The storytellers

A good storyteller

What makes a really good storyteller? Take the protagonist of 1001 nights, Sheherzade. She was arguably one of the best storytellers of all time – even if fictional – since she managed to not only survive the sultan’s murderous habit of killing every wife at the break of dawn, but she also managed to change the sultan’s mind. At the end 1001 nights, the stories have made him see the error of his ways and he relents and is brought to his senses.

A good storyteller captivates and changes her audience.

Another, more theoretical, way of answering the question about a cgood storyteller is to turn to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. This work, that should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in politics or lobbying, sets out the key conditions for persuasion as pathos, ethos and logos – or passions, character and argument. And first of these three is character – the character of the storyteller matters.

Your story can be great, true and exciting – but if people revile you, you will never be able to tell the story at all. But if you are liked or admired, speak with passion and have a great argument you will win every time.

The reason this is important to keep in mind is that we have to be able to judge our own organization as a storyteller. We need to understand where we stand before we can figure out where to go. So, here is a small checklist to think through as you evaluate your organization.

1. What audiences are we addressing? This is a key question, since not all audiences can be addressed in the same way. We need to design our stories for the audiences we intend to captivate.
2. What are the key elements of the stories we are telling these audiences? This was the subject of the previous chapter, and remains important as we think about storytellers.
3. How do we score on character, passion and argument? This is where it is important to try to be objective, and take an outside view, and use guiding questions like:
   1. Are we the most respected company in our industry? Our region or country? If not – do we rank in the top 10%? Top 30%? Bottom 10%?
   1. How well do we connect emotionally? What do people feel about us? This is often much more important than what people think about us. Take tobacco companies – they may have arguments, but these will never be heard, because the feelings these companies arouse do not even let them get to logos. They end at both pathos and ethos tripping them up.
   1. How do we score our argument? And what could make it better? Score from 1-100.

These questions will help you understand if there are the right conditions for your organization to tell a story, or rather, what stories you can tell. Because that is also determined by your opponents!  

Not a single-player game

The storytelling metaphor implies that we have an audience and that they need to listen to our story – but this is clearly wrong. Instead we are competing with a lot of different storytellers: competitors, critics, academics, politicians, employees, ex-employees – there is no end to the number of storytellers out there.

Mapping these out is important. A storyteller map let’s you see not just which stakeholders you are operating with, but also what the gist of their story about you is. You should be able to list the storytellers in your field and the one paragraph story that they are telling about you to understand where you are and what you are up against.

As you do so you must make sure that you not just look at the different storytellers in isolation, but also understand how they reinforce each-other’s stories. Stories are not told in isolation, they are told in narrative networks that create an aggregate or emergent story that you have to deal with.

Ex-employees bashing your company may reinforce critics or politicians that criticize it and you will then find yourself in an intricate web of different storytellers all telling slightly different stories about you, where they all sum up to a master narrative about your industry or organization as a force for evil or an extractive company in local markets.

Once you have arranged the different story tellers in this network or narrative field, you need to start to understand how they connect with outside opinions. Are right-wing politicians more positive than left.-wing? Are optimists more sympathetic than pessimists? What are the dimensions on the storytelling space that you are in?

Seek granularity here – try to find not just stock narratives, but find the salient sentence or paragraph that someone has said, work from specifics and not just the generalized criticism. You need to understand your storytellers as nuanced and detailed participants in the great narrative game of politics.

Once you have this map, you need to look closer at your critics.

Equally, you will have different storytellers in your organization. If you manage this in the right way you will, at any given moment, have a storyteller stable with different storytellers for different contexts and different stories. Deploying them is actually one of the key moves that you can make in the lobbying game, and making sure that your story is told by you, and not for you, is a necessity for success.

These storytellers need to be trained and educated on at least the following things.

• The stories they are expected to tell. The best will also be coauthoring these with you, since they will know the best arguments. Experts in the organization are invaluable if they can tell stories.
• The attacks they should expect. Everyone who gets into the storyteller stable also needs a proper “murder board” where they get the harshest and hardest questions you can imagine.
• The follow ups that you want from their engagement. What is most valuable for you if these storytellers give a talk at a conference and can ask for follow up? Make sure that the stories captivate and get people to engage!

The value of critics

All organizations have critics – and organizations react differently to them. Some take issue with the fact that they are criticized and seek to attack or marginalize their critics, and seek conflict rather than anything else. Some try to embrace their critics, and almost seem to masochistically agree with the criticism while wringing their hands and saying that they do not know how to change. The range of responses to criticism teaches you a lot about an industry.

Critics are valuable, and we will soon get to why, but before we do we need to also issue a warning. Some organizations tend to over-index on critics and assume that what someone critical of the company is saying is more true than what, say, costumers are saying. This inevitably leads to a world in which the organization loses self-confidence and gets stuck in responding to the criticism.

So, is this not a good thing? Should companies not be attentive to criticism and seek to understand it in order to address it? That seems like the ideal state of affairs, right?

Perhaps in some case, but in order to determine if that is the case you need to look closely at the nature of the criticism. A critic is an actor in the marketplace of ideas, and their incentive is not to provide constructive feedback as much as it is to deliver criticism. These two are different. Criticism is successful if the critic gets more attention and interviews and is offered to appear as commentator on the industry or organization they criticize. Constructive feedback is successful if it gives you a means to change to become better.

If we confuse criticism and constructive feedback we risk ending up trying to please someone whose incentives are not aligned with us at all, and who would rather see us fail. That is why critics often suggest that it is not “their business” to suggest solutions as much as to “highlight” certain problems.

That said, we can always work backward from criticism to constructive feedback – or, where we cannot, we can reveal the criticism as essentially opposed not so much the practices of an organization as the existence of that organization or the industry it is a part of.

To the extent that we engage with critics, the most useful way of doing so is to try to take their criticism and distill from it the constructive feedback that it contains. And even finding that there is no such constructive criticism is helpful – since it reveals the critic as poseur.

Note that this is not a criticism of the critic, merely constructive feedback.  

Stories only some storytellers can tell

One key problem for high growth companies is that they often try to tell stories that they could only tell when they were a certain size. The trillion dollar company that is present in more than 100 markets cannot tell the story of the scrappy startup, even if it once was a scrappy startup.

This is important, since it highlights a more general principle: there are some stories that only certain storytellers can tell.

Companies and organizations are likely to get into trouble when they become so infatuated with a story, that they forget this. The story of the small startups or the story about how hard it is to do something the way the legislator wants it done can be great and enticing and true, but the story cannot be told by large successful tech companies.

A key question to ask when you are examining the stories your organization is engaged in, is if you are really able to tell the story well. Stories of hardship, of struggle and understanding how difficult life can be tend to fall flat when told by a millionaire or billionaire white tech guy.

Inversely, this means that an effective way to shoot down a story is to point to the discrepancy between the storyteller and the story they are trying to tell. It is back to the Aristotelian ethos: you have to have the character for the story, or your argument and your passions will fall flat.

There are ways to remedy this, and the most commonly used is recruiting a co-storyteller. Want to talk about how disadvantaged young people can get ahead by coding in life? Tell the story with a youth organization that has the ethos and credibility to tell the story – align with other organizations and tell the story with them, or let them tell the story for you.

Many companies miss this, because they think they will get less credibility for the really good things they do if they do not lead in telling the story – and the result is just that they seem sanctimonious. If you can have a witness that speaks on your behalf that is both much more effective and, frankly, honest.

Most companies efforts at corporate social responsibility or philanthropy is much more effective when done in partnerships with the organizations that really know about the issues.

And, a word here: this is not cynicism. The reality is that there are many people in large companies that want to help “make the world a better place” (a dead narrative for now, especially after being lampooned in the TV-series Silicon Valley), and for them to realize this admirable ambition they really need to partner with others – and that is when they can get the deserved credit for the work that they do.

The cynicism here is on the other side: the people assuming that everything that a company does is solely for the benefit of the story and the maximization of profit. This is a misunderstanding of what a company is – it is much more complex and messy than that, and altruism as well as egoism exist side by side.

Good storytellers don’t try to hide this, and retain the ability to tell the story of the good even as a certain amount of self-interest is acknowledged.

Storytellers and listeners

Storytellers matter – they are essential to the craft of public policy – but there are also cases when you should not put forward any storytellers at all, and not even try to tell stories. There are situations where you need to listen instead, and really stop being a storyteller and become a listener.

The most obvious one is in a crisis (and we will get back to that), but there are many other occasions as well. In fact, a company does well to make sure that just as it has its storytellers – the people who carry the narratives on their backs – they also have listeners. These listeners help the organization understand the environment and other stories, and designating them openly helps foster an understanding in the organization of the value of listening before you tell your own story.

A good listener is the best way to build a story and to choose storytellers.

Sometimes these people are the same, and you luck out. If you have great storytellers who are also great listeners, you have what we could call “teachers” in your organization. They will listen, integrate the story and then explore the alternative stories with your stakeholders. Such people are very rare, and often they have stature and standing way beyond the organization they serve.

Companies also regularly underestimate them, because they underestimate listening. This is a fatal mistake. Just as you build a stable of storytellers, you should build a stable of listeners, who can guide you towards the right stories.

Conclusion & Key Questions

Stories matter, and storytellers matter even more. With the right stable of storytellers you can start to engage for real in the craft of changing narratives and building narratives – and if you add good listeners, you will be well on your way to building the key capability of owning your story.  Here are the key questions for you for this chapter.

1. Do you have a good storyteller map? A map that represents the stories told about you and the actors / people that tell them, with a sense of how they reinforce eachother?
2. What does your stable of storytellers look like? Are they trained and generative in the sense that their engagement generates new opportunities and ideas?
3. Do you know your critics, their criticism and what parts of that criticism can be backed out into constructive feedback?
4. Are you listening in a structured way to the different stories out there? Do you have designated listeners? How do you work to understand shifts in the narrative landscape?