In the last post we looked at why mental simulations are almost as good as direct experience when you want to learn something (or teach something). And we learned that a story can function as a mental simulation.

How can a technology company provide mental simulations through story that create value for potential buyers? One way is to tell a story of an experience that communicates your values and your abilities. As buyers read your story, they will be simulating the experience you are telling. It will closely resemble the buyer having the same experience you did.

Here’s an example: This is a story that High Speed CNC, a specialized machine shop, tells on its website of how it responded to a downturn in the economy. (I don’t know anyone at High Speed CNC. I just happened to come across their web site one day.) High Speed CNC used the extra time on its hands to improve the processes in its shop and become ISO 9001 compliant.

The page describing their experience has all the essential elements of a story: a protagonist we care about (the owner and his business), an obstacle (the economic downturn), a narrative sequence, and a larger meaning.

By the end of the story we’ve learned some things about how Joe Munich, the CEO of High Speed CNC, does business:

• He values his people and tries to keep everybody together during a downturn.
• He looks for ways to improve the company’s capabilities in ways that are good for the customer.
• He is conservative in his financial practices. It will take more than a strong financial wind to blow him over.
• He’s willing to make capital investments in his business.

If High Speed CNC had simply claimed these characteristics on their web site, we would have been dubious. But by walking us through his experience of becoming ISO compliant, the characteristics are much more credible.

And because it’s told in the form of a story, we are more likely to remember the story and be able to share it with others.

If you wanted to learn to cook a new dish, it would be great to have a chef in your kitchen to teach you. The chef could walk you through each step of the process. As you made mistakes or had questions, the chef could answer them and correct you.

The direct experience would involve all of your senses. You could smell and taste the raw ingredients as they transformed into something new. It would involve you physically as you chopped and stirred, mentally as you worked to understand the method, and emotionally as you interacted with the chef.

You would naturally create a story about this experience that you could use the next time you wanted to make the dish. It would also be a story that you could tell others, one where you could re-create the experience – the smells and tastes, the motions of the work, the feelings you experienced.

And it turns out that your listeners could learn how to make the dish from your story almost as well as if they had been there with the chef.

Why are stories which simulate an experience almost as good at teaching as experiencing the event yourself?

In Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick they explain that we are not simply passive recipients of a story. We become involved with the story as we identify with the characters and the storyteller’s world.

The Heath brothers describe research which indicates that we create a kind of geographic simulation of the stories we hear. We organize objects in their proper spatial location.

They also describe an experiment where participants were asked to mentally simulate the events related to a problem they were trying to solve. These subjects did better at coping with their problem. Better than the subjects who did nothing and better than those who visualized what it would feel like to have solved the problem.

Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans show that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin, they activate tactile areas of the brain. The activity of mental simulation is not limited to the insides of our heads. People who imagine words that start b or p can’t resist subtle lip movements, and people who imagine looking at the Eiffel Tower can’t resist moving their eyes upward. Mental simulation even alter visceral physical responses. When people drink water but imagine that it’s lemon juice, they salivate more. Even more surprisingly, when people drink lemon juice but imagine that it’s water, they salivate less.

The Heaths go on say that mental simulations help us to manage emotions. They help us to solve problems. And they can even help us to build skills.

The takeaway is simple. Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation.

This is the role that stories play – putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. More like a flight simulator. Being the audience for a story isn’t so passive, after all. Inside, we’re getting ready to act.

In the next post we’ll look at how you can use stories to create a simulation for your potential buyers, a simulation of what it would be like to work with you.

Well, they might believe it at first. But as soon as they have a story of their own, people ignore the official story.

What is the official story? They are the stories that we learn from official sources – government or religion or school or a business.

As Roger Schenk says, “they’re the stories that our boss, our government, our parents or anyone in authority instructs us to tell.”

“Official stories are carefully constructed to tell a version of events that is sanitized and thought to be unlikely to get anyone in trouble.”

They are intended to make complex issues appear simpler.

Do we believe the official story? Only if we don’t have a story of our own for a particular situation. Once we have our own story that we believe more than the official one, we tend to ignore the official story.

Here is an example. If I hear about a book, I go to Amazon and look it up. First I skim through the Editorial Review for the official story. The Editorial Review is always glowing and positive.

Then I start reading the Customer Reviews. It is these reviews that give me more useful viewpoints and allow me to construct my own story about the book.

It’s not that the Customer Reviews are simply positive or negative. The reviews are more nuanced than that. They describe strengths and weaknesses. They suggest similar books. They indicate what types of people would get the most from reading the book.

Your customers must go through the same process. If they are interested in your company and are considering working with you, they must construct their own story about you. The information they learn about your company will remind them of experiences they have had. Potential buyers will reconsider their experiences in light of what they learn about your company. And then they will create their own story about you.

If all you provide them is the Official Story, they are forced to go to other sources to get the additional information they need to form their own story about you. Or worse, they ignore you because they can’t get the information they must have to construct their own story.

If you were a young salesperson and I were to tell you that it’s always better to get the contract signed as soon as possible after you have an agreement on a deal, you might remember this advice when you need it and you might not.

But what if I were to tell you this story? It’s one that my manager told me a long time ago. The story goes like this:

Many years ago we were in negotiations with a customer to sell a project. It was Friday afternoon and we were meeting with the customer to go over final terms of the contract and were hoping to come to agreement. The meeting went well and we worked through all the issues. I said we would make the final revisions to the contract and have something on his desk to sign on Monday morning. Although the CEO indicated that he would be around over the weekend, we agreed that it could wait until Monday.

Well, on Sunday afternoon the CEO had a heart attack and very soon after had to resign from the company. Although we did eventually get the contract signed and were able to do the project, it was a significant delay. I had to really hustle on some other deals to make my number that quarter.

So, my manager concluded, once you’ve got an agreement always get the contract signed as soon as possible, even if you have to drive to the guy’s house, because you never know what’s going to happen if you delay.

Now of course when my manager told me this story it included a lot of salty language and was told in his New York accent, so you aren’t getting the full treatment that I got.

But it’s obvious that the story is going to be easier to remember than the abstract advice. The story has a character, it has details, and something is at stake. Plus it has the key ingredient of a memorable story: a protagonist we care about whose expectations crash into a harsh and objective reality.

Why is a story a better way to learn this lesson about procrastination and alacrity than the simple generalization?

Roger Schank tells us that it’s because we learn by “reconsidering experiences we’ve have already had in light of new information. We form insights by comparing what we are currently examining with what we have already examined.”

To reconsider past experiences, we have to have labeled them in our memory in a way that we can recall them. If the past experience is understood simply as a generalization, then there are fewer ways to find it, it’s not as “sticky” in our memory.

“We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves.”

In fact, we learn so well from stories that in some cases they can be a reasonable substitute for direct experience as we’ll see in the next post.

Stories are fundamental to how we experience the world, how we organize it in our minds, and how we communicate our experience to others.

As Roger Schank begins his book Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence:

People remember what happens to them, and they tell other people what they remember. People learn from what happens to them, and they guide their future actions accordingly.

… intelligence is really about understanding what has happened well enough to be able to predict when it might happen again.

We experience the world and then organize our memory of that experience in the form of a narrative, a story.

When we come across something new, we are reminded of prior events and can use our collection of stories to help us respond to the new event.

We get reminded of what has happened to us previously for a very good reason. Reminding is the mind’s method of coordinating past events with current events to enable generalization and prediction.

People are social animals. We use stories not only to organize our own experience, but also when we communicate with others. We use them for the pleasure of sharing our experience in conversation, for communicating information in a way that the other person will remember it, and we use stories to persuade.

In the next several posts I’ll explore how we use stories to persuade, drawing on artificial intelligence research, on screenwriting techniques, and on the ancient Greek and Roman study of rhetoric.