Quick Take: What’s your story?
The power to innovate and create change lies in our ability to share stories that move and motivate; are you harnessing the power of storytelling to deliver your message?
Stories pack a punch
I’m in Miami for TWIN IMPACT 2022. We’ve just finished, and I’m writing to share what I learned, focusing on the insights that will help my work on B2B innovation and the future of distribution. Every TWIN gathering features a fantastic array of world-class innovators and artists. Click here and scroll down for this year’s schedule and speakers. In this edition, I offer what I learned about the power of storytelling for creating innovations and launching movements. In my next newsletter, I will offer five breakthrough ideas for radically reshaping distribution. Please come back then, but read below now. I’d love your feedback.
At TWIN, I learned that storytelling is wired in our DNA. As humans, our ability to share essential knowledge in the form of stories helped us live in the wild, create art through the ages, and build on life lessons to endlessly advance our societies and economies. We have discovered that data, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning can deliver exponential productivity gains and lifesaving outcomes in the digital age. But innovation is fired through stories. Stories are how we embrace unsolved problems and potential futures. Stories tug on our empathy, issue a call to action, gather people, and justify commitment. Stories generate ideas that lead to innovations and are the vehicle through which innovators create influence. Innovation cannot happen without stories.
I am working with several industry associations on projects that are different in objective but alike in method. With the National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED), I am helping to imagine doing business in a connected world, with implications for go-to-market strategies and monitoring markets for signs of change. My work with the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) is about constructing a distribution-centric innovation process rooted in the cause of helping customers innovate their businesses. Other associations are on a similar path.
My collaboration with NAW and NAED is designed to avoid writing reports or mimicking best practices. Instead, we nurture a community of curious, thoughtful, and driven members and engage them to explore for insights and answers. Working this way furthers professional development and personal growth, and develops a sustainable core to address emerging issues and opportunities for years to come.
As individuals and teams come together, we will reach out to startups, experts, high-performing leaders, and more to gather insights and practices aligned with each project’s purpose. We will apply them to real-world distribution scenarios and look for ideas, processes, synergies, and plans. Each team’s work is the project’s product, and we will tell stories to share what we do through blogs, newsletters, tweets, videos, live chats, and other formats across a range of social media platforms.
We will take care to notice the people who pay attention to our stories and return to them repeatedly. As we find innovation enthusiasts, we will offer the opportunity to step up, lean in, and take the initiative. We will give our budding community a name and provide a place to gather. Just as storytelling has contributed to the formation of every organization, institution, and society, so will storytelling power our innovation community to shape the future of distribution.
At a TWIN impact workshop led by master storytellers Chris Gebhardt and Elliot Kotek, and through questions and experiences offered by my fellow TWINians, I identified many storytelling principles to kickstart my projects. We will learn as we go, get better and better at storytelling, and share our progress. A few of the best storytelling essentials include:
Ideas + empathy = impact. Telling stories about shiny features and benefits alone will not yield progress. Stories must also tell how outcomes address human conditions with emotion to create empathy. Ideas and empathy go together. One without the other lacks impact.
Hearts, heads, and hands. Stories must offer an emotional context. By doing so, audiences pay attention, think, consider implications, offer help, and take action. Winning hearts and minds comes first. Movement follows.
Internal, external, and eternal. Make sure your storytelling team finds a common cause with the project and personal purpose. Then gain alignment with external partners, collaborators, and stakeholders. Eternals aim for a powerful and lasting impact and are achieved through authenticity, accountability, transparency, and more.
Stories as tools for your ecosystem. Stories may be packaged and provided as tools for customers, suppliers, vendors, and partners to use in their work. As your stories help your stakeholders, you earn points. And as the story becomes understood, it strengthens relationships and encourages collaboration.
Change = from here to there. Meet your audience where they are, living their lives and doing their work and striving for what matters to them. With this delivered, stories may offer an envisioned future to motivate change and create movement from today to tomorrow, from where customers are to where you want to take them.
Your take?
Every B2B innovator should CRAVE stories because stories build Culture, Resiliency, Agility, Vision, and Engagement. Where did you learn to tell stories? How do you tell them? Can you offer advice? Please share your comments below or reach me at mark.dancer@n4bi.com.