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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Review and edit your work

We all make grammatical mistakes and typos. Often readers are forgiving; but not always.

Unfortunately, when a reader sees a mistake, they don't think 'that person has probably worked on this document so long they can't see it clearly any more'. No, they think 'careless, sloppy writing'.

And sometimes they even judge the writer's integrity based on grammatical errors. When I was facilitating a business writing course once, a woman came back after a break and said: 'I’ve just received an email from a barrister. I didn’t feel comfortable about his advice and this email confirmed it. He used a wrong apostrophe! I’ll never trust him again.'

Ouch. It was just an apostrophe!

So how can we make our copy ‘as good as it’s going to get’? Here are my self-editing tips.

1. Take a break. If you edit your work straight after you’ve finished writing, you don’t see it clearly. Any break is helpful, but overnight is best as then you approach your work with fresh eyes.

2. Use Spell Check and set the default to Australian spelling if you live in Australia. I think it’s worth using Microsoft’s grammar check, even though it’s hopeless, as it will occasionally pick up something basic, such as a subject-verb agreement that you’ve missed.

3. Read your work through five times for a Rolls Royce edit:

• once for meaning (Is it clear?)
• twice to change grammar, words etc. (Is there a better way of saying this?)
• once for layout, headings, hyperlinks, tables etc.
• one last time for anything you’ve missed.

I realise this is a bit over-the-top, but I want to stress that one quick read-through is not enough and you edit more thoroughly if you look for different things on separate readings.

4. When editing the second and third times, concentrate on:

• sentences – are they too long?
• words – are any unnecessary?
• grammar
• consistency
• unnecessary repetitions
• typos
• layout.

5. If you’re editing on screen, proofread on a hard copy as well. Unfortunately, we don’t see things as clearly on the screen.

6. Some people find it helpful to read:

• word-by-word
• with a ruler underneath each line
• aloud
• with another person – one person reads and the other follows the text
• in reverse order, i.e. they either read point 7 before point 6 or literally read sentences in reverse order.

7. Ask a friend or colleague to read your work for you. But choose someone with an eye for detail –not all people have that skill.

With self-editing, you may pick up that rogue apostrophe.

These tips first appeared in Flying Solo (http://www.flyingsolo.com.au)

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Phrases we love to hate

In an entertaining article 'Are you going forward? Then stop now' (BBC Magazine), Lucy Kellaway looks at the epidemic use of the phrase 'going forward' and makes fun of some of our other pet hates.
Two of the most amusing examples of the use of 'going forward' are:

'When asked if he was going to be the England captain again after his triumph with Trinidad and Tobago, David Beckham came out with the gnomic reply "Going forward, who knows." It seems that the less one has to say, the more likely one is to reach for a going forward as a crutch. Politicians find it comforting for this reason. "We are going forward" poor Hillary Clinton said just before the last, fatal primary . . . when it became indisputable that she was going nowhere of the kind.'

For nearly a decade, Lucy Kellaway wrote a fictional column in the Financial Times about a senior manager who spoke in business cliches.

She says: 'Martin Lukes talked the talk. Or rather, he added value by reaching out and sharing his blue sky thinking. At the end of the day he stepped up to the plate and delivered world class jargon that really pushed the envelope. After eight years of being him I came to accept the nouns pretending to be verbs. To task and to impact. Even the new verb to architect I almost took in my stride. I didn't even really mind the impenetrable sentences full of leveraging value and paradigm shifts. But what still rankled after so long were the little things: that he said myself instead of me and that he would never talk about a problem, when he could dialogue around an issue instead.'

It is often the little things, isn't it? I cringe when I see 'myself' used wrongly, but I think it's here to stay.

As I read on, I smiled even more broadly when Lucy Kellaway dealt with the word 'passion'.

'Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office — unless things have gone very wrong indeed. And yet passion is something that every employee must attest to in order to get through any selection process.'

If you enjoy being a pedant and want to smile at our crankiness about words, visit http://news.bbc.co.uk:80/1/hi/magazine/7453584.stm

You can also click through to 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7457287.stm

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The English language is changing

In 2010, language researcher David Graddol predicts there will be 2 billion people on the planet speaking English, of whom only 350 million will be native speakers. So how the English language develops over the next 100 years will largely depend on what non-native speakers do with the language.

When Latin colonised the world centuries ago, it dissolved over time into a number of different languages. Thanks to written texts and the global media, that is unlikely to happen today. But English as we know it is changing.

Already, non-native speakers are stripping out parts of English that cause misunderstandings. In the process, they are making the language more consistent. Some of the changes that are already occurring or seem likely to occur are:

• The past tense of irregular verbs — apart from ones we use all the time such as to have and to be — will become more regular (e.g. wed is changing to wedded).
• Some mass nouns may become count nouns (informations, furnitures, staffs).
• The third person singular is the only verb form to take an –s so this may drop off (she runs will become she run).

Listening and watching the language, I see changes such as:

• Brevity is a fading word — young people don't understand what it means.
• Less is often used instead of fewer.
• Myself is frequently used when me would be more correct (e.g. Please contact myself).
• More than and over are used interchangeably.
• Whom seems to be vanishing.

Some of these changes I care about and others I think aren't worth worrying about. What do you think? And what changes are you observing? Email mary@themfactor.com.au

Source: Michael Erard, ‘English as she will be spoke’, New Scientist, 29 March 2008 (http://michaelerard.com)

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Oft-confused words

I am constantly amazed at how intelligent people confuse familiar words, such as 'their', 'they're' and 'there'. But then I remind myself that I can never work out whether 'bimonthly' means twice a month or every two months and I am never sure whether a note accompanying a document should be a 'compliment' slip or a 'complement' slip?

So here's a few commonly confused words.

compliment = to praise, a formal expression of civility or respect (e.g. compliments of the season) complement = to complete, go with (e.g. pepper and salt complement each other)

Both 'compliment/s' and 'complement/s' slips exist in Google, but I think, using the second meaning of 'compliment', I'll choose 'compliments' slip in future.

there = in that place
they're = short for 'they are'their = belonging to them

flammable = able to be set aflame
inflammable = able to be set aflame, easily excited or disturbed

According to the Macquarie Dictionary traditionally 'inflammable' meant likely to burn easily, but to avoid a false analogy with other words such as 'inactive' in which the 'in' means 'not', 'flammable' was adopted as the standard warning in labelling goods. The opposite is 'nonflammable'.

affect = influence (verb)
effect = result (noun); occasionally used as a verb meaning 'to bring about a result'.

dependent = relying on
dependant = someone who is reliant on financial or other support (e.g. a child)

bimonthly = occurring every two months or occurring twice a month. How confusing! I suggest you use clearer terms, such as 'fortnightly', 'every two months' or 'twice a month'.

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The power of words

Reading a book on hypnotic writing recently (Hypnotic Writing by Joe Vitale) I was reminded of the power of words. This book would not have caught my attention in the bookshop if it had been called 'Persuasive Writing'.

As I was reading this book, I realised that Joe Vitale features in The Secret, the book and movie by a Melbourne producer, Rhonda Byrne, popular at the moment. They are about the 'power of attraction' (you get what you focus on), but that title would not have the same impact.

I used to be a bit sceptical about using books such as Richard Bayan's Words that Sell to help me choose words, thinking my writing should be original. I am changing my thinking (slightly). I still think you need to find your own writing voice and write in your own style, but when you rewrite, why not pause and think about the words you're using?

Joe Vitale says that when he's rewriting he has his 'swipe file' handy and adds words such as 'imagine', 'breakthrough' and 'announcing'. I'd never heard of a swipe file before so I googled the term and found many writers create their own swipe file: a place where they store words and phrases that appeal to them (e.g. internet marketing tutor Chris Yates at http://www.internet-marketing-tutor.com/swipe-file.html). Swipe files are meant to give you inspiration, not be a source to copy from.

By the way, what do you think of the word 'swipe' in the term 'swipe file'? Is it stronger than, say, 'good examples' or 'my likes' file?

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