Scroll through the contents pages of best-selling business books, or the HBR or McKinsey Quarterly, and it would seem that we all want to change other people - either their behavior, their performance or their mindset. And so we create tools that we hope will do that for us: pay grades, career paths, bonus structures, training & development, better line managers and great leaders. The missing piece is that in front of all those necessary but insufficient elements there is the story the person is telling themselves about themselves, your element and the world. Everything you offer them they have a story about (and you are part of the story!).
1: 'Stories Drive Behavior' is the first thing I'd want you to know about stories.
People behave as they do because of the stories they tell themselves.
2: There is always, already, a story. Did I say, always?
Cardinal Law of Communication Number 1: You cannot not communicate
I help people identify and live out their Preferred Story, but the sane place to start is locating the Existing Stories their various audiences already listen to and believe.
3: The stories that people tell themselves are designed to deliver 2 outcomes for them only:
a: Happiness, and
b: (in the absence of a state that might be described as happiness) Certainty.
That's why "You can't change a story with facts; you can only change a story with a bigger story." (Dave Snowden). They can't hear your facts because the story they already have in place is delivering so much happiness and certainty for them. Much to your frustration.
4: Barely anyone in the world thinks they are acting on 'a story.' They call what they have going on in their heads beliefs, principles, values, hunches, mindsets, prejudices, generalizations, blind spots, stereotypes, 'the truth,' 'it's obvious, innit?' or, most of the time, they call what they have going on in their heads 'Carefully thought-through rational decisions.' These are all fancy terms for stories. Anyone who tells you they just made a decision "purely based on the facts alone" is telling you a story.
5: You've got a choice. 1. You can be a spear-carrier (or crappily-drawn-AI-generated background detail) in someone else's story. 2. You can be a story-teller - the super-spreader of others' stories. Or 3. You can choose to be the Author of a story that will give you and other people happiness and/or certainty.
What is that story?
