Beyond Mother Goose: Storytelling in Mentoring, Marketing, Managing, More

Mark Beese blogged about the Forbes article by John Kotter on the power of storytelling. Mark described some of the benefits storytelling has for both management and leadership.

Recently Seth Kahan interviewed John Kotter. Professor Kotter opens the interview by talking about why storytelling is so important in presenting ideas that will create desired change:

Five or six years ago I started thinking more consciously about my primary goal: helping people change what they do and get better results. I have spoken at hundreds of meetings. Increasingly it is clear to me that people have trouble remembering what they hear at these meetings. This means it isn’t having an impact on their decisions, their actions, and hence, results on the job.

As I explored, I became very interested in the brain. I learned about neurology, and emerging fields like medical anthropology and the study of the brain’s evolution. I began to wonder how people learned 500,000 years ago. They didn’t have PowerPoint slides. It was from direct experience and stories of direct experience.

Stories stick in the brain in a holistic way, better than charts, numbers and concepts. As a result the probability that the message will have an impact on behavior goes up.

Mentoring, marketing, managing, and more succeed when ideas are presented that are memorable and provocative of action. Storytelling delivers ideas that are both.

As a storytelling bonus for you, here's an interview by Steve Denning. The person being interviewed is Jim Stuart who delivered the keynote address at last month's Smithsonian Storytelling Symposium. In this interview he says the organizational story fosters vision alignment and the personal story creates trust.

Of course, both vision alignment and trust are key components of management and leadership, and thus important to the legal profession today. in both of these interviews, the extraordinary power of storytelling is explained. How many law firms are utilizing this power tool?

Today I am going to see if I have mastered Trackbacks. I am attempting to Trackback to the Mark Beese post mentioned above. You can click on over to Mark's post to see if I succeeded.

Comments

[Chris Bailey]

Stephanie, great reminder of how powerful stories are in our own learning process. My own experience tends to be similar to that of Kotter: most seminars and workshops I've attended are entertaining and informative, but it's all short-lived. I walk away and the lessons are like dust in the wind. My best learning experiences are the ones where I've actually had to wrestle with them after I left the session. More than likely, it was contained in a story...though for some it was just the flicker of an idea that needed time to more fully ignite.

From someone who is fascinated by the legal profession, but isn't a lawyer, I'm curious...in what ways could someone from the legal profession use storytelling techniques? Would it be for use with a client?

I have my first professional presentation coming up at the end of the month. I'm now thinking of how I can incorporate more storytelling techniques into the program.

Cheers.