My Aunt Bessie had a talent for dancing, and her ballet teacher foresaw a great future for her. But she never disciplined herself to practice the way she needed. That was why rather than becoming a prima ballerina, she was forced to drop out of school and work in the coal mine, which eventually lead to her abduction by Bahamian pirates.
When I'm frustrated that my daughters are not working hard enough at their music, sports, or school, I tell them about Aunt Bessie and they listen rapt with attention. For a while anyway, they do seem to apply themselves a bit more. But if I try to explain the reasons why they should be more disciplined, their eyes glaze over.
Stories grab our attention because there is nothing of more interest to us than the actions of other people. We don't just think a story; we feel it, bringing into play our prefrontal cortex and our amygdala, the two interdependent areas of the brain responsible for our decision-making.
Many cognitive scientists believe stories are so accessible because they're the way we make sense of the human world. We identify with the characters in the story, as they key the firing of our mirror neurons, gaining access to the intent behind their actions. Since they're not always reasonable, we acquire a richer understanding of why people do what they do.
The corporate executives I work with in my seminars respond very much like my daughters. My brilliant lectures often produce politely stifled yawns, while my war stories are clearly more engaging. Although it's expected that my course will cover the latest models, and the more quantifiable the better, I suspect my tales are more valuable. Stories enable us to understand people in all of their complexity, and business is ultimately all about people.
The corporate world prizes objectivity and logic. When it comes to working with other people, most managers assume rational behavior. Not only does this cause them to misread the intentions of others, it leads them to believe they can motivate the behavior they need through reasonable means, such as rewards, threats of punishment, and logical argument. But they never seem to work quite the way they're intended.
Rather than another grid offering a grand scheme for categorizing human behavior, managers would gain more of practical value from just asking what's the story people are telling themselves. By attending to their mirror neurons, they would fill in the white spaces and achieve a deeper understanding. They then will intuitively know the story they need to tell to encourage the behavior they want.
In fact, the only way Aunt Bessie was able to escape from the pirates and go on to become a highly successful CEO, with a rich compensation package, was to hold them spellbound with her stories. But that's a topic for another post, one that promises to be far more engaging than this one.
