Flyover Festival Reflections: Story Tell / Story Listen
I’ve spent most of my career believing in the power of stories to inspire positive change.
We put it right in the mission of 12 Stars Media, “We tell the stories of interesting characters who inspire communities to make positive changes.”
And I still believe in that.
But…
My brain won’t let me ignore contradictions, or even seemingly opposing ideas, for long. It’s why I started writing Juxtapost to begin with, and a whole day of learning from peers gave me a particularly good one to stew over…
I attended ICology’s Flyover Festival, a communications and culture conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And while there were plenty of practical ideas I scribbled down, I woke up the morning after with that all-too-familiar feeling that my brain hadn’t connected all the dots to a really important realization. It’s the post-conference version of, “Did I forget to close the garage door?”
The Dots…
The first speaker of the day, Jason Anthoine, talked about the enormous amount of information organizations expect employees to consume. Emails. Announcements. Videos. Messages from leadership.
Organizations can easily produce an hour’s worth of information they’d like someone to consume in a day. Then, they do it again the next day… and the next. All the while, employees haven’t even gotten around to most of what hit their inbox on Monday.
The reality is, they might have five minutes to give us (putting myself in the same boat as the employee communications folks here for a bit) because consuming our communications isn’t their job. They have, like, an actual job.
Then, near the end of the day, Ellen Griley talked about trauma-informed leadership and just how much cognitive and emotional load people are carrying around with them every day. Things we might barely notice can require additional processing for someone else. Even the language we use can create unnecessary barriers.
In between, Alan Oram talked about creativity and storytelling.
He offered one of the simplest and best formulas I’ve seen:
LISTEN INTENTLY.
FIND THE STORY.
SHAPE IT CREATIVELY.
GIVE IT BACK IN A FORM THAT HELPS OTHER PEOPLE FEEL SOMETHING.
It’s notable to me now that his formula doesn’t begin with a message or desired outcome.
It begins with listening.
Whose Purpose?
Alan also shared some old interview clips of David Bowie, because… David Bowie.
In one interview, Bowie talks about creativity, “Never play to the gallery.”
He went on to talk about the impulse that makes someone create in the first place — that thing inside yourself that you’re trying to manifest so you can better understand yourself and your place in the world — and the danger of abandoning that in order to fulfill someone else’s expectations.
I thought about how I’ve applied that thinking to my own creativity.
But, at our table we expanded the conversation.
What does that mean inside an organization?
We talk a lot about getting employees connected to the mission. We want them to understand it, believe in it, find purpose in it.
And, again, that sounds unquestionably good.
But every one of those employees walked through the door with a purpose of their own.
How much should we expect them to subordinate that to the collective?
Maybe the opportunity isn’t simply to make people feel more connected to the mission. Maybe it’s to create an organization where people can bring more of their own sense of purpose into it. And if that’s true, we should probably get to know their individual purposes. Which means we need to listen.
That idea kept surfacing throughout the day.
We talked about internal communications and how often its function is understood as communicating down: leadership has information, employees need to receive it, and the communicator’s job is to make that happen effectively.
But communication doesn’t actually work in one direction.
At least, it shouldn’t.
What do employees need?
What are they experiencing?
Who are they trying to become?
What if the communicator’s job isn’t only to help leadership speak more effectively to employees, but to listen well enough to help the whole organization feel heard, too?
Does Everything Need to Change?
And that’s when I started getting an itch that there was a deeper lesson for me.
Because I tell stories for a living. More specifically, I’ve spent a career telling myself that the point of those stories is positive change. That sounds like an unquestionably good thing. Who doesn’t want positive change? But buried somewhere inside the idea of “inspiring change” is an assumption I’m suddenly having a harder time ignoring:
I know where you need to go. Or, I have something I want you to understand, feel or do, and my job as a communicator is to figure out how to move you there. Maybe sometimes that’s exactly what communication needs to do.
But does it always?
Especially right now, when all of us are being asked constantly to change, adapt, improve, respond, process, learn, unlearn and keep up with whatever happened while we were busy processing the thing that happened five minutes ago.
Does every story need to change us?
Or could a story sometimes support who we already are?
Those questions had me tracing my steps through a twenty year career.
How’d I get here?
Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t unusual for us to show up with cameras to interview someone I had never spoken to before.
We had questions. They had answers.
Roll camera.
Unsurprisingly, the interviews often reflected that.
Over the years, our process changed for the better. We started having pre-interview phone calls and meetings. We spend time with people before putting them under lights and pointing a camera at them. We build rapport. We ask questions. We learn how they talk about their own experiences. We discover which parts of the story matter to them before deciding which parts should matter to us.
The interviews got better. So did the stories. And the impact.
So, naturally, that became the justification for doing it: we listen first because it makes us better storytellers.
In fact, I practically made it a catchphrase over the past few years, saying, “If you want to story tell, you have to story listen.”
An actual title slide for a whole presentation I’ve given on the subject of listening to tell better stories.
But, this morning I find myself wondering whether I’ve been inching closer and closer to a paradigm shift in that approach.
What if listening isn’t just what we need to do so we can tell a better story?
What if listening is the point?
We tend to think about the value of storytelling in terms of what eventually gets made. The film. The video. The story. The thing an audience sees and, if we’ve done our jobs well, feels something because of. But maybe some of the value happens before any of that. Maybe someone being heard matters even more.
I don’t know if this means we need to rewrite the 12 Stars Media mission statement. I’m certainly not ready to abandon positive change. But, I am starting to question where we expect that change to begin.
Maybe it doesn’t always begin with figuring out what we need to tell everyone.
Maybe sometimes it begins by hearing what someone else is already saying.
Which brings me back to Flyover Festival.
Wait, why Sioux Falls?
During the conference, my friend Chuck Gose, Founder of ICology and Flyover Festival organizer, told us how the whole thing started.
He was at another event when a fellow attendee who happened to be from Sioux Falls asked a pretty simple question:
“Could someone host something like this in Sioux Falls? Nobody ever comes to Sioux Falls.”
Chuck listened.
And yesterday, I sat in a room in Sioux Falls with dozens of really cool people at the fourth annual and second consecutively sold out Flyover Festival that exists because someone listened. Then I spent the day listening. And all along the way, I started slowly putting together the pieces to a pretty awesome epiphany:
Maybe listening isn’t just the path we take to arrive at the best story. Maybe listening is the point.
