As toddlers, we always enjoyed our parents tucking us into bed and telling us a good story; bedtime stories were magical times. When we grew older, we learned how to read and enjoyed this magical world in a different format. It may seem that stories and imagination have no place in a business-oriented hectic world. But as we all know, story-telling can serve as means for building empathy, trust, understanding, and influence.
On our KMGN advanced methodologies course this week, Madanmohan Rao led us in our first of three sessions on stories to understand the why and how of storytelling.
A good story must engage the listener through empathy. One of the ideas I liked was on building empathy into a story:
Put the listeners in the scene; Include quotes.
Add descriptions and thoughts to help the listeners feel and sense, imagining they are there.
Make the listener think; about beliefs, even about the plot trying to guess the next step, turning the listener into an active player.
Embed a call for action. Tell people what you expect them to do.
And I would add: Enjoy. Pass not only the words, rather your energy and passion. People will be happy to follow.
The tale of stories is developing AI, machine learning, immersive storytelling in the workplace, and metaverse will be part of our future storytelling in work. But as with other disciplines, human-machine augmentation will win. So let's get better with our stories. Let's start storytelling. Today.
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