So what is a story? At its most basic level, a story recounts how life changes. It is generally accepted that a story is composed of three elements: a protagonist or hero who experiences an experience or a conflict resulting in a change or resolution of the conflict.
That pretty much sums up the business world, both at the employee and company level. Employees of most companies face situations or conflicts every day that require them to seek a positive resolution. Business storytelling is becoming a common tool in management to build teams and cultures, sell ideas and construct common understanding of complex situations (“The Creation of Company Cultures: The Role of Stories and Human Resource Systems,” Human Resource Management, Spring, 1984, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 41-60).
In design and innovation, storytelling is a particularly powerful tool for several reasons.
1. We’re wired for stories
As everyone knows, storytelling is as old as humankind. Before writing, storytelling was a way to pass on critical survival knowledge and express collective values, principles and laws (such as the Bible or other holy texts) that kept order in society.
We still are still heavily story-driven. In traditional media and in our modern society fuelled increasingly by social media communications campaigns and propaganda, simple narratives that just “make sense to me” are demonstrably much more powerful in convincing and mobilizing the masses than more factual research data. Most of us don’t fall into these extremes (well, except 32,662 people who liked this story, perhaps):
We are so wired for stories that we can even develop false memories based on powerful, repeated stories. Elizabeth Loftus is a distinguished professor at the University of California at Irvine who has done a lot of work on how memories can be manufactured during therapy and criminal investigations (Scientific American, September 1997, vol 277 #3 pages 70-75).
The simple fact of telling a story over and over, even if the story is false, rewires our brain to believe the story happened.
In a more positive vein, physiological psychologist Renée Fuller created miniature stories (which she called “story engrams”), composed first of just nouns, then of nouns and verbs. She presented them to severely mentally impaired subjects found that these miniature stories triggered dramatic growth in cognition. The fact that engrams enabled cognitive ability in these cases shows how “hard-wired” our brains really are for stories.
2. Storytelling is an empathy factory
Storytelling also matters because it creates empathy. Many people think of empathy as walking in someone else’s shoes, but that only works if you have shoes.
You might recognize this picture from last year from an extract from the article for the Huff post:
“You have to like what NYPD Officer Larry DePrimo did for a barefoot man in Manhattan one frigid night this month. In fact, more than 260,000 Facebook users have “liked” DePrimo’s actions, a number that’s growing every day. After a tourist from Arizona snapped a photo of DePrimo, of Holbrook, giving the man socks and boots to ward off the cold, the image became an instant hit on the NYPD’s Facebook page. As of late Wednesday, the photo had been shared 47,716 times, boosting subscribers to the department’s 5-month-old page by 7,000, to 95,000, officials said.
“I had two pairs of wool winter socks and combat boots, and I was cold,” DePrimo, 25, said Wednesday, recalling the night of Nov. 14, when he encountered an unidentified, shoeless man on the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue near 44th Street. DePrimo offered to get him socks and shoes.
“I never had a pair of shoes,” the man replied, according to DePrimo, who’s assigned to the Sixth Precinct and has been on the force nearly three years.
The officer walked to a Skechers store on 42nd Street and shelled out $75 for insulated winter boots and thermal socks. He returned to the man, knelt down and put the footwear on him. “He smiled from ear to ear,” DePrimo said. “It was like you gave him a million dollars.”
That’s an amazing example of how a good story provokes empathy.
Back to design. Ideo is THE design firm, best known for having coined the term “design thinking,” which has become a buzzword some designers have begun to resent. Regardless, all designers generally agree that the design thinking process always begins with empathy. You simply cannot design if you do not have empathy for the user.
So storytelling is, well…designed to create empathy.
Even six words strung together can do that very powerfully. One of the shortest stories in the English language is sometimes credited to Ernest Hemingway (although this has been debunked):
“for sale: baby shoes, never worn”
You quickly understand the story is about a couple who have lost their baby. Thinking about it, you can’t help but imagine (at least in a tiny way) the feelings of pain, sorrow and emptiness the couple in this story feels.
In only six words, the author is able to appeal to our brain’s capacity to fill in missing information, extrapolate complex interrelated events, and generate empathy for the protagonists of the story.
That ability to “fill in the blanks” is why stories are unparalleled at providing near-instant context to people.
3. It’s analogue in a digital world
Lastly, storytelling is powerful because it allows you to describe highly complex insights in an elegant, efficient way. Pictures are really good at doing this too, but if you think about infographics, they’re really a combination of images and data visualizations put together to…tell a story.
Most business problems you’ll apply service design to are generally very difficult to summarize in a single chart, table or set of numbers. If your customer satisfaction has been decreasing in a certain unit or country for the last three quarters, what’s behind it? Probably several different things. Conversion rates are low compared to the competition? It’s probably not just because of your last marketing campaign or your sales training. If you try to root cause, stack rank issues and resolve one by one, it’s likely you’ll fail to fix them because there are usually complex interdependencies between them.
Contrary to what you might hear, a single number can’t tell a story. It can only draw attention to one.
More often than not, you need to put such data-driven insights into a story to be able to make sense of it all, feel empathy for the protagonists and understand the context they are experiencing. Then you can start designing solutions.
Without context, you do not know what you are designing for and might be trying to solve the wrong problems. Anyone who has been involved with experience design projects can recall moments where you get additional insight leading to more context. It’s like taking blinders off.
Next post: how some designers have used storytelling.
David.p.Kohler 