PR Knowledge Hub

Have you ever finished a really good story and found yourself missing the characters? They’ve become your friends, bound to you forever as you have been immersed in their world? I know I have - and I still miss some of them, occasionally re-reading well-worn books just to check in and see if everyone's ok.

Sadly, the same engagement won’t be found in organisational storytelling. Even though we have a proliferation of channels and a multitude of means to tell a good story, they mostly go untold, unread and ignored. 

I’ve spent the last six weeks with a variety of organisations working with them on their storytelling, helping their public relations and communications teams overcome some of the frustrations that lock up a good story and prevent their stakeholders from getting to know - and understand - the organisation’s heroes - and occasional villains.

In leadership sessions, authenticity is a prized quality, with the majority of would-be organisational leaders doing their utmost to be as authentic as possible but put them back into the workplace and in an instant, the transformational strengths of transparency, clarity and purpose disappear into the ether in favour of old-fashioned command-and-control. This means the real stories are seldom told, unceremoniously booted out in favour of ‘things we think we should say’ rather than ‘things that actually mean something to stakeholders’.

Organisations - be they government, businesses, charities, schools - default to the provision of information rather than telling the story of who they are and what they do for those they serve. The problem with information is that it is passive, is generally hard to find, it is presented for the organisation and there’s generally a lot of it that is very hard for the ‘outsider’ to piece together.

​Stories on the other hand are active. They go walkabout and they are for somebody - designed to help them, connect or engage. Stories explain and create meaning. They show us your world and invite us to build - or maintain - a relationship with you.

​My tip of the month is don’t be sitting comfortably churning out information. Reimagine storytelling for your business. Break the information chains that restrict understanding. Show us your characters and how they build your world. Engage me in such a way that I miss your organisation and actively seek you out. Tell me a story that changes my mind, makes me think differently or helps me understand. That’s our job to do - and to do it well.

April is all about words here at PR Knowledge Hub, with a series of sessions throughout the month looking at all aspects of storytelling, writing and language. The quote in the headline comes from Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which takes two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and allows them to play with language and meaning. It’s a heartbreaking romp through the twists and turns of  linguistic complexity and one that, if you work with words, you should follow at least once in your life.

Language - the words we choose - help us to make sense of the world around us and, as practitioners, we need to learn to make wise choices when it comes to the words we put to work on behalf of our organisations. Language evolves constantly and the structures that support it - the rules of grammar - shift and bend to accommodate the weight and rate of change.

Words have power. They can wound deeply, be a healing balm, energise the inert or deliver despair - yet often we cast them thoughtlessly into the day, oblivious to the consequences of misuse. In these difficult days, when emotions run high and outrage can be triggered by an errant emoji, all practitioners should make some time to think about the words they choose and how best to use them to build and sustain relationships with their stakeholders and communities.

If you can’t find time to join the sessions, find an hour in your day to consider the way your organisation uses language. Is the tone right - does it need to change? Do you know who you are writing for? Speaking to? Or are you stringing words together to please the boss rather than communicate with others? Check your readability scores and audit your communication channels - are the right words in play or should there be different words at work? 

As your stakeholder or a member of your communities I need to understand who you are, what you do and why we need to connect and if you don’t find the right words - I’ve got nothing to go on.  If you are interested in joining the sessions you can book with the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand.

Truth be told, I've found it increasingly hard to write these last few months, in part due to the harsh, divisive and vitriolic language being used by some afforded the title of 'leader' by their country, their workplace or organisation. It has broken my heart to hear the way my fellow humans have been referred to by those who should be actively seeking to help them in their vulnerability and distress.

Kindness, empathy, understanding, generosity - all of these have been invisible or in short supply, particularly when describing and addressing people faced with the most dreadful situations. People just like me and you, forced to walk never ending roads to a hostile nowhere, as their country's circumstance - be it war, famine, fear or environment - sends them on an often fruitless search for refuge and safety.

The USA isn't alone in its 'Trumpeter-in-Tweet' - there are other autocrats, despots and dictators out there - but in observing the downward trend of 'leadership tone' across many media channels, the USA's current head of state has most visibly replaced discourse with dictat in the channels he favours. It would be a relief if we could account for the twitter rants as simple buffoonery (almost a recognised trait for some ministers and presidents across the world). Tragically though, the choice of language, the adjectives and epithets used to describe the unfortunate, the displaced, the hungry and the homeless are chosen quite deliberately. Dehumanising others through language is a political ploy used through the ages. In recent weeks references to people as 'animals' and 'vermin' have evoked the ghosts of Hitler, Lenin and other shadowy dealers in genocide. Their use of language to divide, demonise and dehumanise people led to the deaths of millions. The deliberate and calculated choice of words was to achieve very specific political ends. 

In listening to the warped, bullying rhetoric of Trump in the USA, Salvini in Italy and Orban in Hungary - particularly as he insists on 'European cultural purity' - or the reported profanity laden responses from UK minister Boris Johnson in recent weeks makes me fearful as to the 'next steps' these people might take. Where language leads, actions follow - and as we have seen from the caging of children, the expulsion of innocents and the fear-mongering of foreign ministers, those actions are generally inhumane. 

So in not writing, I've spent many hours thinking what can I do about this.  I deal with language every day - recommending words that work to build relationships, build bridges, break barriers. Yet increasingly the 'shout and scare' model of leadership language is raised by some as a working strategy - to which I can only reply that true leadership lies in language expressing empathy, logic and reason, not the bullying, malicious harping we have had to endure.

Perhaps all I can do - as can you - is to speak out against such language. Do not remain silent. Change the tone. Don't accept this use of language as normal human behaviour. Call it out for what it is.

The living tentacles of language easily work their way into hearts and minds, triggering cruelty as speedily as love. Those who harness and drive language towards hate and division for their own political ends and personal gain need to meet a wall of words from the rest of us - words of worth, of humanity. Words for good.

Reflecting on storytelling after uploading the Words that Work session, I found myself pondering current progress in algorithmic storytelling. A week ago, the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College announced the winners of the 2017 Turing Tests in the Creative Arts - a prize given to those able to produce a story by algorithm, indistinguishable from the average human writer.

​We've been telling each other stories since the beginning of time and the structure of our stories remains pretty much the same. Probably the most documented structure is the 'Hero's Journey', credited to Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The core structure is simple - the hero goes on a journey, encounters crisis, overcomes crisis, is victorious and emerges transformed.  It's a structure embellished and central to myths and legends for millennia but it is by no means the only one. Rags-to-riches comes to mind (think Cinderella) who also fits the more complex form of rags-to-riches-to-rags-then-riches-again. 

​As humans, we enjoy - and remember - stories that challenges us, deepen understanding, change our perspective, entertain, amuse and many other things besides. So it's fascinating to examine the stories, sonnets and music created by this year's algorithms as we tip-tap our way towards total automation of writing (take a look at Wordsmith). The DigiLit 2017 prize encouraged the creation of algorithms able to produce 'human-level' short story writing indistinguishable from an 'average' human effort. Poetry was also in the running and I would urge you to read the prize winners in each category and spare a moment for the winner of the 'Human-Written Sonnet Most Mistaken for a Machine-generated Sonnet' category.

Increasingly, algorithms are charged with gathering information and producing stories about our organisations. Compare story types used most frequently by organisations - news, chronicle, history and report - with the types employees use when they tell stories about their organisations. Their stories are found in the more appealing forms of anecdote, rumour, hearsay, gossip and jokes. I'd suggest that depending on the available data fed to our new algorithmic friends, there will be few organisations basking in the warm, comforting glow that results from a successful hero's journey. 

When digging for stories for our organisations, I always urge colleagues and delegates to look beyond entrenched or traditional stock narratives broadcast on behalf of their organisations and search instead for the heroic exploits happening right under their noses. In this century, in this decade, if we want to be allowed to continue as organisational storytellers we must drive ourselves beyond 'average' human effort.

Every organisation has heroes - and villains. Indeed your organisation could well be the villain, given that for every story, there is an anti-story. As you dig you'll discover there are monsters to fight, obstacles to overcome and always an epiphany of sorts, even if it is ignored. 

The stories we tell today will be the fodder for algorithmic storytelling tomorrow. Algorithms will scoop up and spit out all we have uttered, in word, on the web, in print and on video. So do we understand our own story? Why must we tell it? And who needs to hear? How does our story structure help our communities understand who we are, what we do and why we do it? And are we telling that story in such a way that it will be remembered, relevant and useful to those who listen?

My challenge to you would be to revisit your organisation's story arc or find a structure that resonates with those who will listen, read or watch your story unfold. At the very least, build a 'who-what-where' structure.

• Who are the heroes? The villains? Who benefits? Who wins or loses? Who needs to know?
• Where we have come from - acknowledge the past, its triumphs, tragedies, errors and glories
• What was our catalyst or turning point? The obstacles overcome, the solutions you discovered and shared
• What's happening now? What does this mean for us today?
• What happens next? Whether happiness or misery ensues, we need a conclusion that sets direction and builds understanding of futures and opportunities

As organisational storytellers we must know, understand and be able to share our authentic, truthful and engaging story with our stakeholders. Artificial intelligence will, for the most part, do what it is told until capable of self-direction and independent decision. Then it becomes smarter than we are, able to analyse content presented to engage. If I was an algorithm charged with scraping engaging, entertaining and educational content I suspect I would pick - like my human self - the anecdote, rumour, hearsay and joke options, not average dull-but-worthy narratives designed for a different organisational age.  

So will an AI sonnet smell as sweet as one gently coaxed into delicate form by a human? Probably. And scarily, when it comes to organisational reputation, AI-led storytelling is likely to cause quite the stink.