Episode 8 | Using Stories To Rally Your Audiences to Action September 05, 2021
GUEST: Annette Simmons, Author, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins
What is it about stories that make them such potent tools of influence and persuasion? Annette Simmons would tell you that stories are largely about connection. When someone can see themselves in your story, that generates a sense of trust in the storyteller and the story they are telling. As she writes in her bestselling book, The Story Factor, “Story is a pull strategy (rather than a push). If your story is good enough, people – of their own free will – come to the conclusion they can trust you and the message you bring.” In this episode, we talk to Annette about her story, including her more than 30-year career listening to and telling stories, and helping others use them to effect change.
GUEST BIO:
Annette Simmons is an author, keynote speaker, consultant, and founder of Group Process Consulting – a firm she founded to help others communicate better through stories. She started her career with a business degree from Louisiana University in the early 1980s and then headed off to Australia where she worked for 10 years in international business. Once back in the states, she earned a master’s degree in adult education and psychology and soon after launched her business to help others use storytelling as a communications tool. In addition to her consulting work, she is the author of four books, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, A Safe Place for Dangerous Truth, and Territorial Games: Understanding and Ending Turf Wars at Work.
LINKS:
The Danger of a Single Story, TEDTalk Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, Stephen Covey
Full Transcript
BRAD PHILLIPS, HOST, THE SPEAK GOOD PODCAST:
Back in college, I read Stephen Covey’s runaway best-seller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”
In the book, he shared a story about an experience he had had on a subway train in New York City that completely transformed my thinking. He wrote:
“People were sitting quietly – some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.
Then, suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed. The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.
It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt like was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, ‘Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?’
The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, ‘Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.’”
The lesson embedded within that short story has tremendous power. Yet, Covey didn’t need to tell that story to make his point. He could have simply stated the lesson plainly: “You don’t know what people are going through, so don’t make assumptions.” But had he stated his point that way – in that more abstract manner – it wouldn’t have landed with anywhere near the same power, and it’s almost certain that I wouldn’t have remembered it all these years later.
I’ll admit that his story has always read more like a parable to me – but whether it happened exactly as he described it or not, it led to, in Covey’s words, a “mini-paradigm shift” for me. In practical terms, it’s resulted in me remembering to extend a generosity of spirit when I see some sort of troubling, upsetting, or obnoxious behavior. I know the person is behaving in a certain way I don’t like, yes. But I don’t know why they’re behaving that way, or saying that thing, or committing that act. So, I try to force myself to give them at least some benefit of the doubt, to allow the possibility that their back story offers an explanation that makes their behavior more understandable, more sympathetic, if not necessarily palatable.
In just 242 words, Covey changed my way of thinking for a lifetime. Surely, you’ve heard a story somewhere along the line – religious or secular, real or apocryphal, long or short – that’s changed yours, too. And stories are not only used to lead to personal self-improvement, but are powerful tools used by politicians to influence your vote, by businesses to influence your buying decisions, and by charities to influence your donations.
So, in today’s podcast, we’ll talk about the power of story with Annette Simmons, the author of several books, including Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins and The Story Factor. She’s also the founder of Group Process Consulting, specializing in helping organizations build more collaborative behaviors for bottom-line results. After hearing our conversation, I suspect you’ll understand why I usually keep her books at arm’s reach.
(MUSIC PLAYS)
I want to begin just by telling you, I read The Story Factor several years ago. And, as I said to you in the initial email, I think it’s even, if you look to my right here, it’s on the lower shelf. It is at arm’s reach and there were a lot of takeaways. I always think the success of a book is when you flip through it and you see lots of passages with that yellow highlight. And, certainly, that’s the case for your book.
One of the things that stood out to me the most and has really stuck for me is that notion of story as a pull mechanism that draws people to us like a magnet …
ANNETTE SIMMONS:
Right.
PHILLIPS:
… instead of a more aggressive form of persuasion that you call a push mechanism.
SIMMONS:
Right.
PHILLIPS:
Could you begin there and talk a little bit more about how you see push versus pull?
SIMMONS:
Well, I’ll tell you a story about working for J Walter Thompson back in the day, when we used to say it’s a great place to work, if your parents can afford to send you there. What I was taught was that we’re building a print ad, not to fill it with the information we want to deliver; what we do is we figure out what the key response is after they read it and then work backwards from that. So the key response is: I trust this company. So you’re focused not on what it is you want to say, you’re focused on what you want them to take away from it. And what ends up happening is that when we try to control and shove all that stuff in, we actually shove people out. And in order for them to feel engaged, they literally have to be engaged in a dual process of interpretation. And so, when I learned to write, I learned to write for direct mail and it was all about how you engage someone so that they’re imagining, and they’re adding their 2 cents worth to your message. And then it feels more like their idea. So, it’s a pull strategy instead of trying to control or dominate.
PHILLIPS:
Could you give me maybe a contrasting example of what it looks like when it’s not done the right way, and then when you have the end in mind, what it looks like then?
SIMMONS:
Well, I, I hesitate to use the right way or the wrong way. Right now I’m using the terms a competitive narrative or a collaborative narrative. You’re going to write better stories when you come from this place of realizing that you and your listener are doing this together. In your imagination you have to conjure up a story that, for instance, when I talk about my greyhound, Larry, who was a racer and when he came home he never did figure out … he didn’t know what toys were. He was a jock. He was an athlete. So, I’d give him a toy. One time, I gave him a bone and he chased it all around the yard before he made the intellectual leap that if he put his paws on it, he could chew it. Well, after that he was on the leash and not really used to that and he would sometimes want to walk on one side of a telephone pole. And I really wanted to walk on the other side of the telephone pole. I could say, I’m the adult and you were the dog. Obey me. But the truth is that when I backed up, he would back up and then we could go another way. And so, I encourage managers to think about how, when they’re being controlling with a narrative and a lot of people actually say that’s what they want to do is control the narrative. And we can see the result of that.
PHILLIPS:
Certainly, in crisis communications, that’s the advice control the narrative.
SIMMONS:
The thing is you need to gather the existing narratives and let those be the fruit from which you design your stories. It’s an inverse relationship between control and participation.
PHILLIPS:
One of the phrases that also stood out to me from your book was that you talk about story is almost embedding mental software into the brains of the receivers. I just made it sound a lot more insidious than you meant it. Can you talk about what you mean by mental software?
SIMMONS:
We’ve talked a little bit about Stephen Covey and the story about being on the train and these kids are going nuts, and then the father’s not taking care of him. And all of a sudden you find out that he had just lost his wife and they had just lost their mother. It completely retranslates what it is that you think you see. So to shift a paradigm – there was a quote, and God knows whether Muhammad Ali actually said it or not and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s something about how we think about a deer crossing the road when another way to look at it is a road crossing the forest.
PHILLIPS:
That’s right.
SIMMONS:
So this flexibility, I call it perceptual agility, because if you have that, and we’ve heard from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie …
PHILLIPS:
Say that 10 times fast. Who is that?
SIMMONS:
She’s the one that did the danger of a single story (TEDTalk). People who think that their goal is to control everybody to use the same interpretation are the people who make up a story or craft a story, or create a story, and then try to shove it down somebody’s throat. What we do is we get the participation. Many times the best stories I have to make my point, or when I was researching the point and trying to get people to tell me their stories about it, is when you get stories from your audience. You’re going to get a lot more feeling of validation that you can give them. Even if sometimes you have to tell what I called the “I know what you’re thinking story,” which is, I know you think I’m a liberal, but I also am an entrepreneur.
When I’m facilitating managers, I’ll go in and say, “Okay, now we all need to hold hands and sing kumbaya, OK?
PHILLIPS:
(LAUGHS)
SIMMONS:
They look at me and I say, no, I’m kidding. I don’t do that crap. But that’s a story where they thought they knew who I was, and I had a pretty good sneaking suspicion of what they were thinking, and then I use a story to have them reinterpret that I may be female, I may be a storyteller, but I’m not one of those.
PHILLIPS:
When you use that phrase mental software, when I thought about, and this has become a famous case study on its own, but when I got out of college, I did radio on weekends. And, to pay the bills, I worked at Nordstrom during the week. Nordstrom famously in their orientation class, and I experienced this too, tells people in their sales orientation class, if a customer comes into the store and says that they would like to return the pair of tire chains that they bought there, give them their money back. And of course, Nordstrom doesn’t sell tire chains.
SIMMONS:
Right.
PHILLIPS:
But because it’s not expected, it sticks. They could have gone with the platitude of saying the customer comes first. The customer is always right, but because that’s so commonsensical, I guess it doesn’t stick.
SIMMONS:
It actually makes the salesperson into feeling like they’re lower than the (customer). And you don’t want to be higher than, and you don’t want to be lower than. Communication happens when you both feel like you’re equally invested in the same outcome. And so, using terms of superiority, which is the customer is king, even though that’s well-intended, turns everybody else into their serfs. And, you’re not going to be a good salesperson, if you feel like a serf.
PHILLIPS:
Right.
SIMMONS:
But if you feel like you have the power to make your own decisions about reimbursing somebody, even though it’s kind of iffy, then that empowers you, and not only helps you remember how to act when somebody does that, but it also makes you feel valued.
PHILLIPS:
That’s a great point. The customer’s king makes you feel like a supplicant versus somebody who has the power to serve them as best as you possibly can. So I am in the tent in terms of the importance of storytelling and the value of it. It’s sticky, it’s memorable. It gives people instructions about how to act. I have encountered through my career, many people, and I will tell you that many of them are women, and many of them are younger, and many of them are both – young women who say they too understand the power of story, but in the cultures, often academic or scientific, in which they’re presenting the people to whom they’re presenting don’t value story, or they fear they don’t. And therefore, they want to give a much heavier data-rich presentation instead. I’m guessing you’ve encountered that kind of feedback through the years as well. How do you address that?
SIMMONS:
Yeah. There’s some great practitioners out there to tell data stories. That’s not my area. But the way to interpret the data into a story, one of our problems is that we have been trained since kindergarten, that anecdotal evidence is invalid. And yet, the stories have wisdom that … Brittany Brown calls story data with a soul. If we’re trying to communicate on a soul level, anything to create trust, then story, when in those circumstances, I recommend that people have a metaphor or a story, and then the data. But, with the data only, it’s just flat and boring and you haven’t activated somebody’s imagination. And the imagination only understands what it sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches. You’re not talking to both sides of the brain. And when we tell a story that provides a format for what’s to come, the data then is enhanced by the metaphor,
PHILLIPS:
Right? I think the concern people have is that they’re going to be seen as cherry picking a story that may not be representative, as opposed to telling something that’s emblematic of a larger truth. And that does serve a useful purpose, as you said, when paired with the data.
SIMMONS:
Here’s the thing: We’re all humans. We share a finite number of experiences. Every single one of us has been betrayed. Every single one of us has betrayed somebody else. Every single one of us have been forgiven or wish we were forgiven. What we do when we tell a story like that, even if it’s just a quick quip, we create bandwidth on our human level, across which our data can then travel. But if you and I don’t have a bridge, we haven’t connected with, and basically we connect when we decide that person is trustworthy, I like his or her values. And that’s where the stories come in.
PHILLIPS:
Obviously there are many different types of stories. Some are more positive in nature – the story about David who conquered the Goliath. There’s some negative stories of a company that didn’t make this decision when they should have, and, therefore, went belly up. What do you find … well, maybe I should ask – because I’m sure they both have their utility and there’s times that you do want to deploy a positive and other times you want to deploy a negative story – but how do you think about that? Which is more powerful and which to deploy when.
SIMMONS:
I’ve got an answer ready. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here’s the false dichotomy of positive negative. It reduces paradox to right or wrong, but story works best when we’re trying to communicate paradox. For instance, does trying to say one story is positive or one story is negative is like saying either you should breathe in or you should breathe out. Because every time we have conflicts, there’s the rest of the story. And even though a lot of people have recruited this hero story, but it cuts a paradox in half. So, I could suggest the six kinds of story. I think you need to tell somebody who you are and at a human level. And simply, you know telling the story about my dog Larry gives you some insight into, you know, I adopted a Greyhound and all that sort of stuff.
Why you were here, because when you start to speak, they think they know why you’re here and pretty much what they think they know is that you’re trying to sell me something I don’t want or need, or you’re trying to trick me. So, if you don’t tell that why I’m here story that shows your good intentions, they can’t then conclude this person is trustworthy. You need teaching stories because that’s a chance to take somebody on a little field trip of an experience in their mind so that they don’t actually have to make that mistake. And so, a lot of the teaching stories include, and I think there are four buckets for all of these six kinds of stories, but a book or a movie, you know, you just let somebody else pay for your special effects. Red pill, blue pill is one that got used enough to where it has its own SlideShare. A mentor because when you tell a story about someone else who illustrated this value for you, then not only you’re taking them on a little field trip, but you’re also demonstrating that you have gratitude and you get double points for that in terms of human connection. And I shine story, which is man, I nailed it. We call these positive stories and yet they’re actually not the most connective stories. I win and you can too, is not the same as a I blew it story. And the I blew it stories for me are just the best, because you’re already on the other side. You’re demonstrating humility. You’re demonstrating gratitude. And you’re also demonstrating resilience. And these are things that people want to know about you and that increase their trust in you.
PHILLIPS:
I really appreciate you pushing back on, on my question of good versus bad as being too narrow of a frame to be looking at this. And you’re reminding me in that answer you just gave, the I blew it story. I worked with a beauty brand earlier this week. And one of the stories they tell is that the original, whatever it was, mascara formula that they had they got negative feedback from their customers and they listened and released V2, which is now a much better product. And it is something that also conveys that sense of we’re listening, we’re paying attention, we hear you. You said something at the beginning of that answer I want to return to. One of the lines, this comes from Chip and Dan Heath, they wrote the book Made to Stick, which I really like, and they have a line in there that I think I’m getting it verbatim. They say common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. And so, when you said story works best when you’re trying to create paradox, it reminded me of that line. Could you talk a little bit more about what you mean there by creating paradox?
SIMMONS:
Well, let me just redefine common sense. What I call common sense is actually paradox. Commonsense is understanding that you can package everything and you can create this platform and all this stuff that you’re going to deliver, and you’re going to have to change the heck out of it as it gets used. So, in terms of user experience design, the only common sense is, is the paradoxical pieces that understand both sides. What was the second half of the quote?
PHILLIPS:
Well, it seems like the paradox I think about is if you want to, for example, if you want to fix a problem, I always say slow down to speed up. You’ll fix the problem faster if you slow down. So that’s what I was thinking about in terms of a paradoxical story.
SIMMONS:
Yes, yes. I see. OK. So, let’s just say, including paradox is what makes a story sticky. If you try to reduce it down to one character who goes on the hero journey and comes back, that’s been done to death and it’s a competitive narrative because it makes it look like there’s one hero. Collaborative narratives always acknowledge multiple sources and multiple solutions. That’s one of the cool things about, for instance, that story I told you about Larry and me, I have to back up so he can back up. Of course, every manager in the room knows I’m not talking about my dog Larry, because they’re at an impasse or else they wouldn’t have hired me. And, it’s now backing up is going to be interpreted in a thousand different ways. What happens in medical situations a lot is they come up with this checklist of everything you’re supposed to do that tries to pre-decide what the situational issues are. The beauty of story, and the story of that tire chain is that it doesn’t presuppose the situation. It can apply a wide variety of ways in any situations and these protocols don’t. Again, they put people in a situation where they feel like they’re being obedient instead of creative.
PHILLIPS:
I think sometimes people have this false impression that stories are soft. You alluded to that earlier, when you said we’re going to hold hands and sing kumbaya, that people think it’s the soft thing, and they think they know who you are. And another thing that you really address head on in the books is the power of story to break impasses at some of the most tense moments of conflict that exists. And so in preparing for this conversation with you, I thought about the kind of quintessential scene at the union negotiation table, where you have the workers on one side and you have management on the other, and they are just at loggerheads and not communicating at all. So how does story help to break an impasse in that type of situation?
SIMMONS:
I actually have a true story about that. I don’t know if it’s in the book or not, but union negotiators were at an impasse with labor and they brought in a new facilitator. The facilitator started with each one, sharing a story about what kind of father I want to be.
PHILLIPS:
Yeah. That does not seem to be the typical question. Even the question itself takes them completely out of where their head space was before you asked them.
SIMMONS:
First of all, they resist. So, you have to create a plausibility for why this is going to work. We need to get to know each other as humans before we try to solve this problem. Right now, we may feel like we’re enemies, but here’s a situation where we all agree. Let’s just see what that feels like. And then let’s move into a more collaborative way of, instead of a power struggle, let’s collaborate in the same way we just did about what constitutes a good father. Let’s collaborate and say what constitutes a good deal here.
PHILLIPS:
That is so powerful because, first of all, I completely understand the resistance. It is very uncomfortable to answer a question like that when you’re trying to project alpha status and stay in control. But if you go along with that exercise, I would imagine that it is so connecting.
SIMMONS:
Oh yeah. And, here’s the thing is that when you use these kinds of ideas, you’re always gonna have some resistors. So, what you do is you start with the people who are on board and after three stories have been told the resistors can’t help but tell a story about what being a father means to them. There’s all sorts of different applications, but that’s a true story I read about that changed the emotional temperance of the experience to the point where if you can change the emotions in the room from being adversarial to being collaborative, you change the outcome of the meeting. One of my pet peeves is everybody comes into a budget meeting and we all agree to lie to each other.
You know, it’s like, I take my budget and I add 30 percent. And the thing is I can start my facilitation and I’ll say so how much did you pad your budget with? Was it over 100 percent? Was it three times? And then when I get their awareness to this idea that we’re actually trying to have a meeting where everybody’s lying to each other, what’s the best possible outcome we could come up with, with bad data? So you’re flipping people’s paradigm from this power struggle to this collaborative point of view.
PHILLIPS:
Wow. That is incredibly powerful because I could see in that union, that conference room table, you’re seeing I’m right, they’re wrong; we need to win, they need to lose. And now it’s, oh, it’s just a person raising a kid. And that allows you to see them differently, which that’s a brilliant point.
SIMMONS:
And so a lot of business people are afraid of vulnerability. You can imagine, it’s now 21 years since I wrote The Story Factor. Honey, 20 years ago, you should’ve seen me trying to sell these ideas to people. Now, there’s people who are willing to be vulnerable. And that’s what storytelling is, is if you want to build trust, you’ve got to go first. And so going first means sharing a personal story, or, your favorite movie scene. And you take a step in and trust them to interpret it in a positive way and in a compassionate way. And we can tell stories on ourselves where we did terrible things and at the end of the story, people love you even more because you were truthful.
PHILLIPS:
Right. Let’s shift to a few practical tips that we could offer listeners. First of all, and I know this is a massive question and probably unfair for that reason, but how do people find the right story to tell?
SIMMONS:
Okay, again, let’s caution the word right.
PHILLIPS:
Okay. Let me rephrase the question. How do people tell a story that is appropriate for their …
SIMMONS:
I’m not even a fan of the word appropriate …
PHILLIPS:
… audience in the moment. OK, I am going to keep trying. And we’re going to keep all this in Annette, because I want people to see how much work it is to get this right.
SIMMONS:
Good!
PHILLIPS:
How do people come up with a story that will hopefully resonate in an honest and authentic way with their audiences?
SIMMONS:
Right. Okay. So, we’re finding stories, we’re not creating stories. So finding stories and those four buckets is my most practical, a story about a mentor, a story about a book or a movie, a story about a time I shined, or a story about a time I blew it. This is where to go. But the rationale behind it is that there are a finite number of universal dilemmas that we have as humans. And, when we tell a story about a universal human dilemma, we have a very high chance of really connecting with somebody because they’ve experienced the exact same thing in a different situation. The way I come up with stories is I start with what story am I telling myself about my audience? Because if I tell myself that my audience is a bunch of hard-asses who aren’t going to accept anything, but, you know, data, well, then that’s not a very nice story to be telling yourself about your audience.
That’s where I start. And the way I do it is, if I’m going to give a keynote, I call three people who work there and ask them to tell me stories about what it’s like to work there. And usually I’ll find, sometimes I can share their story exactly, but most of the time, what I do is if this story sounds like you just can’t win – if that’s the story that I get from these people – then I find a story where I felt like I just couldn’t win. S they recognize that I do know what situation they’re in. I’m not betraying any confidence, but I am illustrating that I did my homework.
PHILLIPS:
I love what you said about assessing your own motives or headspace regarding your audience and using that as the starting point that maybe you have to get your own story straight about who your audience really is and question your prior assumptions.
SIMMONS:
I think it’s the place to start. Where I start is what am I telling myself about these people? And is it true? And what’s actually more true? Do a little research and then you can demonstrate the way you value them. So to a certain extent, any story we tell, and I’m thinking right now about the first story as you stand up to do a TED Talk or whatever, what we’re hoping to resolve is that the key response we’re trying to get is, oh my gosh, she’s like me. Or, she’s been through what I’ve been through. When we do that, that’s where we really connect with that thick bandwidth. And you never tell people what it is you want to inform them with until you have that bandwidth connection. So a lot of people just launch into their data and it just falls into the abyss because there’s no connection.
PHILLIPS:
Yes. I want to ask a question about the biggest mistakes you see storytellers make, because storytelling is in itself an art. It’s something we can cultivate and become better at doing. And I am often struck that two people might have the exact same fact set, and one of them turns that into a really exciting story and one them tells it in such a way that leaves the audience completely uninspired. So, so what are the mistakes you see and what are the remedies to fix them?
SIMMONS:
Well, the No. 1 mistakes, and I added two new chapters to my book The Story Factor. So, the third edition has these two news chapters in there where I actually go through each of the templates that people are using that narrow the bandwidth unintentionally. Because, when we want certainty, we come up with templates where there’s no struggle involved, which is, first you have a character. Then you have a challenge. Then you have the rise and fall twice. And then the resolution. Well, that means that every story you tell is going to be just as boring as the story I just told you. So what we want is we want to look at the organic source of sense-making. And here’s my opinion about storytelling. Storytelling is evolution’s method for passing down the DNA of how to survive. It’s not about these formats that have come from theater. Not that I’m not knocking them that come from theater, but when we only use that template for our story, we end up with a very tight and very controlling story that takes a paradox and cuts it in half. Because there’s this clear resolution at the end. Stories when you don’t tell somebody what to think, they feel like they have, they’ve been invited to think for themselves.
PHILLIPS:
Right. And as you kind of suggested earlier, even though the facts of their own story are very different, they recognize the template and can put their own stories or something that they recognize onto that template to make it more relatable.
SIMMONS:
I don’t like the templates. And I give you in the book, “and, but, therefore,” there are all these templates and they’re too restrictive. They’re too safe.So what I go for is what is the significant emotional experience, which the acronym is SEE, so that they can see what I’ve seen, or I can demonstrate that I’ve seen what they’ve seen. Reality is complex. And when you reduce the complexity out of the story, you make it boring. When you leave it in, you demonstrate that you trust them to make their own conclusions. There’s nothing worse than somebody telling a story and saying, so the moral to this story is …
PHILLIPS:
Right.
SIMMONS:
My new definition of moral comes from storytelling. Moral is inevitably going to be balancing a paradox, like taking care of yourself and taking care of others, which is where we’re at with climate change. And creating this paradox that feels like a conflict, but when we can share a story that says, I don’t really know what I’m doing either, which is the only truth about climate change. We are desperately trying to figure this out. Then people think, okay, well, she really does know what’s going on. But, if I come in and say, I have solved climate change, and what you need to do is A, B, C, and D.
PHILLIPS:
Okay. Well, I’d like to end by sharing a story with you and telling you what my learning from that is and check in with you to see if, if that’s similar.
SIMMONS:
Would love to hear it.
PHILLIPS:
I used to work in news. I was a young production coordinator working for Nightline and ABC News. This was probably in the late nineties, and I hope I’m getting my facts right. There was a very big mudslide in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where thousands of people died. Hundreds of thousands of people, if I remember correctly lost their homes. Ted Koppel and the executive producer of the show flew to Honduras to cover the story. By the time they got there, though, it was three days after the initial event. The numbers of dead, the number of displaced, that story had already been told. They called in at 11 in the morning for our daily editorial call. And we asked them from home base in DC, what they planned that evening show to be. They said, we don’t have a show yet. We don’t really know. We’re going to walk around and we’re going to try to find a story and whatever that is, we’ll let you know when we find it. Long story short, 11:35 comes around and this is the story that they had come up with in those 12 and a half hours. As they walked around, they had found a man digging in the rubble, and they started speaking with him through an interpreter and said, what are you doing here? And he said, I built the front door to my house with my hands, and damnit, I’m going to find that door. The episode of the broadcast became the door. And it was half an hour of who this man was, where he was now, and what his prospects were going forward. And the revelation for me was, oh, I think we all tend to look for stories that are huge and tell the entire thing. And sometimes thinking small to the one object, the one sentence that somebody told you, it’s easier to find that story, and it’s a whole lot, many times more powerful.
SIMMONS:
It’s more powerful because we can almost feel the dirt underneath our fingernails as we imagine digging for that door that we hand made. So there’s a physiological thing that happens, and it’s a specific story. So, the numbers of the dead, that’s an abstraction. Our brains can’t see, hear, smell, taste, or touch what that means. But when you tell a very highly specific story, counter-intuitively, that makes it universal.
PHILLIPS:
Well, Annette, I will admit to you that I think I’m going to have to listen back to this episode two or three times, to be able to get out of it all of the insight you shared. This is why I liked your work so much. You push back in places on what’s thought of as conventional wisdom to offer a different paradigm through which to think about story. And so once again, I will recommend to our listeners, The Story Factor is terrific. Whoever Tells The Best Story Wins is also great. Annette, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us.
SIMMONS:
Sure. And make sure they know that The Story Factor third edition is also an Audible.
PHILLIPS:
Great. To hear this charming accent coming through your ear buds. Thank you, Annette.
SIMMONS:
(LAUGHS) Alright. Thank you so much.
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