Annette Simmons

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September 16, 2016 by Annette Simmons 1 Comment

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!

Filed Under: Annette's Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: Annette Simmons, business storytelling, group process, leadership, metaphor, narrative, storytelling, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

June 17, 2016 by Annette Simmons 1 Comment

Can we “science the shit” out of storytelling?

I loved the movie The Martian. It’s based on Andy Weir’s debut novel “The Martian” I read the book first. Andy described it as basically Robinson Crusoe on Mars without the monkey. So I got curious about his writing process.  He LOVES science, so did he use storytelling science to create this story?

I listened to several interviews.  He loved science fiction- still does.  Andy learned about space travel because he loves space travel.  He read and consumed every documentary he could find.  He is such a cheerful science nerd his interviews are charming to watch. He says he made it up the story as he went along.  Yes, he had planned the final scene, but when he got there “it couldn’t happen,” so he made up a new one.

His day job was coding software, writing was no more than a hobby. He published web comics, short stories and the first copies of The Martian for free on his own website. He wrote one chapter at a time until it was a book (technically his third) putting it on Amazon, more to make it easy to download (at the minimum: 99 cents) than to make money on it. Sales attracted a publisher to knock on his door, not the other way around.  He did nothing to promote it. He’d already taken a couple of years off to be a writer and considered it a failure, so he was back to treating it as a hobby.

He refers to the plot as “man vs nature, where nature gets the first punch” or so he knows a lot about storytelling. He probably studied storytelling as much as he studied science during his two years being a writer.  But the lead character ,Mark Watney didn’t come out of some algorithm, Mark is an idealized version of Andy – with Andy’s passion, enthusiasm, and a cheerful smart ass personality.  The character feels real, because he’s based on a real person.  Story arises from origins (like chemical elements) that can’t be science-ed up from scratch.  They exist already. The elements: human, unpredictable, and personal emotional experiences we feel compelled to share exist already.  Science can tell us how to mix them for particular effects, but not how to make them from scratch.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: andy weir, business storytelling, science, science of story, storytelling, the martian

June 8, 2016 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Storytelling as dialogue: the back and forth of shared context

Uri Hasson uses fMRI scans to show how storyteller patterns of brain activity are significantly duplicated in the mind of a story listener.  But of more interest to me, he pinpoints the yawning gap between lab research and real life near the end of his talk (after 10:00)

Does the neural coupling magic happen everytime you tell a good story?

No. No, it doesn’t.

This neural coupling only happens if teller and listener share the same context or “have common ground.”  I don’t think analyzing your audience is the same as feeling solidarity with your audience.  The stories that flow from solidarity enable much deeper connections – like a dance the storyteller both leads and follows.  Placing yourself firmly in an empathetic relationship with those you wish to influence may inspire higher levels of engagement, too.

Traditional storytellers often go back and forth with their audience until they find a shared context. They know it will be there – humans are humans.   Once they find it, their stories flow along the shared context to deliver a kind of “you are not alone” feeling as well the emotional ride of the journey they narrate.

I found another interesting observation about the back and forth relationship between teller and listener in the online version of his research article:

“We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding.”

Enabling an audience to anticipate what’s going to happen next may be another benefit of starting out from a shared context.  Traditional storytellers often give their audience a chance to jump ahead – narrating slowly enough to let their audience experience the delight of getting there first and guessing right.

Why not add a bit of back and forth with your audience to negotiate a shared context before telling a story? It will put you at ease and may reveal gaps in understanding before they cause a problem.

 

Filed Under: Finding Stories, Uncategorized

June 2, 2016 by Annette Simmons 5 Comments

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…

  • 48% intentionally decreased their work effort.
  • 80% lost work time worrying about the incident.
  • 66% said that their performance declined.
  • 78% said that their commitment to the organization declined.

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.

Filed Under: Annette's Blog, books, Uncategorized Tagged With: business storytelling, group norms, group process, incivility, story, trump

September 27, 2014 by admin

Exercise in Empathy

Anna Deavere Smith is a wonderful actor who “performs” stories by taking on the personality of the original teller. She brings people from Studs Terkel’s collections back to life and takes her audiences on a tour .  Here she is pitching a workshop on Empathy but this little clip reminded me how to really pay attention and I thought it might be a good reminder for you as well.  She points out, “There is someone else going on when you are really paying attention.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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