The Lost Art of Storytelling

by Bob Chartier

Leaders need to re-connect with storytelling. They need to re-learn how to talk to people, rather than present to them.

Take the recent federal election campaign. Rather than classic oratory and sharing who they were, we saw party leaders with speaking points surrounded by a gaggle of journalists commenting on whether or not they ‘stayed on message’. There was no raising our sights, inspiring us with a vision, or even telling a story that helped us connect with who they were.

How many of us have sat in the room as the boss steps up to the podium. Perhaps it is the middle of tough times, our hearts are in our throats and we need to hear from her a vision of success, a sense of true purpose, a glimmer of hope.

She reaches down and flicks on the PowerPoint.

We are now ‘on message’, keying into the twelve speaking points, and our hearts go back deep in our chests where they hope to avoid further damage.

Public speaking is a crucial aspect of leadership. But it is right up there with jumping off a bridge with a rubber band tied to your legs in the top fears of normal human beings. The soothing confidence of user-friendly technology and the use of professional communications staff has eased the transition from speaking to presenting. Storytelling now has an image problem. It's for kids, right? It's not professional. It sounds pretty touchy-feely.

Get over it.

The trouble is, elves and technology have taken over the leader's role. Elves are the people who put the words in your mouth. They draft the message, craft the speaking notes, write the briefing note to your boss. They want to please. They want to protect you and they want no mistakes and no controversy.

And we have technology. "We can put this whole thing together for you in a great PowerPoint. As you stand there in the dark, hit the button (or have an elf hit it for you), there will be no mistakes, the i's will be dotted and the t's crossed and the font will be your favourite. The presentation will flow."

Susan was working for a senior director who needed to talk to a large group of stakeholders – about leadership. He chose presentation over talking to them. Susan drew the short straw, and had to build the PowerPoint. It just about put her under. Each effort was bounced back with frustration and anger. Once it was: "this font will never do and I hate that background colour." Susan nearly lost it when a draft was thrown back at her with: "this thing has no passion, get some passion into it!"

She wanted to let out a career-limiting scream, "Of course there is no passion in it, you idiot, it's a PowerPoint! There is no button for passion. Passion can only come from you, your commitment, your heart, your vision, your values, your energy, your character…your true self."

Instead she went back and added a Dilbert cartoon…they always like that.

Leadership requires something deeper than perfection…the honesty of warts and all, the courage to tell stories.

Imagine a rancher communicating with the team. They gather around the back of the pickup, out comes the laptop, up pop the six speaking points for this year's feed management project and the implications of changes to regulations on the size of cow-calf operations. Not likely. Most ranchers would engage the staff in a vigorous, straightforward conversation on where the ranch was going and what we all have to do to get there. The conversation, I'll bet, would be peppered with stories. Great grandfather's stand-off with the eastern bankers at the turn of the century would re-kindle the vision of a business worth fighting for; the neighbours upcoming bankruptcy auction from BSE and our plans to buy some of their machinery and sell it back to them at cost when they're back on their feet speaks more eloquently to our values than does a pretty list of them nailed to the barn wall. There might even be a funny story about Junior and the calf that came too soon and ruined the first date he had in six months.

We might want to ask ourselves, why does communication have to look and feel so different in a boardroom than in a barnyard? After all, the amount of BS in the mix is pretty much the same.

We may have to consider that as we ‘progressed’ in the evolution of communication, we may have let slide a few of the basic necessities. I would argue that one of those essentials is the ancient art of storytelling.

Let us pry open our spring-loaded corporate minds for just a moment and consider the possibilities.

Stephen Denning wrote about his experiences using storytelling in his work on knowledge management with the World Bank. In his book The Springboard, he invites us to consider the power of the personal story to ‘springboard’ our thinking and understanding from the simplicity of the story to the complexity of the idea or challenge.

I remember listening to a speaker who was trying to help the audience understand the nature of a ‘paradigm’ or ‘mental model’. He related the old story of a group of stone-age people who were hunting a large animal and had it trapped in a corner. They were throwing rocks and primitive spears at it to no serious avail. Along comes a Michael J. Fox-type character from the future, who looks at the situation and hands them a modern hunting rifle with which to finish the job. The leader takes the gun and throws it at the animal.

In their mental model of the world, you kill animals by throwing things at it. Until they could destroy or shift their mental model they were stuck. They could not learn the new technology or make the change needed to do the job better until they agreed to ‘unlearn’ the old.

I don't know about you but that little springboard story helped me get ‘mental models’ immediately. Good stories are a powerful key to new learning. There are so many different kinds of stories, all variants of the first ones told around a fire in front of a cave.

We have accounts, chronicles, histories, news reports, anecdotes, jokes, parables, myths, fables, satires and so much more. They are all just stories. Stories are the core of our history, our communication and our learning.

Good leaders have always used the good story to make a point.

Years ago the mice got tired of being pushed around and decided that they needed some leadership. A huge black cat got wind of it and campaigned for the job. He was a slick talker and a cool cat and the mice voted him in. Things didn't get any better, and mice were disappearing. They decided to hold another election. A very hip white cat ran against the black cat and won handily. Mice still continued to disappear.

In the next election there was a vicious battle for leadership between the black cat and the white cat. Each vilified their opponent and argued for their own moral superiority. There was a third candidate. It was a mouse and she had an uphill struggle to be heard with her message that asked the mice to consider an alternative to cat leadership.

That's my recollection of a story Tommy Douglas, one of the founders of the NDP, used to suggest voters should consider his party.

The art of classical oration was fundamentally based on the foundation of storytelling. If one wanted to be a good communicator and a respected leader one studied and learned the art of the story.

So what happened? Why are there no storytelling courses in the Queen's MBA program? Why is there no demand for executive storytelling sessions?

Somehow communication has become ‘managed communication’ led by the dark arts of presentation. We have been successful in our efforts to communicate great amounts of material but less skilled in our efforts to simply converse with people and deliver simple pieces of wisdom.

We spend more time and money than ever on communication programs. We hire the most talented graduates of communication programs, we spend millions on internal communication studies and we spend huge amounts on communication consultants. We are communicated to the eyeballs. And yet some believe that we are just spending more and more of our communication energy staring at a screen on our desk, a small screen in our hand or a larger screen on the wall.

I am not arguing that there is no place for this ‘managed communication’, but against the status it receives in the workplace. Communication is still one of our most important concerns, but we must realize that the entry point to communication is still conversation, and the entry point to good conversation will always be the story.

We ignore it at our peril. Actually, I have a story about that…


Bob Chartier is a federal public servant. He lives in Calgary, teaches leadership at Royal Roads University and is the author of the not so best seller, Bureaucratically Incorrect…Letters to a Young Public Servant.