Practicing identifying anecdotes

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —November 2, 2005
Filed in Business storytelling

Our narrative technique relies on the identification and extraction of anecdotes, typically from transcriptions. The ability to quickly identify an anecdote comes with practice so I thought I would take you through a way to develop this skill.

First we need to have an idea of what we are looking for. The broadest and simplest definition of narrative is ‘any representation of events over time.’* These events are often caused by characters (in this case I won’t delve into how stories can be effectively portrayed with non-human entities). Two examples will help us here. This first has very little narrative while the second drips with it.

Example 1 – low narrativity

 Two powerful ways of making sense (in a Weickien way) are:

  • Using frameworks to ‘frame’ data
  • Getting people to explain and explore surprises

The first technique of placing data into frameworks is common. Shawn posted a great example of such a technique here.

I like the surprise approach. Asking ‘what has surprised you’ is a great way to generate surprise as well as helping a group to make sense of what’s going on. It’s interesting that this approach doesn’t seem to work so well on lone individuals. For instance, if I ask you, “what has surprised you today”, you probably might struggle to come up with something surprising. Yet, be placed in a social setting and it seems that surprises are ripe to occur.

Example 2 – high narrativity

Apart from rain, Washington State is best known for earthquakes and coffee. Unfortunately, John Pennington—the man in charge of the federal disaster response in mainland America’s most seismically sensitive region—has most experience of the Seattle staple that comes in a cup. After helping the four-term Republican state representative gain his $138,000-a-year post as FEMA’s Pacific Northwest regional director in 2001, congresswoman Jennifer Dunn described him as a “natural.” With no formal disaster-relief experience, the 38 year old ex-Bush campaign co-chair who used to run what local journalists dismissed as a “mom and pop coffee company,” would have to be. Following the Michael Brown fiasco, The Seattle Times picked up on Pennington’s lack of preparedness and found that just before his appointment he had gained a degree from a correspondence school that government investigators later branded a “diploma mill.” In his defense, Pennington argued that as well as surrounding himself with disaster experts since his appointment, he managed to gain an “in-depth working knowledge” of FEMA following a series of catastrophic floods in the late 1990s. But, as professional emergency manager Eric Holdeman noted, “Walking through an emergency room doesn’t make you a doctor.”

Example 1 consists primarily of a person’s opinion except for the last sentence which recounts an example. There are very few events and the relationship between the character (in this case, the storyteller) and the events is unclear.

Example 2 is replete with events and characters who who impact them. Pennington helping the Republican, Jennifer describing him as a natural, Pennington running a coffee shop, Pennington gaining a degree, Pennington surrounding himself with experts, Pennington in the 90s floods and Eric’s observation about emergency rooms.

Both examples are taken from blogs. The diary nature of blogs seems to encourage narrative and in fact organisations interested in collecting narrative should consider installing a corporate blogging solution. Consequently the blogosphere is a great place to look for narrative and develop your anecdote identification skills.

An exercise to do with your colleagues and friends

  • Gather together a handful of people who want to develop this skill
  • Go to www.weblogs.com (this is effectively a random listing of blogs)
  • Choose a blog post for the group to consider
  • Individually rate the blog post’s narrativity. Give it a 0 if it lacks any narrative and a 3 if it predominantly narrative— it’s compelling, coherent and moving. Give it a 1 if there are a few aspects of story in the post and a 2 if there is a balance between description or opinions and narrative components.
  • Get together and discuss your ratings and why you made them. This is the essential step. Sensemaking.
  • After about 10 posts you will get a good feeling for what is an anecdote and what isn’t.

* Abbott HP (2004) ‘The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative.’ (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge)

About  Shawn Callahan

Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:

Comments Off on Practicing identifying anecdotes

Blog