Annette Simmons

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Storytelling and UX: Separated at Birth

Plate Design pre-800 A.D. Nazca tribe, Cusco Peru

Plate designed 0-800 A.D. by Nazca tribe, Peru

In 2004 I introduced my ideas about story-thinking to a bunch of design engineers who responded  “no, no, that’s design-thinking.” So I fell in love with design thinking…genuises like Dan Lockton (101 patterns for behavior change), Jan Jursa and UX Storytellers (free ebook with personal UX stories) create designs that are stories. Perhaps story thinking and design thinking are not an exact match but the steps of find/share/refine from UX, Agile,  and Scrum sources are delightfully nonlinear (story) compared to the decision routines I learned from management by objective techniques (i.e. SMART goals) and I like the conversations of UX people.   They ignite the imagination to pursue goals we can’t yet see.

I have an issue with the UX term “cognitive bias” because EMOTION should be in there somewhere and “bias” makes humans sound like stupid cows who might follow a cattle chute wherever it goes. Even cow chutes can fail until a designer understands the stories cows tell themselves (see Temple Grandin). Human patterns of interpretation can utilize rational tools but our patterns irrevocably reflect the DNA of physical experience and emotional reasoning. Every “cognitive bias” makes as much sense as any stereotype makes sense. It shouldn’t be universally applied, but it comes from an organic place.  I’m happy to know that Dan Ariely says his term “predictably irrational” refers to the idea that it is irrational to think you can predict your own behavior. It is not a blanket disdain for these patterns of behavior. Emotional reasoning is and forever will be more powerful than rational decision making and I see that as a good thing because our future will be much better when we learn to blend emotions like empathy, compassion and love into our ratios.

Before demand for content reduced storytelling to a sequence of linear explanations and numbered bullets, it was mostly taught in person.

Learning storytelling in a group from an experienced storyteller provides an experiential sense of story that can’t be captured with a set of procedural instructions.  There are great courses out there.  We can learn a lot online…but if we want to understand something as deeply human as storytelling its ideal for humans to interact with other humans.

Here’s why: A story blends emotional, visual, kinesthetic and rational reasoning routines without separating them.  Personal stories illuminate insights that are specific to a situation’s people, complexity, texture and relationships. A vibrant true story delivers a hologram of culture, nature, nurture, space and time from an embodied human point of view: WAY more information than a story formated via a hunt and peck search for hero, quest, obstacle, helper and journey.

The job of a storyteller is two-fold. First, a storyteller notices the emotional, visual, and kinesthetic patterns that produce perceptions (i.e. what makes some facts feel more important than other facts) and interpret conclusions (I “know” him therefore he is more trustworthy).  Second, a storyteller must be able to re-create this perceptual/emotional point of view so others share the insights and the feelings as if they were physically there.

Yes, any story that provides your listeners with a vicarious experience of your facts in time and space makes your facts feel more “real” …with all the benefits of that, but to me, the real value of storytelling is the way it allows us to aggregate contexts and shift perspectives so we make better decisions.  When rational objective reasoning is allowed to over-rule subjective story reasoning we end up with projects that should’ve worked, but didn’t because emotions and perceptions rule human reality.

More than a set of tool to persuade, story-finding and storytelling skills increase the variety and quality of scenarios we can imagine to produce the results we seek – sometimes revealing even better goals in the process. Any story that narrates a relevant “Significant Emotional Event” (without some imposed structure) helps us S.E.E. important patterns, better test prototypes, and understand user experiences.

Designing cattle chute stories/interfaces that only lead to pre-determined conclusions is not engaging it is coercion. Narrating stories with the priority of understanding (not controlling) true human experiences releases listener conclusions to be creative and more meaningful to you both.  It means showing faith in your listeners (always appreciated) and sharing responsibility for mutually creative interpretations and actions. There is no “right story.” If you look for the perfect story you sacrifice the process of mindful attention to what is, in favor of what you want to see.  Both are valid…but I’m thinking we could all do a better job of understanding what is.

So to all my UX colleagues, please don’t let your understanding of storytelling get distorted with contrivances created to package and sell storytelling advice.  User experiences with emotion and unpredictability intact are too valuable to the process of innovation to be reduced to fit existing categroies. Be bold.

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The Story Factor Audiobook: Connecting the Dots 2001-2016

The Story Factor is now updated and available on audible as an audiobook. Fifteen years of perspective and a genius editor (Stephen Brewer) helped me cut it from 13 hours to 5 hours flat. Producers Jay and Michelle from Beyond Measure Media took me into a real studio and monitored sound quality and my energy levels to meet their high standards. I hope you like it.

In the Steve Jobs tradition, I thought I’d “connect the dots” between the obsessive research (you have no idea), designed interventions, and no charge experiments I’d run on any group of volunteers that would let me and the journey that lead to the original  The Story Factor back in 2001.  I was still in grad school when I attended my first National Storytelling Festival in 1994, but it was a long time I realized how important storytelling is or learned enough to describe storytelling as a type of “intervention.”

In fact, The Story Factor was the third book in a series of three intense periods of research and experimentation, design and testing that began with my search to increase authentic collaboration.  In 1994 my mentor Dr. Jim Farr (founding contributor to Center for Creative Leadership) taught me how to deliver learning experiences using transformational self awareness techniques that improved leadership skills by blending soul-deep examination of intent and beliefs in a way that clarified their definition of success and for some, redirected the traectory of their life.  So… the “team building” tools at that time just seemed terribly superficial in comparison to my experiences running these workshops. I was certain I could find a leverage point for self-awareness that would shift the negative emotions wasting time and resources with phrases like “not my job,” or avoided questions with “who wants to know?” I set out to identify what patterns work against team building:  “When, where, how do we reject collaboration and why?”

For instance, in meetings, subtle messages like a stiff tone of voice, raised eyebrows, or strategically insincere agreements erode trust and decrease our desire to collaborate, share information, support, or even to save the game player from drowning down the line.  So the first book, Territorial Games named ten micro-behaviors or repeated patterns from hundreds of executive’s true stories I had recorded and transcribed.  Most answered first with metaphors like turf war, back stabber, silo or the thank-god-its-a-metaphor “pissing contest.” I’d point out the metaphor was not literally true and then ask “so what actually happened?” These true stories revealed a subterranean language of inclusion and exclusion understood across all cultures. My theory was that evolution designed us with insincts a/k/a emotions  that compel us to acquire and protect territory: no longer hunting grounds and watering holes but the intangible territory that helps us survive and thrive: information, relationships, and status.  Therefore a rational, cognitive desire to collaborate was insufficient without vital emotions like trust and faith.

So AMACOM published Territorial Games and give it away as the 1998 membership gift for joining American Management Association. Clients hired me to help plan mergers, de-escalate infighting, and unlock impasse.  The games worked best with funny stories that neutralized defensiveness and increased self awareness. I provided an alternative story for the “who started it?” question to decrease assumptions of malicious or negligence, which is that these emotional behaviors are hardwired by evolution for survival. “If you play these games, it’s okay, its not your fault…but guess what…those people who you think deserve payback?  It’s not their fault either.” This new story increased self-compassion and a reason to monitor behaviors that sent unconscious signals to back off.  For those who are doing it on purpose – the list of games denied them plausible excuses.

Still, there were long term turf wars that would never go away until all the old stories were exposed to each other in a way that created a bigger story than the us/them causing problems.  Back in grad school (1994) I had written my masters thesis on “dialogue,” drawing from organizational learning, systems theory, social psychology, In 1996 I got ahold of David Bohm’s “On Dialogue” and continued my enduring study of anything from Ed Schein on group process. Armed with this understanding, and the crafty little tricks I learned from my mentor, I wrote A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear and Distrust.  It was an ambitious design for training a group (60 max, although it worked for 90 at least once) to a.) self-regulate by generating personal and group strategies for pre-empting what I’ve come to call “going to the bad place” and b.) shifting expectations to accomodate the feelings of uncertainty and sheer frustration of stretching your brain wide enough to see that everyone has a piece of the same elephant.  In that book is a shapter on Storytelling as one of the “seven basic facilitator skills.” This is the first time I used simple drawings for common group patterns instead of words.  It was a very successful form of visual storytelling even if I was not yet aware of it.

Everytime I facilitated dialogue I took notes to capture as close to a verbatim transcript as I could.  It turned out the “faulty assumptions” groups decided to abandon were basically stories. And every insight a group dsicovered by examining their bigger story required could not spread from that group to the organization without it’s own stories and metaphors. I realized l was an awkward fish swimming in an ocean of stories.  I wrote the The Story Factor to map the currents.

Fifteen years later, I took time to revisit, update and edit the maps in The Story Factor, producing this audiobook as a result. Let me know what you think!

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Dark Magic: Tony Schwartz’s Abuse of the Story Arts

Most of this post comes from the July 25, 2016 issue The New Yorker by Jane Mayer you can read in full here.

Storyteller and writer Tony Schwartz feels “deep remorse” for ghostwriting the 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal an “autobiography” of Donald Trump that arguably crafted the beguiling character now running for president. Character development is central to good storytelling. Tony Swartz is good at it.

I feel for Tony. Because I think every talented storyteller makes concessions to power and money at one time or another. Half the time, we don’t know the cost of the concession until it is too late. So this post is a result of two days of me wondering how we can tell which concessions might lead to deep remorse and how to avoid them.

Because a story must be specific to feel real we constantly risk what Chimamanda Adichie calls the danger of a single story. Painting a pretty picture can hide injustice, greed, and other sins. Likewise a fearful future can hide hope, positive intentions, and unexplored solutions. Paul Costello writes “a story is never innocent.” (I highly recommend his Ethical Principles of Narrative Work)

How did it happen? How can we make sure it doesn’t happen to us?

The current story is that Trump’s book wasn’t Tony’s idea. It wasn’t even Trump’s idea. It allegedly originated when S.I. Newhouse (dead now) owner of Advance Publications (privately owned media company) called Trump with a book offer via Random House (sold) because an article about Trump bumped sales. S.I. Newhouse used the numbers to conclude that a book about Trump would make a good investment.

Tony says he coincidentally contacted Trump to do a Playboy interview and during their conversation learned of the book deal, suggested the title “The Art of the Deal.” He agreed – for half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance plus half of the royalties, far more than normal –to ghostwrite it. Today, Tony says he will donate these royalties to charity but from what I can tell, he means “from now on.” He didn’t state what he’d do with the millions of dollars of royalties he’s already earned in the last thirty years.

Tony is still in the storytelling business.  Today he runs the Energy Project, a consulting firm that promises to improve employees’ productivity by helping them boost their “physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual” morale.   The quote “I’ve spent significant portions of my life trying to doing penance for having written that book,” is less a mea culpa than an excellent backstory for his current consulting gig. I’m willing to bet Tony Swartz will make more money than ever. But I’m bitchy that way.

It is none of my business. I’m simply looking for useful clues on the mechanics that lead to “deep remorse” to help storytellers make a living without choosing to “sell out.” (Tony Swartz words, not mine.)

In the New Yorker podcast Tony recalls it was 1985. He had a mortgage he couldn’t afford and a second child on the way. He knew writing the book, “might undermine my credibility as a journalist.”  In the end, he admits, “I did it for the money.”

There were still opportunities to walk away. His first meeting, after less than 30 minutes of asking for substantive content, Trump asked, “Do really have to talk about this stuff?” Tony replied that “it’s a lot of space to fill and I can’t just make it up.” Tony: “It’s not that he was private – he was just bored and distracted. He wanted to move on …It was like pulling teeth.”

Tony’s personal journal in Oct 21, 1986, halfway through writing the book gives the first clue:

“…while I’m fascinated by Trump and while it’s been an interesting experience the last thing you could call it is nourishing or enriching, its in fact, precisely the opposite. It is draining, its deadening, its one-dimension-alizing.

It pulls me away from all that is best in life: complexity and subtlety and caring and nurturing. All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular, because it’s all a black hole.”

later …

“the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character—even weirdly sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”

When he tried to check out the facts of the stories from people involved…

“I would walk through what I understood, they would smile or shrug or roll their eyes” and some would share their description of what happened/ There were times when he pointed me to facts that just weren’t true. Tony invented the phrase “truthful hyperbole” rather than call it what it was.  Lying. In the end,

“I was hired to put the best possible face forward. That’s what I was hired to do. And that’s what I did.”

You and I like to think we have good character. Most storytellers do. But research proves that context, not character, is a better predictor for this kind of slippery slope behavior.

Contexts that put a storyteller at risk:

  • Too much personal debt that makes you feel trapped.
  • Client want’s YOU to do the story-finding process without his/her personal involvement.
  • Work that is draining, deadening, or one-dimension-alizing.
  • Rich, powerful organizations without field tested processes for identifying and correcting unethical behavior.
  • Justifications like “truthful hyperbole” or “Maybe it didn’t happen but it could have happened.”
  • One source stories. External stories that don’t match internal stories.
  • Abdicating ethical responsibility to the client.
  • Working for a sociopath. But you rarely know ahead of time.

Sociopaths are charming and charismatic. I’ve been sucked in by two in my career (that I know of). In both cases, I didn’t know until the middle of the work. One was a class action lawyer who asked me to teach his thirty support lawyers about storytelling. In the middle of sharing stories, he took over – putting people on the spot, embarrassing them, criticizing in spite of my design of “no critique.” It was awful. I called him out in private, then did the best I could to save the people and end early. Later I learned that he rigs the annual softball game every year so all the good players are always on his team. Ask around, maybe you will be lucky and find a telling detail like that before you take the client.

The other time I worked for a sociopath she seemed smart, enthusiastic and eager to create a safe place for dangerous truth (a rather intense approach to dialogue). By lunch, I knew. I begged her ‘this is a room full of people just dying to make you proud, but they aren’t sure how.” Blank stare. She told me, “I decided to fire those four last Friday.” The four people who’d had the courage to speak. I regret helping her identify new victims.

Throughout history storytellers have been the conscience of our species. Today evolutionary psychologists posit emotions are the collective error managment system vital to human survival.  Emotion is the only reason humans suffer for each other,  forgive, share, love, and communicate, Remove emotion from your decisions and we lose these things.  If it feels bad, it probably is.

Tony Schwartz former editor called him “Dr. Frankenstein.”

Tony Schwartz current clients include Facebook, Google, and other powerful rich organizations. I just hope he has a system in place to avoid doing something else he might regret in another thirty years. 2046 isn’t that far away.

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The Secret of Storytelling: Take a bite

Apple

Let’s pretend I’m Eve and you are Adam. Don’t worry about what we are or aren’t wearing. So in my hand is this apple, and with it the secret to finding good stories. All yours, free of charge.  But, before you take a bite I have to warn you; there is a big downside. This apple is from the tree of knowledge (yep, that one) and each bite can be as difficult as it is joyful. Tiny bites are okay, but tiny bites mean tiny difficulties and tiny joys.

As a general rule, I harbor deep suspicions against anyone who says they have “the answer” to anything. Storytelling took off around the same time my book The Story Factor was published. Probably a coincidence. I wasn’t the only exploding with ideas at the Jonesborough storytelling festival in 1994. In 1998 and 1999 I wasn’t the only one running experiments and writing about stories. But there wasn’t a big crowd, either.  I felt complete freedom to explore storytelling without restraint and I had more than enough arrogance to assume I understood what I thought I understood. I mainly sought advice from traditional storytellers although my questions came from psychology, group dynamics, and teaching self-awareness workshops.

It was a lot of work…but I felt pure joy writing about storytelling (except for the editing part, editing sucks). Back then stories were allowed to go anywhere and come from anywhere. It felt like exploring a natural wilderness of surprises. There was no internet to harsh my buzz with numbered lists and so I mapped what felt natural to map, connecting my own dots, for my own reasons: I had a shiny messiah complex and I was out to save the world – share storytelling for good, not evil, and all that.

Anyway, it’s 20 years later and you can’t swing a dead cat in a coffee shop without hitting a storyteller. The neighborhood looks a lot different than it did. I see the equivalent of fancy cars and big malls, secret clubs and Disney story wonderlands with hefty entry fees. My friends call it the “storytelling industrial complex.” Do any of them have “the answer?”

Honestly? Some do. I still like my six stories and I’ve felt “this is it! several times since then. But after twenty years, the “this is it!” moments run together. So…I needed one big thing, something pivotal, basic, primitive, and organic to help organize my thoughts and zero in on really good stories.

It’s not surprising I found my new “unifying theory of story” listening to Joseph Campbell. I was two blocks from my house walking Lucy, when through my earbuds I heard Joseph Campbell tell Bill Moyers that he had revised his opinion that the purpose of myth was to create meaning. His tone got lively as he explained that maybe creation stories prompted it, but in his revised opinion the purpose of myth is to chart what it is to “feel truly alive.”

Who cares about a love story if it doesnt make you feel more alive? Horror stories aren’t interesting unless they remind us how precious life is or validate that you are not alone in your fear, a good mystery offers shared wonder that produces a visceral and physiological change in heart rate, etc.  I now think this is the common denominator in all good stories.  They remind us we are alive.

The secret to great storytelling is: does this story make me/us feel more alive? It is as simple and as difficult as that. This aliveness seems to happen when opposites touch: life/death, good/evil, rich/poor, dangerous/safe, dark grey/light grey, love/emptiness, beauty/ugliness and the rest. So contrast is key to creating a narrative frame, but there is a big difference between a story that should work and one that does.

Joseph Campbell spoke of the knights on their quest for the Holy Grail “If a path exists in the forest, don’t follow it, for though it took someone else to the Grail, it will not take you there, because it is not your path.”

My advice? I recommend you go take a big juicy bite out of a real apple. Let the juice run down your chin, look at the red, green, brown and white of it and think about what else makes you feel truly alive. Then look for stories that make you feel like that: more alive. When you find it, that’s a good story.

 

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The cost of incivility, territorial games, and trump

A person exposed to incivility (not a victim, just an observer) is 3 times less likely to help others in lab experiments.  His willingness to share resources drops by 50%  Worse, those who experience incivility first hand…

I didn’t call it incivility back in 1995, but the behaviors workers described as I gathered stories that narrated events behind organizational metaphors like “turf war,” “silo,” “back-stabber,” “pissing contest,” etc. sound awfully familiar.  This research described ten “territorial games” that seem to be correlated with “incivility.” If so, I think it’s worth talking about territorial games again because how we characterize a problem completely alters the solutions we invent.

If we call it incivility then the “cure” might sound like individual training to increase mindfulness and self control. All good, but I’m concerned that most people are in very short supply of the additional willpower necessary.  Not to mention the least civil do not seem interested in this kind of training.

If we look at the behaviors as a function of group norms, then the “cure” is to change the norms.  My approach is to provide a map of how groups end up with “default norms” then help the group collectively reflect and choose new norms by design rather than default.  Groups that share personal stories get there faster. It’s that psychological safety thing.

But what if the behaviors represent a sweeping cultural response to changes in the emotional tone of daily communications (perhaps the daily use of fear/uncertainty/threat stories to grab attention) then we have an epidemic on our hands. An epidemic that makes Trump’s incivility look “smart,” that makes people want to use the same tactics to protect themselves, and worse tells a story that civility is weakness even subterfuge.

No matter what we call these fear-based behaviors lets talk more about how we can make a difference, connect people back to themselves and each other.

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email: annette@annettesimmons.com
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Group Process Consulting, LLC

Group Process Consulting provides keynotes, workshops and personal coaching to CEOs, senior executives, sales staff, fund-raisers – anyone who wants to use stories to motivate groups and/or individuals, via personal interactions or personally delivered presentations.

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