Influence People With Story

Why Stories Matter

We are storytelling machines because that’s how our brain works. The way we understand ourselves, the way our mind selects certain memories and not other memories, is because we’re always constructing a story of the past, the potential future, and how the present fits into that narrative. The result of that is a couple of things. Number one is: even among scientists, I notice, those who are able to explain the story of their field, what they do, and break it down out of the jargon of their language into language that regular people can understand — they’re often the ones who understand their field the best. I didn’t feel I understood the problems that I was trying to investigate nearly as well as I did once I had written out the story of what the nature of the problem is: “This is why people have struggled in the past. These are the solutions that we’ve had and why they didn’t work, and this is where I think solutions may come from.” My brain works that way. Your brain works that way, and I think it’s the way we get to clarity.

The second reason that matters is if you want to influence people, you have to be able to not just tell them what to do. You have to tell them why. And the “why” is a story. It’s a story that has a beginning, a middle, an end. It has an understanding and a set of hypotheses about cause and effect. It is open to revision and error and adjustment. You’re putting yourself on the line when you tell a story because you’re conveying how you think things really work. That’s the only way we’re able to bring others on board with us. If you just tell people to do something, they’ll do it. They won’t necessarily change the way they do things. They won’t necessarily believe in what you’re trying to do until they’re able to incorporate it into their own story.

Centering the Human Element

Telling a story is hard work. The story becomes interesting as soon as you introduce the human element of: there’s a real person doing work. This is the real challenges that they face. This is how they overcome them. If you want to tell the story of how something’s happened in your organization, that means needing to understand: What are the struggles of people trying to do the work at the front line? What are they encountering in the real world? How did they cope, and how did they address those issues and problems? That makes the work real suddenly. It helps others learn what they’re up against. Every time I’ve done this, it’s never been as simple as, “Go find me a story.” The story comes because there are people who you can express genuine interest in who are explaining how they got something extraordinary done. Or how they wrestled with a difficult problem. Or how they are actually just delivering the day-to-day work that you do. It comes alive as soon as you bring in the human beings. You show a face, a person who came from somewhere, the people that they are encountering, and what they have had to learn and do along the way.