People who fail to couch what they have to say in memorable stories will have their rules fall on deaf ears despite their best intentions and despite the best intentions of their listeners.
--Roger C. Shank, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence
I have wondered before here at idealawg how many law firms are using the powerful tool of storytelling. Storytelling is a critical part of the practice of law, can be a dynamic and time-saving strategy in law firm management and leadership, and seems to be an often-shunned way of communicating. Using storytelling when acting as an advocate, perhaps even as an advisor, is probably more accepted than utilizing it in the non-billable hours of a lawyer's day. In activities such as firm management, to quote Stephen Denning, "Real leaders don't tell stories, just as real men don't eat quiche." (This quote is taken from his thoughts on why storytelling is resisted in work organizations; more about what he says below.)
In order to represent clients, James Boyd White in The Legal Imagination tells us that lawyers must master not only theory and analysis but also storytelling.
I think a fundamental distinction can be drawn between the mind that tells a story and the mind that gives reasons: one finds its meaning in representations of events as they occur in time, in imagined experience; the other in systematic or theoretical explanations, in the exposition of conceptual order or structure. One is given to narrative, the other to analysis. Each works in its own way, and it is hard to imagine a conversation between them (what does the economist have to say to the novelist, after all, or vice versa?); but however inconsistent these voices seem, the lawyer must recognize both of them within himself. That he must master theoretical and analytic speech is plain enough . . . . It should be equally evident that he must learn how to tell a story, and how to listen to one . . . .
. . .
Might it not be suggested that the central act of the legal mind, of judge and lawyer alike, is this conversion of the raw material of life -- of the actual experiences of people and the thousands of ways they can be talked about -- into a story that will claim to tell the truth in legal terms? To do this, one must master both sorts of discourse (both narrative and analysis) and put them to work, at the same time and despite their inconsistencies, in the service of a larger enterprise.
Moving into the realm of non-billable activities, the use of storytelling is still rare. We see much evidence of the efficacy of storytelling in processes ranging from branding to marketing to managing, and yet it is not often employed in law firms or even most non-law businesses. Why? Stephen Denning author of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative, has some ideas in answer to that simple question. He gave this explanation in a post to the WorkingStories: Organizational Storytelling listserv when the question posed was the same as the one I just asked: ""Why the resistance to storytelling in the workplace?"
"Soft." "Fuzzy." "Squishy." "Emotional." "Fluffy". "Anecdotal." "Irrational." "Fantasy." "Fairy stories." "Primitive." "Childish." These are just some of the terms that the advocates of conventional management hurl at storytelling, which they see as contaminating the world of pure reason with the poison of emotions and feeling, and dragging the world back into the Dark Ages.
We are only just now emerging from an age when storytelling was suspect. Scientists derided it as folklore. Philosophers threatened to censor it. Logicians had difficulty in depicting it. Management theorists generally ignored it. And storytelling's bad press isn't new. It has been disreputable for several millennia, ever since Plato identified poets and storytellers as dangerous fellows who put unreliable knowledge into the heads of children and hence would be subject to strict censorship in The Republic.
Denning continues giving a historical perspective of attitudes towards storytelling, and then discusses the problems with the standard management manual and the perils of heeding standard management advice. He next describes the contortions of the authors of many books on leadership.
It's actually hilarious to dip into the vast literature on leadership and observe the contorted efforts of academics trying to explain what leaders are actually doing without mentioning that forbidden word, "storytelling".
He believes:
This is now changing, as management journals such as Harvard Business Review and management textbooks have begun recognized the role of storytelling, and firms are introducing storytelling into leadership training.
Denning thinks there is still much movement needed before storytelling is acceptable in most organizations.
Until we recognize the complexity, the mess, the jumble, the clutter, the chaos, the confusion, the living core of modern organizations, and use storytelling to help interact with the people in them, we'll never be very good at leading them.
I recommend you read his whole message on the resistance to storytelling. Denning is a person to whom you probably want to listen if you are interested in the status of storytelling in the workplace. He is a thinker and a doer. He was a lawyer.
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