Storytelling - Not Just For Fun

Having spent my whole life listening to and telling stories, nothing in Squirrel, Inc. or Made to Stick was exactly groundbreaking.  I've always been dominated by the right side of my brain, so I couldn't really sympathize with Diana's plight, but that's to be expected - I don't know many up-and-coming squirrel executives.  I might jest, but this story says a lot about why contemporary forms of communication (PowerPoint in particular) often fail, and fail miserably.  While visual aids can at least force an audience to look toward the speaker and the front of the room, it doesn't force them to actively listen.  A well-told story can entertain, but it can also inform by giving the audience an opportunity to identify with the speaker.  A narrative lets the audience participate as well by placing themselves in relation to the story being told - without pie charts or bar graphs (or with them, as ancillary devices).


Made to Stick and Squirrel, Inc. both attempt to get at how good ideas are created, but ultimately how they are proliferated.  All the surveys and market research in the world are useless if you don't have a proper medium through which to communicate.  You can know what people like and what people want, but you'd better have a way to convince them that your product or your message would satisfy those criteria.  The kind of storytelling these books are talking about are not intended to be Shakespearean or anywhere near that intricate or eloquent; instead, it's the sort of storytelling that can hold the attention of a client or a customer long enough while also convincing them of value or what you have to say.  Squirrel, Inc. emphasizes the most important thing about a story designed to launch an idea:  it has to be delivered with conviction, otherwise it's lost in the shuffle that the disgruntled barfly describes as being crushed by the corporate managing committee.  For an idea to take off, it can't be indistinguishable from any other, it has to inspire excitement.  This kind of concept requires a person (or people) behind it that really believe in it, and pass that excitement on to the next, setting off a chain reaction - or "viral reaction," as it were.