Using the 7 Powers of Story - Interview with Richard Stone

Story Intelligence : Master Story, Master Life on Amazon https://amzn.to/2QOwUbn

And so I've been sort of plowing land myself over the last 30 years, looking at ways to use storytelling in a very applied way. To help leaders become more effective, and organizations to better reach their goals. So that's been pretty much all the work. There's been a few little detours in there. Worked with a small company that used to be part of the Disney organization called Ideas that was on the backlot of MGM Studios in Orlando for a few years as their Story Analytics Master, which was the best title I think, in the universe.

You know, these are all concepts or constructs that people thought up. The notion of intellectual intelligence was a new idea in the early 19 hundreds. And someone devised a test for trying to assess that. And for a long time, we thought that IQ was kind of a fixed thing. You know, you've got your number and that's what it was, but it turns out that's also not true.

Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of this research was being done on the power of emotions. And this sort of new idea was emerging around emotional intelligence, that it's our emotions and our ability to connect to people and read people and read ourselves emotionally. That had a lot more to do with success than your intellect, and how smart you were.

And then over the last 15 years, there's been an all-new body of research coming out and people have been looking at how our brain's wired and it turns out our brain is wired for story. And it is so integral to who we are.

We think that we have a thing that we call a story intelligence and that it pervades every facet of our being. It pervades our relationships, it pervades the way we see ourselves in the world and others. And it's something that we can also enhance because we think it's part of what we would call our native language.

But the first is to transport and we know that stories can take us someplace else into another place in time.

They can take us in the past. They can take us to the future, that we can walk in another person's shoes through stories. So stories do that. And then there are some more fundamental things like communication, which you're very aware of, is that we're all talking all the time. And, it turns out, that we are much more effective when we're telling stories than we are just conveying information or facts.

And there's a lot of data on that, that demonstrates how our brain works and why it works that way. I think it also enables learning, that's the third power, that we can learn better through the power of story and native peoples have known that forever. They have used stories is an integral part of the way they raise children.

The fourth is to create meaning. And I think in past times we had sort of what I would call meta-narratives, big stories about our place in the world. And those aren't as effective anymore for helping us figure out what it means to be a human being and especially in the 21st century.

So that's the fourth one. So let me pause there and see if you've got any questions about those. And then it's three more. Maybe we can get to those when we have time.

We talk about the power of stories in business and why you should master business storytelling.  One example of storytelling in business is storytelling marketing.   Storytelling for business is a very important tool.

Richard talks about Using the 7 Powers of Story in this interview.