Mark had a mind for facts and figures. He knew policy, precedent, laws and legal frameworks. So it was a surprise when his boss called him in to discuss his effectiveness. It seemed that while nobody doubted Mark was super-clever, his knowledge didn’t help them act. His contributions confused people. His presentations, were, frankly, boring. It seemed all that skill and information was going to waste.
Mark’s boss was concerned. She was often asked to demonstrate the value of her team to the business and that meant proving that the knowledge and wisdom they contributed made a difference to the bottom line.
When she talked to Mark she realised he hadn’t grasped the importance of selling in his thinking. He’d understood all the technical, intellectual parts of his job but not that he needed to facilitate action.
What Mark needed was the ability to turn facts into business stories so he could engage, galvanise, inspire and facilitate others to action. He needed stories to harness people to the cause – and first he needed to invest in his own recommendations and back himself.
What Do You Mean By ‘Story?’ Do I Have To Start With “Once Upon A Time“?
Don’t worry, these are not children’s stories, these are business stories. Storytelling is the communication of a chain of events intended to inspire action. In business it is usually factual, and always directional – with a beginning, middle and end.
There are widely accepted to be 7 different types of narrative. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting on LinkedIn how these can be used for different business purposes.We are obsessed with stories because we find it easier to extract meaning from them than from raw information. Stories are information in digestible form.
Stories are the also the easiest way to create commitment and action. As psychology tells us, we are wired to make good- enough decisions, not great decisions. Because thinking is hard work and energy-inefficient, our brains use biases and heuristics like stories to convince us to act. And according to Daniel Kahneman, father of behavioural economics, a good, tidy story is likely to be particularly convincing.
Many religions have books or oral traditions full of stories intended to inspire and guide the behaviour of the masses. They may be historical, mythical, or metaphorical, but they are designed to create and reinforce particular belief or action.
Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, takes it one step further. He proposes that man’s sophisticated developments in areas like science are due to our unique ability to collaborate flexibly with huge numbers of people – even from the past and future – receiving and passing on learning. He puts this superior collaboration down to the power of sharing beliefs in what he calls ‘myths’. Myths are concepts like nationality, religion, goals, values, passions. Some, like nationality or religion are so strong that we would give our lives for others who share this ‘myth’, even though we have never met.
Of course, office life would be rather messy if our colleagues gave up their lives for a strategy we recommend, but there’s power in the shared conviction that results from a well structured and presented story.
What Did Stories Ever Do For Me?
Storytelling has four main benefits
- Creates Engagement: we only have so much headspace in a world where we typically receive 174 newspaper’s worth of information daily. Stories take precedence.
- Creates Emotional Engagement: emotion is a physiological response, mostly there to spur us to some sort of action. By eliciting emotion in the listener, we physiologically support the action we need.
- Creates Action: galvanises intent and teams to create the world and rewards promised in the story. It does this by harnessing the right side of the brain as well as the left.
- Spreads and Gathers Support: Acting like a meme, it is remembered and easily and often repeated
Top Tips for Storytelling
You can start getting benefits from storytelling right away. Here are three things you can do this week to help yourself become more effective:
- When you communicate, be conscious of the result you want – stories can’t be powerful if they have no meaning
- Love your verbs. Throw away academic language and embrace powerful expression. Use active tense and active verbs.
- Use pictures that elicit (rather that represent) the desired emotion in your audience. If the picture doesn’t make you feel something, it’s not adding to your story – don’t use it.
I’d love to hear about your storytelling successes, challenges and questions.
Don’t forget to follow the posts on LinkedIn for more inspiration on the 7 types of narrative and how you can use them to increase your impact.
