First, Some Don'ts

Let's say you've brought your team together, and you've decided that the topic of trust is one you'd like to explore through some stories.

Avoid saying things such as:

You are here to do some story work around the topic of trust and teamwork.

Annette, do some storytelling around the topic of trust in teams.

Madelyn, tell me a story about trust in teams.

You can imagine how Annette and Madelyn might feel as I put them on the spot. Story and storytelling are loaded words for many people and immediately make them think of performance. “Oh, I'm a storyteller now? I guess I should be thinking of my characters, and the central conflict, and not rambling too much, making my voice sound less nasally, and making it compelling.” See the problem here? There's a big difference between thinking about how to tell a story and simply telling a story. It's counterintuitive, but asking for a story may not be the best way to produce a story.

Sometimes in this work I don't use the terms story or storytelling at all. Sometimes it is better just to start telling stories without calling attention to the fact that that's what we are doing. If I do use the term storytelling, I emphasize my preference for purposeful and spontaneous stories rather than well-told stories.

Here are two more prompts that are not likely to deliver stories:

Tell me how to create trust in teams.

Why do you think it's so hard to create trust in teams?

The PowerPoint zombie disease has trained most of us to give correct answers. Yes, you can count on these prompts to put your team in the right conceptual space. But they won't elicit stories. Instead, people will say things like “To have trust in teams, you have to have clear accountabilities” and “It's hard to create trust in teams when people are being incentivized to different outcomes.” Those are useful insights, sure, but they're not stories. If your intent is to generate stories, then you will need a different approach.

Dr. Karen Dietz describes another ineffective approach that may surprise you. Anyone who has ever studied journalism learned to interview people through the classic technique of asking questions that begin with these words:

What . . .

Where . . .

Who . . .

When . . .

Why . . .

How . . .

If Lois Lane were interviewing witnesses to a robbery at the Bank of Metropolis, for example, those would indeed be great prompts. (“Who did you see?” “What did Lex Luthor use to blast open the safe?” “When did Superman arrive?”) They would generate descriptive statements for her note taking so that she could go back to her desk at the Daily Planet and construct the story. (“Lex Luthor blasted the safe with Kryptonite.” “Superman arrived after Luthor escaped out the back.”)

If your intent is to reconstruct a story later from a series of descriptive statements, then these are great interviewing questions. But we are exploring ways of generating stories together in dialogue, and in that context these questions won't deliver what we seek.

Here are some other phrases that may deliver a perfectly lovely conversation but, for the reasons stated above, probably won't deliver a story:

Describe for me . . .

Help me understand . . .

What are some ideas for . . .

Explain to me . . .

Tell me why . . .

Dr. Dietz sometimes has participants in her programs use these ineffective prompts to ask for stories and then make note of the responses they get. (They don't get stories!) Then she challenges them: “How would you modify those questions in a way that generates stories?”

Great question. How would you modify them?

Let's look at what works.

Paul Costello offers insight into story framing (and learning itself) when he says, “The best questions ask for an exploration rather than an explanation.” Story work always opens up the space for dialogue. It is divergent. It does not provide immediate answers, but rather populates the conceptual space with a bottomless well of wisdom to be explored. Thus, your framing efforts should emerge from an orientation of exploration rather than finding the answer. (If quick answers are what you seek, you may not need stories at all. Just Google it.)

Here are some practices that will invite people into an exploratory story space.

Plant the Suggestion

Cynthia Kurtz, one of the pioneers in connecting storytelling to knowledge management efforts, says that she starts her story sessions by setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy. Imagine that we are still looking for stories on the subject of trust. Cynthia might say to a group, “I find that when you put people together in a circle, they naturally start telling stories. So tell me about a time you experienced a leader who extended trust to you.”

See what she did with that first statement? She presented a statement of fact: “This is what people tend to do.” Notice that she didn't instruct this group to tell stories. She simply describes an inclination that human beings have, and that's all. This plants a vision in the minds of participants and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that influences the ensuing behaviors. I tried Cynthia's suggestion with one of my groups, and it worked just as she described.

“Tell Me about a Time …”

This is the classic story prompt. “Tell me about a time someone extended trust to you, and it made all the difference in your work.”

When you say, “Tell me about a time,” you move people's awareness to a linear, time-based continuum which is exactly where stories live. This prompt is historical and encourages people to scan over the timelines of their experiences for a specific event and the cascade of events that followed. Notice how the language in these examples reinforces that we are looking for a specific event:

Tell me about a time when a team failed because people couldn't let go of their old ways of thinking. What happened?

Tell me about a time you were proud that you made a difference for a customer.

Tell me about a time when you felt you were being truly vulnerable as a leader. What happened?

Notice that a couple of the examples above follow the tell me about a time prompt with the question “What happened?” This may seem redundant, but I think it serves a purpose in that it further orients people in story space. The question “What happened?” primes people to drop an anchor that is the catalyst event on their timeline and then begin noticing the ripple effect of events that followed.

Earlier we described that the journalistic “how” questions may not deliver stories. However, Thaler Pekar, an expert on story and persuasive communication, finds that “how” questions are a helpful assist for the reluctant story sharer. “If a teller is stuck,” she explains, “follow up the tell me about a time prompt with how did it happen? This causes them to think of an unfolding of events, a pattern of causation—and stories!”

As we look at other ideas for prompting stories, notice how many of the examples that follow use some variation of tell me about a time.

Story Buckets

Annette Simmons says that in her experience, there are four prompts that are almost always effective at drawing out stories. “These four buckets aren't the only places to find stories,” she says, “but they may be the easiest.” Her four buckets are:

A time I shined

A time I blew it

A mentor

A book, movie, or current event

So, let's say you've brought a team together around the topic of “innovation.” Having a menu of options can generate more productive brainstorming. You could place all four prompts up on a whiteboard and invite participants to pick one (whichever generates an idea for them first):

A time I shined: “We're talking about innovation today. Tell me about a time you were part of delivering something that was especially innovative. What did you do?”

A time I blew it: “Innovation is a fragile thing, and it is easy to compromise. Tell me about a time that you or your team failed to deliver the innovation you expected to deliver. What happened?”

A mentor: “Think of someone you respect most/the most innovative leader you ever knew, and tell me about a time that he or she produced something extraordinary. What did that leader do?”

Cynthia Kurtz phrases her mentor/leader question a little differently:

Did you ever see somebody do something and think, “If everybody did that things would be a lot better around here?”

Or did you ever think, “If everybody did that things would be a lot worse?” Tell me what happened.

She observes that this question roots the answer in behavior rather than the person's status.

A book, movie, or current event: “Think of a scene from a movie, a book, or the news that is a great example of people producing innovation. Tell me about the scene.”

Extreme Prompts

Wherever there is a high point, low point, or turning point in your experience, you'll almost always find stories lurking there. As Paul Smith points out in his book Lead with a Story, this is why many of the most effective story prompts have -est adjectives in them:

What is the craziest thing that has happened to you during a sales call? Tell me what happened.

Share with me the toughest leadership challenge you have experienced in your career.

Tell me about the scariest moment of your childhood.

When did your team learn its hardest lesson while delivering Project Alpha? Tell us what happened.

Tell me about the greatest team experience you've ever had.

Share with me the time you produced the most creative thing you've done in your career. What happened?

It can be valuable to highlight contrast by invoking the opposite ends of a continuum at the same time: “Tell me about your worst team experience, and then tell me about the best. What happened in each?”

My wife and I sometimes do this as a quick check-in at the end of the day, especially if I'm out of town. Robbie will say, “What's high/low?” and I know that's shorthand for “Tell me the high point of your day today and the low point.” It's a simple prompt that always brings us quickly into a conversation around the most important issues of the day. (I mentioned this technique at a story retreat in South Korea, and two executives laughed and said, “We do exactly the same thing at our house!” Storytelling and marriage are both universal.)

Emotional Prompts

One of the defining characteristics of a story is emotion, and in his Anecdote Circles e-book, Shawn Callahan points out that stories built around emotion are the ones we remember. Emotion belongs in our organizational communications as well, although we often don't find it there.

Slash Coleman says this is the very heart of organizational storytelling. Slash is an author and producer whose award-winning storytelling shows have been produced off Broadway and even been archived at the Smithsonian. For Slash, whether he is stunning audiences in a theater or building story capability for business leaders, story work is always about emotion.

Emotion is fertile ground for storytelling. Close your eyes and point to one of the “emotion” words below.What stories does the emotion word trigger?

Slash's best-known production, The Neon Man and Me, found its way to television as a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Special. “I originally created the story to come to terms with my best friend's death,” he says. “But, along the way it turned into an experiment of sorts.” After retelling the story more than 1,400 times over seven years and documenting listener reactions, Slash became a student of the emotional content of stories.

“If you ask about someone's best leader or best team experience,” he says, “you're probably going to get one very specific story.” He defines this type of story as an “identity story,” where the person telling the story is grounded in a single narrative from the past. These stories typically come from our memory, tend to lack emotion, and have probably been repeated multiple times as the teller's way of shaping the identity of a person, thing, event, or even the self. As we've seen, such stories can indeed deliver great dividends of meaning. But Slash sees an opportunity.

“But let's say you ask a leader about a time they felt dismissed on a team,” he says. “You'll probably get an emotional story, and much more. It produces a fluid stream of meaning: stories within stories.” The teller experiences emotion through the telling; the listener (through the phenomenon of neural coupling) generates a parallel emotional state. Everyone shares the experience, and as Slash has discovered from his stance in the spotlight, it can be quite powerful. When you include emotion, Slash says, “even a story about walking to the curb to get the newspaper can become transcendent.”

Notice how most of these prompts overtly use the word feel or felt:

Tell me about a time you felt the power of the organization's value of excellence in a dramatic way. What happened?

Tell me about a time when you realized you were cared about on this team.

Tell me when you felt the proudest of your team/organization/marriage/family. What happened?

Tell me about a time you felt diminished on a team. What happened?

Or, work other “feeling” words into your prompt. Slash often begins with the words on the previous page (drawn from the psychology of nonviolent communication) and you can too by simply closing your eyes and pointing to one at random.

Aspirational Prompts

In organizations, the most generative stories are the aspirational ones, the stories that capture us at our best. Rather than say, “Tell about a time you saw someone acting on our value of collaboration” (which may well deliver a mundane or even a negative story), an aspirational prompt would be, “Tell me about a time you saw someone acting on our value of collaboration in a truly remarkable way.” Do you want to find buried gold—the highest examples of daily leadership that you didn't even know were there in the organization? Aspirational prompts deliver the goods.

I always do this when telling stories about an organization's values. We don't want just any story about quality, for example. We want the dazzling stories of quality, for those are the ones that have something valuable to say about our identity.

I sometimes have groups resist this. “Yeah, but you don't know how screwed up things are around here,” they say. “When we tell those happy-happy-joy-joy stories, we aren't being honest. No one is going to buy it.” The fact is every organization has dysfunction, and there is always a group of employees perpetuating an antinarrative of the organization at its most toxic. The task of leadership is not to ignore the problems but to name them and deal with them. Those are very often current reality stories, whereas aspirational stories present the desired future state. (This is an idea called creative tension, and it is explored in Chapter 14, “Creative Tension Stories,” later in this book.) In effect, by telling the aspirational story the leader says, “Yes, things are hard today. Now let's explore who we are when we are at our best.” With these stories the leader establishes an attractor around which the organization can organize and grow. In this way, they become stories of vision. Speak your desired reality into existence.

Especially in culture building, branding, or engagement work, the extraordinary stories are the ones we want because they make the desired vision real and attainable. Sure, we are not currently achieving the remarkable collaboration we need. But here's a story of a time we did, and it was a powerful thing to behold! Imagine if we could be that way all the time!

Go Wide Open

Many of my story colleagues are perfectly comfortable going into story sessions without the safety net of a predefined topic. A wide-open narrative space allows the wisdom of the group to take the dialogue to wholly unexpected places. This is desirable when you want to foster emergence or a self-organizing group mind. (Make sure you tell the group that's what you are here to achieve.)

Kat Koppett is a master in the application of improvisational theatre techniques for management and the author of Training to Imagine. “You can trust the group to know what they care about, and what they want to talk about,” she says, and offers a wonderful prompt for opening those possibilities. She begins with this question:

What are you curious about right now?

Invoking curiosity can be a powerful thing. Our curiosity hides in the corners of our minds, where we hold untested questions or little sparks of unexamined fascination. Curiosity is vulnerable and precious. We don't reveal our curiosity very often, and when we do, it can lead us off the main path of the typical, and down unexplored trails to places of unexpected surprise.

Kat will have each participant share his or her thoughts, and then she draws out any themes or patterns: “It sounds like we're wondering about how to support positive failure.”

Then she makes the bridge to elicit stories:

Tell me about a time you saw someone wrestle with this. It can be a best-case example or a worst-case example.

Tell me about a time you saw a need in our organization that might have been transformed by that idea.

Have you ever seen a mentor or a leader do that well? What happened?

Go for the Heart

Most organizations have an intimacy threshold, a place where authentic engagement crosses over some invisible but collectively held boundary into a space of discomfort because it lands too close to the heart. For American businesspeople, that threshold tends to be higher than it is in European business cultures, where emotional vulnerability can more quickly undermine credibility. But this is just a matter of degree. Regardless of where your culture sets that dial, many leaders aren't used to revealing their hearts in the conference room.

I for one am a proponent of scooting right up to the edge of that threshold and then placing one toe over the other side (prompting some of my partners at INSEAD and CEDEP in Fontainebleau, France, to tease that I'm so American). I find that people usually squirm only for a moment, and then marvelous things begin to happen.

Bobette Buster is a world-renowned lecturer on stories, the language of cinema, and the economics of Hollywood. She is also a script consultant who has worked with Hollywood power houses, such as Pixar. My team invited her to share her perspectives with our group of storytellers, and she shared something that stuck with me. The most powerful stories—the transcendent ones—speak to the deepest human desires. “Cinema is the art form of transformation,” Bobette says, and the stories that stay with us answer one of three questions that are at the heart of the human journey that we all share:

Will I find transformation?

These may be stories about reinvention, when I bravely chose to step into a new possibility; or redemption when my compromised or “sinful” identity was restored with new value.

How will I become fully alive?

These may be stories of finding liberation, transcendence, ecstasy, or meaning—or they may be cautionary tales, in which I became the living dead, so to speak, through wrong choices.

Where will I find hope?

Dare I entertain my deepest desires in the expectation they might be met? These are stories of times I lost hope, or found it, or both.

Here are some prompts that can invite people to share from the most precious areas of their lives. What stories do these trigger from your memory?

Share with me how you met your spouse, and how you knew you were falling in love.

What is the closest you have ever come to dying? Tell us what happened.

Tell me about a time someone believed in you.

Tell me about when you almost gave up—and how you found hope.

When did you encounter your greatest joy? I would love to hear about that time.

Was there a time you felt the most free? Tell me about what happened.

You can sense how these kinds of prompts would require you to share from the place of your deepest humanity. That may not be what you're seeking in the Monday morning staff meeting. I find that these conversations, if that is indeed what you seek, may benefit from some kind of separation from the demands of the normal work environment. (See the principles about the third space described in Chapter 2, “Story Circles.”)

Stories Beget Stories

Author and consultant Terrence Gargiulo finds that the best way to create a context for sharing stories is, simply, to start with a story.

“The shortest distance between two people is a story,” he says, “and so I begin my sessions by telling a story or a quick series of stories that are connected to our topic at hand. I have found that when people hear a collection of loosely interrelated stories that orbit the topic, they are quick to counter with stories of their own.”

The prompts that we are exploring in this chapter are really focused on starting the story experience. Once the environment for story work has been correctly established, it takes on a life of its own.

“One story usually leads to another,” Terrence explains. “This happens even if we are not thinking about it at a conscious level. Our minds replay our stories and treat them as precious jigsaw pieces of a never-ending puzzle. They become chains of cross-referenced experiences, opening a floodgate of meaning that can be explored in conversation with another person or in a reflective process with ourselves.”

Where Do I Go from Here?

You can use these story prompts anywhere—at a meeting with one of your salespeople at a coffee shop, during an interview for a new team member, in a meeting with your staff in the conference room, or over dinner with your spouse and kids.

My mentor Dick Richardson used to do this when interviewing young managers at IBM. He would put down his pencil, look at the clock, and say, “Well, that's all of my interview questions but it will be a couple of minutes before it's time to leave. So, what are you planning on doing this weekend?” Of course, the interview wasn't really over, but the storytelling that followed produced the most important data of the event.

I do this in the car with my kids on the way home from the bus stop. “Tell me about a time that you laughed really hard today. What happened?” This gets much better results from a teenager than “How was your day?” (Although I've overused the prompt, and now my kids are on to me. There goes Dad again trying to get us to tell stories …)

Once you start defining the story prompt and imagining the conversation that will ensue, you will likely begin to think more broadly about what that shared experience should look like. If you are reading this book out of sequence and you have not yet reviewed the previous chapter, “Host a Story Circle,” now is a good time to jump back there.

To dig deeper into the idea of framing stories for meaning, review the metanarrative structures in Chapters 11 and 12, “Fractal Narratives.”