Story Creates Empathy
The best stories sound and feel familiar
Our team is currently in the final prep stage for Cisco Live US, the annual flagship conference of our largest and longest-term client. Next week in San Diego, 32 members of the Steve Multer. Corporate Storytelling. crew will help share the “One Cisco” story with customers, partners, and industry analysts in hopes of creating a deeper connection between Cisco and its global market. For seven years, “One Cisco” has been an internal concept – next week it goes public. Will Cisco devotees relate? That depends on the accessibility and recognizability of the new “One Cisco” story, and whether that story creates empathy.
The best stories sound and feel familiar. Winning communication sparks natural emotional response based on understanding, and a personal desire for a positive outcome. When something good (or bad) happens to someone we care about, we're invested, as if the story is also happening to us. If we don't see ourselves in the story we have no empathy; we lose interest and disengage. As Donald Miller says, “We can’t be ‘they’ – if the message is not about us, we tune out.”
Who is They?
Yet 'they' is the subject of most public talks, keynotes, lectures, and meetings. The speaker talks about how products benefit ‘them’. How our solutions helped 'their’ people achieve a goal. The ways ‘those’ customers succeeded. This is a big reason most presentations fail to connect – no we. No empathy.
Millenia of human psychology observations led to Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots, and countless other strategies to draw others into our message. All rely on empathy.
The Hero and The Guide
Every successful story features two key characters – a hero and a guide. They work together, side-by-side, making discoveries, conquering obstacles, on a shared journey to success lined with very real stakes and high risk.
Smart speakers craft winning #CorporateStorytelling presentations on this same theme. We have a story to tell and a product to sell. Our audience sees themselves as the hero, the central character in our story, weighing the stakes in our industry, navigating their own company challenges, tight budgets, and leadership resistance obstacles using our information on their path to glory.
As speakers, we are the guide, sharing our compelling narrative, showing what's possible thanks to our solutions and the data to back them up, lighting the hero's path, urging them along step by step to win with our support.
Yet most speakers position themselves and their products as the hero of the story, not as the guide. It doesn't work. If both the speaker and the listener are the hero, they're in competition rather than partnership. With no guide, and no way to create empathy, there’s no connection, no partnership, and can be no new business.
Bottom Line
It's the job of every team leader or #CorporateStorytelling speaker to put themselves in the shoes of those they hope to connect with, to ask what those stakeholders want from us. We can't just talk about what we want to talk about, or spew our data and processes as if our audience's biggest interest in life is us and our content. To create empathy, we have to make our story their story.
Know your audience and their specific needs. Then adapt your story to be about them instead of about you and what you want to sell. Empathy builds connection, connection builds relationships, relationships grow businesses.
