Annette Simmons

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Storytelling and Structure…not so much

“What’s your opinion on the topic of structuring business presentations as Story?”

Question from: Gonzales Alvarez

Good question, Gonzales. Let me begin by giving my definition of a story:

A story is a narrated sequence of words or other triggers in a way that an simulated experience (def: images, smells, sounds, tastes, touches, and emotions) is created in the mind of another person.

This includes true anecdotes, stories from books, movies, folktales, borrowed stories with permission, and personal stories, etc. Further distinctions are founded in critical thinking and a story subjected to critical thinking dies a terrible death.

My books offer a geography of human connections when story can help, I offer buckets full of stories, but no rules, no structure. There is a reason for that. Structural guidelines feel like rules to me, and I have the kind of personality that hates rules. Some people are rule followers, some question rules, and if you want to find me…breaking rules is my definition of the creative process.

This means I break my own rules and try everything. I’m not anti- or pro-structure; I am anti-dogma. I bought a couple of the books Gonzales Alvarez cited in the full text of his question.

  1. Paul Kelly’s 7-Slide Solution
  2. Andrew Abela’s Advanced Presentations by Design and his SCoRE method
  3. Nancy Duarte’s Resonate and her hero’s journey adapted from Vogler’s The Writers Journey, which in turn was adapted from Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

If I was flummoxed about a presentation I would go straight to one of those books and look for ideas. I don’t believe these brilliant people (and they are!) truly meant to issue a Presentation Dogma promising their structure will work every time.

The popularity of story structures is not so much the author’s wish as the wish of people scared of delivering a presentation.

Follow my structure, color in these lines and “I can make you a star (storyteller)!”

An offer that is “too good to be true” is too good to be true. Real storytelling is an art that communicates “Truth” sorely lacking in business presentations. Data doesn’t deliver a promise. Any story designed to illustrate you data is a waste of time, until you have earned your audience’s trust. You can’t predict which kind of story will do that, it is completely relative to the context, and a structure might put you on the wrong track.

You are trying to create a FEELING by using triggers of sound, smell, touch, taste and images that simulates an EXPERIENCE in you listeners mind. The content of the story can be irrelevant to your presentation IF the feeling you create is TRUST, FAITH, EMPATHY, and a genuine promise.

For example, Steve, a British ex-pat working in the USA, picked me up at the airport personally to tell me about using a story from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Tipping Point about “connectors,” people who know lots of other people and have a gift for bringing them together. In it, Gladwell uses Paul Revere as a prime example. As Sheila O’Malley said on her blog, “It wasn’t just that he went on his famous ride, and rallied the troops – it was that he was the kind of person who could galvanize others, who knew EVERYBODY, and everybody knew him …”

The job was a multi-million contract to build a sustainable, wetland-friendly building back in 2009. Many builders promise sustainability but they don’t deliver (not really). Steve’s managers are the Raul Revere’s of sustainable contractors: they are connectors who can locate the before-sustainable-was-cool suppliers because they already know them, they have worked with them.

That day, Steve represented his company in a final presentation among a short list of three contractors. Steve has a wonderful sense of humor and spent his first 5-10 minutes telling his version of Paul Revere’s story in great detail, pointedly using his “losing side” British accent to communicate his genuine humility and genuine admiration for his American “winning side” client. His listeners couldn’t help but remember failures or successes of their own based on the “who you know” truth.

All numbers and dates in a construction pitch are guesses — careful guesses but guesses nonetheless. Once the client was focused on the serious issues of integrity and deadlines, the rest of the presentation was free to follow the structure those presentations always follow. Familiarity creates trust as well.

If Steve had used a structure would he have missed the magic of this particular story? Or worse, distorted it into a structure that would destroy the flow?

Karen Dietz turned up a fabulous clip of Kurt Vonnegut discussing structure. He makes fun of our favorite stories. I think he makes a point about creativity. Being who you are will mean you can’t follow a pattern/structure. Just because we love a story doesn’t mean we trust it.

(You can read the full text of Vonnegut’s entire talk here.)

Humans have a weird relationship with freedom and creativity.

“If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism.”

– Erich Fromm

Following a recipe to create a story offers a safety net that not only keeps you from falling; it wraps you so tightly you can no longer swing from the trapeze.

Gonzalez Question in it’s entirety: Simply told, I don’t buy it. If you put the eggs, onions and potatoes in a sauce pan, you’ll get a mess with little resembling to a Spanish omelet. It is one thing is to use stories in a presentation as another tool of persuasion, illustration, or entertainment; and another thing completely to pretend that by putting conflict into the presentation and having a main character you have a Story.

Telling stories is great for a TED presentation where somebody describes his humanitarian project in Uganda or how she started a movement to save children in India after something striking happened to her. But what story can I tell to my students when teaching them about firewalls? Of course, I tell lots of anecdotes taken from my career or from news clips, but this is not a Story.

As I see it, the only legitimate way to structure a presentation as a Story is when you’re narrating a collection of facts (not necessarily in chronological order) about what happened to you. I’ve structured scientific presentations in the past this way because I was describing the project’s inception (the inciting incident, what led me to start working on the project), the problems I faced and how I solved them, and then the final product with the benefit to the audience. And, of course, ending with the call to action.

But when dealing with more abstract matters – like presenting a business model, a security audit report, or a project’s progress report; when discussing the buying alternatives or selling your product to potential customers – you can use two real or fictitious characters describing the usefulness of your products or resource to stories, anecdotes, and testimonials, but that’s not Story.

What’s your opinion on the topic of structuring business presentations as Story?

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Eva asked about “Bait and Switch” Stories…

Peanuts, by Charles Shultz, Copyright by Universal UClick, all rights reserved. The first time I used the “bait and switch” method was in my first book, Territorial Games: Understanding and Ending Turf Wars at Work.  Without talking too much about that book, I believed some people would buy the book to improve their territorial games so they could crush their “enemy” departments/nemeses like bugs. That was the bait: Here are ten territorial games that keep people from getting “your stuff.”

Bait is never presented as a bad thing.  Part of the “bait and switch” story is to validate that sure, it makes a lot of sense to want that “bait,” we are together in wanting something like that, but…the “switch” is we can have something better, or a hard lesson that the “bait” is, has always been an illusion.

Of COURSE you want to protect (validate), that makes sense, but if you protect everything you may pay a price (switch) in lost relationships, pay-back as others protect/hoard information from you, or build unexplained brick walls (since you started it)…then you might be coming out behind in the long run.  For instance:

Cavemen protected land, water, and hunting grounds by growling, brandishing weapons, maybe even peeing on the perimeter.  Today information, relationships, and authority is the turf to be protected.  Same behaviors, updated.  Who has not seen some doofus get angry (growl) in a meeting, mention unpleasant consequences (weapon) if “idea A” is adopted, or hoard information (peed on it, now it is mine!)?  (after all that validation, my favorite switch)…and who among us has not been that doofus?

Bait and Switch stories tend to be about “THEM” in the beginning and turn into an opportunity for insight about “US.”  Speaking from equality makes the medicine go down.

My favorite “Bait and Switch” story is one I use when there are too many egos in a room who refuse to budge.

Larry was a rescued greyhound. He didn’t win too many races. Larry was retired at 18 months. Retired greyhounds make wonderful pets, but there are certain life skills they don’t learn in a kennel. They must learn that nice dogs don’t go on the oriental carpet. The road is not a race track. They have seen a leash but a pleasure walks in the neighborhood are a new concept with plenty of surprises. Larry, for instance, never figured out (and he lived to the ripe old age of twelve) that if he walked on one side of a telephone pole and I walked on the other side that we weren’t going anywhere. As he felt the backward pull of his leash the look on his little dogface questioned my reason for stopping. I pointed at the pole. I demonstrated how to solve the problem, but no matter what he was going to follow my lead. He never backed off until I backed off. I could spend as much time as I wanted trying to teach him “YOU are the dog, you should back off first.” Finally I was the one who learned it doesn’t matter who backs off first, the faster it happens, the faster we can move on.

Every ego in the room thinks someone else should back up first, until the story frames that thought as worthy of the intelligence of a dog.

Basically, the purpose is to allow our listener/readers to see that what they think they want is not really what they want – that being better than, or master of, or the “winner” is not as satisfying, lucrative, or speedy as collaboration. The trick is to hold the mirror discretely so that no one EVER feels the least bit embarrassed or “called out.” That’s our job as a storytellers – to show solidarity with other imperfect human beings.  Because…we all get our turn at the mirror.

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Experimenting with PhotoStory in Your Community

1. Attract a group of interested community members to meet for a day. Be inclusive. Invite as diverse a group as possible.

2. Come together and talk about what is going on in your community. Discuss the importance of understanding the story of who you are and why you are here. Use your time to tell a few stories about the community, explore that issues are important to you. Explain that this process will lead to unpredictably powerful outcomes only if it isn’t constrained by outcomes based in current thinking.

3. Distribute disposable cameras one per person or ask people to use their own cameras to take photos of your community – the people, places, events – that tell the stories of who you are.

4. Come back together within

5 weeks to share the photos and stories you think best describe your community. Set aside a whole day for this process.

6. Use a democratic selection process to narrow the PhotoStories down to a manageable number. Thirty worked well for us.

7. Ask each of the selected photographers to tell the story that goes with their photo. Use time limits so that everyone gets an equal chance. Three minutes is a good limit.

8. Ask the group to spend one hour examining how you usually discuss things and choosing 3-5 Dialogue Agreements so that the conversation you have as a group will be different, more creative, more tolerant and more inclusive than usual.

10. Set aside two hours for a dialogue process. Make sure that no one person and no one faction dominates the dialogue. Let the PhotoStories prompt the telling of other stories. Wander around the many stories of your community without attempting to summarize their meaning or choosing one representative story. When tension occurs welcome it as an opportunity to better understand the conflicts within your story. End the dialogue at it’s point of natural closure.

11. Allow one hour at the end of the day to harvest new thoughts and ideas that evolved from your dialogue. Ask yourselves: If this is our story, then what actions/behaviors go with that story? Who else needs to know our story? Are there other stories we need to discover?

12. Use your photos and stories to spread your story and create opportunities for new dialogues in your community and with other communities.

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Sinking Ship

The guy on the right drew this map.  He is bailing out the boat that is sinking.  He is doing his job in spite of a bad situation.  I asked, “Who is the guy on the left?”  He said “That’s my boss.”  A few heads turned toward his boss sitting up front.  I asked “So what is he doing?” He answered, “He’s pissing in the boat and not doing much else.”  There were guffaws from his cronies and the rest of us couldn’t resist smiling.  It’s funny.  The manager just shook his head probably thinking “is it that bad?”  Then one of his buddies asked, “So why are you smiling then?”  He whipped his head around and was shocked to see the smile.  This was a union management meeting and so far nothing had gone well.  In that split moment, he saw himself and maybe the others did too.  I mentioned it much later: “Is it possible that the fight, leading the cause, being the union representative is fun for you?  Would you have as good a time if we solved all these problems?”  When the thirty people present got the opportunity to speak for themselves it turned about 27 of them liked their jobs and just wanted to get back to doing their jobs.  Only the three union reps were angry and unhappy.  Often groups that seem to be at an impasse are simply being held hostage by a few malcontents.

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Pulled in too many directions

This guy is in pain. I’ve seen this drawing from many people in many industries.  The tug of priorities feel like they are tearing you apart.  What I like about this guy’s drawing is the expressions on the faces of the people who need his attention.  A nice person, a mad/mean person, a sad person, a clueless person, and the two handed power tug of a scared person.  All priorities are not equal and yet the sense of urgency of the “tugger” is unrelated to the importance of the priority.  This picture also gives the drawer a chance to see that he/she draws him/herself as a victim with no power.  The question arises – Is that really true?

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Eaten Alive

Picture10

Drawing a picture of “what it’s like at work” gives people an opportunity to express negative emotions with humor.  When I facilitate this kind of exercise, everyone shares their “metaphor map” in a democratic process.  Some are positive but many people need to process stress, anxiety and frustration.  It is humor that makes this work.  When we can laugh at ourselves and each other, we find that negative perceptions ARE surmountable if we can talk about them.  Emotions that cannot be discussed cannot be healed.  This map was drawn by a guy who was new to a senior management position at a “troubled” facility of a national organization.  He explained, “This is what remains of me.  This job has ripped out my heart and guts.  The people here are chewing away my legs and feet.  I hold up my arm for help and the guys above me snap it off.”  This drawing was not so much a message to the group – although it made a strong impact – but it was a catharsis for the man who drew it.  Many people say the Metaphor Map process is cathartic.  He got lots of attention, genuine laughter at this graphics, and validation.  My guess is that this picture caused him to ask himself, “Am I really going to let this happen to me?”  After the catharsis of admitting he hit bottom and the validation that everyone could relate to the feeling, there was no where to go but up.