PART 1: Foundations

ONE

Why Leaders Need Good Storytelling Skills

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had the pleasure of coaching one of the national managers of a global manufacturer, who I’ll call Peter. I was about to start a story workshop for Peter and his people when he turned to me and said, ‘Shawn, I would just like to put this session into context for everyone’. Peter then described how, each year, he pitches a budget to the company’s board for approval. His group’s plans all hinge on getting the right level of resources, so it’s a big deal. The pitch is usually a gruelling affair, but the last time Peter did it, things were different. He decided to make his proposal to the board using a story structure we’d worked on together. The board members listened attentively as Peter told a story about what he wanted to accomplish—it took him 15 minutes, with no PowerPoint deck in sight. When Peter had finished, the board asked him a couple of straightforward questions, then there were nods around the table, and just like that his request was granted. Before Peter could catch his breath, the board chair asked him how much more money he’d need to achieve his goals even more quickly. He went with his gut: ‘Five million

will do it’. That was also approved. As Peter was leaving, he heard the chair ask another national manager to make their proposal as clear as Peter’s. He just smiled.

Now you might be thinking: Didn’t Peter need to share a whole lot of data to make his case? When did that happen? Surely he didn’t just tell a story? The answer is that this data was an essential element of the story Peter told. He handed out projections and historical information and then pointed to it as his story unfolded. But the most important thing here is that Peter wanted to engage the board emotionally and make them understand what great opportunities were at hand, and how well placed he and his team were to take them. His story forged this emotional engagement while also presenting the hard numbers of his case.

Of course, a leader has many other responsibilities in addition to obtaining the resources to get their job done. A leader needs to work with their people to craft and communicate strategy, so that everyone in the group has that strategy in their heads while making day-to-day decisions. A leader needs to engage their people so they all know they are doing work that is making a difference, and their individual skills can shine. There will be many times, especially when things get tough, when a leader needs to inspire action. This action will have to be supported by the many decisions people make in the organisation, which requires the leader to influence those decisions that may directly impact their group. Also, every day the leader’s people will face new challenges, and as no-one wants to reinvent the wheel or repeat past mistakes, sharing lessons becomes vital. And sometimes a leader needs to set the record straight: they need to counter half-truths and lies.

The list of potential responsibilities is obviously far longer than this, but the ones described above are fundamental for all leaders. And in each case, business storytelling can play a major role.

COMMUNICATING STRATEGY

Steve Jobs bounces onto the stage and grabs the slide changer from a colleague with a friendly ‘Thanks Scott’. He’s looking thin and pale, illness having taken its toll, but his energy remains boundless. It’s the 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and Steve is about to announce a change in strategy for his company. The 1000-plus crowd cheers as he steps into the spotlight and then falls silent, hanging on his next utterance.

‘About 10 years ago we had one of our most important insights, and that was the PC was going to become the digital hub for your digital life.’ With these words, Steve Jobs begins his strategy story.

* * *

A global study conducted in 2012 involving 300,000 employees found that just over half did not really understand the basics of their organisations’ strategies.1 It’s the dirty little secret of so many businesses: ask any employee, including the executive team, about the company strategy and they’ll lunge for a document that reminds them what it is. It’s rarely embedded in their minds and, as a result, the espoused strategy has a harder time influencing day-to-day decision-making. Given the effort applied to strategy development, there is a massive disconnect here. The opportunity to reconnect a firm with its strategy lies in how the strategy is communicated and understood.

There are a number of ways of conveying your organisation’s strategy. One popular approach is to craft a beautiful-looking PowerPoint presentation and email it to all of your team leaders, with the instruction to present it to their teams.

The head of strategy for one of Australia’s most iconic brands told me he happened to sit in on a strategy talk when a team leader presented a slide deck. It went something like this: ‘OK, HQ has asked me to tell you about… [clicks to the first slide] ah yes, our

strategy… [clicks to the next slide and reads out the contents, then clicks again and pauses] Not sure what this means… [clicks to the next slide]’. The audience slid into boredom. The talk failed to engage the team and left them none the wiser about the strategy. In fact, the employees were probably more cynical about and disengaged from the company than they had been before they sat down for the presentation.

So sure, emailing a slide deck is easy, but in most cases it’s next to useless. It often achieves the opposite of what you want.

Another popular method is the CEO roadshow. This is where the CEO visits each company site and presents the slide deck themselves. This act is symbolic. It’s intended to show that the CEO really cares about the strategy, and they want everyone to know about it because it’s so important. The audience usually watches intently, but mainly to gauge whether the CEO really does believe in what they’re spouting. Of course, the CEO is also there to answer questions, but no-one dares ask one in such an open forum. Sadly, the result is often similar to what was observed by the head of strategy mentioned above.

In kicking off a division meeting following one CEO roadshow, a department head at a well-known bank asked the roomful of people: ‘So, who can tell me about our strategy?’ No response. ‘OK, just one of the 12 items then.’ Still nothing. ‘So, no-one can remember any of the 12 things we’ve just been talking about at all of our sites?’ Silence.

Presentations driven by slide decks typically contain lots of facts in the form of bullet points and graphs, but because these are not supplied within an overarching narrative, it’s hard for the audience to join the dots. People forget the information almost as soon as they file out of the auditorium because the presentation lacks a memorable story.

A key question people often ask when they hear about a new strategy is ‘Why?’ ‘Why are we focusing on acquisition?’ they ask. ‘Why are we outsourcing?’ ‘Why are we demoting the Mac to the

level of an iPhone or iPad?’ They want a plausible explanation.2 And in the absence of one, they’ll make one up, especially when they are stressed.3

A story effectively answers the ‘Why?’ questions because it sets out what has prompted the new strategy and what’s going to happen next. A story provides the context for a strategy, making it meaningful and allowing it to connect with other company stories employees may have in their minds.

I was explaining the concept of a strategy story during a training session for a Malaysian telecommunications company when the organisation’s leader suddenly jumped up and said: ‘I get it. Here’s our story. Over the last 10 years we’ve been focused on building mobile coverage. Our revenues have steadily increased but our infrastructure costs have risen faster. In two years time our infrastructure costs will exceed revenue. That’s why we’re now moving to collaborate and share infrastructure with our competitors, and putting our energy into competing using what runs on our mobile network’.

Why was the company collaborating with its competitors on infrastructure? Because its infrastructure costs were going through the roof. A simple yet effective story made this clear.

Strategy stories are powerful because people can picture the events, remember them and retell them. A well-developed strategy story not only answers the ‘Why?’ questions but also conveys emotion in a way that inspires people to take action in accordance with the new strategy.

Creating an effective strategy story, one with real impact, involves much more than simply crafting and then telling a compelling story. It involves leaders developing the strategy story themselves so that they can own it. It involves teams being comfortable with telling the story and weaving their own experiences through it. And most importantly, it involves everyone in the organisation telling their own versions of the strategy story so that they all own it and act to support and build on it.

The strategy story is a type of clarity story. I take you through the process of creating clarity stories in Chapter 6.

* * *

Steve Jobs paces back and forth across the stage, painting word pictures of where Apple has come from, why a change in strategy is needed, and where the company will now be heading. He talks as if the future has already come to pass. Eventually he brings up his last slide, takes a deep breath, and finishes his story: ‘So that is iCloud’.

ENGAGING PEOPLE

The best business leaders care about employee engagement. That’s because apart from helping to make an organisation an enjoyable place to work, it’s been shown to have a big impact on the bottom line.4 UK retail giant Marks and Spencer and the University of Bath, for example, have documented how engagement is raising performance and productivity across the UK.5 It turns out that when employees are highly engaged, they trust their leaders and their company, and they care about their work. They’ll go above and beyond their duties, and that positive effort and attitude translates into business results.

So how do you increase employee engagement and motivation with storytelling? You use stories to emphasise and advance purpose, progress and trust.

PURPOSE

Back in 2007, Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a fascinating experiment that highlighted how important it is to be reminded of your purpose at work. The study focused on a call centre that raised funds for a

university. Grant divided the call centre workers into two groups and used different approaches to motivate them. The people in Group 1 were reminded about the money they would earn and how it would improve their lives, while those in Group 2 were told stories that reminded them about how their work benefited the lives of others. Assessing the participants a month later, Grant found there was little improvement in the average number of donations (nine) or amount of money ($1290) attributed to the people in Group 1. The people in Group 2, however, had generated more than double the average number of donations (23) and donation size ($3130).6

The regular sharing of stories that illustrate how someone’s work helps those they aim to serve can have a massive impact on output. A reminder of our true purpose, above simply creating shareholder value or maximising profit, rouses the human heart and inspires greater productivity.

Stories about purpose are a type of success story, which we explore in Chapter 6.

PROGRESS

It’s hard to get a clear insight into what a large group of employees is thinking and feeling, especially over time. But that’s what Harvard professors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer were able to do when they conducted a lengthy investigation into the inner work life—the thoughts and feelings we have about our work and colleagues that set our mood and level of engagement—of 238 people in 26 project teams across seven companies.7 Each day the researchers emailed a short survey to the employees that asked them to rate their mood and feelings. The employees were also asked to ‘briefly describe one event from today that stands out in your mind’, which they were encouraged to do by sharing a short anecdote. Over a couple of months, the researchers collected nearly 12,000 anecdotes, and in them they discovered what they called ‘the progress principle’.

We all know from our own experiences that each day we’re boosted by a complex set of small wins, recognition, respect, connection with our group, and improvement in our skills. We also have setbacks, and these negative events often overwhelm the positive ones. Yet of all the influences on our daily outlook and inner work life, Amabile and Kramer found that the most significant was making progress in meaningful work. When managers are asked what things they might do to engage and motivate their employees, highlighting the progress being made rarely gets a mention. But this can make a significant difference to a team’s productivity.

One of your jobs as a leader should be to find and share these stories of progress, to make apparent what largely remains invisible to most of your people. Just talking to employees about this will give them the strong sense that you care about what they do. It will also help you keep a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in your area. To get these progress stories, you can give each individual in your team the daily task of briefly describing one event that helped them to make progress that day. These stories can then be shared in team meetings. This will give you a far greater insight into the health of your team and your project than the standard around-

the-table project update.

Stories that concern progress are modelled on success stories, which I detail in Chapter 6.

TRUST

An engaged workforce trusts its leaders and the company. This trust takes time to earn, yet it can be destroyed in an instant. Our opinion of a leader’s trustworthiness is most influenced by what we see them do, but when we can’t see a leader in action, the next-best way to gauge their character is to hear a story about something they did.

I once heard a story about the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that gave me a strong impression of the man’s character. The company was just starting a trial for a new cancer therapy and

a politician approached the CEO to try and get his wife onto the clinical test. The politician tacitly conveyed that the therapy might jump through fewer government hoops to be approved if his wife took part in the trial. The CEO calmly explained that this would be impossible because the trial was strictly controlled. I heard this from an employee who was clearly proud of his CEO and thought him a man of integrity.

One person who taught me a lot about trust was David Maister, the distinguished consultant to professional service firms. At the time of starting Anecdote, I was already an admirer of David’s work. I’d read Managing the Professional Service Firm and I loved reading his blog. I also made comments and posed questions on his website that he would respond to and periodically incorporate into one of his podcasts. One day I decided to ask David if he would be willing to spend an hour or two on the phone with me, to give me some advice on my new business, so I emailed him. No sooner had I hit ‘Send’ than my phone rang. It was David, calling me from Boston to follow up my request. I made it clear that I would be happy to pay him for a couple of hours of his time. He replied: ‘Shawn, my service fee is really designed for large corporations. I charge $20,000 a day, with a minimum of one day’. Gulp. There was no way my little start-up could afford that. I was just about to say so when David continued: ‘But we are friends now. This is on me. How can I help?’ Engaging in an online conversation with David had created a relationship between us, even though we had never met. So when I reached out for help, he was open to giving me a hand. As Adam Grant showed in his wonderful book Give and Take, the most successful people are givers—though not to the extent of being a doormat whom others walk all over. David is definitely a giver.

David Maister sums up the dimensions of building and maintaining trust in a simple formula.8 Yes, I know, how can you boil something as complex as trust down into a simple formula?

Well, the statistician George Box once said: ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’.9 And I find Maister’s trust formula useful. Here it is:

Trust = (credibility + reliability + intimacy) / self-interest

Credibility is about trusting what a person says because they have a track record of telling the truth, and the expertise and professionalism to know what they are talking about. Reliability is about trusting a person to do what they say they will do, and that they will do it well. Intimacy is about trusting someone to care about your emotions and desires, and to treat your secrets—what you really think of colleagues, what’s happening at work—with confidence. Self-interest, however, erodes trust. A self-interested person only seeks to make themselves look good. They see the people they work with merely as a way of getting ahead.

So if you want to build trust as a leader, you have to act in a way that triggers stories of credibility, reliability and intimacy, but not self-interest. (This is called story triggering, which we revisit later in this chapter and in Chapter 4.) And because engagement is also about trusting the company, you have to take every opportunity to tell stories about the great things other leaders in the firm are doing.

Unfortunately, it’s a fact that bad stories are stronger than good ones.10 Just ask yourself what goes around an organisation faster: stories of success or stories of failure? Relationship researcher John Gottman’s rule of thumb for a healthy marriage is to make sure the good events outnumber the bad ones by a ratio of at least five to one—anything less and the relationship is likely to fail.11 The same could be said for organisations. For every negative story floating around, you need at least five positive ones to counteract its effects. Just one story of self-interest can erode trust fast.

INSPIRING ACTION

As a teenager I loved basketball. I was in a team coached by my best friend’s dad, Walt. One season we found ourselves in the grand final. At our last practice session in a gymnasium before the big game, Walt gathered the team in the middle of the court, pointed to a line on the floor and said, ‘Do you all think you can walk along this line?’ We all nodded and proceeded to walk the line. Then Walt pointed to a balance beam and said, ‘Can you walk along the balance beam?’ We all said, ‘Sure thing coach’, and we walked along the beam. Then Walt said, ‘Imagine this beam crosses a deep, treacherous canyon with a fierce wind blowing across it’. After painting this scary picture, he asked us to walk across the beam again. We all made it without falling. ‘Lads,’ he said, ‘our game this weekend is like the ordinary balance beam crossing a windswept canyon. It’s just another game, yes, but there will be a lot more pressure this time. Are you ready for this game?’

We were duly inspired by Walt’s words, and we won the grand final. Walt generated a strong desire to win in the players by using the analogy of challenging ourselves to cross a dangerous canyon. The analogy story is a powerful one to have in your back pocket as a leader, and we will discuss it further in Chapter 6. Of course, what Walt did with us is only one type of inspiration. There are many others.

We often inspire ourselves. The celebrated documentary-maker Ken Burns felt inspired the day he worked out the secret to engaging with historical photographs. He told The New York Times: ‘I remember realising early in the process [of filming] that I had to listen to the photos, not just see them. Are the waves of the East River lapping? Are the workers hammering? I can remember not wanting to break the spell, not wanting to move my eye from the eyepiece, but to live in that world. It gave me a kind of key to unlock what has been, for the past 35 years, the way I’ve tried to wake the dead’.12 Good documentary-makers, like any good artist, reflect on their practice.

They notice when something happens and tell themselves a story to make meaning of it. As leaders, we need to do the same. This act of noticing is the first step towards good storytelling.

We are also inspired by the actions of others, especially if they reflect how we would like to see ourselves act under difficult circumstances. These moments reveal character. We often don’t get to see remarkable actions firsthand, but this is when stories can play a role in inspiration.

I recently coached the general manager of a well-known home maintenance brand. To kick off the new financial year, she got up in front of all her employees and told the story of how one factory worker—let’s call him Gary—became concerned about one of the machines in his factory. He thought it was dangerous to use. So in his own time, under his own steam, he set about improving the factory’s safety processes to address this threat. When the GM told Gary’s story, everyone pictured what he’d done and they felt proud. Gary himself went up to the GM at the end of the session and excitedly told her about another safety issue he was working on. Such stories of remarkable efforts are great fuel for inspiration. You can share inspiring stories systematically. Apple is one company that regularly shares stories to inspire great customer service in its retail stores. Its process is simple but it has an amazing impact. Each day the company undertakes a net promoter score13 survey of randomly selected customers. If a customer gets great service from an Apple employee and gives them a perfect 10, then at the next morning’s staff meeting, the store manager will say something like, ‘Yesterday Mary got a 10’. Everyone claps. Then the manager says, ‘Mary, remember that customer who came in to get their iPhone screen fixed? Can you tell everyone what happened?’ Mary then tells the story of the iPhone screen, giving everyone else the chance to hear what it takes to get a 10 from a customer and high praise from their manager. Again, this creates a feeling that fuels a desire to take action. It breathes life into the employees, and

it is done every day.

To inspire at work, leaders must share stories of events big and small. Stories are concrete and specific, so the resulting desire to take action is coupled with a clear example of what to do. It is the antithesis of merely spouting abstractions like ‘Let’s innovate’.

INFLUENCING DECISIONS

Leaders are decision-makers. They have to be. As soon as they walk into the office in the morning, they are bombarded with decisions that have to be made: ‘Can our business partner sell our product in that new market?’; ‘Do you want to talk to the journalist from The Times?’; ‘When should we share the new strategy with staff?’; ‘Should we defy the auditor’s recommendation for the good of our customers?’; ‘Should we do business with them?’; ‘Do we fight this, or do we just let it slide?’

Most of the decisions experienced leaders make, day in and day out, are intuitive. When presented with a situation where a time-critical decision is needed, a leader matches it with something they’ve done in the past and then mentally tests that course of action to see if it works. If the mental simulation works out, they go with that decision.14 This match-and-test approach happens in a flash, so quickly that it’s hard for a decision-maker to recall how they made such a decision. But there is nothing magical about this. These judgements are based on the experience of continually making lots of decisions and seeing the results. As Nobel laureate and the granddaddy of psychology Herbert Simon puts it: ‘Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition’.15

Another Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, has also acknowledged this. Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which points out the many biases we have as humans that can lead us astray, is often cited as the reason for a growing feeling in business that we shouldn’t trust our intuition as much as we do. But Kahneman says he ‘never believed that intuition is always

misguided’.16 In fact, in 2009, Kahneman and his research frienemy Gary Klein, who champions intuition, put their heads together to figure out when this kind of decision-making works best. They concluded that it is when the decision-maker can see the results of their decision-making, giving them the opportunity to practise the skill and learn from this.17 This is exactly the environment that the modern-day leader inhabits.

The key word here is ‘experience’. Experiences continually wash over us every day, but only the ones that evoke an emotion get noticed. And of the experiences that get noticed, only a few are thought about and translated into a story that explains what happened. Over time, these accumulate into a repertoire of experience-based stories. It is this catalogue of significant, emotionally evocative experiences, framed by stories, that guides and reinforces our decision-making practices.

So to influence a decision-maker, you need to change the stories their intuition relies upon. As a leader, you can do this either by creating a new experience for a decision-maker (triggering a story) or by telling them about a new experience.

TRIGGERING STORIES

Nothing beats first-hand experience. So if you want to influence a decision-maker, help create situations where they experience something new and remarkable, which will prompt them to tell themselves a story about what happened. I call this story triggering. Here’s one example.

A US manufacturer was being squeezed by imports, particularly from Japan. When management investigated, they discovered that a typical Japanese factory could turn out about 40 per cent more products per employee than their own firm. Management made several attempts to persuade their factory workers that the firm needed to lift its game or it would keep losing business to its Japanese competitors. But the workers didn’t believe them. They thought that

the managers were not really interested in the company’s viability, only in creating bigger bonuses for themselves. Besides, they felt they were already working as hard as was humanly possible.

To break the impasse, management selected 10 influential workers and flew them to Japan so they could visit a typical factory there and see the difference in productivity for themselves. Touring the factory one afternoon, the US employees saw that their Japanese counterparts were indeed working faster and more efficiently, but they dismissed this as a stunt—just the Japanese workers putting on an act for the visitors. The American workers were finally convinced when, late one night, they made an unannounced visit to the factory. To their surprise, the night shift appeared to be working even harder than the day shift had.18

A new story had just been triggered for these workers—a story they would carry back to the United States and share with their colleagues, and which would influence future decision-making.

We’ll revisit story triggering in Chapter 4.

TELLING STORIES

If the decision-maker can’t have the experience themselves, then the next-best thing is for them to hear the story of what happened. Don’t underestimate the value of this. Research performed at Princeton University showed the profound impact that telling a story can have.19

In 2010, neuroscientists Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson conducted a series of experiments which revealed that when someone hears a story, their brain lights up in the same way as the speaker’s brain when they are telling the story. In the researchers’ words: ‘Speaker and listener brain activity exhibit widespread coupling during communication’.20

The experiments began with a young woman telling an unrehearsed story about her high school prom while hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine that recorded

her brain activity; the woman’s story was also recorded. The researchers then asked 12 test subjects to listen to the recorded story while their own brain activity was monitored. The first thing the researchers noticed was that the brain activity of the storyteller matched the brain activity of the listeners. As you would expect, there was generally a small time lag in brainwave synchronisation as the listener took in the storyteller’s words and comprehended the story. But remarkably, the researchers found that the brain activity of the listener often anticipated that of the storyteller at a particular point in the story. The listener was predicting what was coming next. And here’s the kicker: the subjects who did more predicting did better at the comprehension test they took after hearing the story. Really engaging stories, ones where the listener is trying to predict what happens next, have the greatest impact. Or to put it another way, they are the most meaningful.

Now it’s rare that by telling just one story you will influence someone’s mind. This is partly because we are hardwired to be cautious of new things, in case they pose a threat to us. It’s an instinct that has served our species well. As we evolved, we learned that if a new person, animal or plant turned up, there was a chance it could kill us. So we approached the newcomer with caution—it was an effective survival strategy.21 In business, new things can include ideas, approaches, techniques, products and services. When we first come across these, our gut still tells us, ‘Watch out’. Fortunately, it turns out that the more we hear about something, the more we accept it, or even like it. The renowned psychologist Robert Zajonc called this the mere exposure effect.22 This is why it can be a good strategy to tell a series of stories that illustrate why a new thing is valuable.

My business partner Mark Schenk did this when he was the knowledge manager of an Australian defence-related engineering firm. He wanted to get support from the CEO to expand a new initiative called ‘communities of practice’, which involved bringing together like-minded people in the firm on a regular basis to learn

from each other. Mark’s strategy was simple: each time he bumped into the CEO, he told the man a new story about how one of the firm’s communities of practice was making a difference. The first time Mark tried this, the CEO listened to the story but gave no indication that he was supportive of the idea. The second story Mark told elicited a similar reaction. In their third encounter, Mark told the CEO a story about how the Department of Defence had asked their firm if it had an estimate of how many Defence personnel were using a particular engineering software application. As it happened, the firm had established a community of practice around this topic and it was able to give the department a pretty accurate answer— within a couple of days. The CEO was amazed: ‘You mean we can answer a question about the Defence Department faster than they can? Tell me more about these communities of practice Mark’.

SHARING LESSONS

Work can move at such a hectic pace that we often don’t get the time to reflect on important projects that we’ve completed. But valuable lessons can be learned through reflection, and telling stories about what happened can help us to do this.

A team I worked with had toiled on a particular project for two years, and when it was finished they decided to devote half a day to finding out what lessons they’d learned from it. A senior manager in the team came up to me before the session and boldly told me that there weren’t any lessons to be learned from the experience—he would soon think differently. As the project team wandered into the meeting room, they saw a 1-metre-tall scroll of paper covering one wall, with a timeline on it. I asked the team members to think of significant moments in the life of the project, write them on post-it notes and place the notes on the timeline. About 30 significant moments were posted, such as ‘New CIO’, ‘New Version of Software Released’ and ‘Office Move’.

I pointed to the first one, ‘Got Project Funding’, and asked the team, ‘So tell me about how you got your funding. What happened there?’ One of the old hands kicked things off by describing how, before the project had been officially green-lighted, they’d had to get money from multiple buckets. As a result, in the early days of the project, they didn’t have a project sponsor. In a tone of exasperation, the senior manager who’d felt there was nothing to learn then spoke up: ‘It was such a pain. Never let me start a project like that ever again’. Flip-chart marker in hand, I asked whether that was a lesson. Multiple people called out to me: ‘Yes it is.’ ‘Get that one down Shawn.’

We experience a lot in the workplace, but these experiences are mostly forgotten—except for the ones that we turn into stories. Stories give experiences a fighting chance of survival, translating them into narratives which contain the relevant lessons. But here’s the thing: it’s only at the very moment the story is told that the lesson is learned—without the story to give it a context, at best it remains a vague feeling. The leader’s role is vital here. They can help create the conditions for such lessons to emerge, and once they have, they can become stories that can be retold.

Conveying a lesson as a story is particularly effective when the behaviour or attitude you are hoping to impart is complex and can’t be illustrated by something as simple as a flowchart. A good example is company values. A bank we worked with had included ‘integrity’ in its set of corporate values, but what does ‘integrity’ really mean? To explain this, you can’t just list a set of behaviours to follow. (In fact, the bank had tried that and it hadn’t worked.) Instead, you need to provide examples. So our goal was to help the bank find stories that illustrated its values.

I remember one of the stories about integrity came from a young lawyer who’d recently joined the bank. He’d just finished an internal project advising another part of the bank when he realised he’d made a small but significant error. He didn’t think anyone would notice and for a moment he considered just letting it slide.

But then he thought, ‘I don’t want to be that type of sloppy lawyer’. So he went and explained what had happened to his boss, who then informed the internal customer. The error was fixed and the lawyer was praised for his honesty and diligence. That’s integrity.

Some of the best lesson stories concern blunders you made that caused you pain. When you tell such a story, your audience makes a mental note to not repeat your error. Here is an example I sometimes share, usually when I see a customer going down the same fateful path.

Anecdote often works with an executive team to help it create the story of the company strategy. A while back we were set to help a large logistics company with its strategy story. As I was about to get started, I was told that the company’s executive, including the CEO, was too busy to come together and create their story. The client asked whether I could instead interview the executives individually and then craft a story for them to review. I said that wasn’t our process, but the company insisted. (Yes, I know, I should have bailed out then and there.) So I interviewed the executives and crafted a story. It seemed to go well—the people I worked with were enthusiastic and supportive. Then we gathered the executives in a boardroom and I started to tell them the story I’d prepared. All the people I’d interviewed smiled and leaned forward to hear the story. But after I’d spoken just a few sentences, the CEO interrupted me: ‘Excuse me Shawn, but quite frankly I think all stories are lies’. The smiles around the table quickly turned into frowns and the meeting was cut short. The next day I got a call to say that we’d been fired.

When a client asks me to short-cut our strategy story process, saying that their executives are too busy to work out the story themselves, I tell this lesson story. They rarely need any more convincing to involve every single executive in the story-creation process. No-one wants to feel the embarrassment many people felt that day.

As a leader, you should be looking for ways to help lesson stories emerge while at the same time mining your own experiences for those painful moments you don’t want others to struggle through. This will require strength of character and humility, but you will be rewarded by strong new connections.

COUNTERING HALF-TRUTHS AND LIES

Imagine that you’re responsible for communicating your company’s new strategy, and just as you’re about to do so, you hear something worrying on the corporate grapevine. A lot of employees appear to believe the strategy was created by the new CEO going home one night, digging up an old strategy from his previous company, then making copies of it and plastering them across the executive suites of your company’s headquarters. Now, you know this is not how it happened. The executive team actually went through a well-thought-out process to develop the strategy. So your instinct is to refute these claims. You want to set people straight with the facts. This thinking, however, is just leading you into a trap.

To simply deny an untrue story often merely serves to reinforce the misinformation. A much more effective way of countering a misleading story is to tell another story—a better one. I explain how to do this when I discuss how to tackle anti-stories in Chapter 6. For now, though, let’s look at how researchers discovered this enduring feature of stories.

In 1994, Holly Johnson and Colleen Seifert conducted one of the first experiments to show how stories can have a big impact on correcting misinformation.23 Their experiment involved a report into a suspicious fire. Two groups were sent a series of messages simulating how a warehouse fire might be reported in real time. The first group learned that the firefighters had traced the fire to a short circuit next to a closet containing volatile materials such as

oil-based paints and pressurised gas bottles. In a follow-up message, the group was told there had been a mistake: there had not been any volatile materials in the closet and they should just ignore that misinformation. The second group was also told about the short circuit and the closetful of volatile material, and then received a message saying this information was incorrect and should be ignored. But they were also given an alternative explanation for what might have happened. They were told that, in fact, rather than paints and gas bottles, the closet had actually held petrol-soaked rags and empty fuel drums, suggesting that arson might have taken place. This group now had a new story to explain the fire.

Both groups were subsequently questioned about their understanding of what had happened. When the first group was asked ‘Why did the fire spread so quickly?’, their response was that ‘the paints and gas bottles must have exploded and accelerated the fire’. Evidently, despite being told to do so, they hadn’t struck that misinformation from their minds. The second group, however, responded to the question by suggesting arson, having discarded the misinformation and instead embraced the new story about the fuel-soaked rags.

Clearly, the second group, which had heard the plausible story that implied arson, was much less influenced by the original misinformation than the first group, which had simply been told that a mistake had been made. This study demonstrated that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to beat a story with just facts. What you need is a better story.

It’s understandable that stories are so robust and resistant to change. When we hear a story, we take in a complete and internally coherent bundle of information. But if you cut out even one small bit, it’s no longer complete and coherent. Without a replacement story at hand, we revert to the original version—even when, as rational decision-makers, we know that part of the story we are relying on to make decisions is untrue.24

I’ve felt the effects of clinging onto a story despite knowing an important part of it was false. It happened on my first visit to Washington, DC. I was staying at the Willard Hotel, a grand and historic place at the top of Pennsylvania Avenue. My friend and fellow story practitioner Paul Costello swung by to guide me around the monuments of the National Mall, but we started our tour in the lobby of the Willard. ‘Back in the 1870s,’ Paul began, ‘the White House wasn’t the most comfortable place for President Ulysses S. Grant to relax, so he would often unwind with a whiskey and a cigar in the lobby of the Willard Hotel. Word soon got around that the President could often be found in the hotel’s lobby, and people began to come here to get Grant’s ear or seek favours. After a time, these people became known as lobbyists’.

‘Wow’, I said. ‘What a great way for that word to come about.’ Then Paul said, ‘It’s just a myth. The term originated from the gatherings of members and peers in the lobbies of the British

Houses of Parliament’.

It’s such a good story, though. I can picture President Grant with his hand wrapped around a cut-glass tumbler, smoke billowing from his cigar as he sits in a corner of the Willard’s lobby surrounded by a gaggle of people. I have to fight hard to include in its retelling that this story is a myth.

Leaders will always be confronted with misinformation, half-truths, even barefaced lies. Sometimes we just need to ignore them. But when we do need to counter misinformation, stories are our most powerful ally.

* * *

We have just seen six applications of storytelling in a business setting. Quite frankly, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m constantly impressed at how leaders use stories to achieve business outcomes. In Part 2 of this book, you will learn how a hotel chain helped its sales force illustrate its brand with stories, how a retail

store prepared its workers with stories before its grand opening, and most importantly, the many and varied ways in which leaders can find and tell stories to engage and inspire the people they work with. But before we jump into that detail, let’s get a good understanding of the nature of stories and how our storytelling ability evolved.