By J. Dean Spence
While in graduate school, as I conducted research on organizational storytelling, I came across the work of various luminaries on the subject. Luminaries like Paul Smith. Smith is a public speaker, business storytelling consultant, former Procter & Gamble executive, and regular contributor to such publications as The Wall Street Journal and Forbes.
I have read two useful books written by Smith: Lead with a Story and Sell with a Story. But I have a problem with Smith.
In Sell with a Story, he outlines what he calls “Six attributes of a story”: a time indicator; a place indicator; a main character; an obstacle (usually a villain); the main character’s goal; and events. Smith suggests that if a story doesn’t have these attributes, it ain’t a story.
Really?
It’s clear that Smith’s idea of story is that typical of what Joseph Campbell called “the hero quest”—typical of the Western worldview. But as Jason B. Ohler reminds us in Digital Storytelling in the Classroom, “quest stories are not the only kind of stories in existence, and thus…Joseph Campbell’s outlook [isn’t] always relevant and can be limiting and unintentionally prejudicial.”
Quest stories are not even the only stories found in the West.
Ohler contrasts quest stories to stories with antiheroes, antiplots, and stream of consciousness within the Western tradition. Consider the masterpiece Waiting for Godot. Does it have all of the attributes that Smith lists?
Organizational storytelling is not just about a hero’s quest. Organizational storytelling is not just about words on a page or computer screen. A business tell a story through, for example, its interior design.
Consider Hooters. When you walk into a Hooters restaurant you know you’re not walking into a five star restaurant. The interior design immediately tells you this.
I recently walked into the Hooters on Adelaide Street in Toronto, walked into an open and bright space. Above me there was exposed ductwork. The walls were either polished, light wood or beige brick. Hung on the walls were pictures of women in bikinis, a framed Wendell Clark jersey, and shiny placards with corny jokes printed on them (one read: “Hooters is the home of fresh servers, spicy beer, and pretty wings.” Do you see what they did there?). Add to the décor a few trophies, licence plates, over ten televisions turned to sports channels, seats with soft orange padding, and the omnipresent Hooters owl.
As the tagline boasts, it’s all “Delightfully tacky…” It tells the story of comfort, fun, relaxation and more. Written on the walls is male-bonding and good times. It’s casual, trashy “…yet refined.” It is your man’s man “man-cave”, complete with cold beer, the big game, and gorgeous waitresses in skimpy uniforms.
In fact, one could argue that the experience of going to a Hooters is a sojourn into another archetypal type of story that Smith ignores: the neverending story. When you are at Hooters you absorb the story that décor narrates and you don’t want it to end. And when you come back the next time, the story picks right up where it left off: Delightfully tacky, yet refined.
Stories, even business stories, are not only about a hero’s quest. Storytelling, including business stories, is an all-encompassing force that cannot be pigeonholed into six arbitrary attributes. It breaks the mold. It lives and breathes. It surprises just when it seems familiar. It begins and it ends. It does not end. Storytelling is life.