TaleCatcher

As different as black and white

In Tuesday's workshop we were talking about word clouds and how the language we use regularly builds up into an atmosphere around us. I don't want to go into the whole thing, but I was amazed when one of the group pointed out how many of the words George Bush used would also be true of Nelson Mandela. Freedom, fight, challenge, enemy, oppression, liberty, right, people, determined, united, nation, legacy, years, ideals, rights... Maybe she was reading Long Walk to Freedom and had it on her mind. It threw me for a minute. But it turns out she was spot-on.

I guess the stuff that distinguishes them is the context of their story - what they are aiming for, and what threatens to steer them off course. The response to their situations is what appears the same, without the bigger cloud of their world around them. The situations make them very, very different.

Fascinating, isn't it?

Just coincidence

I can find meaning anywhere. I joke that I could find meaning in an apple core lying in the street.

So I'm not very good at thinking things are just a coincidence. Also, my top strength is connectedness, defined as 'Things happen for a reason. You know they do.'

I'm off to London again tomorrow to run a workshop. I was there last week for another presentation (to a great group of people, I had a super time) but arrived late because of a problem at Wymondham station. I ended up on a later train than I should have been, even though I was sitting there in the cold and rain at 6:40 am, waiting for mine. When I got on the next train at 7:50, I joined a funny, squinty, jerky, stammering little old lady, who simply said to me, 'Oh. Oh. Well. I'm going to sleep now. Good night.' And with that she turned to the window, and slept.

Eight hours later, I hustled across London, through the tube stations, and ran across Kings Cross to try to catch a train that would let me see the girls before bed. I just made it. I changed in Cambridge, again running through the rain to get on a train right before it left, and plopped down in a seat beside... the same little old lady. There are hundreds of people on a train, and trains every hour, and I'd had plenty of opportunities to miss more trains after that first one. But there we were.

I wondered if I was meant to talk to her. After all, I shouldn't have been on that morning train with her in the first place.

But no, she told me in her eccentric little way that again, she didn't want to talk. So I got my book out, and that was fine.

So I had to wonder, what was all that about?

Maybe there was a link-in-the-chain purpose to it all. More likely it was just a coincidence.

Whatever that is. I prefer to imagine that I just don't know everything going on. How boring would that be, if we knew all the details, and how these great big stories we're living in our universe end?!

See you when I get back!

Response

This is probably really old, everybody's probably already heard it, and I'm just way behind, but I've been flicking through a copy of the classic 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,' and was struck by Covey's comment on responsibility: it is respons-able. Able to respond to what life throws you.

Yeah there's a story thing there, but I'll venture to say his point is just important, story or not. The ability to choose your response and the presence and energy and composure to get on with it, that's what it's about. The story's just the re-telling of it.

Loving the sound of your own voice

Do you keep a journal?

Not a blog. A pen-to-paper, in-your-hand, tangible, weighty, present on your bedside table, journal.

Back when I taught at the college I gave extra credit to students who wrote every day. It didn't matter what they wrote, and I didn't read it. I saw the writing, initialed it, and rewarded them. The process of getting their voice out meant that they were becoming more confident, and improving, and deserved recognition for the effort.

Back in the present, I've hit one of those walls where I have a question that's really, really tough to break through, but I know that persistence will be worth it, and a new world will open up on the other side. It's about helping people to recognise stories and seeing their experiences as more meaningful. Ahem, remember this is in the hard business world as well, where some people are more aware of the fluctuations of the share price than they are of the mood in a room. 

But I think I was on to something way back then. A journal is key to getting used to hearing the sound of the stories you tell. It's a private place to develop a voice, to hear what you sound like, before other people do.

It's a great place to track the progress of your story, and to find recurrent themes - to discover what's really important to you.

And if nothing else: a £3 bit of bound A5 from WHSmith's is a lot cheaper than a therapist.

Go. Write. Every day. And watch your world open up.

Just walk away

In Robert McKee's fabulous book Story he points out that the story happens when something gets in the way of people getting what they want.

And as story happens when conflict appears, so does our personality. And the collection of stories, or a pattern of how we respond to conflict, becomes our brand.

Elena was telling her litle sister the Christmas story. At five, she's already pretty good at making her way around a narrative, and coming up to her sixth Christmas, it's all starting to fit together. I overheard her tell Adele 'Mary and Joseph didn't fight King Herod for wanting to kill their baby, they just went away.'

I laughed at this possible turn the story could have taken. It's not fresh for me anymore, and I'd never considered that as an option. But it's a good example of how sometimes a story has to go one direction or another. It's part of who the characters are, their personality.

In a company - and in an individual - that is your brand. How is it you have to behave in a moment of conflict, because of who you are and how you need your ultimate story to go?

Something to be known by

My old team used to tell the story of a disabled boy who worked in a supermarket and heard a motivational speaker talk about making your mark, doing something that you will be known by. This is about story - about giving people the 'supermarket story' they will know you and your organisation by.

I suspect the story came from Chicken Soup for the Soul, but it was just repeated to me. The story goes that the boy went home and thought a long time about it, then asked his dad to help him create a 'thought for the day' on the computer. It was the young man's job to help customers pack their groceries, so he put a slip of paper with the thought for the day in each customer's shopping bag.

One day a while later, the shop manager noticed that there was a long queue to pay for shopping. She rushed around trying to open more tills, but the customers refused to move across. They all wanted to see this young man, and to get his thought for the day for themselves.

The idea of individualisation spread across the store. The florists started taking any buds that broke off to elderly women and making a corsage for them. The butcher had 1000 Snoopy stickers printed and put one on every packet of meat he prepared - and people wanted to buy that meat over the ordinary, anonymous options.

What do we do to make ourselves memorable? What story do we create about ourselves, that resonates with the stories our colleagues, customers, friends are telling themselves?

Here's a real life example: Nigel from Homebase got 1600 votes to switch on his town's Christmas lights. Johnny Depp only got 500. People went away from Homebase talking about Nigel and telling about the conversations they'd had with him.

People are desperate to make a connection with other people. They want to be acknowledged, understood, known. To do this we have to be present and confident and real in the first place.

And: Well done to Homebase for allowing him to be himself. Just like the supermarket of the story, the whole business benefits from letting people grow and be individuals. 

Colour as value, and not

I've been enjoying watching Adele acquire language. Naturally this is a combination of the connections she makes between our language and the things we're talking about, as well as our feelings and attitudes toward things.

So I wonder when she uses colours to talk about value. I ask, pretending: 'Do you want coffee or tea?' She wants the pink one. We get this a lot. 'Which shoe do you want to put on first?' The pink one. 'Which leg did you bang?' You guessed it. I can only think that she has picked up from Elena that pink, anything pink, is a matter of inherent goodness.

It reminds me of how Ray's friend Robert in the deep south of the US told how his young son managed to completely miss the colour of his granddaddy's skin. Robert's dad is white, but Robert married black and his kids go to black schools. At dinner one night the son was making comments about 'that's just like a white person to do that...' and Robert stopped him. (Worryingly, the son said he'd heard such talk from his teachers.) Robert asked if he'd ever had a look at his granddaddy to see what colour he is. The boy swore his grandfather was black, even though he'd seen him many times. Robert got a photo of his dad and brought it for the family to look at. The boy was mortified to learn he had a white relation, even worse that it was the grandfather he adored. For him, black was the superior value, regardless of the actual pigment.

I'm impressed with kids' abilities not to see colour, but to see the person instead. It is to our shame that in the meantime, children assign words loaded with values to those people - they acquire the prejudice before they distinguish the tone of the skin.

Where stories lie

Stories don't hide up. They're out in the open, all over the place. It's just that sometimes you have to coax them out to show themselves.

I'm batting emails back and forth regarding a big thank-you one of our staff received from a customer. Good job and all that. All the managers up and down the line want me to use this story. And I'll be happy to - when they tell it to me.

'Steve managed my claim with professionalism and care'... etc. And so he should. And I'll be the first to argue that it's the stuff we do every day that are the stories we need to tell, not just the exceptional stuff.

But I was thrilled with the level of attention I received isn't a story.

The story's around her circumstances. I need to know the 'boring' stuff:

The burglary happened the week before we were throwing my husband a surprise party for his 40th birthday, and we needed the tv to be replaced so we could show the DVD my son had prepared for him.

That would be a story.

Or this:

I know it's only a little thing, but I loved filling my grandmother's vase with flowers every week. I felt a real connection to her every time I looked at it. Yes it was a bit valuable, but I didn't like it particularly. Steve helped me find something from the same era, that my grandmother would have appreciated, and I can like too.

Stories lie in high emotion. When you hear someone gush, or when someone is adamant about something, there is a story behind it, and they probably want to tell it. Don't be surprised when others think that a thank you letter is a story. And don't be surprised when people don't respond to it as warmly as you'd want. None of the connecting and engaging properties of story lie in a thank you. It is meaningful only between those who were there. For the rest of us to understand it, we need to know the story.

Fact plus meaning does not equal truth

One more thing on stories and facts - it is when you add meaning to 'the facts' that you get story.

This is not enough however to make your facts 'true.' The truth is much bigger than one story. Truth is the meaning of all the stories around you, what their collective weight all add up to. If they make a big and clear and strong enough truth, then mere 'facts' anyone tries to tell against it will not stand, because no one will believe them. 

Truth more important than facts

My work at the moment is to understand the brand we are building, and to influence our company and its suppliers to live it.

We will know what this brand amounts to by looking at our behaviours. And with 15,000 people in just our part of the business, nevermind the 5,000 supplier staff, there are plenty of good and bad examples out there.

I was sounding this out with Simon the other day. He wrote the book on brand for me (no literally, it's coming soon) and I repeated a story to him about an indiscretion on the part of one of my colleagues.

He answered: 'Well in the absence of the facts, we have the story.'

Ah. Beautiful words, and true: the story is often true without the facts.

Several years ago a young woman came to one of my workshops. She told a story of how she'd gone out with a guy a couple of times, and then had broken her neck in a terrible car accident. She spent some time in a coma, but when she woke she found that this young man was sitting with her, and had been to visit her every day in hospital. She didn't even remember him, but at the time of telling they were still seeing each other, and talking about getting engaged.

Now I don't remember the facts of that story, but the spirit of it is true. A young woman, a young man, an accident, faithfulness over a period of time, surprise at his dedication, a deepening and growing relationship: all these elements make the story true, even if I got the injury, the accident, the current state of the relationship wrong.

Truth can lie more deeply than fact, and it affects us more deeply. Whether or not my colleague misbehaved, the story is around him, and the question becomes whether it is believable, whether all his other behaviours give evidence in his favour, or show that for him, the facts are irrelevant, because the truth speaks for itself.