I believe it was through a comment to this blog that I first learned of Steve Krizman. We share common roots in journalism. I’m so pleased to present his Q&A over the next five days. If you are squeamish and/or an animal lover, brace yourself for his first paragraph below.

Bio: [From Steve’s LinkedIn profile]: “I enjoy using my communication and team-building skills to bring people together in common cause for the betterment of our world. I currently lead the Integrated Communications and Brand Management team at Kaiser Permanente Colorado. The health care provider and health insurer has been reforming health care for more than 50 years, shaking the establishment by paying doctors salaries, coordinating care across all specialties, and more recently building an electronic medical record accessible to all 8 million patients.

I spent 21 years as a newspaper editor and reporter, before going into public relations and organizational communication. I earned my MA in organizational communication and occasionally entertain the idea of working on a doctorate.”

Steve’s blog is Tropes, about which he says: “Tropes are common patterns in storytelling — the hero’s journey, the turn of fortune, the three guys walk into a bar … I have this hunch that all of life’s lessons can be categorized into a finite number of tropes.”

Q&A with Steve Krizman, Question 1:

Q: How do the storytelling lessons you learned as a journalist translate into the work you now do in PR, organizational communications, etc.?

A: Once a week in the ’70s, the animal control officer in Montrose, Colo., led a few unwanted dogs into a squat brick shed, backed up his truck and connected a hose from the shed to his exhaust pipe. He gunned the engine both to speed the gassing and to drown out the noise of animals in their death throes. It wasn’t long after I described this procedure in the local newspaper that the mayor put a halt to it and a fund-raising drive to build a new animal shelter was launched.

I wrote or edited thousands of articles over 21 years in newspapers, some packed with facts and politics and some that unfolded in story. I always got more phone calls after a storytelling article, whether it be eyewitness accounts of midnight garbage dumping off cruise ships, a woman’s daily cat-and-mouse game with a stalker or the inhumane dispatch of strays. I covered city councils and state legislatures that debated the important issues, but those articles did not capture the attention or provoke an emotional response as did storytelling.

Ironically, there is more call for storytelling in organizational communication than in newspapers. While newspapers chronicle, organizational communication teams try to affect behaviors or opinions. For that, you need storytelling: object lessons, analogies and cultural narratives, to name a few. My journalistic experience gives me a good sense what will resonate with large audiences. It helps me spot a “good story” rather easily. And I have 21 years of practice in written storytelling.

But I have had to learn a lot in the 11 years since I moved into organizational communication. Analogies were not big in daily newspapers, but leaders need them to help explain complex ideas. Helping to identify and affect an organization’s culture requires more anthropology and sociology than I picked up in my newspaper days. In my last years in newspapers, we were testing new ways to visually tell stories (graphics, primarily). Now, visual storytelling in the organizational setting is multi-faceted — video, sound slides, and, yes, PowerPoint.

I feel journalism gave me a good base to branch off into organizational communication.