They present a difficulty, however. In a corporate setting, stories about problems don't flow easily, not only because people fear the consequences of admitting mistakes, but also because, in the flush of success, they tend to forget what they learned along the way. As a result, the knowledge-sharing story cannot be compelled; it has to be teased out. That is, a discussion of successes may be needed to get people to talk about what has gone wrong and how it can be fixed.
Leading People into the Future
An important part of a leader's job is preparing others for what lies ahead, whether in the concrete terms of an actual scenario or the more conceptual terms of a vision. A story can help take listeners from where they are now to where they need to be by getting them familiar and comfortable with the future in their minds. The problem, of course, lies in crafting a credible narrative about the future when the future is unknowable.
Thus, if such stories are to serve their purpose, they should whet listeners' imaginative appetite about the future without providing detail likely to prove inaccurate. Listeners should be able to remold the story in their minds as the future unfolds with all its unexpected twists and turns. And clearly the stories should portray that state in a positive way because people are more likely to overcome uncertainty about change if they are shown what to aim for rather than what to avoid.
Note that telling an evocative future narrative requires a high degree of verbal skill, something not every leader possesses. But the springboard story provides an alternative. Hearing about a change that has already happened can help listeners to imagine how it might play out in the future.
Using the Storytelling Catalogue
The catalogue of narratives constitutes a handy menu of options that can be consulted by executives weaving together a set of stories for a full-scale presentation. Table 1.1 lays out the uses of the various types of stories.
Table 1.1 Eight Narrative Patterns
The point is that there is no single right way to tell a story. Instead, narrative comprises an array of tools, each suitable to a different purpose. Different combinations of story can be woven together as an integrated narrative tapestry. Some examples:
A presentation to introduce a new idea might first involve telling a story to get the audience's attention by talking about a problem of concern to the audience, followed by a springboard story to communicate a new idea and spark action related to it, and then, if the response is positive, concluding with knowledge-sharing stories showing how to deal with the issues of implementation.
A presentation about the strategic direction of an organization might begin with a personal identity story (“who I am”) followed by the company identity story (“who we are”) eventually leading on to a future story (“who we are going to be”).9
With the catalogue in hand, you can also avoid some of the most frequent mistakes in organizational storytelling:
Using a story with negative tonality will generally fail to spark action. However useful such a story might be to share understanding, it is unlikely to inspire and move anyone.
Telling a personal story in a traditional fashion is also unlikely to spark action. It might entertain the audience and communicate who the speaker is, but it is unlikely to galvanize people to action.
Using success stories typically fails to communicate knowledge because it risks missing the nitty-gritty of how things actually get done in the world.
Denying untrue rumors often just accelerates them, although a satire can ridicule an untrue rumor out of existence.
Using detailed scenarios to instill belief in a different future is generally ineffective. Even if believable when disseminated, such scenarios quickly become discredited as the future unfolds in unexpected ways.
The Return on Investment of Storytelling
“What's the ROI of storytelling?” is a question I am often asked when addressing a business audience on the topic of storytelling. In dealing with such a question, the first thing to consider is whether it is genuine. Often the request to quantify benefits is merely a pretext for taking no action or a polite way of making a negative statement. When the response to a request for measurable benefits is followed by a request for additional measurements and studies, then beware. Measurement has value only when it is prompted by a genuine attempt to achieve understanding and is backed by willingness to act on the basis of the findings.10
Talk Is Work
Storytelling is about making managers and leaders more effective in what they do. So what do managers do? The first point to realize is that for managers—and indeed most people in the knowledge economy—talk is work. If you can learn how to talk more effectively, you can become much more productive.
The contrary view is of course still prevalent and still emerges today even in leading business publications.11 But it flies in the face of serious research such as Henry Mintzberg's classic Nature of Managerial Work, which showed that talking comprises 78 percent of what managers actually do with their time.12
Where storytelling gets the message across more effectively, its incremental cost is zero, or close to zero, and so its ROI is massive.13 Moreover, communicating through stories usually means talking more succinctly, so that the cost in terms of executive and staff time is actually lower than for ineffective talk.
Impact of Storytelling on Implementing Change
Assessments of the effect of storytelling on performance have emerged. A study explored the experience of some forty companies undergoing major change, including banks, hospitals, manufacturers, and utilities.14 Each of these projects was initiated by senior management and involved changes such as implementing a Six Sigma program, optimizing business processes, and adopting a new sales strategy. All the programs could potentially have had a large economic impact on the organization, and all required major companywide changes in behavior, tasks, and processes.
Two things are striking about the study's findings. First, it's remarkable how little success the companies had with their change programs. The team gauged the difference between the expected value of a project (essentially calculated in the business case for it) and the value the company claimed to have achieved when it was completed. In all, 58 percent of the companies failed to meet their targets; 20 percent captured only a third or less of the value expected. And the overall differences between the winners and losers were huge. The successful 42 percent of these companies not only gained the expected returns, in some instances they exceeded them by as much as 200 to 300 percent.
Second, one of the key success factors was storytelling. The study rated each company's strength in twelve widely recognized factors for managing change effectively, including the ability to tell a simple, clear, and compelling story with no mixed messages. The researchers found a high correlation between the success factors, including storytelling, and the outcome of the change program. Storytelling wasn't the only success factor, of course; other elements included the company's project management skills, training, and incentives for promoting change. But without a storytelling capacity, the chances of success were significantly lower.
Narrative Is the Foundation of an Organization's Brand
Some progress has been made in quantifying the impact of narrative in brands. A strong brand generates benefits in terms of raising capital, launching new products, acquiring new assets, or attracting new partners. Although strong brands reflect the immense value that can be generated by narrative—the top ten global brands are together worth some $380 billion—the phenomenon of advertising illustrates how extraordinary quantities of money can be wasted in the ineffective use of narrative.15 And what narrative creates, narrative can also take away: the narrative-generated value of brands is vulnerable to attack by narrative. The advent of social media has led to public relations crises of astonishing scale and rapidity. When companies don't live up to their brand values, the consequences can be devastating.
The Emerging Microstudies on the Impact of Storytelling
Resea
rch in speech communications has begun to clarify why stories are effective in stimulating responses from listeners. Stories excite the imagination of the listener and create consecutive states of tension (puzzlement and recoil) and tension release (insight and resolution). Thus, the listener is not a passive receiver of information but is triggered into a state of active thinking.16 The listener must consider the meaning of the story and try to make sense of it. By this process, the listener is engaged; attention and interest are fostered.17
Studies in social psychology show that information is more quickly and accurately remembered when it is first presented in the form of an example or story, particularly one that is intrinsically appealing.18 One study compared the effectiveness of four different methods to persuade a group of M.B.A. students of an unlikely hypothesis: that a company really practiced a policy of avoiding layoffs. In one method, there was just a story. In the second, the researchers provided statistical data. In the third, they used statistical data and a story. In the fourth, they offered the policy statement made by a senior company executive. The most effective method of all turned out to be the first alternative: presenting the story alone.19
Storytelling Is an Amplifier
How consistently does storytelling work? Is it effective 100 percent of the time? Or 50 percent? Or 10 percent of the time? This question can't be answered yet because the body of research simply doesn't include enough longitudinal studies. Nevertheless, it is possible to infer the eventual findings by comparison with an area on which a great deal of research work has been done: teams. The amazing reports from the field about the benefits of specific teams contrast sharply with the gloomy picture that emerges from scholarly research on the impact of teamwork on performance across many organizations: overall, no net improvement in performance can be detected. How can the two be reconciled? Richard Hackman makes several helpful points in Leading Teams.20
First, in organizations, there is no simple cause-and-effect relationship between introducing a management technique and getting an improved business result. This contrasts with other spheres of activity where simple causal relationships do seem to operate. Hit the nail with the hammer, and it goes into the wood. Show a dog food, and it salivates. This kind of simple cause-and-effect logic can be misleading if applied to the complex world of organizations, where it is difficult to trace single effects to single causes. Uncontrollable outside factors can sink a wonderfully designed team (a hurricane just swept the entire inventory out to sea) or rescue one whose design was so bad that failure seemed assured (the firm that was competing for the contract just went belly-up). In organizations, multiple causes are operating at the same time and interacting with each over an extended period of time.
Second, the apparent paradox of zero improvement in performance from teams in organizations overall—along with extraordinary gains reportedly made in specific instances—reflects the fact that teams are found at both ends of the effectiveness spectrum. While some extraordinary teams outperform any traditional units, other teams do so poorly that they are easily outperformed by traditional units. So the absence of an overall benefit from the impact of all teams doesn't mean that teams are irrelevant to performance.
I won't be surprised to find a similar result with storytelling. Thus, you may continue to see case studies indicating improved performance in some instances.21 You will also see instances where storytelling didn't work at all: compare, for example, Chapters Five and Six of The Springboard, which describe how a story that was highly effective in one context got derailed in a different context as a result of extraneous factors.
It remains to be seen whether overall assessments across many organizations will detect a major correlation between the use of storytelling and organizational performance—or not, as in the case of teams. In any organizational change, many factors play a role in achieving organizational performance: a good story may be undermined by other factors (such as counterproductive managerial behavior in other areas), while a story that appeared to fail with most of the audience may be rescued by external events that make the change inevitable (for example, the firm is taken over by a company that is already implementing the new approach).
The effectiveness of storytelling is related to the nature and consistency of the leadership involved, a point I'll explore further in Chapters Eleven and Twelve. It is by no means clear whether any correlation between storytelling and performance will emerge. Nevertheless, as in the case of work teams, it seems probable that storytelling will operate like an amplifier: whatever passes through the device—whether signal or noise—comes out louder. If care is taken to ensure the quality of the signal, the effect can be extraordinary.22
2
Telling the Story Right
Four Key Elements of Storytelling Performance
“Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent?”
Strunk and White1
Knowing the right story to tell is only half the battle. The other half is telling the story right. Storytelling is a performance art, and the way a story is performed can radically change its emotional tone, and hence its impact on the listener. Thus, a leader may have an excellent story to tell and may possess highly developed verbal skills, and yet perform poorly as a storyteller because the story is told as a monologue rather than as a conversation. Conversely, a leader may have very limited verbal skills but a firm grasp of the idea of reciprocity that lies at the heart of effective storytelling and so deliver a very effective performance. “Telling the story right” entails having all of the elements of storytelling mesh together to form the social act known as storytelling.2
In performance, the story, the storyteller, and the audience interact to form a meaningful ensemble. In the world of organizations, there's often a preoccupation with what is said, while in the world of pure storytelling, the focus is more often on how the story is performed. In leadership storytelling, the story's form and content, the storyteller, and the audience are all inseparably intertwined with each other.
Because storytelling is a performance art, reading this chapter will not by itself enable you to tell a story right. Just as you learn how to ski by actually skiing or to sing a song by actually singing, so you will learn how to tell the story right through telling stories. This chapter can explain to you the principles, but you alone can master them through practice. Nevertheless, a guide can help. By knowing what to look for and which pitfalls to avoid, you can accelerate the learning involved in developing your storytelling skills.
The suggestions fall under four headings:
Style
Truth
Preparation
Delivery
Style
Among the many styles of storytelling, the one most suitable for modern organizations is a style that is plain, simple, and direct. This will be the foundation that you can customize for particular settings and requirements.
Different Styles of Storytelling
The plain, simple, and direct style of storytelling advocated in this book obviously isn't the only possibility. Here are some other styles:
The raconteur: The raconteur is polished, glib, even elegant—someone who is always in performance, someone who looks and sounds so polished that every story comes across as a performance, not as sincere. In a corporate context, the raconteur is usually too good to be true.
The stand-up comedian: The comedian is crisp, witty, sardonic, and topical, with the principal objective of keeping the audience amused. The organizational storyteller may tell jokes, but the principal objective is not to amuse and entertain.
The orator: The orator revels in the explicit stance of talking to a large crowd rather than talking to an individual—for example: “And so we see, ladies and gentlemen, in this instance, as so many other instances that have occurred and are likely to occur, that what our organization does will improve the lives of billions of people around the world, a
nd so let us pledge our lives to nurturing that cause.” It is a style of speaking that lives on in the political speech, but is out of place in the organizational context.
The reflexive, self-conscious academic: The academic speaks with endless qualifications and reservations, all aimed at protecting against the potential objections of academic colleagues—for example: “Subject to what others have said, and with all due respect to what my colleague has said on the subject, a different point of view can possibly be argued here if we weigh the various conflicting pieces of evidence.” Academics cover themselves against all criticism, but in the end, they often obscure the very message they intend to convey.
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 5
