Summary: Use stories to teach people lessons so that they remember lessons in high-stress, high-emotion situations.
Read: People can really mess things up. Really smart people can mess things up really badly, even when they know better. Blame the emotions for that one. Our amygdala and the rest of the limbic system can really steer us in the wrong direction, either through panic, distress, depression, sadness, or otherwise mind-clouding confusion. So how can you work with this fog and make better choices?
This is a conversation my wife and I have a lot. She is constantly looking for new systems to instill to help her company get better, be better, and perform at a higher level. And, in the absence of being able to document systems and patterns for every small deviation–systems that must be taught and memorized–she was looking for methods that could help her and others, especially during crunch times.
It is easy to provide short, pithy responses like “keep the big picture in mind,” and, “work as a team,” but it is also easy to dismiss these are fortune cookie type recommendations. How do you get people to act on these? How can you make sure people act in the right way and make logical choices when the limbic system is going crazy?
Here’s my solution: Humans are hard-wired for stories, and so by telling vivid stories that illustrate what happens when things go wrong or when they can go right, you develop a common language that is easily recalled and referred. Lessons have been taught through stories for millennia: around the hunting fire, around the hearth, and around the pulpit. When you can’t account for every possible action, guiding stories are a good way of teaching how to think through a range of situations.
Stories don’t have to take a long time to tell–they can be relayed in 5-10 minutes during a team meeting–and they can serve a touchstone. A vivid story can put someone into a situation, and when similar situations are encountered, that emotion–and its lesson–is easier to access. In this way, you can make very fallible human systems more infallible.
Where to find stories? They are all over. Look at the history of your team and your company. Look to industry publications. Read the stories of people and corporations either in your field or in divergent fields. Stories are everywhere. Make use of vivid details when retelling them. Emphasize the lesson. Let them become a part of your personal and team lore.
The Impactful Writer 