The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

by Stephen Denning

  Introducing radical management entails significant change. Many organizations have yet to make the shift. But in the end, the economics will be inexorable. The rate of return on assets of U.S. firms is already one-quarter of what it was in 1965. The life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 has declined from around half a century to fifteen years, and is heading toward five years if nothing changes.21 The dynamics reflected in these remarkable statistics will force a transition to continuous innovation, whether entrenched interests want it or not. The only question is whether it will happen intelligently and quickly, or slowly and clumsily and painfully.

  The Important Role of Storytelling

  For a quick and intelligent transition to the principles of continuous innovation, storytelling will be critical.

  First, persuading the leadership of organizations to adopt radical management with a new goal for work—delighting clients—will require substantial persuasion. Leadership storytelling, using springboard stories as discussed in Chapter Three, will be central.

  Second, the principles of continuous innovation are focused on the goal of delighting clients. Those doing the work have to understand the client's story and the story of how their own work contributes to enhancing that story, as discussed in Chapter Five.

  A third dimension is that the work is done in self-organizing teams of people who are often diverse in terms of both background and status. Attaining collaboration in high-performance teams is likely only if the managers and participants are skilled in the use of story, as discussed in Chapter Seven.

  A fourth dimension is radical transparency—the systematic communication of impediments to getting the work done. This will typically be done in the form of knowledge-sharing stories, as discussed in Chapter Eight.

  A fifth dimension is the planning of work, which takes place in the form of user stories. The work program doesn't consist, as in traditional management, in accomplishment of a certain number of “things,” such as producing a certain number of products or services or a certain quantity of money. The work program consists of user stories, which are stories set in the future, as discussed in Chapter Ten.

  In effect, storytelling underlies key aspects of continuous innovation because interactive human-based relationships between organization's leadership, the people doing the work (employees), and the people for whom the work is being done are the engines of productivity and innovation. The leadership involved in creating such interactive relationships is the subject of the final chapter.

  12

  A Different Kind of Leader

  Using Narrative to Become an Interactive Leader

  “To be understood is to be open to understanding.”

  Vicki Hearne1

  In this book, I have been exploring the pathways that words take toward meaning, how the use of those words and meanings in the course of performing narratives lead to actions, and how a family of narrative patterns are effective for different aspects of leadership. The use of narrative opens up leadership capabilities that are not available to someone operating solely in the traditional management mode of command, control, regulation, and optimization.

  Implicit in all this is a different idea of what it means to be a leader. It's an interactive mode of leadership that swims in the richness and complexity of living and thrives on the connections between things. Participants grasp the interrelatedness of things in the world—and so are able to connect with the world in new ways. I have been making the case, step by step, that someone who embodies the interactive mode of thinking, speaking, and acting and takes on the new capabilities that narrative enables can accomplish what was inaccessible to someone operating solely in the traditional command-and-control mode.

  To this point, I've been looking at leadership through the lens of storytelling. Now I want to look at leadership more directly and state explicitly what kind of leadership I'm talking about. It has several dimensions:

  The interactive leader works with the world rather than against it. The key is to read the world and let the world do some of the work for you rather than trying to manipulate and control others by imposing various kinds of boundaries, incentives, and disincentives to get compliance with your will. If the traditional manager is a boxer who tries to overpower the world with superior hitting power, the interactive leader is more like a practitioner of judo—someone who can overcome stronger adversaries by catalyzing and channeling his or her energy. As a result, this concept of leadership is independent of hierarchical position and power, and so can be exercised from wherever you are in the organization.2

  Interactive leadership both adds and subtracts elements from the leadership palette. Interactive leadership supplements the traditional management functions of command, control, regulation, analysis, and optimization by adding new capabilities. But it's also subtractive: it requires setting aside techniques of manipulation and winning regardless of cost that are deployed by the robber barons, hardball strategists, and spin artists discussed in Chapters Five and Six. It's not possible for leaders to exercise manipulative and spinning behavior in one part of their conduct and expect to be accepted as open, truthful, and trustworthy in other domains.

  Interactive leadership builds on personal integrity and authenticity. Because you can communicate who you are and what you stand for, others come to know you and respect you for that. Because you are attentive to the world as it is, your ideas are sound. Because you speak the truth, you are believed. Because you treat others as ends in themselves, not merely as means to your own ends, people trust you. Because you make your values explicit and act in accord with those values, your values become contagious and others start to share them. Because you listen to the world, the world listens to you. Because you are open to innovation, happy accidents happen. Because you bring meaning into the world of work, you are able to get superior results.

  Interactive leadership doesn't depend on the possession of hierarchical authority. Anyone and everyone who can help clarify the direction or improve the structure, or secure support for it, or offer coaching that improves performance is providing leadership.

  Interactive leadership benefits from an understanding of the different narrative patterns that can be used to get things done in the world. This involves telling stories, not talking about storytelling. Competence in narrative theory can lend resonance and depth to your storytelling, but you need not burden the world with the principles of what you are doing. Narrative depends on emotional intelligence, but it also puts emotional intelligence to work to achieve practical outcomes.

  Above all, interactive leadership entails active participation in the world rather than detached observation. And it is to this distinction that I now turn.

  Leadership That Participates

  Employing the interactive mode of leadership means engaging the world with a mind-set of active participation rather than detached observation. The mode of disinterested, objective knowing, removed from moral and social responsibility, has been an animating motif of the modern world. In today's context of rapid change, it is producing diminishing returns. Some issues—the most serious leadership challenges of our time—lie beyond its reach.3

  Once leaders adopt the interactive mode of thinking and behaving, the world is no longer separate, out there. They escape from the illusion of passionless objectivity, which may aim at clarity but inevitably ends up distorting the world by stripping away the dimension of human viewpoints, emotions, and goals. Objectivity operates as a distancing device. When you are trying to connect with the people you lead, distancing is the last thing you need. One of the great weaknesses of the controlling mode of management is that it pursues its goals under the pretense of providing impregnable certainty and strength.

  If you are to achieve appropriate connectedness with the people you lead, you need precisely those capacities for understanding, trust, and respect that the command-and-control mode of management suppresses. Choosing to feel compassion instead of detachment is often ridicul
ed in business as being insufficiently hard—insufficiently firm, hard-nosed, tough-minded, aggressive, or any of the other alpha male caricatures—and ultimately hard-hearted.

  As a comprehensive philosophy, care and compassion are obviously inadequate: sometimes you have no alternative but to stand and resist the enemies of the future. When the house is on fire, you don't stop to have a conversation. But you don't have to pretend that the house is on fire, all day, every day, as a pretext for remaining perpetually in command-and-control mode. In most leadership situations, trust, respect, and collaboration are simply more effective than preemptive domination. As Sun-Tzu pointed out several millennia ago, the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without fighting.4

  Leadership That Connects

  To see what I mean by leadership, consider what happens in one of the most frequent and mundane of management interactions: a talk to a group of people. The people might be subordinates, or superiors, or partners or clients, or whatever. Here's what happens when a controlling manager uses narrative, as compared to when an interactive leader makes the same talk.

  The controlling manager comes with a message to impart within the context of a larger agenda for achievement. The presentation is typically in the form of an abstract lecture that proceeds independent of the listener. The speaker discourses on the chosen topic based on premises that are entirely the manager's own. They might be about decisions that have been made, or plans that are being announced, or simply news of what has happened. The audience's spontaneous reactions—applause, laughter, disapproval—are essentially irrelevant distractions to the presentation. No one in the audience enters the picture as an active participant unless expressly invited to intervene. Even if people are allowed to ask questions or make comments, it is expected that the comments and questions will be within the overall assumptions of the agenda. The success of the transaction is seen as depending on whether the manager has been able to transmit the message.

  For the interactive leader, the situation is very different. This leader comes with a message and an agenda, but also seeks to interact with the audience and learn from their viewpoints. For this purpose, storytelling is an extraordinarily suitable tool. Since all good storytelling begins and ends in listening, the session is inherently participative and interactive.

  Even before the presentation has begun, the interactive leader shows an appropriate rapport at the outset to increase the chances of the audience's being responsive. Thus the leader might welcome the audience individually, shaking hands or otherwise physically acknowledging their presence. The leader does this because it's difficult to be utterly unresponsive to someone who is actively signaling responsiveness and reciprocity.

  When the interactive leader begins to talk, storytelling is part of the presentation and, as in all other face-to-face storytelling, the reactions of the audience are central. In storytelling, the teller is of necessity attentive to these reactions because they represent essential markers as to how and whether the story is resonating, indicators as to how to proceed from that point onward. The teller adjusts the performance in the light of the reactions observed, and the audience observes that the leader is making adjustments in the performance in response to their reactions. This prompts new reactions from the audience, which lead to new adjustments by the leader. The leader is aware of the audience just as the audience is aware of the leader, and the leader is aware of the audience's awareness of this responsiveness to their reactions. And so on.

  It is the presence of the explicitly subjective plane in narratives, and the apparent absence of any such plane in abstract assertions, that contributes to the superior audience responsiveness to narratives over abstractions. In a narrative, we know who's talking and why, and often how the characters view the events, with the result that we can begin to get a handle on the potential human significance of what's being talked about.

  So the interactive leader uses a story, and the responsiveness of the audience to the story is contagious. Each listener is very much aware of the reactions of other listeners to the leader. If some listeners start laughing, every listener tends to laugh. The larger the crowd, the greater the likelihood of contagion.

  Listening here means not just a passive reception of sounds but rather an active mental state—penetrating, unified, yet focused and permeable, enhanced by the consciousness of the listeners participating in the interaction. The look of the responsive gaze, the frowning brow, the evident delight of a smile—all of these visual cues communicate volumes even though no sound may be heard. In the interaction, a simple and unexpected sense of deep accord forms between the teller and the audience. Whatever the power relations of the teller and the listeners, for the duration of the story, they are simply human beings connected by the act of storytelling.5

  When the interactive leader invites reactions from the audience, the openness of the presentation has created a mood of possibility. It becomes plausible for the audience not only to offer comments or questions within the given assumptions of the leader but also to offer their own stories, which may have different underlying assumptions from those of the leader, and so the discussion can broaden into areas that would otherwise be impossible to broach. As a result, what begins as a simple talk by the leader to the subordinates can suddenly become an opportunity for new ideas, new possibilities, creativity, and innovation.

  The notional presentation under discussion here would be only one incident in a busy leader's day, which may have over a hundred such interactions. By being open and interactive with all the people who fill the day's calendar—subordinates, superiors, board members, clients, partners, investors, analysts—the leader not only gets across the message and the agenda but also is continually opening up new horizons and possible opportunities while encouraging other people's collaboration.

  By contrast, the controlling manager spends a day full of the same interactions, but they typically end in adversarial, tension-filled, power-driven outcomes, with few new possibilities or opportunities emerging. On the surface, it's a day of apparent order and focus, as the controlling manager appears to win most of the encounters as a result of superior hierarchical power, but all that submissiveness may be deceptive, as those who perceive themselves as losers continue on, often surreptitiously waiting to fight another day.6

  Further insights on the nature of interactive leadership can be gleaned from Vicki Hearne's wonderful book on animal training, Adam's Task. There she notes that the people who come to visit the animals she works with fall into several categories.7 First, there are the people with supersized egos, which she calls “Hollywood types”: they are self-absorbed and indifferent to where they are and their strutting is essentially irrelevant to the animals. Then there are the “researchers,” who are exploring propositions to be tested. These people are contaminated by epistemology. Around dogs, they are “bitees,” that is, the people most likely to be bitten as a result of the dogs' frustration with the combination of intrusiveness and unresponsiveness. Finally, there are the “animal trainers,” who exhibit soft, acute 360-degree awareness of who they are and who else is there. In the way they move, they offer mute acknowledgment of the presence of the animals and fit into the spaces shaped by the animals. It is precisely this same soft, acute 360-degree awareness that leaders need to exhibit in relation to the people they are seeking to lead.

  Leadership That Is Like Conversation

  The interactive approach to leadership is modeled on the concept of conversation—a dialogue between equals. The relationship between storyteller and listener is symmetrical. The approach proceeds on the assumption that the listener could take the next turn in the conversation.

  In an organization, the differences in status between leader and audience may be vast. You may be a boss talking to 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 you may be a supplicant requesting the rich and powerful to change their
ways. As an interactive leader, something you can be regardless of overt status, you ignore these differences and talk to your listeners as one human being to another. In so doing, you slice through the social and political barriers that separate individuals from each other.

  By contrast, the controlling manager usually exploits differences in status that lead to adversarial relationships. Thus, if you assert, “This innovation is a winner,” your listeners' options are to accept or reject the proposition. If they accept it, they are submitting to your authority as an expert, a teacher, a boss, a parent, or whatever. If they reject it or argue with it, then you and they are at once in an adversarial relationship. It's not impossible to maintain a conversation of equals when dealing with someone who adopts a superior hierarchical position, but it isn't easy—there is an inherent tendency to slide into an adversarial relationship of either submission or rebellion.

  By contrast, when you tell a story as a leader in the interactive mode, there is no such implication of submission or rebellion. The listeners don't need to accept or reject your story: it is something that the teller and audience relive together. It is a mutually shared experience, something in which the audience actively participates. The normal response is neither acceptance nor rejection but rather to tell another story. It might be a story in the same vein. Or a listener might say, “I have a different take on that!” and tell a story that reflects another point of view. Either way, one story leads to another. It's not a normal response to say, “That story is right” or, “That story is wrong.” A story is neither right nor wrong. It simply is. In this way, storytelling is naturally collaborative.8