From beginning of time, stories have been the primary means of teaching, learning, and persuasion.
It’s been said that stories were crucial to our development as people— more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on. Stories told us what to hang on to.
Humans are a pattern-seeking, storytelling species. We are addicted to stories. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night telling itself stories.
The best journalism is about storytelling. So is the best teaching, and the most effective learning.
As C. S. Lewis said, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
All of us are reaching for happy endings. Our lives are about creating stories worth telling. Good stories are invitations into something bigger than ourselves. The purpose of a good storyteller is not to tell people how to think, but to give them questions to think about. And a dose of inspiration to do better and be better.
Jim Kouzes, coauthor of the classic bestseller The Leadership Challenge, backs up his opinions with decades of research. So his views on storytelling are well worth a good listen.
Rodger Dean Duncan: Most good leaders seem to be good storytellers. Can you share a story that illustrates the value of telling stories?
Jim Kouzes: Stories are a powerful tool for teaching people about what’s important and what’s not, what works and what doesn’t, what is and what could be. Through stories, leaders pass on lessons about shared values and get others to work together.
When he was program director of knowledge management for the World Bank, management author Steve Denning learned firsthand how stories can change the course of an organization. After trying all the more traditional ways of getting people to change their behavior, Steve found that simple stories were the most effective means of communicating the essential messages within the organization.
“Nothing else worked,” Steve said. “Charts left listeners bemused. Prose remained unread. Dialogue was just too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group of managers or frontline staff in a large organization to get enthusiastic about a major change, I found that storytelling was the only thing that worked.”
Jim Kouzes
Duncan: How does storytelling affect the “stickiness” of information—in other words, making it memorable?
Kouzes: In a business climate obsessed with PowerPoint presentations, complex graphs and charts, and lengthy reports, storytelling may seem to some like a soft way of getting hard stuff done. It’s anything but that. Steve’s experience with storytelling is, in fact, supported by the data.
Research shows that when leaders want to communicate standards, stories are a much more effective means of communication than are corporate policy statements, data about performance, and even a story plus the data. Information is more quickly and accurately remembered when it is first presented in the form of an example or story.
Duncan: You’re suggesting that a relevant and well-told story is preferable to charts and graphs?
Kouzes: That’s certainly been Phillip Kane’s experience. Storytelling has been a part of his life since he was a kid. His dad was a great storyteller, and he used stories especially effectively to teach lessons. Phillip has carried the family tradition into his business life at Goodyear.
When Phillip was named to head up a large team with previously poor engagement scores for communication, he needed to find a way to be more proactive about connecting with employees. So he began writing to the team every Friday, telling them stories in “The Week,” essentially a newsletter in the form of stories with life lessons in them. He carried the practice with him when he was appointed president of Wingfoot Commercial Tire Systems, a 2,500-person wholly owned subsidiary of Goodyear.
Storytelling, Phillip says, accomplishes two things. It offers a framework for relating to the message—something that people encounter in their own lives that can bridge to the main point. It also offers him the chance to lead through an example rather than to come across simply as preaching.
Duncan: Any other benefits?
Kouzes: Telling stories forces you to pay close attention to what your constituents are doing. Peers generally make better role models for what to do at work than famous people or ones several levels up in the hierarchy. When others hear or read a story about someone with whom they can identify, they are much more likely to see themselves doing the same thing. People seldom tire of hearing stories about themselves and the people they know. These stories get repeated, and the lessons of the stories get spread far and wide.
Stories by their nature are public forms of communication.
Storytelling is how people pass along lessons from generation to generation, culture to culture. Stories aren’t meant to be secret; they’re meant to be told.
Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen argues that “the stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred.”
