Storytelling versus psychic pain
Moving communication from the kids' table
I had to destroy my family’s finances before I saw what had been there all along: narrative. I had been studying it and using it, as a writer. It’s the only thing I really understood, but I had to make sure I did understand it, and not only for newspaper columns and novels and failed screenplays.
For a year in France I studied it. And I discovered, with my bottles of delicious wine, that narrative thinking has been at the heart of success as long as humans have communicated. It powers the films and novels and video games and television series that keep us up at night and haunt our dreams. But it goes much farther than that, even if we don’t at first recognize it. Narrative is the hidden power behind the great religions, the enduring companies, the unforgettable cities, the world’s finest charities, and most admired governments. The marketing campaigns that work, and stay with us, are based in a simple narrative pattern that anyone can learn — well, relearn. Politics, at its best and at its worst, is storytelling. The leaders who most compel and fascinate us have a master story, and everything they do and say — at their best — reinforces it.
(Noted story person, Martha Stewart)
Our brains are wired to think in narrative and to respond to narrative, to move others and to be moved by stories. It is simple and elegant and profoundly human. If we want to lead people, the most natural and compelling way to do it, and the simplest, is to invite them in with a story. But it’s more than marketing and communication. For the best of us it is the key to our strategy, at the foundation of everything we do.
Our lives, and the lives of our organizations are, in the language of story, quests. We are imperfect beings seeking perfection. In this sense, there is a simple problem each of us was born to solve. A story, your story, is easy to carry and impossible to forget. No one can take it from you.
Fortune 500 companies and startups and governments and charities and individuals with a simple and unforgettable master story have a massive advantage over those who do not. This is the value of narrative thinking: an easy, natural, distinctly human way to convince everyone around you — your employees and followers, even your mom — why you do what you do.
Most of us work: for a company, for a charity, for a government, for ourselves. Many of us will volunteer. We’ll give. Maybe we’ll fight or suffer for a cause. We will choose one career over another, one bank or university or toothpaste over another, one city or town or region to live in. What we ultimately want is for our choices, and our devotion to them, to mean something.
Narrative is the engine of meaning. If we know the story, our story, we can reinforce it every day with our decisions and the way we communicate them to the world. And the world will notice.
*
This was the core of my wine-drenched idea for a business, Story Engine. At the same time, back in Canada, my friend and former boss was thinking similar thoughts.
*
Shawn Ohler grew up on a farm outside a town of 400 called Stavely, home of the world’s first indoor rodeo. The television mini-series version of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was shot in and about Stavely, a Canadian stand-in for Holcomb, Kansas. When he was a small child, Shawn could do three-digit multiplication in his head. At the bank and at the grocery store, his parents struggled to keep him from becoming a sideshow for friends and neighbours. They would shout numbers at him across the street and he would respond with an answer almost immediately. They would pull out their calculators to see if he was right. He was right.
(Goose, on the right, was in the very good 1996 mini-series with Sir Sam Neill)
Instead of building weapons systems, software, or algorithms for hedge fund managers, Shawn went to journalism school. In the early 1990s, when most people in their early twenties were struggling to find meaningful work, Shawn broke into daily newspapers. He was an unusually colourful writer, noticing small details his older peers ignored. As a music critic he could recall concerts, statistics, boots, haircuts, set lists, lyrics and bizarre onstage banter, precise dates, and the relationships between Nirvana, Peal Jam, and Mudhoney. When he moved into long-form feature news writing, he had a beautiful understanding of what did and did not matter in a 2,000-word story. He expanded one of them into a bestselling book, 100 Days in the Jungle, which was adapted into a movie.
(on the set of 100 Days in the Jungle)
Journalists use the word story all the time. When we say, “Nice story, Lisa,” we’re almost always saying, “Lisa, your linear presentation of facts was clear and informative.” In journalism, the word “story” is a synonym for “article.” Most newspaper stories aren’t stories at all. There isn’t a narrative component, apart from a time sequence, and journalists aren’t trained to consider it. There isn’t much space in an actual newspaper anymore, and the great majority of online articles are artificially short because — according to editors — readers don’t like to read anymore. Readers don’t have time. Their attention spans are tiny. They want lists of the scariest ten birds in the world, the six fattest foods, the twelve naughtiest kittens. Radio and television news features are as short as they can be, timed to the second, with quick cuts between them. Headlines — the online “click bait” — rarely match the material.
Shawn wrote actual stories.
(Here’s Shawn with Bono in 1997)
Even his concert reviews had a narrative arc. I knew him best as my toughest and most imaginative editor, who asked questions none of the others bothered to ask. That is, story questions: Where did this come from? Who founded it and why? Is there anything new about it? What’s the change? Who took the risk? Why? What problem did it solve? I don’t want to read a pretty description of a thing just because it’s a thing: why did it happen? Why should anyone care?
After fifteen years the medium had changed so fundamentally there wasn’t much room for what he most liked to do, as a writer or as an editor. By 2006, Shawn wasn’t interested in the linear presentation of facts. He wasn’t interested in scantly informed opinions, angrily presented with a number of mixed metaphors.
Late that year, a friend in the executive search business sent me a note wondering if I knew someone in journalism — someone dead smart — who might want to work in energy. One of the clichés about the energy business is they’re brilliant public relations strategists, controlling our thoughts and desires from top-floor oak-panelled boardrooms smelling of agèd whisky. The reality is they’re historically terrible at justifying their actions beyond the obvious goal of making profits. The oil executive is a stereotype because the oil executive didn’t bother trying. I knew Shawn was unhappy at the newspaper and I knew he adored a challenge. Neither of us, at that time, knew much about the corporate world apart from working at a corporation and writing about corporations. But Shawn and I agreed, over lunch, that our most memorable interviews had been with presidents and CEOs nearing retirement. They were feisty but they were also philosophical, reflective, willing to talk about failure as honestly as success. That is, genuine leaders.
A few months later, Shawn was no longer a journalist.
For five years he worked for large corporations. He started in a marketing and communications role and veered into core strategy. When I was in France, sniffing around for a miracle, Shawn was in meetings. A lot of meetings. The culmination of four years of meetings. It wasn’t that they weren’t important. The notion of putting a group of good people in a room together to solve a problem is a wonderful one. And his co-workers were smart, often brilliant. But over time he began to feel what he calls psychic pain.
“It was when these lovely people were talking about their business, the ultimate goal of their business, the reason it existed in the first place, what they did to people, that I felt an increasingly intense psychic pain. And it wasn’t even their fault. It was how everyone, in every industry, worked. It was the language of strategic planning, of traditional marketing and branding, of mission-vision-values. It was where pillars and beacons took decision-makers, where value statements, dream statements, and visioning statements took them. Not to a place of strength but a place, ultimately, that meant nothing. They had been led into meaninglessness by expensive processes and they — we — were trying to make decisions based on passive language, on clichés and jargon and banalities wrapped in pretty design.
“It wasn’t just aesthetic. It wasn’t just spiritual or cultural. It was dangerous and pervaded every business function, a leader’s ability to lead. Language led to decisions. And since this language was totally at odds with what people were thinking and feeling, with their instincts, what did that say about the decisions we were making? And selfishly: it was language I had to use. If you don’t start using the language yourself, you’re not part of the club. It led me, and everyone I knew, to superficial complexity. We were making worse decisions, not better ones, and I knew we weren’t alone. I knew every business is doing this, or at least most of them. Read any job ad, for anywhere, and you see it. And I started to think: there has to be a better way.”
(Here’s Shawn teaching people to escape psychic pain and embrace narrative)
In large organizations, the marketing and communications people are usually in a box. They're at the end of the hall or on that other floor, separated from finance, from human resources, from product design, even from sales and business development. They’re at the kids’ table. At executive meetings, their job is either to translate for the customer or to prevent public relations disasters. How do you prevent public relations disasters? By saying nothing meaningful. In order to fit in at the adults’ table, these creative people mimic business jargon. They don’t take risks. They don’t use their imaginations. They don’t ask hard questions. They don’t create anything.
While this is humiliating and limiting for marketing and communications people, it’s also dangerous. It wastes money and time. The great organizations, the ones you’ve heard of, connect all business functions. They don’t separate marketing and finance, communications and product design by some invisible wall that seemed to make sense in 1951.
Those great organizations do something else.
*
Shawn began exploring other ways to get at the truth of what the organization did to its customers. What made the place different? Did it have a “corporate culture,” and did that phrase make any sense at all? At the same time, he had to lead an effort to make decisions and create stuff based on what he felt and what everyone felt, in their hearts, was somewhere between pointless and a good try. He wanted to marry marketing and everything else, so the organization didn’t do or say anything that wasn’t based in a fundamental truth — a story that bound everyone and everything.
So he became, in his words, a pain in the ass. He began to push for something different, even if he wasn’t sure himself what that something different looked like. He knew what didn’t work.
“I felt like a story person smashing up against a non-story world, the corporate world, that so desperately needed story.”
He talked about story and, for a retreat, his company hired consultants who claimed to teach corporations and leaders how to use narrative. Shawn was thrilled. This is what he had been looking for. The day arrived and the consultants put the vice-presidents and the CEO in a semi-circle and handed them small percussive instruments and told them to “tell their personal story” through the magic of the drum.
(nerds in a café)
At about this time, I returned to Canada from France. I told Shawn about wine and my idea. Shawn told me about language and drumming and his idea. It was just about the same idea.