CHAPTER 3
Training Your Brain

GOOD STORYTELLING IS not a skill set. It is not achieved by following a recipe. Skill sets and recipes only work on mechanical things and systems that don’t think for themselves. Things that do think for themselves—humans—have no reliable operator manual or blueprint. Thus we can never have a reliable recipe or skill set for storytelling. At best we can learn to adopt a frame of reference that reveals the stories and subjective interpretations at play.

Storytelling flows from a particular state of mind. Good storytellers live in, or can step into, a philosophical framework that is different from how most of us usually think. Once you have a map of this philosophical frame you can step into it at will. My guess is that you won’t want to live there because it’s not the best philosophical framework for making tons of money—ask any professional storyteller. However, it is a philosophical framework of big truths, moving stories, and deep connections. Things that bullet points fail to achieve. Stories bring hope, faith, perseverance, and other good yet irrational emotions back into our daily lives.

You can train your brain to “think in story.” But first you must unplug your brain from thinking in charts, metrics, and spreadsheets. These kinds of summarizing devices are the culprits that block your imagination from thinking in story. Stories are undigested, presummary, preconclusion reports of actual experiences. Imagination is engaged because the experience is still ambiguous in the way real life is ambiguous. Stories don’t squeeze out interpretation—they invite listeners to participate in the “what does this mean?” question. Stories give people freedom to come to their own conclusions. People who reject predigested conclusions might just agree with your interpretations if you get out of their face long enough for them to see what you have seen.

You may desperately want people to come to the “right” conclusions, but trying to control their conclusions pushes people away. Story is more trusting and thus more trustworthy. Trust and trustworthiness are inseparable in real life. Trust operates along patterns of reciprocity based on assumptions about intent that linear analysis can’t accurately represent. Reciprocity is one of the most reliable predictors of human behavior. In fact, the field of economics has developed an entire field—experimental economics—to understand how perceptions operate on economic decisions. Economic decisions in real life are often not rational. Our emotions cause us to punish those we perceive as free-riders even when it costs us and take irrational risks (no guarantee of return) to encourage reciprocal returns from strangers. This economically irrational risk is called trusting someone. Trust is one of the first things to disappear when all decisions are forced to make objective, rational sense.

Temporarily abandoning well-rewarded skills could leave you feeling untethered. For some it feels downright irresponsible. However, the skills that make you a winner in competition are skills that protect, define, segment, clarify, and “own.” These thinking skills protect you from mediocrity by defining goals, drawing lines of distinction, clarifying roles, comparing measures of quality, and pursuing zero defects. Yet, they forge a philosophical framework that compares and divides. The framework of story connects and inspires. We need both.

Metrics, analysis, and objective thinking are tools that protect you from repeating mistakes by breaking things down into manageable pieces or revealing root causes. Root cause, disassembly, and reassembly work on any systems made up of machines that don’t think or made up of people who reliably will let you do their thinking for them. The military used to be that way, but even the military faces an explosive diversity of thinking and obedience based on agreement. Cultural differences, past experiences, and the Internet fuels independent thinking into wildly diverse opinions on what is right and how to go about it.

Very smart people have tried to design measurements and thinking tools to measure and thus control subjective issues like trust, loyalty, faith, respect, engagement, and inspiration. However, none of these feeling states is reliably measurable. You can measure behaviors that in some situations represent one subjective definition of trust. However, real trust-in-action is too situational for one definition to be meaningful for an entire company, government, or community. For instance, there are times when trust means you keep your mouth shut and protect a coworker. There are times when trust means you protect your coworker from making the same mistake twice by speaking up. It depends on the situation. Applying measurements to subjective dynamics like trust only distorts, or worse, discredits what we “know in our hearts.” Like quantum physics, the very act of measuring it, alters it. We have to get past the mantra “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

The natural way to describe and “manage” subjective issues is to pay attention to the stories we tell. Once we do that we can stop trying to measure what can’t be measured and spend more time managing that which we can’t measure. Unless you are a social scientist, continuing to spend resources in an effort to measure trust leads you further away from the real thing. Worse, it might trick you into a false confidence that meeting your numbers has achieved “trustworthiness.” Hypocrisy thrives when metrics are valued more than personal experience. And because there seems to be an extended time lag between lost trust and bad numbers, once the numbers decline it is too late.

The danger in the adage “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is that people believe it is true. If you can’t measure it you sure as hell better be managing it, every day, with attention, integrity, and self-examination. Accountability needs to stretch beyond that which can be counted. Einstein is popularly thought to have said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” The sheer volume of well-intended measurements we are forced to gather, analyze, and attend disconnects us from our own good judgment and sense of personal responsibility for creating situational and subjective solutions. Storytelling reestablishes accountability for human qualities that numbers distort or miss completely.

Story protects us from apathy, mistrust, disrespect, disconnection, and disillusionment by reconnecting us to commitment, trust, respect, and inspiration. Developing your ability to use storytelling to increase accountability will not erase your talents in objective, rational thinking. You can still be objective and rational when you are done. The additional skill is that you can also be subjective and “multirational” as well. The trick is to develop enough agility to toggle back and forth between objective and subjective frameworks at will.

No Proof

The hardest habit to suspend is our litmus test of expecting proof before you acknowledge anything as “true.” You probably were trained to demand proof, to seek excellence (zero defects), and to apply linear analysis to compare and contrast alternatives. These thinking tools keep you from being duped, tricked, or otherwise misled so you don’t drop a good defense without good reason. The reason to temporarily liberate input from the burden of proof is that there are no reliable proofs for feelings. Think about it: If your spouse says, “If you love me, prove it,” what do you do? Buy your spouse a car? Tell your mother to butt out? Or stop buying flowers and start washing the dishes? My point is that love cannot be proved by objective standards. Too many times, important information has been disregarded because, without proof, it was dismissed.

Proof does not exist in the subjective frame. In the subjective frame, nothing is true more than 50 to 70 percent of the time. (I made these numbers up, okay? Think of them as a metaphor.) Consider a happily married couple. Ask one spouse, “Do you love your wife?” And his answer may be “yes” on Friday night after a romantic dinner. Ask the same man on Saturday morning when he is late for tee time and his car is on “empty” because she used all his gas and didn’t refill it. If he is honest, he will have to report that what he feels toward his wife in that moment is something other than love. The answer to any questions about feelings, values, or attitudes (all subjective) is “it depends.”

Another example. I like to think I’m smart. I’ve written several books, been hired to help important people think through important decisions, and yet when I was in Hawaii and saw a glorious sunset, I got up very early the next morning and went to the same spot waiting to see an equally glorious sunrise. It wasn’t until the sun hit my back that I reluctantly realized that while the sun goes down in the west it tends to come up in the east. I can “prove” that I am both smart and unbelievably stupid depending on the situation. This is an example of how nothing is reliably true or false because human beings are paradoxes of good and bad, smart and stupid, generous and greedy, etc.

If you embrace (temporarily) that nothing is “true” about human feelings more than 50 to 70 percent of the time, it means you have to lower your standards (keep breathing) in seeking and refining stories to tell. You can’t find perfection and you distort things when you try. The only way to approach storytelling is to embrace the ambiguity and imperfections of human experience.

Forget zero defects when dealing with subjective issues. The 50-to-70-percent success rate applies to tools that help you find stories, the strategies of telling good stories, as well as the impact your stories will have on others. These tools work at best 70 percent of the time. Good technique (for example, “confident” tone) might improve your story in one situation yet alienate listeners in another situation. No one story will reach 100 percent of your target with the exact outcome you desire. A good rule of thumb for those of us who don’t know when to stop chasing perfection is that one story will only be meaningful to about 70 percent of the people you hope to influence. That level of reliability means you must diversify your portfolio and spread your risk by telling more stories. It also means you have to increase your tolerance for failure. Think in terms of million-dollar baseball players: a batting average of 300 still means that they strike out twice as often as they hit the ball. Once you expect to miss the mark some of the time you don’t ditch storytelling just because one story fails. You tell another story, or better, ask someone to tell you a story.

So can we improve the tool of storytelling to create better reliability? Not unless you can redesign the human body and brain. The complexity is unavoidable. If you want senior management to delay a decision, don’t just tell them one story, tell them three stories. Expect that you will always leave one or two people unmoved. Once you define acceptable losses, it is clear that telling three stories is more time effective and more authentic than trying to force one story to work for everyone. The trick is to temporarily silence the critical voice that rejects a detail, description, or event after a single trial. It takes a wide net to scoop up the human and humane experiences and feelings that are the stuff of good stories. Stories live in the messy ambiguity of real life. If you clean them up too much you kill them.

Nonlinear Relationships

Now that we’ve temporarily lowered your standards we must also temporarily redefine cause and effect. Your expectations of cause and effect are probably grounded in the physical sciences. One plus one equals two. The neural network of the brain is not linear. It makes connections that are exponential, lateral, and dynamic between people, events, and interpretations of those events. One person plus one person could equal Enron or Hewlett Packard. Between humans there are no reliable “one plus one equals two” relationships. Emotions are activated by experientially based associations that lead to illogical but nevertheless strong connections. Say the word “Hawaii” to one person and he may make the following associations: honeymoon … sex … Viagra … spam e-mails. Another person might think Hawaii: Maui. … Oprah … magazine … pick up dry cleaning. The brain is nonlinear and exponentially multirational when it comes to associated thoughts and feelings.

Your habit of objective thinking is embedded with certain assumptions derived from mathematics. One hidden assumption that is problematic for storytelling is the expectation of linear correlations. For instance, we tend to expect big results from big efforts and small results from small efforts. That’s true in the physical world, but not in the subjective world of perceptions. In the subjective world of perceptions, little details can make big differences. Imagine your staff listening intently for three hours as you patiently explain the new IT system that is about to be implemented. Then imagine as you walk away you see two staff members rolling their eyes and making quack-quack movements with their hands. Which had more impact? Three hours of attention or that one split second? That is an example of nonlinearity—tiny can equal big. Big can also equal tiny. If your child is dying, losing your job because you have run out of vacation time or sick leave is less important than time with your child. Yet the loss of a job for a healthy family can mean disaster. It all depends on the situation and your point of view.

Nonlinear thinking is difficult because we are so well trained in linear relationships. Most decision-making models do not factor for nonlinear truths. However, with practice you can use linear analysis along with nonlinear analysis to make even better decisions. Consider the example of a boss who has four employees and eight hours of overtime to assign. The linear answer might be:

8 hours divided by 4 employees =
2 hours of assigned overtime per employee

The nonlinear answer will take into account that John’s kid’s birthday is this weekend, and that Billy is saving like crazy to buy a motorcycle. So you check with the others and decide together to give Billy all eight hours of overtime. Both answers are perfectly good ways of analyzing a situation yet produce radically different conclusions. The subjective solution is more stable in terms of staff feelings. Many linear solutions create unnecessary unhappiness because a subjective solution was never sought. But that’s another book. For our purposes, put on your objective thinking hat for the numbers, bar charts, and spreadsheet, and then take it off and wear your subjective thinking hat for storytelling.

Temporarily embrace the nonlinear aspects of storytelling. A personal exchange or a story told can impact a relationship in ways that are out of proportion to linear expectations. You can walk into a room and say one right thing and earn trust for a decade—or you can say one wrong thing and blow it for a decade. That’s why linear thinkers get blindsided by emotional response. They don’t have a system for anticipating “irrational” and emotionally charged responses. They still think being right is enough.

The truth is your facts aren’t as powerful as human emotions. Feelings alter facts, at least the impact of facts. A series of negative experiences that create distrust can make perfectly good facts worthless. If people are mad, sad, or fearful, they discredit facts regardless of the credibility of your process. The upside is that when people feel enthusiastic, valued, and inspired they can attribute more credibility than your facts even deserve. Sometimes people get carried away and even embellish facts. Have you ever had to correct someone who was so excited they overstated the case? “We saved $3 million!” when it was in fact $300,000? That’s what happens—perceptions amplify or diminish data.

So, being right is only halfway to action. The rest of the way is through perceptions and feelings. The goal is to alternate back and forth between linear thinking when talking about facts, and nonlinear thinking when telling or interpreting a story. Here’s what you need to remember: Details have a HUGE impact. The things that seem irrelevant when crunching numbers are quite relevant when you tell a story about what the numbers mean.

One more cherished assumption to discredit and we are done.

Root-Cause Trap

The last assumption you must temporarily suspend when using storytelling as a tool is the hardest habit to resist. More than likely you have had great results solving problems with the tool of root-cause analysis. When inventory skyrockets, errors increase, or productivity slumps, our immediate response is to perform a root-cause analysis. We track data upstream, isolate the beginning of the problem, find the root cause, and fix it. Again, this works with systems of inanimate objects and obedient people. However, you may have noticed that obedience ain’t what it used to be. When a problem is perceptual, subjective, or emotionally charged, root-cause analysis can actually make things worse.

When morale is low, a staff discussion about why it is low, about who or what is the root cause, is often destructive and blame based. This kind of conversation shifts a group to defensive reasoning. Each group or individual focuses on proving how they are not part of the cause, which sabotages your ability to promote a sense of personal responsibility for the issue. Even if you perfectly identify the root cause, feelings can’t be disassembled and reassembled based on what you learned.

However, if you resist the impulse to default to root-cause analysis, you might tell a story, or better, ask staff to tell stories about “Why I choose to work here.” Granted you won’t get 100 percent response, but one of those stories might just be the shot in the arm everyone needed. I definitely believe you are more likely to improve morale with this approach than with another blame-game, root-cause analysis. Morale is not a function of removing problems. Good morale is when a clear sense of personal gain or personal mission shrinks unavoidable problems from mountains to bumps in the road. The unavoidable problems don’t go away—all that changes is perspective and staff perceptions. In the subjective world, the solution often has nothing to do with the problem.

Consider addiction. The root cause of alcoholism is drinking too much alcohol. So from a rational perspective, to cure your addiction you just need to stop drinking too much. However, this approach doesn’t have a terribly high success rate. Instead, compare the success of Alcoholics Anonymous, which provides a group experience and twelve steps involving a “higher power.” Meetings consist almost entirely of stories. People share their stories of success and failure, loss and forgiveness, and “one day at a time.” They share their stories about taking the steps or failing to take the steps. The primary substance of these meetings is telling and listening to stories.

Many social issues are better addressed when we stop trying to impose rational root-cause analysis to problems. The decline in education, for instance, might prompt a linear analysis (this is a massive oversimplification) of math scores dropping to 25 percent of previous levels, indicating that math should be emphasized four times as much. High school students are bored enough. Root-cause analysis only blames the parents, the teachers, the system, or the students. And let’s just say we could prove it is the parents’ fault. What solution might you propose? Mandatory parental training? More likely education will improve when we stop looking backward in blame and start looking forward with new stories that bring people together around a vision.

In summary storytelling is best applied when three habits are temporarily suspended:

1. The habit of valuing objective proof over reported direct experiences

2. The tendency to define 50-to-70-percent reliability as “unreliable”

3. The expectation that solutions always have a direct and logical relationship with the root cause of a problem

These habits are useful for objective reasoning, but they will distort your understanding of subjective perceptions and emotional reasoning. Its kind of like using your inside voice and your outside voice—both are entirely appropriate depending on whether you are inside or outside. Objective thinking keeps you outside a problem and subjective thinking takes you inside the problem. Both types of understanding are of great value when you seek solutions.