The Leader's Guide to Storytelling E-Book

Stephen Denning

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: J-B US non-Franchise Leadership
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 606

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

In his best-selling book, Squirrel Inc., former World Bank executive and master storyteller Stephen Denning used a tale to show why storytelling is a critical skill for leaders. Now, in this hands-on guide, Denning explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time. Whoever you are in the organization CEO, middle management, or someone on the front lines you can lead by using stories to effect change. Filled with myriad examples, A Leader's Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling is one of the few available ways to handle the principal and most difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. The right kind of story at the right time, can make an organization "stunningly vulnerable" to a new idea.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

The Different Worlds of Leadership and Storytelling

The Intersection of Leadership and Storytelling

The Role of Storytelling

What’s New in Storytelling

The Emerging Leadership Discipline of Narrative

The Nature of Leadership

The Marriage of Narrative and Analysis

The Performance of the Story

A Different Kind of Leader

Let’s Go!

Author’s Note: Definition of Story and Narrative

Narrower and Broader Definitions of Story and Narrative

The Internal and External Aspects of a Story

The Position Adopted in This Book

[PART 1] - THE ROLE OF STORY IN ORGANIZATIONS

Chapter 1 - TELLING THE RIGHT STORY

The Power of Narrative

Using the Storytelling Catalog

The ROI of Storytelling

Chapter 2 - TELLING THE STORY RIGHT

Style

Truth

Preparation

Delivery

[ PART 2] - EIGHT NARRATIVE PATTERNS

Chapter 3 - MOTIVATE OTHERS TO ACTION

The Challenge of Igniting Action and Implementing New Ideas

The Main Elements of the Springboard Story

Avoiding the Main Pitfalls

Chapter 4 - BUILD TRUST IN YOU

Why You Tell Your Story

How to Tell Your Story

Where You Tell Your Story

Chapter 5 - BUILD TRUST IN YOUR COMPANY

The Promise of Digital Storytelling

What Is a Brand?

Communicating the Brand Narrative to the Company

Communicating the Brand Narrative to the Customer

Chapter 6 - TRANSMIT YOUR VALUES

What Are Values?

Transmitting Values Through Narrative

Chapter 7 - GET OTHERS WORKING TOGETHER

High-Performance Teams

Catalyzing High-Performance Teams and Communities

Getting the Group to Work Together

Chapter 8 - SHARE KNOWLEDGE

Telling the Knowledge-Sharing Story

Creating Context for the Knowledge-Sharing Story

Special Kinds of Knowledge-Sharing Stories

Chapter 9 - TAME THE GRAPEVINE

Stories That Form Corporate Culture

Taming the Grapevine

Beyond the Grapevine

The Driving Force Behind the Grapevine

Chapter 10 - CREATE AND SHARE YOUR VISION

Why We Tell Future Stories

How to Tell a Compelling Future Story

Other Aspects of Future Stories

[ PART 3 ] - PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Chapter 11 - SOLVE THE PARADOX OF INNOVATION

Why Current Approaches Don’t Solve the Innovation Paradox

Why Three Alternatives to Disruptive Innovation Don’t Work

Solving the Paradox

Two Different Modes of Leadership

The Narrative Mind-Set

A Different Kind of Leader

Chapter 12 - A DIFFERENT KIND OF LEADER

Leadership That Participates

Leadership That Connects

Leadership That Is Like Conversation

Leadership That Is Possible

Leadership That Fits the Modern Need

Leadership That Is Not for Everyone

Leadership That Is Relatively Free of Ego

Leadership That Is Like Judo

Leadership That Has Feeling

Leadership That Avoids “Apollo Run Amok”

Leadership That Includes Beauty

[ABOUT THE AUTHOR ]

Acknowledgements

[ BIBLIOGRAPHY ]

[ NOTES ]

[ WRITE TO THE AUTHOR ]

[ INDEX ]

Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Denning, Stephen.

The leader’s guide to storytelling: mastering the art and discipline of business narrative/Stephen Denning.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13 978-0-7879-7675-0 (alk. paper)

1. Communication in management. 2. Business communication. 3. Public speaking. 4. Leadership. 5. Organizational communication. I. Title.

HD30.3.D457 2005

658.4’5—dc22

2005003105

HB Printing

[ INTRODUCTION ]

This book is an account of a simple but powerful idea: the best way to communicate with people you are trying to lead is very often through a story. The impulse here is practical and pedagogical. The book shows how to use storytelling to deal with the most difficult challenges faced by leadership today.

The Different Worlds of Leadership and Storytelling

Storytelling and leadership are both performance arts, and like all performance arts, they involve at least as much doing as thinking. In such matters, performers will always know more than they can tell. I have tried to convey here as much as I can of what works—and what doesn’t—at the intersection of the two different worlds of leadership and storytelling.

For the first several decades of my working life, I remained firmly in the world of leadership and management. Specifically, I was a manager in a large international organization. The organization happened to be the World Bank, but had it been any other large modern organization, the discourse would have been essentially the same—rates of return, cost-benefit analyses, risk assessments, performance targets, budgets, work programs, the bottom line, you name it.

The organization happened to be located in the United States of America, but the discourse would not have been much different if it had been situated in any other country. The forces of globalization have rendered the discourse of management and organizations thoroughly international. It’s a world almost totally focused on analysis and abstractions. The virtues of sharpness, rigor, clarity, explicitness, and crispness are everywhere celebrated. It’s a world that is heavy with practical import: the fate of nations and indeed the economic welfare of the entire human race are said to rest on the effectiveness of the discourse.

It was the force of circumstance, rather than temperament, that led me away from the world of the boardroom, the negotiation table, and the computerized spreadsheet to a radically different world—the ancient performance art of storytelling. At the time, I was facing a leadership challenge that made the traditional tools of management seem impotent. In trying to communicate a new idea to a skeptical audience, I found that the virtues of sharpness, rigor, and explicitness weren’t working. Having spent my life believing in the dream of reason, I was startled when I stumbled on the discovery that an appropriately told story had the power to do what rigorous analysis couldn’t—to communicate a strange new idea easily and naturally and quickly get people into enthusiastic action.

Initially, the idea that storytelling might be a powerful tool for management and leadership was so counterintuitive and contrary to my entire education and work-life experience that I had difficulty in believing the evidence of my own eyes. In fact, it took me several years to admit to myself that I was being successful through telling stories.

“Soft.” “Fuzzy.” “Squishy.” “Emotional.” “Fluffy.” “Anecdotal.” “Irrational.” “Fantasy.” “Fairy stories.” “Primitive.” “Childish.” These were just some of the terms that the advocates of conventional management hurled at storytelling, which they saw as contaminating the world of pure reason with the poison of emotions and feeling, thereby dragging society back into the Dark Ages. It took a certain amount of intellectual courage to brave this disdain and suggest that the world of rational management might have much to learn from the ancient tradition of narrative.1

To build up intellectual stamina to face these challenges, I spent time in the radically different world of storytelling. Not that I was made to feel particularly welcome there. On the contrary, I was initially greeted as an interloper—someone who risked sullying the noble tales of glorious heroes and beautiful heroines, the figures who made the imagination soar and the heart leap, with the shallow, mean, and dirty world of business, commerce, and making money. To some, I was borrowing the magic language of narrative to accomplish something for which a tersely worded “fit-in-or-you’re fired” memo might be more suitable. The possibility that I might be trying to subvert the “fit-in-or-you’re-fired” approach to solving human problems wasn’t always plausible.

What made my reception worse was that I didn’t enter the world of storytelling on bended knee in a mood of respectful submission to drink from the ancient fonts of wisdom and accept without question what had been known for millennia about the elements of a well-told story. Instead I arrived with an iconoclastic attitude, suggesting that perhaps it was time to reexamine the eternal verities of storytelling that had been passed on ever since the time of Aristotle. I implied that it might be healthy to throw back the curtains and open the windows and get some fresh air and light on some of these dusty old traditions. To the world of storytelling, this was heresy of the gravest kind. The suggestion that the ancient world of storytelling might actually have something to learn from organizations was as absurd as it was horrifying.

The Intersection of Leadership and Storytelling

The result was that for some years I found myself uneasily inhabiting these two different worlds—each profoundly suspicious of the other, each using discourse that supported the validity of its own assumptions and conduct, each seemingly unable or unwilling to grapple with what it might learn from the other. Storytellers could talk to storytellers and managers could talk to managers, but managers and storytellers couldn’t make much sense of one another. And what little they did understand of the other side’s discourse, they didn’t much like. As I gradually learned to converse, more or less successfully, in both worlds, I found myself in the role of go-between—someone who reported back from the other world, much as in the thirteenth century Marco Polo reported on his trip to China, telling astonished Venetians that there were strange and wonderful things in that distant world if you took the trouble to go there and check it out. Just as Marco Polo discovered, the very strangeness of my tale rendered my credibility questionable.

Occasionally when I would make a report to managers of what was going on in the world of storytelling, or to storytellers what was happening in the land of management, one of them would say, “How interesting!” And that is one of the points of this book: to point out matters of profound interest to both the world of storytelling and the world of leadership. So when in this book I take potshots of various kinds at both the world of management and the world of storytelling, please see that they are fragments of a lover’s quarrel. If I didn’t care deeply about both these worlds, it wouldn’t be worth the hassle to undertake the role of dual ambassador.2

One of the factors driving me was the awareness that the average manager was not having such extravagant success in meeting leadership challenges that there was no need to learn. Let me cite just a few statistics of the kind that managers love to hang their hats on:

• Study after study concludes that only 10 percent of all publicly traded companies have proved themselves able to sustain for more than a few years a growth trajectory that creates above-average shareholder returns.3

• Repeated studies indicate that somewhat less than 10 percent of major innovations in large corporations—the ones on which the future is said to depend—are successful.4

• The multibillion-dollar activity of mergers and acquisitions enjoys a success rate, in terms of adding value to the acquiring company, of around 15 percent.5

To grasp the significance of these figures, you need only ask yourself, If your airline’s flights only arrived 10-15 percent of the time, would you be getting on that plane? If your surgical operation was only successful 10-15 percent of the time, would you be undergoing that operation? And it’s not as though these rather staggeringly low rates of success have always been accomplished in an admirable manner, with names such as Enron, Arthur Andersen, and WorldCom filling the news. Managers thus have little reason to be complacent about their current mode of getting results.6

Nor was it obvious that the storytellers I met had any reason to be happier with their overall situation. Many of them were entangled in one way or another with the world of organizations. Often storytelling was for them a part-time avocation, as it didn’t generate sufficient revenue to make ends meet: they had day jobs to fill the gap. And those few who were involved full time in storytelling found themselves willy-nilly in the world of organizations and commerce. But storytellers tended to keep the two worlds separate. They were just as unhappy as anyone else with the command-and-control management practices widespread in organizations, but the storytellers had no idea how to change them. They tended to live bifurcated lives. Left-brained workers by day. Right-brained storytellers by night. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t see a way to bring their right-brained storytelling capacity into the workplace. It wasn’t clear that they even wanted to. Just as the left-brained managers were reluctant to contaminate the rationalism of management with impassioned narratives, so storytellers were reluctant to risk dirtying the world of storytelling by introducing it into the world of commerce. Better to keep storytelling pure and noble than risk such a fate.

As I moved uneasily between these two different worlds, it was apparent to me that each of them had something to offer to the other. When I saw how storytellers could hold an audience totally engrossed in what was being said, I could see that this capacity is what analytic managers often lack when they present brilliant plans that leave audiences confused and dazed. I also saw how slighted storytellers felt when the world of organizations didn’t take them seriously. By clarifying the theory and practice of storytelling, I felt that I could show that storytelling had much to offer to organizations. By taking a clear-sighted view of what storytelling could and couldn’t do, I believed I could help it assume its rightful place as an equal partner with abstractions and analysis as a key leadership discipline. Storytellers would get back the respect they want and deserve. Leaders would be able to connect with their audiences as human beings.

And of course, what both worlds of storytelling and organization have been overlooking is that storytelling already plays a huge role in the world of organizations and business and politics today. One has only to glance at the business section of the newspaper to see that organizations are chockablock with stories that have massive financial impact.7 Stories are the only way to make sense of a rapidly morphing global economy with multiple wrenching transitions under way simultaneously.

The choice for leaders in business and organizations is not whether to be involved in storytelling—they can hardly do otherwise—but rather whether to use storytelling unwittingly and clumsily—or intelligently and skillfully. Management fads may come and go, but storytelling is a phenomenon that is fundamental to all nations, societies, and cultures, and has been so since time immemorial.

And it’s not just leaders in business and politics who can benefit from a greater capability to use story—anyone who has a new idea and wants to change the world will do better by telling stories than by any amount of logical exhortation. It is equally applicable to those outside organizations, such as schoolteachers, health workers, therapists, family members, professional colleagues—in short, anyone who wants to change the minds of those around them.

The Role of Storytelling

How large an idea is storytelling? In one sense, telling a story is simply giving an example. It is “glaringly obvious, and is something we all know instinctively. A good example may make something easier to understand, and easier to remember.”8

So what? We can, the thinking goes, recognize the power of giving an example and go on managing the way we’ve always been managing without significant change. No big deal.

And yet it turns out to be a very big deal indeed, with storytelling being such a sizable part of the modern economy. Deidre McCloskey has calculated that persuasion constitutes more than a quarter of the U.S. GNP.9 If storytelling is—conservatively—at least half of persuasion, then storytelling amounts to 14 percent of GNP, or more than a trillion dollars. But it’s not just the size of the phenomenon. There’s something different going on here.

What’s New in Storytelling

To clear away some of the underbrush, let me start with some basics. In my experience, the following propositions do not seem particularly controversial to most people:

• Storytelling is an ancient art that hasn’t changed much in several thousand years.

• The effective use of storytelling in organizations involves crafting and performing a well-made story with a hero or heroine, a plot, a turning point, and a resolution.

• A storyteller catches and holds the attention of an audience by evoking the sights and sounds and smells of the context in which the story took place.

• A compellingly told well-made story is effective regardless of the purpose for which the story is being told.

• Storytelling is a rare skill in which relatively few human beings excel.

While all these propositions are widely regarded as noncontroversial, they are all wrong. They constitute some of the popular misconceptions about storytelling. One of the purposes of this book is to explode these myths and expose what’s really involved in using story for leadership in organizations.10

For one thing, it turns out that different narrative patterns are useful for the different purposes of leadership. Knowing which pattern is suitable for which task is a key to the effective use of storytelling. Ignorance of the different narrative patterns makes it likely that aspiring leaders will stumble onto an inappropriate narrative pattern for the task at hand and so fail to attain their chosen goal.

It also transpires that some of the most valuable stories in organizations don’t fit the pattern of a well-made story. For instance, a springboard story that communicates a complex idea and sparks action generally lacks a plot and a turning point. A story that shares knowledge is about problems, solutions, and explanations, and often lacks a hero or heroine. The stories that are most effective in a modern organization do not necessarily follow the rules laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics. They often reflect an ancient but different tradition of storytelling in a minimalist fashion, which is reflected in the parables of the Bible and the European folk tales.11

Just as the human race began to make rapid progress in the physical sciences when people stopped believing what Aristotle had written and started observing with their own eyes whether two stones of different weights fall at the same or different speeds, so in the field of organizational storytelling, we begin to make progress when we stop looking at the world through the lens of traditional storytelling and start using the evidence of our own eyes and ears to examine what stories are actually told in organizations and what effect they have.

Moreover the idea that storytelling is a kind of rare skill, possessed by relatively few human beings, is utter nonsense. Human beings master the basics of storytelling as young children and retain this capability throughout their lives. One has only to watch what goes in an informal social setting—a restaurant, a coffee break, a party—to see that all human beings know how to tell stories. Storytelling is an activity that is practiced incessantly by everyone. It is so pervasive that it has almost become invisible. We are like fish swimming in a sea of narratives. It is usually only when we are asked to stand up before an audience and talk in a formal setting that the indoctrination of our schooling takes over and a tangle of abstractions tumbles from our mouths. Learning to tell stories is not so much a task of learning something as it is reminding ourselves of something we already know how to do. It’s a matter of transposing the skills we apply effortlessly in a social situation to formal settings.

That’s what this book is about—providing leaders at whatever level in the organization with usable tools for communication—narratives that help tackle the most difficult challenges of leadership. The book has a strong focus on what works. But it also conveys enough theoretical background to give you an understanding of why some stories work for some purposes but not for others.

The Emerging Leadership Discipline of Narrative

Five years ago, when I published The Springboard, I was thinking of springboard stories as a tool, a remarkably useful tool but no more than a single tool.

By 2003, when I was finishing Squirrel Inc., I could see that story-telling was more than one tool: it was at least a whole array of tools—tools that could help achieve multiple purposes such as sparking people into action, communicating who you are or who your company is, transmitting values, sharing knowledge, taming the grapevine, and leading into the future.

Now in 2005, writing The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, I sense that narrative is even more than that. But what? A clue came recently when I was rereading Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline.12 At the end, Senge hints at the possibility of a sixth discipline—“perhaps one or two developments emerging in seemingly unlikely places, will lead to a wholly new discipline that we cannot even grasp today.” The sixth discipline would be something invisible to conventional management thinking, because it would be at odds with its fundamental assumptions.

Thus it would be not a single gadget or technique or tool but rather a discipline, that is, “a body of theory and technique that must be studied and mastered to be put into practice. A discipline is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies. As with any discipline, from playing the piano to electrical engineering, some people have an innate ‘gift’ but anyone can develop proficiency through practice.”13

Given the limited progress being made on innovation even using the five disciplines Senge talked about, this passage got me wondering whether storytelling might not be the missing sixth discipline. Certainly it has the characteristics that Senge envisaged for a discipline: that is, something “where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free and where people are continually learning how to learn together.” And it has to do with “how we think, what we truly want, and how we interact and learn with one another.”14 So could narrative be the missing sixth discipline?

Five years ago, I simply didn’t know enough to call organizational story-telling a discipline: an emerging practice maybe, but not a discipline. Now I can draw upon the work of practitioners like Madelyn Blair, Evelyn Clark, Seth Kahan, Gary Klein, Doug Lipman, Carol Pearson, Annette Simmons, Dave Snowden, and Victoria Ward, among many others. I can also see the wonderful work emerging from academia.15 As I become more and more aware that I’m just scratching the surface of a subject that is broad and deep, I’m inclined to think that narrative really is an emerging discipline.

The Nature of Leadership

The emerging discipline of narrative deals with leadership more than management. Management concerns means rather than ends. Managers usually take an agreed-upon set of assumptions and goals and implement more efficient and effective ways of achieving those goals. They direct, control, and decide what to do, on the basis of agreed-upon hypotheses, generally proceeding deductively.

Leadership on the other hand deals with ends more than means. It concerns issues where there is no agreement on underlying assumptions and goals—or where there is a broad agreement, but the assumptions and goals are heading for failure. In fact, the principal task of leadership is to create a new consensus about the goals to be pursued and how to achieve them. Once there is such a consensus, then managers can get on with the job of implementing those goals.

Leadership is essentially a task of persuasion—of winning people’s minds and hearts. Typically it proceeds inductively by argument from one or more examples toward a more general conclusion about the goals and assumptions we should adopt toward the matter in question. Story-telling is thus inherently suited to the task of leadership.

The Marriage of Narrative and Analysis

This is not to say that abstract reason and analysis aren’t also important. Storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking. It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and is ideally suited to communicating change and stimulating innovation. Abstract analysis is easier to understand when seen through the lens of a well-chosen story and can of course be used to make explicit the implications of a story.

The physical sciences have had an aversion to anything to do with storytelling in part because it deals with such murky things as intentions, emotions, and matters of the heart. Yet in the last couple of decades, most of the human sciences have grasped the centrality of narrative to human affairs. Thus narrative has come to dominate vast regions of psychology, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, political theory, literary studies, religious studies, and psychotherapy.16 It is even beginning to play a role in the supposedly hard science of medicine.17 Management is among the last of the disciplines to recognize the central significance of narrative to the issues that it deals with.

The Performance of the Story

Many of the insights in this book will sound simple and easy to learn. But watch out—this is harder than it looks. Storytelling is a performance art. It’s one thing to realize that you need to link the story with the change idea—it’s another thing to do it, time after time without fail, like the swing of a professional golfer who always performs flawlessly. You will not become a master storyteller simply by reading this book. You will have to put the ideas into practice so that you get into a groove.

Finally, keep in mind that the stories in this book are for the most part intended to be performed. Some of the stories included here, when read in the cold white light of the printed page, may seem so brief and bland that it isn’t easy to imagine how they could have impact. Remember that everything is transformed in performance. Small things make a big difference. The look of the eye, the intonation of the voice, the way the body is held, the import of a subtle pause, and the teller’s response to the audience’s responses—all these aspects make a huge contribution to the meaning of a story for audiences. Chapter Two discusses how to perform a story for maximum effect.

A Different Kind of Leader

Throughout the book, the case is made, step by step, that if you consistently use the narrative tools described here, you will acquire new capabilities. Because you 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 make your values explicit and your actions are consistent 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. Chapter Twelve explores the implications of this kind of leadership for organizations.

Let’s Go!

The challenges of leadership are difficult, volatile, sometimes threatening. This book doesn’t shy away from those difficulties. And yet it offers a note of hope. Leadership is not an innate set of skills that a few gifted individuals receive at birth. Narrative patterns can be learned by anyone who wants to lead from whatever position they are in—whether CEO, middle management, or on the front lines of an organization, or outside any organizations altogether—anyone who sees a better way to do things and wants the organization to change.

Organizations often seem immovable. They are not. With the right kind of story at the right time, they are stunningly vulnerable to a new idea. And this book provides you with a guide to finding and telling the right story at the right time.

Author’s Note: Definition ofStoryandNarrative

In this book, narrative and story are used as synonyms, in a broad sense of an account of a set of events that are causally related. Such a simple, commonsense notion is, however, controversial. Here I have space only to allude to some of the issues.

Narrower and Broader Definitions of Story and Narrative

Some practitioners have suggested different definitions. Some suggest that story should be defined in the narrower sense of a well-told story, with a protagonist, a plot, and a turning point leading to a resolution, while narrative might be used in the broader sense I use. On this view, locutions that lack the traditional elements of a well-told story are not so much stories as ideas for possible stories yet to be told or fragments of stories.18

In practice, the actual usage of both story and narrative is very broad. Polkinghorne and others have suggested that we accept this broad meaning and treat the two terms as synonyms.20 Within the broad field of story, it’s possible to distinguish classically structured stories, well-made stories, minimalist stories, anti-stories, fragmentary stories, stories with no ending, stories with multiple endings, stories with multiple beginnings, stories with endings that circle back to the beginning, comedies, tragedies, detective stories, romances, folk tales, novels, theater, movies, television mini-series, and so on, without the need to get into theological discussions as to what is truly a story.

In common usage, story is a large tent, with many variations within it. Some variations are more useful for some purposes than others. There are probably many variations that haven’t yet been identified. If we start out with predetermined ideas of what a “real story” is, you may end up missing useful forms of narrative.

The Internal and External Aspects of a Story

It is also important to keep in mind that story has an external and an internal aspect. Story in its external aspect is something to be observed, analyzed, and dissected into its component parts. Story in its internal aspect is something that is experienced, lived as a participant. This book explores both dimensions of story. The value of the external view of story is that it is stable and clear. Its drawback is that it stands outside the experience of the story itself. The value of the internal view of story is that it is fresh and immediate and participative. Its weakness is that it is elusive and kaleidoscopic and vulnerable to abuse. 21

The Position Adopted in This Book

This book follows common usage and treats story and narrative as synonyms, to mean an account of events that are causally connected in some way.

This book sees story as independent of the media by which it is transmitted. A story can be transmitted by words, by pictures, by video, or by mime. While recognizing the suitability of language to communicate narrative, it is possible to study narrative in its nonverbal manifestations without requiring verbal narration.22

In examining the phenomenon of story and storytelling, both the external and internal aspects of story need to be taken into account .23

[PART 1]

THE ROLE OF STORY IN ORGANIZATIONS

1

TELLING THE RIGHT STORY

Choosing the Right Story for the Leadership Challenge at Hand

“Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning.”

—Mary Catherine Bateson1

In 1998, I made a pilgrimage to the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee, seeking enlightenment. As program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, I’d stumbled onto the power of storytelling. Despite a career of scoffing at such touchy-feely stuff—like most business executives, I knew that analytical was good, anecdotal was bad—my thinking had started to change. Over the past few years, I’d seen stories help galvanize an organization around a defined business goal.

In the mid-1990s, that goal was to get people at the World Bank to support efforts at knowledge management—a strange notion in the organization at the time. I offered people cogent arguments about the need to gather the knowledge scattered throughout the organization. They didn’t listen. I gave PowerPoint presentations that compellingly demonstrated the value of sharing and leveraging our know-how. My audiences merely looked dazed. In desperation, I was ready to try almost anything.

Then in 1996 I began telling people a story:

In June of last year, a health worker in a tiny town in Zambia went to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and got the answer to a question about the treatment of malaria. Remember that this was in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, and it was in a tiny place six hundred kilometers from the capital city. But the most striking thing about this picture, at least for us, is that the World Bank isn’t in it. Despite our know-how on all kinds of poverty-related issues, that knowledge isn’t available to the millions of people who could use it. Imagine if it were. Think what an organization we could become.

This simple story helped World Bank staff and managers envision a different kind of future for the organization. When knowledge management later became an official corporate priority, I used similar stories to maintain the momentum. So I began to wonder how the tool of narrative might be put to work even more effectively. As a rational manager, I decided to consult the experts.

At the International Storytelling Center, I told the Zambia story to a professional storyteller, J. G. “Paw-Paw” Pinkerton, and asked the master what he thought. Imagine my chagrin when he said he didn’t hear a story at all. There was no real “telling.” There was no plot. There was no building up of the characters. Who was this health worker in Zambia? And what was her world like? What did it feel like to be in the exotic environment of Zambia, facing the problems she faced? My anecdote, he said, was a pathetic thing, not a story at all. I needed to start from scratch if I hoped to turn it into a “real story.”

Was I surprised? Well, not exactly. The story was bland. I did have a problem with this advice from the expert, though. I knew in my heart it was wrong. And with that realization, I was on the brink of an important insight: Beware the well-told story!

The Power of Narrative

But let me back up a bit. Do stories really have a role to play in the business world? Believe me, I’m familiar with skepticism about them. When you talk about storytelling to a group of hardheaded executives, you’d better be prepared for some eye rolling. If the group is polite as well as tough, don’t be surprised if the eyes simply glaze over.

That’s because most executives operate with a particular—and generally justified—mind-set. Analysis is what drives business thinking. It seemingly cuts through the fog of myth, gossip, and speculation to get to the hard facts. It purports to go wherever the observations and premises and conclusions take it, undistorted by the hopes or fears of the analyst. Its strength lies in its objectivity, its impersonality, its heartlessness.

Yet this strength is also a weakness. Analysis might excite the mind, but it hardly offers a route to the heart. And that’s where you must go if you are to motivate people not only to take action but to do so with energy and enthusiasm. At a time when corporate survival often requires transformational change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar and often unwelcome ways. Mind-numbing cascades of numbers or daze-inducing PowerPoint slides won’t achieve this goal. Even logical arguments for making the needed changes usually won’t do the trick.

But effective storytelling often does. In fact, in certain situations, nothing else works. Although good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story—that is, a narrative that links a set of events in some kind of causal sequence. Story-telling can translate those dry and abstract numbers into compelling pictures of a leader’s goals. I saw this happen at the World Bank—by 2000, we were increasingly recognized as leaders in the area of knowledge management—and have seen it in scores of other large organizations since then.

So why did I have problems with the advice I’d received from the professional storyteller in Jonesborough?

A “Poorly Told” Story

The timing of my trip to Tennessee was fortunate. Had I sought expert advice two years earlier, I might have taken the master’s recommendations without question. But I’d had some time to approach the idea of organizational storytelling with a beginner’s mind, free of strictures about the right way to tell a story.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t follow the Jonesborough storyteller’s recommendations. I saw immediately how to flesh out my modest anecdote about the health worker in Zambia: You’d dramatically depict her life, the scourge of malaria that she faced in her work, and perhaps the pain and suffering of the patient she was treating that day. You’d describe the extraordinary set of events that led to her being seated in front of a computer screen deep in the hinterland of Zambia. You’d delineate the false leads she had followed before she came across the CDC Web site. You’d build up to the moment of triumph when she found the answer to her question about malaria and vividly describe how that answer could transform the life of her patient. The story would be a veritable epic!

This traditional, or maximalist, account would be more engrossing than my dry anecdote. But I had learned enough by then to realize that telling the story in this way to a corporate audience would not galvanize implementation of a strange new idea like knowledge management. I knew that in the hectic modern workplace, people had neither the time nor the patience—remember executives’ general skepticism about story-telling in the first place—to absorb a richly detailed narrative. If I was going to hold the attention of my audience, I had to make my point in seconds, not in minutes.

There was another problem. Even if my audience did take the time to listen to a fully developed tale, telling it in that fashion would not allow listeners the mental space to relate the story to their own very different worlds. Although I was describing a health worker in Zambia, I wanted my audience to focus not on Zambia but on their own situations. I hoped they would think, “If the CDC can reach a health worker in Zambia, why can’t the World Bank? Why don’t we put our knowledge on a Web site and broaden our scope?” If my listeners were immersed in a saga about that health worker and her patient, they might be too preoccupied to ask themselves these questions—or to provide answers. In other words, I didn’t want my audience too interested in Zambia. A minimalist narrative was effective precisely because it lacked detail and texture. The same characteristic that the professional storyteller saw as a flaw was, for my purposes, a strength.

On my return from Jonesborough, I educated myself on the principles of traditional storytelling. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle, in his Poetics, said stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They should include complex characters as well as a plot that incorporates a reversal of fortune and a lesson learned. Furthermore, the storyteller should be so engaged with the story—visualizing the action, feeling what the characters feel—that the listeners become drawn into the narrative’s world. Aristotle’s formula has proved successful over the ages, from Ovid’s Metapmorphoses to The Arabian Nights to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and most Hollywood screenplays.

Despite the narrative power of this kind of story, I knew that it probably wouldn’t spark action in an organization. My insight blinded me to something else, though. Believing that this wonderful and rich tradition had no place in the time-constrained world of modern business was as wrongheaded as thinking that all stories had to be full of detail and color. Later on, I would see that the well-told story is relevant in a modern organization. Indeed, a number of surprises about the use of storytelling in organizations awaited me.

Tales of Success and Failure

In December 2000 I left the World Bank and began to consult with companies on their knowledge management programs and, by extension, their use of organizational stories. The following year, I found myself in London with Dave Snowden, then a director of IBM’s Institute of Knowledge Management, teaching a storytelling master class to around seventy executives from private and public sector organizations.

In the morning, I spoke about my experience at the World Bank and how a positive orientation was essential if a narrative like the one about Zambia was to have its intended effect. But in the afternoon, to my dismay, my fellow presenter emphatically asserted the opposite.

At IBM and elsewhere, Dave had found purely positive stories to be problematic. They were, he said, like the Janet and John stories told to children in the United Kingdom or the Dick and Jane stories in the United States: the characters were so good they made you feel queasy. The naughtiest thing Janet and John would do was spill a bottle of water in the yard. Then they would go and tell their mother about it and promise never to do it again. Janet would volunteer to help with the cleanup and John would offer to help wash the car. These stories for children reflected a desire to show things as they should be rather than as they actually are. In a corporate environment, Dave told his audience, listeners would respond to such rosy tales by conjuring up negative anti-stories about what must have actually happened. His message: Beware the positive story!

After the workshop, Dave and I discussed why his stories focused on the negative while mine accentuated the positive. I could see he had a point. I’d used negative stories myself when trying to teach people the nitty-gritty of any subject. The fact is, people learn more from their mistakes than from their successes.

Eventually, however, it dawned on me that our points of view were complementary. We were talking about organizational stories used for different purposes: my stories were designed to motivate people, and Dave’s were designed to share knowledge. His stories might describe how and why a team failed to accomplish an objective, with the aim of helping others avoid the same mistakes. (To elicit such stories, however, Dave often had to start by getting people to talk about their successes, even if these accounts were ultimately less useful vehicles for conveying knowledge.) It was then that I began to realize that the purpose of telling a story might determine its form.

Granted, even optimistic stories have to be true and believable, since jaded corporate audiences know too well the experience of being presented with half-truths. Stories told in an effort to spur action need to make good on their promises and contain sufficient evidence of a positive outcome. But stories intended mainly to transfer knowledge must be more than true. Because their objective is to generate understanding and not action, they tend to highlight the pitfalls of ignorance; they are meant not to inspire people but to make them cautious. Just as my minimalist stories to spark action were different from traditional entertainment stories told in a maximalist fashion, so an effective knowledge-sharing story would have negative rather than positive overtones.

A Collective Yawn

Once I saw that different narrative forms can further different business goals, I looked for other ways that managers could make stories work for them. A number of distinct story types began to emerge—ones that didn’t necessarily follow Aristotelian guidelines but were nonetheless used to good effect in a variety of organizations. (For descriptions of some of them and the purposes for which they might be used, see the section titled “A Storytelling Catalog.”) And I continued to come across unexpected insights about the nature of storytelling within organizations.

For one thing, if negative stories have their place, so do apparently boring ones. In Talking about Machines, Julian Orr recounts a number of stories that have circulated among photocopy machine repair technicians at Xerox.2 While rich in detail, they are even less storylike than my little anecdote about the health care worker in Zambia. Most of these tales, which present solutions to technical problems faced by the technicians, lack a plot and a distinct character. In fact, they are hardly stories at all, with little to hold the interest of anyone except those close to the often-esoteric subject matter. Why are they compelling even to this limited audience? Because they are driven forward by a detailed explanation of the cause-and-effect relationship between an action and its consequence. For example:

You’ve got a malfunctioning copy machine with an E053 error code, which is supposed to mean a problem in the 24-volt Interlock Power Supply. But you could chase the source of that 24-volt Interlock problem forever, and you’d never, ever find out what it is. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll eventually get an F066 error code, which indicates the true source of the malfunction—namely, a shorted dicorotron. Apparently, this is happening because the circuitry in the XER board has been changed to prevent the damage that would otherwise occur when a dicorotron shorted. Before the change in circuitry, a shorted dicorotron would have fried the whole XER board. Changing the circuitry has prevented damage to the XER board, but it’s created a different issue. Now an E053 error message doesn’t give you the true source of the machine’s malfunction.

This story, paraphrased here, doesn’t just describe the technician’s accurate diagnosis of a problem; it also relates why things happened as they did. This makes the account, negative in tone and almost unintelligible to an outsider, both informative and interesting to its intended audience.

As I continued my investigation, one area of particular interest for me was the link between storytelling and leadership. I already knew from personal experience how stories could be used as a catalyst for action. And I had seen in several influential books—Leading Minds by Howard Gardner, The Leadership Engine by Noel Tichy, and The Story Factor by Annette Simmons—how stories could help leaders define their personality, boosting confidence in their integrity and providing some idea of how they might act in a given situation.3

I also had seen leaders using narrative to inculcate a positive set of corporate values and beliefs in the hearts and minds of employees. Think, for example, of Tyco’s effort to repair its battered value system. The company began by developing a straightforward guide setting forth new rules in such areas as harassment, conflicts of interest, and fraud. But Eric Pillmore, senior vice president of corporate governance, soon learned that in this form the booklet would merely gather dust on people’s shelves. So he threw out what he had done and started again in an effort to bring the principles alive through stories. Here is one of them:

The entire team jokes about Tom being gay. Tom has never complained and doesn’t seem to mind, but when Mark is assigned to work with Tom, the jokes turn on Mark. Now that Mark receives the brunt of the jokes, he tells his supervisor he wants to be reassigned. His supervisor complies with Mark’s request.4

This story serves as a sidebar for the section of the guide that deals with sexual harassment and other forms of intimidating behavior. While the company’s policy on harassment is clearly laid out in the guide, the simple narrative helps bring the policy to life and provides a starting point for thinking about and discussing the complex issues involved. Dozens of similar stories illustrate an array of company policies.5

An Enticing but Hazy Future

Although these types of stories furthered leadership goals in a relatively predictable way, others I came across were more quirky—particularly ones used to communicate vision. Noel Tichy writes about the importance of preparing an organization for change: “The best way to get humans to venture into unknown terrain is to make that terrain familiar and desirable by taking them there first in their imaginations.”6 Aha! I thought. Here is a place where storytelling, perhaps the most powerful route to people’s imaginations, could prove indispensable.

But as I looked at examples of such stories in a number of arenas, I discovered that most of the successful ones were surprisingly sketchy about the details of the imagined future. Consider Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Neither of these famous addresses came close to describing the future in enough detail that it became, in listeners’ minds, familiar terrain.

Over time—and, in part, through work I did in corporate scenario planning—I realized why. Specific predictions about the future are likely to be proved wrong. Because they almost inevitably differ in major or minor ways from what eventually happens, leaders who utter them risk losing people’s confidence. Consequently, a story designed to prepare people for change needs to evoke the future and conjure up a direction for getting there—without being too precise. Think of the corporate future laid out in a famous mandate by Jack Welch: General Electric will be either number one or number two in the field, or it will exit the sector. This is a clear but broad-brush description of where Welch wanted to take the company. Like my Zambia story, though for different reasons, it doesn’t convey too much information.

I also came across stories used in somewhat unusual situations that called for reactive rather than proactive measures. These stories counteracted negative ones that circulated like viruses within an organization and threatened to infect the entire body. Dave Snowden of IBM first pointed out to me how stories could be used in this manner. His hypothesis was that you could attach a positive story to a negative one and defuse it, as an antibody would neutralize an antigen.

For example, at an IBM manufacturing site for laptop computers in the United Kingdom, stories circulated among the blue-collar workers about the facility’s managers, who were accused of not doing any real work, being overpaid, and having no idea what it was like on the manufacturing line. But an additional story was injected into the mix: One day, a new site director turned up in a white coat, unannounced and unaccompanied, and sat on the line making ThinkPads for a day. He asked workers on the assembly line for help. In response, someone asked him: “Why do you earn so much more than me?” His simple reply: “If you screw up badly, you lose your job. If I screw up badly, three thousand people lose their jobs.”7

While not a story in the traditional sense, the manager’s words—and actions—served as a seed for the story that eventually circulated in opposition to the one about managers’ being lazy and overpaid. You can imagine the buzz: “Blimey, you should’ve seen how he fumbled with those circuit boards. I guess he’ll never work on the line. But you know, he does have a point about his pay.” The atmosphere at the facility began improving within weeks.

A STORYTELLING CATALOG

Storytelling is an increasingly accepted way to achieve management goals. But leaders need to employ a variety of narrative patterns for different aims. The following sections sketch the kinds of stories I’ve found, following the general outline of Part Two of the book.

Sparking Action

Leadership is, above all, about getting people to change. To achieve this goal, you need to communicate the complex nature of the changes required and inspire an often skeptical organization to enthusiastically carry them out. This is the place for what I call a “springboard story,” one that enables listeners to visualize the large-scale transformation needed in their circumstances and then to act on that realization.

Such a story is based on an actual event, preferably recent enough to seem relevant. It has a single protagonist with whom members of the target audience can identify. And it has an authentically happy ending, in which a change has at least in part been implemented successfully. (It also has an implicit alternate ending, an unhappy one that would have resulted had the change not occurred.)

The story has enough detail to be intelligible and credible but—and this is key—not so much texture that the audience becomes completely wrapped up in it. If that happens, people won’t have the mental space to create an analogous scenario for change in their own organization. For example, if you want to get an organization to embrace a new technology, you might tell stories about individuals elsewhere who have successfully implemented it, without dwelling on the specifics of implementation.

Communicating Who You Are

You aren’t likely to lead people through wrenching change if they don’t trust you. And if they’re to trust you, they have to know you: who you are, where you’ve come from, and why you hold the views you do. Ideally, they’ll end up not only understanding you but also empathizing with you.

Stories for this purpose are usually based on a life event that reveals some strength or vulnerability and shows what the speaker took from the experience.

Unlike a story designed to spark action, this kind is typically “well told,” with colorful detail and context. So the speaker needs to ensure that the audience has enough time and interest to hear the story.

For example, Jack Welch’s success in making General Electric a winner was undoubtedly aided by his ability to tell his own story, which includes a tongue-lashing he once received from his mother after he hurled a hockey stick across the ice in response to a disappointing loss. His mother chased the young Jack Welch into the locker room where the young men on the team were changing and grabbed him by the shoulders. “You punk!” he reports her saying in his memoir, “If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win.”8

On the face of it, this is a story about Jack Welch’s youth, but it’s also a story about the Jack Welch of today. From this story, we get a good idea of the kind of person Jack Welch became as CEO of GE—obsessed with winning, strong on loyalty, and with an aggressive style of behavior, someone who is very much “in your face.”

Communicating Who the Company Is—Branding

In some ways the stories by which companies communicate the reputation of themselves and their products so as to establish their brand are analogous to leaders’ stories of who they are.

Just as individuals need trust if they are to lead, so companies need trust if their products and services are to succeed in the marketplace. For customers to trust a company and its products, they have to know what sort of company they are dealing with, what kinds of values it espouses, and how its people approach meeting customers’ needs.

Strong brands are based on a narrative—a promise that the company makes to the customer, a promise that the company must keep. It’s a story that the customer has about the company and its products and services. The brand narrative is owned by the customer, not the company.

Once you have settled on the brand promise and made sure that the organization can deliver on it, communicating that to customers is most effectively done, not through electronic advertising (which today has limited credibility) but rather through having the product or service tell its own story, or by the customers’ word of mouth.

Transmitting Values

Stories can be effective tools for ingraining values within an organization, particularly those that help forestall future problems by clearly establishing limits on destructive behavior. A story of this type ensures that the audience understands “how things are done around here.”

These narratives often take the form of a parable. Religious leaders have used them for thousands of years to communicate values. The stories are usually set in some kind of generic past and have few context-setting details—though the context that is established needs to seem relevant to the listeners. The facts of such tales can be hypothetical, but they must be believable. For example, a story might tell the sad fate of someone who failed to see the conflict of interest in not disclosing a personal financial interest in a company supplier.

Of course, narratives alone cannot establish values in an organization. Leaders need to live the values on a daily basis.

Fostering Collaboration

Every management textbook talks about the value of getting people to work together. But most don’t offer advice on making that happen in real-life work environments—except generalities like “Encourage conversations.” Yes, but how?

One approach is to generate a common narrative around a group’s concerns and goals, beginning with a story told by one member of the group. Ideally, that first story sparks another, which sparks another. If the process continues, group members develop a shared perspective, one that enables a sense of community to emerge naturally. The first story must be emotionally moving enough to unleash the narrative impulse in others and to create a readiness to hear more stories. It could, for example, vividly describe how the speaker had grappled with a difficult work situation.

For this process to occur, it is best if the group has an open agenda that allows the stories to surface organically. It is also desirable to have a plan ready so that the energy generated by the positive experience of sharing stories can be immediately channeled into action.

Taming the Grapevine

Rumors flow incessantly through every organization. “Have you heard the latest?” is a whispered refrain that’s difficult for managers to deal with. Denying a rumor can give it credibility. Asking how it got started may ensure its spread. Ignoring it altogether risks allowing it to grow out of control. Rumors about issues central to the future of the organization—takeovers, reorganizations, major managerial changes—can be an enormous distraction (or worse) to the staff and to outside stakeholders.

So as an executive, what can you do? One effective response is to harness the energy of the grapevine to defuse the rumor, using a story to convince listeners that the gossip is either untrue or unreasonable. This kind of story highlights the incongruity between the rumor and reality. You could use gentle satire to mock the rumor, the rumor’s author, or even yourself, in an effort to undermine the rumor’s power. For example, you might deal with a false rumor of “imminent corporate-wide reorganization” by jokingly recounting how the front office’s current struggles involving the seating chart for executive committee meetings would have to be worked out first. Keep in mind, though, that humor can backfire. Mean-spirited ridicule can generate a well-deserved backlash.

The trick is to work with, not against, the flow of the vast underground river of informal communication that exists in every organization. Of course, you can’t ridicule a rumor into oblivion if it’s true or at least reasonable. If that’s the case, there is little that can be done except to admit the rumor, put it in perspective, and move on.

Sharing Knowledge

Much of the intellectual capital of an organization is not written down anywhere but resides in the minds of the staff. Communicating this know-how across an organization and beyond typically occurs informally, through the sharing of stories.