High School Graduation Confidential: Lack of Stories Speaks Volumes
In the 1920s a young woman moved to an isolated North Carolina town in part to oversee construction of a church. When she suggested that it be built out of stones from a nearby river, the locals laughed. It wasn’t possible to build buildings out of stone, they said. Their ancestors had done so (in Europe); they had forgotten. Jane Jacobs tells this story in Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
Unsophisticated villagers, huh? Yesterday I went to a high school graduation. A private high school in Los Angeles. There were six speakers: two adults, the school’s headmaster and a history teacher, and four students. Here’s what was so strange: No one told any stories. (One of the students told the beginning of a story.) The headmaster speaks at every graduation. The history teacher has given hundreds of lectures. Neither of them, apparently, knew to tell a few stories in that situation. No wonder the students didn’t know. Long ago, before cheap books, I’m sure everyone knew this basic point about public speaking. Now it’s as if no one knows it. What a vast forgetting!
I was surprised, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Made to Stick sort of says the same thing. One of the authors, a Stanford professor, asked his students to rate a bunch of short talks. Their ratings had no correlation with how memorable the talks were. In other words, the students had no idea what made a talk memorable. They thought a good talk meant you told a joke. What actually made talks memorable were stories, the research showed.
Even Edward Tufte, a presentation expert, seems to not understand this. In his complaints about PowerPoint, he doesn’t tell any stories, doesn’t say anything about PowerPoint’s lack of encouragement of stories, and doesn’t say that students should be taught to tell stories (preferably by example).
I’m giving a talk next week. It’s going to be one story after another, which is not what I would have said before that graduation.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Made to Stick is a great book, yes. Thanks for the reminder!
May 30th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
The school wasn’t Buckley, was it?
May 31st, 2008 at 3:13 am
It wasn’t Buckley.
May 31st, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Not everyone has forgotten: Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software addresses exactly this point in his Introduction to the Best Software Writing. It’s not in the context of graduations, obviously, but in it he makes a similar point.
Incidentally, I bought the book and keep meaning to write about it on The Story’s Story, as the essays are a) interesting, b) tell stories and c) offer a rich load of metaphors for other fields of endeavor. And if he manages to produce another volume, I’ll be sure to read that too — not because I’m particularly interested in software, but because the pieces are so compelling. And why are they compelling? Most tell stories, as you say.
June 1st, 2008 at 1:43 pm
[...] Why public speakers are usually so bad? Posted on June 1, 2008 by bryan They don’t know how how to tell stories. [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I have come to the conclusion that we are evolutionarily hard-wired for understanding the world through stories.
I think NNT wrote about this in The Black Swan as well.
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Steve Jobs gave a highly non-traditional commencement speech at Stanford—the entire speech consists of just three stories (YouTube , text ) .
Edward Tufte’s background is in statistics, which is not usually associated with effective storytelling. You might be interested in John Allen Paulos’s thoughts on this in Chapter 1, “Between Stories and Statistics†of his book Once Upon a Number (1998).
@ Varangy: But in The Black Swan, Taleb says we may have to denarrate in order to rise above the “animal form of lifeâ€.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Regarding PowerPoint, Cliff Atkinson has written a book about using PowerPoint.
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Bullet-Points-PowerPoint®-Presentations/dp/0735623872/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212559939&sr=8-1
“He guides you, step by step, as you discover how to combine the tenets of classic storytelling with the power of projected media to create a rich, engaging experience.”
June 4th, 2008 at 9:21 am
@Nansen
Exactly. The point that Taleb is making is that we are hard-wired for storytelling or rather, interpreting the world through stories. And to employ as unbiased reason in order to make truly rational decisions , one has separate our innnate desire for the narrative explanation i.e. don’t get fooled by randomness.
June 26th, 2009 at 7:24 am
[...] Krafcik repeated an old Jay Leno joke: “How do you double the value of a Hyundai? Half-fill the gas tank.” So he had a great story to tell, the return from ignominy, but curiously he barely told it. Probably this was because he was working at Ford at the time. I have no great interest in cars, I’m not particularly interested in why one company does better than another, yet I was entranced. I came away thinking that most of what I’d heard about public speaking was wrong — most of the stuff in Made to Stick, for example. Sure, the advice to tell a story — and most speakers don’t even understand that — is right. Krafcik did tell a story. But that’s the easy part. I think everyone understands what a story is. The harder part is convey emotion. Carl Willat has said to me that in movies, that’s all that matters. Absolutely, and I think what’s he saying applies to talks as well. Of course an academic talk must have content. But the practical lesson for me is that when planning a talk I should pick something I care a lot about and in the talk do my best to convey how I feel. That’s all. Don’t worry about telling a joke, don’t worry about slick visuals, don’t try to impress them. I plan to show Krafcik’s talk to graduate students (in psychology) because it makes a point I doubt they’ve heard: It’s fine if it’s other people’s work that you feel strongly about. Krafcik isn’t the head of Hyundai. He had nothing to do with their long comeback. But he’s proud of his company — and he conveyed that in spades, and that was enough. Suppose you do research on X. You’re giving a talk about it — perhaps a job talk. Maybe your research is mediocre. But you think research on X is incredibly important. Fine — just make that clear. Everyone in the audience will like you for being able to appreciate the work of others, that’s so rare. When you point them to other work that is great, you’re helping them. Suppose you’re teaching a class. Find the parts of the subject that you feel strongly about. Do your best to convey how strongly you feel. Better positive than negative but negative works. (Ask Nassim Taleb.) Avoid the parts you don’t feel strongly about. [...]