It’s Story Time…

… I loved to hear those words when I was a kid, both at school and at bedtime.  And then all over again when my 4 kids were young.  They were truly memorable moments.  Not only for the opportunity to connect on a personal level, but for the enduring quality of the story itself (of course I did not appreciate this as much as a child, but in looking back I can now say that was the case).  Over the years, I have recalled these stories many times,… often as a point of reference to an adjacent but similar topic/situation.  It’s as if they have created a permanent indexing system to which future memories are linked.  So I began to wonder, what is it about stories and storytelling that make each so special.  I picked up a book called Tell Me a Story by Roger Schank, which led to several interesting discoveries.

Schank goes so far as to say that knowledge itself ‘is’ stories,… specifically he states, “finding a relevant past experience that will help make sense of a new experience is at the core of intelligent behavior.”  We’re bombarded with tons of data all the time,… movies, books, newspapers,… but it is from within us that we retrieve the most important data – our past experiences.  We learn, from new insights, by reconsidering past experiences in light of new information.  So what does this say about stories…?  Stories give context, what Schank calls ‘life’, to past experiences.  The additional information that comes through a story gives our brains the means to cross reference an experience to many locations in memory.  This is probably why I was able to recall these stories from childhood, and many others since; years after I initially heard them.   It reminds me of a quote I once read by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.”

I should have recognized this much earlier from the work going on in our own research group.  Our standard user-centered innovation process depends on individual researchers sharing stories from field observations with their peers.  It is the recalling of these stories that prompt new insights and design ideas.  The role of storyteller is even one of the ten key personas within the social ecology that fuels innovation per Tom Kelley in his new book, The Ten Faces of Innovation.  As Kelley puts it, “stories celebrate and authenticate an experience.”  Research stories trigger an emotional response, in the one telling and the one listening to the story, as they refer to real people in real situations.  These often bring focus to the essential discovery and resulting insights.  Another very cool result of story telling is that it gives a face to your design objectives,… a hero to innovate for.  What a simple sequence – share an authentic and entertaining user-based story, strike an emotional chord within your design team, and deliver new value to the user, the hero of the story.  That’s innovation.   

Got a story…?