The Story of Hot Stone Soup

The most effective way to engage with audience is through storytelling. With changing dynamics in corporate world, where presentations mean gigabytes of data, numbers and information, stories help the audience to get immersed in it rather than just consuming the gigabytes.

There is a reason why stories are essential in communication. Human brain is wired to get involved in stories. Stories are as old as our civilisation, religion and culture. Stories are our own creation. Every story has its path and purpose. Storytelling invokes a fair amount of interest and emotions and helps the target audience to identify with the story. It is their story and the presenter is a mere storyteller.

Stories are good icebreakers too. They can instantly connect. I rely heavily on storytelling. I have found storytelling stands out as a dependable tool for explaining complex aspects in much simplified manner. In this series I will share stories which I have used in conferences, meetings, sales pitch, campus talks and in informal chats with students.

When I look back I am reminded Rudyard Kipling’s famous line “ If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten”

Stories need not be original, and as much I would love to give credit to the original author of the stories, I may not have enough knowledge. If you know the details of the author I will be happy to give the credit. I am making an attempt to share my experience, you are free to use, quote and modify it to your version.

The Story of Hot Stone Soup

Once upon a time, somewhere in Mexico, there was a great famine in which people jealously hoarded whatever food they could find, hiding it even from their friends and neighbours. One day a wandering traveller came into a village and began asking questions as if he planned to stay for the night.

"There's not a bite to eat in the whole province," he was told. "Better keep moving on."

"Oh, I have everything I need," he said. "In fact, I was thinking of making some stone soup to share with all of you." He pulled an iron cauldron from his carry bag, filled it with water, and built a fire under it. Then, he drew an ordinary-looking stone from his carry bag and dropped it into the water.

By now, hearing the rumour of food, most of the villagers had come to the square or watched from their windows. As the traveller sniffed the "broth" and licked his lips in anticipation, hunger began to overcome their scepticism.

"Ahh," the traveller said to himself rather loudly, "I do like a tasty stone soup. Of course, stone soup with cabbage -- that's hard to beat."

Soon a villager approached hesitantly, holding a cabbage he'd retrieved from its hiding place, and added it to the pot. "Fantastic!" cried the traveller. "You know, I once had stone soup with cabbage and a bit of lamb as well, and it was so comforting."

The village butcher managed to find some mince lamb . . . . . .and so it went, through potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was indeed a delicious meal for all. The villagers offered the traveller a great deal of money for the magic stone, but he refused to sell and travelled on the next day.

Relevance

Few years ago we were contemplating to replace our recruiting system. Hence we were given the task to review and decide what could be the best solution. However every system had its own set of challenges. We settled for in-house system, which ran as a massive project with stringent timelines. We as project implementation team had big ideas. They were like those big stones. But the system couldn’t have been developed without tapping into intelligence and experience of each user. Everyone who added a small amount to the big ideas were in fact helping us make our system solution come true.

This story was shared with team members when I wanted to explain that how by working as a team, with everyone contributing what they can, a greater good has been achieved. If you have a vision to run a tremendously successful project, there's no way you will be able to run it as your own. Every team member has to contribute to make the big ideas (soup made from stones) a reality by adding relevant aspects no matter however small.

#storytelling;#teamwork;#teamrecognition;#chnagemanagement;#communication

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