How to get (and tell!) the stories your company needs

Organizations thrive on stories. Stories of your successful work. Stories of the impact a donor or investor can have. You know those stories exist. Stories of what it’s like to work with or for you.

So why is it so hard to find and tell them?

Is it possible to make the process of finding and telling stories easier, both for the storytellers in your organization…and you? Yes. If you find the story they—or rather, their brains—told themselves in the first place.

To understand what that means and how you can apply it to your organization, let’s back up and start with a rather famous story:

Once upon a time, there was a boastful hare. Every day, he would tease his friend, the slow and steady tortoise. Until one day, the tortoise got fed up with all that teasing, and he decided to challenge the hare to a race.

You know how this story ends: The hare takes a nap, the tortoise keeps going, and we’re left with the enduring moral that “slow and steady wins the race.”

Here’s something you may not know: that wasn’t always the commonly accepted moral to that story! While I’ll get back to that lesser-known moral in just a bit, the connection between a story and its meaning (its moral or lesson) turns out to be the key to making finding, and telling, stories easier.

Why it’s hard to find stories

First, let’s look at why people often struggle so much to come up with stories when you ask for them. Sure, there are our go-to storytellers involved in the organization—the people you can always count on with something just right for what you need.

Eventually, though, those story unicorns will run out of stories or you’ll want or need to represent broader points of view. And then it happens: we ask a person for a great story…and they come up blank.

The good news here is also part of the bad news: both the difficulty and the solution lie in how our human brains work. When you ask someone for a piece of new information, their brain goes through a three-step process:

1. Their brain processes that request,
2. It then connects that request to other information already stored elsewhere in their brain, and
3. When it finds a match, it retrieves that information so the person can answer the request

To borrow an analogy from one of my clients, neuroscientist Dheeraj Roy, the process is much like what happens when you go to a library. You have a book you want to find, so you go to a search terminal (or a card catalog for those of us who remember them) to find the right book, and then using that information you get the book off the shelves.

If you don’t know already know what book (story!) you’re looking for, though—if you don’t already know what story to grab out of your head—then the process is much, much harder. You could grab a book, but is it the right one? And where would you even start your search?

This second scenario is what happens when you ask someone for “a story.” Their brains don’t know where to start searching. Thankfully, the solution to both scenarios is simple: give their brain a target. Give them the kind of story to look for.

How the two “parts” of stories can help

Whether it’s a fable or not, there are always two “parts” to a story: the story itself and its meaning. It’s much like those books in the library. There are the books themselves and then what they’re about: the subject matter that determines in which section of the library the book sits, or even the more specific details that determine the search criteria.

It’s that meaning we remember.

This brings us back to our friends Tortoise and Hare. You don’t remember that story word-for-word, but you do remember the big idea of it: “Slow and steady wins the race.”

[By the way, the original moral of this fable was “Even great gifts can be wasted by idleness.” With that big idea in mind, how could or would you tell the story differently? Also, notice how the story turns from a story of triumph to a tragic one of opportunity lost or wasted.]

Once you remember the big idea, it becomes much easier to remember the details of the story. The same is true for the people in your organization and for those you serve.

So, when you want to help someone come up with a story, start with the big idea you’re trying to get across and then ask them to tell you a story about that. For example, “Tell me about a time when you were really proud of this organization?” Or even, “Tell the story of how you first got involved…”

What to do when the stories aren’t “usable”

That helps solve the first problem, getting the stories, but what happens when their answer isn’t, well, usable? Typically the “unusable” answers fall into one of two categories: what’s known as the “shaggy dog” story and the non-story.

You’ve no doubt heard plenty of both. The shaggy dog is a seemingly endless story, full of irrelevant details, all of which lead to a rather disappointing finish. The non-story is often one sentence and simply says what happened (“The founder asked me to invest so I did.”) and doesn’t give you any detail or suspense…and thus, no story.

Can you take either kind of answer and make a story out of it? Yes, you can. You can take a muddle of a shaggy dog story and give it a grooming so that the story is show-ready.

You can also help find the detail that turns a non-story into an engaging tale that others will want to listen to. All it takes is helping your donor or expert find the structure of the story.

The structure that supports all strong stories

Stories are built a certain way because they do a certain thing: Stories are quite literally how our brains make sense of the world. When it sees something happening (or remembers something that did), it identifies the characters. It assigns them motivations. It predicts results based on what it already knows about the world.

Importantly, your brain does this even when the information isn’t told as a “Once upon a time” kind of story. “Why did this good thing happen to me? Because I worked hard!” (I’m the hero!) “Why did this bad thing happen? Because that person has a grudge against me!” (He’s a villain!)

What’s fascinating: the structures of the stories we tell ourselves and of those we tell other people are the same. While there are surely any number of ways to characterize these common elements, I’ve simplified them to these five:

• Establishing a GOAL—the action of a story begins when we discover what someone wants.
• Introducing a PROBLEM someone didn’t know they had—this creates conflict and tension, which is the engine of all action.
• Discovering a TRUTH that makes inaction impossible, because it puts the goal in jeopardy. (In stories, this is often referred to as the “moment of truth,” the “anagnorisis,” or the “climax.”) This discovery forces a person to choose something.
• Deciding to CHANGE—this is what happens as a result of the truth, and it determines whether the ending is happy.
• Turning the change into ACTION—this is what someone does to make the change real.

The story ends when we learn the result of the original Goal: did the character get what they want or not? If they didn’t get what they wanted, did they get what they needed?

You can see these at work in the traditional story of the Tortoise and the Hare:

• GOAL: The Tortoise wants to win the race. On the surface, though, that seems impossible.
• PROBLEM: Focusing on “pace” as the path to success more than on the tortoise’s natural talent—persistence.
• TRUTH: Quoting a favorite adage of mine, “The runner and the road are one with the errand to be done.” In other words, the race is the result of how the runner runs it.
• CHANGE: Run your own race at your own pace…but persist until you finish it.
• ACTION: Go slow and steady to win the day.
• GOAL REVISITED: Not only did the tortoise win the race (achieved his goal) he also won respect for a new approach.

Once you know these basic elements, you can turn into a “story seeker” of sorts. You can either take a shaggy dog story and sort it into its proper elements and order or take a non-story and ask questions to help you fill in the blanks.

• To find the GOAL: Ask questions like, “What were you trying to achieve?,” “What question were you trying to answer?,” or “What problem did you want to solve?”
• To find the PROBLEM: Ask questions like, “Why didn’t the current answers work for you?,” “What was missing?,” or “What opportunity did you see that others didn’t?”
• To find the TRUTH: Ask questions like, “Why was that such a problem for you?,” “Why did you believe another answer was possible?,” or “How did the new approach align with what you believe or value?”
• To find the CHANGE: Ask questions like, “What did you decide to do differently?,” “What was different about your approach or answer?,” or “How was that new or innovative?”
• To find the ACTION: Ask questions, like, “How did you do that?,” “What were the steps you took?,” or “What had to happen for that change to take effect?”
• To find the GOAL REVISITED: Ask questions like, “What were the results?,” “What did you gain above and beyond what you were looking for?,” or “What new opportunity or question did that open up for you?”

You know getting your organization and its message out in the world means having to make the case for it. When time and attention are limited, you know the best way to do that is by showcasing stories of your organization’s inspiration, innovation, and impact.

But even though getting those stories—especially in a form you can use!—is often much easier said than done, now you know steps you can take to seek out those stories and put them into their most powerful forms.

Our brains (and those of everyone in and served by your organization) are full of stories, those explanations of the experiences we’ve had and the choices we’ve made. Once you can help someone know where to start “looking” in their brain for a story—once you’ve asked them for a story about a specific idea or message—you’ve begun the process of activating that inner storyteller.

From there, you can again let their inner storyteller do the work. Just look, or ask, for the specific elements that their brain has already stored about the story: what were they trying to achieve? What was lacking? Why was that important? What did they do differently? What were the results?

The result for you and your organization? Not only getting and telling the powerful stories of your organization and its work but through those stories, inspiring the new stories you’ll be able to find and tell next.

Once you can help someone know where to start 'looking' in their brain for a story, you've begun the process of activating that inner storyteller. Share on X

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