To celebrate World Story Telling day, and to find out what Samuel T Coleridge and YouTube have in common, read my latest article, published today on CraftYourContent.com (@CraftContent).
(Eagle eyed readers of the IJLA blog may spot that an earlier version of this article first appeared on here, last year.)
You may have seen this morning that both the Today programme and the BBC News front page, along with many print papers, ran headline pieces on an attempted murder trial. And you could be forgiven for wondering why – because it wasn't real...
The defendant, the victim, and all of the witnesses were characters from The Archers – that national treasure, the long running radio soap airing six days a week, which usually focuses on nothing more stirring than the Flower & Produce Show, milk prices and poaching ethics.
“An everyday story of country folk” may not sound exactly riveting, and you certainly may not expect its fictional events to hit national headlines – but for the last year this 13 minute long nightly radio drama has built a compelling domestic abuse narrative around two central characters. Yesterday culminated in a unique one hour special, where jurors deliberated over an attempted murder charge against Helen Titchener, the terrorised wife.
An courtroom artist's impression of the fictional trial, created for Radio 4 by Julia Quenzler
But more dramatic than the triumphant Not Guilty verdict – greeted with euphoria by Archers fans on Twitter, where #FreeHelen has been trending for months – is the surprising action it has provoked beyond the fictional world of Ambridge.
In February this year, an Archers fan set up a Just Giving page for the ‘real life Helens’, to help listeners donate to the domestic violence charity Refuge. After seven months, the page has raised almost £160,000. That’s a phenomenal amount of money, largely given in increments of £10 and £20, simply as a response to a story.
No one associated with the radio drama has ever asked for a donation. Not once in the entire storyline has mention been made of Refuge, or their reliance on charitable giving to survive. Helen doesn’t even access this form of support to escape her abuser.
Simply put: the insight, compassion and outrage elicited by this story has triggered a spontaneous response from the show’s listeners, to collaboratively provide the best help they can. Nobody thinks Helen Titchener is real, but they are very clear that she represents a real experience for many.
Stories captivate us. We live out the emotions and ideas of the characters. We imagine ourselves in the same situations. We wonder how we could help. We want to act.
If you want to go beyond simple awareness from your audience, tell them a story – and watch them respond.
"I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done."
Susan Orlean, journalist, author and staff writer for The New Yorker
We all do it. Industry leaders down to undergraduate students; creatives, executives, technicians and salespeople. You may even be doing it right now.
When faced with a big project, a lengthy report to read, a complex client conversation… we put it off. No matter how many helpful screening systems we employ (the Freedom app, for example, can disable all of your social media tools for a specified time), it’s human nature to find distractions amidst the call of focused work.
image credit: Quinn Dombrowski
So is procrastination always the thief of time? When the working world first embraced the internet, its perceived impact on employee productivity was overwhelmingly negative. Facebook and other social networking sites were blocked as matter of course, and using your computer for personal chores within working hours was a covert practice at best, and potentially a sackable offence.
As the Internet Century has moved on, so too has our understanding of what worker efficiency looks like, at least in the world of the smart creative. Flexible hours and and the ‘always-on’ reality of working life has changed how we see the division of work and home, now far more integrated than before.
But time-wasting is still time-wasting, right? Not necessarily. Daniel Levitin writes in The Organized Mind about the switch our brains make between the ‘central executive’ — the fully focused prefrontal cortex which is actively engaged in a task — and the daydreaming state when our attention wanders.
Our desire for productivity isn’t always best served by plunging into work. If we confront that complex task head on — what Adam Grant refers to in his recent TED talk as pre-crastination — we miss the opportunities that arise when our brains wander in a contemplative state.
Allowing yourself time to switch between focused attention and day dreaming (and yes, that includes going completely off topic: YouTube surfing, inbox clearing, Words With Friends, a run or walk…*), you can make the difference between pinging an instant comeback to a problematic email, or designing a thoughtful and constructive response; getting your report in on time, or creating something really worthwhile.
Of course if you’ve allowed time to watched the entire season five of Game Of Thrones, eaten your own body weight in pretzels, and run out of tweets — and you’re still struggling to get the words on a page — it may be time to call in some professional help.
* For some truly inspirational work-deferment, watch another procrastination connoisseur… Tim Urban's funny and enlightening TED talk, taking you Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator
“He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
”
In the age of information, how do we choose to communicate? The answer is… in the same way as we have for thousands of years. Humans tell each other stories. The medium we choose may be different: a tweet, blog, email or text – but mankind has always warned, taught and understood themselves through narrative.
In his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future the business writer Daniel Pink explains that the critical skills of the 21st century are those of story tellers: “a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers”. To stand out in a crowded market, you must make an emotional connection with your audience.
Urban myths, cyberspace anecdotes, watercooler gossip: according to evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, social conversation makes up well over half of all human discussion in public places. The explosion of social media in the last ten years is in fact merely representative of what has been happening via word of mouth since humans first spoke at all.
Over the last few days the international community marked first World Storytelling Day, and then World Poetry Day. We celebrate these forms of communication because they are instinctive to us – they create the capacity to remember and to reflect.
Consider the last two or three stories you heard – read to your child at bedtime perhaps, or watched on television? A fairy tale warning of ravenous wolves in the woods; a Scandinavian crime thriller. A story captivates us where simple facts fail. We are gripped by another’s experience, and just as the wedding guest listening to the ancient mariner, we cannot choose but hear.
And there’s a story in everything. Forget the conventional wisdom telling us a news reporter may cover a political piece, or economics, and at the end of the show you’ll have a ‘human interest story’. Was there really any other kind?
So when you next seek to convey technical information to your customers, to share an update on a breakthrough, to celebrate a new product – do it the intuitive way. Tell them a story.