10. The Story

“Once upon a time….” That is how the book you have in your hands began just pages ago; and it is no coincidence. After all, this book is a story, our story, created from countless observations, experiences, concepts learned and realities discovered over the years. Bringing order to all of this and making it understandable to the reader requires the ability of a storyteller, one who builds stories to convey everything that would otherwise be difficult to explain.

Since the beginning of time, mankind has used stories to share a vision of life. The myths of antiquity are nothing more than stories through which the first civilizations tried to make sense of their reason for existence, the reason for all of its evils and all of its marvels. The stories served to bring together these explanations and to convey them to all the people who inhabited the same territory, thus shaping a common culture based on their myths and legends. The stories were a consensus, a shared way of understanding things.

When we began the second half of this book, we promised that we would steadily go into more depth regarding this new concept that we have called a “dream.” Up to this point, we have learned what a dream is and the importance of translating it into practice through instrumental, emotional and core values, doing something better than anyone else in the world. But there is another aspect that is just as important as knowing how to identify the dream and learning how to translate it into a tangible reality.

Telling the Story

We have already said that you cannot dream alone, because a dream is that which all of us who are part of an organization have in common. In a way, this group of people, whether large or small, is a replica of history’s earliest civilizations that shared a single territory and marveled at and feared the same things in their everyday lives. We also need to share a common explanation of our reality: who we are, where we come from, where we are going, the meaning of our existence in this environment. Thousands of years after those first myths and legends were created, we still need to build a shared vision, and the story format continues to be – and for good reason – a perfect formula for sharing it.

When a company manages to construct a story about how and why it exists, it becomes aware of the immense power of a well-told story. Even though the story tells of its own history, it leads to a sort of rediscovery, to something totally new.

On a personal level we have all experienced at one point or another the great power of a story. Whether at one of our birthday celebrations, on our wedding day, or during an event in which we were receiving an award, someone has stood up and asked for silence in order to say a few words. We, the protagonists of the story, were brought to life by the words of another person and we found it difficult to recognize ourselves, though we were pleased with the image it created in our minds.

Hearing ourselves spoken of by others reveals to us our own story and is much more telling than what we would be able to express if we were to present ourselves. And this happens because the people describing us have constructed a story, likely adding – perhaps without even being aware of it – all of the ingredients in the recipe for a story that were recorded in their unconscious minds when they were young, when they would ask someone to repeat a story again and again.

Our childhoods, like that primitive period we could call the childhood of humanity, show us that stories are what we remember best. Folk tales and the sacred scriptures of any tradition are all stories constructed with those elements that will help us transfer them, remember them and integrate them into our personal culture. Our ancestors repeated them again and again as night fell and they gathered around the hearth. Our children ask us to repeat stories using the same words and will not tolerate even the slightest variation in plot or form.

Stories were told again and again and are still being played in our heads. Every Greek had his or her mental image of Ulysses, commanding his ship through storms, and Penelope, patiently weaving that never-ending shroud. Likewise, every child imagines his or her own Tooth Fairy and is scared by the thought of his or her particular bogeyman.

Being able to put a mental picture to that which we are being told about helps us fix it in our memories. The mechanisms in our brains that make it easier for us to remember things are immediately activated with a story, the oldest and most trusted formula for conveying values and building cultures.

In fact, today there are still some primitive forms of social organization that continue to show us how stories, tales and legends are expressions of our identity. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead spent many years of her life in direct contact with different tribes on the islands of Samoa and Papua New Guinea, where she found, among many other things, that narrative constructions allowed her a glimpse of the values of each particular tribe. Mead was amazed at being able to guess the hopes and fears of those groups of people through the stories they told.

Without traveling so far, we already know that the mythology that built the Mediterranean culture, from the great civilizations of Greece and Rome, is undoubtedly an expression of a reality that is different, for example, from that conveyed by Norse mythology in Scandinavia, which gave shape to Germanic culture, and the mythological and traditional stories that gave form to the cultures of China or Japan. We do not have to know much to realize that the stories that come to us from these other places speak of a perception of reality different from our own.

For all of these reasons, when we now hear of the techniques of storytelling being used as marketing tools to better sell a company, or even for us to better sell ourselves, we cannot help but feel that this new concept is missing the mark and letting the most important element fall by the wayside. What we call storytelling should not be taken up as a passing fad to help captivate our audience. The story is an ancient tool that has configured identities, cultures, nations, countries and entire civilizations. The story is in our DNA and forms part of the way we grow and learn. Although we now apply it to the business environment, its importance cannot be reduced to something measurable based on financial return. The most important contribution of the story to our company is the internal cohesion it creates among the participants of our organization and the consequent coherence in the way we make ourselves known from the inside out.

Once again, it is time to avoid certain temptations that could lead us to confuse true stories with crude attempts at constructing one “on the fly.” The “mission, vision and values” about which you have already been warned could be confused with the story, which we consider to be the cornerstone of an organization’s internal cohesion. In reality, they have nothing to do with it.

If it does not do so, our neural pathways will transport it from the auditory nerve to a warehouse in our brains similar to the Recycle Bin on our computer, where the alleged story will wait, together with other expendable information, until we decide to delete it permanently from our memory.

Building the Story of the Brand

It is clearly very difficult to awaken interest in everyone. We must not forget that it is not about building a fantasy, a fairy tale or an origin myth, which can indeed be shared by generations and generations of people from the same culture. What we are looking to do is to tell our story as a company, that which differentiates us, our “what, how and why” for what we do. In this environment, being able to create a story that generates true interest among all its audiences is very difficult. For this reason, it is very useful to identify in advance the people whom we want our story to reach, because each of these groups are likely to speak a specific language to which we will have to adapt our story if we want to pique their interest.

The generation of interest also depends on two factors that are usually combined in a “natural” balance:

• On the one hand, there are stories that arouse our interest because they touch us immediately and with great force. We all remember the tales and stories that have surprised us with an unexpected ending or a moral that taught us something new, a great discovery. In our everyday lives, we encounter stories on the TV news and in conversations with friends and colleagues that surprise and impact us, and these are recorded directly in our memories. Despite the years that have gone by, we all remember exactly what we were doing when we heard the news of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York.
• The other factor that can lead us to internalize a story is the length of time to which we are exposed to it. This is the case for stories that were not surprising or impactful but that were repeated to us over and over again before going to sleep, those family anecdotes that our parents told us thousands of times, or those war stories that someone repeats constantly and that we internalize over time because we have heard them so many times.

The “natural” balance to which we refer is simply this:

The story we are told by a company can also move along these two axes. On the one hand are the oldest brands, which have cemented their stories over time and have configured a mental image for us that is well recorded in our minds. Then there are those brands that have opted to communicate their story through points of impact, whether by way of advertising campaigns or outstanding actions that catch our attention.

Finally, there is a third group of companies, and this is the group that is, unfortunately, the most crowded: companies that have absolutely no story. These are companies that still have not understood the need for all of their employees and the people with whom they connect every day to share a story that binds them together and helps them present themselves to the outside world in a way that is coherent and differentiated from the rest. This is the group that, sooner or later, all companies want to break free from.

The need to have a story only becomes apparent in companies that know how strong the competition in their industry is, and that see how the consumer has become “king” in an environment in which one company can be chosen just as easily as any of the dozens of others that offer, a priori, the same thing. The more there is to choose from, the more important it is to have a story behind the company that helps it define itself.

The same thing occurs in many other areas. We often realize the importance of the story when the situation is reaching its breaking point. When an industry shows excessive similarity, when there are so many brands dedicated to the same thing that they all end up looking the same, when there is nothing in the minds of consumers to lead them to a preference, companies then realize the need to have a story that will provide them with a tool to explain its differentiating features to the consumer.

This includes companies that appear to have no story. It also includes those that believe that their activity is purely instrumental and minimally transcendent. For every case, the story is a tool with a strong power of bringing internal cohesion to the group of people who make up an organization, and it will seep out until it reaches the end consumer.

In fact, the power of the shared story becomes particularly clear in the type of organization that seemingly has nothing to tell and in which workers operate as cogs in a wheel whose job in and of itself is not very stimulating.

At the Blood and Tissue Bank of Catalonia, for example, we find a paradigmatic example. Some of the work that is carried out in the process of extracting, analyzing and storing blood and tissue is very routine and repetitive. However, the internal story of this organization is very well explained and shared by its employees, such that everyone knows that they are a part of a process that will eventually help people improve their health and even save lives. No matter how small their contribution may be, the employees have internalized the story of the Blood and Tissue Bank and it stimulates them in their daily work.

It is important to underscore that this is not in any way a “top-to-bottom” construct intended to keep workers artificially motivated with a humanitarian excuse while treating them as cogs in a wheel. The story, if true, will emerge from the workers themselves, will be their internal motivation and not an imposed credo that they repeat to themselves as they work doing something they dislike. Once more, we must take care not to confuse things. The story cannot be imposed; it must emerge from that which in reality we are, because if not, no one will believe it, much less share it.

A story, lived and shared with coherence and consistency, will truly unite people within the company. And we must not forget that it is precisely these people who have the most to say about our company, be it good or bad. When we suddenly find three separate friends recommending the same bakery in a single week, we ask ourselves how and where this wonderful phenomenon of word of mouth begins that can make one business visible while the one next to it is invisible. Now let us ask the question: Could it be possible that this string of recommendations is started precisely by those who are proud of being part of a company and speak well of it? Let us follow the thread.