The Importance and Power of Stories

I arrive late into my next destination after my time in San Jose and its pitch black.  My host welcomes me to the 'treehouse' and when I log in to the Wi-Fi connection that night, I see the name is 'treehouse'.  "Cute" I'm thinking, what a nice name.  Next morning, as the light is slowly creeping into my bedroom I sit bolt upright to look out the window - shock - through the dawn light I am confronted with a massive Sequoia tree - CRICKIES I really am staying in a treehouse, and not at the bottom trunk but in amongst the branches of this massive beautiful tree.

Terrence McNally, Speaker at the League of Cities Conference spoke on the unique power of telling compelling stories

We are our stories, Terrence tells us.  The best way to reach people is by sharing compelling stories. To catch people's attention we need to adopt story telling, have a narrative and craft stories with clear messages in them. 

It strengthens our work – how?  It engages people more emotionally and we can more easily connect to our audience.  It helps you build credibility, engagement and trust, but good stories are not enough –  we also need to combine them with data. The treehouse, by the way, is 20 years old, the Sequoia Redwood is about 80 years old. There are no old generation Redwoods in the valley I am staying as they were all chopped down to rebuild San Francisco after the early 1900 earthquake. Century old trees were logged, it was a devastating 'clear cut' of the entire valley.

Data spells out the challenges and value of a story.  If you find data, find a story to link it to.  If you have a Story, link it to data. Then it’s a call to Action.

Story +Data +Call to Action

The earth is warming as we know, we need trees to absorb carbon dioxide as we know, we need plants and animals for humans to be healthy as we know - so we also need to stop logging old growth forests

The ultimate purpose of every communication is to inspire a specific individual to take a specific action.  Your story is part of the bigger story, Terrance advises.

Relating the power of stories to work places. We need core stories.  At Warringah we are gaining more understanding of the need for stories. We are starting to collect stories and we as staff all need to understand the importance of compelling stories and assist in getting a story bank.  As we hear a story we need to bring it in.  Terrance said once you have a system to collect them, then you need to craft them – the secret of great writing is rewriting, produce a draft then rewrite it, a number of times if necessary. Then share it and use it to demonstrate it is something you are doing.

Stories are emblematic, they fit the program an organisation is trying to push, e.g. it goes with the organisations culture. Success stories reinforce what the culture is.  A great story can also be what we didn’t do or what we were up against and the lessons learnt.

What if? Stories.  If this program gets defunded we wont be able to….. –  Terrance says you need to personalise a story, give us a family, children, tell us what it looks like for them if your program doesn't get funded etc..  Any presentation or talk can be very dry, or alternatively, it can be very interesting if it is turned into a 'story'.  

A story needs:

• a Protagonist
• a created world - e.g flesh and blood with people with dialogue that come to life
• obstacles, conflict or drama that has been turned around
• emotion - People  want to be entertained and moved
• data
• clear meaning
• call for action

I'm coming back with all sorts of tricks and tools to elicit stories