Mastering business storytelling with 4 vital disciplines

When I started writing Putting Stories to Work I was inspired by David Allen’s How to Get Things Done. I liked how it gave you a process to achieve a goal. David helped you achieve stress-free productivity, just as his subheading promised. My goal is to help you master business storytelling and the process has four steps: discover, remember, share, refresh.

Discover

If you have been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I believe that business storytelling is impossible until you can tell the difference between a story and a non-story. You need to get great at spotting stories. It starts with the story spotting framework which you’ll need to commit to memory (it’s very simple so that won’t be difficult) then get out there and spot stories. Practice is essential to all the steps in mastering business storytelling and it all starts with spotting stories in the wild. When you’re at work see how many stories you can see and notice where they’re told. Where are the story-rich locations? Where are no stories told? These story deserts could point to an opportunity to stand out and have an impact.

One of the things you’ll notice is that we tell stories all the time in informal settings, down at the cafe, dinners, catching up with friends, yet very few are told in formal business settings except when exceptional leaders are talking with their people. Business storytelling pioneer, Steve Denning, calls storytelling the secret language of leadership. That’s because the very best are master storytellers yet very few reveal what they are doing. Your ability to spot stories will give you the key to seeing how it’s done.

There are lots of ways to find good stories to tell which I cover in Putting Stories to Work, such as using photographs, noticing your own stories, timelines, good questions, published stories, scientific experiments (one of my favourites), movies, podcasts, business books. Stories are everywhere and they can be used to make a business point.

Remember

Our memory has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. It’s evolved to increase the likelihood of our survival in a pre-industrial age. As a result, our memory has some stand-out features. We remember what we feel. A strong emotion is a good indicator that we should remember what caused it. Consequently we have a terrific memory for times when we were angry, scared, sad, joyous, and disgusted. By the way, I remembered that list of basic human emotions by remembering the characters from Pixar’s movie, Inside Out.

Which brings me to another characteristic of our memory, we remember images, especially moving images that are doing things we have never seen before. Have you ever tried to learn a language like German and got stuck on word genders. Gabriel Wyner, in his amazing book on learning a language Fluent Forever, did so he came up with an ingenious way to remember genders. He starts by imaging all the masculine nouns exploding. ‘Tree’. Kaboom. It explodes and splinters fly everywhere spearing everything it it’s path. Feminine nouns catch fire. Your ‘nose’ spews flames scorching everything in your path. Neuter items shatter like glass. Red and sparkling shards of your ‘horse’ smash to the ground. It turns out we remember images exceptionally well.

Why is this important for storytelling? Because stories that contain emotion and are visual are more memorable, more effective, than ones that are not. If you want to improve a story, help people seewhat’s happening and help them feel what’s happening and they wont forget it.

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