Stories that work
What I mean by "stories that work" is stories that contain enough of four essential elements to make insight-producing patterns appear: experiences, events, emotions and perspectives.
Experiences
You need to collect true, raw experiences of real people: not platitudes, opinions, suggestions or complaints. Stories can be second-hand, third-hand or even rumored -- even newspaper stories are fine -- as long as the story resonated with the person who told it. In the case of second-hand stories there are really two stories being told: the original story and the story of its resonation with the storyteller (which is worthy of notice in itself). But if a person says "our company motto is, we always overcome", that is not a story.
Stories are about perspectives on events
Events
You need to collect stories about things that happened. Many of the things people will respond with when you ask for stories I call half-stories, because they are somewhat useful but not the same as a real recounting of events. These are some of the types of half-stories that are common.
- Situations: People might say something like, "I had a hard time my first day at work. Nobody thought I would be able to pick this stuff up fast enough." Quite often people will stop there, only having described a situation without resolving it. If this sort of thing happens in a group session or interview, you can of course say "And then what happened?" But if you have no such opportunity (it's over the web, or the people doing the interviewing are following a script or are otherwise untrained), the full story can be lost.
- Scenarios: Sometimes people generalize their experiences into a sort of generic story, like this: "You click here, you click there, it doesn't do what you think it will, you give up, and then later you find out you just didn't wait long enough but there was no way of knowing it was doing something." Obviously this must have happened a few times, but the generalized scenario is not as good as the particular story, because too much telling detail has been lost.
- References: Sometimes people don't tell a story but simply refer to it, expecting that others will pick up on the reference. This is sometimes a problem in group sessions. People might say something like, "Remember that time in the elevator? It was like that." Which is fine to the people who know what happened in the elevator, but not much use to a story project.
Emotions
It's not hard to get people to tell you what happened during a period of time if you only ask for the facts. But often in a story project you need to know more than facts; you need to know how people felt when things happened.
Perspectives
The last thing you absolutely need to have stories that work is individual perspectives on events. You need people to tell their own stories. For example, people might tell you what happened in an incident, but may be afraid or unable to tell you how they themselves felt about it. That sort of story is less able to "work" in the way you need it to than the person's own story.
What is a story anyway?
Stories are like seeds
The very simplest definition of a story is: a recounting of events where you wonder what is going to happen, and then you find out. In order for you to wonder what is going to happen there has to be a tension between two or more possibilities (it's why there needs to be a comma in that first sentence). Aristotle called it potentiality, development and result -- meaning, something could happen, something does happen, and what happens means something. There can be other recountings of events that are not stories -- for example, lists of things that happened on different dates, or places you stopped on your way to the coast -- but if there is no uncertainty there is no story. Uncertainty is the reason stories draw us in and engage us, because they tap into problem-solving instincts that have evolved over millions of years.
The dominant metaphor I use throughout this book is that stories are like seeds. I like this metaphor because it captures how stories condense complex understandings and perspectives into packages that can be transmitted and stored, then retrieved from storage, planted, and germinated again in the fertile soil of receptive minds. And like seeds, stories are organisms of their own, worthy of respect and admiration.
For further reading
Reader comments, tips and advice can be found on the Stories that work Google Group page.