The Secret Language of Leadership

Harvard Management Communication Newsletter discusses my work

May 2006

Harvard Management Communication Newsletter of May 2006 has an article about storytelling. It’s entitled: “Leading Words: How to Use Stories to Change Minds and Ignite Action: The right story at the right time can be a very powerful leadership tool,” and is written by Cynthia M. Phoel.

It's about my work and begins: “As a program director at the World Bank (Washington, D.C.) in the mid-1990s, Stephen Denning was at a loss for how to convince his colleagues of the value of knowledge management. Presentations built on solid research and carefully constructed PowerPoint slides got him nowhere. Then he started telling this simple story…” It goes on to tell the Zambia story and describe the characteristics of a springboard story, the various purposes of organizational storytelling, how to perform the story, and the various tips and tricks of business narrative.

It summarizes material from my book, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling (2005). And if you want a crisp, clear and succinct summary of what business narrative is all about, you could do worse this than article. It’s available from Harvard here:

The publication of the article is also a sign of the growing recognition in the mainstream business world of the central importance of storytelling as a leadership tool.

Smithsonian storytelling weekend

If you weren't able to make it to the Smithsonian storytelling symposium on April 21 or the following day's events, you can visit a growing set of resources about the weekend, including audio recordings and PowerPoint slides at http://www.storyatwork.com/

"The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling” Selected by Innovation Book Club

Bakersfield, CA 11/28/2005 –  A group of senior innovation leaders has selected twelve books from a field of over ninety candidates for the first, global book club focused on innovation.  Books were chosen for their power to stimulate thought and practical application for innovators.  The book club is sponsored by the InnovationNetwork, a global community of innovation practitioners and additional information is available at http://thinksmart.com

Stephen Denning’s “The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative”  was selected because of its emphasis on the critical skill of using stories to promote and support change.  It is a comprehensive look at the role of storytelling in meeting the most important leadership challenges in today’s world.

Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation, states, "Storytellers play a pivotal role in the 21st century enterprise, and Denning has provided us with a handy field guide to the narrative craft. After making a compelling argument for the power of storytelling, he gives us the details on how to deliver the right story at the right time. Read this useful book-and then tell your friends about it!" 

Larry Prusak, co-author of Working Knowledge says this is “the one book every manager should read before giving up their lifeless PowerPoint presentations. The book is creative, eclectic, passionate and useful--a rare and winning combination for a business book."
    

The full roster for the book club year includes the following:

Month  Book & Author(s)

Jan       The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, IDEO

Feb      How Breakthroughs Happen, the Surprising Truth about How Companies Innovate by Andrew Hargadon, Associate Professor of Management, University of California, Davis

Mar     Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

Apr       The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative by Stephen Denning

May      The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Jun       Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard, CEO Patagonia

Jul            Punished by Rewards, the Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn

Aug      The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts & Cultures by Frans Johansson

Sep      The Art of Possibility by Benjamin and Rosemund Zander

Oct       Making Innovation Work - How to Mange It, Measure It, and Profit from It by Davila, Epstein, Shelton

Nov       How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci by Michael Gelb

Dec            Creativity at Work, Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen by Jeff DeGraff and Katherine Lawrence

InnovationNetwork helps individuals and organizations develop a greater competency of innovation through conferences, events and training programs.

CONTACT: 
Contact Person:  Joyce Wycoff
Company Name:  InnovationNetwork
Voice Phone Number:  1-760-920-2853
Email Address:  jwycoff@thinksmart.com
Website URL:  http://thinksmart.com

Virtual Chautauqua

Just to let you know that there is a Virtual Chautauqua* under way on The Leader's Guide to Storytelling at http://www.virtualchautauqua.com/. Participation is free, though you do need to go through a simple signup process. The discussion continues through November.

So if you have a question on organizational storytelling or want to follow the discussion, or would like to listen to a 30 minute interview that I gave on the subject (to be posted shortly), check it out here:

Among the topics currently under discussion are:

• The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: what's it about?
• What progress is occurring in organizational storytelling?
• Can you misunderstand your own story?
• Can a story be an invitation?
• What constitutes a story?
• How does one learn to tell a story?
• Can story be a conversation starter?
• What is the value of a story?

*What's a chautauqua? Good question. Well, before Monday Night Football, before talk radio, before web surfing and chat rooms, there was Chautauqua. At the turn of the century, there were more than 10,000 Chautauqua venues in small towns and rural areas across the United States. People gathered to enjoy the famous authors of the day, the best musical ensembles, and art exhibits usually available only in major cities. After a stimulating presentation, participants wandered back to their porches and living rooms to discuss, debate, and reflect on what they had experienced together. The Chautauqua movement was all about learning in community.

Today, there are only a handful of Chautauqua sites left to provide this unique opportunity to share a rich menu of cultural and educational activities We can never replace the pleasure of sitting together on the grass and talking long into a summer night. But we can make a time and place for learning in community - even in lives lived on Internet time. The Virtual Chautauqua aims to bring this learning tradition online.

Why storytelling is important

A colleague recently asked me for a quote about why storytelling is important. I came up with the following list of possibilities, that might be of wider interest:

• Storytelling is a key leadership technique because it’s quick, powerful, free, natural, refreshing, energizing, collaborative, persuasive, holistic, entertaining, moving, memorable and authentic. Stories help us make sense of organizations.
• Storytelling is more than an essential set of tools to get things done: it’s a way for leaders – wherever they may sit – to embody the change they seek. Rather than merely advocating and counter-advocating propositional arguments, which lead to more arguments, leaders establish credibility and authenticity through telling the stories that they are living. When they believe deeply in them, their stories resonate, generating creativity, interaction and transformation.

• Storytelling is often the best way for leaders to communicate with people they are leading. Why? It is inherently well adapted to handling the most intractable leadership challenges of today – sparking change, communicating who you are, enhancing the brand, transmitting values, creating high-performance teams, sharing knowledge, taming the grapevine, leading people in to the future.

• Storytelling translates dry and abstract numbers into compelling pictures of a leader’s goals. Although good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story—that is, a narrative that links a set of events in some kind of causal sequence.

• Storytelling is a crucial tool for management and leadership, because often, nothing else works. Charts leave listeners bemused. Prose remains unread. Dialogue is just too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group of managers or front-line staff in a large organization to get enthusiastic about a major change, storytelling is the only thing that works.

• Storytelling can inspire people to act in unfamiliar, and often unwelcome, ways. Mind-numbing cascades of numbers or daze-inducing PowerPoint slides won’t achieve this goal. Even logical arguments for making the needed changes usually won’t do the trick. But effective storytelling often does.

• Storytelling works better than the “Just tell ‘em” approach in most leadership situations. Management fads may come and go, but storytelling is a phenomenon that is fundamental to all nations, societies and cultures, and has been so since time immemorial.

• Narrative is the instrument of continuing creativity, a power that inexorably propels us forward into the future, the unknown, building new worlds and structures.

• Storytelling is part of the creative struggle to generate a new future, as opposed to conventional management approaches that search for virtual certainties anchored in the illusive security of yesterday.

• Narrative can help transform even gargantuan organizations through the unanticipated power of the imagination. It has the capacity to change tangible, hard realities through no more than airy nothings, mere gauzy thoughts.

• Narrative champions freedom, interaction, and organic growth. It operates beyond the scope of simple, linear logic. It is as interested in the unknown as in the known.

• Narrative is a key tool for leadership, because it helps us deal with organizations as living organisms that need to be tended, nurtured and encouraged to grow. It thrives on inspiration rather than administration, fostering change rather than stasis.

• Storytelling liberates innovation, by generating the energy needed to change.

• Narrative helps us make sense of a world that is rapidly mutating, as compared to conventional management, which is more suited to a activities that are stable, linear and predictable.

• Narrative is interested in the next generation of change, not just an extrapolation of the present. It copes with swirling, new, emergent phenomena and phase changes that by definition escape the predictable frame of yesterday’s conceptions.

• Narrative helps us cope with a future that is evolving unpredictably. Conventional management techniques miss the fact that we cannot measure tomorrow when we don’t know what it will involve.

• Narrative is the natural instrument of change, because it draws on the active, living participation of individuals. It dwells in the experience of the people who act, think, talk, discuss, chat, joke, complain, dream, agonize and exult together, and collectively make up the organization. By contrast, conventional management focuses on lifeless elements  – mission statements, formal strategies, programs, procedures, processes, systems, budgets, assets – the dead artifacts of the organization.

• Narrative is a tool that gives privileged access to the living part of an organization, and so can be used to elicit decisions to create organizational artifacts and generate support for them.

• Narrative is a tool for the instigators of change, who aim at continuing transformation and the creation of a fruitful tomorrow. Those whose goal is merely that of control will find that storytelling is not a very useful or important tool. For them, the important thing is accommodation to the preoccupations of a well-behaved yesterday.

• Storytelling is more than just a tool. It is beyond any implement–almost a requirement of being alive. Insofar as it has anything to offer, it generates fresh depth and breadth of perception. It enables us to surmount a humdrum world where everything makes sense and is logical, and get to that realm where deeper meaning is revealed.

• When we hear a story that touches us profoundly, our lives are suffused with meaning. As listeners, we have transmitted to us that which matters. Once we make this connection, once a sense of wonder has come upon us, it does not last long, and we inevitably fall back into our daze of everyday living, but with the difference that a radical shift in understanding may have taken place.

• A story is something that comes from outside. But the meaning is something that emerges from within. When a story reaches our hearts with deep meaning, it takes hold of us. Once it does so, we can let it go, and yet it remains with us. We do not weary of this experience.

• Once we have had one story, we are already hungry for another. We want more, in case it too can transmit the magic of connectedness between the self and the universe.

• Through narrative, we can let go the urge to control, and the fear that goes with it, learning that the world has the capacity to organize itself, recognizing that managing includes catalyzing this capacity, as well as sparking, creating, energizing, unifying, generating emergent truths, celebrating the complexity, the fuzziness and the messiness of living.

For more, go to The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

And my website http://www.stevedenning.com/

Review of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

To captivate staff, executives must be master storytellers

By HARVEY SCHACHTER Wednesday, September 14, 2005 in the Globe & Mail (Canada)

The Leader's Guide To Storytelling By Stephen Denning Jossey-Bass, 360 pages, $31.99

Executives hear much these days about storytelling. In addition to all their other skills, they are expected to be master storytellers, pushing their agenda by reaching beyond fact-based argument to touch the emotions and captivate staff through narrative. But many are no doubt puzzled and therefore paralyzed.

What exactly is a story? How do you prepare it, and just as importantly, tell it in a powerful manner? Traditionally, a story involves a hero or heroine, a plot, a turning point, and a resolution.

But Stephen Denning, a former World Bank official who became enchanted with the power of storytelling and now helps organizations take advantage of it, says different narrative patterns are useful for different purposes of leadership, and they need not be as elaborate as the classic formula.

Indeed, his favourite -- the springboard story -- is quite spare, lacking a plot and turning point. But it's vital for leaders, communicating the complexities of change in a way that motivates others to action. A springboard story tells how one person typical of the audience carried out some recent change that improved the organization. It explains what would have happened without the change. The story has a happy ending, and the teller closes with a link to the purpose he or she hopes to achieve: how this example can springboard the audience and organization to a better future.

Mr. Denning outlines seven other types of storytelling you can use:

Communicating who you are: This is a colourful, well-told story, usually based on an incident in your life, which reveals some strength or vulnerability and helps others to understand you better. In some cases, the story may be from somebody else's life -- a hero of yours, for example -- but because you consider it significant it shows others what you value.

Communicating who the company is: These are the stories told about the company and its products, to develop trust and establish a brand.

Transmitting values: These parables describe an incident that exemplifies the values you want listeners to follow -- perhaps how one employee went beyond the call of duty to serve a customer. You don't begin by specifically naming the value or end by telling listeners to abide by that value, but instead reflect on what the story means to you.

Fostering collaboration: There are a variety of approaches possible here to help people work together, from tales about the past highlighting collaboration, to stories about the glorious future that will occur through the work of a task force, to the personal stories members of a new team share at their first meeting to build bonds.

Taming the grapevine: If dangerous rumours are escalating, you use a story -- often humorous -- to defuse the gossip. But Mr. Denning warns you can't be mean-spirited and can't ridicule a rumour or bad news that is true.

Sharing knowledge: These stories explain something that has gone wrong and how it was -- or wasn't -- fixed.

Leading people into the future: These share your vision of the future in a compelling way. While the springboard story tells about something in the past that can be extrapolated into the future, this is an invented, often quite vague, but evocative story of the future, like Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. It requires a high degree of verbal skill that not all leaders possess. Mr. Denning explains in detail how to craft each story, and provides a template for building your own stories in each category. If you're confused but intrigued about storytelling, the book can certainly point you in the right direction.

Also reviewed in the notice: Seth Godin's "All Marketers Are Liars" and Don Watson's "Death Sentences."

Read the entire review

The Iraq war has lost its narrative

An interesting article by Mark Danner in the New York Times today suggests that the Iraq war has "lost its narrative."

"Sold a war made urgent by the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dangerous dictator, Americans now see their sons and daughters fighting and dying in a war whose rationale has been lost even as its ending has receded into the indefinite future. A war promised to bring forth the Iraqi people bearing flowers and sweets in exchange for the beneficent gift of democracy has brought instead a kind of relentless terror that seems inexplicable and unending. A war that had a clear purpose and a certain end has now lost its reason and its finish. Americans find themselves fighting and dying in a kind of existential desert of the present. For Americans, the war has lost its narrative.

"Of the many reasons that American leaders chose to invade and occupy Iraq - to democratize the Middle East; to remove an unpredictable dictator from a region vital to America's oil supply; to remove a threat from Israel, America's ally; to restore the prestige sullied on 9/11 with a tank-led procession of triumph down the avenues of a conquered capital; to seize the chance to overthrow a regime capable of building an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons - of all of these, it is remarkable that the Bush administration chose to persuade Americans and the world by offering the one reason that could be proved to be false. The failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, and the collapse of the rationale for the war, left terribly exposed precisely what bin Laden had targeted as the critical American vulnerability: the will to fight."

Read the full article

Narrative and business risk management

In June 2005, Harvard Business Review identified one of the links between business risk management and narrative:

"Most companies are already navigating the choppy waters of globalization, and none, presumably, are sailing blind. But corporate leaders may lack the sophisticated understanding this very complex subject requires. Political risk analysis is more subjective than its economic counterpart and demands that leaders grapple not just with broad, easily observable trends but also with nuances of society and even quirks of personality. And those hard-to-quantify factors must constantly be pieced into an ongoing narrative within historical and regional contexts."

The article is entitled “Managing Risk in an Unstable World” by Ian Bremmer. It argues that As emerging markets generate greater shares of global supply and demand, companies need better methods to weigh political risk against financial reward. One of those methods is … narrative.

Harvard Business Review: June 2005, page 51.

Other narrative dimensions of business risk management will be examined a forthcoming article of mine, including:

• fighting risk aversion
• finding the upside to business risk management
• winning support for business risk management programs.

Advance versions of the article will be made available to subscribers to my newsletter, to which you can sign up at: http://www.stevedenning.com

CHICAGO STORYTELLING MASTERCLASS

I will be giving a full-day storytelling masterclass in Chicago on September 29, 2005, sponsored by the ARK Group.

In this masterclass, participants will learn how to use stories to handle the main challenges of transformational leadership, communicate complex ideas so as to be easily understood, spark action even from skeptical audiences, build trust by communicating who you are, enhance your brand authentically from within the organization, understand values and how to transmit them authentically, create high performance teams and communities of practice, transmit knowledge, both explicit and tacit, tame the grapevine, and lead people into the future.

In this masterclass, participants will learn how to use stories to handle the main challenges of transformational leadership, communicate complex ideas so as to be easily understood, spark action even from skeptical audiences, build trust by communicating who you are, enhance your brand authentically from within the organization, understand values and how to transmit them authentically, create high performance teams and communities of practice, transmit knowledge, both explicit and tacit, tame the grapevine, and lead people into the future.

Participants will receive a signed copy of my new book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (Jossey-Bass, 2005) as part of the masterclass.

This is the first publicly-accessible masterclass that the ARK Group is putting on in the US, and it is shaping up with some great innovations. For once, we have a whole day, compared to the half-day that I’ve been doing in the European masterclasses. And my recent whirlwind tour through Australia and NZ (21 workshops/presentations in less than three weeks) has given me the chance to refine some modules and develop new ones.

• The workshop will feature a case study: Participants will get to practice the full array of narrative techniques on a brand new case study developed specially for this masterclass. In this fascinating story of a firm in transition, participants will get to see what’s involved in getting change in a difficult situation, including not only springboard stories but also all the other narrative patterns described in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

• It will include 12 ways to create high-performance teams: the conventional wisdom (e.g. Richard Hackman’s Leading Teams) is that management can’t do any more than create the conditions for teams, not actually generate high-performance teams. In this module, you’ll learn not only why this is wrong but also: twelve things that you actually can do to generate high-performance teams.

• Three narrative dimensions of brands: The idea that brands have something to do with narrative is now becoming quite commonplace. But did you know that there are three different narrative dimensions of brands? Participants will explore these three different dimensions in the case study.

• Innovation: my workshops in the past have focused on communicating a change idea that you already have. In this module, we’ll work on the prior question: how do you come up with change idea? You’ll learn how narrative techniques can help in this area too.

• Seven crucial steps to perform the story: Telling the right story is important, but just as important is how you perform it. In this module, you’ll learn

• The HR dimension of storytelling: smart organizations are realizing that narrative is a core competence of an organization, and are incorporating this into recruitment and staffing policies.

• PowerPoint: In this module, you’ll learn to stop complaining about PowerPoint and start using its awesome capacity to reinforce your narrative.

It will take place at the Chicago Marriott Downtown.

The price is US$995. 

To get more details on the masterclass, click here.

To book your place, click here: 

If you have a question, send me an email at steve@stevedenning.com 

Story and context

As pointed out in The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, understanding a story depends on the context in which the story is told, as illustrated in this courtroom joke from a book called Pilot Your Life by Ron Shaw:

An Amish man named Smith was injured when he and his horse were struck by a car at an intersection. Smith sued the driver. In court, he was cross-examined by the driver's lawyer.

Lawyer: "Mr. Smith, you've testified all about your injuries. But according to the accident report, you told the investigating officer at the scene that you were not injured. What about that?"

Smith: "Well, let me explain. When the officer arrived at the scene, he first looked at my horse. He said, 'Looks like he has a broken leg.' And then he took out his gun and shot the horse. Then he came up to me and asked how I was doing. I immediately responded, 'I'm fine!  I'm fine!'"

Discover the discipline of business narrative at http://www.stevedenning.com

Find out more about The Leader's Guide to Storytelling