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Storytelling as a culture builder – 3 resources to help you get storytelling

Lee-Anne Ragan — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:00:38 +0000

Storytelling is a strategic tool for building organizational culture, managing change, teambuilding and more. In my last post I covered 9 tips to help you get storytelling.

Here are three resources to assist you in your storytelling journey:

Check out Springboard, the classic book by Stephen Denning, considered the grand-daddy of using storytelling as an engagement tool.
Daniel Pink’s book Whole New Mind has a fantastic section on storytelling.
The Heath Brother’s book Made to Stick also has a great section on storytelling I highly recommend.

Want to know more? Check out the storytelling article with 9 tips & more resources listed here in Rock.Paper.Scissors Inc.’s latest e-newsletter.

Storytelling as a culture builder – how feather dusters & snow globes can help

Lee-Anne Ragan — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:00:43 +0000

‘Tell me a story’ are words to make most people’s blood pressure increase. Just as North American corporate audiences don’t tend to sing or draw in public, we don’t tend to tell stories either.

Or do we?

The background story

We all tell stories and we tell them all the time. We just may not call it storytelling. Fact is storytelling is powerful. Storytelling is an agent for: increasing employee engagement, managing change, training and development, interviewing, evaluation, operations, marketing, building corporate culture and more.

Social media rests on our powerful urge to tell and be told stories. The recent popularity of infographics (depicting information, knowledge or data visually) is all about making information more interesting by making it tell a story.

Our brains are wired for storytelling. Stories live in long-term memory, while facts tend to live in short-term memory. Author Daniel Pink, in Whole New Mind, says facts are widely available, it’s putting them into context that makes a connection. Stories increase retention.

Putting stories in the forefront

Curious but unsure how to go about telling or gathering stories? Here’s a nine point storytelling checklist.

1. What’s your muse?

Examples of inspiration for storytelling are all around you. Just take a look. I noticed a client’s receptionist desk was full of snow globes. Curious, I asked about them. Turns out the receptionist was a fan of said snowy pieces and staff would bring her back one from their various travels. What a great jumping off point for a story. Globes could be pictured in the company newsletter with a story of the staff’s travels. Easy? Yes. A tool for employee engagement? Yes.

2. Check your story to make sure it has a beginning, middle and end.

Daniel Pink calls this ‘departure, initiation and return’. Collect or create stories that have this rhythm.

3. Make sure you know the purpose of your story.

Be clear about what are you trying to achieve before you start collecting or creating stories. Are you dealing with a large-scale change? Trying to increase employee engagement? Beef up your corporate culture? Once you know what you’re trying to achieve the stories will flow more easily.

I once worked with a multi-national client where some employees had been active on Facebook telling negative stories about the company. I was called in to help. Essentially I gathered stories that focused on building the corporate culture. The effect was dramatic. Staff felt heard and changes were made.

4. Make sure your story has people + problem (or characters + conflict).

Good stories have a problem or conflict plus a cast of people or characters. The resolution of the conflict is what makes those who are listening curious and engaged. What conflict or problem are you dealing with that could benefit from storytelling?

5. Map your story for ways to leverage curiousity.

‘Ah ha is most powerful when preceded by huh?!’ say the Heath brothers in Made to Stick. Curiousity is gold. Our brains not only love curiosity but more importantly, love to resolve curiosity. Find a story that makes listeners curious and you’ve got gold.

6. Use a feather duster to brush off uninvited guests – a.k.a. check the organizational conditions for storytelling conduciveness.

Stories bypass negativity and judgments. Stories have the power to suspend disbelief BUT organizational conditions have to be conducive for the magic to unfold. Have someone who repeatedly rolls his or her eyes? Does someone else tend towards snippy comments like ‘this will never work’? Or perhaps folks are nervous and you’re hearing things like ‘this is too hard, I can’t do this.’

The solution to these storytelling squashers? Imagine a feather duster brushing off your and/or their shoulder while saying ‘uninvited guest’. Setting the ground rules with an imaginary (or real) feather duster makes a huge difference to people’s receptivity. If the organization isn’t receptive or isn’t prepped properly stories tend to fall flat.

7. Add texture & details.

Good stories transport you and this happens in good part because of adding texture and details. What’s happening to the character’s body while they’re experiencing conflict – for example ‘her throat felt like someone had reached inside and squeezed’ is more transporting than ‘she was nervous.’

8. What’s your message?

What message are you trying to convey? A helpful way to think about your message is to base it on an archetype – for example Nike portrays itself as the brave hero while Virgin is the adventurer. Lego is the creator while M&M’s is the joker.[1] What’s yours?

9. What values does your story portray?

Make sure the values of your story match what values you want to be portraying. I was told a story about a VP who has to approve all company tweets before they get posted. If the company is trying to convey transparency and openness this is not a good story to be making the rounds!

The moral of the story

Storytelling is a powerful medium that can be used in a wide variety of ways to effect positive organizational change. Grab your feather duster and your version of a snow globe and get story gathering and telling.

Want to know more? Check out the storytelling resources listed in Rock.Paper.Scissors Inc.’s latest e-newsletter.

[1] Source: Sam Reynolds, Echo Memoirs

Attention! Attention! A test of your attention.

Lee-Anne Ragan — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:00:18 +0000

The Heath brothers have written in Made to Stick that our brains are more like a sieve than a sponge. Instead of soaking up what catches our eye, we’re more likely to strain out things that don’t catch our attention, leaving behind the big chunky bits in the sieve that is our brain.

Watch the clip below and follow the instructions, then continue reading …

Did you see the gorilla? If you did, a hearty thump on a hairy chest to you. If not, we can commiserate together. I was so focused on the white t’s, thinking there was some kind of trick, that I didn’t see the hairy beast.

If big, hairy apes don’t get caught in the sieve I wonder what else we miss. And what impact that has on our work, our coworkers, our clients, ourselves.

Find out more about Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris’ work at the Invisible Gorilla.

Curiousity may have killed the cat but it’s a trainer’s best friend

Lee-Anne Ragan — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:00:13 +0000

The saying, curiousity killed the cat, means if you’re too curious harm may come to you. That’s true. In some circles curiousity causes problems (say if you’re a bank teller trying to figure out how to steal money) but in the case of corporate training curiousity is worth its weight in gold.

Curiousity opens the gate to learning, it primes participants for wanting to slough off indifference and dive into learning.

Our brains are built to not only be curious but to satisfy that curiousity. It’s called the knowledge gap (read more about it in Dan & Chip Heath’s Made to Stick book). The knowledge gap is what keeps us awake late at night when we know we should go to bed, watching the end of a particularly bad TV show …. simply because we want to find out what happens – who killed the guy, who won the race etc.

A great example of creating curiousity is from the Fast Company article ‘How to Make Corporate Training Rock’. In it, the trainer creates videos, similar to The Office to, get this, help ‘redesign the company’s ethics-and-compliance training program’. Compliance? Snore! Yawn! Yet through the use of humour and pop culture (in this case video clips similar to The Office) they created a knowledge gap that employees were ridiculously keen to fill, vying to be the first one to see the next video installment.

How did it affect compliance? Unfortunately the article didn’t say, however my guess is that with that kind of priming, that kind of curiousity, the cats were sitting fat and pretty.

How can you create more curiousity with your training?

Cultural intelligence and the UN Rio World Urban Forum

Lee-Anne Ragan — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:04:41 +0000

Michael Hager, Washburn University, 'Inclusion/Exclusion' woodcut monoprint, 2004

What’s your CQ? You may be familiar with IQ, social intelligence and emotional intelligence but the new kid on the block is cultural intelligence.

I’m in Rio de Janiero, Brazil at the United Nations World Urban Forum. I’ve just finished doing a workshop on cultural intelligence, which is a combination of meta-cognition, skills and knowledge, that allows us to move with and through various cultures, including our own, with confidence and flair even.

Fill in the blanks: ________ are good dancers, _______ are good at math, ________ are bad drivers. Bidden or not, welcome or not, were you able to fill in the spaces? In all likelihood you were. That’s because our brains are wired to fill in the gaps.

The Heath brothers, in Made to Stick, call it the curiousity gap. It’s the same gap that makes us stay up too late watching a TV show we don’t like simply because we want to find out what happens. Who killed who in the whodunnit. This filling in of the gaps is helpful in some areas of life but not intercultural work.

Too often we fill in the gaps wrong while thinking we are right. We tend to assume we know up to 90% more about another culture than we actually do. What can help?

Have a broad working definition of culture - most of us default to defining culture only by ethnicity. By including gender, faith, material possessions, time, physical space, personal space and many other cultural elements we are more likely to get a richer picture of the people we are working and playing with.
Check assumptions – look for the boxes that we unwittingly put around our thinking that squeeze our brain into road block thinking.
Understand your views on conflict – often times working interculturally includes bumping up against conflict. If you understand your own particular view of conflict you’ll have a more effective starting point. For example, do you see conflict as a chance to vent, a way to clear the air, or something that is scary, something to be avoided at all costs?
Hold a worldview that includes complexity – if you always expect 2 to follow 1, and b to follow a, that is you prefer a linear view of the world you’re likely in for a bumpy ride. On the other hand if, while working interculturally, you expect a complex ride, with ups, downs and hidden corners, you’ll save yourself a lot of stress.

Cultural intelligence is the new kid on the block and a very much welcome one. What will you do to welcome him/her?

Are you a sieve or a sponge?

Lee-Anne Ragan — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:27:12 +0000

We see what we expect to see.

The Heath Brothers, in their fantastic book Made to Stick, talk about our minds being like a sieve as opposed to a sponge – that to remember something it has to be big enough, memorable enough, sticky enough to get caught in the sieve.

My sieve got stuck when I recently saw a bland looking black bird carrying a very large, oddly coloured hot dog bun.

Huh?

Then my brain kicked in and remembered the fact that I’m in Brazil and realized that what I was seeing, wasn’t some unbelievably hungry bird with super strength carrying some behemoth sized bread but rather a wild toucan flying above me.

My radar had filled in the blanks. I didn’t expect to see a toucan so my brain created something that was more ‘normal’ for me.

What do you expect? And more importantly how does it colour your vision?