Speaker and author Terry Paulson describes the impact of stories when making a presentation, and it can be equally true when trying to influence others:

"Never underestimate the value of stories & humor in delivering and organizing your speech. People forget facts and graphs; they remember and retell memorable stories and anecdotes..."

 

Bob Dicman of First Voice Consulting defines a story as:  

"A fact with emotion wrapped around it, which causes some action to occur which produces a change. Because it's a fact plus an emotion, it is memorable."  

 

But just because it's a story doesn't automatically make it memorable, nor is it guaranteed to influence you.  A story that aims to influence is trying to change people's minds by helping people answer these questions:
Will it be worth it?  Can I do it? As the folks from Vital Smarts write in their book Influencer, what you're trying to do is: "present a plausible, touching, and memorable flow of cause and effect that can alter people's view of the consequences of various actions or beliefs."

Sounds like a tall order, doesn't it?  What if you don't think of yourself as a master story teller?  There is hope!

  

Bob Dicman (First Voice) has developed a very helpful formula for creating a compelling story, with the following elements:

 

Passion:  Does the story contain sufficient passion to engage the emotions of its target audience?

 

Hero:  Does the story provide a clearly defined point of view that the audience can relate to?

Action: Are the obstacles that confront the hero of the story (and by extension, the audience) expressed clearly so that the actions needed to overcome those obstacles are understood and the challenge of taking such actions fully accepted?

Awareness:  What new insight does your story bring to your audience?  What have you learned which allows the transformation to occur?

Transformation:  Does the story have the power to change to life of the audience in a meaningful way, and is that transformation positive?

By combining these elements, you can create a story that has the power to touch hearts and change minds. 

 

Here's an extension of the exercise for Strategies 1 and 2:

 Identify an initiative that you are involved with in a leadership role.  You don't have to be the primary leader but you do need to be able to have influence.  Answer the questions below.

Identify the behaviors you want to influence:

• What are the results you want to achieve?  State your desired results in one sentence.
• What are the measures you'll use to track your progress?
• Who are the people you depend on to make this successful?
• What are their few vital behaviors that will have the greatest impact on your desired results?

Identify your own interests, values and priorities:

• What are your own interests and values associated with this initiative?

Identify the interests, values and priorities of the person you are trying to influence:

• Identify one person whose support you really need for this to succeed
• What are their interests, values, and priorities?  What unspoken rules are relevant and meaningful for that person? 

 Closing the gap:

• Evaluate how interests and values compare. 
• Without compromising your own interests, values and priorities, frame your idea with the other person's interests and values in mind.

Using the 5 elements for creating a compelling story (see Strategy 3), what story can you tell that illustrates the need for the change in a compelling way?

Let's say you've identified the behaviors you want to influence (Strategy 1), understood the values and motivations of the person you're trying to influence (Strategy 2) and told a powerful story that was intended to touch minds and hearts (Strategy 3).  Still no results.  Now it's time to try Strategy 4: Instead of trying to convince people with arguments, create experiences to help people see what must change and why.  No matter how well crafted a story is, nothing beats personal experience to illustrate your point.

 Let's try an exercise:  Make a list of one behavior you would like to influence in someone in your life.  It can be your boss, a co-worker, your significant other, or one of your children.  Be as specific as possible. Now think of at least 5 experiences that are consistent with that person's values and motivations which might move that person closer to embracing the change.  Although I suppose the experiences could be negative-I'm thinking of some of the experiences used to discourage drunken driving or get people to stop smoking-I personally favor the positive approach.  Pick one of the experiences to try out and see what you learn.  

 Of course you can't always tell how the other person will react to the experience!  Years ago, I tried to influence my husband to take me out dancing by asking for ballroom dancing lessons for both of us as a birthday gift.  He dutifully gave me the lessons and reluctantly participated in 15 weeks of lessons.  We were scheduled to take a cruise shortly after graduation and I had visions of us waltzing around the ballroom floor dressed in our finest evening wear.  Unfortunately the experience of the dance lessons was so aversive to him that not only did we not dance during the cruise, but we have scarcely danced again in the 18 years since we took the lessons.  Perhaps if I had paid more attention to whether the experience was consistent with my husband's values and motivation I might had had greater influence.  

 Here are several examples where experience did pay off:

 One of my clients was trying to influence her customers to register products they were using with her company in order to be able to provide technical support to these customers.  Repeated attempts to make a strong argument in favor of registering the products was only modestly successful.  My client and her team then tried giving the customers the experience of the kind of technical support that they would get once they registered their products.  Significant improvement in response.

I was trying to influence a colleague to collaborate with me without her feeling like she needed to have each of her ideas credited in the materials we were working on together.  I made what I considered to be compelling arguments about the negative impact that was having on my motivation to collaborate.  She still was not completely sold.  Almost coincidentally, we then began sharing ideas about improving some aspect of what we were working on and the ideas and the enthusiasm flowed.  She commented on what great synergy we had and how much she enjoyed our collaboration with me.  I agreed that it was a better result than either of us could have come up with on our own, and reiterated my desire to feel comfortable with that kind of collaboration without always worrying about who got credit.  As a result, we came up with a mutually agreeable approach to handling the matter of credit for our ideas.

A client was struggling with giving challenging performance feedback to a subordinate.  He found it very stressful to say anything that he considered critical and instead tended to sugarcoat his feedback.  Instead of telling him what to do, I spontaneously asked him to role play how he would normally have such a conversation.  I then gave him some feedback on his delivery. The second time we did the role play, his delivery improved 100%, he was much less anxious, and he has reported that he is now able to give challenging performance feedback without breaking a sweat.