Annette Simmons wrote the book, The Story Factor (2nd Revised Edition), and a hidden gem, Territorial Games. The Story Factor became a classic when 800-CEO-READ named it in their book as one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time (Penguin, 2009). Annette is the founder of Group Process Consulting.
Related Podcast and Transcription: The Story Factor Author on Storytelling
Joe: One of things that you’ve been applying storytelling to that I thought was very interesting was healthcare, and leadership, patient behavior. Can tell us a little bit about that?
Annette: Again I’ll go back to storytelling is a way for us to talk about these things. In medicine, they love for all changes to be backed up by evidence. The catchphrase is evidence-based tools. The problem is that storytelling includes ambiguity; it’s personal which makes it very situation specific. And so they’ve lost the capacity to address these very, very important things that have to do with people’s feelings, not the facts. So for instance if you wanted to lose weight, if things were based on logic, then you’d only need to read one diet book. We got something else going on entirely here. And in order to address the emotions, for instance patient education, you don’t hand somebody a brochure about diabetes and expect it to change their behavior. Well they do but they’re starting to realize it doesn’t work.
The American healthcare act requires that results, patient health be included in remuneration, people are now beginning to think, “Okay patient education has got to improve, what can we use?” Storytelling. When nurses can tell a story, that’s personal to them it feels personal to the patient. So you can deliver some sort of generic instructions about behavior modification but if you tell a story it has emotional content and it starts to sink in. Even if this person is completely different from you. And that’s one of the things people think, “Well that’s irrelevant.” No, it’s not because it’s personal. If it’s personal to you it will feel personal to them and when you make that connection they begin to open up and listen to what you have to say. With patient satisfaction, the same thing applies, and you can use it backwards and forwards. For instance UX, user design, in software does the same thing by gathering user stories instead of surveys which they live and die by.
If a hospital will begin to gather stories specifically about why they got low scores and communicating to the patient why the procedure is late – this is a big deal – they may find out that it has more to do with the way the office is setup. And user design has known this for a long time. If you can have eye contact with somebody then maybe you understand a little bit more about why things are running late. I’m not sure what it is because it’s different in different places. Now I’m using storytelling to train nurses to understand that every patient has their own special story that can only be interpreted through their kind of world view story. If you have a patient that thinks the world is a dangerous place, you talk to that patient differently than the patient who thinks everybody is wonderful and is happy to be there just because somebody said good morning. These understandings really aren’t possible without storytelling. It’s the language for something that we’ve been ignoring for too long.
Joe: You need to directly relate to that person and have that conversation with that person based on their outlook. So you’re talking about storytelling really as a way to create conversation, it’s just not one-sided.
Annette: It’s diagnostic; it’s therapeutic, it’s a form of treatment – yeah, all of those things. One of the most important experiences of my life was teaching leadership in the 90’s, and I began to realize that even the biggest jerk in the world is that way because something happened to them and so I began to realize that everybody has a story. We sometimes got the executives that needed fixing. In our leadership training, it included a self-awareness workshop and I found out one guy when he was seven his five year old brother drowned and his father blamed him for it – a seven year old. And this guy was a total jerk. Ever since I can look at total jerks and because I know that one story I have a lot more compassion for them because I figure they’ve got a story too. So storytelling is pervasive in our ability to understand human beings. And the sense of feeling important. Ambiguity does not mean we can’t understand. We simply have to ask for the story.
Related Podcast and Transcription: The Story Factor Author on Storytelling
Lean Sales and Marketing: Lean Engagement Team
Special Marketing with Lean Book and Program offers on Facebook