Some leaders are natural storytellers, disposed to turn every triumph, every defeat, and every challenge into a drama. If they are really good, they will spin each new drama out as the latest installment of a continuing saga of the organization—its mission, strategy, values, and people. For others, who are familiar with and expert at analytical thinking, making the switch to narrative mode can be uncomfortable, difficult, and puzzling. It follows entirely different rules, requires passion, and draws on self-knowledge. Fortunately, help is easily available for the narratively-challenged, or for those whose yarn-spinning apparatus needs a little tuning up.
A good place to start is with Stephen Denning—especially for analytically-minded leaders. Denning helps get the systematic mind comfortable with narrative by methodically setting out the multiple purposes for which storytelling is effective. In his 2004 Harvard Business Review article, “Telling Tales”, he distinguishes seven different purposes: Sparking action; communicating who you are; transmitting values; fostering collaboration; taming the grapevine; sharing knowledge; and leading people into the future. He suggests that the ability to tell the right story at the right time is becoming an essential leadership skill.
Given our purpose of leading change, two of these seven are relevant. The “Sparking Action” or “springboard” type of narrative helps imagine possible futures by showing an example of a change that has already happened. These are similar to the “strategic stories” described by Janis Forman in “When Stories Create an Organization”, which depict an organization’s future, enabling listeners to experience the future as real. In Forman’s version, a story is an argument for a particular vision of an organization. That argument transports the listeners by ordering the sequence of events, bestowing them with an air of inevitability.
Denning says that “springboard stories”, with their goal of motivating action, should be minimalist in their use of detail, so as not to distract from the message. Minimalism also allows listeners to relate the story to their own circumstances. The other form of narrative especially relevant to change is the “Leading people into the future” type. This form—which is even more potent, but also requires greater verbal skills—shows how to get to a destination, evoking a future while refraining from making explicit too many precise details that could easily turn out to be mistaken.
The Tale Wags the Dog
Why should narratives be such a potent means of setting off change? Without a doubt, analysis offers the considerable virtues of objectivity and impersonality. When leaders are trying to dislodge people from their perches and move them into more productive places and behaviors, objectivity and impersonality simply are not the most appropriate virtues. Purely rational arguments often lack the power to fill people with the energy and enthusiasm needed to take (and sustain) action. The information presented by a primarily rational appeal is worth little if it cannot engage attention and stir enthusiasm.
As Bill Birchard said in “Once Upon a Time”, logical argumentation tries to “push” people along, whereas story-telling attempts to “pull” or coax listeners along. Pushing can cause people to stumble rather than to take a leap forward. When we’re glued to the existing order by a range of commitments, and the future appears dim and probably dangerous, we need to be seduced to step closer to the new reality. One way that stories do this is by providing context and meaning, by making sense of what’s happening. As Karl Weick has argued, organizations are sensemaking organisms. Therefore, you might as well work with their determination to make sense, by developing rapport between yourself and your listeners in a way that strengthens the corporate culture. This helps explain Scott Armstrong’s finding that scenarios are an effective tool for encouraging acceptance of forecasts.
Donald Sull detailed the obstacle to organizational change presented by “reinforcing commitments” in his book, Revival of the Fittest and in his HBR article “Managing by Commitments.” His solution to reinforcing commitments was to establish countervailing “transforming commitments”, which should be clear, credible, and courageous. According to Sull, successful transformations unfold in three steps: 1. Select and anchor. 2. Secure the anchor. 3. Align the organization. This 3-step process maps well to both of the frameworks we saw from Howard Gardner and John Kotter.
Stories work, in part, by making our new commitments more vivid, more real, more compelling. They strengthen the power of the transforming commitments, and make reinforcing commitments fade out by comparison. Moving from Sull’s language of commitments to the cognitive psychologists’ notion of “cognitive frames”, we can see a closely related reason why stories work. Narrative reframes the current situation. Most of the doctors in Deutschman’s example of the heart patients, wielded facts to incite the fear of dying, hoping to push their patients into a healthier lifestyle. Dean Ornish, by contrast, reframed the issue to inspire them with the “joy of living.” If the cognitive psychologists are right that our minds rely on frames, not facts, stories should be effective at inspiring and guiding change.
Psychologist Howard Gardner stresses that reframing is difficult, especially when addressing a diverse or heterogeneous audience. He agrees with Denning’s advice for springboard stories when he adds that, “the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of personal experience.”
The Structure of Persuasion
Management writers have explained the ability of metaphors and analogies to improve understanding, and encourage acceptance, of new ways of doing things. Metaphors and analogies are not themselves full stories, but they do evoke memories of narratives and so carry some of their emotive force. Full-blown stories have to work harder by providing not simply a rich enough structure, but the right kind of structure. You can find an excellent manual for structuring stories in a book by screenwriting coach Robert McKee: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. I will merely provide a spoiler here.
The most compelling stories are typically built around an archetypal form, some of which we instantly recognize from Greek myths. To some degree, experts differ on how many archetypal forms exist. Kenneth and Mary Gergen place stories into three groups: stability narrative, in which the protagonist remains unchanged with respect to the goal; progressive narrative, in which advancement to the goal occurs; and regressive narrative, in which the protagonist ends up further from his goal at the conclusion.
Northrup Frye classifies stories into myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic. Still another source claims that only three stories have been proven to engage an audience. These stories, inherited from classical tradition, he calls “Hubris”; “Discardation” – the story of something that is lost, or thrown away or stolen, including the Romance genre; and “New Order”.
An effective story integrates a range of elements: Agents, predicament, intentions, actions, objects, causality, context, and surprises. Stories should also be plausible, consistent, economical, and unique. The key elements of a classic story (according to Herminia Ibarra and Kent Lineback) are: a protagonist the listener cares about; a catalyst compelling the protagonist to take action; trials and tribulations; a turning point; and a resolution.
McKee advises that the way to discover a story is to ask a few key questions: What does my protagonist want in order to restore balance in his or her life? What is keeping my protagonist from achieving his or her desire? How would my protagonist decide to act in order to achieve his or her desire in the face of these antagonistic forces? Finally, the storyteller needs to take a step back and ask: Do I believe this? Is it an honest telling?
A final piece of narrative advice: McKee says that a leader should bring the problems to the foreground, emphasizing the challenges and antagonists, then show how you have or will overcome them. Stories revolve around a disruption in the balance of life and follow the protagonist’s struggles with harsh reality and antagonists to restore balance. To create effective stories, executives need both to understand the company’s past and to project the future by creating scenarios of possible future events. Denning agrees, warning us to “Beware the positive story!”.