by Dan Heath
THE CHALLENGE PLOT
The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot. A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds. David fells a giant with his homemade slingshot. There are variations of the Challenge plot that we all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of sheer willpower over adversity.
The key element of a Challenge plot is that the obstacles seem daunting to the protagonist. Jared slimming down to 180 pounds is a Challenge plot. Jared’s 210-pound neighbor shaving an inch off his waistline is not. We’ve all got a huge mental inventory of Challenge plot stories. The American hockey team beating the heavily favored Russians in the 1980 Olympics. The Alamo. Horatio Alger tales. The American Revolution. Seabiscuit. The Star Wars movies. Lance Armstrong. Rosa Parks.
Challenge plots are inspiring even when they’re much less dramatic and historical than these examples. The Rose Blumkin story doesn’t involve a famous character. Challenge plots are inspiring in a defined way. They inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder, take on new challenges, overcome obstacles. Somehow, after you’ve heard about Rose Blumkin postponing her one-hundredth birthday party until an evening when her store was closed, it’s easier to clean out your garage. Challenge plots inspire us to act.
THE CONNECTION PLOT
Today the phrase “good Samaritan” refers to someone who voluntarily helps others in times of distress. The original story of the Good Samaritan from the Bible is certainly consistent with this definition, but it’s even more profound.
The story begins with a lawyer who approached Jesus with a question about how to get to heaven. The lawyer was more interested in testing Jesus than in learning from him. When Jesus asked the lawyer what he thought the answer was, the lawyer gave a reply that included the notion “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus accepted the lawyer’s answer. Then the lawyer (perhaps wanting to limit the number of people he’s on the hook to love) says, “And who is my neighbor?”
In response, Jesus told a story:
“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.
“A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
“But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
The lawyer replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
What’s missing from this tale, for modern-day readers, is a bit of context. The Samaritan in the story was not simply a nice guy. He was a nice guy crossing a huge social gulf in helping the wounded man. At the time, there was tremendous hostility between Samaritans and Jews (all the other main characters in the story). A modern-day analogy to the outcast status of the Samaritan might be an “atheist biker gang member.” The lesson of the story is clear: Good neighbors show mercy and compassion, and not just to people in their own group.
This is what a Connection plot is all about. It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap—racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise. The Connection plot doesn’t have to deal with life-and-death stakes, as does the Good Samaritan. The connection can be as trivial as a bottle of a Coke, as in the famous Mean Joe Greene commercial. A scrawny young white fan encounters a towering famous black athlete. A bottle of Coke links them. It ain’t the Good Samaritan, but it’s clearly a Connection plot.
Connection plots are also fabulous for romance stories—think of Romeo and Juliet (or the top-grossing movie of all time, Titanic). All Connection plots inspire us in social ways. They make us want to help others, be more tolerant of others, work with others, love others. The Connection plot is the most common kind of plot found in the Chicken Soup series.
Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people. If you’re telling a story at the company Christmas party, it’s probably best to use the Connection plot. If you’re telling a story at the kickoff party for a new project, go with the Challenge plot.
THE CREATIVITY PLOT
The third major type of inspirational story is the Creativity plot. The prototype might be the story of the apple that falls on Newton’s head, inspiring his theory of gravity. The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way. It’s the MacGyver plot.
Ingersoll-Rand is a giant company that makes nonsexy products such as industrial grinders, used in auto shops to sand down auto bodies. Historically, Ingersoll-Rand had been slow at bringing new products to market. One employee, frustrated by the average four-year product life cycle, said, “It was taking us longer to introduce a new product than it took our nation to fight World War II.”
Ingersoll-Rand decided to do something about the slow development cycle. The company created a project team whose goal was to produce a new grinder in a year—one quarter the usual time. Standard theories of organizational culture would have predicted a slim chance of success. The grinder team, however, did a lot of things right, including the use of stories to emphasize the group’s new attitude and culture. One story, for instance, involved a critical decision about whether to build the new grinder’s casing out of plastic or metal. Plastic would be more comfortable for the customer, but would it hold up as well as metal?
The traditional Ingersoll-Rand method of solving this problem would have been to conduct protracted, careful studies of the tensile and compression properties of both materials. But this was the Grinder Team. They were supposed to act quickly. A few members of the team cooked up a less formal testing procedure. While on an off-site customer visit, the team members tied a sample of each material to the back bumper of their rental car, then drove around the parking lot with the materials dragging behind. They kept this up until the police came and told them to knock it off. The verdict was that the new plastic composite held up just as well as the traditional metal. Decision made.
In the history of the Grinder Team, this story has become known as the Drag Test. The Drag Test is a Creativity plot that reinforced the team’s new culture. The Drag Test implied, “We still need to get the right data to make decisions. We just need to do it a lot quicker.”
The famous explorer Ernest Shackleton faced such enormous odds in his explorations (obviously a classic Challenge plot) that unity among his men was mission-critical. A mutiny could leave everyone dead. Shackleton came up with a creative solution for dealing with the whiny, complaining types. He assigned them to sleep in his own tent. When people separated into groups to work on chores, he grouped the complainers with him. Through his constant presence, he minimized their negative influence. Creativity plots make us want to do something different, to be creative, to experiment with new approaches.
The goal of reviewing these plots is not to help us invent stories. Unless you write fiction or advertisements, that won’t help much. The goal here is to learn how to spot the stories that have potential. When the Jared article hits our desk, we want to spot the crucial elements immediately. Guy faces huge obstacles and overcomes them—it’s a Challenge plot. Challenge plots inspire people to take on challenges and work harder. If that feeling is consistent with the goal you want to achieve, run with the story; don’t tack it on the bulletin board.
If you’re running the Grinder Team, and you’re trying to reinvent the company culture, then you need to be on the lookout for Creativity plots. When you hear that some of your men dragged metal around a parking lot, you’ve found something.
Know what you’re looking for. You don’t need to make stuff up, you don’t need to exaggerate or be as melodramatic as the Chicken Soup tales. (The Drag Test isn’t melodramatic.) You just need to recognize when life is giving you a gift.
Stories at the World Bank
In 1996, Stephen Denning was working for the World Bank, the international institution that lends money to developing countries for infrastructure projects such as building schools, roads, and water-treatment facilities. At the time, he managed the bank’s work in Africa—the third-largest area of the bank—and seemed to be on a fast track to the top of the organization.
Then one of his two main mentors retired and the second left. Shortly thereafter he was asked to step down from his Africa position and “look into the issue of information.” His superiors asked him to explore the area of knowledge management. Denning said, “Now this was a bank which cared about flows of money, not information. The new assignment was the equivalent of being sent to corporate Siberia.”
The task was not just organizationally unattractive, it was daunting. The World Bank knew a lot about how to achieve results in developing nations, but that information was scattered about the organization. The World Bank conducted projects in dozens of countries all over the world—and while there was a central bureaucracy, much of the operational know-how was naturally at the local level. Each project was, in a sense, its own universe. A water-treatment guru in Zambia might have figured out a great way to handle local political negotiations, but he was unlikely to have the opportunity to share it with a highway-construction guru in Bangladesh. Neither manager would know the other existed, unless they happened to be in the same circle of friends or former colleagues.
A month after accepting his assignment, Denning had lunch with a colleague who had just returned from Zambia. This colleague was working on a project to improve health care, particularly for mothers and children. While he was in Zambia he had met a health-care worker in Kamana—a small town 360 miles from Zambia’s capital—who was struggling to fight malaria in the community and was trying to find information on how to combat the disease. The worker had found a way to log on to the Internet and had discovered the answers he needed on the website of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. (Keep in mind that this was in 1996, when the Internet would not have been the obvious first stop for someone in search of information, especially in Africa.)
Denning says that he didn’t give the story much thought at the time; it was just an interesting anecdote about the resourcefulness of a colleague. Later, it dawned on him that the Zambia story was a perfect example of the power of knowledge management. Someone in charge of a vital operation needed information. He went looking for it, found it, and, as a result, was able to act more effectively. That’s the vision of knowledge management—except that the health-care worker shouldn’t have been forced to conduct a trial-and-error search, ending at the CDC’s website, to get the right information. He should have been able to tap the knowledge of the World Bank.
Denning began to incorporate the story into conversations with colleagues, stressing why the World Bank ought to make knowledge management a serious priority. Weeks later, he had an opportunity to speak to a committee of senior management. He’d have only ten to twelve minutes on the agenda. In that time he’d have to introduce a new organizational strategy and win the group’s endorsement. A tall order.
First, Denning set up the problem: the difficulties that the World Bank had experienced in pooling its knowledge and the sorry state of its information systems. Then, rather than doing what most people would have done—i.e., rehashing the discipline of knowledge management and quoting some authorities about the importance of knowledge management for the twenty-first century—Denning did something different. He told the Zambia story.
Immediately after the presentation, two executives raced up to Denning and began to bombard him with all the things he should be doing to get the program off the ground. Denning thought, “This is a very strange conversation. Up till ten minutes ago, these people weren’t willing to give me the time of day, and now I’m not doing enough to implement their idea. This is horrible! They’ve stolen my idea!” And then he had a happier thought. “How wonderful! They’ve stolen my idea. It’s become their idea!”
A few years later, after Denning had left the World Bank, he devoted himself to spreading the lessons he’d learned about storytelling. In 2001, he wrote a very insightful book called The Springboard. Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard stories tell people about possibilities.
One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in. Denning says that the idea of telling stories initially violated his intuition. He had always believed in the value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous, too peripheral, too anecdotal. He thought, “Why not spell out the message directly? Why go to the trouble and difficulty of trying to elicit the listener’s thinking indirectly, when it would be so much simpler if I come straight out in an abstract directive? Why not hit the listeners between the eyes?”
The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you’re implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
Denning talks about engaging the “little voice inside the head,” the voice that would normally debate the speaker’s points. “The conventional view of communication is to ignore the little voice inside the head and hope it stays quiet and that the message will somehow get through,” Denning says. But he has a different recommendation: “Don’t ignore the little voice…. Instead, work in harmony with it. Engage it by giving it something to do. Tell a story in a way that elicits a second story from the little voice.”
In addition to creating buy-in, springboard stories mobilize people to act. Stories focus people on potential solutions. Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode. Clearly, the amount of “problem-solving” we do varies across stories. We don’t watch Titanic and start brainstorming about improved iceberg-spotting systems. But we do empathize with the main characters and start cheering them on when they confront their problems: “Look out behind you!” “Tell him off now!” “Don’t open that door!”
But springboard stories go beyond having us problem-solve for the main character. A springboard story helps us problem-solve for ourselves. A springboard story is an exercise in mass customization—each audience member uses the story as a springboard to slightly different destinations.
After Denning told the Zambia story, one of the executives at the meeting took the idea of knowledge management to the president of the World Bank, arguing that it was the future of the organization. Denning was invited to present his ideas to the bank’s top leaders, including the president. By the end of the year, the president had announced that knowledge management was one of the bank’s top priorities.
The Conference Storybook
We started the chapter with the nurse story, which comes from the researcher Gary Klein. Klein tells another story that provides a good summary of the ground we’ve covered.
The organizer of a conference once asked Klein’s firm to sum up the results of a conference. The organizer wanted a useful summary of the conference—more compact than a transcript and more coherent than an idiosyncratic collection of the presenters’ PowerPoint slides.
Klein’s firm assigned one person to monitor each of the conference’s five parallel tracks. The monitors attended each panel, and each time someone told a story they jotted it down. At the end of the conference, the monitors compared notes and found that, as Klein said, they had compiled a set of stories that were “funny, and tragic, and exciting.” The group structured and organized the stories and sent the packet to the conference organizer.
She was ecstatic. She found the packet much more vivid and useful than the typical conference takeaway: a set of dry, jargon-filled abstracts. She even requested funds from her organization to convert the notes into a book. Meanwhile, as a courtesy, she sent the summary notes to all of the conference presenters.
They were furious. They were insulted to have the stories scooped out of their overall structure—they didn’t want to be remembered as people who told a bunch of stories and anecdotes. They felt that they’d invested countless hours into distilling their experiences into a series of recommendations. Indeed, their abstracts—which had been submitted to the conference organizers—were filled with tidbits of wisdom, such as “Keep the lines of communication open” and “Don’t wait too long when problems are building up.”
Klein said, “We want to explain to them how meaningless these slogans are in contrast to stories, such as the one that showed how they had kept the lines of communication open during a difficult incident in which a plant was shut down.” But the presenters were adamant, and the project was abandoned.
This story is one of our favorites in the book, because the dynamics are so clear. We’re not trying to portray the presenters as bad, idea-hating people. Put yourself in their shoes. You’ve created this amazing presentation, summarizing years of your work, and your goal is to help people master a complex structure that you’ve spent years constructing. You’ve erected an amazing intellectual edifice! Then Klein’s crew approaches your edifice, plucks a few bricks out of the wall, and tries to pass them off as the sum of all your labors. The nerve!