The Power of Storytelling - Part 1

Let me tell you a story... about a life sciences professional who used storytelling to improve knowledge transfer, create a sense of purpose, and enhance the overall performance of their teams.

This isn't fiction. Storytelling is a tool that people have been using for thousands of years to convey important information. In this episode of the Quality Grind Podcast, Dr. Andy Black shares his experience and expertise on how we can use stories in regulated life science environments to both foster connection and improve decision-making.

And stay tuned for the exciting conclusion in Part 2 of our chat with Andy, here on The Grind!

To connect with Andy, you can follow him on LinkedIn (Andrew Black PhD), or visit his website at www.andrewblackconsulting.com.

Contact MEDVACON:

• Message us at @MedvaconLifeSciences on LinkedIn
• Visit our website at www.medvacon.com/contact
• Email us at qualitygrind@medvacon.com

Thanks for listening! Don't forget to follow us @medvacon on all platforms for updates on blogs and podcasts!

Transcript

Ep 27 The Power of Storytelling, Part 1 – Dr. Andrew Black

Jessica Taylor: [00:00:00] This is the Quality Grind Podcast presented by Medvacon. Conversations that go beyond compliance, sharing insights geared toward helping you navigate the everyday grind of regulated life science industries. Here are your hosts, Joe Toscano and Mike Kent.

Mike Kent: Welcome back to the Grind everyone. Mike Kent along with you for another episode of the Quality Grind Podcast presented by Medvacon. Let me tell you a story. Now those words always seem to create interest and curiosity and a sense of intrigue. But how can we use stories and specifically craft those stories in regulated life science environments to really be able to connect people with their work, encourage and facilitate knowledge [00:01:00] transfer and give everyone a sense of more of the why and the how we're doing our work as opposed to just the nuts and bolts of "do this".

It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Andrew Black into the Quality Grind Podcast. Andy is a PhD playwright, author, educator, keynote speaker, and storyteller - of course, given the topic - whose areas of expertise include high level instructional design, strategic planning, facilitation, executive coaching, and storytelling. Andy, it's great to have you here on the Quality Grind Podcast. Welcome, sir.

Andrew Black: Hey, Mike, it's good to be here and I've had the privilege of getting to see some of your other episodes, and I enjoyed them and found 'em really powerful. I also love the way you have used stories with some of your guests. So it's a honor to be here and to be able to share my thoughts on [00:02:00] this subject with you today.

Mike Kent: Appreciate those kind words and we're really looking forward to the discussion today.

One of the things that we're often challenged with in our industry is how do we facilitate really strong knowledge transfer and maintain that stream of information given everything that we're having to navigate. So I'm excited to hear your thoughts and learn from your experiences and expertise on that particular topic.

I wonder if you might start there by providing us a sense of your background, kind of how you found yourself in the space that you're in professionally, and talk a little bit about your "why". Why is it that this work that you do is so important to you?

Andrew Black: Well, great, Mike. Thanks for that. And it's appropriate, since the topic of our [00:03:00] conversation today is storytelling, that I would start by telling a bit of a story, the story of how I came to be here today. And in classic storytelling terms, this might be considered my origin story.

So, I live in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is the city that I was raised in. And when I graduated from high school, I went to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and I majored radio and TV. I would find my career in corporate education. At that time, still to a large extent today, one of the ways that people transmitted educational information in corporate environments was through these video programming, behavior modeling videos.

And even, you know, the kind of thing we're doing right now, of course is a video which is designed to convey information. That became my career. I worked for a construction, in a large global construction and engineering company, which is where I kind of learned about [00:04:00] design and the presentation of content in an educational setting. And eventually I went back and got a master's degree in industrial and organizational psychology so that I could make sure that I was applying the new craft that I had found my way into appropriately and correctly. So I eventually went to work for a large consulting firm, which specialized in large-scale educational interventions, primarily in the leadership space, which, actually as the venue in which you and I first crossed paths way back then.

And at a certain point in my life, there was some creative itch inside of me that was not actually being scratched by this corporate education. There was a way that I felt like I wanted to explore more creative avenues of self-expression. So I decided to, to write a play. I had [00:05:00] experimented in the theater and it was, I had been a bit of a hobbyist. So that was a logical extension of some of the things that I had already been doing. And, I wrote a play with a colleague. The two of us wrote a play together. The woman I wrote with was a woman I actually worked with in this consulting firm. And we were amazed by our success.

We wrote the play in 2001. In 2002 we were the finalist in a national playwriting contest. And in 2003 we got our first production and that little play has been produced all across the country.

Mike Kent: Wow.

Andrew Black: I'm really onto something here. So my writing partner and I would write three more plays together. We eventually landed on projects that we did not no longer really wanted to collaborate on. And at that point in time, I decided that I wanted to get an MFA in playwriting. And I had this idea that I wanted to take the knowledge that I had as an instructional designer and educator and see if I could apply it to [00:06:00] creative writing. So I went to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where I got my MFA. It was a great experience, and when I completed that, I came back to Indianapolis and I began teaching playwriting. Although I was always doing consulting as a part of my portfolio, and I was enormously successful as a teacher of playwrights. And I will say this, that I had been in playwriting classes that I didn't think were very well taught. And I think it's kind of a secret in the arts in general is that just because you're a really good painter does not make you a good teacher of painters, or just because you were a really good saxophone player does not necessarily qualify you to teach other saxophone players. And the same thing could be said of playwriting. And I did feel that my background in corporate education and my experience with instructional design was allowing me to do things in my classroom that other playwriting instructors were not doing. So I [00:07:00] had this idea that I wanted to share what I was doing well with others so they could potentially benefit from some of those insights.

But because I'm not a world famous playwright yet, you know, I'm not Neil Simon, I'm not William Shakespeare. So I thought, well, if I got a PhD and I wrote a book about playwriting that others could benefit from, maybe the fact that I had some initials after my name would qualify me in the eyes of people.

So, I pursued that path and I ended up getting a PhD in theater from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. And I'm happy to say that I was able to turn... my dissertation was on the subject of playwriting education, and I was able to turn a lot of that content into a book, which was published by Bloomsbury - I just so happen to have a copy of it right here - in July. Signature Pedagogies for the Playwriting Classroom.

And so I completed the PhD. I came back to [00:08:00] Indianapolis, and one of the things that I began to see happening in the corporate sector where I still had, uh, like one foot in the theater and then one foot in corporate education, was there was a real interest in storytelling. A lot of the practitioners that I saw who were teaching the content, I think they were doing an effective job, but I realized they didn't completely understand the science of storytelling.

I think we all intuitively or kind of inherently know that telling a story is a good idea and can be a powerful way of communicating with others. But I don't think many of us really understand how true that is and why it's true, and then how to structure the story in a way that has maximum impact. And so I saw that while I'm very interested in the theater space and continuing to work there, I think there's a very strong need in the corporate sector to provide really [00:09:00] rich and deep information about the power of storytelling, how it works, why it can be useful, and then how to deploy those skills to achieve various business outcomes. And because I have a lot of experience in corporate environments, I see how people struggle to get information across. They find themselves in situations where they're expected to communicate important information to people who are interested and they do not know how to do it in a powerful way. That's where I think the power of storytelling comes in. There's a variety of benefits to being able to tell a good story, but I really do see there's a strong need in the corporate environment for people who have to communicate important information to be able to do so in a compelling and an effective way. 

Mike Kent: What I often find in a training environment and a [00:10:00] learning environment in regulated life sciences is that scientists and engineers who are brilliant people who have information that is so incredibly useful, that's their struggle, is how to effectively communicate and connect with that person on the other side of the conversation.

And that's really where the power of storytelling has, in my own experience, been very powerful in terms of being a recipient of those stories as well as being able to provide those stories.

And just in case folks think that this is two creatives, one much more so than the other, playing around with this touchy feely subject. I want to interject something that I think is really important and was really kind of timely.

The Harvard Business Review posted on LinkedIn an article that they wrote back in 2017 [00:11:00] entitled

"Great Storytelling Connects Employees to Their Work".

 And you know, we're not talking about some one-off. This is one of the world's most respected business schools talking about this particular topic. So this is backed up by scientific evidence and really academic thought and perspective and research that illustrates the power of this. And one of the lines from that particular article is, "In every organization we've ever studied where there was a strong sense of moral motivation, the leaders were always storytellers."

And so with that as a background, let's get into a bit of the nuts and bolts, if you will, of some of those specific uses and advantages and maybe some situations where in your [00:12:00] experience, and you work with regulated life science organizations as well in a number of different capacities, so you're no stranger to this environment. Where have you found storytelling to really be powerful?

Andrew Black: Well, you know, it's interesting because 'story' is one of those words, that, uh, there are a lot of 'em out there that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

So I think it might be useful to establish what I mean. But a story is a very specific way of conveying information and there are kind of rules and, and regulations that surround the use of the story. If you wanna go ahead and tell a story,

Mike Kent: Oh no, not more rules and... not more rules and regulations. I have to poke a little bit of fun at ourselves here, that we're swimming in them already. Don't tell us that storytelling has rules and regulations, but...

Andrew Black: I should say...

Mike Kent: Please expound. Yeah.

Andrew Black: [00:13:00] ...guidelines. Yeah. Whenever you convey information. And I'm gonna acknowledge another theorist. His name is James Kinneavy who wrote a book on the aims called The Aims of Discourse. And then there are four, according to Kinneavy, there's four primary reasons that we try to convey information to people. So one of them is that we are trying to just tell people what happened. And I'm gonna use the example of, let's say that you had an automobile accident, right? So you're gonna tell the story about the automobile accident. So the purpose of this story, you call the insurance company and you have to tell 'em what happened. So when you tell that story, you're basically conveying information. The purpose is to information out a event, about an event to someone who is going use it in a particular way. So that's one of the aims of discourse.

The second aim is to persuade people of something, you want to convince them of something. So, to go back to the automobile accident example. [00:14:00] Maybe you wanna convince the insurance agent it was the other person's fault, right? So that's gonna be a different kind of story than if the aim is just to communicate what happened. So let's say then that you felt a little traumatized by the accident, right? So you go home to your spouse and you wanna tell the story of the accident. The purpose of telling that story is to kinda work through some of the associated feelings that you might have had. Maybe you felt trapped, or maybe you felt frightened. So this is called the expressive aim, right? Where you're basically processing information by telling a story. 

The fourth aim of discourse is what Kinneavy calls the literary, or the, it could be the artistic aim. So let's say that you're a performance artist and you decide that you're gonna do a performance piece about an automobile accident. The people are [00:15:00] gonna enjoy it and think it's fabulous, and it's gonna help them understand their own automobile accident. It's that they've had better, right?

So there are four different aims of discourse. So these are the different purposes for which you might use the story is a particular narrative framework in order to convey information. So there's informational, there's the persuasive, there's the expressive, and then there's the artistic or the literary, right? Okay. All different aims.

Now, in corporate environments or in business environments, people are primarily interested in the first two aims. they're not so much trying to process their feelings about something, nor are they interested in creating performance art about a project they're working on. They're either trying to convey information or they're trying to persuade people about something. And so the research suggests that if you want to, for one thing, if you want people to [00:16:00] remember what it is that you said, them a story is a very, very, very good way of communicating that information.

And there's a neurological basis for this. People have been telling stories to each other for over a hundred thousand years now. And if you'll recall the invention of the written word and the printing press and documentation is a relatively recent event in human history. Right? So before we knew how to read and write, we still knew how to tell stories.

So for a hundred thousand years we've been communicating important information about ourselves, about our communities, about the world we live in, to each other, through the telling of stories. And, evolutionary history has rewired our brain so that over all that time we actually now think, uh, we're born thinking in terms of story, the story framework.

So when you tell someone a [00:17:00] story about an event, yet I think of it as riding the horse in the direction that it's already going. You are taking advantage of the neurological pathways that are already present in the person's brain as a way of helping them remember the details of the story. So, Michael, I wanna play a little game with you here a little. I'm gonna subject you to a little quiz, if I may...

Mike Kent: Okay. Alright.

Andrew Black: I'm gonna, where did you grow up? Did you grow up in California? Am I remembering correctly?

Mike Kent: I grew up in Michigan.

Andrew Black: In Michigan. Okay. Where in Michigan did you grow up?

Mike Kent: Just north of Detroit. Small town called Oxford.

Andrew Black: Okay. I don't think I knew this about you. So I'm gonna imagine that when you were a little boy, you celebrated a holiday called Christmas. Is that correct?

Mike Kent: Yes.

Andrew Black: Okay. Now, not everybody celebrates Christmas and Christmas. The way we celebrate Christmas in the United States is different than the way people celebrated around the world.

So I'm qualifying you culturally [00:18:00] here. I'm going to imagine that part of your tradition in your family around Christmas was that on Christmas Eve you had a visitor who came and gave gifts. Is this correct? Was this part of your family tradition?

Mike Kent: It was, yep.

Andrew Black: It was. Okay. Now, who was this visitor, what was his name?

Mike Kent: Santa Claus.

Andrew Black: Santa Claus. Okay. So let me do, I'm gonna do a little Santa Claus quiz here.

Mike Kent: Okay. Let's see how I do.

Andrew Black: Yeah. Where did Santa live?

Mike Kent: At the North Pole.

Andrew Black: Okay. The North Pole. Very good. Now, uh, and what was, what's Santa Claus's main job?

Mike Kent: Delivering toys to good children on Christmas Eve.

Andrew Black: Very good, Mike.

Mike Kent: Woo hoo. Two for two.

Andrew Black: Okay. So Santa Claus has like some rather well-known helpers. Who assist him and are some of these helpers who assist him in his task?

Mike Kent: The elves and the reindeer [00:19:00] who would pull the sleigh and Mrs. Claus, who would get him ready for his all-nighter, if you will. Yeah, those are the three that come to mind.

Andrew Black: Very good. Terrific. Can you remember the names of any of the reindeer by any chance?

Mike Kent: Oh gee, wizz. Well, there's, I'm gonna start singing a song here pretty quick. You know, dancer and Dancer. Prancer and Vixen. It's August, but now I'm feeling like there should be snow falling outside.

Andrew Black: Yeah, there isnt.

Mike Kent: Prancer and Vixen. Donner and Blitzen. Um, yeah, you know, Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, Donner and Blitzen.

Andrew Black: Hey,

Mike Kent: But do you recall the most famous reindeer of all?

Andrew Black: So, I hope that the people who are listening to this podcast are playing along. I'd be surprised if they weren't. So...

Mike Kent: ...and not clicking out? Yeah.[00:20:00] 

Andrew Black: So there's a sort of a criteria or a rubric or a set of rules. I know you don't like the word rules, you've already told me that, but, um, that Santa Claus uses to decide who gets what. What's the principle here about who gets what or what, how some kids get something.

Mike Kent: Yeah. Good children get presents and children that have not been good over the year get a lump of coal.

Andrew Black: Okay. Very good. Terrific. So how old do you think you were, Mike, when you learned all these things about this fictional, gift giving character?

Mike Kent: That's a good question. Probably three or four.

Andrew Black: Okay. Three...

Mike Kent: in that range. Yeah.

Andrew Black: I think that many years have gone by since you were three or four.

Mike Kent: A few? A few. We don't do math here, but, yeah.

Andrew Black: You still remember all these details because they were told to you in the form of a story [00:21:00] about fictional character and even the details about, there's an author named Clement Moore who wrote a famous poem, which is turned into a book called The Night Before Christmas, which itemizes the names Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, and then the...

Mike Kent: Sure.

Andrew Black: Rudolph the Red Nose reindeer. Do you recall the most famous reindeer...

So these are all stories, and the reason that you are able to recall so many specific details about that, that particular character after all these years have gone by is because they were presented to you in the form of a story. Because the story will map to the neurological pathways that we already have in our brain, and make it a whole lot easier for us to remember that content.

So Santa Claus, the Myth of Santa Claus is a story that contains factual information that the child can recall years later. And it also has moral [00:22:00] information that thematically links to a lot of other information that the child is gonna get as they age about how certain actions create certain kinds of consequences.

So this is just one example of how the story framework is used in this particular situation to both facilitate memory and then also to transmit cultural information as well.

Mike Kent: Sure.

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Andrew Black: So one of the reasons that [00:23:00] storytelling is such a powerful vehicle for transmitting this information is because of the impact it has on people's memories. That's one thing.

The second thing that's important is that you can pack an awful lot of information into a small container. And it's almost like if you know how to pack a suitcase, you can put a lot in. You're able to put an awful lot of information that people will remember into a story.

Of course, you have to know how to tell it, but it's a very, very effective way of using a extremely small amount of time to have a really big impact on people. And one of the things I see over and over and over again is how people are given like five minutes in which they have to communicate something as an agenda item on, in a meeting.

I was at a meeting the other day, and it was a group of [00:24:00] realtors. Somebody who runs the political action committee came into the meeting and was making a pitch for why all these realtors should make contributions to and join those membership levels, this political action committee. And she had like five minutes. And I so wanted this woman to tell a story about the political action committee and a big success they'd had, but she didn't do it. I mean, what she did was she kind of began to recite facts and figures, right? And I tell you, I can't remember, I can't personally can't remember a single thing she said to any of those realtors. And I guarantee you, if she had told the story, I would remember the story.

So when you have a very, very small amount of time to communicate information, a story is a really, really powerful way to do it. So those are two. I'm gonna give you a third, uh, Mike, if I may.

The [00:25:00] neurological science suggests that one of the things that's important in group decision making, in group cohesion, is a concept called 'synchrony'. Now, synchrony is when people are physiologically in sync. And when people are physiologically in sync, and you know what it feels like to be in sync, it happens like at rock concerts and at football games all the time.

I mean, groups of people get in sync, right? They have a common goal, they have... There's a variety of things that can put people in sync with each other. And when a group of people are in sync, they think better, they cooperate better, they collaborate better, their decisions are better.

So one of the things that's really, really helpful when a group in a corporate environment, any kind of environment really, but in a corporate environment are working together is for them to be in sync. Physiological science lets us know that one way that people can get in [00:26:00] sync is by listening to a story together. And they have literally hook people up to biometric measures. Right. And then, so they, I don't understand the science of all this part, but you know, the electrodes in their brain and all that.

Mike Kent: Right.

Andrew Black: And then once they're all hooked up, they tell 'em a story. And by the end of the story, they're measuring their heartbeat and their respiration rates. And what they've discovered is that at the end of the story, the people who are in the experimental group are, their hearts are beating in the same cadence. They're breathing in and out in the same way at the same time.

Mike Kent: Wow.

Andrew Black: Right? So the telling of the story actually has a transformative effect on the physiology of the group that's listening to it. And believe it or not, they've actually done this studies in virtual environments. So if you tell the story in a virtual environment where the participants in the experiment are not even co-located with one another, [00:27:00] the same transformative physiological effect takes place.

Mike Kent: Wow.

Andrew Black: If you want a group to be in sync, one of the things that you can do is tell them a story.

And one of the things that I do as a training professional is I conduct workshops, and it's my practice. And I did this before 'cause I understood this intuitively and now I understand the science that goes with it. The first thing that I will do when I get in front of the group is I will say, before I begin, I'd like to tell you a story. And then I tell 'em a story. I know now that by the end of the story, the group that I'm speaking to was gonna be synchronized because of the power of story.

So whatever it was that they were thinking, you know, I don't really want to be here. I have an email I have to send. Oh, I've got that's sick at home. I wonder if they're okay. There's all these different, oh, I, I should [00:28:00] have stopped and got something at McDonald's. I'm hungry. All this chatter that's gonna distract them from hearing the message is washed away by their focusing on the story.

And there's scientific data that actually supports that. It's not just an opinion anymore, it's actually based on some science.

Mike Kent: And I think there's so much in what you've just talked about Andy, that resonates with our audience in regulated life sciences and scientists and engineers. The first thing that came to mind was no one is ever put in a situation where they only have five minutes to convey something very important. So obviously I'm being sarcastic. That happens all the time.

And so now, what I'm hoping is that folks out there that are listening, are hearing all of this and beginning to think about [00:29:00] the additional tool that they can put in their tool belt when they're in that situation.

A lot of us in our environment are charged with influencing behavior and influencing decisions, and we get into the habit of saying, well, here's the information and here are the facts. Here are my expectations and here are the rules. And we expect people to fall in line and go.

But if they have that context of what may have happened in the past, and it doesn't have to be fearmongering, it can be something positive, and in fact probably should be a situation where people acted in a certain way that was positive and this is the outcome that was achieved, can really be powerful.

The other thing that resonated with me is the opportunities we have to share that information. One story comes to mind that was particularly powerful [00:30:00] for me in a cultural aspect. When I joined a company that I went to work for a company in Columbus, Ohio, and it was a small firm and they were doing things differently and it was obvious from the start, from the interviews and once I got there that this was a different place and you know, my curiosity was peaked a little bit.

One of the things that was important that the leaders did there often was they told their origin story. And they always seemed to be able to pick the right spot, right when they wanted to reinforce that 'this is who we are, this is what we do, this is how we do things, this is why we do the things that we do, and this is where we came from'.

So they would tell the story about starting the company as four people in a small room in the basement of a building in downtown [00:31:00] Columbus, and the challenges that they faced about bumping into people behind them, you know, because they're literally two feet away. And how they grew the organization out of that, through the stories and the experiences.

And what I've realized over the years is that was not just about telling people how the company started. It was reinforcing values. It was reinforcing expectations. It was communicating how we as an organization approach and view our work. It was about the why we're doing things and those are such powerful messages.

And I think organizationally we all kind of struggle to get people to the point where they align with, or realize they're misaligned with, what the organization stands for, how they do things. [00:32:00] But that can be a really powerful tool. And that origin story about that company still resonates with me. So, a lot of connection, I think, and applicability to where we're at in the regulated life sciences.

One of the things that I can imagine might be going through folks mind at this point is, okay, this makes sense to me.

But what strategies, what advice, what points would you convey to folks who are now curious about, alright, how do I translate my experiences into some good stories and how can I use those and where might I use those from a practical sense?

Andrew Black: Well, let's see if there's a couple of different questions in there. You know, the, uh,

Mike Kent: I am famous for that, by the way. I always seem to put my guests [00:33:00] up to that. 

Andrew Black: In terms of the opportunities to tell stories, I mean, it's like, it's almost like pick, pick one. I mean, there's so many. So one of the examples that I'm remembering from that group was the, uh, an individual who led a team. This particular individual had been asked to have a meeting with a new employee. So, and I think this is a classic corporate situation where the new employee starts and they say, oh, you've gotta go ahead and talk to Jacob Smith. He's an expert on this. You're gonna be working with him. You need to get to know him. So Jacob Smith is in my, in front of me, and Jacob Smith is like, well, what am I supposed to say to this guy?

And I said, well, you need to tell him a story to get the conversation started. So what's a project that you have recently had that accurately reflects, in kind of a generic way, [00:34:00] the types of projects that you typically work on? So he came up with one, the project involved that the company had had recently acquired an asset, and they were trying to decide whether it was worth pursuing or not. And they were in a trial stage where they needed to enroll participants.

Mike Kent: Okay.

Andrew Black: They were having trouble enrolling participants. So they weren't gonna be able to decide, you know, whether to move forward with the asset or not, because they weren't gonna have the data that they needed in order to do that. So, Jacob's team decided that what they would do would be, maybe it made more sense given the asset and the challenges they were having in the United States was to enroll participants in the study from other countries to do an international enrollment process.

So there were a variety of different logistical challenges associated with making that happen, but they worked through all those challenges, and then they were able to open up study sites in three foreign countries. And not [00:35:00] only did they meet their enrollment target, they exceeded it. So they had plenty of data that they were able then to use about how to make a decision about whether to pursue the asset or not. So that was the story, right?

And, um, the, uh, um, uh, so I, after he put all the pieces together, I was able to say, so what you need to do when you have a conversation with this guy, this new employee is say to him, well, before I begin to tell you about the department, let me just tell you a quick story, is going to give you a sense of what we do in my department and how we serve the rest of the organization. To give you the flavor of that.

Mike Kent: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Black: very long to tell that story. And by the end of it, the new employee is gonna be thinking, gosh, this guy is really interesting. And they're gonna be in rapport with each other because that neurological kind of synchronization will have [00:36:00] happened. Right?

And it's a whole lot more interesting than if Jacob had gotten out a list of PowerPoint slides and a mission statement and all that other kind of stuff, right? So then at that point, um, Jacob can reverse engineer and say, now that you understand the flavor of what we do, let me give you four or five quick. Hits, right? So then he can bring out the

Mike Kent: Sure.

Andrew Black: the figures, and it's gonna make, we have this number of employees. These are the organizations we typically collaborate with. These are the four or five key activities we normally engage in. And they're all gonna make sense in the context of the story that Jacob had already told.

If you have to give an update. One of the things that I run into all the time is the project managers have to give updates to senior leaders on the status of their department or the status of their project, right? And every single time I see one of those slide decks that they have, you know, it's just like, so I can't, I mean, if they set out to stupefy [00:37:00] their senior leaders, they couldn't be doing a better job. So to start out by saying, before I begin, I'm just going to tell you a quick story about one particular challenge that we had and how we overcame it, and then I'll provide you with some of the data, right? So even like in a management update, to be able to provide a specific story about a team or a project success to get going is a very powerful choice that the person who's tasked with doing the update can make.

So there's a variety of different ways that situations where leaders and managers need to have stories at the ready, so that they can kick off an event or enroll people initially as a way of getting them engaged in content that is maybe a little bit more substantial than that.

So, Mike, having said that, let's go ahead and [00:38:00] look back at the structure. And for the purposes of this conversation, I'm gonna say there's five key elements to an effective story.

Mike Kent: Okay.

Andrew Black: So I'll review them and then I'm gonna map them to the example I used the Jacob Smith story.

There's a main character, and the reason that this is important is because we identify with the main character. So if you create a main character psychically, the person who's listening to the story is immediately gonna put themselves in the main characters' shoes.

Sometimes you have to fictionalize the main character, or maybe I'm gonna tell you a story about a client, I'm gonna call him Joe. And the audience will understand that Joe is not really the client, right, 'cause you have to maintain professionalism. You can't be telling stories in certain situations. It may have to take a little artistic license, but it's a main character.

So then there's a inciting incident. Something [00:39:00] happens that kicks off the story, that begins the adventure. And there's usually a question associated with this, right? So then you have challenges that you have to overcome, and then strategies that you use to overcome the challenges. And then finally at the end, there's a resolution. It doesn't have to be a happy one. It can be a sad one depending on the kind of story that you're telling.

Mike Kent: Okay.

Andrew Black: So to go back to Jacob Smith, so the hero of the story, the protagonist, the main character is Jacob. Right. And the inciting incident is that the biopharma gets a new asset and there are having trouble enrolling subjects into the studies to validate whether the asset is worth pursuing.

So the question is, will they be able to validate the assets or not? Right. So we have, set. Yes. Right? [00:40:00] People are already gonna be like leaning forward...

Mike Kent: ...they're leaning in. Absolutely. Yeah.

Andrew Black: So the challenge is people weren't signing up for the studies. Oh, no! So we have to go international and enroll people from other countries. But oh my gosh, there's all these challenges associated with enrolling people.

There's these rules and regulations. Pakistan is not like the United States. We have to, we have to set up an enrollment site there, right? So we did it! We overcame all these challenges! And then what was the result? We over-enrolled the study! We had more data than we even needed!

So in this very simple example, all of the five elements of the story are present. There's the main character, there's the inciting incident with a question that needs to be answered. There's challenges, strategies, and then there's a resolution.

Mike Kent: Well friends, time to reach for that bookmark as we've reached the halfway point of our visit with Dr. Andrew [00:41:00] Black, chatting about the significance of storytelling within regulated life science industries. We've explored how effectively crafted stories can enhance knowledge transfer, engage teams, and create a sense of purpose.

Andy's also illuminated the neurological impact and strategic advantages of a well-told story, including clarifying complex information, fostering connection, and improving decision making. And now having teed up the five element framework, can I somehow follow Andy's lead to create my own impactful story?!? Ah, the cliffhanger...

So join us for that and more in part two of the Power of Storytelling with Dr. Andy Black, next time here on the Grind.

Joe Toscano: If Medvacon can help you and your organization, we're happy to do so. We specialize in the following areas: Quality and Compliance, Validation and Qualification Services, [00:42:00] Project Management, Tech Transfers, General and Specialized Training Programs, Engineering Services and Talent Acquisition. If you have general questions as well, feel free to give us a call at any time.

We can easily be reached at 833-633-8226 or via our website at www.medvacon.com. Thanks so much and we look forward to speaking with you. 

Jessica Taylor: Thank you for listening to the Quality Grind Podcast presented by Medvacon. To learn more or to hear additional episodes, visit us at www.medvacon.com.