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.