See a photo of Thaler, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Thaler Pekar, Question 3:

Q: Are there any current uses of storytelling that repel you or that you feel are inappropriate?

A: Advocates must take care to share stories that further their true agenda; it’s too easy to share stories that result in quick fixes as opposed to systemic change and sustainable support. Stories that elicit a purely sympathetic response can ultimately distance people from deeper, societal problems.

I want people to embrace my client’s solution because it is the right thing for them to do, because the solution my client is offering makes perfect sense given their value system. This will elicit a much more profound and lasting response than their doing something because they feel they have to. People don’t want to be told what to do; they want to discover it on their own.

I go into some depth about this in my article, “Framing for Advocacy Communications”, available on the Tools page of my web site.

Also, if non-profit organizations are going to share compelling stories and elicit emotional responses, I implore them to please remember to give the listener something to do!

Too often, audiences are engaged — and then dropped; the story sharer fails to invite the listener to be a part of the solution. I see this, especially, with visual storytelling: too many videos offering up compelling stories but failing to invite the viewer to participate in the solution.

This is the “hand” part of my practical Heart, Head & Hand™ approach to persuasive communications: place something in the listener’s hand at the close of the communication. Invite them to be a part of your solution. For example, ask them to donate, purchase, volunteer, visit, call their Senator, or, simply, think about the issue.

See a photo of Thaler, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A

Q&A with Thaler Pekar, Question 2:

Q: How important is it to you and your work to function within the framework of a particular definition of “story?” (i.e., What is a story?) What definition do you espouse?

A: I find the most useful framework for beginning story sharers is that a story has a beginning, middle, and end. I work with incredibly smart leaders who, when I initially met them, were often reluctant to share stories in professional settings. Precisely because they recognize the power of great storytelling, they were hesitant to share their stories — they didn’t think they possessed a perfectly polished, fleshed out, protagonist/compelling conflict/earth-shattering journey/surprising resolution tale to share.

The quest for the perfect can be the enemy of the good!

I energize leaders (and, in turn, their audiences), by helping them surface their passion and become the most authentic and persuasive speakers possible. Through several short exercises, I help these bright people see that they are telling stories all day long, and that they possess a lifetime of interesting anecdotes and a multitude of fascinating, powerful stories. To this end, the only story framework I encourage beginning story sharers to use is “beginning, middle, and end.”

Then, details that reveal emotion, and trigger the senses, are added. And then conflict, resolution, and transformation.

I’ve always known that conflict is a critical element in story. But I recently had an epiphany about how even the slightest frame of conflict enables a fact to stick in a listener’s mind. At an event in the “Brainwave: It Could Change Your Mind” series at the Rubin Museum of Art, George Bonanno, Columbia University psychology professor and expert in emotion, stated the fact that birds share more computational language skills with humans than our closest primates.

This fact alone was new and interesting to me. But Bonanno added that former President George Bush, who was “unfriendly to science,” cut funding for a perhaps silly sounding, but quite scientifically important, study of Pigeon Language Cognition Skills.

Adding this point of conflict turned that fact into a story. Bonanno provided a great example of how to take a fact, add a conflict, and make the fact memorable.

I’ve admired Thaler Pekar’s work for a while now, and I had the pleasure of meeting her — all too briefly — at the 2009 Golden Fleece Conference; I wish we had talked more. I sat next to her during one of the workshops and appreciated her critique of Gerry Lantz’s PowerPoint slides (she felt he shouldn’t use slides) and also heard hints of Thaler’s amazing story about Costa Rica — must ask her about that one. I also admire her personal style! This Q&A with her will run over the next five days.

Bio: Thaler Pekar is the founder and principal of Thaler Pekar & Partners, a consulting firm specializing in persuasive communications. She is an expert in message development and delivery, story elicitation and narrative analysis. As a sought-after strategist, coach and speaker, Thaler helps smart leaders and their organizations break through a crowded marketplace and achieve policy goals, raise funds, and engage audiences. She provides clients with practical techniques and proprietary tools for identifying, sharing, and sustaining the success stories and organizational narratives that articulate both vision and impact.

Thaler is a frequent guest lecturer at the Columbia University Graduate Program in Strategic Communications, and the Rutgers Center for Non Profit and Philanthropic Leadership. Her consulting work has taken her throughout the U.S., as well as to Malaysia, Japan, Ghana, Spain, Egypt, Senegal and Thailand. She is a member of the Society for the Advancement of Consulting, an Inaugural Member of the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers, and a Founding Member of the American College of Women’s Health Physicians. She is a long-time resident of Hoboken, NJ, and is active locally as a founding board member of Mile Square Theatre and an advisory board member of the New Leaders Council.

Q&A with Thaler Pekar, 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: Story is an extremely effective tool for persuasive communication. For many years, I traveled around the world, teaching advocates about the importance of values-based communication as a tool for accomplishing social change. I would assist leaders in articulating the values that support their advocacy positions, and the importance of initiating conversation with those values. For example, I worked with public-health advocates across the globe on initiatives that would be “saving women’s lives,” and result in greater health, opportunity, and security. I trained hundreds of U.S.-based advocates, state legislators, and Congressional staff to reframe the discussion of low-wage work in America and focus on the necessity of building “an economy that works for all,” through the underlying values of responsibility, fairness, and dignity. And I assisted a national interfaith organization in connecting their work on religious liberties to their foundational belief in freedom.

As much as I believe that articulating one’s values and commencing conversation from a platform of shared values is vital to effective, persuasive conversation, it increasingly became clear to me that values are subjective. “Responsibility” can mean different things to different people. Heck, it can mean different things to the same person, given the context. And, in an increasingly ambiguous and challenging world, we often need to make choices about the hierarchy of our personal values.

Story serves to unambiguously define the true meaning of those values. Annette Simmons has written extensively about the use of story to clearly define personal and organizational values, and I have had the tremendous pleasure and honor of studying with her.

At the same time I was learning about the importance of story as a tool for defining values, I was also learning about how the human brain takes in and processes new information. Neuroscience, brain imaging, and behavioral psychology, among other disciplines, have taught us that the brain can only connect information to what we already know. People remember new information more easily when it has some connection to what they already know and has personal, emotional resonance for them.

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, summarize this very well: “The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about.”

Story supplies that bridge. Story is an extremely effective communications tool for establishing trust and emotional relevance with an audience. So, that’s how I got to story: as a way to articulate values and most effectively connect with listeners.

When my clients reflect on the values that drive their work, they surface the passion that propels their advocacy. I then work with them to elicit and develop the stories that articulate their passion and underlying values. In this way, values drive the emotional connection with their listener — and story cements that relationship and opens up tremendous possibilities for understanding and action.

My brother, Jim, serves on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he manages the F. M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. He is an advisor to my firm, and he and I have now taken our conversations about brain function and communication public, on our new blog.

See a photo of Jon, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2,Part 3, and Part 4.

Q&A with Jon Buscall, Question 5:

Q: Your “About” page on your Web site notes: “I love helping people communicate more effectively in English, particularly if that involves the web.” You also say that you particularly like helping people communicate in business. In what ways have you brought storytelling into your interests in business English communication and the Web?

A: One of the things I try to do is get Swedish businesses to use storytelling as a way of reaching out to new audiences. I recently did a lot of work for Stockholm University in building its international profile. This involved writing 30 or so profiles of key researchers and international students. The aim was to give international visitors to the website a better flavour of what is going on in Stockholm and encourage students to study there and academics to make links with the university.

Although we used journalistic articles to “promote” leading research at the university I was very cognizant that each article was part of an ongoing story: that Stockholm University is an innovative, forward-thinking, internationally minded university. So I wasn’t just reporting on research initiatives, I was helping academic departments redefine and tell their story in a public setting. Of course, being a former academic myself, I know how cautious you have to be with the press. So I did a lot of work talking to professors, helping them get a story across that would benefit them as well as the university. For example, several people I interviewed wanted to increase their international network and collaborate with more people. I made sure that the articles I wrote on them reflected this.

I think companies need to realise that old-school press releases just don’t work anymore. You have to tell your story in an engaging narrative that will hold an audience. One of the knock-on effects of the Net has been that people graze text on the web. They read incredibly fleetingly. So it’s important that web writing holds the reader’s attention. Through stories and narrative techniques that hold an audience, you can help businesses get their message across.

Convincing managers is the difficult part, though. I find that often people in positions of power underestimate the power of the web and storytelling. I recently tried to convince a CEO that he needed to change the way he communicated in writing email to employees. Each time he wrote anything it was telling a story of how authoritative and unfriendly he was — although he was, in person, actually very amenable.

This came about because his emails were so archaic and blunt. He continually addressed people as “Mr” or “Ms” in emails and the whole tone of them was like some archaic Dickensian missive. This resulted in him effectively coming across as cold and authoritative. Archaic, even. Middle-managers in the company, many of them Swedish, adopted the same rhetorical strategies, following his lead in English, and this led to a lot of bad feeling behind the scenes. Simply because people copied the CEO’s style.

I tried to get him to understand that each email told the story of how people should communicate with each other. It also said a lot about their relationships.

The whole concept of “show, don’t tell”, which I used a lot when teaching creative writing, was very useful here in getting him to change the way he wrote.

It doesn’t matter how much you tell someone that you are friendly if you show them that you are cold and arrogant with the way you write.

So in this instance I helped him develop strategies to show, through his writing and emails, that he was friendly and pleasant. This in turn led middle-managers to change their own tone and things in the company improved. You have to be careful in Sweden because many Swedes copy the English strategies they see native-speakers (or senior staff) using. This can lead to no end of problems.

The same thing can be applied to web copy. Translations of Swedish copy often don’t have the same cultural nuances as the source text. It’s better, often, to write the text from scratch in English. A lot of businesses haven’t grasped how important this is yet. Unfortunately, there are a lot of businesses out there in Sweden who think that because international customers haven’t complained about their English, they must be doing okay. I try and tell them that, well, those customers probably aren’t their customers anymore.

So it’s a bit of an undertaking to persuade some Swedes that if you’re going to tell your story in public in English, it should be done so in a manner that really nails the brief. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of corporate waffle out there that goes for copywriting simply because managers have underestimated how important it is to tell your story effectively in the target language.

See a photo of Jon, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

Q&A with Jon Buscall, Question 4:

Q: You live and work in Stockholm, Sweden, though you are originally from England. To what extent do you notice differences in the way story is used in Sweden compared to how it is used in England or other places in which you’ve spent time? For example, you cite IKEA as a company that effectively employs storytelling. Have you seen different cultures using story differently?

A: Yes, I’m originally from the UK but I haven’t lived there for over 20 years, and I rarely get back, so I would find it quite hard to compare Sweden to England. What I can say, though, is that Swedish companies (like IKEA) are good at using stories to make their brands familiar.

ICA, the supermarket chain, has been running a TV ad which is like a soap opera about the staff in an ICA store for years. Stig (pictured at left) and the rest of his crew have become familiar features of Swedish daily life. This is an incredibly subtle way of using a story to engage the audience in a brand. The ads are humorous and frequently updated and as each new “episode” emerges, the ongoing story brings ICA and its audience closer.

Several companies have tried to follow this technique, notably Findus who produce ready-made-meals, but ICA have been the most successful.

Sweden is very web-orientated, and we have led the world in terms of Internet access and mobile phone adoption rates for years. However, it’s only recently that businesses have started to grasp the idea of storytelling being related to business. It’s coming, but slowly.

See a photo of Jon, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Jon Buscall Q&A, Question 3:

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: Write regularly. Just like going to the gym, you have to keep in (writing) shape. Writing regularly is the only way of maintaining and growing your story-telling skills. I find that a lot of customers get excited about, say, blogging initially but they don’t post frequently enough after that initial kick-off.

Software like Eastgate’s Tinderbox (Mac only) makes it very easy to collect stacks of notes and ideas that you can subsequently edit and craft and ultimately publish. This is how I’ve managed to keep producing material over the years. I have all this boxes of notes (to match the paper notebooks I used to keep).