But this ad, sent by a friend in Brisbane, was too funny and story-related to wait. The ad was created by CANAL+, a Pay-TV provider in the Nordic region.

The original, French version ends with a statement that the company creates extraordinary stories for its audience. However, it was the English “translation” that made me laugh: “Never underestimate the power of a good story.”

See for yourself the sly humour of this story.

No Story, No Fans is available on Amazon as an e-book

If I don’t have a story, I won’t have fans. I believe Raf Stevens when he delivers this message in dozens of ways, through dozens of captivating stories and through concrete steps to find and deliver that story. I believe him because I know what he says is true. I know it in the only way one can truly know anything, through direct experience.

I wish I had had a copy of No Story, No Fans when I was floundering to reinvent myself as an organizational narrative consultant (aka community developer, though that’s not how I thought of myself). Annette Simmons held my hand, with her Story Factor. David Armstrong led me too, with his Managing By Storying Around.

Mostly I felt like a lonely charlatan, waving the flag of storytelling without really knowing how to make the leap from performing storyteller to organizational narrative consultant. I managed, and even succeeded, but it was a scary journey.

Earning trust by demonstrating it

Things are different now. A lot of books and Web sites explore what storytelling means within the context of defining a vision, conveying it, and trying to turn it into sales. And sales are obviously important. A company with fabulous stories that operates in the red is going to sink.

Raf talks a lot about trust. That’s what his subtitle refers to: “Build Your Business through Stories that Resonate. Using the power of corporate storytelling to create loyal customers, fans, and friends.”

He earned my trust right off the bat. In an era of smartphones, I don’t even carry a cell phone. When I’m away from my right arm, er, computer, I don’t want a leash. So when I clicked on the PDF of Raf’s book and saw all the QR codes, I bristled. “Oh, yeah. He’s going to make me feel like an outsider.”

I was wrong. If I’d had a smartphone, I could have pointed it at those squiggly squares and called up fascinating Web sites. Instead, I accidentally moved the cursor over the first one and was startled by a dialog box asking me if I trusted the link or wanted to block it.

That Raf Stevens! So smart. He wanted even semi-Luddites like me to enter the realm of wonder. I ended up clicking on every link. Darn you, Raf Stevens! I’m busy. I don’t have time for all this Web wandering, but your links were so good I was afraid I’d regret not clicking on any one of them.

So here I am, weeks after accepting Raf’s invitation to download his book in exchange for a review, just starting to formulate a response to a book that makes me want to rewind the clock and re-start my consulting career with No Story, No Fans in hand.

A generous book

One thing that leaps out for me, in reading the book, is generosity. Raf gives a lot away. Stories, links, ideas, tips, resources. He just keeps dishing them out, some within the text itself and others a click away. By the time I start Part I: Trading Stories, I’m already feeling as if I’ve stumbled onto a gift exchange. He has already demonstrated his advice to first give something away, to engage emotionally, and to promote trust by promoting other people’s stories.

Partway through Chapter 2, “Flipping Your Script!”, two sentences stop me in my tracks:

Most communication nowadays fails to connect and is not trustworthy because it is too descriptive of situations and facts instead of sharing actual stories about what occurred. That is the script that needs flipping.

I think maybe Raf got hold of the first reports I did for clients when I started my community development career. I was so afraid they would find out I was really a storyteller in consultant’s clothing they wouldn’t trust my work. I overwhelmed them with numbers and facts and insider language so they could see I knew what I was doing.

Only thing was, it was never the heavyweight data that worked. It was always the stories. I could have spared a lot of trees if I’d had Raf’s book to hold my hand while I was learning the ropes.

So I feel like cheering when he writes:

It is tempting to continue to use terms like internal branding, positioning, brand voice, brand identity and so on, while explaining the power of story and storytelling in relation to brand and organizations. Many business leaders are more familiar with these terms than they are with storytelling. Storytelling is for wimps, right? But I am not giving in. We need to flip the script!

Make room for this book

Raf doesn’t try to impose one good model of storytelling. Instead, through dozens of examples, some solid advice, and some well-formulated tips, he encourages readers to find their own storytelling voices. That makes the book useful to a wide range of audiences in both the corporate and non-profit worlds. The book will hold an important place alongside books by Annette Simmons, Stephen Denning, Peter Guber, and Lori Silverman, but it will occupy its own niche.

The field of storytelling books has a lot of entries these days, but No Story, No Fans proves not only was there room for one more. There was a need for this book.

[Note: You can read the first part free on the Web site.]

We live in an experience economy. The experience economy is about people looking for thrills and experiences, and companies selling those as if they were an economic product.

That’s what Sharp is selling in this ad for its Touch Wood SH-08C handsets. The video is a three-minute experience that is absolutely captivating. Right up to the end, there is not a hint of what they are selling. It sells an experience you will not soon forget. And not only is it a small story in itself, you will probably be telling the story of the ad to friends.

In case you haven’t yet seen the video, I won’t give away anything except a promise if you watch the video, you will feel as it it was three minutes well spent.

Projects need something besides a crystal ball to evaluate their work. Photo by islandguy, via Flickr Creative Commons

The question is simple: “Please tell a story about a time when a person or organization tried to help someone or change something in your community.” That question has elicited over 21,000 stories from people in Kenya and Uganda. The stories are part of the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project.

The parent organization, GlobalGiving, matches donors with causes. What sets the organization apart is its efforts to provide progress updates so those contributing dollars can see what impact the donations have had and those carrying out the projects can see if they have been effective.

The story approach allows community members to participate in evaluating projects. Using SenseMaker™ software, GlobalGiving plans to turn the qualitative data embedded in the stories into quantitative reports. Anyone who has worked with or for non-profits is aware how critical this is. In the competition for funds, qualitative data are often dubbed “feel-good” and given little or no credence. So anything that can assess qualitative evaluations in a way that gives them a more “scientific” patina will help attract new or ongoing funding. It will also help those involved to better assess their work.

The stories on the wite are an interesting mixture. One tells of a diplomatic village chief’s skill persuading a scrappy couple to reconcile. Another is the story of a young man from a poor family who became a doctor, thanks to a donor’s paying his school fees. A third tells of a group of farmers who developed a co-operative and opened a market for their produce.

Taken individually, the stories are too brief and anecdotal to provide useful feedback. Using the data GlobalGiving will obtain with the help of the software, the stories will help them to better evaluate the effectiveness of international development projects. Using what they learn, they will develop a community feedback toolkit that can be used by any organization. (Their story gathering tool is already online.)

The reality of community development is much like the sign Einstein is purported to have hung in his Princeton University office:

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

At the same time, effective evaluation of a project’s impact is the only way to assure donors and participants their money and time have been well spent. This will be an interesting initiative to watch over the coming years.

N.B. For an excellent overview of the storytelling project, read Amplifying Local Voices.

Lips on face stone sculpture, photo by Photos8.com

In the August 8, 2011, online edition, he throws out a challenge to culture workers. He calls on those in media, education, religion and the arts to use their influence to tell a new story. He writes, “For better or worse, you are engaged in crafting and propagating the cultural stories that serve either to legitimate the devastation the old economy causes or shine a light on the possibilities of the new economy.”

Whether we stand in front of an audience or work in the broad field of organizational narrative, storytellers bear a responsibility that is, at the same time, an exciting opportunity. Our stories can shore up a status quo that keeps the world teetering on the brink of global disaster. Or they can engender a sense of possibility that will lead us to something sane and life-affirming.

I’m reminded of the four levels folklorist Barre Toelken once told me characterized Navajo storytelling. That was many years ago, and my memory has likely shifted the explanations to fit my own sense of the impact of storytelling. But roughly, these are the four levels:

• Entertainment: The first task of the storyteller is to capture the audience’s imagination.
• Education: Once imagination is focused, learning can begin.
• Spirituality: Here the possibility of transformation begins.
• Witchcraft: Only a shaman can safely tell stories at this level because they unleash forces that cannot be contained in less skilled hands.

From many directions we hear stories that seem to have skipped right over the third level and are wreaking havoc on our environment, economies, and family lives. They are told by culture workers who have sold their talents for pieces of silver, skilled liars whose arguments play out in election campaigns and corporate marketing.

Korten’s charge to artists is one storytellers can answer:

“Talented artists can help us see beauty, meaning, and possibility where it may otherwise escape our attention. They can take us on an imaginary journey to a future no one has yet visited to experience possibilities we may not have imagined. Our movement needs the contribution of millions of artists devoted to liberating human consciousness.”

The YES! essay is based on the 2nd edition of David Korten’s important and encouraging book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth.

So in 2009-2010 First Nations and Inuit Health Branch (Health Canada) funded “Changing Climate, Changing Health, Changing Stories”. This was a qualitative research project to examine “the impacts of climate change on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being” (from Ashlee Cunsolo Willox’s project Web site).

Health Canada has understood the power and importance of stories to community well-being for decades. They have been in the forefront of employing narrative evaluation and research to understand social phenomena. So it is not surprising they chose to support this digital storytelling project.

Beyond the immediate focus of looking at the impacts of a changing climate, the project has led to development of a digital storytelling center in Rigolet and the hope this remote community can become a leader in showing how community narratives can preserve the past and help create the future.

Read more:

• Poster overview of the project
• Rigolet stories
• Storytelling Links Climate Change and Health

Perhaps the saddest reflection of all is this: “The stories we tell of today will one day be the stories of the past.”

My discussion partners often found me a bit too wishy washy in my responses, at least those who had very fixed ideas about what belonged in those categories. I’ve never felt much of a need to put storytelling in one box or another. I see stories everywhere.

When I listen to a symphony, a story plays out in my head. The same thing happens when I watch dance, contemplate a painting, gaze at a photograph or eavesdrop in a café.

I’m not alone in my hunger for stories, and clever marketers know that. The ones who created this video wove together a lot of story strands, with eerie foreshadowing and a satisfying conclusion.

Clever storytelling alone can backfire, when people remember the ad but not what it was selling. For me, the ad in this video works on both counts. It’s a satisfying story, with spooky buildup and a twist at the end. And I’m likely to remember what it’s selling.

Doctor and patient in City Hospital Tuberculosis Division, 1927 (Item 2721, Engineering Department Photographic Negatives (Record Series 2613-07), Seattle Municipal Archives, from Flickr Creative Commons)

In his 2009 book, Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients, Reiser wrote, “Before stethoscopes, the coin of evaluation was words—the doctor learned about an illness from the patient’s story of the events and sensations marking its passage.”

Diagnoses were often made via letters. Patients wrote detailed descriptions of their symptoms, the remedies they had tried, and their emotional state. Not every physician was comfortable with this. Some complained of patients’ inabilities to accurately describe their illnesses. Others chided doctors for subtly guiding the narratives and missing the correct diagnosis.

In 1816 René Laennic, a 35-year-old French doctor, invented an instrument that would allow him to listen to a woman’s chest without violating her modesty. The stethoscope quickly became popular and “took the mantle of illness out of the hands of patients and placed it in the doctor’s orbit.” (Reiser)

When Dr. Goldman interviewed him for White Coat Black Art, Reiser said the stethoscope “led to a seismic shift in how doctors evaluated illness and their relationship with the patient, which changed as they became more interested in the evidence from the body and less interested in the evidence from the story.” The new technology “made doctors more interested in the physical findings of disease than in the life of the patient.”

Reiser is concerned that over-reliance on technology has lessened physicians’ openness to the patient as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms. But there’s a movement toward storytelling in medicine, generally referred to as “narrative medicine”.

Narrative medicine is, in many ways, a return to pre-stethoscope days. Dr. Rita Charon, who coined the phrase in 2000, describes it as “medicine practised by someone who knows what to do with stories”. In “What to do with stories: The sciences of narrative medicine”, she writes, “Whether sick or well, the reader of an illness narrative is summoned by the author to join with the teller—to form community that can combat the isolation of illness.” [Canadian Family Physician August 2007 vol. 53 no. 8 1265-1267]

Illness is a lonely journey, particularly when it’s chronic or when the impact is life threatening. It’s lonely for the person who is ill and for those who are caretakers. Narrative medicine takes this into account, placing the illness in the context of a life rather than the narrow confines of symptoms.

“Where your talents and the needs of the world cross lies your calling.” ~ Aristotle

From eavesdropping to storytelling

One advantage of being a quiet, well-behaved child was that I could listen for hours to stories not meant for young ears. I could color or play with dolls while adults within earshot spun tales about betrayals, triumphs, furtive meetings, secrets. I never tired of the stories and stored them away in my heart.

I didn’t think of their hold on me as a calling until I was in my thirties. I credit a kindergartener with helping me see I could turn that fascination into a career. Her rapt attention as I told a story to her class threw me headlong into storytelling, first as a school librarian and then through twists and turns in my professional life.

I discovered I could take the stories I’d heard, read or lived and give them back and that sometimes people listening to or reading the stories found a measure of healing in them. I also learned I could nudge people, and even organizations, to believe in the power of their own stories to heal themselves, others, their communities.

Finding healing in stories

Isak Dinesen is often quoted as saying, "All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell them as a story." (Photo of Cathryn in Queenstown, New Zealand)

In Storytelling: Imagination and Faith William Bausch nailed my calling in two sentences: “When a man [sic] comes to you and tells you your own story, you know that your sins are forgiven. And when you are forgiven, you are healed.”

When I began to contemplate sharing stories in the public sphere of blogs, I chose this quote from Carolyn Heilbrun, in Last Gift of Time, to guide me: “Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledged—desires that now seem possible. Women can catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend.”

Though both quotes are gender specific, I re-write them in my mind to include any hearts that vibrate when touched by stories.

A legacy of stories

My calling is to create a legacy of stories. I’ve done that in many ways during my meandering career as teacher, librarian, storyteller, farmer, musician, rancher, consultant, community developer. Now I’m doing it as a writer, primarily through three blogs: Catching Courage, Story Route, and Crossroads.

Stories are the one thing of value I can pass on. Not just my own stories but others that inspire and teach me. I write and tell stories because they have the power to stitch together sorrows, passions, joys, and confusions. I piece them together to lay a quilt of comfort over a wounded world.

In a 1990 interview with Common Boundary magazine, Alice Walker said, “Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.”

And so I write—and occasionally tell—stories. They are my most valuable possessions, my life’s calling. This is where I find meaning, working to create a healing legacy of stories.

“If we look upon our experiences as assets, we must manage to preserve or transfer those assets to other people before we die or they dissolve in the grave with us.” Phyllis Theroux, The Journal Keeper

Calling Dream Kit contest:
You can follow the blog tour on the What’s Your Calling? Facebook Page. Subscribe for a chance to win a Calling Dream Kit including $200 in Amazon.com gift credit to buy supplies you’ll need as you pursue your calling, a DVD and poster of The Calling, and an hour of coaching to help plan your project and the chance to share your calling with the community.

What’s Your Calling? explores notions of “calling” from both religious and secular perspectives, or what people feel most passionate about doing with their lives – and why.

Two of my personal favorites on this wonderful site are:

• Poet Ruth Forman on The Power and Magic of Language, who says: “Have the courage to address those things inside of you that you’re afraid to address. So, for instance, as a writer, have the courage to write about those things that you’re afraid to write about, that you wouldn’t even want to admit to yourself because if you can conquer that in yourself, you can probably conquer everything else that’s going on around you.”
• T.J. Anderson, talented composer who says in Any man or woman in a bathtub can give you a tune, “The reason people doubt is they’re seeking perfection. I sought to be the best I could be at a particular time and am still seeking that.”

Those are good qualities for banks. Given the economic chaos of the last few years, we want to believe our money is safe. So a marketing story that makes us feel safe is probably a good business decision. Somehow I can’t imagine a Canadian bank making a social justice statement with its advertising.

That’s what Argentina’s Banco Provincia does with this ad, and it’s a fascinating cultural reflection. We see a vehicle stop. An older man gets out and walks up to an attractive hairdresser, who is standing outside her shop. He apologizes for mistreating her and tells her he asked the bank for a car loan because that same bank granted her—a transgendered woman—a loan to start her hairdressing business.

Argentina is ahead of tolerant Canada in creating an atmosphere of acceptance for transgendered people. It’s encouraging to know that in 2009 Marcela Romero, an activist who fought successfully for the right to have a sex change, was chosen Argentina’s Woman of the Year.

I don’t think we’ll see an ad like this one on Canadian television this year, but the time is coming nearer when we will.

[Keep reading below the video to see one of the reasons I think such ads in Canada are a long way off.]

A postscript to this story, from a Canadian perspective:

No one will be surprised to note that Royal Bank’s ads don’t mention the compensation it gives its CEO. In 2010 Gordon Nixon received $11 million in direct compensation and a pension top-up of $810,000. Another four RBC officers divided up a pie worth $28.08 million.

That same year Toronto Dominion CEO Ed Clark scooped $11.3 million. Scotia Bank’s Richard Waugh came in third, at $10.7 million. Bank of Montreal’s Bill Downe earned $9.5 million. Scotia Bank’s CEO, Gerry McCaughey made a mere $9.34 million.

The heads of Canada’s Big Five banks earned a total of $51.84 million. Statistics Canada figures always lag behind the current year so the closest I can report is that in 2008 the average income after tax of all families of two or more was $74,600. Singles averaged $31,000.

To put that in context, let’s assume those CEO’s didn’t hire smart accountants, lawyers and financial advisors to shelter most of their income. Instead, let’s assume they paid the full 29% owed by anyone making over $128,800. Ludicrous, I know, but it’s a starting point.

Discounting additional income from those CEO’s wives and any investment income they might have, they had an average after-tax pay of $8.4 million. Divide that by the average family income, and each of them made about 113 times as much as the average Canadian family and more than 270 times the average single.

They can afford to buy the things their marketing tells us are important – houses, cars, vacations. Do they really deserve to make that much more than ordinary folk?

Time for a new story.