This one goes out to all the storytellers…

Ping Pong wasn’t perceived as a real sport until it became table tennis.  And now that it has its first sex symbol in Biba Golic, it has, let’s say, aroused a certain demographic that paid scant attention to it before.

The wild dogs of Africa could not be brought back from the brink of extinction until Greg Rasmussen renamed them ‘painted dogs’ (per Nick Kristoff in the NY Times).

And the art of storytelling won’t gain mainstream cred with MBA-educated managers and their brands until professional storytelling gets re-branded and re-positioned.  This came to me while I was reading about how  legendary story consultant Steve Denning changed his working vernacular so he could talk to his clients without them thinking they already knew it all.

Let’s begin by looking at the current status of storytelling in business.  Many managers will tell you that storytelling is too airy to feed the bottom line, or as Denning says, they think they’ve got their story covered.   And they do.  They have it covered.  As in they have a story and they’re sticking to it.  Bringing up the subject of storytelling can be a license to snark.  “Story?  Yeah, we got a story.  We sell our product as often as possible for more than it costs to make and deliver it.   We make our number.  We go get a a drink.  We live happily ever after until the next quarter.  The end.”

As we know, these perceptions cripple a brand.  When a story stops moving forward, it dies.  And when a brand’s story dies, the brand is sure to follow.  Here are three moves professional storytellers can make to break through the crippling perceptions.

1)  Shift the focus from ’story’ to ‘narrative.’ Narrative is our table tennis.  It is our painted dog.  Story is finite.  It has three parts, beginning, middle, end.  Narrative, by comparison, has infinite potential.  It is flow.  It is to organizations and brands what the Ohio River once was to the Shawnee Tribe.  The source of sustenance.  Stories are like the fish that come from the river and feed the family.  Narrative is the river.

2)  Share the narrative. In the networked world, brands can no longer script and control their stories the way they used to when there were only twelve or fifteen media channels for a manager to worry about.  And they can no longer operate on the false assumption that the story that works today is the same one that’s going to work tomorrow.  Today, brands have to find ways to participate in their customers’ stories.  They have to learn to share the brand narrative with customers.  That is a tectonic shift whose implications have just begun to surface in C-suite discussions and executive reading lists.

Sharing the narrative has many benefits.  (We’ve been listing them here for two years, check the archives for backstory.)  One of the big benefits is that narratives that result from collaboration with the customer energize a brand like nothing a brand can do on its own.  And thanks to the proliferation of media platforms, sharing the narrative has the potential to generate ‘positive unforeseen outcomes’ on a massive scale.

3)   Move from scripted to improvised narratives.  Shared narratives cannot be scripted, they have to be improvised into existence. There are too many players in the game to script for all of them, and make no mistake, each and every player plays a role. All it takes is one customer with a bitch and a big network to knock down your market cap like Bluto took out Popeye before he ate his spinach.  Improvisation is to narrative what spinach is to Popeye.  Scripted (and re-scripted and re-re-scripted) scenarios quickly fall out of sync with the customer audience.  Improvisation, by contrast, is about staying in the narrative flow. If you’re not in it, you’re out of it.  Eat your spinach!

Stories are the best way we have of simplifying complexity, of finding common ground.  They provide context that no technology or platform can. In a complex system, context owns.  Because business gets conducted in an environment that’s exponentially more complex today than it was yesterday, story is more important than ever.  But like everyone else does, we have to go about our work differently.  We’re not just storytellers, we are experts in the science of narrative.   We are Shawnee.  We are hot blondes armed with paddles and balls.   We are painters of dogs.