The Power of Storytelling - Part 2

In part 2 of this Quality Grind Podcast episode, we continue our visit with Dr. Andrew Black about how storytelling can enhance knowledge transfer, engage teams, and simplify complex information in regulated life science environments. 

The episode features a practical example where Andy guides Mike in refining a story from his career, illustrating the five-element framework of storytelling. The conversation also touches on the use of storytelling in coaching, mentoring, and networking.

Listen in to learn how to turn complex regulations into clear, memorable connection points.

Connect with our guest! You can reach out to Andy through his website, www.andrewblackconsulting.com, or connect with him on LinkedIn (Andrew Black PhD).

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 28 The Power of Storytelling - Part 2

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! Time to continue our visit with Dr. Andrew 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 [00:01:00] having teed up the five element framework, can I somehow follow Andy's lead to create my own impactful story?!? Ah, the cliffhanger...

Let's pick up the conversation there with part two of The Power of Storytelling with Dr. Andy Black, here on the Grind.

Andrew Black: 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.

So I was thinking we might play this out with a story that you have, Mike, and so I could, this is how it would work with a client help coach them up.

So would you be willing to play along with me? And I can help you tell a story and put it into this framework.

Mike Kent: Absolutely. I'm game. Let's do this. [00:02:00] Yeah.

Andrew Black: What have you got for me? What do you want to talk about today? What would be a story that would be worth, that you might use that would be worth developing for you?

Mike Kent: Well, I think given the environment and landscape that a lot of folks might find themselves in now with regulated life sciences and navigating their own personal situation, the one story that comes to mind for me is how I ended up not where I wanted to be, but where I needed to be that I didn't know I need, needed to go in order to get where I ultimately wanted to be. And so

Andrew Black: Sounds a little conceptual. Let's make it a little bit more finite.

Mike Kent: We're gonna make it finite. Yeah.

Andrew Black: It sounds like the main character is Mike Kent, is that right?

Mike Kent: [00:03:00] Yep.

Andrew Black: So we're looking, and you talked about how, I think the headline for me and what you said was something about how the path that you ended up being on was not necessarily the path you expected to be on that. Did I get that right from your comments?

Mike Kent: Yep.

Andrew Black: Okay. So what was the starting point or what I would call the inciting incident? Where did this, what was the thing that happened that caused there to be a question for you?

Mike Kent: I ended up getting laid off from my job in San Diego, and my objective was to get back to Denver, Colorado, where my son was living with his mom. He was starting high school and I wanted to get back to Denver so I could be there and be present while he was going through high school.

Andrew Black: Okay, great. What I love about this already is the inciting [00:04:00] incident is not only clear, it's actually kind of dramatic. It doesn't have to be. Although that idea about, you know, we have studies we can't get people enrolled in, I mean, there's a certain kind of drama. The more dramatic the inciting incident is, the more interesting the story is gonna be.

And there's a clear question, which is, could I get back to Denver so that I can be with my son?

Mike Kent: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Black: Is that right?

Mike Kent: Yeah.

Andrew Black: What were some of the obstacles that presented themselves or the challenges that presented themselves as you pursued that, tried to answer that question about getting back to Denver to be with your son? What happened?

Mike Kent: Yeah. Exploring opportunities in Denver was fruitless. There's not a, there was not an awful lot of opportunities available there, if any, and things had kind of dried up a little bit in San Diego, surprisingly at the time. So, [00:05:00] the quandary really was, okay, how do I navigate this? A) maintaining an income and B) finding it very challenging to secure an opportunity in the Denver metro area so that I could actually get back there.

Andrew Black: Okay, great. So it's great. So we have a complicating factor, and the story as I would say, the story escalates because there's this financial income issue. I like the word 'fruitless'. 'Dried up'. Your language is describing a barren landscape. Everybody, for those listeners, everybody doesn't have to be quite as poetic as Mike is, but he is modeling. And I don't think you necessarily consider yourself a poet, do you, Mike, or do you?

Mike Kent: No. I dabble in writing music, but...

Andrew Black: Yes. So just your natural language is helping to create, you know, a complex [00:06:00] environment. So then what was the next thing that happened after that? So it was fruitless in Denver, then what?

Mike Kent: I found an opportunity, or really an opportunity found me in the San Francisco Bay area. And that was the one and only job opening that presented itself, and eventually moved its way towards an offer letter. So I'm being presented with this opportunity to go to San Francisco and continue to actually like, be able to pay my bills and put food on the table and et cetera, but it's not where I really want to be.

And knowing that it's probably a two to three year minimum commitment if I take this. What does that do [00:07:00] for the ultimate goal of being present for my son while he is going through high school?

Andrew Black: So we have like a detour, uh, I'll call it a detour that

Mike Kent: Yep.

Andrew Black: itself where you, uh, have an opportunity to, uh, stabilize yourself financially and be stable, but it's gonna be a two to three year commitment, and it's not, does not appear to be directly on the path of being in Denver, which is where your son is, which is ultimately what your goal is.

Mike Kent: Right.

Andrew Black: conflict and a decision here. So what did you decide to do, Mike?

Mike Kent: I took the opportunity in San Francisco. I chose the path of, well, I need to have a job, but I need to have an income and this is what's available. And there was a very small part of me that trusted that, and there was a very big part of me that was resentful that that was the only thing that came about.

Andrew Black: Wow. [00:08:00] Yeah, great. You're being revealing about your sort of interior state, right? You know, when you use the word resentful, there's a certain kind of edge of anger. So your willingness to be open and authentic, and expressing the feelings that were going on with you as you had this experience is actually part of what makes the story powerful and then allows people to relate to it. Because most of us have had situations that made it this feel a little irritated by what was going on, or felt like it, that something that was presenting wasn't exactly the way we might've wanted it to be. 

So you took the job, then what? What was next?

Mike Kent: I took the job and had a, a rough onboarding process. Uh, just the acceptance of being somewhere that I frankly didn't want to be, that didn't feel right. And what I [00:09:00] found over the course of the time I spent there was that those situations led me to have experiences that were formative and incredibly powerful.

And what it resulted in was me having to look at some things in my life that I hadn't looked at for a while. And it was actually life changing in some pretty dramatic ways. I'll just say that. I know that's a rare situation and I'm very grateful for it. But that was really what happened.

And from there, I forged my absolute [00:10:00] commitment to get back to Denver, come hell or high water, by the time my son started his senior year. So, knowing it was a two to three year commitment, two to three years, two years in, I said, look, this is apparently where I needed to be. Now it's about getting to be where I know I need to be next.

And that really anchored some things for me. That allowed me to eventually in June of 2019, arrive in Denver just in front of my son's senior year.

Andrew Black: Wow.

Mike Kent: And be there for him. And we all know what happened in March of 2020. COVID hit and every, the world changed. And I was lucky enough to be there during that timeframe for him, and actually set up my own consulting business, and [00:11:00] created more of what I wanted and more of what I even expected there to be once I got to Colorado, right, because I was there...

Andrew Black: Wonderful.

Mike Kent: Because I had been in San Francisco.

Andrew Black: I'm gonna tell you that I don't feel like you need a whole lot of help with the story structure. You pretty much got it down. And I will say this, of course, I was prompting you with questions, which, using the narrative framework, that is a story. And that actually helped you to organize the narrative in a way that mapped to the framework.

What was the sort of the lesson or the takeaway for you from this whole experience? If you were gonna tell us the moral or the point, what would you say it was?

Mike Kent: The point of the story really comes down to one of, you know, a phrase that I like to use because of that situation is that recognizing that 'sometimes [00:12:00] I have to go left to get right'.

Andrew Black: Yeah.

Mike Kent: And, you know, I may not be able to do what I absolutely want in the moment, but when an opportunity's presented, maybe that there's a reason behind that.

And I didn't understand that reason until after I had been there. So a little bit more trust and trust in myself. Trust that the process, if you will. But you know, that for me was an example that still kind of frames how I go about things is that try and be a bit more receptive to what's out in front rather than trying to control everything along those lines.

Does wonderful. that make sense?

Andrew Black: It makes perfect sense. Yeah, it's clear [00:13:00] as a bell.

So you've got a great story, right? You know, you've got the main character is Mike Kent. You have this inciting incident, which is being laid off in San Diego, and you seeing that as an opportunity to be with your son.

The question that goes with that inciting incident is, "Will I be able to get to Denver?" Some of the obstacles, you know, that was fruitless in Denver. There was enough dried up in San Diego. The only opportunity that presented itself was in San Francisco, which is not where your son was. It was gonna be a two to three year commitment. But given the reality of situation you found yourself in, you elected to take the job. You had to overcome a certain amount of resentment that you had about not being where you wanted. But in the end, many of the experiences that you had while you were in San Francisco were dramatically life changing and sounds like actually positioned you [00:14:00] then to be able to secure the opportunity in Denver, which at the end of the day did allow you to be with your son in time for his senior year. And the moral of the story is sometimes you have to go left in order to go right. Did I get all that correct?

Mike Kent: That. That's it. Yeah.

Andrew Black: What I would say that the thing, well we haven't really talked about this yet, Mike, but one of the places that leaders and managers are often use stories is in coaching situations. They're coaching an employee or mentoring an employee. And this sounds like a situation that a coach might use. An employee has an opportunity that's not exactly ideal, and they're kind of waiting to, trying to figure out what to do about it. The idea that sometimes you have to go left in order to come back right is powerful. And you can say that to an employee that you're coaching or mentoring, but for you to tell me to say to them, "let me tell you a story about something [00:15:00] that happened to me", right, is gonna a powerful coaching moment, rather than simply giving, quoting the aphorism.

I won't tell the story, but one of the things that I recall as we have this conversation is that I frequently managed employees that were impatient with their rate of progress. They felt that they were ready to move to the next step and there didn't appear to be the opportunity to do that. and I a similar experience in my own career. There were a variety of different things that happened that actually allowed me to almost unexpectedly make that move, and things that I did while I was waiting that enabled me to make that move more successfully.

So when I coach or mentor employees that are feeling impatient with their rate of progress, I would frequently tell them that story about my own experience as a way of helping them [00:16:00] deal with some of their impatience and figure out strategies they could use while they were waiting.

So managers and leaders often are required to coach and mentor, and stories are a really powerful way of communicating important philosophical information about things like career growth or dealing with difficult situations, or perhaps dealing with an environment that's not as helpful as one might like, you know?

Mike Kent: Right.

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Andrew Black: So what you and I have done is kind of role play. And if [00:17:00] we were in a workshop together, what I would do is I would have everybody in the workshop identify a story and then map it to these components.

Yeah, it would be, who's the main character, what's the inciting incident and the question? What were some of the obstacles and strategies and how did it resolve? And then just organi...

The first step in telling a good story is just to get it organized in your head, right? You can do this if you're extroverted, sometimes it's helpful to talk it through with somebody else. People who are internal processors sometimes just like to sit and write it all out and have it in front of them. That's one step.

Then there's the actual telling of the story. And in a workshop, I typically create story circles. So I'm gonna go back to the example of Jacob Smith and the asset they were trying to validate. So, Jacob Smith and his partner wrote every, [00:18:00] they both had stories. They wrote everything down on a form that I provided them. Then we all got it, sat in a circle at the front of the room, and people went around and told their stories. And so Jacob told the story, right? So he had the opportunity of actually bringing it to life, having the elements organized in his own mind.

And I'm gonna say that you don't always have to write it all out or practice it the way we did it. I've told the, uh, there are a couple of stories that I've told so many times now that I could practically tell them in my sleep. I didn't write 'em all down. I just kind of told them over and over again and refined them as I went. The story that I told at the beginning of this conversation about my career, I can tell that in a variety of different ways depending on who the audience is and what I'm trying to accomplish in the story. I will say however, that if somebody for, I'll go back to the woman who was the, managed the political [00:19:00] action committee. If I were her and I knew that I had five minutes at the beginning of a workshop to make a pitch for my committee, I would wanna plan the story in advance. Uh, because I would make sure that I was really economical in the way that I told that, that I hit the marks, didn't leave anything out, and there was no confusion about what happened when.

If you're in a situation where telling a story in an effective way is sort of mission critical to achieving your objectives, I think that it's really useful to work it out in advance.

And I like to think of myself as a pretty effective storyteller. But the coaching that I have to frequently give myself is to plan my stories in advance because I discover that if I do that, they're more economical. The point comes across more effectively.

There's different... sometimes people get confused and they have to go back and start over [00:20:00] again. In some cases they leave out, unwittingly leave out an important detail and the story doesn't make sense. In my case, I have a tendency to be somewhat self-indulgent and I kind of linger over details that are not strictly necessary, and then I end up taking too much time.

So there's a variety of different ways that storytelling can go awry. And if you've planned it out in advance and maybe even practiced it with somebody... I actually won an award for my research when I was a PhD student. Part of that involved a series of questions I had to answer and I was telling stories.

So I literally got on a Zoom call with a friend of mine who practiced the whole thing in advance. Because when I went for the, in front of the jury to present my research for this award, I wanted to make sure I was crystal clear, right? So there's...

Mike Kent: Absolutely.

Andrew Black: ...nothing wrong with practicing your story in advance in a high stakes environment. And I did win the award. [00:21:00] 

Mike Kent: Oh, tremendous!

Andrew Black: The investment that I made in the practicing paid off in terms of the results that I got.

Mike Kent: And what comes to mind in that genre as well is that for professionals that are out there listening, one of the things that is important for all of us to various degrees is networking and how you interact with people. And, there are a lot of people that will say, well, practice your elevator pitch, or things along those lines.

And I wonder if there's an opportunity maybe in those environments, do you think there's an application of storytelling as part of, or the entire elevator pitch when folks are networking? As opposed to just listing a bunch of bullet points in sequence of I do this, I do this, I used [00:22:00] to do this, now I do this, blah, blah, blah.

Andrew Black: Well, yeah, absolutely. As a consultant, I'm networking all the time. So the idea that I wanna have a fresh story that I can tell, 'cause I know how interesting it's gonna be and how it's gonna position me and the mind of my viewer, is really important to me.

So just last week I did a strategic... a class on strategic planning for a group of people. So it's like this is the intervention of the week. So if I'm interacting with people who are likely to want to hire a consultant, and they say, so what are you working on these days? What are you doing? Then I can say, oh, well, let me tell you a story about a really interesting intervention I did, like last week. It was a class on strategic planning, and here's how I did it. So to have that story as a, like a symbol or a metaphor, a microcosm of all the kind of work that you do [00:23:00] is a much more interesting way of introducing yourself to a prospect. A lot of times people fumble around and they don't even know what to say because the question, interestingly enough, the question is, so what do you do? It's surprisingly hard to answer.

Mike Kent: Yes.

Andrew Black: But to go into a networking event where you know that people are likely to ask you that question, and you have a very interesting story to tell about something that you did recently, an intervention that you worked on, a project that you're managing, an asset that you are working to develop, if that's something that you're can talk about in a public forum.

To have those stories at the ready, I think is really, really powerful and serves the networking process very, very well.

Mike Kent: Yeah. Being able to connect and all of the things you talked about earlier around engaging people and synchronization [00:24:00] and, yeah. All of those principles then aid in what you're trying to do and connecting with people and engaging people in that dialogue. It feels like there's a couple of really scientifically based undercurrents that support that as a strategy.

The one thing that comes to mind in all of this is, and you've brought it up a couple of times in different contexts, is if we find ourselves tending towards a more introverted personality or style or tendencies. What are some things that in your experience can assist folks if they're finding this to be a bit challenging because it does take a bit of vulnerability and a bit of risk taking in order to share something [00:25:00] of a story as opposed to just throw facts out. There's that emotional lowering of a curtain, if you will.

Andrew Black: Let's see here. The one thing, one thing that occurs to me has to do with the concept of stage fright. People, you know, there's I think well-documented research, like are more afraid of speaking in public than they are of dying.

Mike Kent: Right. Yeah.

Andrew Black: Somebody once said, the thing about dying is after you die, you don't have to leave the podium and go back to your seat, right? 

So, one thing that I have discovered for myself, and this works for me. I can't say that I don't have any science to back this up. But when I get up in front of a group and I say, before I begin, let me tell, I'd like to tell you a story. it's funny too because at the beginning of this podcast, Mike, that was the first thing you said.

I'm gonna tell you a story, right? It's like "Once upon a time" has the same, you know. [00:26:00] So just saying to the group before I begin, I'm gonna tell you a story. That alone has a transformative effect on the audience. Because they're waiting for, everybody likes to be told the story. 

I think it alleviates your own anxiety. Stories are easy to tell. Not only are they easy for the audience to remember, they're easy for you to remember. You get up and you say, before I begin, I'm gonna tell you a story. Then that actually allows you to short circuit the stage fright that's often accompanied with presenting to a group of people in a public forum.

So I think that knowing that and having that experience of how easy it is and how it empowering it is as a rhetorical strategy, I think is gonna make a difference for people. I think you wanna try it out in low stakes environments first, right? You know, if you might wanna try it with your own [00:27:00] internal team before you try it with the senior executives and get comfortable with it and see how it goes.

You might wanna get feed feedback. So you tell the story to your team and then you talk to a colleague on the team and you say, well, how did that work for you? And hear, get a little feedback on how it worked and if there's anything that would've made it better, right? So you can develop your capability gradually so that when you are in higher stakes environments, you have done it already in lower stakes, safer environments, and then you feel more comfortable with it. 

Mike Kent: Okay,

I think there's a real authenticity that shows up that I think also gives credence to building that relationship and that connection with people, which ultimately is coming back to one of the points we talked about right at the outset. Being able to connect with [00:28:00] individuals allows us to potentially influence their behavior, influence their decisions, or at least inform their decisions and their behavior in our high stakes environment from a performance standpoint, which is absolutely critical.

Andrew Black: I think this may be is worth, as a closing thought is that, in the 21st century we are awash with, we are overwhelmed with data. When I did that presentation for the biopharma on the, to the project managers, one of the clients requested that I talk about how to present on technical content.

And I asked the client to send me a sample of what they were talking about. So this guy sent me a slide deck about a drug that was in clinical trials which is the kind of content that normally would be presented [00:29:00] on. And it was indecipherable to me and I, um, I have a PhD. So I'm used to dealing with content that a lot of people would consider indecipherable, and this was like a whole new level of indecipherable. And so we're awash with data, and trying to make sense of all the data that we have is like, it feels like it's overwhelming.

So from a historical perspective, before the scientific revolution, the only way that people had to make sense of the world around them was by telling stories.

So there are the myths. Apollo and Hera and Zeus were all stories that the Greeks and the Romans told about the world around them to try to make sense. And then later the Bible became a set of stories, which among other things, provided information about how people understood God and the nature of humans' relationship to God and the world around us.

Right?

Mike Kent: Right.

Andrew Black: Then [00:30:00] the scientific revolution comes along, and Isaac Newton discovers the law of gravity and of there changes in the way the humankind processes information, and thinks about the world around them. It's almost like, well, we don't need those mythological stories anymore because now we have science to explain everything. We have facts, we have data, right?

So fast forward to the 21st century, we have so much data that we can't find it, we can't access it. And so now we're at a point where we almost have to go all the way back to the beginning. Now we need the stories. Because the stories that we tell are a way of organizing that information so that it has power, it has meaning, and the values that are associated with the information are effectively communicated to the people who are getting, who are the recipients or the audience for that narrative or for the content that's being [00:31:00] told.

So it's interesting to me in a certain way, it feels like we've come all the way back around to the beginning and once again, we get to see the power of story for communicating all the scientific information that we have.

Mike Kent: If we're gonna be successful, we have to find effective ways of taking the information we have and being able to convey it in a way that's useful for people. And that's what I think we've hit on really, really well here with the strategies and the examples and all of the information that you've provided. But more importantly, the examples that you've shown during our discussion here of how we can take all of this and turn it into stories.

And it doesn't have to be difficult or challenging or take a long time or a ton of practice in order to do. With a willingness to take that risk and start that process, we can really have some dramatic effects [00:32:00] and really allow us to be more successful in key situations. 

So, Andy, thanks so much for being here today. The discussion has been wonderful, insightful, and I think you've given folks an awful lot of practical suggestions about how they can use storytelling in different scenarios, really to improve not only the transfer, but the retention of information that's critical for us. So thank you so much for being here.

I do want to give you an opportunity to talk about what you're up to and how folks can connect with you if you're open to that and plug what you do a little bit.

Andrew Black: Well, thank you so much for that opportunity, Mike. So I am a consultant in my primary area. I have a more conventional consulting package, which involves things like strategic planning and leadership development, and coaching. But my real interest in where I feel like [00:33:00] I have special skill and deep expertise is in the area of storytelling, which is what we've been talking about today.

Uh, and I do workshops on storytelling and I can consult. And coach on storytelling as I did with Mike today. My consulting website is AndrewBlackconsulting.com. So you can find all the lines of service that I provide to my clients there. So thanks again, Mike for the opportunity to let the podcast audience know what I'm up to and how they can get ahold of me.

Mike Kent: Yeah, absolutely. Once again, Andy, thank you so much for spending some time with us here this morning on the Quality Grind Podcast. We'll provide all the contact information and links in the show notes, and we'll invite you to stay tuned for additional episodes of the Quality Grind Podcast. You can check us out at qualitygrindpodcast.com or at our website for [00:34:00] Medvacon, www.medvacon.com.

Andy, thanks so much again and hope to connect with you again soon, my friend.

Andrew Black: All right. Thanks so much, Mike.

Mike Kent: Thank you. Bye-bye.

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, 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.