Abstract
Virgin Group founder, Richard Branson, says his best ideas are sparked when he and his team sit around a campfire exchanging stories. “Telling a story is one of the best ways we have of coming up with new ideas, and also of learning about each other and our world. It’s been happening since humans first inhabited the earth,” says Branson.
Branson’s on to something. Anthropologists point to the campfire as a major milestone in human development. Once our ancestors gained control of fire, they could cook food and ward off predators at night. Campfires had another positive benefit. Instead of hunting and gathering as they did during the day, people would sit around the campfire and exchange stories. Stories informed, educated, inspired, and entertained.
In her groundbreaking research titled Embers of Society, University of Utah Anthropology Professor Polly Wiessner concludes that storytelling may have made up 80% of the fireside conversations of our ancient ancestors. 1 As people shared their personal experiences around the fire, they learned to avoid danger, to hunt more effectively as a team, and to strengthen cultural traditions. “Stories told by firelight put listeners on the same emotional wavelength, elicited understanding, trust, and sympathy, and built positive reputations for qualities like humor, congeniality, and innovation,” says Wiessner. “Through stories and discussions people collected experiences of others and accumulated knowledge of options that others had tried.” 1
Wiessner says “appetites” for firelit settings remain with us to this day. The tools we use to communicate have changed—we use PowerPoint instead of drawing paintings on cave walls—but the human brain has not. Storytelling is not something we do; storytellers are who we are.
Remarkably, the same communication skills that our ancestors admired in storytellers are the same qualities we look for today in our leaders. Your listener wants to be engaged and entertained, informed, and inspired. Since storytelling is part of who we are as humans, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the world’s most inspiring leaders value the art of story as the primary tool to deliver ideas and information.
Mastering the art of storytelling is your most powerful weapon in the war of ideas. Sharpening your storytelling skills will help you design and deliver more impactful presentations, motivate teams, inspire evangelists, and start a movement.
The science behind storytelling is now well established in the academic literature. In a 2010 paper published in The Journal of Neuroscience, Princeton University researcher Uri Hasson delivered the results of a profoundly important study on the power of story. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to study blood flow in the brain, Hasson recorded the brain activities of people telling real-life stories to another person. Hasson then measured the brain activity of people listening to the story and also scanned the brains of people resting, without hearing the story. To mirror real-life conditions as closely as possible, the speaker was asked to tell the story as if she were talking to a friend. Hasson took it one step further and asked the listeners to fill out a detailed questionnaire to measure how well they understood the story. 2
Hasson discovered that “speaker-listener neural coupling is widespread and extensive.” 2 Simply put, when telling a story, the brains of both the speaker and the listener showed remarkable patterns of activity in exactly the same areas. The 2 people were engaging in “neural coupling,” having a mind-meld. The coupling only occurred when the speaker was telling a story to the listener in a language familiar to the listener. For example, when a speaker told the story in Russian to non-Russian speakers, the coupling did not take place. Hearing and understanding a story is what caused the speaker and listener’s brains to be in sync.
Across the country in Los Angeles, Dr Paul Zak is also studying the effect of story on our brains. Specifically, he’s looking at the release of oxytocin, a social bonding molecule our brains release when feeling empathy or compassion for another person. Zak discovered that oxytocin levels in a person’s brain can be “hacked” to motivate people to cooperate. Storytelling is the key to doing so. Zak and his team of researchers found that stories captured on video raised the oxytocin level in the brains of those participants who watched the videos.
In a paper on the subject, Zak writes, By taking blood draws before and after the narrative, we found that character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis. Further, the amount of oxytocin released by the brain predicted how much people were willing to help others; for example, donating money to a charity associated with the narrative.
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Zak took his storytelling research one step further to figure out why stories have the effect they do. His research in neurobiology helps to explain why great stories typically have an element of struggle or adversity the hero must overcome. We discovered that, in order to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first sustain attention—a scarce resource in the brain—by developing tension during the narrative. If the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters, writes Zak. Enduring stories tend to share a dramatic arc in which a character struggles and eventually finds heretofore unknown abilities and uses these to triumph over adversity; my work shows that the brain is highly attracted to this story style.
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The first step in crafting your story is to get really clear on what drives you. Enthusiasm is contagious, but your listeners need to understand why you are excited about your project or idea. Part of my job is to elicit the most compelling stories from the participants I interview for my books. I used to ask them, “What are you passionate about?” The answers often served as the foundation for their speech, presentation, or conversation. A few years ago, however, I watched Steve Jobs’ last public presentation. Near the end of the keynote, Jobs paused and said, “It’s the intersection of technology and liberal arts that makes my heart sing.” 4 I turned the statement into a question. The results were amazing.
For example, I met with the CEO of a health-care company that enjoyed the backing of some of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms. The company had developed a blood test to detect and manage cancer. I asked the CEO a series of 4 questions intended to elicit an emotional response that we could use to create the company narrative. The answers to the first 3 questions didn’t trigger emotion. The answers could apply to many health-care companies. Listen to what happened, though, when we reach the fourth question.
Why did you start a company? “To impact patients’ lives.”
What does your company do? “We’ve developed a tool that allows us to fight cancer with a simple blood test.”
What are you passionate about? “Patient care.”
What makes your heart sing?
“We were working with an oncologist who told us about a patient they had diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It had spread everywhere. The patient was told she had 2 months to live. There was no hope. Her oncologist knew about our blood test and decided to give it a try. The test results had successfully found the mutation of the patient’s cancer. The mutations were inconsistent with pancreatic cancer. The patient had ovarian cancer. Her oncologist changed the treatment. In 12 weeks she had no detectable cancer. These stories keep me burning the midnight oil and working through the night.”
Reflect on what had happened in the previous conversation. The first 3 questions elicited factual responses. The fourth question—What makes your heart sing?—triggered a story. Facts alone don’t inspire. The heart of your story gives facts their soul. Fact-filled PowerPoint presentations do not win hearts and minds; stories do. Presentations complement the story, but the story must come first.
Three Types of Time-Tested Stories
There are 3 types of story you can—and should—incorporate in your next presentation intended to change hearts and minds: stories about yourself, about others, or about the organization.
Stories About Personal Experiences
These are the easiest stories to find and, in many cases, have the most impact. Human rights attorney and author, Bryan Stevenson, received the longest standing ovation of any TED Talk in the conference’s history. Watch Stevenson’s presentation on TED.com and you’ll notice that he tells 3 stories. Each story is about an incident that happened to him that relates back to the theme—injustices in the American penal system. Stevenson tells a humorous story about his grandmother, a touching story about meeting Rosa Parks, and an inspiring story about a janitor who gave Stevenson hope when he was tired and frustrated.
The story about Stevenson’s grandmother is especially valuable as a lesson in storytelling. The story begins when Stevenson was 11 years old. His grandmother pulled him aside one day and said, “Bryan, you’re special.” She asked him to make a promise—never to drink alcohol in his life. He was just a kid, so he accepted. Here’s how Stevenson concludes the story: When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this 6 pack of beer—I don’t know where he got it—and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods. And we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did. And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some, and they offered it to me. I said, “No, no, no. That’s okay. You all go ahead. I’m not going to have any beer.” My brother…looked at me real hard and he said, “Oh, I hope you’re not still hung up on that conversation Mama had with you. Mama tells all the grandkids that they’re special.” I’m going to admit something to you. I’m 52 years old, and I’m going to admit to you that I’ve never had a drop of alcohol. I don’t say that because I think that’s virtuous; I say that because there is power in identity.
Over the course of the story (which only takes about 60 seconds to tell), the audience laughed, they were touched, moved, and inspired to listen to more. “Narrative is hugely powerful in effective communication,” Stevenson told me in an interview after that TED talk. 5 Stevenson chooses stories that are relevant to the topic, of course, but also repeats stories that are personal. By telling a story about his grandmother, he’s breaking down walls between speaker and audience so they can bind over common ground. After all, nearly everyone has a grandmother.
Aristotle—the father of persuasion—believed that persuasion cannot occur in the absence of 3 elements: ethos (character), logos (rational appeal), and pathos (emotion). When Stevenson talked about his experience as an attorney who took death row appeals, he demonstrated his ethos. When he delivered the data about how many people are unjustly incarcerated, he provided the logos. But a full 65% of Stevenson’s presentation fell under Pathos—story. In 18 minutes, he inspired his audience to donate a combined $1 million to his nonprofit—without asking.
I’m not suggesting that 65% of your next presentation should be personal stories. But I’d argue that many business presentations are 99% logos (data, facts, figures) and 1% emotion. There’s plenty of room to bring the two into balance.
Stories About Other People
If you don’t have a relevant personal story, a case study also works well. Your listeners crave real stories of real customers who have benefited from your product, service, or company. Your listeners crave real stories of real people who you or your organization has helped.
Adam Braun is the founder of Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit organization that builds schools in the developing world. Braun’s fundraising efforts are meant to convince wealthy donors to write big checks. The challenge, of course, is to persuade people to contribute money to faceless and nameless children on the other side of the world. Braun’s solution is to put a face and a name to those children so donors could “meet” them and get to know them as real people. And nothing comes closer to a real face-to-face meeting than video.
Three little girls whom Braun met in the small village of Pha Theung, Laos, would provide the jaw-dropping moment that Braun’s pitch required. In March 2009, Braun was scouting the location for the organization’s first preschool. Most families in the village lived in bamboo huts on less than $2 a day. Braun stumbled upon 3 little girls in one of the huts, playing with letters on a chalkboard. They wanted to learn but had no teachers and no classroom. Their names were Nuth, Nith, and Tamund.
Braun took out a smartphone and recorded a short video. In the video, Braun can be heard off-camera asking, “Jao seu nyang?” (What’s your name?). The girls answer, smile, and giggle to each other. Braun pans the camera around to show the empty site where his organization was going to build the school. “You’re going to be our first preschool students,” Braun tells the girls as they giggle and smile.
Braun inserts the 40-second video into his PowerPoint presentations, which is always a hit with the audience. Braun told me, There’s an authenticity to the footage because it’s not super high quality and it’s in the first person. You feel as though you are witnessing a special moment. The video is less than 1 minute long and it’s a powerful element for drawing out an emotional response.
Once the video clip ends in Braun’s presentation, he advances to a slide that shows a photograph taken 4 months later, showing the same girls smiling and learning in their first classroom.
Braun’s presentation isn’t all story; he delivers facts and figures about the organization’s financial stability to audiences of potential donors because it’s what they think they want to hear. But while the facts and figures might draw a nod of affirmation, they have yet to elicit a standing ovation. The video does—every time.
Signature Stories About Your Organization
When L. L. Bean ended its legendary lifetime return policy, employees and customers were outraged. Why? After all, very few companies offer lifetime returns. The policy change sparked a controversy because it went to the heart of the brand’s story. The narrative had been a part of the culture since its founding in 1912 when Leon L. Bean, a rugged Maine outdoorsman, made a waterproof boot for hunting and fishing. The first ones he sold had a design defect. Bean gave every customer their money back. The legendary guarantee was born and the story became part of the brand’s folklore. L. L. Bean learned not to mess with a brand’s story.
The Leon L. Bean story is called a signature story. It’s not necessarily an origin story—about how the company or organization was founded. Rather, a signature story is about a significant event in the organization’s history that reflects today’s values and mission.
Recently, I met with a vice president of Medtronic, maker of health instruments and medical devices. He told me that new employees don’t always know about a signature event in the company’s history.
The story begins in 1949, when Earl Bakken ran a medical equipment repair shop in Minnesota. His shop had 8 employees who worked in a garage for the first 12 years (today Medtronic has thousands of employees in 140 countries). Bakken and his team repaired pacemakers—huge, electronic pacemakers had to plug into the wall to keep patients alive.
On October 31, 1957, a massive blackout took out power in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Patients died, including a baby who was hooked up to an electronic pacemaker. Earl was so disturbed that he took up the challenge to build something better. Over 4 weeks, he created the first battery-powered pacemaker. Once it was tested and approved, Earl was walking through the hospital and noticed a child wearing a battery-powered pacemaker, with the freedom to play and just be a kid.
The mission statement he wrote, based on that experience, remains the company’s North Star more than 50 years later. The company’s objective is to research, design, and manufacture instruments that alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life. Stories about brand origins are irresistible.
A venture capitalist behind some of the most iconic names in start-up history once told me, “Storytellers have an unfair competitive advantage.” He’s right. A healthy relationship in the workplace is based on mutual trust and admiration. Stories break down walls. Stories build up trust. Stories also connect people in a profound way. Storytellers influence one another to dream bigger and move mountains. The end of one story is the start of another. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato once said, “Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.” Plato meant that the stories themselves create, inspire, and guide others to play the hero in their own life narrative.
Walt Disney once said that storytellers instill hope again, and again, and again. Storytellers give us hope, and hope is a universal desire.