As storyteller, you have no such luxury. Storytelling is a performance art, and you must be ready to deliver your peak performance at the appointed hour, without misstatements, errors, omissions, or unintended effects.
When you open your mouth, make sure you are ready to speak—that you are fully there for the audience. You may be suffering from all sorts of worries, tensions, and difficulties. Nevertheless, now is the time to put these out of your mind and make yourself totally available for the audience. If you are there for them, they will be there for you.
If necessary, pause a moment and collect your thoughts. If you're not feeling calm and relaxed, take a few deep breaths before you start to speak. There's no need to rush. An opening pause can be a dramatic focusing of the audience's attention on what you are going to say.
Get Out from Behind the Podium
Because you are presenting your story as an individual in a conversation, the more you can arrange the physical setup of the room so as to reflect that of a conversation, the better.
Don't hide behind podiums or microphones or use notes. In fact, get rid of anything between you and the audience. Notes are a huge distraction for the audience, which will take them as a signal that this is not a conversation but rather a one-way communication. You risk being seen as uninterested in the people you're talking to.
Connect with All Parts of the Audience
Use body movement to show your interest in the entire audience. Don't always talk to the same part of the audience. Move toward the audience so as to show your eagerness to speak to everyone.
Keep an open body stance, evincing your willingness to be open with the audience. Maintain direct eye contact so as to get attention and facilitate interaction.
Use Gesture
Appropriate gestures can emphasize key elements of your story as well as demonstrate that you believe the story—not just in your mind but with your whole body.
Your gestures should be natural and flowing and communicate your pleasure in speaking to this audience at this time. Avoid abrupt facial expressions or jerky gestures, which reflect lack of composure and a sense of unease in speaking to the audience. If you as the speaker feel unease, your audience will experience an equal or greater unease.
Be Lively
Since you are the one doing the talking, keep the audience's interest. It is through reliving the story that you are telling that will stimulate the audience's interest. Vary the pace and tone of your story to keep people alert.
Raise and lower the tone of your voice appropriately. Figure out the parameters of what is permissible in the specific setting. If you're in a board meeting, the parameters might be quite narrow. But if you are in an off-site retreat or conference, you can establish very broad parameters so as to make what you say entertaining. The parameters that are permissible in any context may be wider than you think.
Use Visual Aids Judiciously
It's fashionable to complain about PowerPoint, but that's like complaining about the English language. PowerPoint is an infinitely flexible tool. What people are complaining about is the bad use of PowerPoint. Use it intelligently: to convey images and support your storytelling. PowerPoint can reinforce the story and serve as a prompt to you as the storyteller so that you don't lose the thread.15
Remember also that human responses to linguistic and visual messages are not gender neutral. On average, women do better with words, and on average, men do better with the visual. These are averages, and of course there are vast numbers of individual exceptions. But the bell curves of men and women don't overlap exactly.16 So if you want to increase your chances of reaching everyone in the audience, use both words and images.
Making your slides available electronically to your audience—for example, on the Web or an intranet—at the time of the presentation can be an effective way of disseminating the story. Thus, if listeners like the presentation, they can use the downloaded PowerPoint slides to retell the story to their own teams and communities. In this way, a lively presentation can cascade rapidly through a large organization just like a juicy rumor.
Be Comfortable in Your Own Style
You can present any story in many different ways, but you must feel comfortable in the particular style that you have chosen. You may prefer to sit down rather than stand up. You may prefer to use visual aids or avoid them. These are choices that you make, conscious of the costs and benefits of each. For instance, if you decide to talk sitting down rather than standing up, you may be less mobile in terms of holding yourself accessible to all the members of the audience in different parts of the room, but you may gain the benefit of seeming more approachable and collaborative. And if you decide to forgo visual aids, you may concentrate attention on yourself as the storyteller, but you risk having a less powerful impact on listeners whose preferred learning style entails the reception of visual images.
These are the trade-offs. In the end, choose a style that is suitable for you. Once you are at ease with your own style of telling the story, the audience will be at ease with you.
Know Your Audience
The more you know about the audience, the better. Mingle with them and find out what makes them tick, what their hopes and fears are, what their current priorities are as opposed to yesterday's news. This information is vital to making your presentation sound fresh and up-to-date.
One key area to focus on is the audience's interests: What's in it for them? How do they stand to gain or lose? When as a leader you come to make a proposal for change, many in the audience will be asking themselves, What does it mean for me? It is therefore crucial to tell a story that draws attention to benefits in terms of interests, roles, and goals for the audience and is frank about risks. The audience will want to know what role they are going to play in the change process and how it will affect them. And perhaps the most important question is, What's the audience's story? What's the larger story in which they see themselves living?
In any audience, you will need to take account of the propensities of listeners to certain approaches. Some listeners may prefer numerical results, detailed reasoning, and evidence of what has worked in the past, while others may be more interested in getting the sense of the idea. Some may be attracted to what is new and different, while others may be more concerned about risk.17
Robert Nisbett has also suggested the presence of geographical differences between audiences, with East Asians (a term that Nisbett uses as a catch-all for Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and others) being measurably more holistic in their perceptions (taking in whole scenes rather than a few stand-out objects), while Westerners (a term Nisbett uses to refer to those brought up in Northern European and Anglo-Saxon-descended cultures) tend to have a “tunnel-vision perceptual style” that focuses much more on identifying what's prominent in certain scenes and remembering that.18
More striking, however, than the differences between the listeners are the similarities: in all countries and all cultures, stories have a universal appeal.
Connect with Your Audience
You connect with your audience by approaching the task of storytelling interactively and modeling your behavior on the concept of conversation—a dialogue between equals. You proceed on the basis that the relationship between you and your listeners is symmetrical. You talk as if the listeners could take the next turn in the conversation.
In practice, the differences in status or power between the storyteller and the audience may be vast. You may be a boss talking to your subordinates or a subordinate talking to your boss or bosses. You may be someone with great wealth and power talking to people who have neither, or it may be the reverse—you may be a supplicant requesting the rich and powerful to change their ways. As an interactive storyteller, you ignore these differences and talk to your listeners as one human being to another. In this way, you slice through the social and political barriers that separate individuals and humanize the communication.
Nevertheless, if you are presenting bold new ideas
that will turn your listeners' working lives upside down, those ideas will come across as profoundly disturbing. The audience may be skeptical or even hostile. How do you tell a story that will ignite their enthusiasm for doing something radically different? It is to this fundamental challenge of leadership that I turn in Chapter Three.
Part 2
Eight Narrative Patterns
Chapter 3
Motivate Others to Action
Using Narrative to Ignite Action and Implement New Ideas
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into.”
Jonathan Swift
If I was a leader and could choose to tell only one kind of story, that story would be a springboard story. That's because a springboard story performs the most useful thing a leader can do: communicate a complex new idea and inspire action to implement it. That's what leadership is centrally about—inspiring people to implement new ideas in the future. And not just grudgingly but enthusiastically, because they believe in it.
The Challenge of Igniting Action and Implementing New Ideas
The conventional management approach to this challenge is to give people reasons.1 Sadly, this faith in reason isn't borne out in practice. Asking people to stop doing the things they know and love doing and start doing things that they don't know much about amounts to asking them to adopt new identities. The usual result? Skepticism. Hostility. Sitting on the fence. Anything but enthusiastic implementation.
Then what happens? Leaders in their desperation drift toward more directive methods: “You've got to do it or you're fired!” This generates an adversarial relationship—the exact opposite of what a leader needs to achieve.
Fortunately, there's a solution at hand in a particular form of story. Better yet, it's one of the easiest kinds of stories to tell. It's a story about the past that is told without a great deal of embellishment. It has the advantage of getting the listener to do the hard work of inventing the future. Even better, as the future evolves, the listener keeps updating the story as the future changes. The story doesn't become stale because the listeners keep seeing new meaning in it—which they themselves provide.
I call this type of story a springboard story because it springs the listeners enthusiastically into a new future.2 I've already presented one example of a springboard story in Chapter One: the Zambia story. This was a story that I told in 1996 when I was trying to introduce the World Bank to the idea of knowledge management as a strategic thrust. This simple story helped World Bank staff and managers envision a different kind of future for the organization.
Now let me give you another example of a springboard story and then discuss the ingredients that make it work and why.
An Example of a Springboard Story: Pakistan
Once knowledge management had become an official corporate priority in the World Bank, I used stories to maintain the momentum. September 1998 was a moment of particular difficulty. The effort to implement knowledge management had been under way for almost two years and, as with any major innovation, implementation had been far from smooth. Communities of practice were sprawling untidily all over the organization, and their purpose was not well understood by top management. Moreover, there was a feeling that the external world was at the brink of a global financial crisis. Russia had just defaulted. East Asia was in financial ruins. Brazil was teetering on the brink. The currency and stock markets were gyrating wildly. Inside the World Bank, people were asking: “Why are we bothering with knowledge when the world is on the brink of crisis?”
I was asked to make a presentation to the president and senior managers about the status of the knowledge-sharing program. Here is one of the stories that I told to show why knowledge management and communities of practice were crucial to our future:
Let me give you an example of how knowledge management is working in practice. Just a few weeks ago, on August 20, the government of Pakistan asked our field office in Pakistan for help in the highway sector. They were experiencing widespread pavement failure. The highways were falling apart. They felt they could not afford to maintain them. They wanted to try a different technology, a technology that our organization has not supported or recommended in the past. And they wanted our advice within a few days.
I think it's fair to say that in the past we would not have been able to respond to this kind of question within this time frame. We might have proposed to send a team to Pakistan. The team might send the report to the government, and eventually—perhaps three, six, nine months later—might provide a response. But by then, it would have been too late. By then, things would have moved on in Pakistan.
What actually happened was something quite different. The task team leader in our field office in Pakistan sent an e-mail to contact the community of highway experts inside and outside the organization (a community that had been put together over time) and asked for help within forty-eight hours. And he got it. The same day, the task manager in the highway sector in Jordan replied that, as it happened, Jordan was using this technology with very promising results. The same day, a highway expert in our Argentina office replied and said that he was writing a book on the subject and was able to give the genealogy of the technology over several decades and continents. And shortly after that, the head of the highways authority in South Africa—an outside partner who was a member of the community—chipped in with South Africa's experience with something like the same technology. And New Zealand provided some guidelines that it had developed for the use of the technology. And so the task manager in Pakistan was able to go back to the Pakistan government and say: this is the best that we as an organization can put together on this subject, and then the dialogue can start as to how to adapt that experience elsewhere to Pakistan's situation.
And now that we have discovered that we as an organization know something about a subject we didn't realize we knew anything about, now we can incorporate what we have learned in our knowledge base so that any staff in the organization anywhere at any time can tap into it. And the vision is that we can make this available externally through the World Wide Web, so that anyone in the world will be able to log on and get answers to questions like this on which we have some know-how, as well as on any of the other myriad subjects on which we have managed to assemble some expertise.
The story worked to spring the listeners to a new level of understanding as to what is knowledge management and refresh their memories as to why sharing knowledge is fundamental to the future of the World Bank. Immediately following the presentation, the president decided to push forward with accelerated implementation of knowledge management, and by the year 2000, the World Bank had met the stretch objective it had set for itself in 1997: the organization had been benchmarked by several organizations as a world leader in knowledge management.3
The Role of the Springboard Story
With the wisdom of hindsight, this successful outcome may seem inevitable. Today, it's a no-brainer that an organization like the World Bank needs to share its knowledge. But at the time, the situation was agonizingly fragile. Knowledge management was only half implemented. Benefits were emerging but still limited to a few parts of the organization, and costs were perceived as significant. As in any other major new initiative, implementation had proved more difficult than had been expected. Was the glass half empty or half full? The opponents of knowledge management, including some at the highest levels of the organization, viewed the glass as half empty and wanted to rethink everything.4 Our contention was that the glass was half full: we felt we had made good progress and should press on to complete the job. The decision could have gone either way. Management could have set out on a witch hunt to find out why knowledge management hadn't already been fully implemented. Or it could focus on the fact that much progress had been made and push forward with a whole new spurt of energy to make knowledge management the major strategic thrust that it became. The Pakistan story was one of the factors that led to the latter result.
&n
bsp; On the surface, the Zambia and Pakistan stories might not seem very similar. But in fact they share a common narrative pattern. That pattern makes it possible to find similarly effective stories in virtually any context. Understanding the narrative pattern is one of the steps necessary to move leadership from the realm of an arcane and mysterious art that only a few people possess to a skill that anyone can understand and learn.
Thus, in the late 1990s, leadership books—for example, Noel Tichy in The Leadership Engine and Howard Gardner in Leading Minds—began mentioning that storytelling is central to leadership. In the past ten years, storytelling has been a frequent theme in books on change and leadership, such as Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge and Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Books like Annette Simmons's The Story Factor and Jim Loehr's The Power of Story have expanded our understanding of the impact of storytelling in various organizational settings.5 What has been less clear in these books is that most stories do not result in people embracing major change. A story that can inspire people to change—a springboard story—has particular characteristics. Systematic success in using storytelling to spark change requires an understanding of those characteristics and the mechanisms underlying them.
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 7
