Special Olympics: To transform communities by inspiring people throughout the world to open their minds, accept and include people with intellectual disabilities and thereby anyone who is perceived as different.
Amnesty International: Amnesty International’s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments.
The World Bank Group: Working for a World Free of Poverty
Asian Development Bank: an Asia and Pacific region free of poverty.
African Development Bank: Building today – a better Africa tomorrow.
Inter-American Development Bank: Consolidate a working area of excellence that will position the IDB as a relevant partner in the region and in the international community as a whole in transparency, accountability and anti-corruption policies.
Islamic Development Bank: Our Vision is to be a world-class development bank inspired by Islamic principles.
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the website has a “commitment” not a vision statement): The EBRD is committed to furthering progress towards market-oriented economies and the promotion of private and entrepreneurial initiative.
United Nations Development Programme: UNDP’s vision is what the organization aspires to be: the UN’s lead development agency, and a trusted source of support for countries seeking to solve national and global development challenges. UNDP’s vision is based on the fundamental principles of development and human rights enshrined in the UN Charter.
Having gone through this list, we can leave you with a few other principles to keep in mind when designing or revising your vision statement:
• A positive vision of what you want is stronger than a negative vision of what you don’t want: “clean drinking water for every person on the planet” is better than “fighting poverty.” The second phrase puts more emphasis on the persistence of poverty, but doesn’t provide a vision for a positive alternative.
• Don’t make it about your organization; make it about creating a better world: “To create a world where people live in harmony with nature” is better than “Aspires to be the UN’s lead development agency.”
• Be specific about what you want to accomplish, not generic: “A world where everyone has a decent place to live” is better than “To implement sustainable programs that improve access worldwide…”
As a final thought, note that when a group of people discover they have a common vision, they can become a force to reckon with. We develop this further in the final chapter, which is about creating alignment.
Chapter 16
Motivation: The DUH Triangle
It’s one thing to share an inspirational vision or idea, another to get people to act on it. Much has been written on the psychology of motivation, some of it wise, much of it dubious. We have boiled it down into three simple principles to keep in mind when you are communicating with specific audiences. We call these principles the DUH Triangle. “DUH” stands for Dissatisfaction, Urgency and Hope. Finding the right balance among these three elements is the key to motivating people to act.
Dissatisfaction
Even if you have a great positive vision that inspires you to move forward, that is no guarantee others will want to join you. If people are more or less content with the way things are, it’s hard to get them interested in creating change. Or if they think that you’ve got the issue handled, they don’t feel the need to get involved. Dissatisfaction prompts action. If you can rouse people to feel fear or anger, impending loss or outrage, their negative emotions create an urge to change the current situation. That’s what makes an indifferent audience ready to move from inertia into action: to fight against tyranny, end hunger, stop child trafficking.
Creating dissatisfaction requires communicating clear facts about current conditions that the audience can accept – even if they don’t like what they’re hearing. These facts should come from sources they trust, not from those that can too readily be dismissed as politically motivated. Once you paint the current situation clearly and accurately – highlighting the points of dissatisfaction – you can then ask your audience to imagine what the future will look like as these conditions intensify. Put them in the picture of this uncomfortable reality.
Dissatisfaction alone is seldom enough to actually get people to move into action. To create the impulse to act, you need the second element:
Urgency
“So you have a good cause. Why should I do something about it now? I’m busy today. Maybe later.” Later is our default mode. We procrastinate and in the end nothing changes. It’s like going to the dentist. We all know we should get our teeth checked twice a year, but how many of us put it off, until suddenly we get a throbbing ache in the jaw? When an ache turns into pain so acute if feels like an icepick digging into our gums, then we’re ready to jump into the dentist’s chair!
Urgency may be negative, like a toothache, but it can also be a potential gain that will disappear if it’s not acted on. At the crassest level, advertisers do this whenever they make a “limited-time offer.” Communicate urgency so your audience will want to act now – instead of never.
To convey urgency, you have to give people a clear timeline of unfolding events. It’s not enough to say, “If we don’t act now, all will be lost!” The more precise you are, the better. This is a problem that has bedeviled advocates of acting on Climate Change. Scientists predict a range of possible disastrous points of no return. They are all bound to happen, but because no one can say exactly when they will happen, people don’t feel the urgency of acting now.
If your own issue has no clear deadline, provide a specific window of opportunity when action can make a difference. For example, those who sell college savings plans are quite persuasive about the value of starting to save for college now while your children are young, because the longer you wait, the bigger the annual financial burden of college becomes.
Beyond dissatisfaction and urgency, one final element is essential to motivate action.
Hope
Can you demonstrate that the change in behavior you are calling for will work? Or are you asking your audience to invest in a potential lost cause? We all make mental and emotional calculations that prevent us from wasting our energy. These days, there’s a pervasive atmosphere that for the most part, things are getting worse. Political standoffs, debt, inequality, rising crime, impending environmental disaster – this despondent atmosphere makes it easy for people to lapse back into inertia and just accept that things will never get any better. Psychologically, apathy is less stressful than desiring something with all your might that you think probably won’t happen.
To inspire realistic hope, the best approach is not only to have a clear vision and the right facts on your side, but also to be able to give compelling real-life examples and stories that show success is possible. For example, if you were trying to have a state government change a biased law, then speaking about how another state made this change as a result of community demand would be a good way to give people hope. If this is the first time such a law has been challenged, then reminding people of different harmful laws overthrown by community action could also work. The main point is, a clear narrative and compelling stories are great ways to convince people that change is possible.
The Dynamic DUH Triangle
The DUH triangle is dynamic. This means the three corners shift in importance in response to each specific audience. The better you know your audience, the better you can shift the dimensions of the triangle to emphasize the most effective way to move them into action. For example, some audiences might be very well informed on the discouraging facts of your issue. They don’t need you to make them feel more dissatisfied. Perhaps they feel so bad they are discouraged. Instead you need to emphasize examples of realistic hope.
Another target audience may have so much hope they think the change you are seeking to accomplish w
ill happen anyway, without their involvement. So they have no sense of urgency. For them you have to stress both the timeline and the need to act now. What about potential donors for your work, who are realistically hopeful about your cause and understand the urgency of it, but given the many causes in the world, they don’t feel a strong motivation to give to your group? In other words, they don’t feel enough dissatisfaction. For them you would have to stress why – from their point of view – this particular issue needs their action and support.
Tim saw an example of the DUH triangle at work some years ago when he was on a writing assignment in Thailand. He was writing a story on the Global Environment Facility’s small grants program. He visited a coastal village that had received a grant to replant and restore a tropical mangrove forest on the community’s common land. The story sounded very straightforward. But actually, Tim found out the villagers didn’t want the grant at first.
The village leaders said that when the GEF approached them about a grant, people were apathetic to the idea. Although their forest was quite run down – many trees cut, trash on the forest floor, declining quantity of medicinal leaves and other forest products to harvest – nobody was ready to do anything about it. So in terms of the elements of the DUH triangle, at this point they were dissatisfied with the status quo, they knew there was practical hope to improve the situation because of this grant…but there was no urgency that impelled them to action. Then one day, a villager spotted a couple of strangers in the forest with surveying equipment. They knew these were Thai government surveyors, and they knew what that meant. Under Thai law, if a community allows its forest areas to degrade beyond a certain point, the central government can permanently confiscate the land and turn it into a protected area that is out of bounds for the community!
The villager raced back to the community elders with the news. It jolted them. They immediately applied for and received the grant. Following its terms, the whole community went into the swamps to clean up the trash and replant the mangroves. They showed Tim photographs of the mayor and police chief smiling broadly as they sloshed around in the muck by the water’s edge. After the initial campaign, they mutually enforced a ban on foraging as the forest regrew. Only when dissatisfaction, urgency and hope all came together did the community act.
The villagers told Tim their story with much pride. A woman elder told him their medicinal plants were flourishing again, and they had resumed limited harvesting. She recalled that the leaders from a neighboring village had even come to beg permission to forage in the newly revitalized land – because this other community had let their own forest degrade. With a chiding tone in her voice, the elder said, “But I told them, ‘No! You can’t use our forest! You must learn to take care of your own resources, the way we do it!’”
Keeping the DUH triangle in your head reminds you that you are never just speaking to a generic audience. When you seek to motivate, you are connecting with real people, with their own complex desires, knowledge and maps of what the world is like and what’s important. Ultimately, the DUH triangle awakens people to their own sense of agency: that they have the power to create change in their world.
Chapter 17
Transformational Storytelling
Once upon a time nobody told stories in business meetings, at conferences or during media interviews. People focused on the facts. Data, statistics, the bottom line – information mattered most. Then management gurus like Steven Denning came along and told everyone that storytelling was the “Secret Language of Leadership” (the title of one of his best-selling books on the subject). Gradually more and more people became convinced that you had to tell stories in the workplace. Soon everyone was telling stories. Everyone was expecting stories. Everyone was talking about the transformational power of stories. But there was still a problem – the actual evidence for this transformational power was not so obvious. Everyone believed in stories, but in the back of their minds, they were recalling the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes…
So what’s the problem with storytelling? The answer is simple: in a professional context, people usually tell boring stories. The good news is that in our experience running storytelling workshops, it’s relatively easy to teach people to tell riveting and transformational stories. It typically takes us about 3 hours to take the dullest bureaucrat you can imagine, and make them capable of enrapturing an audience.
In this chapter, we will take you through the five elements of great storytelling. First, we’d like to explain why well-told stories can be transformational.
Stories open our minds and our hearts. When someone tells a good story, our minds shift gears. We relax and enjoy the experience in a different way than when a speaker is relaying purely factual information. Neuroeconomics researcher Dr Paul Zak11 and his team at Claremont University have discovered that certain kinds of stories affect the brain’s production of mood-altering chemicals. For example, character-driven stories produce oxytocin, a neurochemical that makes us feel trust and safety. In other words, stories put us into a receptive state of rapport. In our storytelling workshops, we can sense the energy in the room shift dramatically as people start to tell their stories to one another. The participants almost instantly become open, relaxed and energized in a magical, positive way.
Stories focus our attention better than a presentation of facts alone. According to Dr Zak’s research, the elements of tension and anticipation in a well-told story trigger the release of cortisol, the chemical that makes us focus and remember things clearly. Information encoded in a story can thus be recalled much more easily than a collection of informational facts, and we’ll remember it far longer.
Stories are convincing because they portray information in the context of human experience. We process facts and data in the left hemisphere of our brains, which allows us to evaluate the information at arm’s length. But a good narrative draws us into our imagination. We put ourselves in the shoes of the characters, and experience the action almost as if it’s happening to us. Since we tend to trust our own experience, information delivered in a story feels more convincing.
Stories make us care. The oxytocin triggered by character-driven stories also makes us feel connection and empathy. When we put ourselves in the shoes of the characters in the story, they start to matter to us. This shift in perspective can actually help people step out of a mindset that has become inflexible or intolerant. In this way storytelling can be a powerful technique for helping someone reframe his or her thinking.
Stories make us believe change is possible. When we hear a story of one person overcoming injustice in an oppressive society, we learn that victory can be won. If change can be accomplished once, then it can be accomplished again. Stories enable us to imagine how our own actions can create change in a similar way. This lays the groundwork for transformation.
Stories motivate us to act. By setting up a new pattern or paradigm of what is possible, stories rouse our passions and motivate us. For example, if we hear a story of courage, our own sense of courage may be awakened. The chemical oxytocin also triggers us for cooperation, and so storytelling is a perfect vehicle for inspiring a team to unite and work together towards a common purpose.
What does it take to learn to tell a great story that produces these benefits? In our storytelling workshop, we break it down to five key elements.
1. A Good Beginning: The Red Chair
It’s painful to have to force yourself to listen to a story when it limps along after a slow beginning. It’s almost impossible to grab your audience and make an impact once you’ve lost them. A great teaching example of how to start a story can be found on the BBC’s The Graham Norton Show. At the end of each show the host invites members of the audience to come up and sit in a giant red chair and tell the best story of their lives. The catch is, if the stories bore Norton, he pulls a silver lever and the chair flips over backwards, sending the storyteller flying with their feet scrabbling in the air – to the great amusement of the
audience. Most contestants are flipped almost immediately, because they start their stories with dull preambles like this:
“I spent a summer teaching windsurfing in Turkey—” (Flip!)
“I was in Israel on a vacation, and I got on a bus for 4 hours—” (Flip!)
Our favorite Red Chair story was told by a very respectable-looking woman in her sixties who began like this: “I used to ride an Arab stallion in the desert…” After this first line, Norton burst in, exclaiming “Hello! If the story continues this way, we’re loving it!”
The key is to begin your story in the middle of the action, not before the action. Instead of starting by explaining the details that set the story up, bring your audience into the scene with a moment of danger, suspense or wonder. Here are a few great examples of this from people in our workshops:
“I didn’t understand a word of the Cambodian language, but I instantly understood the meaning of what our guide had just screamed: we had wandered into a minefield…”
“I’d like to tell you about the day I realized sometimes planes do fall out of the sky…”
“I looked at the orangutan, and the orangutan looked at me. I could tell he was thinking, ‘I can take her…’”
“I want to tell you about the day I died…and the only reason I’m here to tell the tale is because a curious nurse lifted up the sheet over my face. She’d never seen a dead body before…”
2. Vivid Details Capture the Imagination
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