Tell Me Your Story

kevin | Random Walk | Monday, May 26th, 2008

Recently I was one of the keynote speakers at the SAMA annual meeting. The topic was story telling. Here’s a snip . . .

Before we go any further, perhaps it would be useful to talk about what I mean by the word “story.”

This isn’t a college class so we don’t need to be particular here. One obvious meaning of the word is simply a sequence of events. This leads to this, leads to this, and then that happens. It is a common form of communication between two people, particularly in a business setting. Another word for this type of communication is “narrative.”

More formally, we might reference Aristotle. Although humans have been telling stories for as long as we’ve had language, the Greeks brought story telling to a high art. Their epic heroic tales and classic tragic plays adhered to what we would now regard as classical form.

Obviously a story should have a beginning, middle, and an end. A good story should include characters with some complexity. It should have a plot that incorporates a change of fortune and then the subsequent lessons learned. And finally a story should engage the imagination so that the listener might visualize what the characters see, feel, experience, and hear.

For the purposes of business people, we are not looking to win a prize in literature. What we are interested in is how our clients and colleagues talk about what’s important to them and their companies. We are interested in how the people who work in our client companies talk about what’s wrong and what’s right. And equally as important, our clients are interested in how what we have to say matches up with what they think is important.

It is these kinds of stories, or what I like to think of as “narratives around the edges,” that give us the real insight into what we need to know about the people we’re trying to influence.

The key, as we will see, is in the details. It is in the details, in the little things, that we find the texture and meaning that turns a bunch of words into a story. And it is the stories that people tell themselves and others that explain and deliver their decisions.

Having thought about and told a lot of stories over the years, I would add a couple of comments to the framework laid down by Aristotle.

The first is simply this: Stories win. They are the great leveler. Humans have been telling each other stories for so long that the elements of telling and hearing are deeply engrained in each of us. I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t love a good story. I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t tell stories, however poorly or expertly woven. When someone introduces a story into the proceedings, something in the dialog changes.

Over the arc of time, every tribe, village, culture, team, and organization has used stories to communicate what it means to be . . . to be a man, a woman, a hunter, a warrior, an adult, a wife, a team mate, a competitor . . . The list is endless. The Bible, just to pick one piece of the canon of wisdom literature, is filled with stories instructing us as to the why and how of living an obedient life, a just life, a life of grace. At some fundamental level, we immediately recognize these stories as both tales of our people, and tales of the inner journeys we have taken and have yet to take. Reaching back to my previous point, this is why stories win.

In this way, I think stories can also be thought of as containers, containers that hold important information about context, frames (what’s in and out), values, and choices. I’ll touch on each of these topics in the following paragraphs.

Stories are “space-makers”: They make room for people to enter into a state of boundarylessness with each other. Inside the comfortable confines of a story, you stop being you and I stop being me and we become caught up in the arc and the detail of the story. In those moments, we find a new ground on which we can relate to each other.

Finally, and I think most powerfully, when I am able to hear me in your story, when you are able to hear yourself in my story, the space extends and the boundaries that separate us become less formidable, less permanent. We’re not so different after all. We’re not so strange. Perhaps we can travel together after all.

This is why I believe that stories win.

You can read my comments in their entirety, or mostly so, at www.kevinhoffberg.com.