#156: Stories that stick

Last week’s letter focused on getting people ready, willing, and able to change. It reminded us that if we don’t build organisational support and momentum around a strategy, it dies (This letter from March 2022 shares more insight from the Fit for Growth team). Today’s letter continues the theme.

/ strategy

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath comment “A strategy is, at its core, a guide to behavior. It comes to life through its ability to influence thousands of decisions, both big and small, made by employees throughout an organization. A good strategy drives actions that differentiate the company and produce financial success. A bad strategy drives actions that lead to a less competitive, less differentiated position. A lot of strategies, though, are simply inert. Whether they are good or bad is impossible to determine, because they do not drive action”.

Why don’t they drive action? Because they’re not effectively communicated.

The Heaths provoke, “Compare a typical customer with a typical employee. Companies spend millions trying to understand the Typical Customer. They’re studied and analyzed. Their whims are plotted and charted. Messages are laboriously tailored to their concerns and delivered to them via convenient media. Meanwhile, the Typical Employee receives a bland (but cheerful) monthly e-mail newsletter, which an unlucky HR employee hacked together in ninety minutes…Customer communication is taken very seriously, and employee communication isn’t…Employees need to understand what your organization stands for, where it’s headed, and what will make it successful. In other words, they need to be able to ‘talk strategy.’ And if they can talk strategy back to you, you’ll benefit from insights that would otherwise be untapped and invisible.”

How we use language is how we make friends. And enemies. It is how we get hired. And fired. It is the difference between a strategy that dies on PowerPoint and one that inspires consistent action. Yet, we are rarely (almost never) taught how to craft our messages.

Made to Stick identifies six principles that make messages stickier – simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories.

You’re right, it is SUCCES. Cheesy, but you’ll remember it.

They observe that the stickiest of sticky messages – proverbs – encode abstract truths in concrete language: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.

Or think about those just-wont-die urban crime legends that circulate in family WhatsApp groups – the headlight flashing gang initiations, the stolen kidneys – you know them – there’s no fuzzy abstract language there…no one forwards a message that says ‘a regionally based illicit business operation intends to diversify its operations into the removal of organic waste-filtering devices accessed through the surreptitious administering of a narcotic placed surreptitiously in the target’s beverage’…nope, it’s you, a spiked drink, your kidney, gone, to someone in another country. Very concrete. Very sticky.

(If you don’t know this urban legend, the brief version is business traveler is asked by an attractive person in a bar to join them for a drink, they wake up hours later in an ice bath with a note explaining they’re one kidney down.)

The Heaths cite study after study, showing that sharing vivid, relatable details relevant to the core idea that you’re promoting makes your message stickier and more persuasive.

FedEx gives an award called the Purple Promise, which celebrates employees who keep their promise that packages will ‘absolutely, positively’ arrive overnight. It shares detailed specific stories of how employees have lived that promise. Each story helps make the strategy specific, actionable and replicable.

So often we write in language that is so abstract, ambiguous, and jargonized that no one acts. For your strategy to stick, it must make your audience pay attention, understand and remember it, agree with it, care about it and be able to act on it.

Concrete images help cement this process 😉

// self

Vivian Gornick is an acclaimed writer who taught for many years at The New School in New York. This month, The Paris Review gave her their Hadada Award for lifetime achievement; previous recipients have include Joan Didion and Jamaica Kincaid. Her The Situation and the Story is about the art of writing personal memoir.

I read it because whether conscious or not, we have stories that we live into, stories that shape the characters we are in the world, that shape the actions we take and do not take.

We are the authors of our lives and understanding the art of personal narrative, of how to tell our story, in turn helps us understand how to be more effective in creating our lives (If this idea appeals to you, you’ll enjoy this letter).

She writes “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

Isn’t that life? We are born into a situation. It is up to us to craft the story.

Imagine that in each moment of your life, you are writing a paragraph of your autobiography. What is it saying? Is telling a story that you’d be happy for others to read?

Look back. What is the story of your life thus far? What do you learn about yourself as you examine the story that has unfolded from the situation into which you were born? What story do you tell yourself? Are there other stories that you’ve not seen? What might happen if you lived that story?

Don’t expect the process to be easy.

Gornick cautions us, “Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard, hard work”. Rousseau makes a similar observation, “I have nothing but myself to write about, and this self that I have, I hardly know of what it consists”.

The regular cycles of life can anesthetize us. Yet, with patience and attention we can catch glimpses of our story beneath the daily flow of life. With care and courage, we can lift them to the light, we can live into them and experience the power of being intentionally aligned with who we are, we can add details, experiences that embroider our autobiographies, enriching them, making them stories to share and inspire.

/// soul

In Ben Okri’s The Freedom Artist, a character reflects that in that world writers had lost their power.

He comments that “They wrote for fame, for money. They did whatever it took to succeed in changing times. They lost their integrity. They diluted the language of the race…They championed a downward trend and eliminated mystery from the world. They didn’t trust in beauty anymore. Every word became only what the word meant. A tree was a tree, nothing more. Poetry died. People couldn’t think symbolically. They turned against myth. Realism became the only truth. The written word became poorer than conversation. It was no longer necessary to read because books no longer nourished, they only informed. But technology could do that more easily.”

Stories that stick are rich in detail, they create an emotional connection, and they nourish our souls.

We are born into situations, and we have the chance to write our stories. We can live a literal life, or we can create one filled with beauty.

I hope that this week gives you the chance to trust in beauty and to remember that a tree is more than a tree (if you don’t believe me, read this).

Karl

PS: If you’re wanting to shape your story, you might want to work with me. I have space for three new clients from June. Email me if you’d like to have an exploratory conversation.