Hollywood stories
What can HR learn from movie narratives?Storytelling is a hot topic in HR communications, but not one people always fully grasp.
How best to deploy ‘narrative’ can sometimes seem a bit murky. Especially when you don’t have a ready-made story just waiting for you. Not every business stretches back to the 15th Century, or rose to be a multinational from a single sausage stand.
Today, we’re featuring an extract from Only Connect, a book by Robert Mighall. He’s a rare combination of literary historian and corporate adviser who attempts to shed some light on the intricacies of using stories in a corporate environment.
We can’t say it better than he can, so enjoy.
Why business needs stories
Take the idea of ‘integrity’, a popular theme in the business world. Nearly every company (including Enron) lists it among its values.
There are more effective and convincing ways to demonstrate integrity than simply talking about it. One of these is telling a coherent story.
Integrity literally means ‘holding together’. A building has structural integrity if all its parts hold together and support each other. A person has integrity if he or she demonstrates moral wholeness, with what they say and do matching up.
Stories need integrity too. The thread holding all the parts together in a logical satisfying order, without which they just don’t add up. How many times have you left a cinema not entirely satisfied with the film’s ending? A broken thread, a vital scene missing that might have explained all. But the film lacked narrative integrity.
There’s a reason why integrity is such a vital concept; but it needs to be demonstrated not discussed. Consider the courtroom drama, where life and freedom depend on a coherent story being made about a man’s conduct and integrity. A similar case can be made for a business, demonstrating integrity far more effectively through a coherent story than simply listing the word among its values.
Story helps to reveal who you really are through what you say and how you say it.
Business audiences are indeed time poor and impatient. Which is why effective storytelling perfectly serves their needs. Story provides the clarity, concision and focus to hook an audience’s attention, and a thread to hold it there long enough to get your point across. Remember the cerebral ‘interpreter’ working away in the brain’s left hemisphere, trying to make sense of data by turning facts into coherent narrative.
It is precisely because these audiences have not elected to be told a story, and have little time and patience to waste, that you need to use the sharpest tools at your disposal to cut through these barriers. Story, sharpened to perfection through millennia, provides these tools.
Finally, story’s association with the world of entertainment should hardly encourage us to segregate creativity and commerce. Their successful partnership in an institution like Hollywood should be reason enough for business to take storytelling very seriously and be prepared to learn from the commercial masters of the craft.
Hollywood is, after all, a highly effective machine for turning stories into dollars. It has made vast riches from making narrative an almost exact science, establishing principles for screenwriting that are applied in movie after movie. Story by numbers, perhaps, but it makes the numbers.
The public that seeks story for entertainment is made up of individuals who also buy products and services, put on suits and go to work, seek information, exchange information, analyse companies, speculate on their possible futures, buy and sell companies and justify these actions in narrative accounts; they gossip, joke, banter, surf the internet, read the paper, read stories to their children, watch TV, read a few pages of a book, dream.
Entertainment stories simply exploit for commercial ends this voracious, ubiquitous need for narrative. Something we do instinctively when we forget we are ‘at work’, or ‘doing business’.
Story is whole-brain thinking. Its desire for clarity demands intellectual and analytical rigour; its desire for narrative coherence seeks logical order; and its emotional resonance moves people.
By moving people you make them act. The captains of commerce neglect a very powerful tool if they believe story is simply about irrational entertainment, and has no role to play in their world. Ultimately there is no separate world. That is just a story.
By rejecting these distinctions, and denying these denials, story can help business communicate much more effectively. The world of business cannot pretend to be immune to the power of storytelling.
But by understanding its principles, and applying them consistently it can simply do this a whole lot better.
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