If a story leaves you indifferent, the story won't affect others either

Topic: Reading Notes – "Your Team Needs a Storyteller" (Part 2, Part 1)

"Your Team Needs a Storyteller" By Annette Simmons (Author), Yin Xiaohong (Translator)

Teams run on numbers, facts, predictions, and processes. These may sound boring and boring, but it's because these factors don't inspire our passion and desire to be exceptional, to be a pioneer, or to put ourselves into our work. Ultimately, only diverse and passionate teams can create revolutionary results that also depend on the human factor.

"Your Team Needs a Storyteller" not only illustrates how to learn and enhance this ability, but also uses stories as a way of thinking to inspire people to solve problems.

Part TWO: Be the one who can tell a story

Chapter Five: Sensory details are more realistic than stories

Even if you've never been to Russia, I can use a story to make you feel immersed, using sensory experience as a basis to describe the scenery, the people, the events, the ending.

We can use the sensory experience to tell a story about a Russian woman who looks homeless, wears ragged skirts and coats, sells trinkets, small handkerchiefs, and doesn't make a living begging. Sensory cognitions like these are all constituent elements of the story, and with more sensory information to make the story more concrete, the image of a woman becomes vivid: she stands in the cold rain, maintaining her dignity as much as possible in an upright posture. She was wearing an old crochet sweater with an overcoat over it. The sweater was too thin to keep warm, and only a rhinestone button was left on it. When I walked over to buy a handkerchief, I found that her eyes were much stronger than I thought.

Now start grooming. Once images with sensual details come to mind, I can choose some details to make her image stir up your emotions: anxiety, despair, sympathy or uneasiness.

Each story can be modified, and each story represents a subjective choice of people to leave details behind. If you want your audience to come to the same conclusions as you, construct a story with specific sensory experiences that allow the listener to derive the same insights as you.

Tried and tested sensory connections

For the first time, people heard stories of "someone waking up in a bathtub in Las Vegas and finding themselves covered in ice and their kidneys removed." They could almost feel the chill of the ice cubes in the bathtub, and they seemed to be able to see the handwritten note that made them call the hospital soon. Strangers daze guests in hotels and take away their kidneys—and before people's foreheads can doubt the credibility of the story, imagination takes the first step forward to create this feeling.

The story of "Spider Under the Toilet Lid" takes place in an olive garden restaurant, a place you know even if you've never been there. This is the result of a double-striped Cape New Spider (a scientific-sounding name that seems plausible). The story about "spiders under the toilet lid" is particularly interesting. This story is a good example of how triggering physiological sensations can make the story easier to spread. The author who fabricated this event blinded people's rational thinking with the help of vivid sensory details. When the story gives the listener a physically perceptual response and also experiences a strong emotional experience, the story is unforgettable.

One person I admire who knows how to harness the power of storytelling to bring numbers to life—audience analysis and advanced conceptual models are important—though these abstractions don't tell you what kind of sensory experiences lead to insights and stimulate emotions.

Experience is about the senses

While both analytical and advanced conceptual models of the listener are important, knowing the data about the listener (digital abstractions) doesn't make you feel much empathy so that you won't find the specific sensory experiences that elicit new ideas. Storytelling mobilizes the five senses of our perception of the world—smell, taste, hearing, touch, and vision—to simulate impactful experiences.

If you buy stocks in a volatile market environment, the numbers alone can make you emotionally fluctuate, but only because you associate stock price fluctuations with your own real life: a limousine vs. an old car; champagne versus beer; or a 80-year-old retirement at a golf course compared to a security guard at a mall. This is the practical significance of the number after converting it into physical health and mental state, and reality can stimulate people's feelings.

Hands-on investigations

It is not enough to simply investigate the age group and habits of the target audience. You have to turn off your computer, put away your market research, and go out and talk to your target demographic in person so you can find the story. If you want to activate your creative mind, let your body and senses move. Your brain may crave the false clarity of data, but your body needs to activate feelings with sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

Experiencing the meaning behind the data in real life adds more detail to your story, allowing the listener to have a more direct experience and tell them in real-world details that you're seeing and hearing the same thing. So you really see things from the same perspective. This kind of dedicated investigation can increase the credibility of the story, add creativity, and make your story more deeply rooted and convincing.

As we explore the art of storytelling, we find that a lot is hidden behind averages and numbers. Only by devoting yourself to investigation can you lead to a "flesh-and-blood experience" that creates a great story, whether your purpose is to understand the audience and then influence it, or to examine future actions, as long as you go as deep into reality as possible and abandon preconceived notions, this is the best way to investigate.

In Nigeria, I had the opportunity to invite local women to tell their inner "stories" of strength. I started with a story called "Lady Lagnell" that ends with the puzzle "What a Woman Wants" and the answer "Freedom to Choose." Then I invited the women present to tell a story that I had recently felt so powerful. One woman said that she also had the right to control property and could lend money to others without the consent of her husband. Another woman said she asked an arrogant doctor to re-examine a neighbor's child's leg, and the doctor finally found and removed the glass from the child's leg, stopping the ulcer on the child's leg.

Instead of sitting on the research cutting board for a week in a diabetic community, you'll find that the pamphlets that teach people to eat healthy are often ineffective. Dietitians have to admit that no one reads these pamphlets, and people never change their eating habits. If all medical researchers had lived with the "population" they studied for a week or more, they could discover more creative stories.

Research is usually based on factors that are easy to separate, rather than on which factors are easy to change behavior. When the subjective problems of the "distorted" study are separated, the results lose all the subjective factors that influence behavior. Argument-based investigations may be precise, but they miss creative electronics that can only be conceived by observing people's actual behavior for themselves. A full-bodied investigation is likely to debunk the assumptions espoused, expose flaws in logic, and overthrow the ivory tower. Sometimes, stories make us take a step back so that we can move forward.

Use familiar experiences and feelings — that is, use hands-on experiences to make stories more tangible. If a story leaves you indifferent, the story won't affect others either.

Chapter 6: The Benefits of Brevity

Simplicity is not a waste of effort, and it takes a lot of time and effort to do so. As Goethe wrote in a letter to a friend: "If I had extra time, this letter could have been shorter." ”

First, let's find the root cause of simplicity. The opposite of simplicity—vagueness, repetitiveness, repetition, or other forms of storytelling that are extremely boring to the listener—arise because you don't solve the predictable problems before you tell the story. Blindly pursuing the perfect "original abstract" or "elevator speech", and too blindly and too much editing, will also make the story cut too much, thus affecting the appeal of the story.

What is your story

Brevity requires you to make a judgment about the most important information here at this point before editing it. Trusting your judgment also means trusting your audience. When you overcome your dilemma and choose the story that best reflects who you are and why you are here, these difficult choices become easier. Choosing the stories that will lead to the best presentation is a rigorous process. After sorting out the contradictory values and walking through the hidden dilemma, it becomes easier to edit for the sake of simplicity.

This is the best simplicity

After figuring out the focus of the problem, we can better pursue simplicity. If you're trying to be concise from the start, trying to find "acoustic abstracts" or "elevator speeches," it's easy to think, "I don't have time to think about the nonsense of 'who I am,' 'why am I here,' 'the most important values.'" "After all, you're going to clip out most of the content. However, the vegetables picked out of the soup will still leave the flavor of the vegetables in the soup.

Good artists and writers often spend hours pursuing a concise expression that encompasses everything, or drawing a line with rich connotations. Imagine the time it takes to streamline paintings and movies down to a few important details. This is a proportional relationship worth remembering: millions of dollars and hours are spent just to create an experience. Paintings that seem effortless and stories that seem simple are usually the result of years of hard work. Of course, sometimes some wonderful story will come up in your head and you can tell it along the way. In most cases, the perfect story needs to be created, and the flesh-and-blood experience is edited after self-reflection and reflection on intentions. Pull out a story you're best at and ask yourself, "What's the core message I want to give?" ”

Make the story more concise

For the most part, you'll tell stories in private conversations, speeches, or informal exchanges. This is the moment when the practice becomes concise. Practice various ways of editing stories on less important occasions, and then you'll already develop the habit of brevity at important junctures. When practicing, you can find problems that undermine simplicity, such as ambiguity due to inner contradictions, chattering because you like to listen to details, excessive control, or lack of preparation.

Doubt the methods of persuasion that you have learned before. In the culture of our entire society and the culture of your organization, it is possible that you have imposed some formal or informal oratory templates in your mind, and these models will automatically jump out when you want to sculpt the story. These mental models sometimes conflict with each other.

For example, to avoid ambiguity, the information you convey is too certain, which may make you appear arrogant or lack curiosity.

Be subjective

We sometimes have to revise lengthy descriptions of the purpose of the company at meetings, remember the pain of those terrible meetings? We sat down with high expectations at first, only to find out that word games had started. Therefore, you should choose the language that you end the meeting as soon as possible, not the nonsense that looks forward to a bright future.

In all cultures that seek clarity, simply asking subjective questions tends to feel vague or simplistic. Only stories and metaphors can illustrate vague concepts of passion, service, and belief while engaging people in the process of information input. When a group seeks an unattainable level of clarity, people are constantly wrestling with the wording.

Everyone has their own definitions in mind for professional presentations and for proper definitions, and these hidden definitions can sometimes upset your footing. If the template for your "great talk" is an extremely objective, linear evolution, with all relevant information marked with key symbols, your slides may be as long as 70 pages, and the effect may not be like a three-minute story.

Test yourself: If you're going to give a one-hour talk about your most important plans and the relationship between plans and organizational goals, how do you give a presentation? Keep an eye out for what you're going to do next. Take the time to think about the first thing to do, or open the slides and write down a few key sentences?

Turn off the computer and ask yourself some basic questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What is the best outcome of my presentation? It may not be like actually working, because you can think about problems in a daze, walk, or even exercise, but it's the work that allows you to send a more effective message. These questions can expose incongruities and contradictions in your speech, and can help you find conflicting values. That's what it's all about taking the time to ask yourself questions. The inability to solve the problems of incongruity, self-contradiction, and conflicting values is the root cause of the fragmentation, superficiality, and cumbersome details of the speech process.

Taking a stand reduces anxiety

Charts line up reality neatly, and stories may indicate chaos, but can also help address that confusion. Avoiding the chaotic side of reality isn't the only way to keep things simple. Taking a stand can achieve a clear and concise effect, and can also show the strength of clear and crisp information. This requires you to respect both your audience and trust them. Once you've made up your mind, your presentation becomes an impressive story, and the charts and figures are reduced to the most important ones.

Core values clash at some point, which requires a bold decision to be made in advance, and when two values clash extremely, pick the most important one in your heart.

Take the courage to make a decision that will ease your anxiety and relieve the anxiety caused by the unfinished story. A meaningful story with a degree of brevity and clarity that makes the other person feel your sincerity. Contrary to the fallacy of "business selflessness", you must first be full of feelings, so that you can stir up the feelings of others. Trust, loyalty, enthusiasm, and compassion are all the ultimate personal feelings. Therefore, your personal story can turn unkind into full of human feelings in a very short period of time.