Annette Simmons

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From “Contact” to Friend

Debra CondrenI have to confess I never liked the word “contacts.”  I have always preferred to make friends but social networking warmed me up to the word: contacts.  I probably don’t know you personally, but I appreciate you because you and I ARE connected.  I wish I knew you better, knew some of your stories.  And it could happen.  In the radio interview link below, that’s exactly what happened between Debra Condren and myself.

Debra interviewed me about storytelling, how to find the story so you are the one who wins, when “Whoever The Best Story Wins.”  During the interview you can hear how “give a story/get a story” works in several spontaneous exchanges.  Best of all for me, this interview demonstrates how exchanging stories shifts two strangers, two “contacts,” to two good friends.  I think you will find it a delightful and instructive audio download (50 minutes) to listen to during your commute time.

Listen online or download the radio interview:

AMBITION Is Not A Dirty Word – Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

by Dr. Debra Condren

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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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Saying "Hero" One Too Many Times

William Deresiewicz’s essay “Empty Regard” delivers a punch while illustrating that overuse of the term “hero” has drained the word/story of it’s true military meaning and The Hero with a Thousand Facesworse, out-right accuses embarrassed team-players of grand standing. Online replies from members of the military tell their personal stories that will silence and liberal or conservative hoping to wag a finger in the air.  What happened happened, an important specific symbol was generalized into meaninglessness.   [Read more…]

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Raf asked me about "untrue stories"

“How true does a story have to be?”

Raf – a good buddy who stretches my brain – asked me to visit  http://significantobjects.com/ where people make up stories and compete to see how much value they can add.

I puff up with pride and can barely muffle my “told you so!” when well told stories take a meaningless object and give it enough meaning to register in dollars and cents! Whoo hooo!! The project raised money for writing programs, until is was shut down.  I suspect the project was suspended because technically they were committing fraud. Oops, no harm meant.  Adding a sentence: “even if they knew it wasn’t true” can’t fix the fact that eBay tests do not show any substantive disclaimer like, “This story is false.”

My philosophy is being tested here:

“People don’t want your information, they want faith..that you know what you are talking about, that this is a good product, they will be happy they listened to you…”

Faith that you are telling the truth, in other words. I want to focus on this point, not because I’m all uppity about the ethics, but because this is a critical crossroad where your choices make you a good storyteller or a brilliant storyteller.

I deeply believe all stories should be literally true, or transparently metaphorical or fiction – movies, folk tales, etc.

Untrue stories (particularly those that could have happened) are still untrue.  Lying to your customers is bad business. And, I use this inflammatory word not to insult anybody, but to grab your attention.

Two reasons I recommend you keep working until you can tell it a true story.

1.If you have to invent a story, you aren’t doing your homework.

Either, you haven’t been talking to your customers, or you haven’t tested your product yourself in real situations…whatever it is. Needing to invent a story – to take that kind of short cut – reveals a much bigger problem in that you don’t know a true story that is worth telling.   If the product is actually good, and you know your audience, then why do you need to make something up?  I think it is a warning sign.

2. Customers generalize.

If I discover you told me one untruth, I will doubt everything.  In today’s market trust is incredibly expensive to create and maintain.  The ROI of untrue stories can’t be high enough to compensate for the risk of losing trust.  Maybe it is a small risk, but Toyota having a jammed gas-pedal was also a tiny probability.

In the case of the eBay items, the fictional backstory seems harmless enough, unless it encourages anyone to tell untrue stories for any reason other than entertainment.

At least, this has been my personal experience:

One time, in New Orleans I began a keynote at a great hotel by saying, “I love this place, and I am extra happy to be here today.” I followed with a story (big surprise) about how the last time I was in that hotel I was a child, it was Easter and I was with my mother and father who had decided to take a trip to New Orleans.   I remembered that trip so vividly because in the lobby downstairs were bunnies!

Bunnies not just for show, but bunnies I could hold and pet.  I was in heaven.  There was a circle of colored corrugated cardboard and I could reach in and just pick one up. As an adult, I’m sure there was also a hotel staff member who managed that process. But I don’t remember that, I just remember burying my face in the neck of a warm soft bunny.

Later, at the client’s evening event I felt a vise-like grip pinch my elbow, I turned and a woman tugged my arm down so she could reach my ear.

“Was that true?”

“Was what true?”

Whatever it was, her tone indicated she believed it was not true. After asking a few questions I realized she figured the bunny story was adapted to lots of hotels. to unfairly suck the participants into liking me.

I didn’t blame her.  I hate it when people make up stories.  I feel demeaned and betrayed if I find out I smiled or cried or felt a strong connection – when the story wasn’t even true.

Conversation on Twitter at #TRUorNOT

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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.