Analysis is what drives business thinking. It cuts through the fog of myth, gossip, and speculation to get to the hard facts. It goes 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. At a time when corporate survival often requires disruptive change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar, and often unwelcome, ways.
But effective storytelling often does. In fact, in certain situations nothing else works. Although good business arguments 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.
I saw this happen at the World Bank—by , we were increasingly recognized as leaders in the area of knowledge management—and have seen it in numerous other large organizations since then.
So why was I having problems with the advice I had received from the professional storyteller in Jonesborough? The timing of my trip to Tennessee was fortunate. The story would be a veritable epic. 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. 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, my telling it in that fashion would not allow listeners the mental space to relate the story to their own quite different worlds.
Although I was describing a health worker in Zambia, I wanted everyone to focus not on Zambia but on their own situations. A minimalist narrative was effective, in fact, 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 about the principles of traditional storytelling. More than 2, 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.
In retrospect, though, I realize that my insight blinded me to something else. 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. I would later 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. In December , I left the World Bank and began to consult with companies on their knowledge management and, by extension, their use of organizational stories. 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. 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 out 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 are.
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, that negative stories can be more powerful than positive ones. The fact is, people learn more from their mistakes than from their successes. 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, 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 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 order 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 the minimalist stories that I told to spark action were different from traditional entertainment stories, so effective knowledge-sharing stories would have negative rather than positive overtones.
New York: Basic organizations. Oxford: Butterworth- Books. Gersie, A. Frank, A. Families, Systems and groups. London: Jessica Kingsley. Health — Orr, Julian E. London: University ethnography of a modern job. Hicks, R. Greenhalgh and — Skultans, editors Narrative research in health and Polkinghorne, D. Oxford: Blackwell. Simmons, A. New York: Basic Books. London: Sense-making in a complex and Perseus. Snowden, David J. Oxford: Oxford A practical guide. London: University Press.
Radcliffe Medical Press. Tsoukas, Haridimos Lipman, D. Chia ed. London: Routledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Feldman, M. Pondy, P. Frost, G. Morgan Watson, Tony J. Dandridge eds , In search of management: Culture, Organizational symbolism. Mason, H. What do transformational leaders actually do? You'll find the answers to these questions and much more. Thus it's a book that's as much about leadership, as it is about storytelling.
It addresses the most difficult challenges that leaders face and suggests practical ways of dealing with them. What is typically missing in current theories of leadership is: what specific leadership behavior leads to what result?
It is thus unclear exactly what transformational leaders actually do to achieve the results they are said to achieve. This makes it difficult to validate the underlying ideas or to train people to become leaders. What The Leader's Guide to Storytelling does is to spell out the specific, identifiable, measurable, trainable behaviors that can be used to achieve the goals of transformational leadership.
It gives detailed how-to advice and practical templates for constructing and performing your story. Why is change so difficult? What is human identity? The principal trick to successfully using this narrative pattern lies in telling the story in a minimalist fashion, i. The reason for this is that the story that is told is much less important than the new story that listeners imagine for themselves. As listeners envision new narratives set in their own contexts, they unwittingly craft action plans for implementation of the change program.
In effect, they are already co-creating the strategic shift. Stories that communicate who you are Companies are also discovering that leaders can use their own stories to communicate important messages to others. As a respected and admired leader, a story disclosing a failure can have the paradoxical effect of building trust and encouraging openness.
The product is simply a conduit through which customers can experience the stories that the brand tells. When consumers sip a Coke, Corona or Snapple, they are drinking more than a beverage. Rather, they are imbibing identity myths anchored in these drinks.
An effective cultural strategy creates a storied product, that is, a product that has distinctive branded features mark, design, etc. The stories reside in your employees, in your customers, in your vendors — they all have different stories because they have different experiences relative to the organization. Often this activity has amounted to little more than the manipulation of meaningless abstractions[6]. Unless brand managers become directly involved in the composition of the brand narrative, they delegate to outsiders the strategic direction of the brand[6].
Firms like the Brand Consultancy can help executives understand and handle the challenge. Sharing knowledge through compelling stories Whereas stories to spark action need to be positive in tone and told in a minimalist fashion with little context, stories to share knowledge should be crafted differently. Because their objective is to generate understanding and not action, they tend to highlight the pitfalls of ignorance.
But in fact, they have little to hold the interest of anyone except those close to the often-esoteric subject matter. Why are they compelling to this limited audience? 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. Generating such narratives however takes time and effort. We start with workshops and exercises, then usually a project to code interviews someone else VOL.
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