouble, but not enough to get out of it again. Not helpful...

Smart-talk is the bane of most business - and probably of most communities too. So what can we do to catch it? What can we do to tell the difference between real experience and mere smart-talk?

The answer: get them to tell a story.

Someone who really does know what they're talking about will be able to reel off one real story after another from their own experience, and describe alternative scenarios, adapted from other contexts, other companies, even other industries. By contrast, the smart-talk pundit will be able to deliver someone else's story, or quote theory at us, but won't be able to give a real story of their own.

To identify a real story, we're looking for the usual criteria:

• a time - "last summer", "back in 2003", "when we were in the early part of the project"
• a place - "Vancouver", "our office", "up in the mountains"
• one or more people - "June Thomas", "her boss", "that guy with the curly hair"
• a sequence of events - "this happened, and then that happened"

and, usually:

• a 'why' or lesson-learned, often in the form of a punch-line - "and that's how we came to open our office in Beijing"

A story is always about people rather than things, and about experience and lessons-learned rather than ideas or theory. For practice to help you identify real stories, try Anecdote's The Story Test: ten real examples of would-be business-stories. (There's also a really useful commentary-post by Shawn Callahan, 'The StoryTest results', on the Anecdote website.)

It'd also be useful to trawl through your Zahmoo story-collection, to pick out appropriate stories as a gentle challenge in hiring and the like. Present the story to the candidate, asking them to reframe the story from their own experience. Ask them to change the details, to try a different context, a different real-world problem to resolve: those who only have smart-talk will struggle, whereas those with real experience will have no trouble at all.

I wanted to concentrate on the 'how-to' part, so this post itself isn't much of a story! But a simple test-exercise for you: how would you reframe this as a story, from your own experience of catching someone indulging in smart-talk? Who are the people in the story? Where, and when? What happened - the sequence of events, the punch-line? And what did you learn from it?

Smart-talk is the bane of business: catch it with a simple story.

----

This post was authored by Tom Graves and originally posted on the Zahmoo blog.

Image credit: Elegant smart friend by Matthew Fang under a Creative Commons BY-2.0 licence.

We are all looking for better ways to sell.

Better ways to build relationships with our clients. Better ways to understand their needs. Better ways to communicate our products and services with impact.

We all want to stand out from our competitors.

Anecdote's Storytelling for Sales Program develop's your story skills to do exactly that.

There are now only 2 days to go before we run our first Storytelling for Sales public workshop here in Melbourne this Wednesday (the 20th March 2013).

Tickets for this special workshop are only $695, but there are only a few places left, so you'll need to be in quick.

To register please go here.

Every two months an email arrives that I am always happy to receive. Its the bi-monthly newsletter from the Awesome Stories website.

Awesome Stories is designed as an educational website that makes primary source material available to the general public. Much of the material is normally available only via national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies etc. The stories are used to place these materials in context and make them much more accessible.

There are numerous categories: biographies, disasters, history; philosophy, sports, the arts, trails and flicks.

The site might be designed for educators, but it's also very valuable in organisations. If you are looking for a story to use in a presentation or to support a point, this is a great resource. A word of warning though: it's very easy to lose yourself for a few hours on the site :-)

Leaders should find and tell stories to help their people understand the concrete actions needed to get a job done, enact a business value or even implement a strategy. Stories are our user manuals for life. 

There's a tendency, however, for leaders to find and tell the big stories in the business—it's human nature. For example, we did some work for one of the national supermarket chains and they wanted to embed the principle "take me, show me." This simply means if a shopper asks, for example, what aisle the tofu is in, rather than quoting an aisle number they would take the shopper to where the product is located.

They started collecting stories and were so excited to find this one: an elderly gentlemen, who visits the supermarket regularly and knows the staff, falls over, hits his head and falls unconscious. The employees find his home address in his wallet and as he is taken to the hospital they drive  to his home to let his wife know what happened and then they take her to the hospital. The employee stays with the wife until they are certain everything is OK.

Great customer service, right. But how often does this happen? I would say, very rarely. And does it help embed "take me, show me"?

The supermarket accident incident is an example of a story that has low frequency and high impact, but overly focusing on it probably isn't helping you achieve your business outcome of embedding the principle of "take me, show me."

A better strategy is to find and tell the many smaller stories that are happening every day. For example, as the store manager you see David in aisle 23 being asked by a shopper where a product is. David is busy packing shelves but he steps down from his ladder, and with a smile, casually escorts the customer to the product. So now the store manager is talking to Gerry in aisle 12 and mentions what he just saw David did (i.e.., he tells the story) and how much he appreciates this behaviour. And of course, during the day he pops on over to David and praises him for his customer service.

If the store manager tells the many small yet regularly occurring stories, each with a similar theme or message, a larger story emerges in the workplace that is the sum total of these many small stories. Employees start to see the evidence that this is how things work around here. Robert Cialdini's concept of social proof is triggered and people will begin the adopt this behaviour: it's what everyone else is doing.

Thanks to Kevin for the terrific conversation that sparked this post and for Daryl's sketches.

A particular type of story that gets retold in organisations is the story about when ‘power’ was challenged and the result.

We collected the following story from a client about how challenge, or more accurately, a perceived challenge, was handled by their former chief executive:

Keith just asked a question during one of John’s Chief Executive Roadshows, and all he was really saying was, ‘I think there’s a problem. We need to fix it’. Keith wasn’t having a go at John, just trying to get a problem fixed. But apparently after that session, John pulled him aside and tore a strip off him, and that story went through this place like Epsom salts. From then on, no-one was going to open up in those sessions.

Some work we did recently with a City Council gave us a contrasting example.

On our first visit to the council’s main building, we found that the receptionist was very efficient – a little abrupt perhaps, but she left you in no doubt as to what was required of you as a visitor and the processes and procedures you had to follow. When we were in a lift with our client, we made a light-hearted comment about how efficient the receptionist was. The client laughed and told us a story about the day their CEO walked into the building to find she’d left her ID pass in her car. The receptionist denied her access. The CEO shrugged her shoulders and, without saying a word, went back to her car to get her pass. The next time we were at the council building, someone else told us exactly the same story. It had obviously had an impact across the organisation.

So what stories about challenging 'power' are being told in your organisation? What do they say about your culture? If you wanted to trigger a different story around this how could you do it?

Love to hear your views