I’ve followed the activities of Margaret Parkin, especially her masterclass workshops in business storytelling, for quite a while. I’ve been hoping for a long time that she would participate in the Q&A series, and I’m delighted that she has. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: UK-based Margaret Parkin is the author of four best-selling books on storytelling in organisations — Tales for Trainers, More Tales for Trainers (her newest), Tales for Coaching, and Tales for Change. The books have been translated into five different languages across the world. She also consults and coaches, offers training and development, and presents keynotes; see the Web site for her company, Success Stories. Margaret offers public masterclass workshops in business storytelling designed for HR managers, training managers, organizational-development managers, and coaches.

A good way to see what Margaret does is though this short video:

Q&A with Margaret Parkin, Question 1:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: I have been involved in organisational learning and development for a long time now. Even from the early days, my training style was always anecdotal; I have always, (initially unconsciously I think) used stories and metaphors to get a message or concept across. But then I found that I was telling and more stories and my participants were coming to expect them and look forward to them! One of the turning points for me I think was when I had been asked to address a rather large and boisterous group of MBA students at a university in Scotland, who had completed their weekend of practical assignments, completed their dissertations, and now just wanted to go home — and certainly didn’t want to listen to my talk on powerful communication skills. It was only towards the end of the hour long session (and possibly out of desperation), that I decided to tell them a story… and then something rather strange happened. One by one, the animated conversations on each of the dozen or so tables simply seemed to peter out and die, and I found, to my surprise, that my storytelling was greeted by complete and rapt attention. The change in atmosphere was so pronounced that, at the end of the session, rather than leaping out of their chairs like rockets as I thought they would have done, no-one moved. I actually had to tell them that they could go home! From that day, I began to realize that there was something special about storytelling. I discovered that stories do something that other forms of communication fail to do — they completely engage an audience — and they can actually change behaviour.