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.

Remember your last trade show?

Think about your booth or poster presentation for a minute. Is it jam-packed with data? Now ask yourself, how many people out of ten that walk by are pausing by your display? How much time does it take to grasp your message? Does your display tell a story that people will remember? Can you use your display to engage people in conversation?

Click here to learn more, or call us at (314) 772-1185.

How well are you relating to your audience? Are you making it easy for them to see themselves working with you? If you throw data at people you are forcing them to search through information and make judgments about what may be relevant. So, for the data hounds among us, who is really telling your story; you or the viewer?

On the other hand if you show that you understand your audience by reflecting their immediate concerns in your display, they will want to talk to you. And isn’t that why you came to the show?

Click TellingYourStory.com to learn more.

Join us for "Coffee with the Experts" Wednesday, June 13th, 8:00am at the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Washington University. The panel of experts will include:

Rex Reed, Executive Director for Community Relations, the YouthBridge Association, www.youthbridgeassociation.org, addressing the structural needs of children’s charities by blending entrepreneurial thinking with the best business practices of successful social agencies

Dan Davison, Founder & CEO, BentonsEdge LLC, www.bentonsedge.com, sales and marketing for technology companies

Mary Kay Digby, Social Entrepreneurship Collaboration Coordinator, Skandalaris Center

If you would like to make a 10-minute appointment with the panel, to have some coffee and talk about your idea, contact Jane Yorker at yorker@wustl.edu or 314.935.9134. If you haven't already done so, you will be required to post a brief description of your idea to www.ideabounce.com prior to the Coffee.

Originally published June 7, 2007, as an e-mail sent from the BentonsEdge web site. Written by Dan Davison.

Stories Help Convert Free Beta Users to Paying Subscribers

Last week I met with the executives from a relatively new company that is offering a faster Internet service for PC gamers. Their immediate challenge is converting free beta trial-users into paying customers. A trial makes for a pretty good self-test of benefit. Users can prove it to themselves. But people can quickly become habituated to a higher level of service, and lose the emotional spark required to push them to action, to sign up and pay. Therefore you have to tell the Value-Story™ as well. Ironically, demonstrating value is not enough! You’ve probably seen the same thing yourself. So we are looking at ways to demonstrate value and simultaneously tell users about the benefits that they are getting. Let’s engage emotion and rational thought to get those beta-users to sign up and pay for that great service!

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.

Emotion: "Homeless. Will Work for Food" Works!

People are moved to action more by a single example—as in one sunburned, long-bearded guy at the exit ramp, or one poor up-gazing child—than by the statistics that describe an entire population. Just think about Al Gore’s approach when he ran for president against George Bush. Compare that to his approach selling the concept of Global Warming with his movie, Inconvenient Truth. In the movie, Gore sells a bleak vision. Though he uses statistics extensively, each instance is backed up by a story.

Sell against the pain

Gore moves us to action by showing us what we are losing. Remember, ‘loss’ is more real than ‘gain’ because I can see and touch the elements of my loss. When selling against pain, the communications challenge is much easier. We need only demonstrate significant risk to stir emotion. So seek out pain and risk, find sources of fear, and find headaches. There, you will find emotion. Use stories to show how you can eliminate pain, risk, fear and headaches. Your point of view becomes naturally attractive.

Selling to the pain helps you as the communicator. By focusing on the alleviation of pain, you are more likely to understand your listener’s self-interest. You are more likely to be relevant and you can borrow existing emotional power.

When you must sell the benefit

Future benefits are more abstract. Future benefits require people to envision something that they have never seen. And few benefits elicit an emotional response powerful enough to move people to action. For example, it is difficult to get people to forgo current spending (creates PAIN today) to save money for the future (may offer GAIN in the future).

But when you sell future benefits, use inspirational stories and legends. The schoolteacher retired rich by living modestly. Scrawny, poor kids Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich became world-wide cycling legends by always working harder than anyone else. Warren Buffett cites the Russian immigrant who built a $100 M furniture store chain on $500 cash and hard work.

People only feel for other people, not abstractions. So use stories about people. Relate your facts to people.

Credibility: Let them prove it to themselves

People don’t really buy into case studies. They are simply looking for a context into which they can plug their own particulars, then run through and test for themselves. So the best credibility is that which people create for themselves by asking and answering questions in the context of your story. For example, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan, 1980. No matter the reality, most people answer that question in the negative. That lent credibility to Reagan’s position.

Sources of credibility:

• The best proof is that which the listener proves to himself (see Reagan example). Make claims that are easy for listeners to test, like “Where’s the Beef?!” They can go to any Wendy’s restaurant and look for themselves.
  

• “I saw it with my own eyes!” Provide opportunities for listeners to see, hear, touch, taste, and feel, for themselves. Want to sell corn? Feed them corn bread.
  

• Contrite or antiauthority: Cancer patient warning us not to smoke.
  

• Details lend credibility…he couldn’t have made up all those details, it must be true! But don’t make it complicated (SIMPLE) or attempt to clear up miscommunication by adding more detail (CONCRETE).
  

• When using facts and statistics, bring it to a human scale. For example, illustrate a big number with an equivalent amount of BB’s in can, and shake it. Rather than talking about billions in the world, talk about hundreds in my neighborhood.

• Involve your audience. Tell a scary story or an apt anecdote, no matter how statistically insignificant the occurrences. It will make your major point seem real.
  

• Using experts to lend credibility is less effective than you may think. Listeners often don’t understand what makes the person an expert. So the listener has to take your word for it that the person is an expert. And you’re no expert. Nobody cares what degrees people have. A human-scale story by a peer to your listener will convince the listener more than the insights from an expert.

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that...concrete

Your story must be relevant before it can be concrete. So keep in mind that the subject matter that you select should never be about you, but about your listener. Truly listen to your audience to find the ballpark in which they are playing. Identify a context that has meaning for them. This is not to say that you should respond to stake-holders point for point. Storytelling is more creative, more interesting than that. Do not react. Rather, elevate the conversation above the finger-pointing. Be relevant, not reactive. A good story leads listeners to generalize. When listeners generalize, they convince themselves of your point of view. But when you do it, you are simply not listening. Here are three points to keep in mind:

• Most business communications is hopelessly abstract. Bring everything to a human scale. Don’t concern yourself with telling the “whole story.” Nobody cares but you. Give a human-scale example to which people can relate, and from which they will generalize.

• Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. Use names, faces, places. Think like a newspaper reporter.
  Show. Don’t snow. That is, showing with a carefully chosen detail is more effective than snowing your listener with superfluous facts. Experts react to miscommunication by increasing elaborateness. Don’t do it!

• When you have to be abstract, use metaphors. For example, illustrate Global Warming or Climate Change with a globe sitting in a steam bath, or anthropomorphize the globe showing it with an ice pack on its head and a thermometer in its mouth. Turn a strategy into a game, or a capabilities presentation into cartoon characters doing things.

To Stand Out, Make it Unexpected

People naturally look for patterns. In fact, we spend our lives developing and testing patterns to live by. Most of the time, patterns help us evaluate information efficiently and accurately. But they also exclude much new information. So if you are communicating something new, first you most push people out of their patterns. Help them jump the groove. Go against conventional wisdom. Challenge assumptions. Open gaps in people’s knowledge. Then fill them with something new. Violate people’s expectations…that will grab their attention.

Example:
Common perception: Department store service people don’t care about customers. Story: Nordstrom employee accepts return on tire chains even though Nordstrom’s does not sell tire chains (connection plot).
Common perception: An experienced, pro team will always beat the rookies. Story: 1980 US Olympic team beats “Red Machine” Soviet team (challenge plot).

Here are some techniques you can use:

• Mystery: Don’t blurt out everything all at once.
  
• Curiosity: Challenge common knowledge and preconceptions, and then prove your point with concrete steps.
  
• Gaps: Show gaps in your listener’s knowledge, then fill in the gaps.
  
• Insight: Rather than plodding from one incremental step to the next, occasionally you can make leaps. Important ideas give a sudden, dramatic glimpse of how the world might unfold. Then, with your audience listening, walk through the concrete steps.

Simple: Choosing Your Core Message Is the Toughest Part

Prioritize relentlessly. Prioritize based on what is relevant and top-of-mind for your audience, down to only the MOST IMPORTANT, MOST RELEVANT message. Anything else just gets in the way. Avoid the technologist’s need to drag people through the details for the shear joy of it. Proverbs are the ideal. They are simple and profound. Simplicity seems to be the most difficult element of storytelling for most people.

• Keep it focused, really, really focused.
  
• Your stories should be constructed simply, with few paths or options. Don’t provide too much choice…because deer freeze in the headlights, remember?
  
• Once you know something, it is hard to pretend that you don’t. But try to write as if you know nothing, and you’ll be more likely to write at a comprehensible level.
  
• Write about things that you can see (concrete), which will force out the abstract language.
  
• Rather than writing about your “subject”, consider using an analogy with clear implications for your topic. Analogies can be very simple, more interesting, and help people reach their own conclusions. This will help you avoid lecturing to your audience, making it easier to relate to them.

Storytelling for Buy-In and "Made to Stick"

Over the past few weeks I read a book on storytelling as a mode of communication. For me, the work by Chip and Dan Heath, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die: Made to Stick, crystallized an aspect of the work I have been doing in the area of getting buy-in for change. Over the past three years I have been working with organizations and their leaders—CEO’s, sales executives, marketing professionals and executive communications specialists and others—whose success depends upon getting others to come along with them on a trip to the future, to a better place. No matter the situation, the goal is the same: to get people to “buy into” a positive future, a vision they have never seen before, a better place that they have never been.

Prior to reading the book a natural arch of communication evolved from our work in organizational storytelling. We codified the system into what we call ‘steps for getting buy-in.’ And—surprise—our steps contain many of the elements of good storytelling. As a former journalist, present communications professional, copy writer and visual storyteller (www.TellingYourStory.com) perhaps it was inevitable that we would come to something like a storytelling model.

Then as I read Made To Stick and found, conveniently, elements in the Heath’s methodology that mapped to my own. Ideas like “Concrete Steps” and “Stories” that inspire others appear in both. So I bounced my work against what the Heaths. In fact we present the Heath’s model along with our own in the workshop that my company provides on the topic of getting buy-in and storytelling for change in organizations (Seminars & Workshops). Last month (April 2007) we video-recorded one of our workshops, so check back for that in the near future.
In the next few postings I will share with you a high-level summary of the guts of the Heath brother’s approach. It is called the SUCCESs model, a great pneumonic. Now, my posting are my impressions. If you want the Heath’s ideas straight-up, you should read their book. I and clients that have read the book highly recommend it.

By way of preface, let me say that good storytelling starts with listening, real listening. Listening requires humility. You will know that you are humble in your communications when you crave the sound of other people’s voices and shun your own. When you speak it should be to evoke a response, to get other people to speak. When they speak, listen for context. Find the ballpark in which they are playing. Then relate to them with stories on a human scale. If you are effective, your listener will generalize from your story to their situation. In so doing, your listeners will convince themselves. And you will have said precious little.

Now, in the postings that follow, here is my interpretation of the elements of Chip and Dan Heath’s SUCCESs model....

Grab Their Attention Visually

Get more click-through from your e-mail campaigns with visuals, especially illustrations. BentonsEdge helped promote an event for a software consulting company, Brown Smith Wallace Consulting.

Our custom illustrations, e-mails, and web-based lead-generation programs encouraged CIO’s and IT directors to sign up for BSW’s online software trade fair, the “Virtual Trade Fair.” Visitors can browse vendors online, talk to experts, and learn about new software and the change it brings in their companies. In fact, you can drop by the virtual event for free, TODAY, at http://www.virtualtechfair.com/.

BentonsEdge interviewed CIO’s to uncover their pain points, especially the pain implementing change within their own companies. Download the latest case-study to learn more.


BentonsEdge illustrated the pain of change, and built a visual lead-generation program around it. Download the 'change roadmap'.pdf.

Customers know that all high-end software and services require change to occur. You can tap into that fact to promote your programs. Get the 'change roadmap' and lead-generation case-study. And call me for more information at (314) 772-1185.

Craft Your Value Proposition This Friday!

Come work with me for free this Friday, April 27, 2007, at Washington University. I will be working with managers and innovators like you during the Innovators and Entrepreneurs Workshop from 2:30 to 3:45 at the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. For more information, see the Washington University Skandalaris Center web site. I am looking forward to seeing you there!

Please sign up to get the next issue of the BentonsEdge Reporter and receive your free visual story.

Originally published April 26, 2007, as an e-mail sent from the BentonsEdge web site. Written by Dan Davison.