Three years ago when I was working on my dissertation, Lori Silverman did me the amazing kindness of sending me page proofs of her book, Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results, so that I could use it in my research even before it was published. We have remained in contact since, and I look forward to meeting her someday. This Q&A with her will run over the next five days.
Bio: The following is an excerpt from the bio on Lori’s Web site, and the full bio can be read here:
It was in 1999 that Lori Silverman came to truly grasp the need to make story work conscious and purposeful rather than happenstance. The turning point was the night before a keynote talk to eleven hundred people in Seattle, Washington, which she planned to give without relying on visual aids.
Through feedback from a friend who heard her practice she suddenly realized that something needed to replace the props–stories that brought concepts and ideas from her book Critical Shift:The Future of Quality in Organizational Performance to life. Soon after, she simplified her talks and queried colleagues for tales to tell. No more brain overload for those sitting in the audience.
In her consulting, varied kinds of future stories entered her strategy work, and storytelling to facilitate organizational change and performance improvement became a thoughtful occurrence. Yet something was still missing. But Lori chose to go with the flow and let life take its course. It soon brought the opportunity to coauthor Stories Trainers Tell: 55 Ready-to-Use Stories to Make Training Stick. While interviewing trainers, storytellers, speakers, consultants, and business leaders for the book she stumbled onto more answers–and more questions that stimulated the current book, Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results.
Q&A with Lori Silverman, Question 1:
Q: The book, Wake Me When the Data Is Over, has been out for just over two years, but organizational storytelling is evolving so rapidly that I would imagine you have already thought about changes for the next edition. What are the first things you’d change or add to the book for its first revision?
A: I have two reactions to this question.
First I’m not certain the field of story work in organizations has evolved since the book was written. The piece that is still missing for me as a strategist is story as an organizational core competency. I’ve yet to find an organization that has systematically thought about how story could be used in all its work processes, both internal and external to the enterprise. It’s my contention that until we change how we talk about this subject–and move from calling it “storytelling” which is a self-limiting term, to calling it “story work,” this broader context for integrating story throughout an organization will be hard pressed to occur.
Secondly, there are several things I’d do in the next edition.
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I’d reconnect with each interviewee and ask them to update me on their organization’s progress with story. There hasn’t been any longitudinal data on story use as far as I know.
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I’d add several chapters that time did not allow us to research fully. They’d include topics such as story use in a recessionary economy, sales, innovation, and mergers and acquisitions. As someone who once worked in the field of career development, I love the application of story to the job-search process that you, Katharine, present in your book, Tell Me About Yourself.
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I’d add the composite results across all 72 examples which are in the article, “The Five Sides of Story”, to the book’s content and update it with data from the new examples. In this article (which outlines the story use model presented at the end of the Wake Me Up book), it becomes evident that telling a story may not be as powerful as some other approaches such as evoking stories from others, listening to them in a specialized way, the symbolic embodiment of story, and finding ways to employ story triggers.