Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin.

The power of story

If you are old enough, you can shut your eyes and travel back in time and hear once again the voice of Daphne Oxenford. Imagine sitting on your mother’s knee listening to BBC radio’s Listen with Mother, and hearing the words, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

Later the television programme Jackanory (I’ll tell you a story) ran for 3,500 episodes over a thirty year period.

This paper is all about the power of story and its potential as a tool for learning. To get the point across, we’ll be telling one or two stories along the way!

The first doesn’t have a great plot; nothing much happens but hopefully it will paint a picture for you of a particular moment in time. It takes place at a school in Manchester in the early 1970s. A man called John Cunliffe, a schoolteacher, is promoting children’s books and stories. He enters the space reserved for storytelling, and slowly settles his tall, slim frame into a position seated on the carpet. His ability to command a circle of the deepest concentration even amongst the most excitable and hyperactive of audiences is quite marvellous. It might be his voice, a rich spoken baritone with a colourful Lancastrian dialect; but probably not. It might be his prodigious height, but probably not that either. It might be his Edward Lear beard; but no; what makes the man so charismatic is the promise of a story. He’s not yet a celebrity in his own right. His best known creation, Postman Pat, features but is not yet widely recognised. And so it is not John, but the great wealth of stories he tells and the style of his telling them, that commands absolute attention.

What makes story so compelling?

Lewis Carroll had something provocative to say about the mixing of perceptual modality. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?” (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.)

It’s not the pictures the writer paints, it’s the pictures the reader or listener draws for himself. You do not need to see Ysanne Churchman in the real flesh-and-blood world to know that Grace Archer wore royal blue (The Archers, BBC Radio, 1950 – present day). Her voice and the whole ambience of Middle England Borsetshire told us that.

On the other hand, when Coronation Street was first broadcast in colour (episode 928), it was a jolt to see that Elsie Tanner’s dress was a modest off-white colour, with a grey diamond pattern (Coronation Street, ITV Granada Television, 1960 – present day).

Surrounded as we are by a profusion of imagery and audio-visual media, can we detect in our businesses and organisations a groundswell of interest in storytelling? Does that storytelling depend upon anything other than a narrative and a human voice? After all that’s how we’ve been communicating since we humans lived in caves and exchanged tales by firelight. Now in this 21st century Age of Information, story-telling is used to engineer practical outcomes for people, communities and organisations. Some see it as a central plank in the construction of communication, education, training, government and innovation in the 21st century.

Why is narrative important?

When we use the word ‘narrative’ we refer to anything that forms part of a record and an account of a human experience. This includes sculpture, painting, dance and artefacts as well as written texts, poetry and spoken stories. With the rise of social media that is synoptic and heavily text-biased, we are at risk of diluting that distinctly human skill of narrative. Composing or reading a Tweet of 140 characters or a txt msg is not the same as building, creating and declaiming a sustained and rounded narrative; something which has a beginning, a middle and an end.

When a learner reads silently or listens to a story, writes one in poetry or prose or presents it non-verbally through art, dance or mime, they are learning to make sense of the world, of themselves and of other people around them. Perhaps the greatest gift a teacher can bestow is to inspire an interest in stories. As we develop language through infancy we meet many stories – myths and legends, fiction and fact. Not only do we learn from them the rules of language, but also we learn about our human condition.

As we are exposed to culture in its many rich and diverse forms, we open windows onto people, places and situations that we’ve not met before, and so we are able to analyse and synthesise, in other words from the experience of others we build for ourselves a world and a way of life and work that is uniquely our own.

The power of story

If to tell them is a natural and spontaneous human activity, then why should we try to use stories to engineer and track practical outcomes for people within communities and organisations? Is it not enough to allow time and opportunity for people to tell and attend to story?

Maybe it is, but analysis and evaluation and critical judgement are skills that may need nurturing if they are to develop. A story works well as a simple unfolding of events; this happened and that happened. Children growing up in the fifties were raised on so-called ‘and then’ stories, from writers such as Enid Blyton and C S Lewis. There was not much to be read into the characterisation or the relationship between cause and effect. Moving through childhood into adolescence the ‘and thens’ for this generation came from Agatha Christie (Murder mysteries) and Ian Fleming (James Bond).

However, it could be a meeting with Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s great detective, that first turned critical faculties towards characterisation and problem solving through story. Here were narratives that had intricate patterns of behaviour and of interaction amongst humans. It inspired the feeling of wanting to know what happened next, how the protagonists were feeling, what motivated them and how you might behave under similar circumstances.

Stories, case studies or scenarios – however we choose to describe narrative – can be so useful in engineering particular behaviours in the workplace or the community. Narrative creates a fresh insight into new destinations, and reveals paths you might follow and actions you might take to reach them.

In sales training it is common to use story. A sales assistant might use a narrative with dialogue to come to understand what a customer had in mind that led to a decision to buy or not to buy. Analysis and generalisation might lead to a planned change in behaviour and improved sales results. But the story and the dialogue must be authentic. After matching with their own past experience or other reality checks, the learner will dismiss it as just pure fiction if does not have a ring of truth.

Using unlikely sounding dialogue is a common way of losing the learner. Writing realistic dialogue is absolutely fraught with risk and hence must be approached with caution and skill. A useful tip is to always read out loud the dialogue you write. If it is awkward to articulate, then it is almost certainly unrealistic. People take shortcuts when talking – particularly in an informal situation.

A ‘What if?’ has a lower prospect of affecting behaviour than a ‘What when?’. For example, if we say, “Let’s imagine what it will be like if our managers make a better job of performance appraisal”, then the likely response is “That might work for XYZ, but you’d never get our managers to do it”.

By contrast we might say, “Let’s see what happened when reluctant or unconfident managers like ours changed the way they thought about and conducted performance appraisal.” Now the story is a verifiable matter of historic fact. It has already happened, and so it can happen again if the circumstances can be understood and repeated.

We need to take care not to manipulate facts and figures in a cynical way. A narrative might be factually accurate but not truthful. A commonly quoted example is the true fact that 700 passengers who travelled on the Titanic reached New York in complete safety. Once it has been revealed that the ship sank with the loss of 1500 lives then the story and the teller have irrevocably lost trust and credibility.

One company I know tried to encourage people to persevere with its ‘delinquent’ CRM system by relating the amount of money it had invested in it, the effort it had devoted to improving and updating it, and the string of successful implementations its supplier had accomplished in other businesses. It went on to describe all the features which made it so user-friendly and reliable. None of those messages were as influential as the ‘pity parties’ that took place daily wherever users convened and spoke of the frustrations and disappointments they were suffering and the ‘work-arounds’ they had developed using spreadsheets, paper, post-it notes and other ingenious tactics.

Sharing stories can have a major impact in transforming individuals and organisations. It can intensify learning and self-awareness. When people exchange stories – whether it is something they’ve heard or something they’ve experienced for themselves – it has a profound effect on their mutual trust and respect as well as their learning. But there is a strong tendency for communication in organisations to skew the picture of how things are in reality. Training must take care not to be complicit in this deception, because trust, once lost, is difficult to recover.

And they all lived happily ever after

You might suppose that you’d get a negative response from a story that began, “Let me tell you about a team that did everything wrong and ended up in dire straits”. Think again. Take a lead from Shakespeare. He set out to show through his tragedies what can happen to The Weak, or The Naïve; to the The Vain, The Lustful or The Vengeful. All the great classical dramatists knew about this.

The power of story

The Greeks had a word for it - catharsis. Story was believed to be so powerful a tool in influencing and regulating behaviour that it was compulsory for the people of ancient Athens to attend the theatre and witness crime, tragedy and retribution on an epic scale. If a citizen had no coin to pay, then the state provided it for him. The principle was simple – if the ordinary man witnessed Oedipus murdering his father and bedding his mother, then his own blood lust would be satisfied by proxy as it were, and he would be morally stronger for having seen the punishment that follows sin.

Story-telling as an instructional strategy

It is not by accident that teachers turn to story to settle excitable young children. It works for adults too; a good book or an interesting film has the ability to transport us beyond the cares of here and now and can inform, inspire, instruct - or simply soothe.

The satisfaction that comes from a story is held within its structure – it has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Everything that happens is tied together by a string of events, in which people meet and then respond to challenges with more or less positive outcomes. A good story can help us to form concepts and develop beliefs and values. It can use metaphor and narrative to make complex ideas accessible and to help us to recall intricate chains of cause and effect. Social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook have caught on to the importance of story in people’s lives and so have introduced narrative and timeline as a means of harnessing the elegant self-containment of story as a format. We engage with story through our emotions as well as our thoughts, so we can become immersed in it. Afterwards, our insights and memories can be as strong as if we as if we had actually been present in the events that the story related. The easiest stories for us to assimilate connect with our understanding of the world, and have a logical flow so that we can make sense of them and remember what they were about.

Let’s get serious

The limbic system is the part of the brain that science has linked with motivation and emotion. It is the limbic system that signals whether we ought to laugh or cry at a stimulus. Earlier in this paper, we mentioned John Cunliffe and his circle of attention when telling stories to children. Adults react in that way, too; promise a riveting tale and you can sense the change in the mood and body language.

Whether it comes from a person or a screen, you can see people lean forward towards the storyteller. They release tension, and apply all their senses to receiving the sounds and perhaps sights too, that combine to tell the tale.

Suppose someone said to you, “I’m about to tell you a deeply moving and inspirational story. Many people who have heard this story say it changed their lives profoundly and they became better people for hearing it.” Or alternatively, “I’m about to tell you a story in which some very good people struggling against impossible odds were defeated and lost everything.”

Do you want to hear that second story? Will you feel keen, ready to listen, disinterested, intrigued, suspicious, ready to switch off?

The textbook says that the prospect of a happy ending makes the limbic system inject its own special opium (dopamine) into your brain to give you a ‘feel good’ sensation that comes when the guy gets the gal, the whale returns to the sea, the rightful king is crowned, or the aliens are repelled.

If we can accept the truth in this science then we might draw the conclusion that ‘feel good’ would be a more productive state than ‘flight or fight’ for someone who is conceiving a bright new future for themselves or their organisation.

The monomyth

The work of Joseph Campbell focused on stories, myths, and rituals across cultures and throughout time. He detected common patterns, especially in rite of passage stories and rituals in which people progress from being dependent children to responsible adults in the community. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he showed how ancient myths from around the world all have a similar basic plot. Campbell called this ‘the monomyth’. It contains some or all of the same eight ingredients whether found in the legends of Gilgamesh, Osiris or Prometheus, in the tales of the Buddha, Moses and Christ, or (bringing things up to date) Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or your favourite adventure game.

The Call to Adventure 1. The hero begins in the normal world 2. The hero receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events 3. The hero accepts the call

The Road of Trials 4. The hero faces tasks and trials either alone or with assistance 5. The hero faces a life-threatening challenge, often with help earned along the journey 6. The hero survives, achieves a great gift (the ‘boon’), and often discovers some profound self-knowledge

The Return 7. The hero decides whether to return with the boon, often facing challenges on the way back. 8. The hero gets back safely and the boon makes the world a better place.

Some tips for using stories in training

Know your audience. If you are writing for a predominantly young age group, use a tone, style and language they will relate to. If you are writing globally for a multicultural audience, avoid jargon and idioms.

Use real stories wherever possible. Senior members of staff are often happy to provide real stories of mistakes they have made in their youth that had disastrous consequences but which have clearly not affected their rise up the corporate ladder. People lower down the pecking order may be less open to paint potentially disastrous scenarios.

Make sure your characters arouse interest. How many times have you read a book and not given a monkey’s about what happens to any of the characters because they are all so one-dimensional? Give them a bit of background; their likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses. Base them on people you know or have met along the way.

Use humour with caution. All equality and diversity training courses say, “make jokes we can all laugh at”. This is, of course, easier said than done and it comes back to knowing your audience.

Avoid rights and wrongs. Most decisions are not clear cut. Don’t over simplify or make the right answers to situations that you paint painfully obvious. People and the systems they interact with are complex. Encourage further questioning, research or validation to uncover more nuggets of information that may have a vital impact on the scenario you are painting.

Test your dialogue out loud. Photo or audio stories that use direct dialogue must have resonance with reality. There are some shockingly badly written dialogues out there. Read out loud the words you have written. Does it sound clumsy or is it difficult to read? Then it is.

Photo story or not photo story? Photo stories can work well. They add another dimension to the written word and can be particularly helpful if you cannot use audio.