Kate's Voice

I have been traveling a fair amount lately.  Today, I began working on this post and had to connect to the Internet.  As I browsed the Sheraton site, I noticed a link on the home page that encouraged you to share your story.  When you click on the link it takes you to “Good Stories,” a site with stories on Sheraton travel from around the world. Kind of cool!  It’s interactive and you get to explore the world through stories.

Storytelling is a form of communication that is common to everyone’s experience, and is becoming increasingly important as we face the large amounts of data and  information that are now available to us, such as where to stay and what to see when traveling.  Statistics on the recession are made more understandable when we hear stories of people losing their homes, or getting jobs in some innovative way.   And presentations are more interesting when the presenter is a storyteller.

In business,  creating a story out of raw information can help you see the problem better in order to understand the solution better. By collecting information to create stories, you can assure yourself that you can answer the key issues that need to be addressed to qualify your lead, to solicit a donation,  to make your point or to find the best solution.

My first introduction to the importance of storytelling in business was the book, The SpringBoard Story by Stephen Denning.  I love this book and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be inspired about the importance of a great story.

And since reading that,  I have explored this with many people, and watched as storytelling has become more and more important.  Again, storytelling makes sense out of a complex world.  However, it’s not all that easy to create a great story, and many people call something a story when it is not a story.

To paraphrase the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, stories are a conduit. They connect us to each other because your story reminds me of my own. In the simplest terms,

• A story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end.
• In addition, it needs to have emotional content, a feeling that we can relate to, even if it is a story about business.
• It needs to have an obstacle to be overcome.

If you want to learn more about storytelling, here are three places you might look.

• An article in Fast Company on a fabulous storytelling program to boost volunteerism in the schools.
• A blog about Applied Storytelling called “A Storied Career,” in this case a post about tweets on storytelling.
• And finally, a remarkable story to inspire us all:

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