Tag: storytelling

The last turn problem

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Next time you’re driving somewhere new, notice how you process the directions you’ve been given.  If you’re like me, you’ll give your complete attention to the overall route and the first 9/10th of the drive, and then when the time comes, you’ll pay close attention to the last set of turns.  “OK, I’m doing a 2 hour drive, going North on I-95, and then I need to take Exit 16…” gets you most of the way there.

This is an efficient way to process information: it’s simple, you keep to the key information, and you’re processing the amount of information you can handle given that you’re a novice on this route.

Notice the difference between this (the information you want to be told by a friend giving you directions) and how two locals talk to each other about driving.  If you’ve  ever visited Los Angeles, you’ve seen this scene unfold: the first 30 minutes of a party are spent with people (all insiders) comparing notes on how they got there, which freeways they did and didn’t take, how they remembered that there was a Lakers game tonight so they did such-and-such differently…  This is interesting if you spend a lot of your day trying to figure out how to beat nightmarish traffic.  But if you, guest at said party and newcomer to LA, are listening to this conversation, you’re lost and you’re not learning what you need to hear.  You just want to know which freeway to take when you go home and where to get off.  In fact, you’re probably OK sitting in traffic if it’s a choice between that and getting lost altogether.

Now, hold this thought for a minute, and then ask yourself how you take your experience as a driver trying to get from point A to point B and use it to make your storytelling more effective.  And take as a given that you, the storyteller, know your story inside-out and backwards.  You’re the expert who knows all the back roads and has the best secret for skipping off the highway to beat rush-hour traffic.

Don’t start talking about the back roads.  Don’t give all the tips and secrets.  Tell the story at the level of information and expertise that is right for the listener, not for you.  You can and should telescope in from time to time to provide context and details and be specific.  But if all you’re doing is sharing the insider’s version of your story, you’ve lost your audience.

This is why “storytelling” matters.  It’s not because people want simple answers and live at the level of anecdote.  It’s because stories provide a common language and a way of interacting that everyone can relate to, so they become the vehicle through which the expert (hopefully you) and the neophyte (your audience…sometimes but definitely not always) can develop a common understanding.

And going back to the driving analogy, as you develop your story, you are driving along the freeway, and if you bring your audience with you, you can delve into the nitty-gritty details of those last 8 turns.  Just don’t start there.  They’re not ready for that conversation, because it doesn’t matter to them…yet.

Your voice

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Seth recently shared a great response to all the people who say they’re going to be the next Seth, rightly exhorting folks to get busy being their best selves instead.

But how do you find your own voice?

We all stand on the shoulders of giants – people whose ideas we are building on, whose lessons we are working to learn, whose path has inspired us.

For a while, I think, we have no choice but to internalize, and at times mimic, the voice of those we admire, trying on constructs or phrases or ideas for size. If done honestly, without claims of being the next anything, it can be constructive, a process through which we play, we practice, we experiment…and in so doing we discover the ground we would like to stake out for ourselves. It’s the intersection of where we know the most, care the most, and have something to say that adds to the conversation.

It can be an awkward process. We see people who are great at what they do – especially great communicators – and can’t help but fault ourselves for not being as great as they are (never mind they’ve usually been at this a lot longer – you’re seeing the fully formed version of them, and you’re just starting out). Why don’t we do it the way they do?

It’s because their voice is theirs. You’re not ever going to do it the way they do because you’re not them. This is why you will never BE the next them; you can only be the best you.

Learn from them, walk in their shoes and down their path for some time. And in so doing discover your own gait and your own way forward. Someday, all that will be left of their voice in yours will be lines that start, “A mentor of mine used to say….” These are the crisp encapsulations of your own guideposts, how you navigate and explain your own orientation in the world.

Take the time to discover your own voice. And be patient with yourself. It takes a while.

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Classical or jazz?

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Is storytelling more like classical music or jazz?  Is there a grouping of notes and turns of phrase that you hone and deliver, or just a rough outline and a sense of where you’re going, with lots of improvisation along the way?

A few months ago I was lucky enough to participate in a (surprisingly useful) communications / storytelling workshop. The workshop was led by two people: a political consultant who works with politicians on their public speaking; and a former stage actor turned coach.  One of the most interesting parts of the workshop came when the political consultant described his recent work with a local politician who was, in the consultant’s words, one of the worst public speakers he had ever met.

The genesis of this conversation was a question: whether it was more effective to have a single story and stick to it, or to have a stable of stories and pick and choose from those stories depending on the person you’re meeting/the group to whom you’re speaking.

My bias is to do the latter – I just cannot have a genuine conversation, nor can I be genuine, if I am giving what feels like a canned speech.

Hence my surprise at their response, that the “one story” approach often works better.  In the particular example of the politician and his political campaign, they worked with him to develop exactly ONE stump speech that he delivered, word for word, at virtually every public speaking opportunity.  The only difference was the ask at the end: for voters, he asked them to go to the polls, to bring their friends to the polls, and to vote for him; for donors, he asked them to give, to ask their friends to give, and to vote for him.  Apparently it worked like a charm, and audiences would laugh and applaud and respond at all the same points in the speech, each and every time.

Even imagining this makes me feel pretty cynical.  Part of the reason that politicians are generally not trusted is the sense that they will say anything to get an outcome.  On the flip side, it is interesting to look at the extreme take on a situation (tell one story, tell it well, hone it to perfection) and see if there’s something to learn there.

I agree that I need to have easy access to a few stories that consistently get my message across, since the message is the point and the stories are enablers.  I need to have enough opportunity to play with and test and experiment and refine these stories to understand how and why they work in communicating my message.  This takes time, work, practice….repetition.

(To go far afield for a minute, say you’re interested in getting people to wash their hands as part of a broader hygiene campaign.  You have to test and know which messages work, which ones are memorable, which ones get people to act differently.)

It’s no different with your stories.  Your goal is to communicate and connect, and the people to whom you are speaking are listening to you because they want clarity, understanding, and inspiration.

So how much is classical and how much is jazz?  What’s worked best for you?

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Let’s trade in these old stories

~ Sasha ~ 9 Comments

Roll the tape from my childhood TV screen: image of a 4 year old Ethiopian girl, ribs visible, distended belly, flies on her face, and a voice over, “For just 50 cents a day, you can feed this child.”

This story is  emotional, concrete, personal…and effective.  It accomplished its goal (getting people to donate).  But the aid did not get to the root of Ethiopia’s problems.   And the image of the poor, suffering, African child who needs to be saved is tremendously destructive.

This story, and its many cousins (the emotional appeal, focused on pity) were in vogue in the 1980s, and they got people to dig into their pockets to donate to international charities.  They also did a lot of harm.  They dehumanized people, creating an us/them mentality.  They fed on and into a  power imbalance.  They created distance rather than connection.   All of this in the service of getting someone to do something good.

The good news is that this storyline is mostly dead.  But there’s a newer version of this story that’s still pervasive, and it’s more subtle.  It’s the “here is what you’re buying with your money” story.  “For $10 you can buy a bednet that will save a life.”  “For $120 you can buy a goat that will feed a family.”  “For $5,000 you can dig a well that will provide safe drinking water.”

Here’s what worries me.  It is true that you can buy and deliver one bednet, one goat, or dig one well for $10, $120, or $5,000.  And as a donor you absolutely want to know that your money is being used well, and a concrete connection reinforces that feeling.

But just because the one story is true doesn’t mean it remains true when you play the same reel 1,000 times.  When you want to dig thousands of wells or provide livestock to millions of families, don’t things get a whole lot more complicated?  And, by the way, who came up with the technology to create that mosquito net?  Who is funding innovation to create the next, better solution?

We need better stories, ones that recognize that we are all interconnected.  Ones that put dignity and creativity and innovation at the center.  And ones that give space to create complex solutions to complex problems – while still giving people a sense that they are part of the solution.

I think part of the answer comes in replacing the somewhat misleading concreteness with membership and inclusion.  Your $15 is helping solve this problem.  And better yet, here are a bunch of other people who are also interested in being part of this same solution.

Let’s share our stories, why we care, what we hope to see accomplished, and what else we are doing to make the world a better place.

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Honey, did you hide the Sample Copy button again?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know for sure, but I’d venture to guess that, given the near-extinction of the VCR, the copy machine has captured the title of Consumer Electronics Product that Most Makes People Want to Scream.

Today, two and a half years after I first used the copy machine at work, I noticed a tiny prompt in the LCD display asking me if I wanted to do a “Sample Copy” before making copies of a single sided document that I wanted to turn into 10 double-sided copies.

Now this is a great idea!  This way I get to see if my copies collate wrong; if I inadvertently clicked the “2 sides → 1 side” icon instead of the “1 side → 2 side” icon; or if the copy gremlins will stop the copy halfway through.

I go for it.  I hit the “Sample Copy” button, it makes one copy, and everything looks great.  Plus, a big question comes up on the screen saying, “Continue to make the remaining 9 copies? (Yes/No)”.  Yes!  9 more beautiful, double-sided, collated copies.  Mission accomplished!  A certifiably delightful copy experience.

This is brilliant.  Small swaths of forest could have been saved had I discovered this little button two years ago.

So why didn’t I find it sooner?  Because the darn copier has so many whiz-bang options for each copy, and it leaves it up to me to figure out which features are going to be most useful to me.  The message missed for me the first 50 times I used the copier.  That’s a design blunder if I’ve ever seen one.

It’s so easy to make the mistake of telling someone everything you know about something in the hopes of getting them as excited as you are about the story.  Don’t be like the copy machine designers and fall into this trap.  The person you’re talking to (one on one, in a group presentation, on your website, in a job application, on your blog) doesn’t live and breathe this stuff every day.

Instead, tell people what they need to know with the right level of information, detail, and complexity to meet them where they are.  Know what point to raise up in big, boldface letters , so that they hear your message the first time, and not two and a half years after they first meet you.  Be relentless about what you cut away.

(Oh, and don’t forget that at least some of what you need to put in boldface will be different for every person and group you meet.  That’s where things get really interesting.)

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A ‘sustainable’ revenue stream?

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Hats off to Nell Edgington at the Social Velocity blog for a post titled “The Critical Alignment of Mission, Money and Competence,” which kicked off an interesting conversation between Nell, me, Sean Stannard-Stockton who writes the Tactical Philanthropy blog, Nathanial Whittmore who writes the Social Entrepreneurship blog for Change.org, and Kjerstin Erickson, the CEO of FORGE.

My first observation is that this discussion happened very quickly thanks to Twitter.  So I’ve realized that Twitter is here to stay for me, and that even if I’m not ready to commit to more than a 1-2 Tweets/day, Twitter enables very useful conversations that I’d miss if I gave it up.  So, if you’re interested in following, you can find me @sashadichter

On the substance of the discussion, there are two threads that I found particularly interesting:

1. The first thread centers on the risk many nonprofits run of their revenue model compromising mission.  The stark example is when a nonprofit ends up chasing funding dollars and makes small programmatic contortions for each subsequent grant (more on this here).  As I suggested to Kjerstin, your only hope as a nonprofit is if you start with a bright line that says you absolutely will not compromise mission at all to get funding…since even with this much clarity, you will still make the occasional compromise.  But if you start saying that some compromises are OK, you’ll be so far off mission in a year or two that you won’t recognize yourself or your organization.

2. The second thread was somewhat more subtle, and it centered around what it takes for nonprofits to have a “sustainable revenue model.”  When I read that phrase it implies “earned income,” which worries me because there are tons of nonprofits out there that do not and should not have a model that itself generates a significant revenue stream.   Which I why I commented that, “I sometimes feel like there’s an implicit notion in the (sometimes too theoretical) discussions of nonprofit funding models that downplays the fact that philanthropic dollars can beget philanthropic dollars; that there are very powerful network effects that come from the creation of strong communities of supporters/friends/advisors/Board members; and this itself can be a “sustainable revenue model.”

Put more simply, to me a sustainable revenue model is one that gives the organization and its donors a high degree of confidence that 1,2, 5, and 10 years down the line, the nonprofit will continue to exist, will continue to focus on its current mission (or the next iteration of that mission), and will have the capital on hand that will allow it to engage in long-term strategic planning and execution.

There are a LOT of ways to get here, and we shouldn’t forget that most “sustainable revenue models” center around creating an energetic, passionate tribe of donors who want to give and who are fervent advocates for your organization (no matter if they make $10 or $10 million donations.)

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44 reasons I blog

~ Sasha ~ 13 Comments

“Why do you blog?”

I get the question a lot.  So here’s a list.  I originally wanted to come up with 99 reasons, but 44 is where I ended up.

(If you have serious additions to the list please comment and I’ll approve.  I’d still like to get to 99, and if I do I’ll repost the whole list as “99 reasons we blog”).

  1. It improves my writing
  2. It forces me to learn how use new social media tools
  3. It occasionally gives me a reason to fiddle with some HTML code
  4. It’s practice creating a written end product faster
  5. It’s a chance to experiment
  6. It’s a chance to work on my storytelling every day
  7. It’s a discipline
  8. It’s a megaphone
  9. It’s challenging to build my own tribe, from scratch
  10. It makes me to be more aware of and informed about topics that interest me
  11. It makes me a contributor to a community I respect
  12. It’s a chance to go from observation to synthesis every day
  13. It’s a diary of where my thinking is every day – and over time a reflection of the arc of where I am in my life
  14. It’s a platform…who knows where that will go?
  15. It’s free
  16. It’s become a daily habit, and I’d miss it if it were gone
  17. It makes my mom proud
  18. It’s fun to have people email me interesting things and say, “You might want to blog this.”
  19. It teaches me…about people, about writing, about technology, about storytelling.
  20. It’s an act of letting go – to take an insight and put it out in the world, asking for nothing in return
  21. I felt like I had something to say, and it turns out that I do
  22. I think storytelling isn’t just interesting, it’s important
  23. I started without a plan and in a short time have a good-sized group of readers – which means that there are a lot of people out there with shared interests who want to come together around these ideas.
  24. I don’t see anyone else out there linking up marketing, storytelling, influence, nonprofits, philanthropy, and social change…and I think these things are intimately related.
  25. I may inspire people I’ll never have a chance to meet
  26. I can share wonderful, undiscovered gems with others
  27. I’m a little compulsive
  28. I think the reality of how philanthropists think and make decisions needs to be better integrated into the dialogue about what philanthropy “should” be
  29. Marketing, storytelling, influencing, tribe-building, leading, creating, experimenting, sharing, testing, getting instant feedback…all good ways to spend my time.
  30. More people read my blog every day than read my college thesis – and that took a year to write
  31. Every so often, someone I don’t know emails me to say that something I wrote helped them
  32. Every so often, someone I do know tells me to keep it up
  33. Once you feel like (some) people are listening to you, it’s very hard to give that up
  34. Unexpected posts often strike a chord with people…and the ones I love can bore people to tears
  35. Learning what does and doesn’t work in spreading ideas online at a very low cost…THAT’S a skill that will only get more important over time
  36. Maybe, someday, if I keep at this for a few years, they’ll be a book in it
  37. And even if there isn’t, if I have a tribe of thousands of readers sharing what I’m writing with their friends, why exactly would I need to write a book?
  38. Traditional newspapers and magazines are dying a slow death.  Even if blogs aren’t the end game, distributed, independently-created content is.
  39. Beats the heck out of a resume as a portfolio and a calling card (Malcolm Gladwell suggests that blogs are the new resume…Seth Godin says maybe you shouldn’t even have a resume.)
  40. Looking back, I can’t tell which posts I thought would be “good” or “bad”
  41. Won’t it be cool 5 years from now to look back on 1,000+ posts?
  42. Now that I know I can blog, I’m not afraid of Twitter (@sashadichter, by the way)
  43. If it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something, now’s the time to start logging those hours
  44. We need more hope in the world, and I’d like to be part of that hope

(HT to the SAMBAers’ Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas for the long-list idea)

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Which way to Newark?

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

I was walking up 6th Avenue around 26th street last night, talking to a friend on my cellphone.  A guy pulled over in a black SUV, rolled down the window and called out, “Hey, excuse me, can you tell me, how do I get to Newark airport from here?!”

“Hey,” I interrupted my friend on the phone in mid-sentence.  “A guy just pulled over and asked me directions to Newark.  I’m 26th and 6th.  The Holland Tunnel, right?”

“Right.” he said.  “I think he can drive straight down 6th and he’ll see the entrance at Canal Street.”

I told the driver, “Go down about two kilometers,” (he seemed European), “at around Canal street you’ll see signs for the Holland Tunnel.  Take the tunnel and follow the signs for Newark.”

“Thanks a lot,” he said, with a smile on his face.  “Straight on and to the Holland Tunnel, right?”

“Yes,” I said, turning back away to return to my phone call as the guy started to roll up the window.

“Excuse me, sir!” the driver shouted again, “Can I ask you another question?”

“Sure,” I replied.

“You see, I have to catch an 11:20 flight back to Italy. I was here for Fashion Week and I’m just going back.  I’m a designer and I was working these past two weeks at the shows and now I’m heading home.  So I know this might sound a little crazy but I’ve got all I can carry – you know, free stuff that you get at the shows, Valentino and Armani – and if I take it home I have to pay tax on everything I bring back.  $1,200 in tax, and I don’t need the stuff, I’ve got too much.  I wanted to give this away to someone because it seems crazy for me to bring it back home, and you seem like a nice guy.  Really, normally I wouldn’t do this, but are you interested in a suit or a jacket?”

“Hang on one sec,” I said to my friend.  “This is getting a little weird.  I’ll call you back,” and I hung up.

The driver backs the black car in front of the fire hydrant where I’m standing, and steps out onto the curb.  He’s dressed in black from head to toe, in casual but elegant clothes.  He opens up the back door, and the car is spotless and has a few designer bags on the floor and on the leather back seat.  “Here, let me show you these coats,” he says, “What size are you?”

He pulls back the wrapper, hands moving expertly up and down the lapels.  The whole thing is very casual.

“You know, this coat retails for $2,000, and this one for $1,800, and I’ve got a Valentino suit here.  I don’t even want to make any real money on these – I normally wouldn’t even do this,” he says, pulling a small stack of $20 bills out of his pocket, “I don’t need the money.  I just figured I don’t need these and you seem like a nice and helpful guy.  And if I could pay just for my rental car I figure we both come out ahead,” he says, showing me his $800 rental receipt from Budget Rent a Car.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

You can see where this is going, right?  It seems obvious in retrospect, but the delivery was good in this small-scale scam.  Fortunately I picked up on enough signals (the suggestion that I could go to an ATM to get some cash) that I eventually walked away.  But I’d been pulled in enough to hear the story, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a rube.

Why did this guy get my attention?

My guard was down because he had engaged me as a helper, brought me in to help solve a problem he had (getting to Newark).  So from the outset I’m feeling pretty good about myself.  I’m the Good Samaritan who disproves the New Yorker stereotype.

Then, almost casually, he presents an opportunity.  But he doesn’t really care that much either way.  He doesn’t need the money.  And, as the story unfolds, I get just enough concrete facts to make the story hang together: touching the coats and seeing their designer labels; his Italian passport, his ticket to Italy, his receipt from Budget Rent a Car.  The car is spotless, and has some designer bags in it.  And every time I started to doubt him he was more open and acted more like someone who would never do this, someone who was totally honest and just found himself in a stupid situation, with a bunch of designer clothes he didn’t need that would cost him $1,200 to take home.

My point is, if this guy could get even five minutes of my attention it’s because he knew how to weave a good yarn.  Storytellers are everywhere, and they spend a lot of time perfecting their craft.  Stories themselves are not good or bad.  They’re just a tool.

This guy reminded me that everything you do is part of your story.  How you dress, how you speak, how you shake someone’s hand, what your office looks like, where you meet someone for lunch, the thank you note you write, your email signature, your credentials, your photograph on Twitter, even your name.  These are all processed in real time and filed away by your audience.  They serve as shorthand for your listener, a way to understand who you are and decide about the credibility of what you’re saying.

Once you start thinking hard about stories, you see them everywhere.  Our brains are wired to find them engaging, so it’s easy to get drawn in to almost any story (Reread the first half of this post.  It’s not great writing.  It just says, “He did this, then he did this, then he did this,” and that simple sequence can keep you engaged for quite a while.)

Compare this to how we tend to speak and write about ourselves (especially in the nonprofit sector).  Think about the last presentation you gave, the last meeting you had, the last time a friend asked you what your organization does.

Did your second or your third sentence start with the words, “For example?”  If not, it’s time to start thinking harder about your story.

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Living like your best years are in front of you

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Speaking of yoga, when I first started taking yoga classes a decade ago, I had a teacher named Rolf Gates who started his professional life as an Army Ranger (the army equivalent of the Navy Seals) [pls see comments below; this isn’t exactly right, apparently, but it’s close].  One day, Rolf made the point in a class that, for those of us who played a sport seriously, we often treat physical activity as if our peak days were behind us.  For the high school or college athletes, we trained hard and pushed our bodies back then…now we just totter around the gym, acting like breaking boundaries was a thing of the past.

It’s easy to fall into the same trap professionally – to think that our days (or years) of greatest growth were a decade or two (or three or four) ago, when we were in a structured university environment surrounded by great minds who pushed us every day.

What about now?  We might learn incrementally, take a training course here and there…but the breakthroughs, the “ah hah!” moments?  Those are in the past.

Or are they?  You can have a professional life surrounded by great, inspiring people who push you every day.  And those great, inspiring people don’t have to be people with fancy degrees and lots of letters after their names.  Instead, you have the opportunity, right now, to start listening to people and to their stories – the people you work with, the customers you serve, maybe the person you pass every day to whom you just say “hello.” If you take the time to open a conversation, you will learn from these people (and they from you).

And if every day you are learning something, think of where you’ll be a decade from now, and compare that to the person you would have been if you thought your days of greatest growth were behind you.

Man on Wire: in defense of beauty

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment
Philippe Petit walks between the Twin Towers
Philippe Petit walks between the Twin Towers

Yesterday I finally got to see “Man on Wire,” the wonderful,  superlative-defying documentary about Philippe Petit, who illegally strung a wire between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974 and then walked across the 450 foot span between the towers, 1,350 feet above the ground.

I was left with two specific reflections from the film.  The first was that when Philippe came down – handcuffed – from his 45 minutes on a wire more than 100 stories high, he was repeatedly asked “Why did you do it?”

His response was, approximately, “I just created something singular, something of beauty, something that has never been seen and never will be seen again, and all people can think to ask is why I did it!”  It’s a helpful reminder that we do not always need a ‘why’ for everything, that beauty and inspiration themselves are enough of an answer sometimes.

My second reflection was about people and roles that are needed to create something truly spectacular.  Philippe plays the part of the entrepreneur whose vision and passion are so captivating and inspiring that people are pulled to him and offer up their support – because they want to be part of something great.  These other people don’t need to be – and probably shouldn’t be – entrepreneurs.

Philippe’s counterpart is his friend Jean-Louis Blandeau, whose job is to be the naysayer, the guy who pressure-tests the plans, the person who butts heads with Philippe but who ultimately has Philippe’s complete trust and respect.  Jean-Louis is part of a crew of 8 people who play a part in this triumph, and it served to remind me that to do something great, you generally don’t want a gaggle of entrepreneurs (or, for that matter, any group of people with the same characteristics).

There are different roles that need to be filled and part of each of our individual challenges and opportunities is to be self-aware enough to know what role we are most suited to play, and then to become as good as possible at playing that role — while still leaving plenty of space to stretch ourselves from time to time.