Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

Annette Simmons: Well, it's been an interesting journey. My first book was about turf wars, territorial games where people get their egos involved and justify to themselves things like withholding information or even sometimes giving a little false lead to someone to point them in the wrong direction, and as I began to try to get these people to talk to each other, I mean, after all they worked for the same company except for they felt like they were on different teams, I began to realize that they needed to walk a mile in the other person's shoes, you know, if you could just get the marketing people to go and understand what it was like to design this software that they thought, you know, should be available in 24 hours, they would be more circumspect when they promised, and sometimes, of course, overpromised. Now you couldn't give them the experience because marketing people don't design software, but if you could tell a story that viscerally communicated what they just did when they overpromised, it was so powerful that they began to realize the impact of their actions in a way that the normal business communication, which is, "We can't do this, you're being unreasonable, well, blah, blah, blah," wasn't getting through. And everyone knows that experience is the best teacher and ideally if we could give people the experiences of the different things we're trying to communicate, even in a new product that would be best, but second best is story, because story is actually a proxy for personal experience.

Rachel Salaman: In what kind of situations can stories be used?

Annette Simmons: We're looking at it – a lot of people are buying this book thinking, you know, where am I going to use story?" And what I want people to understand is you're actually already using story all the time. If you're breathing, you're telling stories; you're just not paying attention to the stories you're telling. When you're upset, you turn to someone and say, "You will not believe what just happened to me," and then you tell a narration of those events. That's a situation where you're using story as therapy to try to, you know, to have someone understand and witness, you know, how hard your life is. But if you use that kind of story in a business situation, would you end up as having an unintentional negative impact? So I want people to pay attention to the stories they're telling their business associates, so that they are having the impact they want. Any communication situation can be enhanced by a story and I can promise you no-one is going to complain that you delete a PowerPoint slide and add a story.

Rachel Salaman: Can't you use too many stories sometimes?

Annette Simmons: Too many stories is a function of too much ego, and not paying attention to your audience. If you get a reputation as a bore, that is not because you're telling too many stories, it's 'cause you're telling stories that are boring or you're telling long stories, so you're making people feel impatient, and making people feel like they're not a part of the conversation. Storytelling is really a misnomer, story listening is 50% of what you're doing when you decide to start to use story. You might tell a story just to get it started, but let's just say you've met a client for the first time, and this actually happens a lot, you tell a story about your last airline disaster and what do they do? Immediately, they tell the story of the last airline disaster they had, but you can turn that around. You can start to tell stories that are more applicable to the product and you can, say, tell a story about the first day that you worked with that company, and then this person will probably tell you a story back, and so if you are maintaining reciprocity where you listen to as many stories as you tell, you're not going to be in danger of telling too many stories.

Rachel Salaman: Well, what does make a good storyteller?

Annette Simmons: What makes a good storyteller is very similar to what makes a good human being. Basically, you're authentic. One of the things that makes a bad storyteller is someone who is trying to manipulate someone, and a lot of people when they hear the word 'storytelling' immediately think, you know, that people are stretching the truth or tall tales or lying, basically. And authenticity is number one in terms of telling a story, so I always want to say that first, but in terms of the craft, the secret of good storytelling is that you pay attention to the fact that what you're creating is an experience. Now experience is a function of your five senses: what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch, and a good storyteller stimulates the senses in a way that someone mentally sees, hear, smells, tastes and touches what it is that you're explaining.

Rachel Salaman: And in your book, you identify six different story structures, before we go into them, why is it useful to differentiate between story types like this?

Annette Simmons: Well, the most important thing, I think, in the book is that I make a distinction between objective thinking and subjective thinking, and objective thinking is very important, and it was designed to keep emotions out of decision making. It was designed to keep us rational, but our business situations are usually involving human beings and as much human beings would like to think themselves rational, we are still emotional animals and we are driven by what we desire, and by what we fear, and so you can take objective rational information and you can make it mean different things based on the story, so let's just look at the New Orleans levy, the Katrina disaster. There are people telling many different stories about what happened that will stimulate different emotions and when you stimulate different emotions, you're going to stimulate different actions, because that's what emotion is, emotion – to move. The reason that I wanted to have six stories is that – not that there are six because story is definitely subjective, so there could be, like, only one, kind of, story or there could be a 101 different kinds of stories. I named these six because I want to give people the opportunity to pay attention to the places where story does the most benefit.

Rachel Salaman: Well, the first of your story structures is "Who I am" stories. What do you mean by this?

Annette Simmons: When you walk into a situation, we've been so over trained to start with the benefits and what – at least in America, we call the WIIFM, "What's in it for me?" you know, thinking about your customer and what they're going to get out of it, that we forget that we are the vehicle, we are the medium of the communication. And so people will make judgments about whatever information we deliver based on who they think we are, what kind of person they think we are. And if they think that we are a good person, and that we are there for the right reasons, then they listen to what we have to say, but frankly, most people you approach, particularly if you're in sales, even with internally in your own company, when you go to another department and you've got to ask for a favor or you have to tell them that something's going to change, they have an opinion about who you are that doesn't probably match your opinion about who you are. You think you're a good person here to help. They think that you're a pain in the neck who, you know, must have screwed up something in your department so now you're going to pass it over to their department. As long as they believe that, there is only a fragile, if any, bridge between you and them, over which you can deliver your information. When you accurately convey to them who you are, for instance, I've found myself in consulting situations where I walk in, they look at me, they think, oh, great, here's a consultant trying to sell books, and get more consulting gigs, but that's not who I am. And so I began with just a little story about how my father was a social worker and my mother was a schoolteacher and that dad wanted me to live a life of service, but he also wanted me to be my own boss, and so he told me I could be a doctor or a lawyer or an architect, any one my choice. He felt that was rather broadminded of him. Ultimately, I ended up going to Australia instead of telling my daddy I didn't want to go to law school, so that I could get out of going to law school. Now, that "Who I am" story may seem to have nothing to do with, for instance, I'm about to train people in a financial – the financial industry, right now, I'm doing a whole lot of work with all the accounting firms and financial firms. It may seem to have nothing to do with it, but yet it gives them some insight into who I am, and not incidentally demonstrates I did not grow up rich. I think that's, you know, for a lot of people a point in my favor. My dad was a social worker and teacher. They make some assumptions about that. The other thing is that it demonstrates that I could be rather foolish, and I think moving to Australia was a bit of an overkill to try to get out of going to law school.

Counterintuitively, when you display a flaw, when you actually tell somebody about something you screwed up, you will increase trust out of proportion to what you might think if you were using your objective rational brain. It just doesn't make sense that you tell somebody something you screwed up and all of a sudden they trust you more. But emotionally what happens is, number one, you've trusted them first, by sharing a flaw of yours and number two, you are now more real to them. People make a mistake of trying to come across as professional and they end up coming across as cold, because they're just a little too perfect and so this "Who I am" story allows you to become three dimensional, even four dimensional, whereas when you walk in through the door and immediately start pounding them with the attributes of, you know, what your idea is, you can actually build up resistance.

Rachel Salaman: It sounds like this type of story is good for introductions, when you're meeting people for the first time, is that right?

Annette Simmons: You would think, and definitely it's good for meeting people for the first time, but I have worked with, to give a specific example, one law firm I worked with, these people had been partners with each other for 30 years, and I had them tell "Who I am" stories and they learned things about each other that they had never ever even dreamed were true, because their relationships had been, particularly, you know, you think about it from, you know, the 60s, well, the 70s, 80s, 90s, I mean, that's the bulk of their relationship. They were primarily men, except for the new Lawyers, and when these men shared "Who I am, why I'm here," story, it broke apart the walls that had been built up between them over 30 years of differences of opinion. That "Who I am" story completely reframed their relationship, and allowed them to, kind of, start again.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned, briefly, the second story structure there, the "Why I am here" story. Can you explain that type?

Annette Simmons: That's very similar to the "Who I am" story because it targets the same issue, which is that when you are asking someone to give you money or to change their behavior or to listen to you, if you're trying to get – you're trying to influence them, they will naturally assume you have an agenda that benefits you. So that is kind of a discrediting assumption when they think that, you know, you've got – there must be something in it for you, or etc. When you tell the "Why I'm here" story, you're able to supplant, you're able to replace this suspicion that you've got some, sort of, agenda with the truth, which ideally is that you're here for a really good reason, and again, like I said, that you're a good person.

Rachel Salaman: Well, moving on to the third now, which is "Teaching stories." Why do people need to know about this type of story?

Annette Simmons: When you teach someone a skill, it is very useful to be able to demonstrate. For instance, it's hard to teach someone skiing if you can't get them out on the slope. The same is true with many of the things we need to teach people in business. When you use a story that gives them basically a demonstration, it is almost as good, as I said earlier, this personal experience. A lot of teaching, for instance, would be involved in, you know, "Don't do this," or "Don't do that." For instance, if you're in a medical situation, washing hands is something that is obvious that people need to do, and everyone knows they need to do it. My experience with teaching is that it's not just knowing what you should do, it's a function of two things: one is, you've got to remember to do it, and a lot of, particularly leadership task, you actually know what to do; the problem is you don't feel like it. For instance, when I'm, you know, about to crawl across a table and grab someone by the neck, I can't remember which of the quadrants in the Strategic Leadership Model that I'm in, and so teaching stories connect with the experiential part of someone so that they remember, number one, and so that they can begin to manage their emotions in a way that allows them to feel the original intent.

I have been hired by a nursing home. Sunrise Senior Living is the largest provider of elder care in the United States and they're going international, and so, you know, ideally I would like these 19, 20 year old caregivers to learn that their tone of voice is very important. They tend to talk to older people with a, kind of, "Well, how are we today?" Kind of, a sing-song voice, talking to, you know, adults like they're three years old, because they're drooling or they can't speak, and young people are nervous and it's a natural thing to have happen. Yet, if I can successfully tell a story about my grandmother who, when she had a stroke, was so miserable being in a situation where people spoke to her like a child, and she had aphasia and she would cover her eyes to me and I could tell how much it irritated her because my grandmother was used to being treated with dignity, and she finally quit eating because she would rather die than live without dignity. That sort of story ideally will help a young person remember how important their tone of voice is, much more than having them list a set of things they should remember at the end of a course, and of course they'll get on a multiple choice that tone is important, the question is, does it transfer? And teaching stories helps the content transfer into real action.

Rachel Salaman: That's an excellent example. What about "Vision stories" this is the fourth type of story?

Annette Simmons: Vision story is basically a story that creates the emotion 'hope'. Hope is in short supply these days. We are inundated with lots of fear stories. We're inundated with more information than we can possibly take action on, and we're frustrated. We're tired. We have too much to do and there's a long list of things that we haven't done today and we feel guilty about it. In that situation, the frustration of having to soldier on, or worse, finding out that everything you did just got lost, let's just say, on a computer or that your plant is closing, those frustrations are enough to cause someone to just quit. At the very least, what they do in real life is they cause cynicism and apathy, which degrades someone's quality of work. If you can create a vision that is compelling enough so that people understand why we are enduring these frustrations because of a future that is worth the effort, it transforms meaningless frustration, which is pretty much unbearable, into meaningful work, and that's what a vision story does, is it pulls someone to the future and it reframes the present as worthwhile.

Rachel Salaman: Can you give an example of that type of story?

Annette Simmons: Well, the story that I use on myself, and a lot of times, you know, these stories aren't just to be used on other people. The story you tell yourself about who you are and, kind of, why you're doing what you're doing is more important than the stories you tell other people and people don't pay attention to what story they've been telling themselves. I think too many people say, "Well, I'm just trying to make a living," and that's not a really good vision story. It doesn't create excellent work and it doesn't get you excited in the morning. The first book I wrote about turf war examines a behavior that pretty much looks to be embedded in human nature. Human beings are territorial. They will fight over things that are of value, and here I am trying to write a book to get them to, you know, share stuff, share information. And so the vision story I tell myself is that if human beings developed territorial behaviors, they did it because of the survival benefit, and if we are to survive as a species, then we are going to have to develop new behaviors that are more collaborative. If we don't, we're going to destroy our environment, or we're going to blow ourselves up in war, so I think if our species could develop an opposing sum, that surely we can develop new behaviors. Now I understand that in my lifetime, and I'm 46 now, it probably won't be clear by the time I die whether we're going to survive as a species or not, and it really doesn't matter to me, because every morning I wake up, it's enough to me to know which team I'm on. And that's my vision story, about who I am, why I'm here, you know, what my vision is, what team I'm on, so if I'm in an airport and my plane has been canceled for the third time and I really feel motivated to display behaviors that would not be collaborative, I can remember my vision story and it helps me reframe the situation and decide differently.

Rachel Salaman: Well, moving on to the next type, "Values in actions" stories. When would you tell this type of story?

Annette Simmons: Well, people throw the word 'value' around so often that, you know, "We're a values driven organization, and we value integrity here, we value respect and we value excellence," and frankly, that's not enough because the word – any value word is interpretative. Integrity, for instance, it depends on what the situation is as to what integrity means. It also depends on the personality, for instance, my father, having been, you know, an employee of the Federal Government and also in the Army Reserve, he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel, his definition of integrity is that when his boss told him to do something, he did it. No questions asked. That's integrity. For me, integrity means that if my client asked me to do something, and I don't think it's the right thing, I have to resign the client, and it doesn't matter how much cash is involved. You can't pass on the value unless you tell a story that gives an example of what it means to you, and you also can cause problems within your organization if you continue to throw these words around, without a definition and the only kind of a definition that works is the story. Integrity is particularly important in terms of telling a story in action because integrity happens when no-one is looking. Integrity is when you do the right thing and no-one would ever know whether you did or not. Doing the right thing when there are witnesses is called 'covering your ass'. That's not integrity. Integrity is you could have gotten by with doing the wrong thing, but you did the right thing anyway, and so the reason you have to tell these stories is that no-one else would know otherwise, and so if we had the younger generation coming through our organizations, those people who want to keep integrity alive in our organizations must take the time to share these stories with younger people so that we keep integrity alive.

Rachel Salaman: The final type of story is "I know what you're thinking stories." Can you just explain what these stories are like, and how are they appropriate in a business context?

Annette Simmons: In a business context, we're constantly bargaining back and forth. We're constantly asking for more and people are trying to give us less. That's a complete oversimplification but, you know, that's, kind of, what business is. Now, in that sort of situation, this person may have an objection that you already anticipate. If you can validate that objection in a story and then show how, in this situation, it's not applicable, what you are able to do is preempt the bargaining A versus B back and forth that can cost you in terms of, you know, what it is that you're putting on the table. So you validate their concern and then you turn it around in a way that demonstrates that in this situation, it's not applicable. It's a very, very sweet maneuver that shows respect for their point of view and also overcomes their objection before they even have a chance to voice it.

Rachel Salaman: Well, that's an excellent taster of some of the ideas in your book. What tips do you have for people who are not used to telling stories, but now would like to use them more?

Annette Simmons: The main reason we don't tell stories in business is because we were so trained to be objective and rational that stories don't fit the criteria we expect in a professional, business presentation. What I suggest people do is not to replace their objective criteria, but simply to add an insert for experiential examples, which are otherwise known as story. So when you insert an experiential example into your presentation, you know, whatever you need to do, every three PowerPoint, put the slide you're going to tell a story, or you decide a situation where you think a story is necessary, where you definitely want to insert emotion, and by the way, you're not actually inserting emotion, you're just acknowledging the emotion that's already going to be in any decision anybody makes anyway. Look for that situation and then decide the point that you want to make, look for an example. In the book there's four places to look for the example. We don't have time to go into it here, and then practice that story with someone who is a friendly listener. Do not go to someone who's going to start giving you a critique because that will kill a baby story. Trust yourself much more than someone else 'cause you're the one who knows the situation and it's got to be authentically from you, so you really don't want anybody else's words in there. Make sure that you have enough details so that people see, hear, smell, taste and touch. At least touch on all those five sensory stimulations so that you are stimulating in their imagination a real situation, and finally, the most important thing is never tell a story that's longer than three minutes. That way, if you screw it up, it's going to be over soon. Know that no matter what stories you tell, this is not a perfect medium, you're dealing with people's emotions and the complexity of human behaviors is far too complex to have any, sort of, guaranteed 100%, it's going to work every time, return. I tell people to expect story to work about 50 to 70% of the time. Any smart person understands; anybody who's done the Stock Market understands that with that kind of risk, what you do is you diversify. You make sure you have two or three stories for any really important point you want to make, and that whole idea of the three minute story keeps you safe. It keeps you safe from being a bore. It keeps you focused so that your stories are tight, and delivered with intention. Again, you asked the question earlier, you know, what about when somebody gets a reputation for telling too many stories? That's really someone who tells stories that are too long, or too boring. So the three minute story is the final, for me, advice in the time we have available to us in this context. When they do that, and practice, they'll get better.

Rachel Salaman: Annette Simmons, thank you very much for joining us.

Annette Simmons: You're very welcome.

Rachel Salaman: You can find out more about Annette and her work at her website, www.groupprocessconsulting.com.

I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.