CHAPTER 13
Brand, Organizational, and Political Stories

FINDING BIG STORIES that capture the essence of an organization, candidate, or brand is the Holy Grail for many newcomers to storytelling. They seek the kind of story that resonates and “travels” like a virus. A story that is simultaneously personal and collective. A story that sweeps attention and conclusions to a desired position. During the Bush administration, the story that “Freedom is on the march” was powerful, motivating, and funneled new data (even contradictory data) to fit this story. This story is a war metaphor that transforms news stories within one frame: either helping to win or lose freedom. Complex “on-the-other-hand” news analyses take longer than a sound bite, seem to slow the march of freedom, and thus translate to losing freedom. Any opposition to “winning freedom” seems to oppose freedom.

While this story was running high, slower more considered interpretations felt risky, even passive. Many citizens (myself included) think that this story framed interpretations that funded questionable actions and reduced scrutiny for several years. But regardless of your politics, the “Freedom is on the march” story worked its magic. But, who chose this story? How did they choose it? What competing stories were also considered? Understanding the group processes that influence story creation and selection can be just as important as understanding the characteristics and crafting of such a “Holy Grail” kind of story.

The quality of any story chosen to represent a group or agenda inevitably reflects the quality of the decision-making processes and thinking routines used by the group. If the group is disorganized and in conflict, the stories told are likely to be disorganized, conflicted, and weak. When a group is cohesive, deeply committed, open to risk, and disciplined in the face of adversity they have a much better chance of divining a story that pulls from the universal well of meaning.

Borrowing from the language of myth, these bigger stories are archetypal stories that trigger deep personal recognition because they highlight universal patterns of experience/response that draws attention, brings meaning, and creates a sense of belongingness—like kittens attract kids. Fear is a very strong universal pattern. Urban myths demonstrate the stickiness of fear stories. Love, hope, and faith stories seem to need more energy, imagery, even self-discipline to travel as far as fear stories.

However, building a taxonomy or formula for the “big story” only gives you the illusion that you understand “how to” find or create magic stories. And even if it was more than an illusion, your formula does not teach you how to create group consensus on your newfound “magical” story. Even if you can produce the perfect story, you still have to convince everyone else on the team that your story is “it.” Understanding the highly predictable dynamics of group process helps you navigate waves of emotion that push, pull, and tumble story ideas. When you seek “Holy Grail” stories, your experience and talent facilitating group decisions can be just as important as your experience and talent as a storyteller. Great stories often lose cohesion and magic by the time they are approved.

Creativity = Deviance

When I was in advertising, our creative team often mourned “magic” stories that were picked clean of all magic by nervous product managers measuring and evaluating subjective metaphors with objective criteria. They often responded to a story by imagining worst-case scenarios of misinterpretation, weighing perceived risk against some best guess at perceived gain. Their rational approach (ratios of high risk to questionable gain) did not allow them enough room to embrace distinctive (i.e., deviant) images.

I remember our creative team pitched a radio ad to capitalize on Ford’s sponsorship of the Australian Open in 1994 by using tennis court sounds in the background, as well as the trademark sound effect of Monica Seles’s grunt as she hit the ball. Because Monica Seles had won the Australian Open in 1991, 1992, and 1993, and because Australians love their sport, we were confident radio listeners would easily recognize the reference. But the product manager had reservations. He became fixated on the potential for listeners to find the grunt … unpleasant in some way. The creative team narrowed their eyes and one leaned forward and asked, “Unpleasant, how exactly?” Lines were drawn and while civility and “the customer is always right” language prevailed, the “story” of performance with “grunt” died in that room without a funeral.

That story may or may not have had the magic we thought it did, but its death on the cutting room floor had less to do with the value of the story and more to do with the power struggles between the individuals making the decision.

Creative ideas initially appear deviant because … well, they are. Creativity is, in essence, deviation from the norm. To prompt new conclusions and thus new behaviors from an indifferent or hostile audience requires new data or a new frame for old data. Either way you must deviate from an old norm.

Another story—probably not technically true, but “true” enough to travel the halls of frustrated marketing and advertising executives—also targets this kind of default to objective, risk-based decision making. The story takes us back to 1978, in a Coca-Cola board room. Apparently the marketing and advertising gurus were struggling over the final decision to name a new lemon/lime soda they planned to introduce the next year. The favorite name of the creative team was “Mello Yello.” When the product manager (always portrayed as the idea-killer) finally articulated his reservations, he said, “Mello Yello just … sounds like the name of a street drug.” To which the creative director nearly leapt across the table to ask, “What in the hell do you think Coke is?”

Stories like these reveal that decisions on subjective issues are distorted when objective criteria oversimplify the ambiguity of subjective issues. Objective thinkers seem to think that reducing ambiguity is the same as reducing risk. Not so.

Choosing Without Ratios

Choosing the right story to communicate an archetypal “truth” to the “masses” depends equally on your group’s imagination and your group’s skill in nonrational decision making. Groups in the unfamiliar territory of images, metaphor, and emotion often seek relief by oversimplifying these immeasurable qualities and converting them into some kind of quantifiable criteria that will offer them a basis from which to make a rational (i.e., ratio-based) decision. This default to numbers doesn’t make for a better decision, it just allows for an easier decision.

Another escape route to minimize creative risk and avoid difficult conversations is to lean too heavily on the opinions of the most powerful people in the group. This dependence strategy works just fine if that person is a brilliant storyteller. Having a genius storyteller at your helm is an ideal situation. Genius storytelling leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry Ford, and Jack Welch deliver stories that move huge groups of people to actions that turn visions into reality. However, most of us nongeniuses are stuck in committees with other nongeniuses, struggling with paradox, competing values, and diversity that swell and shrink our sense of cohesion on all big decisions, including “What is our story?” These are the groups sorely tempted to default to measurable outcomes, rules, and formulas in order for their decisions to be more “rational.”

In her most recent book, On Becoming an Artist,¹ Ellen Langer cites recent research into the “illusion of control” that ruthlessly deconstructs our favorite habits of seeking rules, principles, and cognitive frames that guarantee a winning formula for success (i.e., “Whoever tells the best story wins”). Particularly in business, routines that have shown a track record of accelerating decisions and bringing products and processes closer to perfection take us further away from the imperfection of human emotions and human experience. These processes literally depersonalize work relationships and personal commitment to subjective ideals like quality service, excellence, and dedication. The better we get at acting like automatons, the less meaningful our stories become.

There are no magic formulas. All of the really important issues in life are ambiguous and subjective. Your definition of success depends on your culture, age, socioeconomic status, personality, and the recent events of your life. I’ve seen many groups locked in mortal combat over a compensation plan or reward system, as if there were a “right” answer. Subjective issues have many “right” answers. To find a story that makes your target market feel important again depends upon where you and they are, who you and they are, when you and they are, why you seek to engage them, and why they might want to respond. Whether you chose the answers to these questions or they were chosen for you, to whom/where/when/why you tell a story creates the context upon which you can build meaning. Most work groups do not have good skills in negotiating subjective issues.

Statistics (and I love demographics, psychographics, and nifty cluster analyses) help us begin to answer some of these questions. However, once we begin to select and test story ideas in focus groups, test campaigns, or simply by running them up the flag-pole, it is important to stay aware that everything from this point on is a result of subjective choices based on the questions asked. I don’t mean to degrade the value of research, but it is important to resist the urge to treat research results like “facts.” In this subjective milieu the single most important advice I can offer is to stay personally involved.

If objective decision making is a methodology for making impersonal decisions, then our methodology for subjective decisions must be to keep them personally relevant. Personal feelings and personal observations are suddenly as valid as numbers when choosing a collective story that evokes strong feelings.

The more personal feelings that go into finding or selecting your group’s story, the more personal that story will feel to your group and to all who hear it. Passion is a tuning fork that vibrates the soul of anyone tuned in to the same key. Outcome-based reductive reasoning is thinking from the outside in. Powerful stories originate from inside-out reasoning that resonates. There aren’t many rules other than “seek and ye shall find.”

When the seeking is done collectively, your group’s story evolves as a collective expression. This begins with individual stories. Don’t rush or neglect individual stories in favor of finding the collective story. This rush omits a vital step that can result in a weak story, a “story by committee,” or a superficial story without emotional depth.

Storytelling as a Self-Diagnostic Process

Storytelling as a function of self-expression requires some level of self-examination. In order to tell you a story that communicates who I am and why I am here, I must spend a little time asking myself those questions. This is usually done at a superficial level as quickly as possible: “We manufacture electronics that entertain people and earn a profit for our company.” Snore. Diving deeper to find more personal meaning is the only way to evoke a more personally meaningful story. Self-examination is difficult enough at the individual level, but at the group level, egos get involved, old disagreements surface, and ideological differences can turn adults into kids fighting over the front seat.

The self-diagnostic process that finds meaningful stories scares the hell out of people who aren’t sure they are living meaningful lives. Anxiety flares when outside-in thinking tools are set aside for inside-out thinking tools. Once they reflect, most people do find their lives are plenty meaningful (if a little out of balance). However, the process of self-examination tests your faith that your organization and your group are basically good people with good intentions. Groups that avoid deep examination seem to me to be anxious that honest self-examination might expose hypocrisy or emptiness. I’ve found that anxiety to be overstated in most cases.

The storytelling process is best begun by asking individual members of the group to tell a story that expresses who they are and why they are here, personally. It doesn’t require a formal process, and it isn’t always necessary to share these stories. However, sharing the stories can avoid a lot of nit-picking later, because all members of the group will have shared both the difficulty and the fullness of using one story to communicate such a big concept as “who we are” and “why we are here.”

First attempts at group stories are often highly aspirational in that the story is more about who we wished we were, rather than who we are. Stories that aspire to more than we can back up risk sounding hypocritical. A minister friend of mine defined hypocrisy as “a fourteen-year-old boy standing in the balcony holding his girlfriend’s hand and singing: ’All that thrills my soul is Jesus.’” When you look at it, hypocrisy is usually fueled by shame or some sense that “who you are” isn’t good enough. From that point of view, hypocritical stories are a much bigger problem than at first appears.

True faith in your organization is based in honesty. The process of self-diagnosis through storytelling forces your group to keep your eyes wide open while finding stories that fuel (or douse) that faith. Embrace all of the stories—even the stories that represent less than ideal aspects of your organizations. The level of reality you embrace will ultimately shine in the authenticity of the stories you eventually choose to tell. More importantly, your ability to face reality will also improve your group’s ability to fix subjective problems (hypocrisy, poor morale, cynicism) rather than cover them up with spin stories.

Solidarity

Stories that mobilize active engagement trigger personal recognition: that’s me, this is about my life, this impacts people I love. Belongingness and solidarity are response and cause. Too often belongingness is sought by matchy-matchy strategies that—with images of race, adopted jargon, and other imagined hooks—try to tie you to a particular demographic and say, “This is you.” The problem with this approach is that it is an “outside-in” rather than an “inside-out” approach. Find stories where we are the same and you find a mutual connection. Their “outsides” will always be different. But as human beings, our “insides” share common elements that can leap across superficial distinctions to connect a much deeper level—the level at which myth operates, or as Jung might call it, the collective unconscious.

To illustrate one such universal connection, here is a myth about Eris, the goddess of discord. Most people have at one time or another personally experienced this situation from at least one of the roles of this story when working with a group:

Invitations to an upcoming wedding omitted the goddess Eris. All of the gods and goddesses were rather outcome oriented and wanted to have a good time. Eris had ruined many parties. They decided to omit her name from the invitation list, but Eris showed up anyway. She threw a golden apple that was engraved, “For the Fairest,” into the middle of the room. The cat fight that resulted among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite completely ruined the wedding. It ultimately led to the Trojan War when Paris awarded the apple to Aphrodite after she promised him the love of “the fairest of all women,” Helen of Troy.

All groups deal with dissent. They may try to escape dissent or invite dissent intentionally, but the goddess of discord visits all groups that have big decisions to make. Finding a “big story” will lead to some dissent about which stories are good. This dissent will come invited or uninvited. The advantage of inviting dissent intentionally is that your story will be more robust. Storytelling that tolerates group differences within collective meaning offers enough solidarity to tolerate differences outside the group as well.

As an example, you and I are not gods or goddesses (except on weekends, maybe). Yet we recognize this story as both personal and collective. We know all about Eris and her apple. At different times we lived this story. Sometimes we were the ones who uninvited “trouble.” Sometimes we were the trouble. I can only speak for myself, but I must admit to having been involved in a catfight or two. I began using the word solidarity more often after I read the following quote by Eduardo Galeano:

I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.

When our stories are sought and found from the subjective statement that “I have a lot to learn from other people,” they invite difference and are infused with the kind of solidarity that causes people to think, “This is important.” Solidarity in action creates more stories of solidarity. Gathering stories teaches you how to get outside your own experiences and experience life as others might. To sit in someone else’s chair, to walk a mile in their shoes, this is the kind of research that produces stories that makes listeners feel important again—feel as if they belong.

Note

1. Ellen J. Langer, On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).