How to manage by not managing: The power of storytelling

Stories offer us some important clues about communication and relationships.

Terrence Gargiulo is the author of Once Upon A Time, available from Amazon.com here [4].

So much has been written about the art and science of management. In our heart of hearts, we know there are no "Ten Steps to Becoming a Better Manager." We are guilty of gobbling up whatever latest quick-fix fad is out there, while we console ourselves for falling short of finding the holy grail of management.

People are not simple. When you put lots of them together, with the aim of rallying around an organization’s mission, everyone’s needs, desires, and fears muddy the waters. Simple principles, not complicated theories, are our best hope. Stories offer us some important clues about communication and relationships.

It’s no surprise that our relationships at work and at home are often riddled with problems. We do a horrible job of listening to each other. To make matters worse, we do not treat our experiences with circumspection, and so we fail to learn from them. We stumble along, oblivious to other people’s perspectives, and unaware of what experiences have helped shape the perceptual filters that color each person’s world view. If it were just our own world view, we might not care, but this inaccessible, foggy filter also guides the behavior affecting others.

The following short story provides a glimpse of the problems that occur when we become engrossed in our own perceptions:

The Train Story

Four travelers shared a train compartment: a beautiful young woman, the young woman’s grandmother, a distinguished general, and a young officer. As the train sped along at night, the lights in the compartment suddenly turned off. In the darkness two distinct sounds could be heard from the compartment – the sound of a wet juicy kiss and the sound of a hand slapping the side of a face. When the lights turned back on, the faces of the travelers told a story. The young woman’s face was red from embarrassment. She was mortified to think that the young man had kissed her in the dark. She was very thankful that she was traveling with her grandmother, who had slapped the young man. The grandmother’s hands were clenched in fists of rage and she was fuming. She could not believe that the general would try to take advantage of her granddaughter, but she was glad she had taught her granddaughter to never let a man touch her without permission. Her granddaughter had done the right thing to slap that dirty old man. The veins in the general’s neck were bulging. He was furious. He had tried to teach the young officer about respect and discipline. The general couldn’t believe that the young whipper-snapper had kissed the beautiful woman who then mistakenly had slapped the general. The young man was grinning from ear to ear. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. How often do you get to kiss a beautiful young woman and slap your boss at the same time?

Everyone in this story is mixed up, except for our friend the young officer. Emotions run high as the characters operate, literally and figuratively, in the dark. Don’t we act like this sometimes? We seldom know the "real story" behind someone’s feelings, beliefs, or actions. Worse yet, we do not make the effort to discover their story. Convinced of our opinions, we keep our mental model of the world neat and orderly by staying focused on our perspective rather than entertaining another point of view.

While these natural proclivities of our minds are assets intended by evolution to equip our species with the ability to act independently and decisively, they are liabilities when it comes to relationships. When we actively listen to other people’s stories, we do not need to abandon our ideas; instead we can enter a new frame of reference by reconstituting the story being shared with us in our minds and hearts. Stories allow us to move in and out of different frames of reference. We are, in essence, "standing in someone else's shoes."

Management has come to mean control to many people. If we cannot control something or someone, how can we manage it? But managing is all about relationships, and relationships cannot be controlled. Relationships depend upon open lines of communications. We cannot enact a policy to ensure people take the time and effort to hear one another. We must model these behaviors and invest energy and patience into sustaining these fragile conduits. Stories turn out to be a great tool to do this.

Hearing someone else's story may not change our perspective, but it opens up dialogue and increases the chance of a mutually satisfying resolution. Many of our habitual ways of looking at things can be altered by a story's capacity to engage us. Our connection to others and our understanding of their perspectives is deepened by a story’s ability to inform us in ways that words by themselves cannot do.

Stories have multiple threads. However, our imagination can be lazy. We need to challenge ourselves. Is it possible for us to find a new nugget of gold each time we hear or relay a story? Can we find an unturned rock, a new nuance? To do so, we must develop the capacity for active listening.

Managing is an art of bringing our attention into the moment. Like the wise old owl, the more we strive to hear people’s stories the more we will be able to manage by not managing. Put another way, as we listen to each other’s stories it becomes possible to negotiate differences.

More often than not, our conflicts are a function of not hearing and understanding one another. Spontaneous solutions and resolutions arise when we enter someone else’s frame of reference. Sharing our stories generates vivid pictures for others because when we listen actively we bring our experiences to their telling. Therefore, a bridge of understanding is constructed between people. Our greatest challenge as managers is to create an environment of genuine interest, trust, openness, and reciprocity where people willingly share their stories.

So, what does story-based communication look like? This table [5] shows the differences between more traditional forms of communication and story-based communication.

Bear in mind that both types of communication are critical to the success of effective organizational communications. It’s just that we tend to think of stories as another tool in the first column; whereas stories operate best when they act as stimuli, rather than as information containers.

Stories achieve their greatest punch when they are used to create interlocking webs of meaning. A story used as a solitary chunk of communication is far less effective than when we find innovative ways to string associations of stories together. If one story paints a powerful picture, what will several well integrated stories do - especially if we invite people to co-create them with us? Although this may seem counterintuitive, stories used to stimulate the storytelling of others yield the best results.

IA Director of Learning Barry Rosen contributed to Once Upon A Time, by Terrence Gargiulo. Download the Foreward to Once Upon A Time here [6].