The Power of Storytelling

Telling stories is one of the most powerful means that leaders have to influence, teach, and inspire. What makes storytelling so effective for learning? For starters, storytelling forges connections among people, and between people and ideas. Stories convey the culture, history, and values that unite people. When it comes to our countries, our communities, and our families, we understand intuitively that the stories we hold in common are an important part of the ties that bind.

In every culture, in every corner of the world, storytelling has been an intrinsic part of human communication since the beginning of time. From ancient myths etched on cave walls to modern-day novels and podcasts, stories have served as the lifeblood of human connection, understanding and growth. Beyond mere entertainment, storytelling offers a myriad of benefits for both the teller and the listener, weaving a tapestry of shared experiences and profound insights.

This understanding also holds true in the business world, where an organization’s stories, and the stories its leaders tell, help solidify relationships in a way that factual statements encapsulated in bullet points or numbers don’t.

I have written on the subject of ‘Have we learned from the Tudors and Storytelling’, ‘Are good story tellers happier in life and business and ………’Continued’ and ‘Do fables really convey the power in storytelling and education?’

Stories have value. As an author, I have come to respect their evocative power, I share many stories and quotations daily. But even these stories are like fingers pointing to the moon. At best, they replace a deluded cultural narrative or a misleading tale with a tale of compassion. They touch us and lead us back to the mystery here and now.

Perhaps the most interesting intersection in the business world is between mindfulness and technology, as they appear to pull in opposite directions.

Stories do grab us. They take us in, transport us, and allow us to live vicariously and visually through another’s experience. As I’ve said often in my work around presence, shared stories accelerate interpersonal connection.

Learning to tell stories to capture, direct and sustain the attention of others is a key leadership skill. Storytelling also greatly helps anyone speaking or presenting in front of an audience.

As Steven Spielberg once said:
“The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time.”

A Hopi American Indian proverb says: “Those who tell the stories rule the world.” Well, just maybe these words of wisdom are totally correct.

A feature interview with author Salman Rushdie. Literature plays an important role in providing insight into society.

It is true that in our information-saturated age, business leaders “will not be heard unless they’re telling stories,” says Nick Morgan, author of ‘Power Cues’ and president and founder of Public Words, a communications consulting firm.
“Facts and figures and all the rational things that we think are important in the business world actually do not stick in our minds at all,” he says. But stories create ‘sticky’ memories by attaching emotions to things that happen.

That means leaders who can create and share good stories have a powerful advantage over others. And fortunately, everyone has the ability to become a better storyteller. “We are programmed through our evolutionary biology to be both consumers and creators of story,” says Jonah Sachs, CEO of Free Range Studios and author of ‘Winning the Story Wars’. “It certainly can be taught and learned.”

Consumers want to know they can trust a brand before they buy from it. But establishing that trust is a complex, convoluted journey that takes time. The customer has to know they’re in safe hands – and that is getting harder for brands to manage.

The equation for trust was easier in pre-internet days. You would know the local shopkeeper or the brand in your town. You might have friends or family who worked there. And you almost certainly would read about them in the local paper from time to time. The community would tell stories about the brand – and that was enough.

The story that goes before a brand interaction influences how much trust people will give. While great digital experience has been hailed as the holy grail for modern companies, consumers quickly become fed up with brands that fail to cater for unusual or bad user experiences.

Typically, these are experiences that don’t fit the normal user journey, such as customer support, resolutions, payments or something else that is hard to scale.

For that reason, brands have realised that engagement is key to customers – not only the purchase and user experience as you’d expect – but also general behaviours and more recently, points of view on global affairs and news.

In times of growing uncertainty, trust is built further when you demonstrate an ability to address unanticipated situations effectively and demonstrate a steady commitment to address the needs of all stakeholders in the best way possible.

The best business leaders begin by framing trust in economic terms for their companies. When an organization has low trust, the economic consequences can be huge. Everything will take longer, and everything will cost more because the organization has to compensate for the lack of trust it commands.

These costs can be quantified and when they are, leaders suddenly recognize that low trust is not merely a social issue. It becomes an economic matter. The dividends of high trust can also be calculated, and this can help leaders make a compelling business case for trust.

The best leaders focus on making the creation of trust an explicit objective. Like any other goal, it must be measured and improved. It must be made clear to everyone that trust matters to management and leadership. The unambiguous message must be that this is the right thing to do and it is the right economic thing to do. One of the best ways to do this is to make an initial baseline measurement of organizational trust and then to track improvements over time.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a famous Buddist monk whose core message to the tech leaders was to use their global influence to focus on how they can contribute to making the world a better place, rather than on making as much money as possible. Fame and power and money cannot really bring true happiness compared to when you have a way of life that can take care of your body and your feelings.”

As Jon Kabat-Zinn sums this up quite well when he quotes: “Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing.”

Finally, a story expresses how and why life changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in balance: You come to workday after day, week after week, and everything’s fine. You expect it will go on that way.

But then there’s an event—in screenwriting, we call it the “inciting incident” that throws life out of balance.

You get a new job, or the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality.

A good storyteller describes what it’s like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth.

All great storytellers since the dawn of time — from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day — have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality.

Self-knowledge is the root of all great storytelling. A storyteller creates all characters from the self by asking the question, “If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?”

The more you understand your own humanity, the more you can appreciate the humanity of others in all their good-versus-evil struggles.

I would argue that the great leaders Jim Collins describes are people with enormous self-knowledge. They have self-insight and self-respect balanced by skepticism.

Great storytellers — and, I suspect, great leaders — are skeptics who understand their own masks as well as the masks of life, and this understanding makes them humble. They see the humanity in others and deal with them in a compassionate yet realistic way.

In the words of J.K. Rowling:

“The stories we love best live in us forever.”