I didn't realise it at the time but when we started this blog back in 2004 we were creating a type of story bank where we could go back and retrieve great stories to tell. Recently we have made this more accessible with Story Finder. We have an even more sophisticated system we use internally that allows us to manage the many stories we collect with our clients.

So I'm facinated how people manage their stories and enjoyed this short clip from a documentary about Joan Rivers on how she keeps track of all her jokes. I'm so happy we started in a digital age and don't have to maintain a card catalogue. Love to hear how you organise your stories, if you do.

Thanks to @makingstories for the link to the Joan Rivers clip

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Telling, telling, telling ...  So many in the field of story work focus on storytelling. Sure, telling a good story at the right time has impact. But storytelling represents a mere fraction of what can be done with business stories.

Here is one little example.

Last year I had a call from Kirstyn. She works in HR for a large engineering firm. Kirstyn runs a program for their graduate employees to build their skills over three years. This firm has some or the world's engineering and scientific experts and the graduate employees get the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with these experts on some amazing projects. The thing is, the graduates often don't make the most of it because they rarely get to hear what these experts have actually done in their careers. Why? Because they graduates are unskilled in asking story-eliciting questions.

So we set about helping about 40 graduate employees learn how to elicit stories from their expert colleagues. And after learning the basics we wheeled in some senior experts as guinea pigs to practice with. It was a great way to practice their new story-listening skills but more importantly it was an opportunity to get to know some of the more senior folk in the firm.

And because we know that people remember what they feel we asked Melbourne Playback Theatre to perform some of the stories the experts shared with the graduates.

Here is one of the stories.

You could hear a pin drop as the graduates heard Clare tell this story and their jaws dropped when Melbourne Playback Theatre performed the story for everyone.

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Thomas Jefferson was a great believer in luck, and he found that the harder he worked the luckier he got. His friend and fellow signatory of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, shared this belief in hard work and self development. From a remarkably young age Franklin understood the importance of practice. Not the kind you get knocking a tennis ball around with friends. But that drilled, repetitive practice of hitting the same shot over and over again. Benjamin, however, didn't have his eye on Wimbledon (actually it's kind of a temporal impossibility), rather his ambition was to be a man of letters.

The Anecdote blog is all about how leaders can return humanity to the workplace and the vital role stories play. I get a little tired of leaders who hear about the value of storytelling and then tell me they don't have the time to learn how to do it. The fact is it takes practice to be good at anything. Some estimate 10,000 hours of practice. But it is not just any type of practice. You need to engage in deliberate practice just like Ben Franklin did to be world the renowned writer and communicator he became.

Terrence Gargiulo and I and going to share some of our ideas about storytelling deliberate practice in a webinar next week. Please feel free to come along and join our conversation.

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

The story about Ben Franklin comes from his autobiography. You can read the whole thing on Google Books.

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I'm looking forward to heading down to the Novatel on the Upper Esplanade in St Kilda for the annual ODA retreat. It all happens on the 24-25 August. I believe there are still some places to be had.

I'll be presenting a couple of sessions on using narrative techniques to support change initiatives. Lots of interesting sessions to attend. I'm looking forward to hanging out there for the two days and dinner and enjoying some excellent conversations.

Here's the website where you can get the details to register etc. Very reasonably priced.

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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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My friend Greg Stewart is putting his blogging efforts at Clarity Rules behind a movement he cares deeply about: the pursuit of clarity.

His manifesto is simple:

There is a great movement afoot, and I want to help:

Tribes have been started by the likes of Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, Nancy Duarte of Slide:ology, Dan Roam, Barbara Minto, Chip and Dan Heath and many others, and more and more, their work is having an effect on all of us:

We are improving the way we think and present.

Clarity Rules is a call to arms in support of this growing movement.

Its goal is to spread this good thinking. To be another voice insisting that clarity is an absolute necessity. To unpick tangled thinking. To smooth out waffle. To kill off bad presenting altogether. I want Clarity Rules to be a place where everyone can come and share their stories of clarity winning over obscurity, and to make sense of how it can be done.

I want use this blog to assemble everyone's great ideas and techniques into a series of Clarity Rules we can all share and use.

So let me add some stories and some ideas for better clarity.

Yesterday I blogged about Richard Branson and his simple story to launch Virgin Money. That’s clarity.

A couple of weekends ago my daughter attended a presentation to help her pass her Japanese exams with 1,000 other Victorian students. The presenter read their slides for 90 minutes. That lacks clarity.

But then the presenter switched gears and had two past students role play a good and bad Japanese exam interview. That’s clarity.

Consultants using big words to make them sound more important and intelligent with gems such as transformational leadership, team-based solutions, re-engineered synergy, enhanced competence and retrospective coherence. That lacks clarity.

One of the reasons why these abstract concepts are lost on us is that we don’t have the real life experiences or stories of others’ experience to make sense of them. They are labels without an anchor.

So here is my clarity rule: when introducing a concept that your audience might unfamiliar with, illustrate the idea with a story to ground it and make it concrete.

Greg’s blog is in my must read RSS list because I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to be a better communicator. Plus he’s a friend. We're never short of something to gas bag about.

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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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I have just finished The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin) a book I have been waiting for some time to come out. I am very glad to say the wait has been well worth it.

Positive deviance has received a lot of attention since the concept was laid out in a series of articles way back in 2000 – one in the Harvard Business Review and the other in Fast Company. The concept has recently received a new boost since it was covered in both Influencer: the Power to Change Anything and by Chip and Dan Heath (where they called them ‘bright spots’) in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

Continue reading "Book Review: The Power of Positive Deviance"

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In our work to help organisations make their strategies stick we often start by helping the executives get clear on their purpose. Why does their enterprise exist? If you have facilitated these types of sessions you probably seen this happen a million times: the group circles in on the essence of what's important and then suddenly they get bogged down nit picking words and trying to incorporate every possibility. In large organisation each executive wants to ensure their part of the business is included in the purpose statement and if you let this happen you end up with mush.

Here's what I do which makes a big difference. Just when they start to get bogged down I call a time out and ask them to watch this video.

From that point on everyone refers back to the Dan's messages and pull each other up when they start acting like a 10th grade school teacher and we move along at pace.

Here is an example of a purpose statement we helped deliver from the Transport Accident Commission: "A future where every journey is a safe one."

It's interesting to note that Dan uses a story to get his message across and clever use of animated graphics.

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Earth Hour has been held annually since 2007, in late March. In that first year, Earth Hour focussed on getting one city, Sydney, to switch off its lights for 60 minutes. In 2010, over 1 billion people participated in 128 countries and over 4000 cities. Where did this global phenomenon originate? What forces were arrayed to make it happen?

I hadn't thought much about those questions until last night, when Shawn and I were at a conference dinner and heard Todd Sampson (of the Gruen Transfer fame...oh yeah, he has also climbed Mt Everest solo) talk about creativity. Todd described how, in 2006, he met with five other people in the Hilton hotel in Sydney. The group wanted to tackle a big question: how do you change people's behaviour for the benefit of the planet without using fear? The answer they came up with… Earth Hour. The World Wildlife Fund got behind the initiative, people's imaginations were ignited and the rest is history.

We are always on the lookout for little things that make a big difference. Earth Hour shows us that we can switch off our lights. Time to start making some beeswax candles in preparation for the next Earth Hour which will be held at 8.30pm 26 March 2011.

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