How to Position Creative Agencies with Storytelling

The video above was taken last year in October, when I had the distinct pleasure of speaking at the MYOB Conference in Nashville. This annual gathering of creative service agencies and design firms is put on by renowned management consultant David Baker and How magazine, and it brings together an incredibly eclectic and exciting group of people. Appreciating that any creative services agency is only as good as the people within it, I spoke to this group about how they can use storytelling to attract, engage, align and retain talent. If you don’t feel like watching the video, a transcript of what I say is below. Enjoy!

Video Transcript

About  eight years ago, the business world started catching on to storytelling. They started realizing the place that this timeless art of humanity has in the cold, hard world of business. What they came to recognize was that storytelling has a way of connecting with the most important asset any organization has and that is, of course, people. Stories connect us to ideas, but they also connect us to each other, around those connections to ideas. They help us understand not just what we’re working on, but also what we’re working towards. They help us marry the logic of where we want to go as an organization to why we would even want to go there in the first place. This is a lot of what we’re going to talk about: how you can use storytelling to create that connection and how that creates collective understanding.

People are certainly important in any industry, but I would suggest that nowhere are they more important than in your industry and in my industry. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. Your clients are people hiring people. And people can be an incredible differentiating and distinguishing factor for your firm and your agency.

Your business, my business, it’s incredibly crowded and incredibly competitive. It’s a somewhat desperate business. You know…we’re fighting tooth and nail for every client, every account we can get at. And any advantage that we have, that we can leverage and showcase, gives us an advantage over our competitors. But guess what? There are lots of different things that can differentiate you, but some of them are maybe not as differentiating as you would think.

For instance, I’m sure a lot of you have a unique trademark process. So do I. But guess what? So do they. They might have successful case studies and shiny industry awards, and you do too. Great! They might have beautiful, kick-ass, hip offices, a cappuccino machine…I don’t know. You do too.

These things can be differentiating, and I’m not saying that you should ignore them. But I think the best potential for differentiation for you firm, for your agency, is your people. The ideas that they produce and the services they provide.

With some of your agencies, with agencies that I’ve lead in the past (I grew up in the advertising agency business) there are, a lot of times, some star players. Maybe one person, two or three people who are real showcase individuals that the agency becomes known for, or their work becomes celebrated and famous around the world. That’s a great thing. But if the story of your agency is inextricably linked to those people, sometimes there’s some risk involved with that. What if they got hit by a bus or worse, what if they went to competing agency?

There is risk involved in that. And again, not that you shouldn’t showcase those star individuals, but if the story of your agency is inextricably linked with them, there is some risk. Instead of focusing your story around those individuals, around those one, two or three people, think more about the collective, the collective of individuals. What binds this beautiful, motley crew together, emotionally, mentally, philosophically and, I would say even, spiritually. Uncovering that story can be powerful: the things  like where you are, where you’ve come from, where you’re going, the higher purpose that’s driving you there, the differences that you want to make in the world and in the lives of your clients. That’s what great agency and creative firm stories are made of.

Lessons from Lincoln on How to Persuade with Storytelling

For the past several months, friends and colleagues have been urging me to see Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” Having finally gotten the opportunity to do so on recent flight, I am grateful for my friends’ steady insistence. I am also grateful for the nice woman seated next to me who pretended not to notice me tearing up several times during the film.

Lincoln As A Storyteller

“Lincoln” is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s novel, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” which my mother gave me for Christmas several years ago with the simple instructions of, “Here, learn something.” The movie does an incredible job of showcasing the remarkable depths of Mr. Lincoln’s persuasiveness: most notably his ability to swim tenaciously and tactfully against a current of opposition until he eventually tires that current and coaxes it to flow in his direction. The movie celebrates many things about Mr. Lincoln, reminding us what a great president, leader and man he truly was. What the film celebrates most, however, was Mr. Lincoln’s talent at oratory and debate and, in particular, his masterful use of storytelling to amplify the power, impact and persuasiveness of his oratory and debate.

I imagine that if Lincoln were alive today, retired from the presidency, he would be spending the twilight years of his stellar career sharing his wisdom on persuasive communications with others. I envision him giving a TED talk somewhere, waxing on about how and why storytelling can be so effective and powerful in the most combative of situations, sharing the following rationale.

  • Storytelling disarms people — While debate and arguments can be threatening, storytelling is not. We all have positive feelings of storytelling because it has been a part of our lives as early as we can remember, first exposed to us by loving parents comforting us at the end of the day and an integral part of our lives ever since. Accordingly, “Let me tell you story” can be a warmly familiar and wonderfully benign grenade to toss into the most contentious of discussions. It’s like issuing a momentary cease-fire for everyone involved, providing even the most heated of debates (and debaters) the ability to pause, take a breath and simply listen. And in that moment, tempers can calm and cooler heads can prevail.
  • Storytelling can help others to see your side of an issue — As storytelling disarms us, it brings down the mental and emotional barriers we erected to protect ourselves in arguments. And as those barriers lower, our ability to open our minds and our hearts to new ideas rises. Debate is often practised as an intellectual exercise, as each party tries to out-logic the other. But storytelling calls on magic as well as logic, imagination as well as reason, and senses as well as sense. As storytelling opens people’s minds and hearts, it also opens up their eyes. Using a story to illustrate your point clears the smoke of a heated debate, if only for a moment, and enables others to see where you’re coming from. They might not agree 100% with that perspective, but at least they’re now seeing it. And often, that’s half the battle.
  • Storytelling enables others to see you — The Danish author, Isak Dinesen, once said, “To be human is to have a story.” Our very lives are shaped by the stories we tell, the stories we hear and the stories others tell about us. When I embed a story into a heated debate, not only does that story enable my opponents to see my side of the issue, but it also gets them to see a side of me. Storytelling gives your opponents a glimpse at who are you, what you hold dear, what makes you tick. There is a vulnerability in opening yourself up and revealing that that softer side of yourself, but there is also power. For in that moment, you compel your opponent to rise above the debate and connect with you at a deeply human level, paving the way for common understanding and potential accord. It’s easy to disagree with a point someone is making in a heated debate. It’s much more difficult to disagree with a story and, therefore, the person telling it.

Abraham Lincoln was a great leader because he was a great communicator, and he was a great communicator because he was a great storyteller. But he wasn’t just any type of storyteller; he was a strategic storyteller. He deeply understood the power storytelling has to influence the way people think and feel about an issue, shape their perceptions and move them collectively towards a desired action. And he was able to read a contentious situation, the people involved and their opposing point of view, and then strategically pick the right story to tell at the right time. Did he have a gift? Did someone teach him about storytelling? I don’t know. What I do know is that his ability to put storytelling to work simply…worked. And we are all the better for it.

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