How would you tell this story?

My current reading for the UW HCDE 520 class I'm co-teaching this Fall was all about decision making and how biases play into those decisions – whether based upon intuition or logic. One chapter spoke about how conscious thought (logic) works well for simple decisions while unconscious thought (intuition) is better for complex decisions. The bottom line is that we need to blend systematic analysis and intuition when making decisions. In a similar vein there are multiple ways to tell stories based upon our own perspective and biases - including both logic and intuition/emotion.

The picture above is one with my sons and their “Uncle”. Where are they? What time of year is it? What other images might have been cut out of the picture? What would my sons think about this picture today (many years later)? Or how does their “Uncle” remember the story? What’s my own memory? Depending upon the audience, I might even tell the story of this photo in multiple ways. And that’s what I’ll do here…as aligned with several different methods I’ve presented to various UW HCDE classes previously for telling stories.

Elevator Pitch

One of the more well-known methods of telling stories in business is the elevator pitch. The premise is based upon the idea of you entering an elevator with the CEO of some company (maybe where you work or some company you do business with). The only time you have is the time it takes the elevator to ascend from the 1st floor to the 100th floor (executive suite) to explain your story. What might the CEO want to hear about that photo? Maybe that I was with my sons and a few other friends. We all enjoyed ourselves away from Seattle for a long weekend. I might have taken a few days off to refresh as I prepared for some huge meetings coming up the following week. The fresh air during my morning walks with my dogs (while my family slept) along gave me a lot of time to think about my strategy for the upcoming meetings. And then I’d ask for my CEO’s view of my thinking for the upcoming meetings before stopping at floor 100.

Kindergarten class

Over the years, I’ve had an opportunity to present at the annual “What does your Dad do for work?” day presentations to my sons’ kindergarten classes. The goal was to present complex topics in a very easy-to-understand manner. No acronyms. No concepts we learn in college or after. No presentation decks of 50+ slides or word documents with seventeen different sections. My older son was about in kindergarten during that photo. I’d probably tell the story of how much fun they had just before and after that photo. How they were digging in the sand, re-routing water coming from the peninsula, building cool sand castles and playing in the ocean. And what they were doing with their dogs and their “Uncle’s” dogs (cropped out of this photo) on the beach during low tide. How their “Uncle” and “Aunt” were letting them have SO MUCH MORE fun than their Mom and Dad might normally allow them. In whatever direction the story went, it would be fun, entertaining and totally focused on what the kindergarten class might enjoy themselves if they were in a similar environment at the time.

Metaphor

Some stories are so complex or unknown to the audience, one might need to find a story that’s similar in nature to the story you are telling. What if you were explaining this photo to someone who has never been to the beach or seen the ocean? Or what if they were confused by the concept of my sons’ “Uncle” in the photo? If they came from a big family, maybe I’d ask them if they ever went to a pool…and whether their big brother or sister took a photo with them on a bench with the pool in the background. The idea of the metaphor as a story is to appeal to something very familiar with your audience and directly align the people and situation of your story to their specific knowledge base. 

Eulogy

I’ve shared previously that my father passed away in March of this year. If, for example, it was my father in that photo with my sons, I might share the story in the manner of a eulogy. The foundation of the story might be this great trip with my sons to the beach and Pacific Ocean. I’d talk about the fun my Dad had with my sons during that amazing weekend. Then I might expand upon that weekend and talk about the many wonderful times my Dad spent with my sons…and then with me and my own brother growing up. Maybe then I’d expand the story yet again to share the many incredible parts of my Dad’s life and turn it into a fuller eulogy about my father. If you haven’t seen the movie “Serendipity”, it includes one of my favorite scenes. It’s the obituary one friend writes for another to help him through a difficult time. The question the Greek’s used to ask when someone died – “Did they have passion?”. Enjoy if you have three minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HW7RU6i86I

Whole Brain Framework

Reading about the biases we all have during decision making got me thinking about the Whole Brain training I went through years ago. We learned about the “Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) - a system to measure and describe thinking preferences in people, developed by William "Ned" Herrmann while leading management education at General Electric's Crotonville facility”. I won’t go into details here, other than to say the system is also great for storytelling.

Typically, you’ll start with the “Why?” quadrant of the model. Why were my sons with their “Uncle” in that photo? The big picture is we typically took a weekend or two every year to spend time with good friends at the Pacific Ocean. The “What?” can delve into our great group and individual activities – cooking, playing games, doing puzzles, walking on the beach with our dogs, jumping in the ocean and generally having a great time without phones or Internet. The “How & When?” talks more to our logistics. For some reason, we’d venture down in the Fall or Spring when there were fewer people and the weather varied between warm and cold (chilly ocean - though seeing storms come in over the ocean is VERY cool). And the “Who?” was an easy question to answer – my family, our closest friends and our many dogs (and there were five tied up at the end of that log in the photo).

And the very best story tellers start with the “Who?” across the audience. They start by digging into their personal experiences and knowledge of beach vacations, the ocean, time with family, etc. Then they will modify the story above to align even more directly with their personal preferences of the audience. Only then will they follow the same pattern above with the Why-What-How & When-Who of this method.

Proposal format

In my business, we often need to respond to a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) coming from another company interested in how we might help them solve their business challenges. A typical RFP response format might include some of the following sections – Executive Summary, Our Understanding, Specific Business Challenges, an Assessment Process, the Solution, the Approach and the Next Steps.

I’m not going to attempt to apply a work proposal format to the fun picture of my sons with their “Uncle” here. But I’ll share a high-level explanation of the sections above. Basically, tell the story from the company’s point of view by confirming you have a great executive perspective and understanding of their problem down to the unique business challenges they are facing. Share with them how you’ll dig in even further to understand, apply your own lessons learned from other situations you’ve face and present a solution. Give them a more detailed understanding of the process for bring that solution to reality with a starting point of the next steps to get moving forward.

Even more simply – research the gaps that exist for the customer, present some opinion you form about the situation and present a plan for building out a solution to address their business challenges. Then build a cohesive story around the overall process to explain succinctly.

Amazon Press Release

I’ve really liked leveraging this approach more recently in my story telling. The idea is to think about your desired result and pretend you issued a full press release about it. The press release itself tells the overall story (The “Why” from above) and value of the solution (The “What”) you are presenting. The Q&A section will highlight much of the “How & When” and “Who”.

Using the photo as my baseline, I might tell the story in the future of our Fall 2021 trip we had to the Pacific Ocean. How on Friday it was sunny, and we spent hours on the beach with the kids and dogs – throwing sticks into the ocean and creating the most amazing sandcastles. Then the weather turned on Saturday and we ended up inside doing puzzles, playing games and cooking several excellent meals for multiple sets of friends who joined us. We still went outside with the dogs and had a blast in the rain and wind and ocean late that afternoon…but then came inside to warm up with hot chocolate. The sun joined us again on Sunday so we stayed late to enjoy the beach and ocean for most of the day before driving home.

The Q&A might answer questions about who all was invited, when and where we made reservations, how we planned to pack, what activities we were considering, etc. The whole written press release could be 1-2 pages with another 1-2 pages for the Q&A.

Relating back to my class for tomorrow night, the bottom line is that decision biases exist because individuals have a very different point of view on a specific situation. Regardless of whether you are making a decision or telling a story or doing something else, the KEY MESSAGE for you to retain right now is that you need to have full awareness about why and what you are doing. AND to consider that you and others might have other biases in making decisions or methods to tell stories. Each one might lead you to a slightly different conclusion and your own version of the truth.

And my wish for you is that each version is as much fun as the times we had at the Pacific Ocean with family, friends and dogs over the years.