Storytelling: The Digital Hero

Why is storytelling so tremendously effective for digital leaders? Good stories make an impression upon peer groups, they inform without being intellectually demanding, they are easy to understand, inspire strong feelings, keep interest alive and leave an indelible mark on our memories. People can recall a digital leader and his story quickly when they face a decision, such as whether they should work together with him, whether they should invest money or write an article about him.[2] Who doesn’t like to hear it: the story about the company’s start-up in the garage all the way to its arrival on Wall Street? Stories about a world in which people exchange videos, audio files and important tips? Digital leaders tell us about how hard they work on data security, which challenges they face and how they overcome them.[3]

The Samwer brothers Alexander, Marc and Oliver tell a tremendously exciting success story. In 1999 and with three friends, they founded the Internet auction house alando.de based on the model of the American company eBay. Only six months later, they sold their company to eBay for 43 million dollars. In August of 2000, they founded the ring tone seller Jamba with business partners Debitel and the Metro subsidiaries Media Markt and Saturn. Using ring tone melodies, the brothers demonstrated how Europe’s largest supplier of ring tones and mobile phone applications could be established. Following sharp criticism, they sold the company to the American corporation VeriSign for 273 million dollars in 2004. Since early 2006, the Samwer brothers are now active as venture capitalists for Internet and mobile start-ups. Their European Founders Fund’s investments include the game portal bigpoint.com, the photo service provider myphotobook.de, the student network studiVZ.net, the matchmaking service eDarling, and the media exchange platform hitflip.de. managermagazin estimates the three brothers‘ wealth to be 350 million Euro.

Stories connect at the brain’s fundamental principles: its intake, processing and storing of information. In other words, storytelling is communication made perfect for the brain. Neuroscientist Werner Fuchs explained in a lecture, „Processing, storing and passing on information in the form of stories is one of evolution’s strokes of genius. Because only in this way can our brain, with its more than 100 billion nerve cells, connect patterns that enable us to make predictions, thus serving the purpose of reproduction, adaptation and survival.“^[4]

Above and beyond the mere facts, a digital leader tells her peer groups about what is important to her, what guides her thinking and action. She also tells them what expectations she has of them and what reward she is offering them for supporting her in her mission to shape a successful digital future. Stories about the successful digital hero inspire and unleash energy that can be used to support her.

Stories, however, are not chitchat, spin or tall tales. On the basis of fact, the digital leader shows us what it is he stands for and his vision – for example, the vision of a world in which the elderly use digital technology to improve their quality of life at home.

The payoff from storytelling is that the important internal and external peer groups have a clear, attractive mental picture of the digital leader. Due to the positive nature of this mental picture, their behaviour toward the leader is more positive than in the past. Employees want to be part of the common story and can identify themselves more closely with the leader and his objectives, live out his values and externalise them in all encounters – from the switchboard to the website, whether at a trade fair or in the field. Investors want to partake of the success stories and profit from them. Journalists report on those leaders who can offer the most interesting stories.

In light of this knowledge, it is all the more astonishing that the telling of stories was not mentioned as a factor for success in a study by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research of 1,853 personnel officers in German companies.[5] On the other hand, aspects such as „trust in employee autonomy“ and „practicing a family-friendly and equal-opportunity personnel policy“ were mentioned – topics exceptionally suitable for storytelling.

Systematic and Targeted Storytelling

Storytelling in digital leadership means conveying facts in a targeted, systematically planned and long-term manner in the form of stories.[6] Stories enable a digital leader to make important content more comprehensible in order to support sustainably the listener’s learning and thinking, to spread ideas, to promote intellectual participation and thus bring a new quality to communications.[7] What is her intention – does she want to give her customers more security, does she want to enable them to discover something new, or does she want to improve their performance? What obstacles are in her way? Is it her competition? Does the product lack quality? Are there conflicts with customers? Or do the investors still have to be convinced? How will she accomplish the task in spite of this? How will she reward others? Andrew Mason of Groupon tells us how he helps people to save money with discount offers.

The storytelling technique has three components: what the digital leader tells (plot), how he tells it (portrayal), and to what end (effect):^[8]

• What: The digital leader uses the plot and the persons involved in it to explain how he uniquely satisfies the motives of his peer groups.
• How: Stories are considered and composed based on a model. The two most important requirements are that the events have a common temporal and substantive context. Simoudis writes, „We understand the world by connecting events around us causally and sorting them chronologically. This includes dividing time into individual episodes consisting of a beginning, middle, and an end. Human life itself is also subject to this division of time, as are the many episodes of which it consists. Not a single moment of our lives is without context – we have integrated it chronologically as well as causally and purposefully into our life’s story.“[9]
• To what end: On the one hand, the objective of storytelling is to make the digital leader known to important peer groups and keep him present in their minds so that he is remembered spontaneously when decisions are made. On the other hand, stories are conducive to creating clear, unique and attractive mental pictures of a leader and to developing this image systematically and for the long term.^[10] This mental picture means that people recognise a leader quickly and clearly distinguish him from and prefer him to others.

Thus, storytelling tells meaningful stories about a digital leader in a particular way in order to have a targeted effect on important peer groups and to win them over for the leader’s objectives.

Core Elements of Stories

Studies conducted in various cultures show that at all times and in all locations, stories have very similar structures. There appears to be a set of rules, a universal grammar for the composition of stories.^[11] The digital leader can use this to address peer groups worldwide. First and foremost, stories consist of actors and an action that takes place at a specific time at a specific place.

Actors

At the heart of a digital leader’s storytelling are stories she tells about important people: research scientists who develop innovative products and new kinds of digital services for her, employees in production and quality assurance who work for the products‘ extraordinary quality. She can tell stories about her employees and their affinity for their customers, about competitors, as well as protagonists outside her company who support her, such as international experts.

At the heart of her stories are the main characters: „They purposefully promote the action, grow over the course of it and engage the reader’s feelings. As protagonists, they inspire sympathy, curiosity and interest, as antagonists antipathy, even hate, frequently pity and a strange kind of fascination.“[12]

Actions

What is it about? What is the substance of the digital leader’s story? What happens to the characters in his stories? Far too often, strategies are mere catchwords that are never lived out authentically. In contrast, a digital leader uses his stories to tell others about people and their actions in order to achieve an objective. They show what his peer groups might like and even imitate.

The original form for actions has been the same since time immemorial.^[13] It seems to have its roots in the biological past of our feeding process, essential for survival: awareness of the need, departure from base camp, discovery of the right place, battle for food, success, return. A model emerged from this original form, which even today, consumers still know intuitively, have stored deep inside, and which a digital leader can use:

• The trigger for action is a deficit, in the health of her customers, for example (security motive), in their motivation to discover (stimulation) or their performance (dominance motive).
• The digital hero wants to change this and heads off. Her storytelling describes how she wants to fix the deficit and improve her customers‘ wellbeing, such as with the search for new medicines or digital services.
• The digital hero is put to the test, and as a reward, receives additional support, such as a helper. The search for experts turns out to be difficult, but in the end, she finds the right specialist after all.
• The digital hero arrives at the sought place and meets her adversary there: her greatest competitor on the pharmaceutical market.
• She defeats her opponent and fixes the deficit. Her company carves out a good competitive position for itself and is successful on the international pharmaceutical market.
• The hero is rewarded for her deeds. The medicine is successful and cures diseases, the digital services are important for the patients – and the shareholders reward her for this.

It becomes clear that stories are structured narratives. The elements of the plot are ordered with reference to time and content.^[14] Stories are not mere actions stringed together; instead, the digital leader puts actions and events in relation to each other.

The plot is particularly activating if their topic is a conflict of some kind. The leader battles against fear and insecurity in the digital transformation, against monotony and boredom in the face of overdue innovations, or against inferiority and anger when the competition is successful. The solution to the conflict consists of alternative approaches to be taken. At the end of the plot comes the happy end, the positive solution. Klaus Fog and his colleagues work with a conflict barometer, which indicates how pronounced the leader’s conflict is.^[15] This makes sense, because while the conflict always activates, one that is too strong can activate the peer groups‘ fear and flight system or demand too much intellectual energy, which can lead to rejection in the end.

Myths make the subconscious comprehension of the leader’s actions much easier, as these archetypal stories are usually learned early in life. With their hypercultural use, fairy tales and myths form a kind of meta-language.^[16] Myths can be found in advertising, for example, as paradise stories. The fundamental patterns of these archetypal stories remain even though they are implemented anew, as in our example of the temptation story. Further examples of such archetypal stories about leaders are the battle of David against Goliath (Richard Branson), the victorious (Google). In his book „David gegen Goliath,“ Klaus Schmeh gives 33 examples of companies that use this pattern.^[17]

We can distinguish between physical actions and emotional actions. Physical actions include the digital leader’s visible actions. His emotional actions include how he feels, which conflicts he experiences mentally, which doubts and which certainties he has. In particular, peer groups can experience the emotional actions together with him – thus, they can bring them tremendously close to the leader.

The physical and emotional actions demonstrate the person’s dramatic dialogue:

• The digital leader encounters a conflict. He might, for example, have to fight against his fear of change.
• He interacts with others (enemies, friends, etc.).
• He acts with reference to himself (overcoming fear).

Stage and Props

The leader’s stories take place on a stage. The audience perceives this stage and stores its memory together with the knowledge and feelings – both emotional and physical – experienced. Where do the digital leader’s stories take place? In her home country? In the great, wide world? She can distinguish here between the main stage, on which the plot plays, and backstage, where understudies and minor characters act.

The setting of the stage includes not only its location, but also the possibility of equipping the place with props, such as symbols. Symbols are signs that represent something, such as the digital leader’s clothing, company car, and briefcase.

Conclusion

By telling stories, the digital leader can apply a particularly brain-friendly leadership form because it is vivid, moving, and intuitively accessible. Storytelling enables him to develop systematically a clear mental image of himself, his motives, and his rewards within the minds of his peer groups. Research has shown that this kind of clear, mental picture strongly motivates people to action. People will thus behave more positively toward the digital leader than they would without a clear mental picture conveyed through storytelling.