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Features

Published May 2008

How to Add Storytelling to Your Toolkit

  

  Ryan Mathews

Since the beginning of civilization, storytelling has been a central part of human culture. By harnessing this universal methodology, learning professionals can establish an emotional connection between their content and their audience.

For as long as there has been language, the six most powerful words in humanity’s collective vocabulary have been, “Let me tell you a story.” Throughout humanity’s time on earth, stories have been the universal, and preferred, way of passing down history, culture, tradition, wisdom and meaning. They also have been used to give meaning to individual lives, family structure, societies and even civilizations. Of course, businesses have used storytelling to sell soap, cars, stocks, services and, for that matter, everything else.

No wonder then that storytelling remains one of the most powerful — if also underutilized and often misused — weapons in the arsenal of business. Its underutilization results in large part from the McLuhan-inspired temptation to confuse the media with the message and the subsequent fixation on what channel is used to tell a story rather than what story is being told, to whom and why.

There are even more critical reasons why most businesses fail when it comes to storytelling. The first is that many companies fail to realize that storytelling, like the development of corporate culture, isn’t an activity that ought to be left to chance.

People continually tell stories about themselves, their companies and their products or services. Now, those stories can be consciously guided by the storyteller or left to be shaped by random and diffuse forces. Just because you don’t choose to tell your story doesn’t mean other people, from regulators to bloggers, are going to stop telling their versions of your story.

The Changing Nature of Storytelling
That brings us to the most critical issue of them all: the changing nature of storytelling itself. There are three essential elements to every storytelling exercise: a story, a storyteller and an audience. From time immemorial, the relationship went something like this. The storyteller either brought together or was sought out by the audience, and then he or she delivered the story. The storyteller’s role was active, the audience’s essentially passive. The storyteller provided the content, which the audience chose to either accept or reject.

Today, thanks to changes in society and technology, audiences have the potential to become interactive. Often, that potential is exercised to the degree that the traditional roles are reversed and the audience actually is providing content to the storyteller.

Let’s look at two examples, one from the world of high technology and the other from the world of decidedly low technology.

From BlackBerry to Greenpeace
A few clicks on the Internet take you to the “For Individuals” section of the BlackBerry Web site (www.blackberry.com). From there, it’s just a click more to the “Owners Lounge” and another click to the “Member Stories” section, where the headline asks, “Every member has a BlackBerry story. What’s yours?”