Storytelling & Leadership

In my last blog I wrote about one of the main points from Donald Miller’s book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years where he stated we need to be intentional about creating memorable scenes in order to create a memorable life. As a follow up to that post, I want to share some content from his book about the principles of storytelling and how these principles correlate to our lives as leaders.

These principles are related to storytelling but are also very relevant to the stories we are living and the stories we are creating as leaders. One of the main responsibilities of a leader is to cast a vision of a future state you want to lead your followers towards. This requires motivating others to buy into and participate in the achievement of the vision. One of the most effective motivation techniques used to get people to “buy-in” and understand their place in the vision is the use of storytelling.

Miller unpacks these principles throughout the book and received inspiration for his content from a seminar he attended led by Robert McKee, the renowned teacher of screenwriting and storytelling. Below is the list of principles followed by some content from the book elaborating on the principle.

As you read, check and see if you are applying any or all of these principles to your leadership or others as you attempt to create a better story in your different areas of influence.

Principles of Storytelling:

• Every scene has a purpose: In a pure story…there is purpose in every scene, in every line of dialogue. A movie is going somewhere. Life has to be lived with intentionality just like a story is written with a purpose predefined. What will I live for? Good stories don’t happen by accident. They are planned.
• Great stories are told in conflict: Somehow we realize that stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a great storyteller.
• All stories have an ending: The thing about death is it reminds you the story we are telling has finality
• Most of our greatest fears are relational: I also knew from the McKee seminar that most of our greatest fears are relational. It’s all that stuff about forgiveness and risking rejection and learning to love. We think stories are about getting money and security, but the truth is, it all comes down to relationships.
• The point of story and life is Character Transformation: The point of a story is the character arc, the change. A character arc is the status of the character as it unfolds throughout the story, the storyline or series of episodes. Characters begin the story with a certain viewpoint and, through events in the story, that viewpoint changes (Wikipedia)
• A Character is what he does: The only way to know the truth is to witness him make choices under pressure, to take one action or another in the pursuit of his desire.
• Every story has a writer: I admitted something other than me was showing a better way. And when I did this I realized the Voice, the Writer who was not me, was trying to make a better story, a more meaningful series of experiences I could live through.
• Writing a good story takes work: Here’s the truth about telling stories with your life. It’s going to sound like a great idea, and you are going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you’re not going to want to do it. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.
• Characters don’t want to change – They need an inciting incident: A general rule in creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. The must be forced to change. Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort isn’t all that comfortable.
• A story is made up of turns: A story is made up of turns, Robert McKee says. Once an ambition has been decided, a positive turn is an event that moves the protagonist closer to the ambition, and a negative turn moves the protagonist away from his ambition. All stories have both.
• The ambitions we have will become to stories we live: If you want to know what a person’s story is all about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories.
• The story is not about the ending, it’s about the character transformation: When something happens, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter or better.
• Great stories have memorable scenes: You have to intentionally create memorable scenes to create a memorable life.

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Discussion Question: How have you used storytelling as a leader to cast vision for your organization or team?