In 1969, two Stanford University professors, Gordon Bower and Michael Clark, set out to test the memorability of words embedded in stories against that of a random list of words. Participants in the experiment were asked to memorise and then recall 10 sets of unrelated words. One group remembered the words in any order they wanted, while another group used the words in each set to construct a separate story. When asked to recall the words, those who had constructed stories were able to remember 6–7 times as many words as those who had not used stories. Memory champions use the approach of constructing stories from lists to great effect—the world record for remembering a pack of 52 playing cards using this technique is currently 20.44 seconds.

Did you ever hear an explanation for something that just sounded like gobbledegook, and so you said, ‘Can you give me an example?’ This simple question is likely to result in a story. When we hear that story, we inevitably feel more relaxed and in the picture. That’s because we are hardwired to seek stories that give the things around us practical, concrete meaning. This is why stories are so useful in making a point: the story is evidence of what you are proposing, and if it’s your own story it also highlights your experience. In fact, in the absence of a story that explains what’s happening, we often just make up one that does. This was beautifully illustrated by two American psychologists back in 1944.

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel created a three-minute, silent animation in black and white, consisting of a large triangle, a small triangle and a small circle. The shapes move around the screen in a way that suggests the story of a heroic little circle that saves the small triangle from the big triangle bully. At least, that’s one story people tell when they see this video. Sometimes people think it’s about a big dog protecting its territory, or a father chasing away his daughter’s suitor, or a workplace dispute. After nearly every viewing, the audience tells a story to explain what’s happening onscreen. Only rarely has anyone said: ‘They’re geometric shapes moving on a two-dimensional plane’. In a simple and clever way, Heider and Simmel showed that we just can’t help but make meaning out of everything we see. We are averse to uncertainty and ambiguity. We do all we can to create mental closure so we can get on with things, particularly if we feel threatened. And we bring this clarity to an experience by telling ourselves a story. And if you are sharing the story you want people to get, they are making up their own story and it might not be the one you want them to take away.

I remember working with the scientists from Australia’s top government science organisation, CSIRO in their Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics Division. I was helping the scientists make their presentations more impactful. One researcher was working on chemical blooms in the Brisbane River. The first version of his presentation talked about taking measurements of regular chemical blooms in the river and how the chemicals morphed over time. He had developed a series of formulas to model the event. So, I asked what the blooms looked like. Like a purple stain across the water. When did they happen? Early in the morning, around 5am. Take me back to the first time you were at the river taking measurements, what was it like? He painted an evocative picture of what it was like to see the bloom for the first time and how he took his measurements. You must add that to your talk, I said. He did and we found a bunch of other places to bring his talk alive with his real-life experiences. His talk was a hit.

My client, Carrie Bengston, was the head of communications for that division. At her farewell morning tea years later, she was told that the storytelling work had an incredible impact and transformed how they interacted with customers and research partners both in their one-to-one conversations and in presentations.

A great example of someone who does this well is the biologist, oncologist and author, Siddhartha Mukherjee PhD. I was listening to the radio on my drive to work recently and heard him being interviewed. When he answered a question, he would start by making his point about the science and then wrap up his idea by saying something along the lines of, “Let me give you an example. A patient visited me recently …”, and he would tell a story to illustrate his point. He is a master science communicator. In 2011 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. It is filled with stories.

We were part way through a Storytelling for Sales workshop in Seattle for Microsoft, I was teaching their technical salesforce story skills, when one of the participants expressed his concern about influencing people based on a single event, a single anecdote. This is a common concern especially among the scientifically minded who have been taught that the plural of anecdote is not data.

Stories are memorable because they evoke pictures in our mind’s eye. The memorability of images was nicely demonstrated in a paper called Learning 10,000 Pictures. In the early 1970s an experimental psychologist, Lionel Standing, wanted to test just how much we can remember depending on the characteristics of what we are remembering. Earlier researchers in the ‘60s showed people were better at recalling concrete objects such as scenes, sounds and objects over abstract information such as letters, words and numbers. But they had only tested smaller sets of objects. Standing wanted to see what happened when participants were shown 10,000 pictures.

He used his students at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Canada. In groups of 5 they watched 35mm slides projected in a dark room. Each picture was shown for 5 seconds with about ½ second between slides. It takes a long time to see 10,000 images so the students were given regular breaks. When they had finished, they were brought back into the viewing room two days later. This time they needed to indicate the pictures they had seen from ones they hadn’t from two days earlier. The images were placed next to each other and they just had to record Left or Right.

Standing showed that, while there was a drop off in what they could remember compared to the smaller sets of images, at 10,000 images the participants could remember about 6,600 correctly. A pretty impressive feat.

In the past online transaction processing was done by mainframes that were designed for high throughput work. Relational databases like Oracle were invented to analyse data from these systems. Our simple table structures really helped people understand the information and gain insights.

But then something happened. Relational databases using client-server approaches started to be used instead of mainframes. They were more user friendly, easier to maintain and cost substantially less than mainframes. As a result, transaction loads shot up with the popularity and relational databases were struggling to keep up.

So now we have brought in Oracle 6. Oracle 6 is focussed entirely on high transaction scenarios such as banking and airline booking systems, which were once only served by mainframe systems, but without losing our analysis capabilities.

So, in the future we see much more user-friendly systems being developed that can handle lightning fast transaction speeds. Your employees won’t need to learn esoteric keyboard commands and instead will enter and retrieve information from intuitive online forms. Development times will drop, user satisfaction will soar and your ability to respond to new business needs with be unparalleled.

With the big picture set we can now delve into the details. People need the gist before the details.

For each new feature I would briefly describe it then tell a story of how it would affect an end user. It is even better if the story is about the customer’s customer.

Take one of the features of Oracle 6, row-level locking. Now this wouldn’t mean much to a business person so I would need to tell a story about what can happen if you don’t have it. It might be something like this …

Row-level locking not only speeds up transactions but saves everyone from embarrassment. Imagine what can happen without row-level locking. An important customer comes to the bank to transfer significant funds into an investment account. A transfer is essentially a delete from one account followed by an update of another. Imagine that after the delete, another user updates the information you are trying to change and the two transactions get confused and the wrong amount is transferred. It’s unacceptable. In the past  to avoid this problem, we would lock entire pages of memory containing hundreds of rows. This just slowed everything down. With row-level locking we lock just one row and it speeds everything up and ensures the integrity of the transaction.