The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

by Stephen Denning

  The Performance of the Story

  The basics of leadership storytelling can be mastered quickly. Mastery of the discipline, however, takes a lifetime. Storytelling is a performance art. It's one thing to realize that you need to link the story with the change idea; it's another thing to do it, time after time without fail, like the swing of a professional golfer who always performs flawlessly. You will not become a master storyteller simply by reading this book. You will have to put the ideas into practice so that you get into a groove.

  Finally, keep in mind that the stories in this book are for the most part intended to be performed. Some of the stories included here, when read on the printed page, may seem so brief and bland that it is hard to imagine how they could have impact. Remember that everything is transformed in performance. Small things make a big difference. The look of the eye, the intonation of the voice, the way the body is held, the import of a subtle pause, the teller's response to the audience's responses—all these aspects make a huge contribution to the meaning of a story for audiences. Chapter Two discusses how to perform a story for maximum effect.

  A Different Kind of Leader

  Throughout this book, I make the case, step by step, that if you consistently use the narrative tools described here, you will acquire new capabilities. Because you communicate who you are and what you stand for, others come to know you and respect you for that. Because you are attentive to the world as it is, your ideas are sound. Because you speak the truth, you are believed. Because you make your values explicit and your actions are consistent with those values, your values become contagious and others start to share them. Because you listen to the world, the world listens to you. Because you are open to innovation, happy accidents happen. Because you bring meaning into the world of work, you are able to get superior results. Chapter Twelve explores the implications of this kind of leadership for organizations.

  Let's Go!

  The challenges of leadership are difficult, volatile, and sometimes daunting. This book doesn't shy away from those difficulties. And yet it offers a note of hope. Leadership is not an innate set of skills that a few gifted individuals receive at birth. Narrative patterns can be learned by anyone who wants to lead from whatever position they are in—whether CEO, middle management, or on the front lines of an organization, or outside any organizations altogether—anyone who sees a better way to do things and wants the organization to change.

  Organizations often seem immovable. They are not. With the right kind of story at the right time, they are stunningly vulnerable to a new idea. And this book provides you with a guide to finding and telling the right story at the right time.

  A Definition of Story and Narrative

  In this book, narrative and story are used as synonyms, in a broad sense of an account of a set of events that are causally related. Such a simple, commonsense notion is, however, controversial. Here I have space only to allude to some of the issues.

  The Definition of “Story” and “Narrative”

  What is a story? What is a narrative? Are they the same or different?

  This book follows common usage and treats story and narrative as synonyms, to mean an account of events that are causally connected in some way.

  Some practitioners have suggested different definitions. Some suggest that story should be defined in the narrower sense of a well-told story, with a protagonist, a plot, and a turning point leading to a resolution, while narrative might be a better choice in the broader sense I use. According to this view, locutions that lack the traditional elements of a well-told story are not so much stories as ideas for possible stories yet to be told or fragments of stories.20

  Others have suggested that story should be used in a broader sense, while narrative should be restricted to the narrower sense of “a story as told by a narrator.” According to this view, “narrative = story + theme”: the theme is a layer added to the story to instruct, provide an emotional connection, or impart a deeper meaning.21

  In common usage, both story and narrative are inclusive. Polkinghorne and others have suggested that we accept this broad meaning and treat the two terms as synonyms.22 Within the broad field of story, it's possible to distinguish classically structured stories, well-made stories, minimalist stories, antistories, fragmentary stories, stories with no ending, stories with multiple endings, stories with multiple beginnings, stories with endings that circle back to the beginning, comedies, tragedies, detective stories, romances, folk tales, novels, theater, movies, television mini-series, and so on, without the need to get into theological discussions as to what is truly a story.

  In common usage, story is a large tent, with many variations within it. Some variations are more useful for some purposes than others. There are probably many variations that haven't yet been identified. If we start out with predetermined ideas of what a “real story” is, you may end up missing useful forms of narrative.

  The Internal and External Aspects of a Story

  It is also important to keep in mind that story has an external and an internal aspect. Story in its external aspect is something to be observed, analyzed, and dissected into its component parts. In its internal aspect, it is something that is experienced, lived as a participant. This book explores both dimensions of story. The value of the external view of story is that it is stable and clear. Its drawback is that it stands outside the experience of the story itself. The value of the internal view of story is that it is fresh and immediate and participative. Its weakness is that it is elusive and kaleidoscopic and vulnerable to abuse.23

  The Position Adopted in This Book

  This book sees story as independent of the media by which it is transmitted. A story can be transmitted by words, pictures, video, or mime. While recognizing the suitability of language to communicate narrative, it is possible to study narrative in its nonverbal manifestations without requiring verbal narration.24

  In examining the phenomenon of story and storytelling, both the external and internal aspects of story need to be taken into account.25

  Part 1

  The Role of Story in Organizations

  1

  Telling the Right Story

  Choosing the Right Story for the Leadership Challenge at Hand

  “Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning.”

  Mary Catherine Bateson1

  In 1998, I made a pilgrimage to the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee, seeking enlightenment. As program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, I'd stumbled onto the power of storytelling. Despite a career of scoffing at touchy-feely stuff—like most other business executives, I knew that analytical was good, anecdotal was bad—my thinking had started to change. Over the past few years, I'd seen stories help galvanize an organization around a defined business goal.

  In the mid-1990s, that goal was to get people at the World Bank to support efforts at knowledge management—the idea of sharing knowledge horizontally across an organization and even beyond. It was an unfamiliar notion at the time. I offered people cogent arguments about the need to gather the knowledge scattered throughout the organization. They didn't listen. I gave PowerPoint presentations that compellingly demonstrated the value of sharing and leveraging our know-how. My audience merely looked dazed. In desperation, I was ready to try almost anything.

  Then in early 1996, I began telling people a story:

  In June 1995, a health worker in a tiny town in Zambia went to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and got the answer to a question about the treatment of malaria. Remember that this was in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, and it was in a tiny place six hundred kilometers from the capital city. But the most striking thing about this picture, at least for us, is that the World Bank isn't in it. Despite our know-how on all kinds of poverty-related issues, that knowledge isn't available to the millions of people who could use it. Imagine if it were. Think what an organization we could become!<
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  This simple story helped World Bank staff and managers envision a different kind of future for the organization. When knowledge management later became an official corporate priority, I used similar stories to maintain the momentum. So I began to wonder how the tool of storytelling might be put to work even more effectively. As a rational manager, I decided to consult the experts.

  At the International Storytelling Center, I told the Zambia story to a professional storyteller, the late J. G. “Paw-Paw” Pinkerton, and asked the master what he thought. Imagine my chagrin when he said he didn't hear a story at all. There was no real “telling.” There was no plot. There was no building up of the characters. Who was this health worker in Zambia? And what was her world like? What did it feel like to be in the exotic environment of Zambia, facing the problems she faced? My anecdote, he said, was a pathetic thing, not a story at all. I needed to start from scratch if I hoped to turn it into a “real story.”

  Was I surprised? Well, not exactly. The story was bland. I did have a problem with this advice, though. I knew in my heart it was wrong. And with that realization, I was on the brink of an important insight: Beware the well-told story!

  The Power of Narrative

  But let me back up a bit. Do stories really have a role to play in the business world? Believe me, I'm familiar with skepticism about them. When you talk about storytelling to a group of hard-headed executives, you'd better be prepared for some eye rolling. If the group is polite as well as tough, don't be surprised if the eyes simply glaze over.

  That's because most executives operate with a particular mind-set. Analysis is what drives business thinking. It seemingly cuts through the fog of myth, gossip, and speculation to get to the hard facts. It purports to go 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. And that's where you must go if you are to motivate people not only to take action but to do so with energy and enthusiasm. At a time when corporate survival often requires transformational change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar and often unwelcome ways. Mind-numbing cascades of numbers or daze-inducing PowerPoint slides won't achieve this goal. Even logical arguments for making the needed changes usually won't do the trick.

  But effective storytelling often does. In fact, in certain situations, nothing else works. Although good business cases 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. Storytelling can translate those dry and abstract numbers into compelling pictures of a leader's goals. I saw this happen at the World Bank—by 2000, we were increasingly recognized as leaders in the area of knowledge management—and have seen it in scores of other large organizations since then.

  So why did I have problems with the advice I'd received from the professional storyteller in Jonesborough?

  A “Poorly Told” Story

  The timing of my trip to Tennessee was fortunate. Had I sought expert advice two years earlier, I might have taken the master's recommendations without question. But I'd had some time to approach the idea of organizational storytelling with a beginner's mind, free of strictures about the right way to tell a story.

  It wasn't that I couldn't follow the Jonesborough storyteller's recommendations. I saw immediately how to flesh out my modest anecdote about the health worker in Zambia: you'd dramatically depict her life, the scourge of malaria that she faced in her work, and perhaps the pain and suffering of the patients she was treating that day. You'd describe the extraordinary set of events that led to her being seated in front of a computer screen deep in the hinterland of Zambia. You'd delineate the false leads she had followed before she came across the CDC Web site. You'd build up to the moment of triumph when she found the answer to her question about malaria and vividly describe how that answer could transform the life of her patient. The story would be a veritable epic!

  This traditional, or maximalist, account would be more engrossing than my dry anecdote. But I had learned enough by then to realize that telling the story in this way to a corporate audience would not galvanize them to implement a strange new idea like knowledge management. In the hectic modern workplace, people had neither the time nor the patience—remember executives' general skepticism about storytelling in the first place—to absorb a richly detailed narrative. 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, telling it in that fashion would not allow listeners the mental space to relate the story to their own very different worlds. Although I was describing a health worker in Zambia, I wanted my audience to focus not on Zambia but on their own situations. I hoped they would think, If the CDC can reach a health worker in Zambia, why can't the World Bank? Why don't we put our knowledge on a Web site? If my listeners were immersed in a saga about that health worker and her patient, they might be too preoccupied to ask themselves these questions—or to provide answers. In other words, I didn't want my audience too interested in Zambia. A minimalist narrative was effective precisely 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 on the principles of traditional storytelling. More than two thousand 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. Furthermore, the storyteller should be so engaged with the story—visualizing the action, feeling what the characters feel—that the listeners become drawn into the narrative's world. Aristotle's formula has proved successful over the ages, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to The Arabian Nights to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and most Hollywood screenplays.

  Despite the narrative power of this kind of story, I knew that it probably wouldn't spark action in an organization. My insight blinded me to something else, though. 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. Later I would 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.

  Tales of Success and Failure

  In December 2000 I left the World Bank and began to consult with companies on the use of leadership storytelling. The following year, I found myself in London with Dave Snowden, then a director of IBM's Institute of Knowledge Management, teaching a storytelling master class to around seventy executives from private and public sector organizations.

  In the morning, I spoke about my experience at the World Bank and how a positive orientation was essential if a narrative like the one about Zambia was to have its intended effect. 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. They were, he said, like the Janet and John stories told to children in the United Kingdom or the Dick and Jane stories in the United States: the characters were so good they made you feel queasy. 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 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 actually are. In a corporate environment, Dave told his audience, listeners would respond to such rosy tales by conjuring up negative antistories about what must have ac
tually happened. 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. I'd used negative stories myself when trying to teach people the nitty-gritty of any subject. The fact is, people learn more from their mistakes than from their successes.

  Eventually, however, it dawned on me that our points of view were complementary. We were talking about organizational stories used for different purposes: my stories were designed to motivate people, and Dave's were designed to share knowledge. 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, however, 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 that I began to realize that the purpose of telling a story might determine its form.