Mastering Collaboration

by Gretchen Anderson

  Whichever approach you choose, if you bear in mind the overall shape of your story and make sure to create tension to move the audience through, you’ll be much more successful. You will rely on the specifics of a story, whether one or many, to carry people through your presentation. You aren’t writing a novel here, but it’s still worth thinking through factors like the setting of the story, and how you foreshadow struggles and problems in order to engage people’s neural networks. The sidebar “The Mechanics of Stories” gives additional tips for effectively moving an audience through your story.

  The Mechanics of Stories

  In any good story, it’s the details and the techniques that the writer uses that transport us through the story’s structure. The mechanics of your story will support (or detract from) the main message you want to convey and the experience you want your audience to have. “Mechanics” here means the specific techniques you use to bring the plot to life, help people connect with the characters, and communicate where you and your collaborators are in your journey. Mechanics in storytelling is a big topic, so I’ll focus here on those that are most relevant to the kinds of stories you are likely to tell.

  It’s also important to note that for our purposes, the stories we tell are unlikely to be simply written prose. Most often you will be working in a more oral tradition, speaking to an audience about what you saw or what you envision. This means that you have the advantage of using visuals and performance techniques in your delivery.

  Mechanics can refer to:

  Setting/place

  Bring your audience into the location that supports the drama. If it’s somewhere interesting, spend time telling (or better yet, showing) what it looks and feels like. When I did research with child diabetics in their homes, it was crucial to show how their houses were both similar and different from what’s common to make the audience understand where they needed help and where they needed to be respected. Conversely, when your story is about the team or takes place within the office, make the setting drop away to focus on what the audience isn’t familiar with.

  Cadence and pace

  Think about how quickly you want your story to unfold. Make sure you have enough time dedicated to building up tension and suspense, rather than jumping straight into the action. Repetition grounds people using a key phrase or image, bringing them back to a point or moment. Pausing, or bringing friction into the progression (“but we were stopped by…”), makes the audience wrestle with an unforeseen challenge.

  Point of view/tense

  Be deliberate about choosing to tell the story in the first, second, or third person. First person lets you speak very convincingly, but it also tends to minimize the group effort. Third person is the most common point of view I’ve seen in the type of persuasive stories used in business. Demos are best done in the third person if the audience doesn’t fully understand how their target market differs from themselves. Use second person sparingly, as your audience probably tends toward taking a self-centered view, which your collaboration is there to disrupt. While it can be useful in a “how-to” situation (much like I’ve done in this book), in most stories the second person is tricky, and many editors and writers counsel against using it. Note that Steve Jobs often used the second person in his performances, because the Apple story aimed for a sense of universality where everyone brings their own viewpoint. Choosing to tell the story in the past is great when you are recounting something that has occurred (obviously), but the present tense is better when you’re demonstrating prototypes or features. The future tense can be effective when the goal is to draw the picture of a brave new future or a rebirth.

  Reversal and foreshadowing

  As a storyteller, you can use your audience’s preconceived notions to your advantage. A reversal is when you turn something that is taken for granted on its head. Liz Ogbu, in her TEDx talk, “Why I’m an architect that designs for social impact,” tells a personal story about her work by opening with, “I’m an architect, but I don’t design buildings,” piquing the audience’s curiosity about what that means. Foreshadowing refers to dropping clues about what will happen based on the audience’s expectations. Chekhov’s gun, the idea that “if a gun appears in the first act, it goes off in the third act,” is the most common example of foreshadowing. Foreshadowing taps directly into the neural story network that Kendall Haven describes, using the brain’s natural tendency to make connections between events to make sense of them. One useful trick is to start a story where everything is going along swimmingly, when you tell the audience directly that all is not as it appears and a villain is lurking somewhere in the future. This keeps people on the edge of their seats, looking out for the danger. Foreshadowing is a form of mystery, or whodunit—one of the most popular forms of stories we consume today.

  Conceits and metaphors

  Another technique you can use to make your story stick is to draw a comparison to something else that will highlight contrasting or similar aspects of your big idea. Danielle Malik’s talk about using data to develop products compares it to being in a bad relationship. Instead of a more straightforward, “I used to think X, but now I think Y” formulation, her conceit injects humor and describes how designers can be seduced by the idea that data, despite its imperfections, offers something perfect. Be careful that you know your audience when using this approach, or it might seem overly precious.

  Delivery

  Finally, consider the actual telling of the story itself. Where will it take place, who will be delivering it, and what else will be done in that session that will support or contrast with your main point? A good place to get practice with creating and telling stories is during demos or other reviews of a finished product. This is where the collaboration has already taken place, so trying to ask for feedback or participation is disingenuous. Rather, the best thing you can do at that point is use story to bring the audience along on the journey you have already traversed.

  Laddering

  When choosing a shape for your story, it’s also important to establish a core concept of the story at several levels. Laddering is a technique you can use to help you create that concept, and stay organized when you are presenting and discussing the concept with others. Laddering means taking the big message you want to convey to your audience through multiple levels of abstraction—from the very abstract to the concrete, and even back again. Steve Jobs was famous for his product demos at Apple conferences. His presentation of the first iPhone is a classic example of starting with an abstract concept: a new type of mobile phone. Then he moves into the three big things that make it different: it’s a phone, a music player, and a camera. From there he describes specific features, and then he demos how the iPhone works. This helps people understand something new both as a big idea and as a set of specific features. You can invert the approach as well, starting with specifics that people may be familiar with or looking for, and leading up to a bigger idea or rationale.

  I find this technique useful not just in creating the story, but also in telling it, especially if you aren’t entirely comfortable in front of an audience, or you’re facing a tough crowd whose interactions during the session tend to put you off your game. While presenting, you’ve probably experienced the situation of people jumping into your well-crafted spiel with questions that seem out of place, are overly detailed, or force you to restate something you just said. These people generally aren’t trying to derail the discussion; rather, they’re trying to fit what you’re saying into their neural story net. So you need to be able to allow interruptions and requests for clarification without losing the plot entirely.

  Take the situation where you are speaking broadly about the concept at hand, at the abstract level, and someone asks about a particular edge case or technical detail that seems very remote from where you are at the moment. Perhaps, and hopefully, it is something you were going to address, but at a different point in the presentation. The trick is to pause and take a moment
to climb down your ladder of abstraction to the detail level—moving, say, from Food to Cows to Tacos to Best Taco Toppings—to share the secret you were saving for later. But at this point many people may find themselves stuck: What was I saying before I got derailed? By having the ladder of your concept in your head, you can climb back up the rungs to your higher-level point about cows as a source of great nutrition or, for non-meat-eaters, the merits of eating plant-based sources of protein and saving the cows. Likewise, when you are deep in the details and someone expresses skepticism or confusion about the big picture, traversing the ladder helps you quickly restate the big idea and then move back to your detailed point. See the sidebar “Laddering Template” for more advice on structuring a ladder for your ideas.

  Laddering Template

  It’s useful to have the team level up their ideas from a conceptual perspective to a specific one. Not only will this help them explain the idea, but it also helps the person presenting it when they get distracted or interrupted while speaking. A ladder (Figure 11-4) moves from the most abstract to the least and back again.

  Figure 11-4. The laddering framework

  What a Character!

  So far, we’ve been talking mostly about the structure and ideas that a story needs to communicate. And, since this isn’t a book for novel writers, we’ve generally been talking about using stories as a way to make more persuasive arguments in business settings. So, it’s worth talking about the “protagonist” and characters for that context, because it’s unlikely that the stories you tell will take the form of tales told ’round the campfire. More likely they’ll be artfully constructed and delivered examples that support your argument. You don’t have the time or license to spin up backstories for what we might think of as characters.

  So what does “character” mean in this context? There are three main types of characters that storytellers in the corporate world use: end users, team members or employees, and brands. Focusing a story on end users is great when demoing or proposing features for them. It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people make the “user” in a scenario an unspecified ghost of a person, giving little thought to their motivations, challenges, or goals. Some people think that by creating this sort of person, they are addressing a wide set of users, smoothing out the differences in target markets in an effort to show how the solution meets a wide audience. And they’d be wrong. Without understanding what drives the character, and what makes them different from “everyperson,” you run the risk of your audience inserting themselves into the story and bringing into the mix all the preconceived notions you worked so hard to get past.

  The second type of character to consider basing your story around is the team or employees involved in the collaboration. This approach works best when you need the audience to understand the challenges a team faces, or to give the “status update” a more persuasive edge. I’ve also focused on team members as characters when I needed to convince stakeholders of a perspective shift the team has experienced. As I mentioned in Chapter 9, I was once part of a team that was developing a device to enable nonsighted or dyslexic people to photograph and “read” text via their ears, and our first prototypes mimicked the form factor of a camera. Once we started seeing actual users struggling with something intended for a completely different usage, we realized we needed to go back to the drawing board. No one wants to give that status update. Instead, we focused the narrative of our progress around our initial enthusiasm for such a strong, iconic form, followed by our despair upon seeing that form fail utterly, and finally our redemption in what a better solution would be—with a nod to the fact that we’d need a bit more time to make new prototypes. Rather than experiencing the backlash of a missed milestone, we got nods of agreement that we were on the right track. When what you seek is empathy for the team, put them at the center of the story.

  Finally, putting the brand at the center of a struggle and success is the meat and potatoes of the advertising industry, but that trick doesn’t belong to them alone. Think about BMW, the “Ultimate Driving Machine,” setting itself up as a James Bond–type character that is highly capable, pleasurable, but never too finicky to tackle an adventure. Or, take the Method brand of household products, which, at launch, positioned itself as the answer to other types of cleaners, calling them “dirty” in comparison. A brand need not only be the company or product brand, though; teams can brand their own work and tell the story of what they accomplish through that lens.

  Note-Taking Supports Storytelling

  Often, storytelling is left until the end of a cycle, when the team is furiously pulling together the output of the collaboration, and there isn’t a great record of what happened along the way. One suggestion is to have the team historian keep explicit track in their notes of the story as it unfolds to make creating the narrative easier. I use a system of symbols (Figure 11-5) in the margin of my notes to help me find sources of friction, big breakthroughs, and quotes later.

  Figure 11-5. Example notations I use when taking notes to help me go back later to pull out specifics for the story

  Try not to leave the story creation until the very end. Teams can take time after every few sessions to talk about what story they would want to tell so far, which not only will help the person writing it, but also serves to keep the team united in their view of their own progress.

  When creating a narrative, teams may struggle with how much of their story is nonfiction. There may be a bias to want to be fully “authentic” about what actually happened, or didn’t. I like to coach teams to think about their tale as revisionist history, where the main plot is a solid reflection of the takeaways that the team has come up with, even if some of the events have been altered for dramatic effect.

  Over time, you may find that your story is actually episodic, where you are telling it as it unfolds in a series of meetings. In this case it can be useful to practice what’s known as retconning the story, short for “retroactive continuity.” This happens often in comics and movies where stories typically are long-running with multiple authors. A classic example of this is when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock back from the dead after having him killed off by his arch-enemy, because fans clamored for more tales. Star Trek and the race of Klingons is another example: their appearance and storyline change dramatically over the 40+ years of the show, but unlike in many retcons, the storytellers barely acknowledge the changes, instead relying on the audience to trust the narrative.

  Troubleshooting Storytelling

  Creating compelling stories may seem like something that happens naturally, but teams often don’t spend the time to do so. This section details some common pitfalls that storytellers run into, and ideas to avoid or recover from them.

  No Struggle to the Story

  Teams may find it hard to expose anything negative about the collaboration. This leads to nonstories that fail to engage the audience. Leaving out the struggle of the main character, or a failure the team faced, is a surefire way to fail. Remember, without an “oh shit” moment, it can be hard for the audience to relate to the challenge and start them jumping into their own ideas.

  So what can I do?

  Invert it

  If all you have are sunny moments and you can’t think of a struggle to present, write about the opposite outcome happening. You can present it as a potential future that never happened, that you avoided, but it will start you thinking about what the team actually overcame to get to the positive outcome.

  Take notes

  Make sure you identify someone on the team whose responsibility is to find the negatives—the struggles—and bring them to life.

  Test yourself

  If you think all you have are right answers, there’s no better way to create a struggle than to put your solution in front of others. When they develop arguments and poke holes at your ideas, you can turn that into fodder for a better struggle to overcome.

  Inconsistent Audience

  No
matter how good your story is, it can be challenging when the people you are telling it to are coming in and out of the storyline. Whether it’s someone who leaves the room to make a call, or audience members who attend different sessions over time, missing episodes in the progression, you can find yourself skipping around and losing the plot.

  So what can I do?

  Previously on Lost

  If your story is unfolding over several sessions as the collaboration progresses, make sure that you recap what you’ve told people in previous sessions. This should be short, sweet, and focused on relevant plot points and characters needed for the part you will tell that day.

  Have a private audience

  If you know you have a key player who missed an important session, try to meet up ahead of time or afterward to catch them up. Don’t just leave them hanging with a hole in the story, or they will fill it in themselves.

  Record it

  Whether it’s a written recap or a video of the presentation, you can make your stories available offline in case you need someone to relive it. If you can, include the debate that the story provoked so the audience can hear when their questions or arguments are raised and addressed.