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.
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