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Friday, October 2, 2009
Telling the story of your business, your entrepreneurship
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"Facts are facts, but stories are who we are, how we learn and what it all means." Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company and author of Rules of Thumb, has it exactly right. Storytelling is the most important tool for any innovator. It is the best way to create emotional connections to your ideas and innovations. Sharing stories is the way to create a network of passionate supporters that can help spread ideas and make them a reality. We remember stories. We relate to stories and they compel us to action.
Storytelling is a core value at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF). We believe that advancing our mission to enable system change in health care, education and energy is critically dependant on our ability to create, package and share stories from our work.
And that’s why BIF’s annual Collaborative Innovation Summit (in Providence Oct. 7-8) is all about storytelling. I will never forget meeting with my friend and mentor Richard Saul Wurman (RSW) to get his advice prior to our first summit five years ago. As an innovation junkie, it doesn’t get any better than having RSW as a mentor. He founded TED, for heaven’s sake. I went to the meeting prepared with an approach that I had worked on for weeks. As an MBA, of course I had a matrix, with speakers organized by theme. RSW heard me out and could only shake his head saying, “Saul, you have a lot to learn about how to create an emotional connection with an audience.” He patiently told me to throw away the matrix. He said it was as simple as inviting people to a dinner party. Ask speakers that you want to have dinner with to share a personal story that you are selfishly interested in and invite others to listen in. RSW has been a storyteller at every summit we have hosted.
Storytelling is an essential tool for all innovators and organizations. Whether you are an entrepreneur, social innovator or corporate leader, stories can help you sell ideas and motivate followers. Think about the stories in your organization. There is the story that is passed on about how a legendary salesperson landed your company’s biggest account. Or the one when the inventor of your core technology had that “aha” moment in the middle of the night. Of course, there’s always the one about how we passed on the idea that ended up being as big as Google. There should be more organizational stories about legendary customers. We remember and are compelled by stories. Does your organization leverage the power of storytelling?
Don’t wait to tell stories after the fact. Tell them about your work while it is ongoing. We make the mistake of waiting until a project is complete to package the conclusions or outputs. In today’s connected and social media enabled world, no one wants to wait for the finished goods. People are turned off by glossy deliverables and collateral material. Just check out the traffic on YouTube or Twitter. People want to participate and contribute to the story while it is evolving. The process is as interesting as the final product and stories can connect people to your work while it is under way. Being genuine is valued above all else. Polished stories packaged by communication and PR experts are viewed with skepticism. Genuine stories resonate. Storytelling expands purposeful networks of motivated innovators willing to contribute ideas and new connections if they relate and can participate directly in the story.
Storytelling expert and author Steve Denning says, “People think in stories, communicate in stories, even dream in stories. If you want to get anything done in an organization, you need to know how to use the story to move people.” I agree with Steve: Stories can change the world, and storytelling is the way to make it happen.
Saul Kaplan is founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory in Providence, R.I. He can be reached at skap@businessinnovationfactory.com and followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/skap5.
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