FEW THINGS CONNECT LIKE A STORY
Not long ago I gathered with my mother’s family to celebrate a seventieth birthday. With all her siblings present, the stories poured out one after the other. I begged my uncle to tell me again about the time that he and my granddad were trimming a backyard tree, and he obliged. The story goes like this:
Years ago my uncle and his dad (my granddad) decided it was time to prune back some limbs that were growing too close to the house. My granddad, who was 80 years old at the time, climbed a tall ladder that he had leaned against a sturdy limb and began trimming with a handsaw. My uncle was collecting the limbs as they fell when all of a sudden the ladder, the saw, a large limb, and my granddad came crashing to the potato patch below. My granddad had mistakenly sawed off the limb that the ladder was resting on.
“Dad, are you all right?” my uncle asked frantically.
“No, I’m not all right,” my granddad replied in his Newfoundland brogue, “I ruined me potatoes, me poor potatoes.”
Around the table, everyone laughed. Then my uncle paused a moment, and said, “I know how much you all love Dad, and he knows it too. He’s been lonely since Mom died, but all of your calls and visits have really helped. I’m so grateful. Thank you.”
It was an accident that my granddad sawed off the wrong limb and fell into his potatoes, but it’s no accident that a story triggered a strong sense of connection. The images and memories brought up by the story opened up a window for sharing that my uncle climbed through. A simple story led to a meaningful moment of connection.
Storytelling—the final part of your communicator’s toolkit—is a powerful higher-order communication skill that grabs attention and can bring people together. Unfortunately, our verbal storytelling skills are in peril from twin threats, just when it’s harder than ever to get people’s attention.
On one hand, verbal storytelling is being elbowed aside by stripped-down messages, information, and data. The tendency in the digital age to cut messages down to their most expedient form sacrifices richer context for pared-down information. It’s faster for me to say that Sarah’s a good colleague than it is to tell you about the time she pulled an all-nighter helping me get ready for a client presentation. It’s quicker for me to tell you what I want than it is for me to explain what I want, why I want it, and how that relates to you.
But in communication, as we’ve seen, what’s fast and expedient for me often comes at the cost of your understanding. You’ll know more about Sarah (and about me) if I take the time to paint the picture instead of just giving you the data. That’s the difference between showing and telling, between communicating and just talking.
At the same time, verbal storytelling is also increasingly marginalized as the “old” way of telling a story—face-to-face—has faded, and mediated storytelling through video and image-sharing sites has exploded.
There have never been more ways to digitally tell our stories. We can blog, shoot a video and upload it to Facebook or YouTube, or tell a story through images on social media sites. And we do these things in staggering numbers—over a billion people on Facebook and 72 hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube—which highlights our propensity as a storytelling, connecting species.1 The proliferation of devices that record images and platforms that share stories are two very noteworthy facets of the communication revolution. Our devices have changed the ways we connect, share, and remember things, and they have even—when used in popular uprisings like the Arab Spring—changed the course of history.
We shouldn’t turn our back on any communication innovation that allows us to connect and share with others. But let’s not entirely displace our oral storytelling tradition with YouTube videos and Pinterest accounts on one side and abbreviated e-mails and text messages on the other.
Verbal storytelling is a descriptive, higher-order communication skill, and as such it is prone to degradation from lack of use. I’m not worried that my niece and nephew won’t know how to tell a digital story. They were born into the hyperconnected era, and they are remarkably adept at navigating all things digital. I am, however, concerned that they might not have the same exposure to verbal storytelling that I did growing up in the decades before the digital communication revolution.
The same teenager who can shoot, edit, and post a short film in a matter of hours also needs to be able to tell his best friend about his weekend. It’s nice that people can get a sense for how much I love Hawaii by looking at my photos online, but I should also be able to communicate how Hawaii makes me feel through verbal stories of my time there. In a job interview, a prospective employee needs to be able to offer relevant and compelling narrative accounts of past achievements, not just hand the interviewer a current résumé. And employees need more than facts alone to be reassured that the sweeping structural changes you are recommending are worth implementing; they need to understand the grand narrative of the initiative.
A couple years ago, I was chatting with my six-year-old niece, Iris, via Skype, and I could see she was rapidly losing interest in our conversation. My questions about her day were met with flat, one-word answers. She started to fidget, looking to her mother for permission to end the conversation. Knowing that I was losing her attention, I reached into my toolkit and pulled out old faithful—a story.
I improvised a tale about going to see a doctor because my leg hurt. I gave vivid details about the pain, and I told Iris about the eccentric doctor who treated me (he dressed in a top hat and started all his sentences by saying “My good man”). After examining my leg thoroughly, he pulled out a pad, wrote a prescription, and handed it over to me. I was surprised to see that only two words were written on the prescription: ice cream.
“Why’d he write ‘ice cream’ on the prescription?” Iris asked.
“That’s precisely what I asked the doctor,” I replied, and then paused.
“Well? What’d he say?” she pressed.
I replied that the doctor said, “My good man, ice cream is good for you!”
Iris burst out laughing. The line “ice cream is good for you” would become something that we’d repeat to each other for months. Our faltering conversation was rescued by the irresistible lure of a story.
My niece didn’t love the story because it was about ice cream; she loved it because it was ice cream. Storytelling is like conversational dessert that we can have at any time.
Think about how you loved stories as a child and how you begged your parents to read you one more at bedtime. Do you remember how story time was the best part of elementary school (next to recess)?
Stories aren’t just an entertaining part of our childhood; they’re an inextricable part of our shared human history. Long before texts and tweets, and even before paper and parchment, we told stories to communicate. That’s our heritage.
Stories have survived as a way of passing along knowledge, in part, because they are powerful explanatory tools. Stories generate more interest than “straight” information, and we understand and remember information better when it is presented in narrative form with a clear ending.2 Stories also activate our minds, which increases our conversational engagement.3 And stories simplify abstract or complex matters into something more comprehensible.4 Put these strengths together, and you have a lesson that you learned in kindergarten: people love stories.
I use narrative (stories) all the time in my consulting, especially in organizational change initiatives where uncertainty abounds and people are trying to get their minds around what’s happening. The story of a company transitioning from childhood to adolescence, for example, helps people understand more clearly why their organization is experiencing growing pains. A narrative that traces a company’s history from an idea on the back of a napkin, to a parent’s basement, to an office tower is far more likely to stick in employees’ minds and help establish the context than a list of dates and milestones.
If I tell you that my company values keeping our educational content up to date, you hear what I’m saying. If I tell you about the time I updated my presentation in the parking lot 30 minutes before I was due on stage because I’d just heard about a new study on the radio, you see what I’m saying. People love (and remember) vivid stories, examples, illustrations, and other descriptions of people, places, things, and ideas.5
Watch what happens when stories emerge in your conversations. People can’t help but pay attention. Stories cut through the fog of distraction and grab people’s interest. In the digital age, where it’s easy to send a message, but hard to get anyone to notice, storytelling is an indispensable communication skill.
A motorcycle policeman once crashed into a car I was driving.
I’ll explain this true incident later, but notice what’s already happened: you probably “see” parts of the story in your mind, and you’ve started forming your own narrative. It was raining. It was sunny. It was day. It was night. I was alone. People were with me. It was on the highway. It was on a city street. It was on a country road. The policeman was on a Harley. He was on a Honda. It was Geoff’s fault. It was the lawman’s fault. After only one sentence, your mental storytelling was already off and running.
Stories are so intricately woven into the human fabric that we have a predisposition toward creating them, even when all we have are the barest of details.6 Give humans some information, and we’ll put it together and create a story. We do this all the time. If I notice that Jim doesn’t feel like talking this morning, I’ll take that information, add it to a conversation we had earlier about marriage trouble, and develop a story that he had an argument with his wife. If the boss starts treating me differently, I’ll stay up at night creating stories about what might be happening. If I lose a customer, I form a story to explain why (and probably hang some of the blame on an external excuse to let myself off lightly). If I get a new client, I create a story that highlights what a great salesman I am (making an internal attribution for the success to give myself full credit).
We translate the information we receive about our world and the people in it into story form to make sense of our surroundings. When we communicate with stories, there is less chance of slippage between what we say and what someone hears because people are converting information into stories continuously. Stories are already in the “language” we prefer.
For centuries, teachers have used fables, parables, and other stories to provide a safer way to communicate about touchy topics. Stories can minimize a listener’s reflexive resistance to what we’re saying and can encourage people to draw their own conclusions.
Back to the police officer who crashed into me.
I was turning left into a cemetery as part of a funeral procession when a motorcycle policeman patrolling the line crashed into my driver’s side door. Right after I felt the impact and saw the officer lying on the ground, I jumped out of the car to see if he was hurt. Thankfully, he was a little disoriented but otherwise fine. I helped him up, and we determined that although his motorcycle was largely spared from damage, my driver’s side door had a big dent in it.
Complicating matters, the police officer’s uniform indicated that he was a master accident inspector—that’s what he did for a living—and his initial comments suggested that he might be looking for a way to pin blame for the accident on me.
I ignored his initial comments (using the 60-second rule) and told him how glad I was that he wasn’t hurt. It took a few moments of nonthreatening discussion and some space for the police officer to self-correct, but he eventually took the blame for the accident (he was driving down the center line of the road without his siren on and hit my door while I was turning left; only by driving sideways could I have hit him in this scenario).
Once he admitted that he was at fault, I told him that it was up to him whether or not we called for an accident report. I didn’t imagine that it would be good for a master accident investigator to call in an investigation of himself, so I gave him that choice. All I wanted was to get my dented door fixed. He chose to skip the report, and he paid out of his pocket for the repairs.
Every time I tell this story, it generates a type of discussion that I’d normally be reluctant to wander directly into. It exposes several sensitive, identity-related topics: law and authority, ethical decision making, and responses to stress. Such topics can easily provoke sharp responses, but stories can protect conversations by providing a less threatening way to talk about core beliefs and deeply felt opinions. Some people think I should have forced the policeman to call in the accident for an official police report. Others would have been willing to pay for the door on their own and not force the officer to pay. Some people get mad at the officer for initially blaming me for the wreck.
By talking about how they might have handled the situation differently, people express their beliefs just as clearly as though it was a simple statement of fact. But by communicating through my story, the ground is safer for people to talk about issues that might otherwise be too hot to handle.
Stories are peerless communication tools. They grab people’s attention, help people understand, are more easily remembered, and provide a safer way to talk about sensitive issues. But stories also perform one more vital function.
My friend Bill was fighting cancer, and I took him to several of his medical appointments when he was too sick or fatigued to drive. At one early chemotherapy treatment, Bill explained that he was having difficulty finding an effective antinausea medication. The first two drugs he tried hadn’t worked, so his oncologist prescribed a new one. I immediately asked if there was a fourth pill we could try, in case the third one failed. Both my friend and his oncologist were puzzled, so I explained with a story.
When I went through the army’s Ranger School, it was winter. The Ranger instructors (RIs) called cold-weather gear like gloves, wool hats, and face covers “snivel gear,” since we weak and sniveling Ranger students were not tough enough, according to the RIs, to handle the elements.
Naturally, it took a blizzard before the RIs would let us put on any snivel gear. But even when we were allowed the luxury, there was an ironclad rule among us: no matter how cold it was, you never put on your last piece of snivel gear. One piece was always left unused in your rucksack, because once it was gone, your situation could never improve. And this would be a devastating mental blow to a freezing Ranger student.
The doctor understood right away. “So you want to make sure that the third prescription isn’t the last piece of snivel gear?”
“You got it, Ranger,” I said. With months of chemotherapy remaining, I didn’t want to contemplate that my friend’s nausea might not improve.
The snivel gear story helped the oncologist understand my fears. It also struck a chord with him, because he had been concerned for some time that his patients didn’t fully appreciate how many different options were available for chemotherapy-related nausea. He asked if he could share the story with his patients as a way of encouraging them to speak up if their medications weren’t working (I readily agreed).
Bill eventually found a drug that eliminated most of his nausea, and throughout the process the oncologist—a good sport—eased our minds by repeatedly telling us that we were never going to run out of snivel gear. Sharing that story helped me, my friend, and his oncologist draw a bit closer together, in a way that hours of previous appointments and checkups never did.
The robust power of stories explains why I can send you 10 informational e-mails and we still might feel like strangers, but after we share only one or two stories, we often seem more like friends. And it’s okay that a story might only draw us slightly closer together, because slightly and slowly are how we build strong, enduring relationships.
Stories don’t have to be perfect, brilliant, or even very long. Ministories like nicknames and metaphors can help paint a quick verbal picture and draw people in to what you’re saying.7 Your stories (and ministories) don’t need to be flawlessly scripted. Stories that make a point without rambling and, when possible, involve some sharing are all that you need to harness the power of narrative.
While personal stories are often most effective, don’t hesitate to use secondhand stories, anecdotes, and examples to make your point. If you hear or read a good story on the Internet, on the radio, at work, or wherever, make a note of it and consider how you might use it. Think like a storyteller, gathering stories and looking for opportunities to spread them.
Sharing stories draws people together and facilitates meaningful connections. And thinking like a storyteller shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for you anyway. After all, it runs in our human family.
Storyteller Ron Evans tells about an African village without electricity where people would gather in the evenings and listen to tales from the griot (storyteller).8 When electricity finally came to the village, the tribe bought a television and abandoned the griot to watch TV. But after a few weeks, people started returning to hear the griot once again.
An anthropologist studying the village witnessed this turn of events and asked a villager, “Why do you return to the griot? After all, the television knows many stories and never gets tired.”
The villager replied: “The television knows many stories, but the griot knows me.”
Successful communication in the digital age requires higher- and lower-order communication. It will take effort to maintain our higher-order communication skills in a predominately lower-order environment, but if we allow our higher-order skills to atrophy, the productive and meaningful communication we want will too often elude us.
Let’s embrace new ways to connect while also retaining the timeless ability to tell stories that don’t involve turning on a computer. Let’s introduce ourselves to a new acquaintance without referring someone to our social media page, troubleshoot an interpersonal issue face-to-face instead of through a dozen e-mails, tell a client or boss what we mean without reading from our slides, express heartfelt birthday wishes instead of resorting to a preset Facebook message, and comfort our friends in real time when they need it the most. These higher-order communication skills aren’t outdated; they’re eternal.
No matter how many new devices flood the market, no matter how powerful our computers get, and no matter how automated our environment becomes, our work and our personal lives will always have one constant: people.
We can’t afford to lose our capacity to share things that aren’t measured in bytes, to connect slowly and without devices, to reconcile feuding coworkers as well as spreadsheets, to look into eyes as well as at screens, and to not just “like” people, but to actually like them.
Connectivity is no guarantee of connection, and connection is what we’re really after. The ability to connect with another person is one of the simplest and most powerfully resonant pleasures of life. It’s also the most effective way to get things done. As the griot story shows, personal connections give our life meaning in irreplaceable ways and create enduring bonds at work, in families, in communities, and in our world.
Our primordial urge to connect and our love of communication will pull us onward to our next conversation, and the one after that, and the one after that. It’s up to us to retain the higher-order communication skills we need to make the interactions count.
Good communication = good relationships = good life, at work and at home (and on the moon if humans ever move there). The ways that we communicate—and the ways that we don’t—shape our relationships, and our relationships shape our lives. The most important people in our lives deserve our very best communication.
Two people talking, without devices, distractions, or anything else coming in between, is a vital and cherished part of our past that we need to safeguard for the future.
Your future begins with your next conversation.
Here’s to the life of your higher-order dreams, built one conversation at a time.