My name is George McWilliams, and I was born in 1861 as an enslaved person. I don’t remember much about emancipation, but I do remember hearing the bells ringing, the church bells. And I do remember someone coming in our yard wearing a white vest and telling us that we were free. And I do remember hearing one of my half-sisters say that when the master asked her to come and work in the fields, she said, “Tell Old Bartholomew he should go work his own farm now.”

I grew up very poor. I had a lot of sisters and brothers, but I had this ambition that I was going to get land, and somehow I did. I was able to put together a farm piece by piece, like 50 acres here, 50 acres there. I met my wife, whose name was Mary Harvey, at the Sunday school because there were no schools for us as free people. But on Sunday she would go to the church, and they taught us to read, write, and sing.

So I met my wife there, and we ended up having 15 children. We had 8 girls and 7 boys, and my goal was to leave 100 acres of land to each one of my children. I worked hard. And I did other things. At one point, I had a cotton gin so that we could gin the cotton. I actually made bricks too. We set up this little factory, and we made bricks. And I believed in self-sufficiency, so on this farm there were chickens and ducks, and I planted an orchard.

This rich, first-person tale of a slave’s transition to freedom was told not at a seminar on historical memory, not at a family gathering, but spontaneously at one of our workshops. It emerged from the Grandparent Exercise.

THE GRANDPARENT EXERCISE

It’s odd how some of the most enduring practices arise from the most frustrating circumstances. I created this exercise as a direct response to resistance I encountered during my work with clients at the Brooklyn AIDS Day Program. I was searching for a storytelling practice that would simultaneously break the ice and allow people in the group to get to know one another in a substantive manner. When I invited them to tell first-person stories about their parents, the idea backfired. The patients seethed with anger, pain, and rage. Many group members were gay, had been in trouble with the law, and/or had been or still were drug addicts. As a result, most had no relationship with their parents; many had been thrown out of their homes. Psychiatrist C. G. Jung compared psychotherapy to alchemy, in which one applies heat to transform chemical elements. Too much heat and the compound burns; too little and nothing happens. Since the parent stories were so hot, I turned down the heat.

I asked them to tell a first-person story about a grandparent. This proved highly effective because most people have fond memories of their grandparents. The Grandparent Exercise became a powerful way of locating the personal story within a larger historical context in an intimate and emotional way.

There are two roles that are essential to conducting this exercise:

1.   The facilitator, who explains and leads the exercise

2.   The timekeeper, whose role is not only to keep time but also to support the facilitator in creating the listening space for the grandparent stories to emerge

Here’s how we explain the Grandparent Exercise to participants in our workshops:

In this listening exercise, the group will be giving and receiving the gift of listening to each person, and even when there are obstacles to listening, each group member will bring his or her listening back to the person who is speaking.

You will notice that we haven’t asked you to introduce yourselves. The first thing you do when you meet someone is introduce yourself and tell him or her what your profession or other life role is. Here we purposefully did not ask you to do that, and now we are going to ask you to introduce yourself, but not as yourself. We are going to ask you to introduce yourself as one of your grandparents. And when I say introduce yourself, I mean really become that person, so speak in the first person: “My name is … ”

The facilitator will be attuned to the effect that these instructions have on the listening of individuals in the group. People are probably shifting in their seats and wondering which grandparent they should choose. Very often it happens that people didn’t know their grandparents, and that’s fine. If you have any memory, a photograph, anything at all that someone else said about that grandparent, draw on that image.

When running this group exercise, we refer to the work of anthropologist and filmmaker Barbara Myerhoff, who used the term “re-membering” as a way of ritually including deceased persons into the current time and place.¹ We can see life as a membered club. When people die, they lose their membership. Telling a story about them is a way of bringing them back to life. Re-membering them. This is what we do by listening to and telling stories about our grandparents.

THE GROUND RULES

Our workshop instructions continued:

You will have three minutes to present yourself as your grandparent. Speak in the first person “I” point of view, tell us your name, and somewhere in the course of the story, tell us when you were born and whether you are currently alive or have died. If you have died, please tell us when.

Please remember that this exercise is really about listening. It is not about performance or delivery. It’s about the listening, which is the safe container for your story and which will also shape the story that you tell. You may think that you can prepare for this, but once you start speaking, the listening will take you in directions you cannot predict. In this group, you can speak anything. You will have three minutes each to tell your story. After three minutes, we will ring a bell and your time will be up. Remember, it is the listening that creates the telling.

At this point, participants are reminded to put away any pens or papers they may have. The timekeeper times each participant and rings the bell after three minutes. After each grandparent story is told, the teller is asked to give the story a name, and the facilitator writes the story title and the teller’s name on a flip chart.

The facilitator neither comments on the content of the story nor offers any suggestions for story improvement. The only comment made to the storyteller is a warm, genuine “Thank you.” After each story, the facilitator asks the group, “How was your listening? Were there any obstacles?”

People may respond, “I was thinking about my story,” or “I was thinking about how little I know about my grandparents.”

The facilitator acknowledges these obstacles by responding with, “You are now aware you have an obstacle because you have spoken it. You have acknowledged that it is there. Now let it go, hit the refresh button as you would on a computer, and bring yourself back to be fully present for the next story.”

The facilitator then moves on to the next person.

If some people appear to be distracted, the facilitator may specifically ask them to reflect on their obstacles to listening. If someone—the storyteller or any of the listeners—starts to cry or becomes emotional, that’s fine. There’s no need to comfort or coddle anyone. There’s no limit to how long or how frequent the post-story listening reflections should be. The facilitator’s job is to move the energy in the circle and make certain that everyone in the group understands the rules and feels safe.

After a while, the facilitator may decide to acknowledge the group’s listening and move on to the next story by saying, “Well done with the listening. Who is next?” If a story has been particularly emotional or painful, the facilitator can invite the group to take a collective breath as a way of letting go of the previous story and moving on to the next one. It is also important to acknowledge the group for the level of their listening and share that you think they are doing a good job of listening.

After the last story is told, thank everyone for giving the gift of listening to one another and congratulate participants for being present and bringing powerful listening to the circle.

When we use this exercise with teams, it provides a means of connecting people to a sense of where they come from and simultaneously sharing that bit of background with their teammates. Liberated from the pressure to talk intimately about themselves, which is horribly uncomfortable for some, participants are nonetheless able to share a deeply personal relationship. For a group, the exercise creates a sense of unity in that having grandparents—whether or not one has ever known them—is a universal phenomenon. It naturally stimulates our sense of empathy and understanding.

As Craig Kostelic of Condé Nast told us, “The Grandparent Exercise put me in my grandmother’s shoes, how life was through her eyes, what she thinks her life represented, and the things that she went through. I think we largely look at our grandparents as symbols of something rather than actual people. Talking about her life as if I were her made a huge difference. It humanized her in my eyes.”

In the context of the Narativ method, the Grandparent Exercise demonstrates the following:

•   That there is a reciprocal relationship between listening and telling

•   That listening is a gift

•   That everyone has a story

•   That everyone is equipped to tell a story

•   That basic storytelling principles can be applied by anyone

•   That a story can be constructed with fragments of memory and information

•   And that however much you protest you can’t tell a story, you’ll find it’s a natural ability of your brain!

As we mentioned already, when we conduct the Grandparent Exercise in our workshops for companies, we ask people to introduce themselves as one of their grandparents, and we give them three minutes to do so. The moment we give that instruction, people’s brains start to engage with storytelling. They remember an instant with their grandparent, something that happened that made an impact on them, and then they tell it without any preparation. As they tell their story about their grandparent as their grandparent, people who are listening lean in and give their full attention because their brains are now fully engaged in storytelling.

Think back to the opening story of this chapter: What happened to you when you read it? How did it impact you? What memories came up for you? What parts of your experience were engaged by that story? Did it make you think of your own grandparents? What were their circumstances? How might you tell their story if you were given three minutes to do so?

Now try the Grandparent Exercise in your work environment and experience its impact. The exercise is not simply a warm-up to storytelling. It can be implemented to reach communication goals in and of itself.

Let’s look at a case study in which the Grandparent Exercise was used to powerful effect in bringing a global leadership team together for the first time with the goal of collaboration and connection.

The HR director of a major media entertainment company e-mailed me after seeing my storytelling performance Two Men Talking. She was “compelled” by how my childhood friend and cofounder of Narativ Paul Browde and I listened and told stories to each other onstage. Our program said we ran storytelling workshops for companies. She wanted to meet.

One week later I was in her office facing a giant map of the world dotted with red pushpins on India, Russia, China, South Africa, Israel, Iran, Turkey, Singapore, Greece, and other countries. She told me she was putting together a conference where leaders from these countries, 40 in all, would gather.

Next thing I knew, I was on the phone with a senior vice president at their Paris headquarters. “We’re all about magic,” said he, “and that’s what I want to create.” This conference was a very rare opportunity for managers from around the world to meet one another, in most cases for the first time. He wanted something spectacular that would “break down boundaries among people.” He cautioned that some participants were from countries that had waged wars against each other and whose governments still hated one another. “I have just the thing,” I said, and I told him about the Grandparent Exercise.

He chose Cyprus for the conference, a global midpoint where East meets West. I flew to Paphos and checked into my hotel.

The next morning the senior vice president introduced me as a storytelling guru. One hundred sixty curious faces looked at me. At the midmorning tea, he gave me the thumbs-up. My introduction had been pitch perfect. Everyone had loved my story, even the listening contemplation. While we chatted, hotel staff rapidly arranged the chairs in two large circles, one inside the other, all seats facing the center. Lists were posted assigning people to the inner or outer circle.

When we returned to the room, the noise level rose as people looked at the circles and wondered why they’d been assigned to one or the other. I was fitted with a headset mic, and my voice boomed out across the enormous room.

There was hushed silence as I explained that the outside circle consisted of company “old-timers” who mostly knew one another. The inner circle comprised those who were relatively new. Then I gave the instruction: all those in the inner circle would present themselves as one of their four grandparents in the first person, using the pronoun I. There was a three-minute time limit, and I would ring a bell when the time was up. The only job of the outer circle was to listen openly without criticism or judgment.

There was an audible collective gasp. “Who’s first?” I asked looking around the inner circle.

The first was an Iranian woman who channeled her grandmother, who never went to school, was sold into marriage at the age of 11, was widowed at 16, was sold again into marriage, and had nine children. Midway through the story, she began to sob. The women on either side of her put their arms around her and gave her tissues.

“Your emotions are welcome here,” I reassured her. “There’s no need to fear or judge them. They are part of life, part of telling stories. Emotions are the release valves for stories that are painful and hard to tell,” I explained. “She’s okay,” I said to her coworkers. “There’s no need to take care of her.” When she finished, I thanked her. She wiped the tears from her cheeks.

Next was a woman from Belgium. She told the story of her grandmother, who had scavenged from garbage cans during World War II, doing anything to feed her children. She too cried, and I once again promised that feelings and emotions were permitted.

The third teller was a Polish woman, who incarnated her grandfather, a poor farmer. Conscripted as a soldier at the age of 21, he left his pregnant wife to go to war—and never returned. Once again there were tears.

After checking in with the teller, I turned to the audience in the two circles to check in with their listening. “What are your obstacles to listening?” I asked, looking at the outer circle. Before anyone could answer, a man stood up and said, “I’m from Germany. Let’s face it, when I say that my grandparents were Nazis, you all know what I am talking about. I am not at all comfortable talking about this.”

A man from the Netherlands spoke: “It’s mostly the women who are crying. They’re too emotional. This is not how to conduct yourself at work.” Another man concurred: “This is the reason that women don’t get far in business. They don’t know how to be professional.”

The senior vice president stood. “If I had known this was what you were going to do, I would never have agreed to this! You are upsetting these people.” His voice grew louder. “And I don’t like to see my people upset.”

I asked if there were any further obstacles to listening. There was silence. I turned to him: “May I continue?”

And he replied, “You might as well.”

By the end of that morning, we had traveled across the globe listening to 60 grandparent stories: soldiers, sailors, nurses, farmers, housemaids, mothers with multiple children, poets, musicians, and merchants. Over the next two days, we listened to many reflections about the Grandparent Exercise. The Indian team members were unanimous in feeling that the exercise was a precious opportunity to honor their ancestors in front of their colleagues. The Iranian woman cherished seeing her grandmother in a new light, and she felt gratitude for the good fortune of her own freedom and the opportunity to work with this team. While many said it was the most powerful training they’d ever attended, others felt it was an invasion of their privacy, that it was too touchy-feely and too American. A man from Italy said, “I don’t come to work to find meaning. I am there to fill the shareholders’ pockets. My family is where I find meaning, not my work.”

Finally, while standing in the passport control line at the airport in Larnaca, a participant from Singapore tapped me on the shoulder. “That was quite an experience,” he said. “You must be exhausted.”

I asked for his reflections. He took a moment and said, “You placed a golden thread through our hearts in a very mystical way.”

Ten years later, as part of the research for this book I wrote to one of the company’s regional directors, who had attended the Cyprus training. I asked what he remembered.

He told me that in all his years at the company, it was one of the most memorable trainings, but it was also the most controversial. He explained that until Narativ, the emerging markets group had done very standard, common trainings regarding planning, selling, and basic communication. Nothing had been groundbreaking or innovative. This was very different. He said, “I think it was a right moment and a right setting. You applied the right tools for people to loosen up. Quite a few people were surprised by themselves, that they had been so open and spontaneous and transparent.”

“Why had it been so controversial?” I asked.

“We had never been pushed outside of our comfort zones before. It had always been easy to find our way back after the exercise. But this was more complex and a hell of a lot deeper. What we experienced was a lot of emotions in that team, which no one expected to be released. However, it was clear that the individual participants each had a choice in how to present themselves.”

He continued, “We were a completely new team. I think the exercise helped us to bond. By reflecting on each other’s backgrounds and each other’s history, we had to take into account that we all come from very different parts of the world, different cultures, with different personal experiences of those. That led us to make closer connections at the outset of our conference, and overall, I think it helped us to communicate in a better way.”

Storytelling has the power to transform. Some of that power lies in how it restructures our communication through our becoming aware of the reciprocal relationship between listening and telling. Some comes from the stories themselves. Stories offer us a bridge to a new relationship with our colleagues at work. Stories dimensionalize us. They peel back layers and expose universality. They can play an evolutionary role in any team’s connectivity as well as their ongoing productive relationships.

If I could prescribe one type of communication-enhancing formula for every company, it would be that every employee do the Grandparent Exercise in the presence of his or her teammates. I guarantee you that this will transform communication in each and every team.