Knowing your storytellers

There are a few things you need to understand about the people you will be asking to tell stories before you decide what is the best way to approach them. Consider these questions about the group you will be asking to tell stories (or about any subgroups, if there are differences).

How much do authority and power matter to your storytellers?

Are they people who expect to be obeyed or people who expect to be ignored? Or will the authority level of storyteller and listener be unimportant?

If authority matters to your storytellers,

• With people who are used to authority, you may need to prove the worthiness of your project, you may need to approach them in a respectful or even subservient way, and you may need to guide them towards telling stories, which they may disdain as beneath them. They may refuse to participate in exercises or travel to group sessions, but they will often consider giving an interview to a properly deferential person.
• For people unused to authority or afraid to say something that people in authority will hear, you may need to convince them that you really do want to hear their voices. Group sessions and exercises may be useful to help this group of storytellers speak out. If the issues are too private to air in a group, a carefully worded interview may be best, and special attention to your privacy policy is essential.

If you are dealing with a community or organization that is highly stratified, you have to be careful bringing people of different ranks together. It is sometimes better to separate groups of people who will inhibit each other from storytelling.

If authority is not an issue in your group of storytellers, for example if they are just people who live on the same block, you can ignore these issues. But watch out - there may be authority lurking where you hadn't expected it. Maybe the older people will expect more deference, or the people who have lived on the block longer, or the people who keep the park clean, and so on and so on. One useful way to find out if there will be any authority issues is to ask people who you think might have different levels of authority how they would feel about participating in a group session with people from another group. If they say something like, "What? With them?" you have an issue to attend to.

What is your storytellers' level of confidence?

Are they timid or boastful? With people who tend to boast you have to watch out for lectures and attempts to "set things straight", and you may need to focus their energy on telling real stories of their experiences. With people who are excessively timid you may need to provide extra measures of privacy and ways to contribute without becoming too exposed to possible ridicule.

How busy are your storytellers?

Some people literally cannot give you five minutes out of their day, and others can give you days and days. If people are very busy you will probably need to avoid asynchronous methods such as email (they will not respond) and you probably will not be able to get them to commit to a planned group session. You may have to content yourself with a half-hour interview conducted over the phone during their lunch hour (but that still may be very fruitful). When people have plenty of time to give you, you can have the luxury of asking them to go through exercises, answer many questions, and so on (though see the section on cognitive budget).

Are all your groups equally easy to get access to?

If you need to juxtapose the views of more than one group of people, you may have difficulty getting the same numbers of stories from all groups. For example, it is usually easier to get stories from employees at most organizations than it is to get stories from people who use the services of the organization (customers, visitors, etc). You may need to spend more time and energy on one group than another in order to make sure the focus and breadth of your project is supported.

How much importance do your storytellers place on succeeding?

You would be amazed at the number of people who try to figure out how to "win" when you ask them to tell stories. They assume there is one right response and try their hardest to succeed. Depending on your storytellers, this issue can range from trivial to ruinous. For example, some respondents refuse to tell a negative story, no matter how horrible their experiences with something have been, because they think they will succeed only by telling about something wonderful. Or they think you want to hear "useful" stories, so they try very hard to tell a story that is obviously elucidating, even if it is not something that happened to them or anyone else. These attempts to "win" can be elucidating (what do they think it means to win?), but when mixed in with real experiences they can make it harder to find out what is actually happening in a situation.

When you have indications that your storytellers will be trying too hard to succeed (rather than just telling honest stories about their experiences), there are two ways to deal with it. First, you can explain carefully the point of what you are doing and how they can succeed in helping you - thereby using their drive to succeed in useful ways. Alternatively, you can disrupt their drive to succeed by asking questions in ways that don't provide an obvious way to succeed. For example, instead of asking "What was the best day you ever had at work?" you might ask "What happened the first time you went out on a client project?". By directing them to a very specific recollection you can avoid giving them the options of choosing an astoundingly wonderful story with which to win the game.

How concerned are your storytellers with privacy?

This one is obvious: if you think the group of people you will be asking to tell stories will be more aware of security and privacy issues than most people, you need to pay a lot of attention to your privacy policy. Don't assume; ask, because people might be more wary than you think. Also, if you will be talking to two groups and one is more concerned than the other, you might want to use two different methods to talk to them.

How large of a bag of grievances are your storytellers carrying?

Is there a lot of pent-up emotion in this group of people? If you expect to release a lot of emotion you need to pay attention to privacy and make it very clear what the goals of the project are, in order to avoid people taking out their negative emotions on you instead of releasing them by telling you what they are upset about. Helping people feel that it is safe to talk about their negative feelings is important, because probably the goal of your project is to understand those feelings and find out what can be done to ameliorate the situation. If you can't help people surface their negative feelings in a safe and productive way, your project will have been in vain. Some of the exercises such as exploring metaphorical space can be helpful in opening emotional floodgates safely.

Are your storytellers' feelings about you and about the project positive or negative?

Will the people you will be asking to tell stories view you (and possibly the group you represent) as a friendly helper or as a hostile force? If you will be viewed as hostile, you can either follow the procedures for the "bag of grievances" situation (strong anonymity, clear goals, helpful exercises), or you can remove yourself from the center of the project by having someone else elicit stories. For example, asking people to interview each other, or asking outsiders to conduct interviews or run group sessions, can help people open up and talk about you when you are the problem they are upset about.

How seriously will your storytellers take the project?

I remember once answering a phone call and being asked if Coke or Pepsi was more in line with my lifestyle. I said, "It's sugar water!" (As I recall the interviewer dryly commented, "Oh, a philosopher.") The point is, some people may not think your project is as important as you think it is. This often happens when the storytellers are young people. I don't know how many web collections I've seen where one of the dominant answers was "this thing is STUPID!!!". Sigh.

When you think your storytellers will not take the project seriously, either because they think nothing is serious, or because they think the subject matter is unimportant (as I did with the Coke/Pepsi call), or because they think nothing anyone does can change anything (even if the subject matter is important), there are some things you can do. Exercises can help draw out stories that people think don't matter, as can group sessions, where enthusiasm tends to grow as stories are told. Engaging or interesting questions (here the "fictional scenario" method of asking for stories can be useful) can draw people in. Statements about the importance of the project can get some people interested. In general you will need to sell the project to people in order to draw them in, either by impressing them with a sense of purpose or by entertaining and engaging them.

What do your storytellers think of stories and storytelling?

People vary on whether they think stories are worth telling. I've found that whenever the group you want to tell stories is made up mostly of analytical, logical, careful thinkers, it can be difficult to convince them that the effort is not just "fluff". That mindset makes it difficult to get people to contribute, both because they aren't used to telling stories and because they don't think their experiences could possibly be helpful. With this sort of group I've found a mini-course on the power of stories to create change is sometimes necessary. It can come in the form of a three minute talk at the start of an interview or group session or a two-sentence introduction in an email or on a web site. As with the situation of taking the project seriously, you need to sell the project to these people before they will be willing to tell you anything useful. Exercises can also be helpful in getting these people to open up, as can group sessions.

You also have to be careful if the group you want to tell stories is of the opposite type. If they are people who pride themselves on being great storytellers, they will be more likely to derail the project in another way. They may be more apt to perform or to tell a good story that is exciting but not actually useful. For these people structured exercises can be useful, and one-on-one interviews can be wonderful, but an unstructured group interaction can be a disaster because it can devolve into a talent show.