made to stick

Most of us can tell stories. It’s our normal mode of relating what we did at the week-end or last night or when teasing someone about the office party. Or why we arrived home a few hours later than promised. These different stories may contain varying levels of truth and exaggeration, of course, but they tend to share a structure that the audience of the tale understands (even when not being entirely sympathetic).

Tell Stories in Business — Old Timer Explains The Expenses Claim Process

But when it comes to business communication, many companies seem to forget the need to tell stories. They feel that, because “this is business, it’s not personal”, a different structure needs to be used. Something more obviously grown up. More serious. With serious business words.

If you’ve ever followed the instructions to programme the DVD recorder or build a flat-pack shelving system, read a typical ‘look at us’ brochure or website, or glazed over while digesting a vacuous press release or white paper, you will have experienced fully the benefits of grown up and serious writing first hand.

And that’s what they inflict on their customers.

In a lot of companies, the state of internal communications can be just as bad, if not worse. Not only do we need to find ways to use stories to connect to customers, I think it is equally important to tell stories within business.

Stories connect people and I believe it is a rare person who does not have a natural ability to do it. It is the corporate fear of openness and honesty that demands we lose the emotion and the fun when we discuss business.

In Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath talk about Xerox engineers gathered for a game of cribbage. One of the repair engineers discusses – over time – a peculiar fault uncovered after a recent ‘improvement’ in the electronics. The story gets told, the other engineers take it on board – and they remember it for when they might face a similar situation. This story was not – and could not – be replicated in a procedure manual. At least, not in a way that would have made it so memorable. (Read my review of Made To Stick.)

Therein lies the problem: many companies not only discourage (actively or passively) the storytelling approach to conveying information but they also have no processes in place to capture stories should they come to accept their importance.

Would the stories dry up if employees thought they were being captured? That’s a risk that stems primarily from the fact that many people are locked into thinking that business writing is an artificial construct that only skilful practitioners can master. Encourage people to find and use their own voice and free themselves from the belief that there is a special way to write that is so different to the way they speak and much of that paralysing fear will disappear.

It is up to companies to implement tools that allow the writing of stories in ways that retain their spontaneity and flexible structure. Social tools such as blogs and forums are perfect for such a thing. These can remain on an intranet for all good and proper business and security reasons but at least a repository of expertise and company knowledge will have a place to reside.

Pipe dream or necessity? How do you see the future of stories in your business?

The second book on my recent reading list is Made To Stick by Chip & Dan Heath.

I had read their book Switch earlier in the year and enjoyed it, so grabbing hold of their previous book made sense. To me, anyway.

Where Switch deals with what change is hard and what to do about overcoming the obstacles – both external and internal – in the way of change, Made To Stick looks at the apparently simple notion of why “some ideas take hold and others come unstuck”.

Of course, it’s not a simple notion and the Heath brothers take close to 300 pages to examine it.

Conveying ideas and getting them to make an impact – the longer the better, in most cases – is a vital component in the writer’s skill set. I approached this book, therefore, as a writer with a novel nearing completion as much as someone looking to launch a new business. The book rewards both approaches.

Like Switch, this book is written in a style that is engaging and easy to read. It is peppered, too, with great stories that are a treat to read and which easily convey the concepts discussed in a particular chapter.

The basic thesis of Made To Stick is carried in six chapters that follow the pleasing acronym of SUCCES(s). These break down ‘stickiness’ like this:

S for Simple: find the core message to be conveyed
U for Unexpected: grab and hold attention with surprise and interest
C for Concrete: make abstract ideas concrete with a real and telling example
C for Credible: help people believe through using authority or details they understand from experience
E for Emotional: make people care
S for Stories: people act on the back of inspirational stories

This just touches the surface of what the book covers. But if you want to know what makes an idea (including a business idea) stick or have a chance of longevity – and how to give your ideas the best chance to acquire such stickiness – this is a greatly rewarding read.

Many of the techniques described by Heath & Heath would be covered in a top rate creative writing course and I was fascinated to see the parallels between building a narrative (whether fiction or journalism) and developing a way to ensure that information is retained in the minds of an audience of potential customers or when we want to influence behaviour.

It should not be a surprise that the processes are so similar. After all, stories have long been used to carry history, myth, tenets of faith, and proscriptions of behaviour. The best stories – and their messages – endure in the same way that brand messages and propaganda and urban legends persist.

I would recommend reading both books pictured above (with the obligatory affiliate link to Amazon). The Heath Brothers also maintain a web site, which is well worth a visit. There are all kinds of download goodies available from their site, including great swathes of PDF versions of the material from their books.

Let Your Employees Tell Stories To Each Other

Stick It To Them