Once Upon A Time...A Podcast Episode About Corporate Storytelling

When we tell stories – whether its to our children, our work colleagues, or our neighbour’s cousin – we help others make sense of what is, and what is not, important. That means storytelling is how we make sense of life. 

Stories are everywhere in organizations

Given that stories play such a critical role in provide meaning, they have forever been part of how humans engage with one another. So, it’s natural that every organization is a hotbed of stories. And, we’re not just talking about those stories crafted in, or spread with the assistance of, a public relations department. For decades corporate storytelling has been shown to emotionally connect people – often a prerequisite for exceptional productivity and performance – and create loyalty to employers. Across industries, stories and storytelling has become recognized as a key management tool to help in sales, marketing, project management, risk management, and organizational development. 

Why stories resonate

But why are stories compelling? Why do they stick with us long after we’ve heard them? Why are they an essential part of an employee communicator’s toolkit? According to Paul Smith, the author of several books on the art and science of storytelling, “Recent cognitive studies have found that stories stimulate the logical and emotional parts of the brain. In other words, according to Smith, that means “we’re hardwired to respond to stories”. 

Storytelling 101

We sat down recently with Smith, who trains leaders/managers on how to become better corporate storytellers, and discussed the issues Fearless Communicators face in harnessing stories and storytelling in organizations. Here are some of things we covered in our lively 50-minute conversation:

• The components of a great story
• Skills and traits of a great storyteller 
• Using stories and storytelling to navigate change 
• Dealing with leaders who think they’re great storytellers 
• How to capture corporate stories
• Storytelling metrics
• Dealing with negative stories (i.e. rumours) 
• The shelf-life of stories (and COVID-19)
• The 10 stories all leaders should have in their repertoire

 Nuggets of Wisdom

Some nuggets of wisdom from Paul about storytelling:

• Use stories to illustrate and inspire
• Structure stories with a specific objective in mind

Some nuggets of wisdom from Paul about stories:

• Keep your stories short and succinct
• Include an emotional element in stories
• When possible, include a surprise ending

Surprise Ending

We may think of storytelling as a one-way communications exercise – after all, the word ‘telling’ is in the name. But, the most effective storytellers deliberately build in listening throughout the process of crafting, testing, honing, telling, and re-telling stories. To make your corporate stories and storytelling as effective as possible, make sure you inject listening.

**Exclusive for listeners of The Swear Jar: You can get a 20% at LeadwithaStory.com (by entering the code, LAUNCH).**

Transcript

Elizabeth Williams : 0:14

Hi everyone and welcome to the swear jar. The official podcast at the Academy of business communications where we tell it like it is about corporate and employee communications, and use occasionally colorful language to raise money for worthy causes. My name is Elizabeth Williams.

Andrew Brown : 0:27

And I'm Andrew Brown. Today we're going to talk about corporate stories. So we'll tackle how to tell great stories, what makes great stories and of course, storytelling as a means to achieve organizational goals.

Elizabeth Williams : 0:42

And we are going to be drawing on the insights from our very special guest Paul Smith. Paul is a business storytelling coach and author of many books such as lead with a story sell with a story 10 stories great leaders tell and even parenting with a story. He spent 20 years with Procter and Gamble and then he did a crazy thing. And I will let you all tell you that story. So welcome Paul to the swear jar. Tell us about your crazy thing and why organizations need good storytellers.

Paul Smith : 1:07

Thanks for having me on. Well, the crazy thing was leaving my cushy corporate job in my mid 40s, yet too young for retirement and with a wife and two kids and college funds to build and all that to leave all of that and become an author and a speaker and trainer on storytelling, which you know, to my father sounds like a crazy idea, but it's been absolutely the best decision ever made. So I'm pretty happy with that. Why should organizations look to storytelling and good storytellers? The most important reason is that it works. It works so well and better than just about any other form of communication to accomplish your mission, your conversational objective. You know, humans just seem to be hardwired for stories and they communicate much more effectively. The underlying reason behind that is a very physiological one, right? So it turns out and we just learned this the last few decades from the cognitive science that's been done and Is that human beings don't make the rational logical reasons that we'd all like to think that we do. Right? It turns out that we make subconscious, emotional, sometimes irrational decisions in one place in our brain. And then a few nanoseconds later and another place in our brain, we rationalize that decision in logical terms. So we leave a decision, thinking that we've made it for only the rational, logical reason. But the truth is many times our our subconscious emotional brain has decided for us and we're just trying to catch up. So stories just happened to be particularly well suited to reach both sides of the brain, not just one which our normal mode of communication only reaches that one logical conscious thinking part of the brain stories can help you connect with the other side and you need both. If you want to be as effective of a communicator as you can be.

Andrew Brown : 2:51

I think all of our listeners want to be as effective communicators as they possibly can. So that makes sense to me. Maybe you can help put some meat on the bones by sharing a story that you think is great. And then we'll deconstruct it into the components that absolutely have to be there, in order for there to be a great story.

Paul Smith : 3:15

Corporate values are one thing that professional communicators often have to impart to the organization. So the company's ethics and values and culture. And the way we typically do that is we come up with a corporate value statement, and we type it up and it's on pretty paper, and it's got seven points on it or whatever, and we send it everybody and it ends up in file drawers and probably doesn't see the light of day. That's not the most effective way to communicate company values. You have to have it, it's a good starting place, but it's probably not the right endpoint. So a better way is to communicate each of your values with a story and a great story can communicate multiple values in a way that people will remember longer, they'll act on it more frequently, they'll be able to share it with other people. So for example, Imagine you worked at the company Walmart, right? And it's your first week on the job. And maybe in addition to giving you their corporate value statement, one of your boss just tells you a story about the founder of the company, Sam Walton, whose name you probably all recognize. And the story would be about back in the 1980s, when Walmart was rapidly becoming one of the biggest retailers in the state of Texas in the US, the largest retailer was a company called htb. He but grocery chain until about 1985, or six, and that's when Walmart overtook HDB and became the largest retailer in the state of Texas and just about everywhere else. So what happened was the CEO of ATP, a guy named Charles but the great grandson of the founder, literally called Sam Walton on the phone in Arkansas, and said two things. First, he said, congratulations, you're now the largest retailer in the state of Texas and my family's company has been for decades until now. And secondly, I'd love to know how you did it. Like you're clearly doing something right. I'd love to bring my leadership team to your head. quarters on a learning mission and just learn what we can now of course, Sam Walton would have been within his rights to just tell the guy to shut off right? I mean, you're my competitor, I'm not telling you a damn thing, right? But he didn't. What he said was, well, I don't know what I can teach you but I'll be happy to try. So they literally made an appointment for the all these executives to fly to Arkansas and meet him at a local Walmart store. So on the appointed day, at the appointed hour, the all these executives show up in suits and start walking around looking for Sam Walton. And they find him at the end of this aisle. And so they start marching up the aisle and Sam holds his hand up and stops them. He says Charles, I'll be with you in just a minute. I'm talking to this young woman. He was trying to sell her an ironing board cover and like he was literally like, you know, telling her about all the different color patterns and quality and thickness and different prices and eventually she got satisfied with one and put it in her buggy and you know, pushed off the register. Sam Walton then turns around to Charles but and says Charles, do you know how many worn out ironing board covers there are In this country, we're gonna sell a million of them this month. Now, what can I tell you about retail? First of all, they probably learned a lot just watching him sell that ironing board cover. But the point of sharing the story with you is imagine you're that employee at Walmart. It's your first day and somebody told you that story. Let me just ask both of you, what lessons would you learn about the corporate values at Walmart?

Elizabeth Williams : 6:24

The customer centric nature of the organization comes through loud and clear in that

Paul Smith : 6:31

right customers number one, what what else do something else strike you?

Elizabeth Williams : 6:34

The very top of the house, the leadership team is as focused on the customer as the frontline.

Andrew Brown : 6:41

You know what, Paul, I was actually listening for different elements of the story rather than the lesson. So okay, come back to that. So I was looking for something very specific.

Paul Smith : 6:51

Yes, Elizabeth, those two are correct. And if we spent another 10 minutes deconstructing the story, you'd probably come up with four or five others of lessons that You learned about what is valued at Walmart. And that's the point is that story illustrates the value that the customer is number one at Walmart, they could tell you that the customer is number one, but you wouldn't really know what that means. But hearing a story about the CEO, who made another CEO, and that CEOs entire leadership team, who'd flown hundreds of miles and who'd been invited to meet with him at that moment, he made them wait, while he took care of a customer. I mean, that speaks volumes about what is meant by the customer is number one. Even in a situation like this, the customer comes first stories do a much better job of communicating company values than simply a values statement. And a good story like that can illustrate multiple values. But if you don't have good stories like that, you probably don't have a strong set of company values because values are just words on a piece of paper until they're tested in a moment like that. And that's what a story does. For you, it shares that moment and lets people evaluate it. When you

Andrew Brown : 8:03

tell that story, Paul, it reminds me that the distinction between the story and the telling of the story can often get blurred. I liken it to in a ballet, there's the music and the dance. And you can't separate the two or it's very tough. And I was listening for some components or structural things in the way that you were telling your story. And you can tell me Have I got these wrong they are, but these seem to be some of those elements that helped propel the story and make it compelling. So one of the things is that in telling the story, you made it very physical. You use the words like marching up that he held his hand out, he turned around, so you really made it very physical. For a listener to understand. One of the other things that jumped out to me was that you created a tension. You talked about a recognized goal. You created a sense of mystery. And you made this very human. So those to me seem to scream out as elements of the story. And in the way that you told the story. Tell me as you see it as a storyteller, what are some of the things that make that a compelling story and the way you told it to compelling?

Paul Smith : 9:22

First of all, A+ for your observational skills? I think those are all very correct, and that those are certainly elements of a good story. And there probably dozens of elements of storytelling, and I try to focus on what I think are the most important ones when I teach my audience, the few that I would mention to you that maybe come to the top of my list, first of all, a recognizing that this is a moment that a story should be told, recognizing when to tell a story and when not to tell a story, because it's not all the time, like you shouldn't be telling stories all day long. In fact, I think it's only about 10 to 15% of the time. Is it appropriate to share a story the other 85 to 90% of the time, you're just talking to people the way you normally talk to people,

Andrew Brown : 10:02

But, what's an ear mark for knowing when to tell a story?

Paul Smith : 10:05

Well, first of all, if you don't have a good story to tell, it's never a good time to tell a story. Don't Don't tell a story, if all you've got are lousy stories, it's a good time to tell a story when somebody isn't understanding the point that you're trying to make. And you need an illustration of it. So that's often what storytelling is, is a concrete example of the theoretical nebulous concept that you're trying to get across to people, other good times, or when you're trying to motivate them, like yeah, they get it but they're not motivated to go do what I want them to do. So I need to I want to share a story that will help motivate my audience or illustrate my vision in a way that they they needed illustrated or their stories you can tell to get people to be more collaborative together. So there are lots of different purposes. And Elizabeth, I think you're reading lead with a story now. So I think there's 20 some odd different types of leadership challenges where leaders need to tell stories and I'm happy to share, you know what some of those are, in general, it's a communication technique. That will bring clarity to nebulous ideas and abstract ideas.

Elizabeth Williams : 11:06

One of the things that communicators really struggle with a lot when we're trying to communicate something like values is they are nebulous, they are squishy, right? So if one of your corporate values is the customer always comes first. It's an easy thing to put on a coffee mug, but it's a really difficult thing, sometimes to dimensionalize. And I think that is one of the most important takeaways for why we want to put that into our mix as communications professionals.

Paul Smith : 11:31

I like that deal. He goes on a coffee mug easily but you need the story for people to understand it. Andrew, I think back to your question. So a recognize when a story needs to be told B. Tell the right story. So you need to have a repertoire of stories to tell or you or when it's time to tell a story. Guess what, you got nothing. Your chambers are blank and your gun right? You need a large repertoire of stories to draw. And so I think leaders need to develop consciously and intentionally develop a repertoire of stories to be able to accomplish their leadership. two objectives. But once you've gotten past those two, you know that I need a story right now, and I've got exactly the right story to tell, then there are techniques you can use to craft a better story. And I think that's what you were listening for in my story. So those are things like does the story have a good structure to it? Is there some emotional engagement in the story? Is there a surprise, you know, hopefully a surprise ending? Is there dialogue, sufficient amount of detail for me to feel like I was there? I think you mentioned something like that. Those are different techniques that we could get into however much detail you want to get into to how to accomplish those things. But there are definitely techniques to storytelling that make stories more effective than others.

Elizabeth Williams : 12:37

Perfect. As you mentioned, I'm just finishing up the lead with a storybook. And you rightly remind me that I started at the beginning and I have many more after read to catch up to you. And in it, I was really struck by all the great stories, particularly from Procter and Gamble, but also Pizza Hut, and Nokia. And I'm wondering, hopefully not putting you on the spot here. Who is your favorite corporate story? storyteller and why?

Paul Smith : 13:01

It's somebody I'm pretty sure I mentioned him in the book in that first book. His name is Jim Bendel. And he's retired now but he was the Procter and Gamble corporate storyteller. There was and maybe still is today, one person out of the 80,000 some odd people are 120,000 when I was there people whose job was the corporate storyteller, and he got that he was the first and only one at the time corporate storyteller, and he got that title. So he was a statistician, he worked in the research and development department. And every month he had to write a memo to his bosses basically explaining what he's done all month. Right. So here's the research I did. And here are my conclusions and that kind of thing. And of course, there are 10s of thousands of other researchers writing these Brian boring memos that only an engineer could appreciate. And he got bored with that. So one day, instead of writing his normal, boring corporate research memo, he wrote a story and he gave it these whimsical fictional character names like executive's and sell a case and max profit, you know the finance person. And you know, he gave these corporate titles, funny names. And he had his characters go through some ordeal. And the ordeal taught them the lesson. That is the same as the lesson he learned from his analysis that month. So instead of explaining what he learned over the course of doing research for a month with all the statistics and data and the way that everybody else did it, he made up a story that illustrated what he learned. And his bosses loved it. He was the only one writing stories and so they would share it with their peers and their bosses. And so every month he started getting this bigger and bigger readership of people reading his memos, even people that didn't work in his department, and eventually he became one of the most widely read and recognized and influential people in the company. Now the CEO would want to read his monthly memo, and so they eventually appointed in the corporate storyteller, and that fascinated me and I'm sure there was a more than a tinge of jealousy in there. I want To be that person. And so I set about trying to learn the art in the science of storytelling after that he definitely one of my favorites.

Elizabeth Williams : 15:06

Well, that's a great story about storytellers. What would you say are the top three or four skills that a great corporate storyteller needs to have?

Paul Smith : 15:15

First of all, I think I've mentioned this having a large repertoire of stories. It's hard to be a great storyteller. If you don't have good stories to tell. You need to be consciously mentally filing away these stories so that you have lots of good stories to tell at a moment's notice. I think being able to tell us a story short and succinctly makes one a good storyteller. So these these stories ought to be two or three or four minutes five at the most right, these are not long stories that you tell around the office. If you're telling 10 or 15 minute stories, you're probably not a great storyteller. great storytellers have stories that resonate with people emotionally they connect with them on an emotional human level. So that that I think makes you a good storyteller. The surprise ending to I think that's certainly stories with a great surprise ending is very memorable component of story. So naturally gifted storytellers kind of do this somehow by second nature. Most of us have to study that art and intentionally put those things in. But that's exactly why I do what I do for living is teach people those tricks of the trade so that you can craft great stories, even if you're not a naturally gifted storyteller.

Andrew Brown : 16:18

We've all gone to presentations. We've all been in venues when we feel connected to the stories because of great storytelling. And it always seems to me as if there's that combination of skills, but there's also sometimes are qualities that great storytellers have. And I'm wondering if beyond the skills are the qualities that you've seen time and time again, in great storytellers, that's the morphus the qualities things like curiosity, or empathy. When you look back at storytellers, they have those traits as well.

Paul Smith : 16:55

I'll give you a few things that I think is on my list and a few things that you might expect to be that are in Not. So being curious, of course, is is always helps out in almost any venue in life, the difference between people who always seem to have a great story to tell and people who don't. I used to think that it was, well, those people just lead a more interesting life than it right. They just always got some interesting story to tell. But I don't believe that anymore. I think all of us have interesting things that happened in life. And many of the stories we tell shouldn't even be about us anyway. They're about other people. So now what I've concluded is that, in addition to being curious that, like you mentioned is that good storytellers are just observant. They notice when something interesting happens and mentally register it as Oh, that's an interesting story. I'll tell someday when it's appropriate. 10 other people saw the same thing happen, but the good storyteller will remember it and tell other people about it. So that's the big difference. What's not on my list that people often think would be or should be, is that I don't think of what makes a great storyteller is oh, you know, they're, they've got a good resonant voice. And they make good eye contact and they seem to know naturally what to do with their hands and they're charismatic and engaging. And you know, those things are nice. If you tell a story using all of those kind of world delivery techniques, will it make your story better? Of course, you don't need that. Right? The story is more important than the delivery when you're talking about the kind of leadership you know, sales marketing stories I'm talking about. If you're a professional speaker or an actor, yeah, you better nail that stuff where you get you'll get booed off stage. But most of us aren't professional speakers and actors. We're just people who work. And so people don't expect the perfection and delivery when you're telling a story, but they do expect you to tell them an interesting story that will help them so if you deliver a story with the performance that would make a Shakespearean actor proud, but it wasn't the right story to tell and didn't help your audience. They will never forgive you for wasting their time. Right. The story is more important than the delivery.

Elizabeth Williams : 18:57

One of the things that Andrew and I do a lot of work. Working is around change communications, right and particularly in larger organizations that the change never stops. And I'm wondering about the role of stories in helping people navigate through change. So more than just the setting values and you know, communicating policy, our stories have a useful thing when we are in the midst of change.

Paul Smith : 19:21

Yeah, in fact, there's two or three types of stories that I think help you navigate a major change. And the first one is the case for change. Why is there a problem? Why can't we just keep doing things the way we are now, because most people don't like change, change is different. Change is difficult. change requires effort. It's easy to just do what we're doing. So the first story, you need to tell when a change is necessary is tell the story of the problem that is happening that will convince people that the status quo is unacceptable. So that's the first story why we need to change. The second story in that chain is typically what our vision is for the future. What do we want to do differently in the future? So that we won't have the same problems that we're having now. And then after that there could be a number of different stories you might tell I've had clients who then want to tell the story of how we're going to get there, you know, what's our strategy to accomplish that other clients that want to tell the story of why you should believe us that this time it's going to work? Because I know we've had three changes in the last five years, and none of them worked. And so now we've got a credibility issue. So now we need to tell a story to help convince you that this time it's going to work. But those first two almost certainly go into that communication set for any change why we have to change and what we want to change to what is the vision,

Andrew Brown : 20:33

I gather from the leaders that you've worked with, that you've come across leaders who often assume that they are natural, great storytellers. And I'm curious knowing that some will believe that and in truth, they may not be what do you point to, in order to demonstrate to them, that perhaps they aren't as good at Storytelling as they think they are,

Paul Smith : 21:03

What an interesting question. So fortunately, most of the leaders I work with have the opposite problem. They assume that they're just terrible at telling stories. And so they're afraid to do it. They just want to stand up and read from the teleprompter or follow their message track. And they're afraid to tell stories, because they think they'll just they'll just butcher it because they don't know what they're doing. And most of them don't know what they're doing in terms of storytelling, but but that's why they're in my class, right to learn that there obviously are a few who you don't get to be in the most senior positions without having at least some ego so that yes, there are always a few who think they're better than they are. Fortunately, I don't have to tell them, you know, you're not nearly as good of a storyteller as you seem to think you are. Because the way I conduct the class as well, they'll find that out pretty quickly because everybody that comes to class has to share a story. And then the rest of us critique the story. So not just me, but everybody in class, and we do it in a productive way. So it's okay, here's what we liked about your story. Here's what worked. Here's what made the story hang together based on all the techniques that we've learned during the day. But here are the parts that didn't really work that well. And here's the specific technique change that we would recommend to help you make that story better. And if you have a leader in there who shares a story, and there are, here's two things we liked about it, and there's 15 things we think you could do better, it'll become pretty obvious to them that it wasn't the best story in the world. And they're hearing that from a bunch of people they know and trust and care about who are sharing that feedback, a because they have to, that's what we're doing in this class. And B, they're doing it because they want to help them be a better storyteller. So it's a pretty safe environment. It does

Andrew Brown : 22:32

sound like a safe environment, sometimes within organizations that because of egos because of constraints put on leaders because of their own reputation or credibility gaps, it may not be quite as safe. How would you suggest to an employee communications person or an HR person, hey, you've got to let them know they're not that good at storytelling.

Paul Smith : 22:53

So you could call me and I'll have that conversation with them. That's part of my job, but just like any sensitive question, conversation, you want to do it in private, you certainly wouldn't want to tell them right in the middle of a staff meeting that, you know, you kind of suck at storytelling, and at the same time you would offer them as a good corporate communications person would know some solutions, you know. So Elizabeth, you could let them borrow the book that you have, here's one solution, or we could go take this class, or we could watch some videos or whatever, you personally can coach them a little bit. So you always want to have a solution handy and to deliver it in private.

Elizabeth Williams : 23:23

One of the things that struck me your advice that leaders need to have a repertoire of stories? And I guess the thing I wonder about is, how do we go about collecting stories individually, of course, we've got the stories we all tell that we remember and we tell over and over again until our children beg us to stop but in a corporate context, I think want to make sure that we're collecting stories, we're keeping them we're curating them and we're not letting them dwindle. How do you collect corporate stories? Great question.

Paul Smith : 23:56

There are a number of different ways and have clients who do it all kinds of different ways. Some Have a really sophisticated ones literally have computer databases where they write the stories down or their VHS tape, somebody's telling the story. And they literally have a database where they capture these stories. And there are actually some online solutions for that, literally story databases where you can capture the story in any whatever format you have others more rely on their own memory. But what they do is they spend time encouraging people to share them. And so they'll do clever things like once a month, they'll have story circle, which basically means we've randomly invited 30 employees to have a pizza lunch, and we'll order pizza for everybody. And there's only two rules for the next hour in this room. One is your pizza or whatever you want to eat, and to share stories. But that's all you're allowed to do. You're not allowed to talk about your current business problem or your barbecue this weekend or whatever. You just need to share stories, stories about work that will generate a bunch of stories and you can assign a note taker to record them somehow. Personally, I literally capture my stories in a single Microsoft Word. Word document in bullet point form. So the answer to the eight most important questions which I don't think we've talked about that yet, but there are eight questions that I coach people that your story needs to answer. And in this particular order to have a well structured story, well, I just capture the eight bullet points with a title on it. And then a page later is another story. And so I can literally go into this one document and search for what was that story about Sam Walton or the ironing board covers or something I just, you know, type ironing board cover and boom, that story comes up. So to me, that's my personal way of doing it. But there are there certainly others as well.

Elizabeth Williams : 25:34

You know, you've collected more than 3000 organizational stories over the years. And given how much our leaders love numbers. I'm wondering, is there a way that organizations and leaders can use metrics to understand the effectiveness of stories communicators are always being pushed to measure what we do?

Paul Smith : 25:53

Yeah, I know it's the bane of all of our existence is trying to financially quantify the benefit of our hearts and And sorry, my answer will probably be frustrating or the same as any corporate communications person is, is I know anecdotally that it works because my clients tell me it works. But what I haven't seen, there have been some academics who've tried to quantify it. And they've documented that stories make facts between six and 22 times more likely to be remembered if they're embedded in a story. And there's never been a company I would imagine in the history of the world who has said, You know what, starting Monday, we're all going to start telling stories, but we're not going to change anything else about our business for the next six months, and then we'll see what happens. It's just never happened. So there's really not a good way to say ah, see 5000 people started telling stories on Monday and by Wednesday, our sales doubled or something like that's just not gonna happen. But what I do have is literally hundreds of executive clients who tell me Wow, I am so much more effective as a leader now, now that I am practiced at this art of storytelling and my people are more clear on my objectives there are more eager and willing to follow my leadership. I seem to To be a more charismatic and engaging leader, and this is like clearly the only thing I've changed. And so talk to somebody who knows a great storyteller around the office. And they will tell you, I want that skill set because I see the way people listen to and look at and follow that person who's a great leader and how could that not be effective in an organization?

Andrew Brown : 27:23

All the discussion I think so far, that we've talked about stories and storytelling begins with an assumption that these are very positive or purpose driven stories that we're hoping people to become better at delivering. There's a deliberateness to them. There's also a dark side of story tellings and stories. And in reality, during catastrophic changes within organizations, often negative stories arise often in the form of rumors. So there you have compelling stories and they are Often rooted in fear, misinformation, bias and a spreading thread an organization like wildfire, right? So what makes rumors such compelling stories and from a storytelling perspective? What actions? Can you tell an HR professional or comms professional? What can you tell them to do to address these stories? Like do we carpet bomb them with other stories? Do we had to undermine the stories? Do we attempt to dislodge them? Do we torpedo the tellers and the shares of the rumors? So how do we use storytellers to make good of bad stories?

Paul Smith : 28:39

Let me answer the second question first, while it's still fresh in my mind, and all except for the last one that you just mentioned, are certainly fair game. I would never recommend undermining the person who shared the story. I don't think that's a generally good practice, and I probably wouldn't use the word carpet bombing. But in general, you can't stop people from telling stories, right? You just cannot issue by either. Thou shalt not tell this story, this bad story ever again, right? It's hard to offset it simply with a set of facts, the best way to get rid of a bad story is to replace it with a good story. So you've got to find and create that story. So if people are telling a bad story about how the company responded to some situation, I mean, if it's a false if it's not true, of course, that's when you would just simply go in and say, Look, this isn't true. Okay, here are the real facts. So the story you're hearing is simply not true. Probably there's some truth to it, though most stories have some truth in them. That's how they got started. The way you get rid of them is by replacing them with more interesting, good stories that address the same topic and scratch the same itch. That's what gets into your first question is why are these stories so interesting that people want to keep telling them and that's because they're kind of salacious? You know, you tune into a podcast called the swear jar and you're expecting people to drop the F bomb. I'm kind of waiting for both of you. Do that, you know? We haven't. Exactly so I've dropped a couple of not so terrible swear words so far and you didn't yell at me. So I'm getting a little braver in the next one might be a little worse and right so we're naturally attracted to train wrecks and salacious material and people getting fired and like the, you know, scandalous rumors, and so you need stories that have some of that component, it's just that it was a good result instead of a bad result, and then people will want to tell that story instead of the bad story.

Elizabeth Williams : 30:30

Let's address the story sucking elephant in the room right now, which is of course COVID-19. And we're recording this in early May of 2020. And we're just seeing our clients are starting to emerge from from the lockdown. And, and they are actually starting to tell their own stories about what happened to them to their clients, to their customers to their employees during this I'm wondering in your mind is it I feel a sense of urgency around collecting those stories on behalf of our clients because I feel like they might go away if we don't collect them and start telling them now two stories expire later, what's the shelf life of one of these?

Paul Smith : 31:12

They do. But for a couple of very different reasons, a story could could use your word expire. If people just forget about it, people retire, they move on. And so the story is just gone, because nobody captured it and wrote it down. Which is exactly why you need to capture them in more of a tangible database fashion, like we talked about earlier. The other reason you might say they would expire is that they just become no longer useful. So people could keep telling them, but they wouldn't be working any longer. Because while the Times have changed, there are better examples of that. Now, it's just an irrelevant story now, so it just doesn't do you any good to keep telling. In fact, it just kind of bores people now, and that's why you need to constantly be collecting more stories, because some of them will expire all the time for both of those reasons. To your first point. Yes, I agree with you. We should be careful during some of these, you know, COVID-19 crisis stories now, because surely, a year from now or two years from now, or 10 years from now, when something similar happens, we're going to want to look back and be able to tell people what we did, right what we did wrong, how these things impacted people. And we're going to wonder, and if somebody didn't have the foresight to write these things down or capture them, somehow, it's going to be unfortunate.

Elizabeth Williams : 32:23

It feels like there's probably a good opportunity to use these covert stories to contribute to the way we understand organizational culture, and values. And I'm interested in how stories work in terms of defining culture and helping to inculcate values, whether COVID related or not.

Paul Smith : 32:42

So one example would be the Sam Walton story that I shared with you earlier. I'll give you another one here that is about a crisis situation. So it's not a disease crisis, but a similar crisis situation and you'll be able to see the corporate values playing out in this situation. So this one was a company called BK. Finance, which was an online lending platform in London back around the year 2000 with the.com bubble and burst. And so it was a very small business. 25 employees, the owner and founder of the company is guy named Andrew Morefield, and something happened to him and that company, which happens to a lot of fledgling companies, and that is at one point, they ran out of cash. All right, so he literally didn't have enough money to make payroll. And so he had a decision. Well, what am I going to do, and what he did about it was, he called all 25 employees into a room. He sat them down, he went up to the whiteboard, he wrote a number at the top of the whiteboard. He said, that was our bank account balance at the beginning of the month. And then he wrote two numbers underneath that. And he said, those are the revenues and expenses that we'll be getting during the month and having to pay during the month to keep running the company. And he drew a line underneath that he did the math and put the answer at the bottom and he circled that number he said so that is how much money we're going to have in the bank at the end of the month to pay all of your salaries. Then right next to it. He wrote another number and he circled it. He said, and that is how much all of your salaries add up to. And then he just stood there, and let them take in the dire consequences of what they saw in front of them. Because the number on the right was three times the size of the number on the left. So the salaries added up to three times as much as the bank would have in it to pay them. Well, that's a problem, right? And so then he asked them, so if you were me, what would you do about this? Of course, he saw this coming for the last week or two. So he had plenty of time to think ahead of time, what would be the fairest thing to do? Well, you know, should I lay off two thirds of the staff, you know, furlough two thirds of people, or should I cut everybody's salary by two thirds? And that, by the way, the second thing was what he thought was the fairest thing to do. But he didn't tell them that. He asked them, What would you do if you were me? And they thought about it and talked about it amongst themselves for 10 to 15 minutes, and they came to the conclusion, much to his horror, we think two thirds of the people in this room should not get paid this month and the other one third should get one 100% of their salary. And he was just aghast at that he's like, How on earth am I going to decide which two thirds of you not to pay? And that's when they surprised him a second time. They said, well, you don't have to, we'll decide amongst ourselves go out in the hallway, give us 15 minutes. So he did. He went out there. And of course, he's thinking, Well, you know, what are they going to decide? And he assumed, well, they're going to decide like I thought all along, he would like them to pay everybody a 37. They'll probably decide that the senior executives who are wealthier they can probably afford to, you know, skip a paycheck or two, they'll be fine. But the, you know, the junior people, the new hires, they're probably living paycheck to paycheck, I probably need to pay them. So that's what he went back in assuming they'd say, and that's when they surprised him a third time. They said, we think you should pay the executives all of their salaries, and the junior folks should get nothing. And again, he's like, why are people nuts? Like, why would you decide that? And it was a young 20 something new hire who was telling him this is the decision of the group, and we're all in unanimous agreement to and they explained that. Look, I'm 23 years old. I will Live with a couple of my best friends downtown in an apartment month to month rent. I can literally leave tomorrow and go live with my parents for the next couple of months, I'll be fine. But these executives, she's a single mom, she's got two kids at home, that guy's got a mortgage and college funds to build, we just don't have that kind of debt service will be fine. And so, you know, he honored that decision and paid them that way. Now, you know, two months later, the business turned around, everybody got caught up and everything was fine. But the point is, hearing this crisis moment, he did something two or three things that I think is worth communications professionals of taking note of, first of all, if anybody ever told a story with five numbers, it was Andrew Morefield on that day, right. He brilliantly told a story about the bank account with five numbers on a whiteboard, and like good storytelling. There was a surprise ending there was some emotional engagement. And importantly, he let the audience draw the conclusion which is what you do in good storytelling. You don't tell people how to think about it. The story when you're done, you tell them the story and let them decide how to think about the story. He did all of that with numbers on a whiteboard. So he was a brilliant use of storytelling. Alright. But secondly, notice that instead of him telling them what the corporate CEOs decision was, he asked them, What would you do if you were me? And the brilliance of that is two things. First of all, your people might give you a better idea than you had on your own. And in that case, they did. But even if they don't have a better idea, nine times out of 10. If you've hired smart people, they're going to tell you what you've already decided you're going to do anyway, because they're smart like you, they're going to come to the same conclusion. And how much easier is it to tell a group of people, I'm going to have to furlough two thirds of you or I'm going to have to cut two thirds of your pay. If they just told you. If I were you, I would cut my pay by two thirds. It's very easy to do. But if you haven't given them the chance to weigh into the decision, and you're just telling them, Hey, I'm the boss, I'm cutting your pay by two thirds. That's a hard sell. But if you've given them a chance to weigh in and tell you what they would do, it just makes it so much easier. So there's a lot of lessons, I think, to learn from that one story.

Elizabeth Williams : 38:13

Yeah, because you hear in that story, very quickly, you understand the company culture, you understand that leaders values, the employees values, the shared values, but not so shared values, and also the the whole power of a small number of numbers. I had a boss once whose mantra was no five numbers. And so even though there were a million things on the corporate dashboard, every employee in the organization, this was a 30,000 person organization, just had to know these five metrics and what they meant.

Andrew Brown : 38:44

I listened to that story. And of course, I'm listening to you telling the story as well as I'm curious about how the story was told as well. One of the things that is a theme with all of our clients and all the work that we do with clients is helping people listen to stories. rupture in listening. And storytelling is very much a listening process as much as it is a telling process in that story just related to a senior executive built in listening. Now he built listening into and dovetail that with decision making, right, he could have listened to their input and denied their decision making authority. So he dovetailed both. But from our perspective he built in listening into the successful telling of that story.

Paul Smith : 39:35

I think that's it. Yeah, that's a good observation that I hadn't made before. I appreciate you adding that. And I recognized you know, that's a story about a company of 25 people, not 30,000. So you certainly wouldn't want your CEO going on to a 30,000 person webcast and asking for their input right at that moment. But you could do that at the department level manager level. So you push down the deployment of the crisis response and let the people at that level. Collect back to that kind of input and then tell people what's going to happen. Because again, probably the same thing, you're going to have people in the room that tell them, I would do exactly what you are about Transcribed by https://otter.ai