Stories for Good

If you asked me a week ago if I thought stories belonged in a professional environment, I would have said no. I tend to think of them as an ineffectual communication method, diversions that can be fun or, in less desirable circumstances, can induce boredom or skepticism. This may stem from the fact that seven of the nine people I see on a daily basis have history degrees. A typical question-and-answer session might go like this:

X: “Where would you like me to put the fruitcake collection?”
Y: “In 1827 we kept the fruitcakes on the second shelf on the east wall, but in 1854 it was necessary to move them to the southern end of the building. Why is that, you ask? Well, the east wall was susceptible to rays from the rising sun….”
X: “So do the fruitcakes go on the south wall, then?”
Y: “Actually, as an indirect result of the cadet walkout of 1920 we found it necessary to build a new shelving unit…”

And so on.

After reading the first five chapters of Squirrel Inc. I can accept that certain kinds of stories, the organizational stories, belong in the workplace. Susan Weinschenk has convinced me that storytelling is an integral part of how we as humans communicate (112). And Heath and Heath have shared the importance of visualization in communication and realization. Like Stephen Denning, I believed that the best way to communicate is by being direct (233). Or I thought I did. If someone asks me a question, I try for a direct answer. I appreciate direct answers. Yet, when I started thinking about these readings, I found myself thinking in terms of examples. I realized that I couldn’t get through a day without telling or hearing some sort of story.

As an experiment, I decided to pay attention to the stories that were going on during a typical workday. I would have started earlier, over breakfast with my husband, but we both overslept and all conversation was related to who would make lunch. At any rate, within 45 minutes, I had a tidy little collection of stories (I may have checked Facebook – lots of stories there). Alas, not one of them was useful for my job. I found out why a coworker was late (missed the bus), what someone did over the weekend (yardwork), shared what I did over the weekend (closet cleaning) and heard that Wendy’s is doing a great Frosty promotion (buy a little card for $.99 and get a Frosty a day until October 31). We were all chatty and lively for a little while at least. After about 10am we were all firmly ensconced in our cubes doing the same old stuff. No more stories. By 4pm I realized that, since about 10 am, I had heard nothing new, done nothing new and had a bit of a headache coming on (perhaps a little more social interaction have prevented that and made me more productive as a result). I had spent the afternoon doing a fairly repetitive task that I have tried unsuccessfully to share with my co-workers.

Is there a story that could convince my co-workers to share in my task? I don’t think there is. Heath and Heath describe three types of plot: the Challenge Plot, the Connection Plot and the Creativity Plot (226-229). Do I have a story about how data entry changed my life or the life of a friend? No. Can I appeal to everyone’s sense of order and talk about how the correct syntax for name authority records will allow disadvantaged children to search Strom Thurmond’s papers more easily? No. Can I find a new way of viewing the task or its outcome so that the importance of the project becomes devastatingly clear to all concerned? Maybe. I’ll have to work on that one.

I began to worry that workplace stories don’t apply to the routine. Then I remembered something. The introduction to UNC-Chapel Hill’s Louis Round Wilson Library processing manual is a brief story:

...in a now legendary processing project, a student (somewhat, but not completely new to the manuscripts biz) was asked to chronologize a correspondence series by month ("No need to sort by day," said her supervising archivist). And that is exactly what she did. She put all of the January letters together, all of the February letters together, etc., etc. Regardless of year. The funny thing was that it took her supervising archivist, not new to the biz at all, two days to figure out what was wrong with the correspondence series. Could happen to anyone. (How to Proceed)

The gist of the story is that everyone should read the manual and that no one should consider themselves mistake-proof. They could have just written “Everyone should read this manual; no one is mistake-proof.” Instead, someone came up with a slightly longer way to make the directive stick. It’s certainly stuck with me. I don’t work at Chapel Hill and I last read this at least two years ago, yet I have remembered the story and have even shared it with my own student assistants.

Keeping this in mind, I now have an entirely new way to think about storytelling. I still believe that stories can stick in the gears and get in the way and otherwise muddle things up, but I’ll pay better attention and look for the right stories: the ones that will allow listeners to visualize the process and the outcome and to see themselves as part of the story.