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Shawn and I have spent the last couple of days working with a client helping them create their strategic story down in the Mornington Peninsula. There are certainly worse places in the world to spend a couple of days than at a winery in such a beautiful spot. It was a throughly enjoyable off-site, made even more so by working with such an energetic, passionate and fun bunch of people.

During lunch yesterday I noticed that Harry, the guy sitting beside me, was checking his emails, and on his screen was the image below from The Sun newspaper.

Obviously curious I asked him what that email was about. He laughed, and then explained it was from one of his guys who organised the teams lottery syndicate. That night was a $70 million jackpot prize on offer in the OZ Lotto, one of the biggest prizes in Australian lottery history, and as yet he hadn't signed, or paid up.

There was no other text in the email. All the person did was send on this story about how an entire Spanish village won part of a £600 million ($960 million) lottery jackpot apart from one resident who got nothing because he didn't buy a ticket.

That was it. They let the story do the convincing. And it worked.

Jonathan Gottschall, a literary scholar, has just written a piece for Fast Company called Why Storytelling is the Ultimate Weapon and in the process has set back the field of business storytelling with his emphasis on fictitious stories.

I can imagine that being a literary scholar gets Jonathan entwined in myths and legends and literary works to a point where it must be hard for him to see the real life stories told every moment of every day in a company. A good business storyteller recounts things that have happened to them or tells the stories they hear about in their company or other companies, and always for a business purpose. Only then should they throw in one or two fictitious tales. For me it's all about understanding the difference between Big 'S' (fictitious, crafted, marketing) and little 's' (real-life, experiences, anecdotes) stories. Jonathan is focussed on Big 'S' storytelling. Big 'S' should be left for Hollywood. Successful business people are more effective telling little 's' stories.

The simple fact is, executives feel more comfortable with little 's' stories and consequently more likely to tell them. I met a CEO the other night at a fund raising dinner. He told me he went to New York to take part in a business storytelling session conducted by actors and everyone had to act out their story. He said it was a painful experience. "I felt like an idiot, it just wasn't my thing." I shared the Big 'S' vs little 's' idea and the relief on his face was instant. I said, "Now you have to get good at noticing stories and retelling them." You only get the benefits of business storytelling if leaders are telling stories.

I agree with Jonathan's point that we need to base business storytelling on a foundation of research. There is defintely a lack of story-specific research being done and applied. But if you dig you will find all sorts of gems like this one we wrote about on how our brains sync when we listen to a story. The research is emerging. Pratitioners need to seek it out and apply the findings.

Executives are wary of made up stories. They duck for cover when you mention fairytales, myths or legends. Most hate the idea of writing their story or acting out a story. It just smacks of hippy idealism and a big waste of time. Jonathan triggers all these stereotypes turning the ultimate weapon into a toothless tiger.

Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson are Princeton University neuroscientists who in 2010 conducted a series of experiments showing that an audience's brains light up (imagine they are all in a fMRI machine) the same way as the presenter's brain when she tells a story. In their words, "Speaker and listener brain activity exhibits widespread coupling during communication." The mere fact that our brain activity gets in sync when we share a story is pretty amazing but there are a couple of other findings which might be even more important. More on that later. But let's start with what they did.

Their experiment (*1) starts with a young woman telling an unrehearsed story about her prom while she is hooked up to a fMRI machine--not the easiest task when telling a gripping story. They recorded her story and her brain activity. Her tale took about 15 minutes to tell.

Here's my potted version of her story (you can read the full transcript in the extended version of the paper). It starts with the storyteller promising Charles she will go to the prom with him and then how she falls in love with another boy, Amir, and promptly forgets about her promise until Charles reminds her - awkward. She decides to keep her promise and on the big day she goes scuba diving with her family and the boat breaks down and she only gets home with five minutes to get ready for the dance. Prom night was tricky because Amir was there and she planned to hook up with him for the after-party but he was getting plastered so she had to drive him to the after-party while he played air guitar. They then see an accident and get distracted (probably by a sizzling guitar solo) and crash into the already smashed cars. The police question her and she gets a lucky break. They're sent home without charge.

With that story duly recorded the researchers choose 12 people and asked each subject to listen to it while they lay in the fMRI tunnel. The first thing the researchers noticed was that the brain activity of the storyteller matched the brain activity of the listener--the same parts of the brain lit up on the fMRI. And as you would expect, there was a small time lag as the listener comprehended the story. The researchers were seeing the brain activity between the speaker and listener synchronise.

To test whether the listener was really responding to what was being said and not just responding to noise, they also recorded a version of the story in Russian and played this to their listening subjects. The result: when the story was in Russian there was no brain activity correlation. The listener had no idea what was being said.

Personally I think this next finding is the most significant. As I've said, you'd expect the brain activity of the listener to lag because it takes a moment to comprehend what's being said. Remarkably, however, the researchers found many times when the brain activity of the listener preceded what was said. The listener was predicting what was coming next--something you can only do listening to a story. And here's the kicker. The subjects who did more predicting did better at the comprehension test they did after they heard the story. Stories are meaningful, and really engaging stories where we are trying to predict what happens next are even more meaningful.

My one frustration with this research, however, is that the researchers seem to only select a story as their example of communication accidently because they didn't go the next step and test the difference between what happens when a story is told compared to when it is a non-story such as an opinion. So I emailed Uri Hasson, the designated correspondence author for this research, and set out my concern. Here is his reply: "We didn't quantify the level of B2B coupling for different communication styles so I can't tell you the answer yet, but I share your intuition that story telling will evoke tighter coupling."

(*1) Stephens, G.J., Silbert, L.J. & Hasson, U. 2010, 'Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 107, no. 32, pp. 14425-30.

The following few paragraphs are part of an exercise I'm doing with Madelyn Blair. We're writing an Essay in Two Voices, a format invented by Madelyn and Victoria Ward I believe. Here, however, you're only hearing one voice, mine. My first part (500 words) is here. Here is my second part (250), which is partly in response to Madelyn's first 500 words. Just as some context, you should know that Madelyn told some anecdotes about stories her grandparents used to tell her.

Family stories are such an interesting case. I know with my daughters they'd always request as youngsters a story I'd make up which we called "A Josie and Ellie story." It had the same premise: two ordinary girls enter a magical world and have magical powers. Coincindentally, Josie and Ellie shared many charcateristics with my two daughters, apart from their names.

When reading your stories about your grandparents I could feel the warmth and patience they felt for you. It got me thinking that stories get retold when they make you feel something. I did a little investigation and found my hunch is supported by research showing that stories with emotion are more likely to get retold. In fact, stories that surprise or disgust us are particularly likely to be shared.¹

Have you heard that story about the wife who cuts off the legs of the turkey and just throws them away before putting the bird in the oven? It's a story that's been retold umpteen times, even by us (http://bit.ly/HH4hhP). I think some of the reasons it gets retold is that it is about ordinary things (food, family, marriage), it's a simple story that copes well with variation (sometimes it's a turkey, a lamb roast etc) and there's a clear reason why you would tell it (it conveys a lesson). It also has that surprise element. There's probably no coincidence that stories in the Bible share these characteristics.

Everyone says emotion is a fundamental feature of stories. While this is true I think we need to delve deeper and work out ways to help people retain their emotions in their stories instead of washing them out to be what they've been told is more busines like.

1. Heath, C., Bell, C. & Sternberg, E. 2001, 'Emotional selection in memes: The case of urban legends', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 81, no. 6, pp. 1028-41.

We can now confirm the venue for our 'Storytelling for Business Leaders' workshops in Boston, on the 5th June, is the Harvard Club of Boston.

It is a truly stunning venue. Full details about it can be found here. If only those walls could talk!

To read more about the course itself and to make use of the 'Early Bird' rates please go to the event page.

Really hope you can join me for a great day learning about story work at this amazing venue.

When asked for the secret of his success in the steel industry, American industrialist Charles Schwab (1862-1939) always talked about using praise, not criticism, giving liberal bonuses for work well done, and "appeal[ing] to the American spirit of conquest in my men, the spirit of doing things better than anyone has ever done them before."

He liked to tell this story, retold in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, about how he handled an unproductive steel mill:

Schwab had a mill manager whose people weren't producing their quota. "How is it that a manager as capable as you can't make this mill turn out what it should?"

"I don't know," the manager replied. "I've coaxed the men, I've pushed them, I've sworn and cussed, I've threatened them with damnation and being fired. But nothing works. They just won't produce."

Schwab asked the manager for a piece of chalk, and asked: "How many heats did your shift make today?"

"Six."

Schwab chalked a big figure six on the floor. When the night shift came in, they saw the "6″ and asked what it meant. "The big boss was in here today, he asked us how many heats we made, and we told him six. He chalked it down on the floor."

The next morning Schwab walked through the mill again. The night shift had rubbed out "6″ and replaced it with a big "7."

When the day shift reported for work the next morning, they saw a big "7″ chalked on the floor. So the night shift thought they were better than the day shift did they? Well, they would show the night shift a thing or two. The crew pitched in with enthusiasm, and when they quit that night, they left behind them an enormous, swaggering "10."

Shortly, this mill, which had been lagging way behind in production, was turning out more work than any other mill in the plant."

Schwab's improvised just-in-time leader board was simple, quick, cheap and powerful. Leaderboards can stimulate and motivate people to succeed. Making outcomes more visible to more people guarantees more discussion about who's successful and why. Leaderboards are therefore a terrific way to trigger stories.

Did you see Dave's team is leading this week, did you hear about that big deal they did last week? See Tracey's guys have gone up since last week after she had them on that training course? What do you think is going on with Gary's team to bomb that badly?

Visible results, tied in with competition, trigger stories. This is a central tenant of the whole gamification movement

Carnegie concludes his anecdote by quoting Schwab: "The way to get things done is to stimulate competition. I do not mean in a sordid, money-getting way, but in the desire to excell."

Obviously, no sane organisation wants a competition right out of David Mamet's Glengarry, Glen Ross. But if it drives the right behaviours and triggers the right stories then it can be a great way to build motivation and increase performance.

I did a blog post in February about reconnecting with an old friend of mine, and how she is one of the most gifted storytellers I know. In that post I said I would be sharing some more of her stories, and here is one she shared with me recently.

A few years back, I attended a reception at Parliament. We wanted to share with selected MPs and officials the results of our research, which showed the considerable contribution our industry made to the country's economy. One of the issues that both sides of the House had had with our industry in the past is that the industry wasn't united, and there was ongoing disharmony. After a round of drinks, the CEO began our presentation. He hadn't got more than a few slides in when the Chairman stood up from the floor, and took over the presentation, leaving the CEO still standing at the podium looking like a deer in the headlights.

Can you imagine how the story of disharmony that the audience were already telling themselves would have just been confirmed as true? How the belief of not being joined up was reinforced by these actions?

This is a classic case of story triggering. By simply taking over from the CEO the Chairman triggered a story amongst the audience, a story that just reinforced their existing beliefs.

There was nothing that could have been said by the Chairmen, or the CEO for that matter, that changed this belief. As the saying goes; "You can't talk your way out of something you have acted your way into".

As soon as I walked into our office I wanted to tell Kevin the story Hugh Grant told on Graham Norton's talk show last night. It was a funny little story; an embarrasing stituation for Hugh in a French train toilet. It made me laugh. And when I told it to Kevin we both laughed together then started our day.

For some time now I've wondered why we retell stories and what makes a story retellable. On the surface I told Hugh's story to simply entertain Kevin and myself. But perhaps there was a deeper motive about reinforcing my identity as someone who likes a laugh. Come to think of it the story is more liikely to be retold among blokes so this story reinforces my identity as a guy.

We run business stortelling training for a bank. We teach at their academy. We hear all sorts of stories from the bankers and many are about their leaders. For example, the CEO this year gathered his top 150 leaders in an auditorium to share the goals for the year. Thirty minutes after everyone was back after morning tea the CEO looked at his watch and said "we are going to take another short break. Everyone be back at 11am sharp." People wandered off and checked their Blackberrys and at 11am the CEO was on the stage waiting. People strolled into the room. At 11.05am the CEO was pacing up and down the stage, clear unhappy. Not everying was back yet. At 11.15am everyone was in their seat. The CEO went ballistic: "How dare you show such disrespect for your colleagues. This tardiness is unacceptable. You're our leaders and you need to lead by example." This story must have been retold hundreds (thousands) of times. All of a sudden people people were attending meetings on time.

We retell stories about leaders because they wield power and their actions can affect us. So we want to know what they're like as a person, what's important to them and how are they likely to react. And because most employees don't get a chance to experience the leader's actions first hand, they need to hear the stories of what the leader does to understand them. As I said in my last post, actions speak louder than words.

We often retell a story to share an insight. My friend Darren (@darrenp3) heard about how a prominent twitterer (@maverickwoman - also a friend) was in New York and looking for a hotel for the night. She tweeted her question and Bryant Park Hotel replied saying that if she went to this website and entered her twitter id she'd get a discount, which she did and was offered a 50% off. @maverickwoman then tweeted all her followers about this great deal but heard back they were only offering her friends 10%. She contacted the hotel and they told her that she got 50% because her Klout score was 57 (an indicator of influence on the web) but her friend only had a score of 15. Darren told this story at least 10 times in 2 days. He was impressed by the sophistication of the hotel and it supported his view of the power of social networking on the web.

There are many more reasons why people retell stories and I'm just starting to explore them more deeply. Would love to hear your thoughts on why you think some stories are retold more than others.