"It's the easiest thing in the world to make communication in business utterly forgettable (some people have a real talent for it) and even annoying. The craft of storymaking and the art of the storyteller can help you be relevant and engaging... but how?"

Word count: 1186 words (reading time 5 - 6 minutes)

Storytelling in Business (2) - If I were you, I wouldn't start from here…

It’s all very well going on about the power of storytelling in the vital task of engagement in business, but it begs some questions: “how do I use it? How do I use story to rework the way I communicate so I engage people rather than boring them or even alienating them?”

For me, storytelling is a practical art: it’s not about academic or theoretical musings. It’s about doing something different the next time you’re in a meeting or up on your feet in front of a crowd. It’s about paying more attention to the way we put together the things we want to say, and engaging ourselves differently in the way we say them. Only then will we see a difference in the way people engage with us and our message.

I have to warn you though: the story approach is very much lined up with the way human cultures and communities truly work, but it’s a big shift away from how most businesses operate. You might feel a bit out on a limb. You have a choice: keep comfortably doing things the same old way (which, if you look around you, you can see doesn’t work), or you can take the risk: explore something new and keep falling over for a while until you get the hang of it and you get results. In the words of Albus Dumbledore: we are faced with a choice between “what is easy and what is right”.

So lets’s start where most people are now: there’s a fundamental difference* between communicating with story and how it normally happens.

At best, in the normal way of things, you’ll see someone following this sort of model:

Tell them what you’re going to say…
Tell them…
Tell them what you’ve said.

That’s it.

The problem is that it’s all too easy to make it all about you. Sadly, the honest truth is (deep breath) that nobody really gives a flying feather what you think, or what you want, or what you care about. Or even what you have to say…

…unless there’s something in it for them.

And there’s more (yes, it gets worse…): unless what you say is rooted in what they already know, you’ve lost them from the beginning.

“Huh?” I hear you say. “But I want to tell them something new. They’re intelligent people. They’ll get it. What do you mean ‘rooted in what they already know’?”

Well here’s a little insight into how memory works: it ‘chains’ things.

In other words, we only remember things if they connect to something we already accept to be true and useful. If we are presented with an idea which is unconnected to our previous experience in life we will probably just ignore it or forget it, or at worst reject it and maybe even the person who presented it to us.

However, if we can establish a solid connection with what someone already knows, and an obvious** link to the next step of what we are trying to get over, then we’re in with a chance. This is how many memory improvement techniques work: they set up some sort of framework (sometimes incredibly complex but manageable because they are image-rich and symbolic) into which the desired lists can be integrated, often (again) symbolically*** (lots on Google about this if you’re interested).

But what we are trying to do here is bring someone on board with a new idea: they don’t know the framework, they don’t know the symbology. Dump them into the middle of your thinking and they will be completely lost, uncomprehending and at best bored, maybe resentful and at worst (imagine senior, busy, stressed and having his time wasted) hostile. Not good.

So we need to help them find the way in. Once they are there, then we can lead them through the framework and reveal the meaning of the symbology. Only then will they understand what we’re getting at, recognise its value and remember it.

The temptation is to call out “it’s over here - come along…”.

Sadly, your listeners are where they are. You need to bring your entry point to that place: you can’t expect them to come to where you are because they simply don’t know how to get there, however willing they might be. This is why so many people hate Maths. Nobody took the trouble to bring the way in to us. Instead they said ‘learn your times tables or else…”. Some motivation for learning that is! It’s a characteristic of every successful mathematician or physicist I’ve ever met that they see Maths as just another language for telling stories (check out Jim Al Khalili, Brian Cox and Marcus de Sautoy to see what I mean). Someone, somewhere took the trouble to apply some real imagination, insight and creativity to bringing the doorway of mathematics to the feet of these people at just the right moment, and extraordinary things have followed.

Where was I?

Oh yes.

You must bring your doorway to them, not expect them to make the journey to you.

Now that’s interesting. If you have to bring your doorway to them, that means that you need to know who they are. It’s no longer just about you having something to say and saying it. Success is about understanding the people you are bringing your message to, and meeting them where they are in their map of the world.

Once you’ve met them there and won their trust (or at lest broadly benign tolerance), only then can you start to guide them at their own pace through the doorway of your story and step by step, scene by scene, image by image encourage them to follow you along the path from where they really are to the view you would like to show them.

That’s just the beginning, of course. The art of crafting the path on which you want them to join you is yet to come: in exploring that we may well come to understand why human communities have for millennia grown out of a web of creation myths, hero tales and folk stories which carried wisdom, beliefs and values from generation to generation. And, of course, the organisation you work in, or for, or with (however much it would like to believe it’s an efficient piece of mechanistic economic engineering) is just another human community...