Small Accomplishments are Your Most Compelling Stories

Personal stories showing how your new product or service solves a problem or meets a need are a great way to lead your two-minute presentation. Stories can be engaging, especially when written in the first person. But in the two-minute format, you can only afford about 25 words for your lead. So keep it brief.

Get to the point quickly and spend more time answering the questions posed in the Two-Minute Forum checklist available on the MVF website under Two-Minute Documents. The checklist is the result of feedback on hundreds of presentations. Following the checklist will also keep you within the bounds of Securities & Exchange Commission securities regulations.

When writing your presentation, remember that the dollars you seek will not solve problems on their own. Funding simply helps you scale solutions that you should have already defined, if not implemented. Have you tested your solutions through sales, working closely with customers, beta tests, small-scale implementations or other direct customer feedback? If so, make sure to cover it. Relate the assistance you seek to achieving milestones that you have already defined. Few investors will fund a project that is still meandering toward an unknown solution.

Every venture boasts hockey-stick growth. So spend most of your pitch on explaining what you can accomplish in the short term. Then do it. Meeting your forecasts is more likely to reassure investors that you can follow through and achieve return on their investment. So what are your near-term milestones? Which ones have you met? What is the reasonable next step to take? Relate your funding needs to that step, and convince investors that step-by-step you can get to real and significant growth.

Want change? What Self-Image Are You Offering?

After decades of training, and years of making daily life-saving decisions, doctors may have developed a self-image which does not include checklists. Like the rest of us, doctors may not want to be reminded of their limitations. In the world of process improvement where I come from—and that’s what we are talking about here—the hard part is seldom designing a better procedure (aka: checklist), but how you will get people to use it. As evidenced by Dr. Pronovost’s resignation that checklists may never be accepted in US Medicine, he is recognizing the greater challenge: changing doctor’s behavior.

As practical and apparently effective as Dr. Pronovost’s checklists are, his strategy for adoption is, apparently, ineffective. Process improvement consultants today include a “buy-in plan” as part of any initiative. Many companies today have “change management” managers responsible for stewarding new ways of doing things. Like we ask our change-initiative clients to consider, what self-image are you asking people to accept when you ask them to change? Are you asking people to accept a story that they have failed, that they are incompetent, forgetful? Given that medicine has—as Robin Moroney of the Wall Street Journal aptly points out—gone the route of specialization over process, it was predictable that Medicine would chafe at a procedural cure.

Furthermore, the protestations of some doctor’s groups that one can’t possibly make a procedure for everything, grotesquely distorts the truth that codification of a few important and simple procedures can make a big difference. Dr. Pronovost has proven that, as have many others in scientific, technical and business disciplines.

But what successful change-agents do that apparently Dr. Pronovost has not done is offer an alternative self-image for doctors as attractive as the one that he seeks to replace. If you are going to challenge doctor’s self-image of expertise, then you must replace it, for example, with one of selfless service to patients, and leadership by example.

Can we find an effective counter-story, a countervailing machismo for the hyper-competent, cool and collected doctor? A culturally-shared story that occurs to me is that scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the engineers at Houston Control have to design a procedure—a checklist—for the astronauts to use to assemble improvised filters to remove toxic levels of CO2 gas from the cabin air. Later mission control boss played by Ed Harris commands “failure is not an option.” And with that, the men of Mission Control get busy making their lists and savings astronauts. Ed Harris’ character Gene Kranz challenged one self-image and offered another: He challenged mission engineers’ by-the-book thinking with throw-the-book-out and-improvise-a-new-book thinking. Kranz offered an equally appealing self-image for his engineers. What is Dr. Pronovost offering doctors?

Dr. Pronovost writes about Medicine lacking a discipline of medicine-delivery. He may be right. But that will take years—probably decades—to change. But immediately with each proposal he can borrow from the business-improvement playbook: Every change needs a change-management plan. Every self-image that you will challenge needs an appealing replacement. Every storyline that you want to re-write needs a new story. Dr. Pronovost, what is your story for doctors?

How can something be so simple yet so impossible?

If a drug saved 1,500 lives and millions of dollars, we would see commercials for it on TV. Doctors across the country would be demanding it from their hospitals. In fact, Dr. Peter Pronovost, intensive care specialist, Johns Hopkins University Hospital, saved the state of Michigan more than $100 million and 1,500 lives over an 18-month period by teaching doctors to use something more prosaic than a new drug. He taught them to use checklists.

Now, when I say ‘checklist,’ business people typically think of job aids commonly deemed by a work group as the minimum tasks required to ensure a job-well-done. It is not that workers don’t know what to do without a checklist. Rather, it is that in the real world with interruptions and distractions it is easy for anyone no matter how skilled to miss something, or simply forget if a task has been completed. In my marketing and business-improvement work, I often help teams come up with their own checklists. Teams usually see lists as helpful because they ensure consistency and engender trust among co-workers. Everybody ends up looking good. Here is the kind of list that Pronovost was using:

• Doctors should wash their hands with soap, and wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves


• Clean the patient’s skin with Chlorhexidine, a chemical antiseptic common in hospitals


• Avoid insertion of the catheter in the femoral (groin) area which has a higher infection rate


• Take the catheter out when it is not needed


• Use sterile drapes over the entire patient, a common practice in hospital intensive-care units.

Nothing high-tech here. Within three months of implementing the checklist, the likelihood of following all these steps went from 30% to nearly 100%, and infection rates dropped to near zero.

Stories this week in The New Yorker magazine and National Public Radio recount the dramatic results Dr. Pronovost showed in trial usage of such lists in the intensive care unit of the resource-starved Sinai-Grace Hospital in inner-city Detroit. Results were jarring enough so that the state of Michigan requested that Dr. Pronovost test checklists state-wide in reducing infection due to catheter use. State-wide results were equally as jarring.

Would you rather look like a test pilot or a nerd?

So why haven’t doctors jumped all over this? Why aren’t checklists —as posited by New Yorker journalist and surgeon Atul Gawande—as ubiquitous as stethoscopes? After all, checklists have been proven to save lives, and stethoscopes have not.

Dr. Pronovost holds out little hope that checklists will ever be widely adopted in US medicine. “At the current rate, it will never happen,” Pronovost said. “The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science.”

To explain but not excuse this disconnect, Gawande adeptly selected the analogy of the test pilot cowboy culture. As planes became ever more complex, pilots missed mundane flap-releases and pressure checks. They crashed. They died. The engineers survived. A culture of safety and procedure ascended. Like aircraft, hospitals have become exponentially more complex. It’s not a matter of expertise, but a matter of human capacities.

Maybe what we need is to ‘sex up’ the idea of checklists. Can we find an effective counter-story, a countervailing machismo for the cowboy test pilot image? The closest culturally-shared story that I can come up with is that scene in the Apollo 13 where the engineers at Houston Control have to design a procedure—a checklist—for the astronauts to use to assemble improvised filters to remove toxic levels of CO2 gas from the cabin air. Later mission control boss played by Ed Harris commands “failure is not an option.” And with that, the boys of Mission Control (all males) get busy making their lists and savings astronauts. What kind of impending disaster will it take to get doctors busy making checklists?

Dr. Pronovost, maybe you need to hand out DVD’s of Apollo 13 with every proposal. Or maybe you can find some doctor-movie where the nerdy checklist doctor-guy saves the patient, or maybe even an entire city? Maybe, instead of that clunky clip board, you can hand out PDA’s or iPhones, anything brightly lit and rechargeable that looks cool when you pull it out of a lab coat pocket.

OK, so maybe I am being glib. But we in business as in medicine must recognize the conceit that we are asking our people to make when we ask them to use job aids like lists, or to accept improvement initiatives more broadly. Nobody enjoys admitting that they are fallible (e.g.: human). Not customer service personnel, not mechanics. Not doctors. What self-image are we are asking our people to adopt?

I have no background or expertise to evaluate Dr. Pronovosts’ assertion that a new discipline of medicine-delivery is needed to address error rates that in other settings would never be tolerated. Yes, 1% error as measured in hospitals in Pronovosts’ studies is at least an order of magnitude worse than quality levels measured in hundreds of thousands of adequately run product and service companies across this nation.

But I guess that setting up a new branch of medicine will take awhile. For now, Dr. Pronovost, where is your Houston Control story? So I ask you Dr. Pronovost, and my business manager-readers, what self-image are you offering? What is your story?

Finding stories in performance

So often we tell people what we mean when we would be better served to show them. This example is not a story per se, but an example that would make a great story. It is based on a performance I attended last week. And it a dynamic example of continuous-improvement in action. To see what I mean, check out San Jose Taiko.

Growth so often requires increasing the quality of what you do (otherwise, you grow your capacity to waste resources while you grow your capacity to produce goods & services), so part of our business is assisting companies with quality initiatives. While this may sound simple, getting people to really accept the concept of continuous improvement and apply it to their work lives has proven to be a formidable challenge.

San Jose Taiko grew out of the Japanese tradition of drumming in time of war and festival. Taiko remains a popular format in Japan, where local festivals and civic gatherings often include Taiko performances. San Jose Taiko hails from the Japantown section of San Jose, CA. All its members were born in the US. They have been performing outside of their Buddhist temple for at least a dozen years, and have been playing as a group for 34 years.

Saturday’s Taiko at COCA in University City, MO, was as much performance as demonstration. Between routines, the musicians explained that each time they approach the drums, they do so with the attitude that something can be improved. While San Jose Taiko says that they continue to improve, it was not evident to me that anything needed improvement. In an hour-long performance resembling a synchronized martial arts demonstration as much as music, I did not discern so much as a missed beat.
That “attitude” of continuous improvement is the first of Taiko’s four principles, as the group members explained.

Second is “key” or energy, which is the life-force and enthusiasm that is so evident in their performance. While pounding the drums, the performers share encouragement with one another, with loud, guttural monosyllabic outbursts that would seem menacing if not belayed by their beaming smiles back and forth. “We pass energy among us, and to the audience. And the audience passes it back to us,” one musician said.

In each performance piece, six or more performers stood behind or near their drum in a specific pose, or kata, which resembles a martial arts pose. Katas, which translates as Form, is the third of Taiko’s four principles. As in many martial arts traditions, there are no written instructions, but a vocabulary of movements which is passed down from teacher to student. In Taiko, the student learns the kata vocabulary one pose at a time. The kata vocabulary also includes various grips of the drum sticks, or bacci, as well as drum-striking techniques. Over time, students assemble the vocabulary into routines or full katas just as a martial arts student assembles jumps, kicks, punches blocks and grabs until the individual movements coalesce into a recognizable routine.

Taiko is just as acrobatic as martial arts. Players jumped and spun from drum to drum, swinging and striking at drums with large baccis that could have easily caused injury if intercepted by a fellow player’s elbow.

Taiko’s fourth principle is musical technique. This concept is perhaps most familiar to us in the Western mindset, and most often the subject of training and improvement initiatives. But in Eastern traditions, it is the last of four improvement principles. The drummers’ performance was rich with call-and-response, syncopation, timing changes and intricate drumming routines. Their performance often reminded me of kind of precision and virtuosity that I have seen in a big university marching bands and drum lines.

Watching the performance it occurred to me that Taiko could serve as an apt case study in team-based continuous improvement, or Kaisen. The highly coordinated movements and percussion performance would be a dynamic example of team performance improvement in action, literally. Video segments of their performance and practices may demonstrate kaisen techniques. Right now this is just an idea. But look for Taiko in a future BentonsEdge quality training video.

So an engineer walked into a bar...

What happens when an engineering approach is applied to business communications? An engineering approach might call for deconstructing complex ideas into symbols, then reassembling the elements. Incongruously, technologists often take the same approach when explaining what they do for customers. Have you ever received a chart jammed with squares, circles, globes, arrows, all kinds of shapes connected by lines and arrows? If so, an engineer was attempting to reduce what he does to its essence in the hope that you—ostensibly the receiving engineer—would reconstitute the message from the symbols. Here is a recent example of what we encountered and how we used a simple visual story instead.


Before there was a flow chart there was a story. Click the above graphic to download the one-pager that shows how we helped one engineering team get back to their story.

Getting across the time relationships or relative importance between events assumes that your audience understands your symbolic language. But symbols, like letters of some strange new alphabet, have no intrinsic meaning.

Before a technologist could construct the boxes, circles, arrows and lines, he had to assemble a narrative about how, when and why things happened. In short, he created a story first. So, listen for the story.

Regardless of the technical training of the listener, we all understand and enjoy stories. No need to jump into abstract symbols. Show interaction among characters. Include objects that have intrinsic meaning for your audience. Show benefits being delivered, albeit metaphorically. Organize your story in time or space, and you can show people what you do.

Click TellingYourStory.com to learn more.

Help People Relate to Your Law Firm Using Stories: Nursing Home Malpractice Example

Professional services, legal services in particular, lend themselves to storytelling. So it is a mystery to me why most purveyors shroud what they do in stilted language devoid of emotional content. Rather, the subject matter cries out for storytelling.

Rather than reciting the typical laundry list of capabilities, in this example we describe a legal specialty with a story. Read on:

After years of caring for her husband at home, our client Mrs. Williams sought nursing home care for her husband. She was reluctant at first, but as his dementia worsened and her own health declined, adequate care became impossible without help. Mrs. Williams visited homes and interviewed staff before finally selecting a home that seemed safe and clean. It was nearby, and she visited each day at lunchtime. Things seemed to be OK, for a while.


One day, Mrs. Williams received a call informing her that her husband had suffered a fracture in his left leg. The home said that he had been treated and was resting comfortably. With each visit, however, her husband seemed worse. One morning, Mrs. Williams arrived unusually early for her visit. Her husband’s room was unkempt. She smelled a foul odor, and then noticed a dark stain on his bed sheets.

Alarmed, she lifted the sheets to find maggots infesting several ulcers in her husband’s leg. He eventually lost his leg.

Despite what you may see on visiting day, sometimes a single nurse may be assigned to care for up to 40 patients at a time. Lack of care is a violation of strict state and federal regulations. Not only do neglect and substandard care deprive your loved ones of their dignity, but such actions can frequently cause physical injury as well. Understaffing may increase nursing home profits, but our loved ones pay the price.

The expert witnesses that are required to make a case may include gerontologists, nutritionists, nursing home administrators, and wound-care specialists – and can cost $25,000 to $50,000 or more. If we take your case, we pay for everything. Furthermore, we only receive payment for fees and expenses if we collect.

Mr. Williams will never get his leg back. But we obtained a settlement that helped him and his family to purchase a new home, and quality in-home care. Our elders, many of whom live in nursing homes, built this country. They deserve dignity in their later years, and we can help ensure that they get it.

Why Do Most Attorneys Hide Their Stories?

Most legal services are sold on relationships. You call a lawyer because someone recommends them, or you met them. So why are most attorney’s web sites, and legal marketing in general, so impersonal? It’s as if showing us who they are as people is somehow unprofessional. Well, I was fortunate enough to have a law-firm client who understood that the more effectively the firm connects with prospects, the more likely they were to land the client.

We interviewed each principal of the firm and had them tell their stories in full-page profiles. Though present, their education and experience was de-emphasized. Rather, we had the attorney tell us what motivated them, and why they did what they did. Wolfgram & Associates is a personal injury firm. Personal injury law involves, as I learned, delving into people’s problems. Medical problems. Personal problems. Frankly, I found it really depressing. So if you’re going to do personal injury law, and be effective at it. You really have to want to help people. Because every day when the attorney picks up the phone, they welcome tragedy into their offices.

Like magnets for misery, personal injury attorneys attract regular folks in the worst of circumstances. By definition, personal injury clients have demonstrable, compensable losses. Moreover, personal injury clients have more often than not been wronged by arrogant insurance companies, disrespected or dismissed by indifferent hospital administrators, abandoned by friends and spouses. You meet crippled, brain-injured, suffering children. You comfort people in the cold face of losses so profound and untimely that I hope you and I will never know them. Yet, as a personal injury attorney you must rise to the occasion each and every day and be a comfort for humble people in such circumstances.

At the same instant you as an attorney must be a fighter to get respect from in-house council and insurance adjusters who see your client as an acceptable loss, as a data point in a numbers game. ‘Fight every claim no matter the merits or they will all come knocking,’ is opposing council’s attitude more often than not.

In the face of all this, personal injury attorneys simply must have a fire in their bellies for justice and something in their DNA that drives them to help people. Otherwise, they would become casualties themselves.

And all this became clearly evident in the stories the attorneys told, about themselves, their clients, their cases. This was done with sensitivity and without coming close to violating any standards of conduct. Attorneys are, after all, people with feelings and emotions. And when clients sense your humanity, they will be drawn to you. Because they know that you care, and that you will fight for them, they will hire you.

Check out the site Wolfgram & Associates, and decide for yourself if feelings, emotions and stories are consistent with professional communication.