Practising the Art of Story-telling in Initiating Interventions

Part IV

Practising the Art of Story-telling

First and foremost, you need to get over anxiety and embarrassment. Every single individual has stories and every occasion can be suitable for sharing them

Mine -

The mining part is about finding your own story material, to draw personal important events or turning points on a timeline. By drawing the events instead of using words, it immediately takes a ‘flesh and blood’ form, not abstract thoughts. By reflecting on the deeper meaning of the events, one discovers the existential importance or becomes aware of the personal learning. And that’s exactly what listeners want to hear from the story-teller. No corporate factoids, numbers and charts, but authentic testimonials that inspire, move, ignite.

 A common pitfall is to only focus on successes. This will not add to the authenticity. Real people fail, struggle, and have doubts. If you share a success, don’t forget sharing the hardship or the challenges that preceded them.

Craft -

Every story – from Hans and Gretel to The Matrix – follows a simple structure:-

·         An exposition of the situation at the start of the story (once upon a time)

·         An inciting incident that caused stress or conflict (the appearance of a villain, a fight with your boss)

·         The endeavors to overcome the conflict (from fighting seven-headed dragons to facing your team after a negative evaluation)

·         A climax where the protagonist finally overcomes (or not)

·         A resolution in which everything can return to a normal situation (and the lived happily ever after)

If the clue of the story is self-explaining, stop here. However, if there’s a moral or a deeper learning you want to convey, make sure you make this explicit.

This process is simple but requires some blood and sweat. The blood and sweat come in when you start writing it out. It’s writing, re-writing, grating and refining. What usually helps is to start with the end in mind. Once you have a clear view on the point you want to make (And how often have we heard stories where you think at the end: So what?) you can work out every element so that it builds up to this final point.

And then for the seasoning, add three key flavors: action, color and emotion (ACE):-

·         Add action by describing the event in the present tense from the first person perspective

·         Add color by describing a few details: the name of a person, the color of his tie, the weather at that moment, the smell

·         Emotion is a key ingredient for every listener – even if they pretend being walking brains. Bringing in emotion is very simple. Just say what you felt and your listeners will also feel it

Share-

Telling the story again and again. Look for occasions where you can practice it. Test the reactions of your audience, take the cues and keep on improvising and refining. Many a times it will land on flat ears, many a times it will bomb, but the more you practice, the more you can discover where your story really grabs attention and where it doesn’t. There’s no need to master presentation skills for telling stories. Even if you don’t have an impressive voice or full control over your bodily language, you can inspire and move people. Step into your own story. If you live it, feel it and believe it, your listeners will do so as well. Become your story!

Pitfalls

Storytelling is not the single, sanctifying skill any leader or professional should master. The pitfall lies in believing that a story will help you get away with anything or that it is the key that will fit any door.

A pitfall that has to do with the nature of the story you are telling, the temptation to make it all sound easy or spectacular. Never star an ‘Over-dog’ and never star selves. It’s good to share successes but what people really want to hear is that you – or whoever the protagonist is – are also vulnerable. That you also face bad luck, you also have to fight your inner demons, etc. Your story must draw them into empathy or identification with you. No identification, then no connection, not relatable.

There are many events and practices from the company’s past that would be no longer in line with a new strategy. Those are the stories that you need to abandon. One method is to use ‘Transition Rituals’ to leave part of the habits or culture in the past, and to take the successful ones with them into the future. We then reflect together on which of these stories can serve as inspiration for the future and which ones should become past tense. It’s actually no different from the parables in the bible or other stories in other religions. The selected stories become symbols and touchstones that can guide or inspire behavior in future challenges.

People value their own conclusions more highly than yours. They will only have faith in a story that has become real for them personally. If people make your story their story, they will recall and re-tell the story to others. They become the missionaries of your story.

Conclusion

Storytelling is an interactive methodology that can be used in widely divergent settings with a change- management intention. Building up and monitoring a narrative space characterized by a respectful, constructive exchange of events experienced with differing emotions can lead to a creative learning process coming about and being guided, so that people can exchange and (re)construct meanings with each other:

•        As an exchange between people or groups in the same organization to get a development going or to reinforce it;

•        At the tense moments in change processes to make a transition possible or develop a vision about the future and learn consciously from your experiences;

•        As a form in which a large diversity of experiences become available for sense-giving, inspiration, interpretation, learning and application in the context of organizations.

Storytelling is an intervention that enables consultants, coaches, workshop leaders or people in another influential role to urge and inspire people to learn, develop and give meaning. Stories and metaphors appeal to people's imagination. But that is not sufficient explanation for the strong rise of storytelling as intervention. It is the growing need to create sanctuaries in the organization where there is space for reflection, not as an inward-looking process, but as an interactive event and a creative process and in which the more uncomfortable feelings evoked by experienced or future events such as doubts, disappointment, fears, shame and anger can be placed in the ancient ritual of the story circle that forever manages to renew itself.

(This is the end of the series Organizational Change through the Art of Story & Story-telling)