Small Stories Follow and Big Stories Lead

Stories with a small ‘s’ are the tradecraft by which you coax people into adopting or even “stealing” your ideas. In your role as a communicator, you must learn how to spot good stories, and what type of stories will work for your purposes. For example, inspirational stories generally fall into three genres:

• The Challenge Plot: David & Goliath
  


• The Connection Plot: Good Samaritan or Mean Joe Greene/Coke
  


• The Creative Plot/ mental breakthrough: That eureka moment like rigging Apollo 13 to save the astronauts, the apple falling on Newton’s head, or every episode of MacGyver
  

If you have selected relevant stories, then you are showing—rather than telling—how your ideas are relevant to your listener’s world. Yes, stories are anecdotal. And thus they have the power to coax listeners to fill in gaps and make connections from their world, to yours. Your job is to select the stores that reflect your core message, your agenda. You must tell the right story at the right time and tell it artfully. Your listener will do the rest.



Think of Stories with a big ‘S’ as the Big Story, the future that we all want, such as more resources and less work, a more prosperous, less uncertain future, a safe and sustainable environment. CEO’s, presidents, and leaders offer us a positive future, their vision…that is what makes them appear to us as leaders. But the best leaders show a path to the future with concrete steps and the other foregoing elements. In so doing they evoke emotion and move us to action. Big stories in and of themselves do not prompt people to take action. But big stories bolstered by lots of small ones, each built with the elements above, do move us to action.