Author: Nailia Tasseel

This week’s Friday story comes from the 2003 documentary film Touching the Void, which tells the story of two British mountaineers who experience disaster on the desolate face of a Peruvian peak.

Joe Simpson and Simon Yates were descending the Siula Grande after a successful trip to the summit, when, as a storm was brewing, Joe fell and severely broke his leg. There was no chance a rescue team could be summoned. So the two tied a rope between them, and Simon slowly lowered Joe down the face of the mountain.

But after they got started, the ground gave way beneath Joe. Simon, higher up the peak, had no idea that his friend was hanging helplessly from over the side of a cliff.

Simon was left with no real choice: it was either perish on the side of the mountain, be pulled over the cliff along with Joe, or cut the rope. So he cut the rope.

Joe survived the fall, but ended up deep in a crevasse from which he’d never be able to climb out. Simon hadn’t a clue where Joe had ended up, and assumed he was dead. There was no one else around.

This is where Joe’s courage and understanding of his situation culminated in an astoundingly courageous decision. 

“Short of dying on the ledge”, he says, “my only choice was to lower myself deeper into the crevasse.

“You’ve got to make decisions, you’ve got to keep making decisions – even if they’re wrong decisions. If you don’t make decisions, you’re stuffed”.

In such a situation, all the inner voices would be saying to wait for help, to avoid making a bad situation worse. But here, he had nothing to lose. All was just about already lost.

“I really struggled to make that decision. I was so scared of going deeper. The other option was just to sit there, blindly hoping it might get better, and I just knew it wasn’t going to get better”.

He deliberately avoided tying a knot in the end of the rope. If there was nothing down there, no ground he could reach, he decided to fall rather than hang there.

Of course, at this point in the story, we know it worked out – otherwise there’d be no story. 80 feet down, Joe finds the bottom of the crevasse, as well as a corridor of light coming from one side, a perfect pathway out.

What’s amazing is not so much that he survived, but the counterintuitive decisions that allowed him to.

Take a look at the full clip – and be sure to rent the film and watch it in full.

In one of these many books on storytelling and communication that come across my desk, I recently noticed a piece on 'knowing your audience'. It referred to some research that was done by three psychologists called Rowe, Boulgarides and Mason on how different people tend to make decisions. They found that people tend to fall into one of four camps, depending on whether they had a high or low tolerance to ambiguity, and whether they were more socially or task focused. Of course, they gave these camps names…

Camp 1: Conceptual – people who had a high tolerance of ambiguity and were socially focused. These people like the 'big picture', conceptual ideas, visions etc. They are more likely to engage in the big ideas within business narratives, and are not so interested in the details.

Camp 2: Analytical – they also can tolerate ambiguity, but tend to be more task focused. These people like to analyse information or be presented with conclusions drawn from analysis. They like to see narratives supported by key facts, figures and other evidence to support the narrative’s emotional and intuitive allure.

Camp 3: Directive – people who have a low tolerance of ambiguity and are more task focused. The opposite of Conceptuals, these people are just looking for clear direction, and will place their energy determining how to make it happen. I suspect this camp respond well to the 'elevator story'. They also require a clear framework of objectives, milestones and clarity of tasks within a narrative.

Camp 4: Behavioural – they also have a low tolerance of ambiguity and are more socially focused. Like Directives, they are looking for clarity but they see the world through a human, experiential lens. For this group the illustrative anecdote is what brings to the narrative to life.

I’ve found it useful to keep these categories in mind when working with executives. Very often a boardroom – and whole organisations – will be filled with many different kinds of thinkers, each of whom we need to find ways to connect with. In coaching leaders, it is useful to recognise all four styles and encourage them to present their story in a way that appeals all round.

The executives in charge of Tabasco for the McIlhenny Company in Louisiana were pondering how to increase sales of their famous product. They called a meeting of their top brains from sales, marketing, product development, and advertising, and even some taste scientists and consumer psychologists. Flip charts were used up with diagrams, projections, and ideas for ads and promotional offers. “We need to turn Tabasco into a lifestyle brand”, said one.

Coffee break came around, and the local lad who delivered it to the meeting room asked what they were doing. Being a friendly kind of company, they explained exactly what they were there to do, and he immediately said that he knew how to increase sales of Tabasco, and that it was obvious. With a smile, the VP asked him what idea this was.

“Simple”, said the coffee boy. “Increase the size of the hole”.  

They did just that, and sales jumped for the first time in a decade.

Welcome to a new weekly fixture from The Storytellers Blog: Friday Stories. These will generally be short stories or anecdotes drawn from all kinds of places – from our own experiences with clients to classic bits of folklore.

This week, we’ll begin, fittingly, if not overly self-referentially, with a story about storytelling that came through BBC Radio 4 last weekend.

Philippa Perry tells the story of a social worker and three children who, after years of movement and instability, had finally been placed with a foster family that was working out exceptionally well, and the foster parents wanted to adopt the children permanently.

Delivering the good news, the social worker told them, “'You will not be split up. You are going to stay with Leslie and Sam. We are going to find local schools for you all and start the adoption process.'”

But the children gave her a blank look. She asked them to repeat back to her what she had said.

“'We will be split up. We can’t stay with Leslie and Sam. There aren’t any schools for us and no one will adopt us.'”

“What happens”, Perry asks us, “when we don’t know about happy endings?”

Eventually, Perry says, the correct message got through, and the children sobbed with joy. The children’s difficulty in processing the information given to them stemmed from their inability to place the information within the context of a narrative they had heard before. Their own happy ending was a brand new story, and it took time, and repetition, to sink in.

As humans, she says, “Stories formed us, and continue to do so. We are our stories.”

What are the plots, the dynamics, the characters that continue to fill our understanding of our own experiences? It’s not an easy question to answer, either for ourselves personally or more broadly, for businesses and institutions, as they decipher and reshape the stories that live within them.

“Be careful of the stories you repeatedly expose yourself to”, she warns, because stories absolutely affect our perception of reality.

It’s well worth a listen.

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We all took a sigh of relief yesterday as it was announced that the second week of planned London Underground strikes had been called off, saving us more travel chaos and disruption.

The threat of continued industrial action begs the question as to how Transport for London (TfL) has presented the proposed changes to its workers and the union. They've given us the rational side of the argument: savings of £50 million a year, reduced fares, more visible staff at stations to help customers, and all without involuntary redundancies. The union, RMT, has leapt into the rational counter argument of the potential impact of automisation: the loss of 950 jobs, unhappy customers who need help from people rather than machines, poorer service and compromised safety.

On the surface, both sides are presenting a rational argument of risks vs. benefits: a modernised, efficient service at the possible expense of customer service and jobs. But the union is also playing to the emotional arguments, which are likely to override the rational ones. Job cuts, poor service, unhappy customers, lack of safety – a dreary picture indeed. Who'd be in favour of that?

What is missing from TfL is a compelling vision of a modern, cutting-edge Underground, presented in a way that reminds people of what a fabulous transport system London has and why they should be proud of it. The threat of job cuts and risk to service and safety would be greatly diluted if the whole future scenario could be painted as a truly inspiring picture of success. They could be saying, for example, “we want to be recognised as the capital city in Europe with the safest and most efficient underground transport system”.

They could remind tube employees and the general public alike of the reasons to be so proud of a system that has been around since the 19th century and travels 43 million miles a year. It facilitates 1.2 billion passenger trips annually, keeping London’s workers and tourists moving. Nevertheless, fares are high, and as anyone who rides to work between 8:15 and 8:45am can tell you, the system is under stress. It’s tough to argue that some kind of modernisation isn’t necessary.

It may not be a silver bullet, but creating a real sense of pride, purpose and an inspiring vision will make the clunkiness of the operational changes required to get there more palatable. Dare I say, even necessary.

It was just over a week ago that David Moyes was unceremoniously dismissed from his post as the manager of Manchester United FC. He’d endured a rough ride at the helm of a club that had never finished a season in worse than third place since the early 90s. Fans, players, the media were, perhaps excessively, obsessed with the club’s travails simply because it was doing something no one could remember them ever doing: losing.

It’s hard to say what exactly went wrong, but the weekend following Moyes’s departure saw United beat Norwich City by a resounding score of 4 to nil. The performance could have been seen as a protest on the part of the players to the notion that the club had irrevocably lost its power.

Or the victory could be seen as a players’ tribute to a manager whose sacking irked many who thought the dismissal tarnished United’s reputation as much as the match results did (the announcement was made via Twitter).

As the Mail on Sunday’s Patrick Collins put it yesterday on the Today programme, “Man United stands for things. It’s always had relatively decent values in fairly difficult world. People feel sorry for Moyes and the way he was mistreated.”

Perhaps Moyes simply wasn’t up to the job, which seems all the more evident given the success attributed to his predecessor, the almost mythical figure of Sir Alex Ferguson. But it begs the question of whether Moyes’s failure to match Ferguson’s success was in the cards from the very beginning. Success can cast a long shadow, particularly if that success is down to the leadership of just one person.

There are certainly cases of business that have survived, and thrived, upon the departure of remarkable leaders. Apple, whose share price has risen more than 50 percent since Jobs's death, is one example. Lou Gerstner, who shifted IBM from a cumbersome mainframe computer manufacturer to an enduringly successful IT services company, is another.

But, punctuated by Moyes's woes, United's success under Ferguson highlights a kind of paradox of success. As this week's Economist points out, there are similar questions surrounding Berkshire Hathaway's succession plans. Could anyone really succeed Warren Buffett's astounding and unrivaled success after he retires on May 3? Buffett and Ferguson each presided over long, turmoil-transcending periods of excellence in their respective fields. If indeed Berkshire suffers a fate similar to United's, the downfall of the two great leaders would both highlight their own exceptional leadership as well as reveal a fatal, final flaw – their failure to give life to an institution larger and stronger than themselves.

Perhaps we should withhold the final evaluation of apparently great leaders until after they have moved on. Surely the ability to build enduring and dynamic institutions – replete with compelling and living stories of their history, their values and where they are going – should be an important criterion for successful leadership.

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