The Art Of Storytelling With Annette Simmons

In this episode, Annette Simmons, a renowned expert in social psychology and leadership development, delves into the art of storytelling. Join J.R. Lowry and Annette as they explore how storytelling not only enhances collaboration and communication but also addresses deeper workplace issues like turf wars. Annette shares her journey, insights from her books, and practical advice on how stories can create emotional connections that lead to genuine understanding and problem-solving. Tune in and uncover the transformative power of narrative in leadership and organizational culture.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this https://pathwise.io/podcasts/annette-simmons

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The Art Of Storytelling With Annette Simmons

Author of The Story Factor, Named One of the Best 100 Business Books of All Time

My guest is Annette Simmons. Annette helps organizations improve collaboration, sustain values, increase inclusion and communicate more effectively through storytelling. She has written five books, including The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling, which has been published in three editions and named one of the best hundred business books of all time. It has been featured on CNBC’s Power Lunch, NPR’s Market Watch and numerous talk radio programs.

She’s been quoted in Fortune, Working Woman, Harvard Business Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and many more. She is valued for her expertise in social psychology and leadership development. Annette has a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Business from Louisiana State and a Master’s degree in Training and Development from North Carolina State. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. Annette, welcome and thanks so much for joining me on the show.

It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

Annette Simmons’ Background And Current Work

Absolutely. I gave a quick overview in the intro to the show, but tell us a little bit more about yourself and the things that are keeping you busy these days. I know you’re not doing as much professionally as you used to be. We talked about that a little bit before we started recording.

I’ve been a weird person since I was a child. I started studying psychology when I was, like, thirteen years old, transactional analysis. My dad was a social worker and so I came up with these ideas of models and patterns. I wanted to study psych and my dad was like, “No, you can be a doctor or a lawyer, an architect, whichever one you want,” and so I moved to Australia instead because I didn’t want to go to law school.

In Australia, it was the first time I was hit with other narratives, other cultural narratives. Honestly, it’s not until you’ve been removed from one narrative and put into another that you really understand what happens when even one thing changes. In Australia, they have the belief in the tall poppy. Have you ever heard of Tall Poppy Syndrome?

Right.

I went over there and I was like, “Hi, my name is Annette Simmons and I’m good at this.” That education led me to adult ed and psych because I had seen large groups, and ended up facilitating with a mentor in Greensboro, North Carolina, large group self-awareness workshops, specifically for executives, mostly bank executives, back in the ‘90s. As a result, I heard hundreds and hundreds of executives tell true stories, not necessarily about what happened that day or that week, but you’d find out everybody has a story. That started me on my next phase, which was I was working for this consulting firm and it was all white men. This was the ‘90s and they wouldn’t let me even near the good clients.

I decided to do original research and my mentor, Jim Farr, taught us how to do deep psychological interviews. Basically, you’re gathering stories, so I decided to do my research on my pet peeve, which was what I called turf wars, being excluded as a female. I have experienced a lot of that. I took a J. Walter Thompson account from $200,000 to $2 million. They hired a man to replace me. I knew I couldn’t talk about gender, but everybody has a story about a turf war. These people would start to tell me stories and it would be like, “The guy stabbed me in the back,” and I’m like, “Actually, that’s a metaphor, so what actually happened?” When I got all the stories together, I published my first book. The American Management Association used it as their free member gift that year. It was about the ten territorial games.

I wrote A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear and Distrust at Work because I realized you can’t just name the games and expect everybody to stop playing them. There are some stories behind why they’re playing those games, so to peel back the stories, which are always pointed at somebody else, I never talked to the person who started it. They’re always like, “Those people over there.” I began to realize that storytelling was a way to take a deep dive into the emotional and ego dynamics of what’s actually going on. In order to facilitate, I wanted to help people self-regulate without being accusatory. We’d talk about those games and all those other people and how they do that.

Towards the end, I’d ask, “Have you maybe played one of these games, intimidation, strategic non-compliance, which is sure, I’ll do it, shunning?” Over time, storytelling became a tool that I used to help facilitate. I used it to do research. I used it to help members of a group communicate with each other because instead of saying, “You’re an idiot,” they need to tell the story of why they came to that conclusion. Usually, there’s something in there that they didn’t get right or didn’t have all the information.

I wrote The Story Factor and that pretty much went boom. That was in 2000. It was one of the first books about storytelling and people started to hire me more for storytelling. Probably one of the most interesting gigs was around 2003, when I was working with Microsoft and I came to teach story thinking, which is different from fact thinking. They said, “No. You’re talking about design thinking.” That was my first exposure to design thinking and it’s very similar because design thinking is about adjusting to everything changing along the way.

It’s user stories. It’s at the center of design thinking.

Except for user stories, the way I identify them is a little bit different, but anyway, that was just incredibly validating. It’s just like we had a great time. I ended up working. The federal government was my primary client up until 2016. I worked with groups from the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, FDA, IRS, Treasury Department, and Bureau of Debt, and was that an education. It was coming in, trying to create consensus when everybody had their little turf. I would use both the ten games and the storytelling, and then people would ask for more practical advice. I wrote Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, which is basically just a workbook, the six kinds of stories and four buckets.

Since I’m retired, I finally decided to go back to gender, and so I reconducted research that I had actually done in early 2000 after I returned in advance. When they got my manuscript, they thought, “This is a little too scary.” Also, I was like, I don’t want to end my career here. Now that I’m retired, I asked women to tell me a story about the last time they were powerful and I asked men to tell me a story about women when the last time they were powerful. It’s a self-aware exercise; coming up with a story like that is a mini self-awareness workshop because you’ve got to figure out not just what your beliefs are, but you need a story that shows them in action. That’s drinking from a different well.

I’ve been doing some work supporting women, thinking about what is, instead of saying what’s bad or good about it, gender is just like, what’s different. We can be prepared for a lot of times misjudgment causes. For instance, if you’re dealing with a paradox, you’re dealing with something that it’s both. It’s like we have to take care of the individual and the group.

In practice, balancing that paradox looks wishy-washy. Just supporting women to realize that when they’re doing a really good job of that balance thing, they’ll get accused of being wishy-washy and they have an answer to say, actually, my favorite thing is to say, paradoxes are, “Do you want to breathe in or do you want to breathe out? Which one? Choose.” A lot of the zeros and ones rational, linear equations act like that’s possible. I’m messing around with AI and just seeing what it can and can’t do.

From our conversation before we started, it sounded like you’re having a little bit of fun with that, if nothing else.

It’s a lot of fun. At first, I hated it and it just made my skin crawl, the whole idea of it. And then my girlfriend, who’s a cybersecurity genius, was like, “You’re hurting my feelings.” She set me up as a developer on OpenAI and I played with that in January. We’re playing a little bit with Llama, using perplexity.

The Power Of Storytelling

I don’t have as much time to play with those tools as I would like to, but we’re starting to roll out more of them within the company that I work for. There will be more of it coming for sure. Let’s talk about The Story Factor. You gave a little bit of the genesis of the book, but what is it that makes stories so powerful? What makes them more useful in many instances than facts and other approaches that people often use to influence and persuade?

Let’s go back to why there are stories. The evolutionary software for behavior is the old fables and stories that taught us what is good and what is not good, that taught us that if you do this, then that might happen. Our entire programming as human beings comes from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we’re here and who those other people are and why they’re here. It’s the basic level of the source of behavior, and I understand that because I come from social psychology and psychology.

Storytelling: Our entire programming as human beings comes from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we’re here.

Once I started working with business, I began to realize that, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the arduous letter of inference, we shouted at each other from the top of our ivory towers, You’re an idiot. No, you’re an idiot. If I can get them to go and tell their stories about who I am and why I’m here, then all of a sudden they’re like, “We have common ground,” and then we can build the one ladder for our project that we have at hand.

I was using this and facilitating. I taught storytelling and leadership in the Veterans Hospital leadership program for a decade because of all of the conflicts that they had in trying to run a hospital and then, of course, using the territorial games. One of my friends was like, “You need to write a book about storytelling,” and it was like, “That’s like writing a book about religion. Are you kidding me?” He pushed me, and that’s when I started to clarify what had been working in my life. My work is always about a group and the group dynamics. One of the things that I know about groups is that they have about six questions before they decide to work with each other. Who are you? Why are you here? What’s your vision? What are your values?

You can’t just say, “I value integrity,” because that means different things, it could mean shutting up or it could mean speaking up. When I get people to tell the story about their values, then we have a visceral understanding, and it’s something that we can talk about. In The Story Factor, I ended up with the six stories. Who are you? Why are you here? Vision, value and action.

Teaching stories, which is, you can give a demo in somebody’s imagination. That’s a lot easier than actually letting them crash a plane. I know what you’re thinking stories, which is a lot of times we go into a situation and we already know what their objections are going to be. Instead of starting to push what we think they should be thinking, what I suggest is that we tell a story that validates their thinking that says, “I really understand how you came to that point.” It’s like an Aikido move. I was trained in Aikido. It’s to look in their direction and then use their momentum to keep going. It’s also a sign of respect and then you get to go second.

In that book, there are four buckets for each of the stories. A time you shined, a time you blew it, a mentor. I love mentor stories because you get double credit. If you’re telling the mentor story, you’re illustrating gratitude and sharing credibility and people look for that in somebody they want to work with. The book or movie, you can just lift a scene and let somebody else pay for your special effects.

Very true. You do the book and let somebody else do the heavy lifting with the movie. Although maybe AI can do the movies for you.

I like the imagination better.

I do, too, but those demo videos that OpenAI put out, the woman walking on the streets in Tokyo or wherever it was, are pretty cool.

They are pretty cool.

The Importance Of How You Tell A Story

How you tell a story is as important as the story itself and you talk a bit about what makes a good telling of a story in the book. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Finding the story is probably the most important. You need to, and I think you should go back for a significant emotional experience. If it didn’t stir your emotions when it happened or when you saw it on TV or watched your mentor, then it’s not going to stir their emotions. You need to know you have a good, solid story that means something to you first. However, when you start to tell it, one of the things that we tend to do is we forget to show, don’t tell. In a story, show means that you have to tantalize all their five senses, see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.

When I teach storytelling, you don’t just say it was hot. You say, “I could feel the sweat trickling down my back.” You don’t say, “He got mad.” You say, “He clenched both of his fists and his jaw went tight.” This is a much more powerful communication tool because your listener is then coming to their own conclusions about whether the guy was mad or not. It’s a much more powerful way to show that you have the five senses. I also believe in the three-minute story.

In business, we don’t have time. What’s amazing is you can actually tell an epic in three minutes after you practice. That’s the second point: storytelling is a social experience, so you can’t practice it in a mirror. You need to practice it with a friendly listener. I have a very specific format for people who are listening. One is there’s no negative feedback. That’s easy to give. What’s hard and what I really need to grow is what I’m doing right.

It’s amazingly powerful because I’ve been doing this for many years, that the bad stuff falls away. Don’t make someone self-conscious about them going and all say, “When you describe that orange, I could smell it.” Appreciations include what I like about your story, what your story causes me to understand, and the details that make it real and sensory. That’s how I teach storytelling and I have people go pretty quickly. You can spend a lot of time getting nervous about telling a story, but if you tell it with a friendly listener, they understand their job. When I teach storytelling, everybody in the room is a qualified partner to practice stories. It’s got to be personal.

If it’s not personal to you, a lot of business people, when first exposed, don’t want to tell personal stories. They say it’s not relevant, but if it has to do with your integrity, your character, your vision, it’s relevant. One time, a guy said, “I want this to be fun.” I said, “How do you have fun?” He told me about searching junkyards for pieces of a car that he put together and his voice and his face lit up. I said, “Okay, tell that story and then say and I want this meeting to be just as much fun as that.”

It comes back to your first story type, which is who am I? People want to know who their leaders are because they’re being asked to follow them. They’re being asked to trust them. They’re being asked to be inspired by them. When you do business with a partner, you want to be able to trust them. You want to understand them and those personal stories give you a sense of who these people really are in an indirect way, more than their job title.

Your occupation and location. One of the things that I say is people do not want any more of your damn information. They have way too much information to deal with. The one thing they want from you and desperately want is faith. Faith that you’re a good person, that you’re here for the right reasons and that they’re going to be glad they worked with you in the end. Faith is an emotion.

The Six Story Types

Absolutely. You wrote the book more than twenty years ago, and I know you’ve made a few updates to it since then. Do you feel like your six story types have held up to the test of time and have you ever been tempted to tinker with them?

No, other people adopt them and they have the four, the six. It’s almost always a version. I felt validated about that. I added two new chapters to the most recent version because the proliferation of information about storytelling has leaned into how somebody might monetize and duplicate without having created some sort of cash cow, running modules. What’s happened is that a lot of the advice is accurate. The story has a beginning, a middle and an end, but that’s useless. That doesn’t help me at all, except for maybe framing how long I give each part. But even then, that could mess up a great story that has a surprise ending.

I have found that I had to. I went through all the different templates. Some of them are really good. Pixar, for example, their work is really good and when you look at their storytelling information, which they are very generous with, almost all of their designers and storytellers start with a human that they have already met in order to develop a character. They may develop that character differently, but it’s not just out of nowhere. One of the things that some of the templates teach is that you can just make up a story. You have to find a story.

I worked with a Buzz Lightyear. I did not work for Pixar, but I worked for a Buzz Lightyear. I would tell you that anybody who was listening or watching this, who has worked with me, will know exactly who I’m talking about.

He’s real, huh?

He is absolutely real. We were talking a little bit earlier about AI, including before we started recording and how it struggles to create stories.

I have not found an application that’s any better than just being a human being talking to another human being. As a matter of fact, it’s worse. It can regurgitate. It’s wiped my books. If you ask it about Annette Simmons, it will say the six stories in the four books, but my friend has been trying to create a coach bot for storytelling using Llama. She set me up on ChatGPT 4, but then she said, “Speak in the style of Annette Simmons.” It started sending stuff out, bless my buttons, Southern.

That really didn’t enhance it. It was funny, but I really haven’t found an application that works well. I’m interested in coming up with the parts that are better done with humans and integrating them into what the AI is good at. I can imagine there will be territorial games of “I’m not going to give that much information” or “Somebody giving me a lot of information, I’m not going to give them way too much information.” We need to handle those emotional-based behaviors first before we move into the application.

I would imagine, though and I have not tried this to be very clear, if you go back to “his fists were clenched and his jaw tightened,” if you wrote it into ChatGPT, “describe how somebody’s anger manifested,” or “how they felt on a hot day,” if you’re struggling for some of the narrative.

You could. I have a thesaurus of emotions and it’s for writers, so I can just look at my little book. But the thing is that when I’m teaching somebody to tell their story, I have to get them to go back to that moment in time and re-experience it, narrating. It’s so much more powerful for them to actually remember what happened. A lot of times when they’re trying to remember, okay, oh, actually, what happened before that, they come up with details that make the story, but it’s in their memory bank. It’s because that experience caused emotions in them. While it’s of limited value, if I was writing fiction, I might use it. But it’s fun to play with, though it can be a time suck.

Most things on computers can be a time suck if you do too much of it.

It really is quicker to do it yourself and find somebody else to share the story with.

However, I find that sometimes it does help you spark inspiration.

I love it. I’m teaching in Dordogne, France and the last question I asked was, “Tell me all the novels written in that area.” I’m reading a bunch of mystery novels that happen there so that I can get a feel for the terrain because maps just bounce off me. It’s great fun. It’s also like when PowerPoint just went overboard.

You can because we’re anxious about the presentation we’re about to make, and it feels like we’re making it better by pulling a picture from there. Yet, if you would just set that aside and pay attention to the story you’re telling, I don’t use PowerPoint at all. There are only two situations where I’ll use PowerPoint and I encourage other people to do that. Decks of 60 and 70 PowerPoint slides, again, too much information.

For most people, definitely. I think we’ve all probably seen more than our share of 60- and 70-page dense PowerPoint presentations that fall flat because you don’t really get the story behind all those slides.

If you need to give them information, give them a printout and just go live.

Territorial Games And How They Manifest

Let’s talk about the other thread of your books that you talked about earlier, those territorial games and some of the turf wars that you wrote about in that book. What are some of the ways that these territorial games manifest themselves?

There’s intimidation, which is, excuse me and then all of a sudden, you’re like, “Maybe I didn’t think you’d say that.” Intimidation only works if you let it. One of my favorite stories is when I was working with a group from the Pentagon. This two-star general screamed across the room at this female lieutenant colonel and said, “Why don’t you just grow up?” She says, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but could you be more specific?” A lot of territorial games are designed to scare you off, but if you stand your ground calmly and don’t flip out, because if you start playing games back, then it’s on.

If you can stay an adult. One of the things that I do with these ten games, intimidation, filibuster, camouflage, which is a wild goose chase, strategic non-compliance, invisible walls, shunning, discrediting and powerful alliances. Once I present that to a group, the ten games, we’re laughing about those idiots. Sometimes, I’ll use a little survey and say, “Okay, here are the games that you think other people play in this group. Here are the games you think you play,” and then I tally it up. Of course, it’s impossible because everybody says, “I may do information manipulation every now and then,” but if you see the report from the rest of the group, strategic non-compliance may be a lot more frequent than people are being self-aware.

What I do with territorial games is two things. One is remove the blame. It’s not your fault. We’re all territorial. It’s human nature. Relax. It’s also not their fault. It’s human nature. Relax, and then we can get there. There are certain tools that I use, such as models to expose the five different sides of a particular problem that we’re trying to solve. It’s about self-regulation. We don’t realize how often someone thinks we started it just by a question we asked. We have the opportunity to de-escalate and to use that point of conflict to actually, instead of push, pull and create that chance for connection.

You said it a second ago. I’ll put it in slightly different words. Ultimately, denying that these things are going to happen, denying the emotions behind them is not really productive. You just need to acknowledge rather than fight it or deny it.

You have access. If you’re in denial, you’ve got no control over what’s going on.

How are you, obviously, going to differ? I would imagine it depends on what the person is and what game they’re playing, but are there some general principles that would guide how you respond to those situations? Acknowledging what’s going on, you talked about the woman holding her ground with the two-star general, but more generally, no pun intended. What are some of the ways that you can manage that?

If you’re dealing with the uninitiated, they weren’t in the workshop learning about the ten territorial games. One of the things that I’ve been doing, and this isn’t the only thing, but I’ve run some experiments, which is turning conflict into an opportunity for play. When everybody’s getting really serious, they just dig their heels in more and more and so what she did was, it was almost play though, what her response was. I talk about giving second chances, and it’s spontaneous in the moment, but I can name their behavior in a way that they don’t feel threatened and then re-approach and give them a second chance to listen to what I have to say. Going back to storytelling, the best way to get a chance to tell your story is to get them to tell their story.

You can validate something about it, and then you can say, “This is what has happened since 1960,” which they may not know. It’s in everybody’s interest to get everybody’s information and point of view together because we’re smarter. What I talk about with territorial games is and also avoid parliamentary procedure, Robert’s Rules. What they do is they turn it into an adversarial situation, A versus B, guilty versus not guilty. A lot of lawyers that I’ve coached actually have to set that aside to find the stories. It’s both and when we give a second chance, even if it’s only 30% or 40% of the time that they come around, that’s way better than before.

I teach subjective reasoning and one of the things about subjective reasoning and storytelling is it’s only going to work 50% to 70% of the time because there are too many variables. The thing is that when it works, you can garner loyalty from your team for 30 years. The exponential payoff and I do that also to reduce all of us overachievers’ and perfectionists’ desire to do it right. There is no right. You just do it and so it’s not. You don’t have to waste time trying to get the perfect story. It’s much better to practice that story with real humans and let it evolve into something that delights both of you. It needs to be a delight to tell and listen to.

The Current State Of Collaboration And Empathy

It’s very true. Thinking about some of the games that people play, you wrote that book ultimately because you were experiencing some of this in your own life, having accounts taken away from you and things like that. And we’ve been talking about collaboration, empathy, emotional intelligence and a whole bunch of other things related to group dynamics over the last few decades. Do you think we’re getting any better at this or are we just modernizing a version of the same old thing?

No, we’re getting worse.

That’s not good.

I was like, why did I even write the book? It’s like, well, maybe I saw ahead or something. It’s a little worse. Although I do believe we’re on the cusp of making it better. It comes from this adversarial competitive narrative that it’s either you or me, so collaborative narratives operate on a different principle. It’s both you and I. It changes the strategy that you need in order to reach, ideally, consensus.

Instead of majority rules, you end up with a little less than 50% of the people who don’t like your idea. Facilitating dialogue is a way to decrease the feeling that you have to play territorial games to survive. If you look at what I did, I was being marginalized, but I used what I had. I went with what talents I had, which was to name those games. It was translated into fourteen languages because I did a lot of international work. I haven’t lived internationally.

It’s beneath culture. These games are beneath culture. I would like to do it again, do the research again, because I think social media and some of the assumptions we’re running about what’s possible with rational thinking have created another game. But misinformation, disinformation, that’s storytelling that could be described as excellent because it works, but it’s so damaging. That’s what’s come on that I say that it’s actually got worse.

It’s fair. I hadn’t really thought about it in that context, but certainly, we live in a very divisive political environment at the moment in the United States and many other countries as well and social media, you have that us versus them, win versus lose, either/or. It just happens. The ability to pump out misinformation, you go back 100 years, and somebody may tell misinformation, but it was like, maybe they could scream it at 100 people at a time. Now you can get to millions.

Using all of that emotional sensory data, it’s no mistake that these videos are being created to mimic something that could never happen. Once it happens in your imagination through the video, then your body has recorded it under hearsay, smell, and touch. The brain records data, but the body records emotional information and there is no information more important than whether you are safe, connected, or belong.

I’m going to use the word safe to jump into A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths, one of your other books. This is ultimately about getting people comfortable speaking up and getting leaders to not react in the wrong way when some hard message is being delivered to them, which is easier said than done.

What I do is I preempt in my mindset, so I have a five-stage model of dialogue. Basically, it’s a box where you all come into the room and accounting thinks we need to do it this way and marketing thinks, “You idiots, we need to hire more salespeople.” Everybody has a little belief bubble, but we don’t immediately start with it. We have politeness and pretending. Every meeting starts with, “How was the weekend?” that sort of stuff. You can’t skip that stuff. I tried.

You can’t skip that stuff. You need that molding in, and then we will start telling a little bit more about what marketing thinks and what accounting thinks. They’re telling their stories and their beliefs. The thing is that you’ve got five different points of view. You have five different beliefs and they’re single stories. That’s where A versus B would cause one story to win, whoever the biggest talker is. In dialogue, everybody’s sharing their point of view until we piece together the terrain and get a bigger picture. It’s A plus B equals Q, instead of one or the other. Once they get that, the desire to do it, the second thing I have to do is I have to warn them about how frustrating it is.

In what sense?

There are two reasons why people don’t dialogue. They have a bias to action, which is, “I’d rather just do it. Don’t make me sit here and try to listen to this idiot,” and then they also have a low tolerance for the frustration of adapting your narrative to actually include someone else’s. That’s hard work. It’s mentally and emotionally draining. When I let them know ahead of time that that means you’re doing it right, when they get frustrated and they want to bail, then I engage more of the stick-to-itiveness and the depth that people are willing to put in because they’ve decided to have faith in each other.

I’ve only had two sociopaths in my entire career and they always interview well and they always destroy this sense of safety, but what was interesting in one of the most recent ones is that the dialogue took on two forms. One was what was approved by the boss, what you could say and get by with and the other was kind of a metaphorical communication between the group and so when we come together, even if there’s one outlier, it’s always going to be better. That particular group just figured out a better way to take care of each other.

Survival instincts kick in at some point, I would imagine, in those situations. In a team situation, how do you, when you’re working with team, how do you get them more comfortable with being willing to stick their necks out, especially when the stakes are so high?

I have lots of little tricks. I just packed my postcards, but I have a set of 250 postcards that I’ve collected over the years. CCL actually created formal image metaphors, but that’s not as much fun nor as creative or varied. Actually, my girlfriend was the artist who invented that at CCL. She started collecting her own postcards, and she taught me how to do it. I’ll just lay them out on the ground. As people are coming in, instead of sitting there like this, they’re wondering what these images are. On the board, pick an image that helps you describe what it’s been like to work here, what this project means to you or it doesn’t really matter what.

What it does is that it shifts the power. Instead of me being the facilitator, I have put myself on an equal basis. When they introduce their name, everybody is actually introducing their point of view with this image. It’s always fun, and everybody gets the same amount of airtime. There is no status because whoever’s the most clever ends up being the center of attention, if you will. That’s one of the things I do: I take the hierarchy and flatten it using exercises and making sure everybody speaks. Of course, then you have to manage time, but that’s why we use the images.

What else do I do? I talked to you about preempting that this is going to get difficult, so they’re ready to go. I always introduce myself with the who I am, why I’m here story. One of the stories that I use is from Sufi literature about Nasruddin, a traveling preacher who was asked to speak three weeks in a row at a village. The first week, he came in and said, “My beloved people, who amongst you knows that of which I speak?” The people said, “We are poor, simple people. We don’t know that of which you speak.” He said, “Well,” threw his robe over his shoulder and said, “There’s no need of me here,” and he walks out.

Next week, there are even more people there and he says again, “Who amongst you knows that of which I speak?” They all stood up and said, “We do. We know that of which you speak.” He said, “Well, then there’s no need of me here,” and he leaves. The third week, they have a plan. After he says, “Who knows?” half of them say, “We are poor, simple people.” The other half says, “We know, we know of which you speak.” He says, “Of those who know, tell those who don’t, there’s no need of me here.” When I tell that story, it’s a who I am story as a facilitator.

I show faith that the wisdom is in the room because I believe the wisdom is in the room. All I do is help facilitate the sharing of the wisdom. There are some other things I do, but I think you get a general idea.

Creating A Culture Of Psychological Safety At The Organizational Level

How about at the organizational level, what’s important for them to get right and what do they need to avoid in creating this culture of psychological safety?

At the organizational level, it’s time to understand that there are two different kinds of thinking. There’s objective thinking, rational thinking, ratios, either/or, zeros and ones and then there’s subjective thinking. For instance, let’s use a real example in hospitals. We want to show more compassion for the patients and someone who called me said they wanted to have a course to teach nurses compassion and I’m like, are you kidding me? I’ve never met a nurse that didn’t have compassion. The problem is the system because when we’re taking care of patient safety, the definition of quality is consistency, standard operating procedure, every single time, do it the same way every single time. Empathy, by definition, is a deviation from the standard operating procedure, taking a little more time with this patient, going faster with that one, listening or just acknowledging their silence.

On an organizational level, it’s very important to make sure that our structural practices aren’t actually destroying the culture we’re looking to create. At the cultural level, probably the most important thing for an organization is that whatever their values are, they have to have a story for each value. You can’t just say excellence. What does that mean? I think the boss needs to have 3 or 4 different stories. Also, role modeling, you can create opportunities to do your own PR for your cultural values because it’s what you do and say that’s going to make the biggest difference. I try to do and say things that are good enough that somebody’s going to tell a story about it.

One of the stories I have is about being in India and looking for a rug. We were in Mumbai and going to travel all the way to Calcutta and then I would come back to Mumbai. When you’re looking for a rug, the taxi driver is going to get 30% of the sale. I was trying to work on my own and it happened to be in the downstairs of the Hyatt that there was a rug seller and you’d think that’d be the most expensive. When I went down there, of course, they showed me all the rugs.

Finally, we’d spent enough time together that he said, “I think I know what you want, but it’s going to take me a while to get it up here. When you come back, I’ll have the rug you want,” because I had very specific colors. I said, “Okay, I’ll go ahead and pay for it.” I paid $2,000 on my Visa card, and when I got back, not only did he have a gorgeous rug for me, but I was also invited to their cousin’s wedding that night. There are people who would automatically think I’m stupid for paying ahead, but look at the results. I’m quite sure the rug I have beneath me is worth a lot more than what I paid for it.

Last question. What’s ahead for you?

I am going to teach facilitation. I would like to produce something useful for people who want AI to do what AI can do well and I think it’s going to include some things that AI can’t do. We can stop trying to make it do everything and we can turn it into a tool that, instead of crowding us out of the way, actually does what we want it to do.

Thank you. Glad we got a chance to do this. I appreciate your time.

Me too. Thank you.

Thanks and have a great day.

Thank you.

I want to thank Annette for joining me in discussing the power of storytelling, how to battle turf wars, and how to create an environment where people are comfortable speaking even the dangerous truth. If you’d like to learn more, you can visit Annette’s website, AnnetteSimmons.com or pick up one of her books. If you’re ready to focus on your career journey more generally, visit PathWise.io, become a member and take advantage of the wealth of resources that we offer. Have a great day.

Important Links

• Annette Simmons
• The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling
• A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear and Distrust at Work
• Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins
• LinkedIn – PathWise.io
• Facebook – PathWise.io
• YouTube – PathWise.io
• Instagram – PathWise.io
• TikTok – PathWise.io

About Annette Simmons

Annette Simmons helps organizations improve collaboration, sustain values, increase inclusion, and communicate more effectively through storytelling. She is the CEO of Group Process Consulting and the author of four books, including The Story Factor, which has been published in three editions and named one of the Best Hundred Business Books of All Time.

Annette has been featured on CNBC’s Power Lunch, NPR’s Market Watch, and numerous talk radio programs, and she’s been quoted in Fortune, Working Woman, Harvard Business Review, The Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post. She is valued for her expertise in social psychology and leadership development.

Annette has a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Business from Louisiana State and a Master’s degree in Training and Development from North Carolina State. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.