CHAPTER 7
Teaching Stories
TEACHING IS A SPECIAL kind of influence. The six stories overlap—each emphasizes different aspects of influence but they all do a little bit of everything. A Teaching story can reveal a little bit about who you are and why you are here simply by your choice of material. Yet it’s useful for us to treat Teaching stories as a distinct specialty. For our purposes, teaching is about changing behavior and building skills to creatively interpret tasks and goals.
At its best, a Teaching story transports your listener into an experience that lets him or her feel, touch, hear, see, taste, and smell excellent performance. It demonstrates in the mind how new behaviors create new results. A Teaching story is a no-risk demonstration—a trial run by imagination. Scrooge’s ghosts were basically taking Scrooge on Teaching-story tours. Each ghost told a different Teaching story, allowing Scrooge to emotionally and mentally experience the subjective consequences of not changing his behavior.
STORY ONE: In your past, you delayed your marriage to make more money and lost Belle, your one true love.
STORY TWO: Your need for money is creating poverty for the Cratchit family.
STORY THREE: Your continued need for money will kill the Cratchits’ son, and you will die alone and miserable.
It was a three-story transformation delivered in one night. These experiences delivered in story form are much more effective than scolding or preaching.
Teaching stories travel in time and perspective to enhance your listeners’ experiences and thus conclusions about what is the right or smart thing to do here. Highly specific rules and procedures often frighten staff into following these rules and procedures to the letter, regardless of the circumstances. Yet, some of the worst treatment of customers has been perpetrated by “Sorry, I don’t make the rules” or “That’s not my job” justifications. True customer service is flexible and even breaks the rules on occasion. If a good customer returns an obviously faulty product on the 31st day when you have a 30-day return policy, you want your staff to make an allowance. They need to have the freedom to do the right thing. Rules keep them from making judgment calls. Story gives both room for judgment calls and guidelines for making good judgments.
A casualty of overdoing clarity is the mindless attempt to force good intentions onto grocery story clerks with scripts for greeting customers. Increased clarity in this case actually degrades customer relations. When I reach the register in the supermarket line I feel sorry for the guy or gal who is forced to ask me “Did you find everything you need?” First of all, what if I said “no”? Should the five people behind me stand and wait while I explain that I was looking for gnocchi—which I know darn well they stopped stocking two months ago? Not only is this question badly timed but the person asking it is limited in her ability to do anything about it.
I’ve never heard anyone say “no.” The bosses who make them say it—who would probably penalize them in some way if they didn’t say it—have lost faith in the clerk’s ability to properly greet customers and otherwise tend to the customer/employee relationship. The clerk knows she isn’t trusted to choose her own greeting and has no choice but to decrease her personal engagement in the interchange. She becomes a robot, mechanically polite but less alive and stripped of spontaneity.
Treating a customer well is not predictable enough to handle via objective criteria. It’s too subjective. My good friend Pam McGrath, a minister, preached a sermon on “evangelism” that begins with a scene in a grocery story checkout line. She tells it like this:
A woman and her children are grocery shopping after work on a Friday. The store is fraught with danger: giant cereal boxes, bags of candy, etc. The woman is at wit’s end, and just as she finally makes her way to the head of the line at the checkout, the machine runs out of tape. She is impatiently tapping her foot while the kids grab things from the confined area. The checkout girl is trying to hurry. Everyone in the line behind her is sighing. Then she notices the checkout girl has on a cross like her mom used to wear. She says, “Nice cross.” The checkout girl stops and looks into her eyes. They smile. She continues, “My mother used to have one like that.” The checkout girl says, “My mom gave me this one.” They both breathe and smile. Two humans take the opportunity to connect and feel human again.
The kindness of seeing someone—truly noticing their presence with your full attention—is the spirit of customer service. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities to the point of providing “scripts” to people can shut them down. Improving performance may actually occur with fewer lines of demarcation so that staff step into the gray areas and use their imagination to solve problems.
Teaching stories provide a demonstration of how different behaviors yield different results. Some stories will rewind a past action to view it from another point of view. For instance, if you were training a new “caregiver” at a nursing home, it would be wonderful if you could put that strong 24-year-old person into an 87-year-old body for one day—just one day—so he can feel the vibrations of Parkinson’s disease distort his ability to walk or sit still. He could feel what it is like to be dependent, and how belittling it feels to have someone say, “And how are we today?” in a singsong voice normally reserved for toddlers. That personal experience would stay with him forever. But we haven’t figured out how to switch bodies yet, so the next best thing is to bring life-altering experiences to those who can benefit from Teaching stories.
Certain lessons can only be learned from experience. Some lessons apparently have to be learned over and over again for the rest of our lives. Patience, for instance. You could teach yourself and those around you about patience, using a different story every week, and not overdo it in most cases. What we tend to overdo is repeat unhelpful phrases like “Be more patient” or “I should be more patient.” These well-intended reminders don’t translate into real live patience when you need it. Nagging like this can do more harm than good.
Patience is one of many skills that combine temperament, experience, intention, and your subjective frame of reference. When you frame issues in a “big picture” frame you have more patience. Thinking in a small picture frame, “I’m late for work” might prompt a snippy “not now” response to your two-year-old’s silly question. A big picture frame like, “I’m teaching my two-year-old about the value of curiosity” may generate much more patience. Skill-based training can teach a student “what” patience is, and still miss the “why” or “how.”
Whether you are a boss training employees, a parent training teenagers, or a customer training a supplier, a Teaching story better motivates creative interpretations of the spirit of the relationship. When both parties focus on the spirit of the intent they invent innovative ways to meet genuine needs. Using story in teaching situations keeps everyone aware that circumstances change and we need to pay attention to those changes.
When a simple task isn’t being done well or is not done with the “spirit” you’d like to see, ask yourself if there might be a compounding problem of resentment or disillusionment. If so, you can bet a story will improve performance. However, remember that you need to start with your Who-I-Am or Why-I-Am-Here story first. The people you want to teach may have been treated like they can’t think for themselves for a long time. They may expect more of the same from you. Set things up for success by telling your Who-I-Am or Why-I-Am-Here story before you move into Teaching stories.
One caveat for using story to teach: Remember, it only works 50–70 percent of the time. That’s the price you pay for creative interpretation. People miss the mark sometimes. That means that when you inspire and encourage people to think for themselves, they will think for themselves. You must have a correlate norm (and stories) that demonstrate how to report mistakes early, ask forgiveness, and grant forgiveness, even as mistakes are fixed.
Don’t use story for everything. Technical issues still need rules and policies. Keep worst-case-scenario-derived rules and procedures for life-and-death situations. Hospital staff requires clarity for technical issues like attaching IVs, but teaching staff about empathy by telling a story of a nurse calming a frightened patient does not require clear policy guidelines. Tasks that require technical proficiency are still best handled with rules and clarity. Yet even technical tasks can be reinforced with stories to illustrate worst-case scenarios in a way that engraves the importance of inflexible perfection on a trainee.
STEP ONE. Now it’s time to think about the skills you want to teach others. Start with the basics. Identify a few basic tasks that need improvement. Perhaps you are teaching someone to do your job so you can move up. Consider the deliverables of your job and then move back upstream to consider what you actually do to deliver results. Frequently, your “best skills” are not adequately described with bullet points or summaries. Consider ambiguous situations where you imagine that staff might need to come up with creative solutions. One idea is to simply list your top five pet peeves. If they are pet peeves, it’s a good indication that what you have been doing isn’t working.
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STEP TWO. After you have examined “why” you do what you do, start looking for stories that demonstrate in a visceral way the benefits you seek. Here are four Teaching stories from our four buckets to get your juices flowing with ideas:
A Time You Shined
There are many courses on cultural sensitivity. If you had enough time to get a master’s degree or a Ph.D. in “cultural differences,” you could list thousands of specific ways to offend people in different cultures, such as showing the soles of your feet in an Arab country, or pointing with your index finger in India, and so on. Yet, ultimately the most important skill to learn is constant sensitivity to subjective interpretations that don’t match your expectations.
The generalized skill of staying open to new experiences is best taught through stories like this one told by a young lady named Cindy (quite young to me … under 25), who had just come back from two years in the Peace Corps. She told about being stationed in the Philippines. Her tour of duty began with a week in the home of a resident of the area. She explained to us that she expected it to be similar to traveling with the church choir back home—prearranged and structured. Instead she stood in a line as she and her new Peace Corps buddies were “sort of auctioned off.” Individuals or families arrived, picked out the volunteer they wanted, and led them out the door. The lady who picked her did not speak English. Cindy didn’t speak Tagalog. Her advisor assured her she should follow the woman and come back in a week. So she did. This is her story:
She took me further and further away from clean streets and houses with walls. The regular houses stopped and in their place were tarps on frames, lean-tos, and cardboard boxes. Finally, we arrived at a lean-to right next to the town dump. There were no walls. The floor was the dirt on the ground. I wasn’t disgusted so much as … well, I was scared. There were bugs everywhere. But I put on a brave face and I helped where I could. We went to get some food and prepared it on an outdoor fire. We ate dinner. I didn’t eat much. I didn’t feel so good. It got dark. I needed to go to the bathroom but didn’t see a bathroom. I didn’t see a latrine. I mean I wasn’t looking for a tiled floor or a door that said “Ladies.” I knew it would be basic, but I literally could not figure it out. I tried to watch to see what others did, but I still didn’t know where in the world they went when they needed to “go.”
I couldn’t ask because I didn’t speak the language. Finally, it got urgent. I needed to go, so I had to mime to the lady who was my host. Luckily, a knock-kneed bouncing seems to be the international symbol of “I need to go.” She laughed and laughed and then she showed me in mime that they did number one in a corner nearby in the dirt. Then she began to mime how to handle number two. She took a plastic grocery bag and indicated that you use the bag as a toilet and she handed me the bag, but I was still confused. What would I do with the bag when I was done? She could see my confusion and smiled, took the bag and pretended to swing the bag over her head like a shot put, and hurled it off in the direction of the dump, speaking the only two English words I heard the whole week, “Flying Saucer!”
That story cracked us up. There were 250 people in the room and the phrase “flying saucer” became a code word for how to deal with tough situations. This story is specific to the Philippines and yet useful to any group hoping to help strangers.
Describe a task that has been done by you, your team, or your organization the “right way.” Think about a time when the circumstances were confusing and yet the solutions applied were creative and well done. When was it difficult to find a path to solve an internal problem but you came through with flying colors? Certainly, there have been tough times recently that stretched your ability to do a good job. Think about an event or a customer who tempted you to hide behind rules or stock standard answers but instead you invented a solution where none existed before. Or, tell about a time when following a rule you didn’t understand ended up saving the situation, client, or even a life. Rules make more sense and are more easily remembered in the context of a Teaching story.
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A Time You Blew It
I found this story in the New York Times nine months after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, in which all crew members died. You know part of the story already:
When the Columbia took off a piece of foam broke off the wing, and without it, the craft burned up on reentry over Texas on February 1, 2003. With the 20/20 hindsight of an in-depth investigation, it was discovered that the data that predicted this disaster was available but was buried deep inside a PowerPoint slide. Edward Tufte, a professor from Yale who specializes in the visual presentation of data, analyzed the slide. The information was in the last line of a nineteen-line slide and read: “Flight condition is significantly outside test database, volume of ramp is 1920 cu. in. vs. 3 cu. in. for test.” Much has been made of the visual insignificance of “significantly” relevant data. But more importantly, this story highlights how words on a screen don’t deliver enough context to interpret the data’s meaning in terms of human life.
The data was there—the piece that broke off in the test was hundreds of times larger than anything they’d ever tested to be safe. But it was out of context. Could lives have been saved with a metaphor like “similar to losing the door panel of your car?” Did PowerPoint kill those people? No. Ted Simons, editor of online magazine Presentations, coined the headline, “PowerPoint doesn’t kill presentations, people do.” My main concern is that PowerPoint lets you think you communicated when you didn’t.
There was a cartoon in the New Yorker —a scene from Hell’s HR headquarters, where a recruiter for Hell is interviewing a new torturer. The recruiter leans back from his desk and looks at the prospect and asks, “That’s all fine and good but do you know PowerPoint?” One of my friends told me that a senior manager is known as “PowerPoint Bob” by his staff, and they don’t mean it as a compliment. Trust me, no one will ever complain if you delete a few PowerPoint slides from your presentation and tell a story instead. And depending on what industry you are in … you might save a life!
Think of a time your naϊveté created a big problem for the customer—specifically a time when following the rules to the letter didn’t serve the customer or the organization. Borrow from Dickens and tell three stories of past, present, and future consequences for missing the mark. Disaster stories are sometimes told only to show how stupid someone was or how incompetent people can be. We need to move into a frame of reference where we acknowledge that smart people make mistakes too, and use these mistakes as learning opportunities. In order to sound sincere—use your own mistakes whenever possible. By doing this, you model self-examination and encourage others to self-examine. When did you not follow the rules (in a technical situation) or when did you not break the rules (in an adaptive situation) in a way that you interpret as a mistake?
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A Mentor
People complain these days about a lack of civility. One hospital group I work with launched an initiative to improve civility, and lo and behold it improved safety performance. Incivility operates like a contagious virus. When one person treats an employee badly, they are more likely to dump on a customer or patient who is usually rude in return. It’s a terrible spiral. We parrot the words, “The customer is always right,” but that’s not true up to 50 to 70 percent of the time. Because it is subjective. If this hard line is held, employees end up feeling abused because no one ever acknowledges how hard it is to be nice to an unpleasant client or patient. Here’s a story from a woman in one of my classes who has become a role model for me when I feel mistreated. I try to remember her story because, most of the time, it inspires a creative, even humorous response when I feel like punching someone in the nose or bursting into tears. She told it without a trace of bitterness or self pity:
I was the ugly girl in high school. As an adult, I now know that every class has one. Your class had an “ugly girl.” That was me. I was the one who had cooties in grade school, the freak who was picked last in gym, and in high school there was a group of boys who made my life a living hell. No matter where I hid they’d find me. After school I’d hang back or find a bench far away from the rest of the kids where I waited on my mother to pick me up. I was as invisible as I could be. Thank goodness I didn’t have to ride a bus. Anyway, those boys would eventually find me no matter where I hid. When they found me they’d start to play one of their favorite games. One of them would sit beside me, put his arm around me, and they’d all laugh as he’d pretend to ask me out on a date, beg me for a kiss. I would try not to cry but my chin would start to quiver. The more I cried the more they laughed. This went on for most of a year. Then one day … I have no idea what came over me. One of these boys had his arm around me, taunting me … and something—not really me—but something lifted my left arm and draped it right back over his shoulder. My arm gave him a squeeze. And my brain kicked in and I winked at him. Now the other boys weren’t laughing at me anymore, they were laughing at him. I air kissed him and I started to laugh too. I wish you could’ve seen his face; it was pretty funny.
From that day on things were different. Sure they still teased me, but I never again let myself feel so devastated. I had power and I used it.
It is an old but excellent strategy: Find someone who is successful and copy them. When you adopt the habits, mannerisms, and daily goals of a successful person, you often can recreate their results. Find someone who has the skills you want—study their story and tell their story. For instance, Ben Franklin invented a system to rate himself everyday on the values he chose as important, choosing one a week for special emphasis. Actively seek mentors whose examples inspire you and you will learn things you didn’t even know you needed to learn. Autobiographies are an excellent way to study what attitudes, skills, and habits create the kind of life you seek. The beauty of real live mentors is that they have real-life flaws and can teach you how to cope and compensate as well as how to “achieve results.” If you don’t have mentors, you are wasting a lot of energy reinventing the wheel. Whom did you last witness performing a task in a way that inspired you? Tell about that moment (it could be from work, church, or the Olympics):
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A Book, Movie, or Current Event
An old friend of mine is a therapist. To keep his license he must constantly earn education credits by attending courses on the latest developments in mental health. He frequently attends free trainings produced by the pharmaceutical industry to keep abreast of the drugs out there and to fulfill his licensing requirements. Sometimes, I like to go too, because I learn more about neuroscience, emotions, and mental health.
The presenters vary considerably in quality. They are all smart. Most have M.D. or Ph.D. degrees, but only a few are interesting to listen to. One psychiatrist stood out for me when he used a story from a movie. Right in the middle of a deck of PowerPoint slides, with graphs of experiments on treating manic depression, I could feel my eyes glazing over as I tried to deal with unfamiliar words like Lamotrigine and Carbamazepine, but I woke up when I heard him say:
We forget how inexact this science it. You know, it’s only fifty years since we discovered lithium. I just read about a movie being produced about John Cade. John Cade, an Australian, discovered the use of lithium for mania in 1947. That was only fifty years ago. At that time everyone else was using electric shock and lobotomy, and this Australian doctor—John Cade—started wondering if manic behavior might be a result of too much of something. Maybe the body was intoxicating itself with some internally produced stimulant. He treated ten manic patients at a nearby institution. So he started collecting their urine and feeding it to guinea pigs. Nothing happened. He decided to inject it in the guinea pigs. In order to do that he needed a salt combination as a base fluid. Through trial and error he discovered that lithium carbonate was very stable. He injects it and notices the mixture has a strong sedating effect, which is the very opposite of his theory. Curious enough, he tries it on himself to see if it is safe enough to try it on a patient.
He knew which patient he wanted to treat first—a terribly manic man who was bouncing off the walls. This man’s mania was so bad that he had lost his job and was institutionalized. Almost immediately after the injection, the manic man was “more settled, tidier, able to pay attention and to control his impulses.” After two weeks of injections the man was able to leave the institution and go back to work. It was a miracle.
John Cade discovered the miracle fifty years ago, and we still don’t know why it works. (The psychiatrist then paused and looked up at his graphs in silence.)
You can bet we hung on every word he had to say next about his research.
Movies are wonderful for teaching situations. They provide ambiguity that encourages curiosity and discussion. There aren’t many human issues that haven’t been covered in one way or another by a movie. The classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, could stand up to high school students (a tough crowd) even today as a story that prompts introspection about racism, integrity, humility, and stereotyping. List your favorite movies, then write beside each movie title a notation of a scene that stands out as clever, innovative, or simply memorable. Don’t worry about the application of this story yet. Work it up as a story by writing the bare skeleton of what happened. Then look at the elements of the story and decide whether these same elements might work as a Teaching story.
Look to books or movies to find a historical character that teaches your point, or one who simply livens up your presentation (e.g., rewrite a Stripes-inspired marching chant, characterize a problem using a scene from Caddyshack, or adapt a Monty Python skit).
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STEP THREE. Choose one of these ideas to develop into a story. Write the story here in your journal. Do not edit. Write in whatever order it comes, including every single detail you can remember. Provide sensory details for all five senses. Write as much as you can remember.
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STEP FOUR. Now put your journal away and find someone who will listen to a “test-telling” of this story. Tell your story without these notes (storytelling, not story reading!) to someone you trust.
STEP FIVE. Ask your listeners for appreciations. Ask them to respond to your story with any of the following appreciation statements, and record what they say:
“What I like about your story is …
“What your story tells me about you is. …
“The difference hearing your story might make to our working relationship is …”
“I can see you using this story when (client situation) in order to (impact) …”
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STEP SIX. Now write your own thoughts about this story. What do you like best? When you tell it again, what do you want to remember to say first or last? Are there any new details you can include to make this story more vibrant or alive? Is there a particular order that is more engaging?
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