Storytelling
Guest Blog: Mawy had a Yittle Yam
Feb 9th
[In response to my post on Tea Bog Beet Knee, Matthew Ritzman, a friend of mine, wrote a response that I thought worthy of more attention. Matthew and I met while he was President of the local Toastmasters club that I attended. His speeches always tied in personal stories and how they impacted him and his story below is another excellent example. Tea Bog Beet Knee was about the responsibility of the communicator to speak in a way that can be understood by his audience, this is about the other side of that coin]
The more I understand the hurdles of getting my point across the more amazed I become that any communication can happen at all. In the very best of scenarios, information is lost between the speaker and the listener.
We present our ideas and we absorb concepts, often in rapid succession. When we are the ones trying to make sense out of the senseless, there are many things we can do to help facilitate communication. One is to familiarize ourselves with the vocabulary and the ways of speaking of the other person.
My younger daughter, Josie, has developmental delays. She has a limited vocabulary, has difficulty pronouncing certain letters (she uses ‘Y’ in the place of ‘L’ and drops most of her ‘S’ sounds) and letter combinations, and speaks slowly with a very metered cadence. She seldom has the luxury of saying things in a different way, so she goes with volume and repetition. (We are actually very happy for whatever words and fragments she provides – she used to say, “EEEE, EEEE, EEEE, EEEEEEEEE” when she wanted something). We’ve found that she often says some pretty remarkable things, but we have to pay close attention and analyze her words to figure out what she’s saying.
With effort on both sides, we are often able to figure out what she’s trying to get across.
As an example, her sister, Kallan, brought home a recorder from school, and was learning, “Mary had a little lamb,” by playing it over and over. Josie, who doesn’t often string together words together came up with two complete sentences.
STOP………………. PLAY……………… THAT
STOP………………. PLAY……………… THAT
I………………………TAKE……………….EEE……………..AWAY
The long pauses between words and limited enunciation are barriers to communication, but they aren’t completely insurmountable. By understanding her patterns and the context we found the intended meaning (and the unintentional humor).
Besides merely listening to understand, another thing we can do is engage additional media. I tend to communicate best with the help of pictures. Dan Roam, in his book, _The_Back_of_the_Napkin_, discusses how drawings can break down barriers and help us identify and solve problems. He gives some useful strategies for attacking problems with pictures. Pictures can be understood in situations where language gets cumbersome.
True communication is a two way street. It really comes down to a partnership between the audience and the presenter. In fact, the best communication happens when both parties do their very best to communicate clearly as well as listening to truly understand where the other is coming from.
Lord Of The Rings – A Story from Christmas
Jan 21st
Over the Christmas holiday, a friend and I were walking to lunch after a fresh snow had fallen. While engrossed in conversation, I walked into a pile of some snow and slipped.
Mostly embarrassed, I got up and felt like something was lost. I checked my pocket for the three usual things — wallet, phone, and keys. Check. All was in order so I chalked it up to my pride being what was missing and continued on to lunch (after a little laughing about the event).
We ordered sandwiches from the deli and continued talking in earnest, when about half way through the lunch, I noticed that there was nothing solid between my fingers. No the sandwhich hadn’t disappeared, and I realized it wasn’t only my pride I had lost in the fall. My wedding ring was gone. After eliminating the sandwich as the suspect 
, my friend identified the fall as the culprit and we agreed to go look right after lunch.
When we returned to the scene of the “street theft”, we saw that they had plowed the snow and no trace of the imprint was left in the snow. We kicked around the snow abit before heading to hardware store (in the same shopping center) to see if they had a metal detector, but to no avail.
He agreed to keep his eye out for it, after all, he had recently found a key that had been lost in the snow until it melted. I returned to work, searched for a metal detector to see if there was one locally – the closest internet search came up 45 miles away. Certainly not going to cut it. Finally, I was encouraged by a collegue to try calling up a tool rental place (rather than just doing an internet search) and did so. They had one! But there were just about to close and someone else had lost their only set of keys in the snow and had rented the detector until morning. So even though it looks like everything is on the internet, it isn’t.
I woke up early on Christmas eve and my brother-in-law, Ben, was willing to head out on a very cold morning to search for the ring in the snow. Plus we were both fascinated by how metal detectors work.
We picked up the metal detector at the shop. It was beeping like a barking dog in the rental store and excitedly we took it out to the site of the fall. We started doing some basic sweeping of the street corner with no sounds. We continued to make adjustments to the depth and the sensitivity but still we couldn’t find anything metal. Eventually, Ben dropped his keys on the sidewalk to see if the metal detector would pick them up. We adjusted all of the settings but still couldn’t detect the keys without violently shaking the detector and even then only occasionally — this was not a good sign.
After trying to warm up the detector in a coffee shop to make sure it just wasn’t cold, we still had no success and returned to the rental place only to have them realize one of the batteries was loose (it worked well in the store earlier due to the shaking and the fact that metal was everywhere and the shaking caused the battery to touch sufficiently to beep). We made sure it could find keys on the sidewalk before leaving.
Back in the car, we returned to the site, glad that this time it detected a sprinkler. We found another piece of burried treasure, but we passed on digging it up since we were really only looking for one thing. Finally, by the grace of God, we wondered out into the street where there was about 2 inches of packed snow, and we heard a beep. We raked a little and the beep moved, and then, Ben reached down and pulled out the ring(s).
By all appearances, several cars had run over them, but they were intact, and with a little bending, even wearable. Though cars may run over our marriage, yet still it remains intact.
The Story Of Our Lives
Nov 2nd
This last week, my wife and I were taking a bus ride between two cities and the bus had a movie going. I recognized the movie as Inkheart, but couldn’t hear any of the sound as the earphone jack was not functioning. My resulting, rather loose, understanding of the movie is that the main character can read books and bring them to life — the result, a bunch of characters from all time trying to stop some bad guy, or at least, that’s what I put together. Turns out audio significantly helps in the comprehension of movies.
Nevertheless, I have been thinking about how each of our lives is a story in and of itself. Similar to novels that have several plot lines going on in parallel at the beginning only to bring them together as threads that eventually are woven into the tapestry of the story, our lives and the lives of our friends, and the lives of complete strangers are all threads of a grand narrative.
We all reflect back on our lives in a narrative form. How often do you think of yourself as a fact and figure or as a statistic? When picturing your birth do you just picture the fact of the location, or have you synthesized a picture of a hospital based on your knowledge of your birth. Even engineers don’t live their lives in the abstraction of facts and figures, we live them as an ongoing story with plot lines still left unfulfilled. And when we close on one part of the story, it is inevitable that a new part is opening up. We communicate with stories to share experiences with our friends and we listen to and enjoy many stories in books and movies. Imagine a movie of facts and figures…
We watch our lives as movies, we reflect on them as narratives and what is amazing is the billions of stories that have gone on before we were even born and the billions that are going on even now with all of us around us. As we share our lives with each other, we feed the tapestry of life.
This strong connection to stories should resonate with any one desiring to communicate with their team, with their customers, with their friends, but many have slowly given control of this art form to the television, movies or YouTube. Stories are the bedrock of comprehension for us as humans and as such, we should become talented at this increasingly lost art.
Experiences versus Possessions: Stories Matter
Oct 6th
We communicate with stories because they are richer experiences and objects or things. I found this study interesting because it actually helps demonstrate the difference in regard to the impact of buying an experience versus buying an object. When things go wrong, it has a bigger impact, but it also has a bigger impact when things go right. Perhaps this is why we get much more upset at services companies for making a mistake than we do when the object we purchased breaks. Even when the object breaks, the experience we have getting it fixed carries more weight than the fact that it broke.
Any business should consider the experience of it’s customers with more weight than the product that it provides. This is what allows them to tell stories about your business.
Personally, it is an indicator that we should invest in experiences over simple material possessions. These are the things that stay with us long after the purchase. Plus, you know you want to have a story to tell your great grandkids 40 times over.
The Cost of a Story
Sep 26th
Since stories are inherently valuable for so many purposes, I’ve come to start looking at bad experiences as simply stories that come with a cost. Some stories are extremely expensive – having a complication in surgery, being stuck in the middle of nowhere after running out of gas and getting a flat tire.
In most of these cases you survive to tell the story, and the more harrying the experience, the more regaling the story. In this way, some of the best stories, are the most expensive to acquire. Of course, I don’t recommend collecting stories where you don’t survive.
When times are tough, it’s good to remember not only that it won’t always be this way, but that the story you are now taking part in,will be useful to yourself and others. It’s not all bad and those who get to receive the gift of your story will thank you (unless you keep giving the same one to them over and over and over again. ).
The Power of Stories
Sep 23rd
Jose lived with his wife and children in Madrid. One morning, after a family breakfast, Jose grabbed his umbrella and left for the office. In Madrid, it rains every day and Jose had to fight his way through the wet traffic yet again.
You probably read this and thought: “Yes, and?”. If I had simply stated:
In Madrid, it rains every day.
You are more likely to object. And if you were really insistent, you might head over to a local weather site and check it out. But when information is presented in the form of a story, we simulate the information rather than question whether the facts are true. Much of this stems from the so-called Suspension of Disbelief that we enter into when enjoying a story. We all know Matt Damon is not a janitor at MIT solving extraordinarily difficult math equations, yet we put that objection aside and just enjoy the show.
This gives stories an extra ability to persuade, but also allows us to learn far more from them. For instance, firefighters tell each other stories of things they have experienced so that others can know how to respond in similar circumstances. When those circumstances arise, they can very quickly recall the story and act accordingly. This is far more effective than simply giving a set of facts to memorize.
There are people who can memorize a deck of cards in under 30 seconds and remember the order perfectly because they tell themselves a story about the cards. We remember stories, we simulate them and they become part of our experience. Ever watch a tense movie and have your adrenal glands kick in? That’s simulation. Ever have your adrenal glands kick in from watching someone read a power point presentation? Not usually (unless you managed to weave a story in your mind that gets you excited).
When we plan for the future, we plan with stories. We picture what it will look like to have this or that and what work will be required to get us there. We are hard wired for stories: both learning from them and telling them.
I think that powerful story telling is becoming a lost art in our modern culture. Partially because of the shear number of distractions in the world around us, and partially because people don’t spend the time telling stories. We waste our time on stories that carry little merit but are entertaining and ignore stories that have significance — ones we can learn from.
This gap I think provides an opportunity for us as leaders. Share your stories so that others can benefit, tell stories to help instruct others, and listen to good stories so that you can learn as well.