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....