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....