other people's stories

I'm currently putting together a whole bunch of stuff on stories and I came across this quote from Steve Denning that I think is very important:

We usually spend a great deal of time thinking about what story we are going to tell. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out what story the audience are currently living. (The Secret Language of Leadership, p. 89)

Official communications often assume that the recipients are blank slates, waiting eagerly to receive what we have to say. A more sophisticated view says that our audience is busy and we must craft compelling stories that grab their attention. However for us to know whether a story is "compelling" or not, we have to know what stories our audience are already telling each other.

We may then choose to tell them something that aligns with what they tell each other already (which is safe but runs the risk of being boring) or present them with something different (which will stand out but always runs the risk of rejection).

the strange fate of steve denning

I am currently have a mild stoush with Steve Denning on actkm. I had the experience of meeting the "best keynote speaker on leadership innovation business narrative & storytelling" in DC earlier this year and it was as thrilling as any encounter between two awkward introverts (one of them still jetlagged) can be.

I picked up The Secret Language of Leadership in the US and have been listlessly flicking through it. It's not a bad book. In fact more than anyone else coming out of the KM arena, SD has found a topic and a style that resonates with business managers. He writes well. He has his sights set on the lucrative "leadership" market* and he's using storytelling as his differentiator. On their own, each book is good. But the overall sense is one of diminishing returns. This book is quite similar to the last. Either SD is a prisoner of his own success or he simply hasn't noticed yet.

He also has a worrying tendency (along with many other popular management writers in the US) to offer fixed recipes that allegedly cover every situation. This makes it easy for the reader to digest and gives them to confidence to apply the advice but life isn't always that simple. For example, the weakest chapter of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling is the chapter on innovation. Storytelling gets advanced as pretty much the only way of advancing innovation within organisations and it all gets a little silly.

The next book concerns high-performing teams. My fear is that there will be a thin veneer of new research over familiar themes. My hope is that it will be something completely new.

*This market will always exist because most people want the kudos of being a leader without the pain of actually leading. Books, seminars, workshops - anything but actually taking other people somewhere new.