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.