The Master Communicator's Handbook

by Teresa Erickson

  The magic of a story is that with just our words we can create a movie in our listeners’ minds. This transports our audience to another world. The “special effects” that make this happen are vivid sensory descriptions that shift the listener from the analytic left side of their brain into the right hemisphere, where images and sense data are processed. It doesn’t take a lot of description, just a few vivid details. Here are two examples from our workshop participants:

  “In a Sumatran rainforest, all you see is shades of dark green. Something white in the distance stands out like a beacon. It can only mean one thing: bone – in this case, the skull of a rhinoceros, killed by poachers…”

  “I looked over the wall of our house in Bombay, and on the other side, in a dusty construction site, I saw one of the women workers. She was tying the foot of her baby with a cord to a rock, tethering him, so that as she worked carrying piles of rubble in her basket, her child would not crawl away…”

  To make your stories vivid, think about the experience you are going to share and imagine yourself back in the moment, reliving it. As the sense impressions come to you, write them all down. Then select those that most powerfully evoke the key details of the scene. Be sure to include more than just sight and sound. Impressions of smell, taste, touch, as well as bodily sensations and emotions all create an impression of vividness that brings a story to life.

  3. Drama Creates Tension and Suspense

  Most stories told at conferences or in presentations are boring because they are predictable. For example, in international development circles stories typically go like this: “A community is poor. Our agency comes along, analyzes the problem and builds a project. Now the community is happy.” Sure, there is action. But the events are totally uninteresting. It’s the obstacles, struggles, risks and unique challenges to overcome that bring a story to life.

  To make a story interesting, focus on what went wrong. What crises occurred? How did the people in the story overcome them? This creates tension and anticipation. Then cortisol, the stress hormone, is released into our brains. We feel the danger, the urgency. It focuses our minds. It makes us wonder what’s going to happen next. Anticipation puts us in a heightened state of awareness in which we remember things more clearly than in our normal floating-along-through-life state of awareness. One way to get your audience into that state is by telling a harrowing story that sheds light on the larger issue you are talking about. We’ve heard surprising tales from bureaucrats and managers of being stuck in a war zone with bombs exploding around them, or being gored by an elephant, or being robbed at knifepoint.

  Of course, workplace stories can’t all involve being chased by elephants. One of the best stories we’ve heard in one of our workshops was from a Korean man, a development bank country director, who told us a story that forever changed the way he looked at water. His development bank had completed and closed a hydropower dam project in Laos when an NGO representative showed up at his office with complaints about communities downstream suffering water shortage problems. Since the project was closed, he could have told her, “Sorry, nothing we can do!” But she spoke passionately about how villagers downstream found their crops had withered and their fish disappeared. They were planning to protest and blockade roads. The director realized this would damage his bank’s credibility. More importantly, if people were suffering as a result of this dam, then he and his bank had a moral obligation to put things right. So he agreed to reopen the project and conduct an investigation – a terribly risky move. He himself went down to the area and discovered there were legitimate grievances, which his organization worked to fix. He admitted this was not a successful project, but it was the one that taught him the most in his long career.

  4. Character

  We enter into a story through the characters. This makes us care about what happens, and makes us care about them. We put ourselves in their shoes and feel the emotions they experience. Stories give us empathy, and can inspire us to act. The problem we often encounter with workplace stories is that the characters seem fake – a client or a customer – but not a real person. A story that starts with: “Mohammed is a poor farmer in Bangladesh…” but gives no specifics makes the person seem like a generic “project beneficiary.” People can’t connect to a cardboard cutout.

  Resist this tendency to make up characters or create a “composite” character. Tell stories about real people. Your audience will sense the difference. If you are a manager conducting site visits and you meet people involved in your work, be sure to ask their names. If they have an interesting story to tell, write it down. When you introduce these real people in your story, provide at least one vivid detail about them. One of our participants told a story about a Mongolian project partner who “had a real glint in his eye.” Another participant who worked on tiger conservation told us about a Nepalese farmer who had become a strong advocate for protecting tigers – though he had a large scar from a tiger attack across the right side of his face.

  We learn about characters through their actions in the story. What people do, especially in the midst of crisis or hardship, tells us a lot about who they are, and this is what makes us care, connect and enter into the story. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the finance minister of Nigeria, tells a riveting story in a TED Talk of how as a teenage girl she carried her sick baby sister through a war zone to save her life. The girl was dying of malaria, and young Ngozi had to strap her on her back and walk 10 kilometers in the burning heat to find help. When she arrived at a church where a doctor had set up a clinic, there were a thousand people trying to get in through the door. With her sick sister on her back, she crawled through the legs of the crowd to the side of the church and climbed in through a window. The doctor told her she was just in the nick of time; her sister wouldn’t have survived much longer. The doctor gave the child a shot of chloroquine, and saved her life. We learn so much about Okonjo-Iweala’s character from her actions – her determination and resourcefulness in overcoming obstacles.

  Character is especially important in development stories, because the generic examples of project beneficiaries often portray people living in poverty as victims who depend on others for their rescue and survival. While sometimes this is true – people do need to be rescued in the midst of disasters – when you make a “poor person” into a victim, you deny him or her agency.

  We heard a great story of a character with agency, a woman who broke a gender barrier in her hometown in Kerala, India. She was an unskilled laborer who worked at a construction site. She qualified for a skills-training program and selected plumbing as her trade. No other woman had ever become a plumber before in her town. However, after completing her training, no construction company would hire her. They didn’t trust that a woman could do the job well. She was no better off than before. Instead of giving up, she started doing kitchen repairs for her housewife neighbors. Then she started getting referrals by word of mouth. Apparently, male plumbers used to leave a mess when fixing the plumbing. However, she would always leave the kitchens and bathrooms spotlessly clean. Soon this woman had built a successful local business and was taking on young women like herself as apprentices.

  When your characters have agency, your audience can be inspired by their actions to see how change is possible.

  Finally, when you yourself are a character in your story, it can create a sense of authenticity, trust and shared conviction. We worked with Crawford Allan, a leader in the global fight against wildlife crime. In his talks, he tells the story of the moment that changed his life. He was working as a detective in London and his team was following a lead on a smuggling case. Crawford recalled entering a room filled with the carcasses of hundreds of stuffed, endangered species. “A dead zoo,” he called it. He spoke about holding the severed and preserved head of a chimpanzee in his hand. The wrongness of it filled him with such conviction that he vowed to do whatever it took to end this kind of brutality. Everyone in the room felt his passion and conviction, and it m
ade us all want to support him in his mission.

  5. Resolution

  When the resolution to a good story is satisfying, our brains get a hit of the pleasure chemical, dopamine. But the end must also be surprising in some way. Think for example of the twist at the end of the movie Planet of the Apes. The main character has fought his way to freedom – but in the last frame he discovers his ordeal has been on planet Earth in the distant future. Though he survived, human civilization had perished.

  Fortunately, your stories don’t need quite such earth-shattering endings. You can use one simple tactic to help you find your way to the unexpected. Focus on what has changed as a result of the story. For example, the Korean country manager ended his story about fixing the Laos dam’s harmful impacts by concluding, “This experience made me think about water differently. It made me realize water is about energy, food and environment all together. You can’t think about only one side of its impact. You have to see the full picture.”

  By concluding with an element of change, you can highlight the transformation in your story. For example, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala ended her story about saving her sister from dying of malaria by saying, “My sister grew up to become a doctor herself, and now she is saving other lives.”

  Transformational Storytelling

  Transformational stories show us that change is possible. They show us how human agency can make the world a better place. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s sister, the Korean country manager and the woman plumber in Kerala are all examples of this kind of positive change. When we learn about transformation through a well-told story, it feels almost as if the story happened to us, and we integrate it into our understanding of the world as personal, rather than abstract, knowledge.

  If change can be accomplished once, then it can be accomplished again. In this way the logic of transformational stories convinces us that change is possible. Stories with this transformational dimension can be a powerful tool for helping people reframe how they see the world. Often people aren’t motivated because they believe change is not possible. Stories can shift them out of their old beliefs and into something new. That shift helps move them to act.

  Narrative and Mythos

  We conclude with a final and very important element of storytelling: how narrative shapes our understanding of the world. Each of us makes sense of the world through stories that tell about how things are. We use the word myth – from the Greek mythos – to describe ancient stories of gods and heroes. But in this broader sense, mythos means any story people believe that helps them understand their origins, values, and sense of purpose or destiny.

  When you speak to your audiences’ sense of mythos you can move them deeply, and motivate them to care and to act. Think for example of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, in which he speaks of the founding of the United States on the premise of freedom for all, the bloodshed in the civil war as a struggle to preserve that freedom, and the task of the nation in the aftermath of the war to rebuild so that “government of the people, for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth.” In evoking mythos, he set out to inspire all citizens for the difficult task ahead.

  This is where storytelling intersects with vision. When you tell an audience their story, a story in which the ending has yet to be written, a story in which they are the actors who have the agency to influence their own fate, then you have become a transformational communicator.

  To sum up, the key elements of a great story are:

  • A good beginning

  • Vividness

  • Drama

  • Character

  • A resolution that satisfies and surprises the audience

  When you put these together, you become a transformational storyteller, and a master communicator.

  We would like to end with a riveting and elegantly concise story we recently heard from a Chinese woman economist:

  “I’d like to tell you a story about the day my father beat me up. I was 19, and my parents had found and read my diary. They discovered their suspicions were true – I had participated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. That evening my father came to me in tears. He shocked me by telling me I had once had a brother. He died when he was a baby, before I was born. This was during the Cultural Revolution, when my parents were politically active and were persecuted. My father told me he vowed he would never lose another child to political activism…I tell this story to explain why for so many Chinese, stability is the most important social value.”

  Chapter 18

  Alignment: Expanding Your Influence

  To change the world, even just one corner of it, you can’t do it alone. You need a strong, collaborative network. Often, however, when we attempt to work with others to achieve a common goal, we end up in power struggles, negotiations and entanglements that can sap our energy and leave us frustrated and falling far short of our ambitions.

  Alignment, as we define it, offers a different path. Instead of finding a common goal to rally around, alignment depends on finding a common purpose. A goal is an external objective. A purpose is internal; it’s about values and vision. Finding a common purpose transcends specific objectives and creates a bond that makes you feel part of the same tribe or team as your collaborators.

  The TV show Survivor is a great example of what happens when people only have a common goal. Season after season we watch alliances form with the mutual goal of making it to the “final five” or the “final three” on the show. Yet because the ultimate goal is for an individual to win over all others, these alliances almost always break down. Somebody wants to get the jump on the rest and betrays the group.

  A common goal is a means. A common purpose is an end.

  Contrast the Survivor type of alliance with one of the most famous cases of alignment the world has ever known: the Battle of Thermopylae, which was not long ago made into a Hollywood film, 300. This historic event is considered one of the greatest displays of courage in the face of overwhelming odds – and its outcome decisively altered the course of history.

  In 480 BC the Persian emperor Xerxes invaded Greece, determined to add it to his vast empire. A massive army, estimated at 100,000 men, marched on Athens and central Greece from the north. But to reach their goal, the Persians were forced to travel through a narrow pass at Thermopylae. For 2 solid days, a band of 300 Spartan warriors blocked the pass, holding at bay the entire Persian attack force. Ultimately, the Persians defeated the 300, but the fortitude of the Spartans who died at Thermopylae inspired the Greeks. Although they lost the battle and Athens fell, the Greeks refused to surrender. Later that year they won two stunning victories. Xerxes retreated, and most of the defeated Persian forces died of disease and starvation as they fled from Greece.

  Had the Greeks lost heart, there would have been no golden age of Athenian democracy with all it has given to the world – elected leaders, the birth of reason, dramatic theater, trial by jury, free speech and universal public education of citizens.

  To the 300 Spartans, their aligned vision of a free Greece was worth dying for. We might say alignment creates a common purpose worth living for.

  When we teach alignment to our clients, we do it at the end of a 6-day Master Communicators program. This is because to effectively create alignment you need to know just about every other skill in this book, including messaging, authority, rapport, cueing, framing, vision and storytelling. Here are a few additional techniques you can easily use to increase your ability to align yourself with others:

  Find the Right People

  Your existing network is your best resource. However, people often don’t see their network. It’s a sort of hazy web hanging in space. To concretize this web, take a large sheet of paper and draw a small circle in the center with your name in it. If there is a particular purpose you are working towards, like moving a project, program or piece of legislation forward, write that at the top of the page. Now you can map your network: draw lines connecting you to others in yo
ur work or personal life. Next, take a colored pencil or marker and use that color to connect you with those on the alignment map who could help you achieve your goal in any way. It could be that some names on your map are bridges to other networks of influence.

  The result will probably look like the sort of diagram you see in detective shows on TV – with a murder victim connected to dozens of potential suspects and witnesses. It doesn’t matter if your diagram looks messy or chaotic; creating the display so you can visualize it is what counts.

  If you are focusing within your company, get hold of an organizational chart. Circle your name, and then connect it with others with whom you have a connection within the organization. You can use different colors and thicknesses of lines to indicate the strength of the connection, whether it is personal or professional, etc.

  Here are two lessons some of our participants learned through this exercise:

  One thought leader we worked with was attempting to influence several governments across South America to forge an economic policy agreement. She needed to align with others with a similar vision: individuals who would be willing to use their influence to get the key decision-makers to sign off on it. By simply diagramming her relationships she quickly realized there were three people she knew in Washington DC who could help her – and in fact, she knew one of them would be meeting with a visiting South American president the following week. But it had never occurred to her to think of asking for his support on this issue.