Tag: stories

Seven Words

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“I’m going to tell you a story.”

This was the first thing Acumen Fellow Aaron Kirunda said last week in a talk I heard him give at Acumen’s Partner Gathering.

Upon hearing those words, the audience leans forward a little bit, they relax, they open up. Because everyone loves a story.

Aaron’s story was about enjuba, his Ugandan organization that provides literacy training to 1.5 million Ugandan kids, anchored around hosting spelling bees. But that’s not where he begins.

He begins by telling us about two children who grew up in a Ugandan village. One of those boys dropped out of school, he never learned to read, he ended up cutting sugarcane, and he eventually struggled with alcohol abuse and parenting multiple kids out of wedlock.

The other boy, his friend, also had trouble completing primary school, but he had a mother who read the Bible to him and his brothers every night. That boy was fascinated by that ritual, of the family gathered together around a dim light and his mother’s own storytelling. He dreamed of one day being able to read that Bible, and eventually he did learn to read, as did his brothers. This reading ignited his passion for education, and he ended up being the best student in his district, which opened up doors to Uganda’s prestigious Makerere University and eventually to the London School of Economics.

This boy eventually made his way back to Uganda where he started up an organization to pass on the gift of reading to more kids like him and like his friend. This boy’s name was Aaron Kirunda. The organization he found was enjuba, which means sunshine. Seven years after he founded that organization, he came to New York to share his story, and I was lucky enough to hear it.

The reminder here is: I didn’t take any notes on this presentation, and I didn’t know Aaron’s story in this way before that night. But because he told me a story, I listened. And because it was a story, I not only stayed engaged, I remember it effortlessly a few days later. That means it stayed with me, so I can carry it around and reflect on it and contemplate its meaning.

The reminder here is: we want to listen to stories.

They keep us engaged.

They have a beginning, a middle and an end.

This makes them easy to remember – both their content and the lessons they contain.

So, it is our job as people trying to make an impact to tell stories all the time. Not just when we’re in front of a room of people doing “a presentation.” All the time.

These seven powerful words, “I’m going to tell you a story,” whether spoken or implied, can and should be used anywhere. The story can be about a challenge we once had at work, what it felt like when we heard hard feedback for the first time, the lead-up to an insight that hit us over the weekend, or a yarn about a friend we knew who also struggled for nearly a year before putting down roots in a new place.

“I’m going to tell you a story” is the beginning of a conversation that people will remember.

If they remember, it might change them.

If they forget, it definitely will not.

Story Gardens

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Whether you’re a writer, a blogger, a trainer, a facilitator, a coach, a speaker or a fundraiser, you need a story garden.

These are stories that illustrate and illuminate important concepts you want to share with your audience. These are stories they will be drawn to, understand and remember.

Like all gardens, they don’t come out fully formed. Gardens require care, cultivation, time and patience.

We begin by finding a place and a time to plant the seeds.

Most of the time, for most people, it doesn’t work to set aside big chunks of time to come up with fully-formed, engaging and useful stories. The pressure is too great, and the habit unfamiliar. High expectations and low output create frustration, so we quit.

Instead, take the pressure off and begin with a commitment to awareness, observation and capture.

Awareness of the concepts you’re carrying around that are looking for stories.

Observation of small moments—in conversations, books, memories, articles—that might become bigger stories.

And capture, so you can hang on to those moments quickly and easily, before they vanish. This might be a notebook, an email address you set up so you can send yourself ideas, the audio recording feature on your phone.

My capture process often involves just a headline and a few words. I include the moment I noticed, and a few words (max 1-3 sentences) about what it might become. I write down details about the moment that sparked the idea, so that these details, and the thoughts surrounding them, can find their way back to me.

Then you need a “going back” process: dedicated, regular time to turn those snapshots into somewhat-developed stories. The process is up to you, but dedicated, regular time plus deadlines will help a lot.

And then you need time to practice telling these stories. The sooner and more often the better.

For example, recently some members of Acumen’s Fellows team who facilitate seminars started holding hour-long Story Garden meetings. They sit around a jar filled with slips of paper, each with a core teaching point from an upcoming seminar. One team member at a time pulls out a slip and then tells a 60-second personal story to illustrate that concept. They’d give it a go, get feedback, and move on to the next person.

You could easily imagine doing the same thing with your fundraising team: pick 10 key selling points or examples about your nonprofit or social sector organization, get 5 fundraisers in the room and start picking pieces of paper out of a jar and telling your stories. Take and give feedback. Repeat.

A number of years ago I noticed that the best communicators I know speak in stories—all day long. What I’ve realized since then is that process of story capture, development, practice, refinement, selecting and discarding is both iterative and self-reinforcing. Once you start down the path and see that stories land with your audience, you’ll realize that this is something that you, too, can do. Then, one day, you’ll get to a point when you can hardly remember talking any other way.

No Better

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

It’s easy to confuse the time we spend thinking about getting better at something and time we spend doing the work of improving.

“I’m no good at fundraising.”

“I’m terrified of public speaking.”

“I don’t stand up to people when I disagree with them.”

These are our going-in narratives

Then we start thinking about how we’d like to be better at that thing, maybe we buy a book or take a course or join a gym in service of that goal.

We’ve done something. A thing. It’s more than nothing, just enough to tell ourselves we’ve started.

But improvement is slow. We get distracted. We do a little bit every now and again, but not much.

And then something subtle and truly dangerous creeps in: an old story. The part of ourselves that enjoys the narrative of this particular limitation mounts an argument in favor of how we’ll never get from here to there. It does this by winding the clock back to that first day we noticed a gap, then skipping forward to today, and says something like, “You see? A full year has gone by and I’m no better. Just goes to show that I never will be!”

As in: never mind that I’ve only talked to 10 potential investors in the last six months, look at my meager fundraising results. There’s something wrong with my pitch and with my capacity as a fundraiser.

As in: I’ve only given a stand-up talk in front of an audience twice since last March, yet when I watch someone else nail their speech I’m quick to decide she’s more talented than I am and that she’s never been as nervous or as fumbling as I think I am today.

As in: my appropriate and legitimate fears about challenging authority notwithstanding, I’ve never used the safer spaces around me to practice speaking up. Yet I beat myself up when, at that one moment when the stakes are highest, I don’t speak my mind.

It’s clear when you describe it this way: the thing that keeps us from persisting, from growing, from ultimately transforming is that quiet, alluring voice in our heads that smiles and says “You see? You’re still no better.”

Your reply is simple: I am. Just a bit. And I’m going to keep at it until I get there.

Three Realities

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Consider three realities:

  1. Who you are
  2. Who you think you are
  3. Who others think you are

Consider three sources of information:

  1. The actions you take
  2. What you see about the actions you take
  3. What those around you see and hear about the actions you take

It’s nice to think that the stories about us are written all around number 1 type things. It’s nice to believe that who people see us to be is who we really are.

In truth, people form and affirm impressions based on what they see and hear about the actions we take. So, to change minds, we must change what people see and hear.

This starts, every time, by doing great work. Work full of care and love and conviction and joy. If we don’t do that, then there really is no point, is there?

But that is not enough.

A good friend once told me that we should think of ourselves as Sherpas who must scale the mountain twice: once as we do good work, and once as we care for the story that is told about this work.

It might feel challenging, even disingenuous, to consciously think about what people see and hear about us: shouldn’t we just do great work and have that speak for itself?

Yes, and no.

All work arrives with a story wrapper, and part of that story is the story of you.

There’s no harm in directly attending to that story as well, especially if there’s a big gap between what you do and what is directly seen and heard by those whose minds you seek to change.

 

(Related: it’s also the case that “who we are” and “the stories we tell ourselves about who we are” also aren’t one and the same thing. But that’s a post for another day).

The problem with big numbers

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The problem is that they’re big, and that they’re numbers.

Our brains are not capable of thinking about “1,000 people” in a real way, let alone 10,000 or 100,000 or more.  We don’t know how take something amazing, or tragic, that happened to one family and multiply it by 10,000.

Emotions, whether joy, fear, or disgust, don’t amplify that way. We just hear a number.

And that fundamental limitation too often insulates us from reality and from action.

And what this means is

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Whether you are presenting slides or sending out a dashboard to your Board of Directors, every single time you share numbers or graphs or a table, it’s your job to start with simply explaining “this is what this means.”

Of course, in the best cases your slides and numbers will speak for themselves. And, in case they don’t, or they don’t do that job well enough, it’s your job to make sense of them for your audience.

When giving presentations, adhere to the discipline of “clearing a slide” each and every time: name each axis, or each column, or what that trendline represents. Actually say out loud, “on the vertical axis we have fourth grade test scores, and on the horizontal axis you’ll see January 2014 and 2015 – so we can see the effect of the new teachers’ aides who started in March 2014.”

Some goes for piles of data you send to folks: verbally, or in writing, communicate as if they aren’t going to read the attachment. Because in the worst cases, they won’t, and even if they do, they don’t have the context you have for understanding the story the data tell.

Minimally, this sets people on the right path towards looking at the numbers with your guidance and insight. But what you’re actually doing is framing what the numbers mean, guiding and controlling the story that they tell.

On the continuum of data, information, and meaning, you’re in the meaning-making business each and every time.

The perfect toy

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Last week we got my son what he called “maybe the best present ever.”  It’s a Structures 200 Plank Set.Structures 200

Before buying it my wife and I kept on reading over the description to see if we were missing anything.  It is described as “200 identical wooden planks.”  Each of them is a three-inch long little pine rectangle.  No notches, no nothing, no different sizes.  The product description says: “No glue connectors required, simply stack wood planks to create buildings, monuments and geometric forms.”  200 identical little pieces of wood, along with “ideas for over 40 structures?”  Yup, 200 identical little pieces of wood, plus the clever idea to put them all together in a box and sell them for $49.99.

Really?  Yes, really.

And the truth is, it’s wonderful.  You can build bridges, staircases and vortexes.  The pieces are light enough and have enough friction that they don’t collapse.  It’s a blank canvas in a world where everything (especially toys) is over-engineered with too many instructions to follow.  It’s what Lego used to be before they figured out that if you sell a bunch of nondescript bricks each kid will max out at a thousand pieces, but if you sell them the Death Star and Ewok Village and an X-Wing Fighter and the Republic Attack Cruiser, you can keep on selling, well, forever.

So Legos as they are today win.  And Legos as they used to be (Structures 200) wins too, albeit at a smaller scale.  Why?  It’s because we can deliver one of two kinds of experiences to our customers.

At one extreme we have what Lego has become: each individual story perfectly constructed, honed down to the last piece, and that one special character that you can’t get anywhere else.  The edges have been smoothed off, you can have what everyone else has and talk about it with your friends.  You know exactly what you’re getting and it delivers.  All you have to do is buy it and follow the instructions.  (This is the big, institutionalized nonprofit, where any gift can be broken down into a small, digestible story and you can shop for product like you shop on Amazon.  Crank those babies out on the assembly line and sell ‘em like hotcakes.)

At the other end is the pure, blank canvas: create your own story, tell it in your own way.  You, the customer, are the creator and curator and artist, and we are the vehicle for your self-expression.  This is the startup, the dream, the “let’s build this thing together and we will change the world.”

Where things fall down is in between, where the story is neither crisp and clean enough to make a simple promise and deliver on it, nor is there an exciting blank canvas where big thinkers and first movers can make their mark.  Stuck in the middle is disappointing to everyone, and you have no customer whose problem you’re completely solving.

(By the way, blank canvases and products that deliver on their promises can co-exist within one organization, you just have to realize which is which and never forget that each of those gets sold to a different customer.)

Blank canvas

Concrete, concrete, concrete

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Concrete, concrete, concrete

As Chip and Dan Heath captured so elegantly in Made to Stick, to get your point (your story!) across you need to be concrete, always. Concreteness is one of the six elements of their SUCCESS rubric for telling “sticky” stories.

More specifically, you need to use language that speaks to the shared vocabulary of the two people who are speaking. If you have more expertise on a topic than the person to whom you’re speaking, this will feel like dumbing down your language. It’s not. It’s making sure there’s no possibility for confusion where there doesn’t need to be.

Think about it: every time we use language that is not in people’s day to day vernacular (I mean that literally: language that they use every day; concepts that are so familiar that they don’t require a second of extra thought), we are asking them to spend mental effort deciphering language rather than resonating with our story. That is wasted attention and the fault is with us for asking them to expend it.

This is not (not not not!) a question of their intelligence, this is a question of your shared vocabulary and where you want them to use up their precious, finite attention.

This means that every time you’re speaking, you’re saying “for example,” a lot.

It means, for example, that you’re not saying “ethical sourcing” when you could be saying “six year olds in factories.” You’re not saying “assess baseline data” when you could be saying “go to 10 customers’ homes and record whether or not they have corrugated tin roofs.” You’re not speaking about millions of dollars when they live and breathe crores. You’re probably never, ever talking about “paradigms.”

Instead, you are trading conceptual terms for concrete ones, exchanging categories of things (“processed cotton”) with specific and familiar examples (“thread”). You are starting with one specific, familiar item (or action) and generalizing from there, rather than staying at the conceptual level and assuming they’re smart enough to boil it down to the specific. They are, but they shouldn’t have to.

And you’re doing this in a disciplined way, time and time again, because that’s what it takes to have this become natural to you.

Live in their world, speak with their language using vocabulary that parallels their reality, not yours, and they’ll finally start hearing you.

I think with my brain, but…

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I spent some time today talking with a great filmmaker and TV producer.  Her mantra for everything she creates is to what she called the “micro story:” that one, personal narrative that captures the whole.

We know this, but we don’t practice it.

We throw up statistics.  We create mash-up stories profiling a series of good projects and forget that the end result of the glossy portrayals is so much less than the sum of the parts.  We have conversations about giving to our organization that lead with programmatic jargon, budgets, abbreviations and ratios.

I think we’re afraid that telling real, honest stories will somehow be insulting to someone’s intelligence.  We know that “people respond to stories” but the woman across the table from you is so smart and so accomplished that of course she “really wants to dig in.”

What if we imagine our audience wearing block-lettered, tacky t-shirts (like the caps that Frank from 30 Rock wears) that shout out:

I THINK WITH MY BRAIN

BUT I ACT FROM MY HEART

I bet we’d act differently, we’d inspire more often, we’d create genuine connection and a sense of hope.

The story-reality gap

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Whether or not you consider yourself a marketer or a salesperson, one way or another you’re telling stories all the time.  It happened the moment you traded in your college rucksack for that nice Kenneth Cole leather briefcase; it happens each day when you talk (or don’t) in meetings, when you speak (or don’t) about topics that are a stretch for you, when you write an email (or don’t) in a voice that stands out from the crowd.

Your organization is also telling stories all the time, and the easiest, most obvious water-cooler scuttlebutt is about your story-reality gap: how the software suite that your company just touted in a $3 million, 30-second Superbowl ad is just a mash-up of so-so apps that were just rebundled and re-branded; how the ink wasn’t even dry on the financing plan when it was put in front of your Series B investors; how you don’t have everything just right yet, so how can your CEO be talking about the next phase of growth?

Here’s a dirty little secret: that gap is supposed to exist, it has to exist, it’s the gap between where you are now and where you’re going.  And without this gap, you might never get there.

If your organization isn’t living this gap then it’s going too slowly, it’s dreaming too small, it’s getting too comfortable in its little sandbox.  This doesn’t mean you always have to grow fast – in terms of revenues, employees, customers – but it means that you have the potential to teeter on the edge of exactly what you know you can deliver today and what you dream of delivering tomorrow.  Daring to dream out loud is just the first step.

Never lie, and never ever make promises to your customers that you can’t keep (nothing spreads faster than stories about broken promises).

But the world understands that five-year plans are aspirational.  You’ll never rally the troops with small dreams.