The art of storytelling in business

A colleague was lamenting the lack of storytelling training in the business world. Thinking there must be some experts in this field, I googled and came up with Australian-born Steve Denning, author of several books including The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

Steve believes storytelling in business can be used for a variety of purposes, such as igniting organisational change, innovation and building community.

Storytelling is often a one-way process, with a storyteller and a listener. In the business world, Steve says business leaders need to see storytelling as a two-way process: as well as telling a good story, they must anticipate how the audience will respond, and interact with them. He defines this as ‘narrative intelligence’.

Steve describes different types of stories, such as ‘springboard’ stories that enable an audience to understand how an organisation or community may change; anti-stories, which undermine original stories, such as office gossip; and accounts, such as the reckoning of a financial matter.

In the first chapter of his latest book, which you can download online, he says the three key steps in the language of leadership are getting the audience’s attention, eliciting desire for a different future, and reinforcing with reasons.
www.stevedenning.com

Storytelling in marketing
In a blog posting, Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars, itemises some of the ingredients of great stories:

• Great stories are true and trusted.
• Great stories make a promise. They promise fun, safety or a shortcut.
• Great stories are subtle. The fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story.
• Great stories happen fast.
• Great stories appeal to our senses.
• Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. The most effective stories match the world view of a tiny audience that spreads the story.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/ode_how_to_tell.html

A story

All this theory needs a story, so here’s a little story about testing assumptions.

The creators of Sesame Street assumed you couldn’t mix fantasy with reality, so originally there were no Muppets in the street scenes.

When they tested the show with children just before it went live, they found the children were bored with the street scenes. That’s when Big Bird, Oscar, the Grouch and Snuffleupagus were born.
Source: Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

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