A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (14 page)

Story, businesses are realizing, means big money. Economists Deirdre McCloskey and Arjo Klamer calculate that persuasion—advertising, counseling, consulting, and so on—accounts for 25 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. If, as some posit, Story is a component of half those persuasive efforts, then Story is worth about $1 trillion a year to the U.S. economy.
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So organizations are embracing the story ethic espoused by McKee and others—often in unlikely ways.

The clearest example is a nascent movement called “organizational storytelling,” which aims to make organizations aware of the stories that exist within their walls—and then to use those stories in pursuit of organizational goals. One of the founders of the movement is Steve Denning, an Australian who began his career as a lawyer in Sydney and later became a midlevel executive at the World Bank. “I was a left brain person,” he says. “Big organizations love that kind of person.”

Then one day, in a World Bank shake-up, he was booted from a job he loved and banished to the organizational equivalent of Siberia: a department known as “knowledge management,” corporate jargon for how a company organizes its vast reserves of information and experience. Denning became the department’s chief. And—grudgingly at first—he underwent a transformation. (Sounds like a hero’s journey, doesn’t it?) As he sought to understand what the World Bank knew—that is, what knowledge required management—Denning discovered that he learned more from trading stories in the cafeteria than he did from reading the bank’s official documents and reports. An organization’s knowledge, he realized, is contained in its stories. And that meant that if he was really going to be the top knowledge honcho at the bank, he had to go well beyond the L-Directed lawyer-executive approach he’d learned in the first twenty-five years of his career. So he made the World Bank a leader in knowledge management by making it a pioneer in using stories to contain and convey knowledge. “Storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking,” he says. “It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds. . . . Abstract analysis is easier to understand when seen through the lens of a well-chosen story.”
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Now Denning is spreading his message—and telling his story—to organizations worldwide.

Denning isn’t the only one taken with stories’ business possibilities. 3M gives its top executives storytelling lessons. NASA has begun using storytelling in its knowledge management initiatives. And Xerox—recognizing that its repair personnel learned to fix machines by trading stories rather than by reading manuals—has collected its stories into a database called Eureka that
Fortune
estimates is worth $100 million to the company. In addition, several ventures have emerged to help existing companies harvest their internal stories. One such firm is StoryQuest, based in suburban Chicago. It dispatches interviewers to a company, records the stories of that company’s employees, and then produces a CD that uses these personal narratives to yield broader insights about the company’s culture and mission. In the United Kingdom, Richard Olivier, the son of Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright and a former Shakespearean theater director, now advises large companies about how to integrate Story into their operations. Olivier calls his technique “mytho-drama.” His clients read and act Shakespeare’s plays to elicit lessons in leadership and corporate governance. “Logical and analytical abilities alone can no longer guarantee success,” Olivier says.
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Successful businesspeople must be able to combine the science of accounting and finance with the art of Story.

“Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.”

—JOSEPH CAMPBELL

It’s easy to make fun of a purchasing manager pretending to be Titus Andronicus. But the fact that slow-moving, change-resistant large organizations have begun wrestling with Story—a word that itself would have made someone an executive suite laughingstock a decade ago—is telling. And it speaks to that innate capacity that I mentioned earlier. As Alan Kay, a Hewlett-Packard executive and cofounder of Xerox PARC, puts it: “Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.”

S
TORY IS
having another important impact on business. Like design, it is becoming a key way for individuals and entrepreneurs to distinguish their goods and services in a crowded marketplace. The best way to explain this phenomenon is to tell you a couple of stories from my own consumer life.

The first example of story-as-differentiator arrived in the mail. My family’s neighborhood in northwest Washington, D.C., is in the midst of a slow generational turnover. The people who bought their houses decades ago and raised their kids in tidy brick colonials have started to retire. Meantime, young couples with children want to move into the neighborhood because it offers the conveniences of a suburb without actually having to live in one. Since prospective buyers far outnumber potential sellers, prices have been climbing. And so, to entice a few more of the older folks to get up and go, realtors frequently send postcards to every address in the neighborhood touting the latest sky-high price they’ve gotten for one of these modest homes. But in the mail one day came a realtor postcard that was different. I nearly threw it out at first. On one side it had the usual photo—a house a few blocks away that the realtor had just sold. But on the other side, instead of the sales price in 72-point type followed by a row of exclamation points, it had the following:

Florence Skretowicz and her husband bought this delightful home in 1955. They paid $20,000 in cash for it and loved the many special details like solid oak floors, large windows including many with leaded glass, oak millwork around the doors, . . . an Old English fireplace mantle, and a garden pond. At age 91, Florence moved to Brighton Gardens, a retirement community in Friendship Heights, and the Fernandez sisters, neighbors and old family friends, asked me to sell this jewel. I was honored. Florence let us clear out the house, paint it inside and out, refinish the floors, and wash the windows.

Now please take a minute to welcome Scott Dresser and Christie Constantine, the new residents who love the house just as much and plan to be in it forever and ever.

The postcard didn’t mention the sale price of the home. That seemed like an oversight at first, but it was actually a deft bit of Conceptual Age marketing. The price the house sold for is easy to find—in the newspaper, on the Internet, in neighborhood chitchat. Besides, the houses here are similar enough that their selling prices don’t vary all that much. So despite realtors’ persistent efforts, it’s doubtful that a postcard celebrating a high price would be enough on its own to persuade a potential seller to sign up with a particular realtor. But selling a house you’ve lived in for half a century is not simply a financial decision; it’s also an emotional one. And what better way to make that high-touch connection—and for this realtor to distinguish her services from her number-happy competitors—than with a story?

Or take another example of narrative’s role in a time of abundance. I was at the store one afternoon picking up food for dinner, and I decided to grab a few bottles of wine. The selection was good but modest—maybe fifty bottles in all. And I quickly zeroed in on three inexpensive reds. All three were about the same price—nine or ten dollars each. All three seemed roughly the same quality. How to decide? I looked at the bottles. Two of them had labels filled with those fancy wine adjectives. But the third bottle—2 Brothers Big Tattoo Red—told me a story:

The idea for this wine comes from two brothers, Erik and Alex Bartholomaus. They wanted to sell a great wine, sourced by Alex, labeled with Erik’s art, in a non-serious way for a good cause. Their goal was to pay homage to their late mother who suffered an untimely death due to cancer. . . . Alex and Erik will donate 50 cents from the sale of each bottle of Big Tattoo Red to Hospice of Northern Virginia and/or various cancer research funds in the name of Liliana S.
Bartholomaus. Thanks to your support we have donated approximately $75,000 from the sales of our first release, and hopefully much more in the future. Alex and Erik thank you for purchasing a bottle of Big Tattoo Red in honor of their mother.

Guess which wine I bought?

The Story of Healing

Modern medicine is a marvel. Powerful machines, like the MRI that took pictures of my brain, are letting us glimpse our body’s inner workings. New drugs and medical devices are saving many lives and improving many more. Yet, those spectacular advances have often come at the expense of a more mundane, though no less important, aspect of care. The medical system can “completely eliminate the person’s story,” says Dr. Jack Coulehan of Stony Brook University Hospital in New York. “Unfortunately, medicine sees anecdote as the lowest form of science.”
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You’ve probably had this experience yourself. You’re waiting in the exam room at your doctor’s office. When the doctor comes in, two things are almost certain to happen next. You’ll begin telling a story. And your doctor will interrupt you. Twenty years ago, when researchers videotaped doctor-patient encounters in an exam room, they found that doctors interrupted their patients after an average of twenty-one seconds. When another set of researchers repeated the study more recently, doctors had improved. They now waited an average of twenty-three seconds before butting in.

But that rushed just-the-facts approach to patient care may be changing, thanks in large part to the work of Dr. Rita Charon, a Columbia University Medical School professor who is attempting to place story at the heart of diagnosis and healing. When Charon was a young internist doing rounds at a hospital, she made a startling discovery: much of what she did as a doctor revolved around stories. Patients explained their ailments in narratives. Doctors repeated stories of their own. Illness itself unfolded as a narrative. Narrative was everywhere. Everywhere—except in the medical school curriculum or the consciousness of students and teachers. So Charon picked up a PhD in English to go with her MD—and then set about reforming medical education. She launched the narrative medicine movement in a 2001 article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
that called for a whole-minded approach to medical care:

“Stories—that’s how people make sense of what’s happening to them when they get sick. They tell stories about themselves. Our ability as doctors to treat and heal is bound up in our ability to accurately perceive a patient’s story. If you can’t do that, you’re working with one hand tied behind your back.”

—
DR. HOWARD BRODY,

family practice

physician

A scientifically competent medicine alone cannot help a patient grapple with the loss of health or find meaning in suffering. Along with scientific ability, physicians need the ability to listen to the narratives of the patient, grasp and honor their meanings, and be moved to act on the patient’s behalf.
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Today, at Columbia, all second-year medical students take a seminar in narrative medicine in addition to their hard-core science classes. There they learn to listen more empathically to the stories their patients tell and to “read” those stories with greater acuity. Instead of asking a list of computerlike diagnostic questions, these young doctors broaden their inquiry. “Tell me where it hurts” becomes “Tell me about your life.” The goal is empathy, which studies have shown declines in students with every year they spend in medical school. And the result is both high touch and high concept. Studying narrative helps a young doctor relate better to patients and to assess a patient’s current condition in the context of that person’s full life story. Being a good doctor, Charon says, requires narrative competence—“the competence that human beings use to absorb, interpret, and respond to stories.”
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Narrative medicine is part of a wider trend to incorporate an R-Directed approach into what has long been a bastion of L-Directed muscle-flexing. Fifteen years ago, about one out of three American medical schools offered humanities courses. Today, three out of four do.
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Bellevue, the legendary New York City public hospital, publishes its own journal—the
Bellevue Literary Review.
(Literary journals have also popped up at medical schools at Columbia, Penn State University, and the University of New Mexico.) The editor in chief of the Bellevue journal, Dr. Danielle Ofri, who teaches med students, requires her young charges to write up at least one of their patient histories as a narrative—to tell the patient’s story from the patient’s point of view. “That’s not different from what the novelist wants to do,” Ofri says. “I think we can take people who are basically empathetic and well-meaning and give them better skills to connect with their patients.”
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Of course, narrative competence cannot replace technical expertise. A doctor who listens empathically to her patient’s story but forgets to take his blood pressure or prescribes the wrong drug is not long for the profession. But Charon’s approach can help young physicians imbue their work with greater empathy. (I’ll discuss empathy in greater detail in Chapter 7.) For example, Charon’s students all keep two charts on each patient. On one chart, they include the quantitative information and medical lingo of a typical hospital chart. But on the other—what she calls the “parallel chart”—students write narratives about their patients and chronicle their own emotions. According to the first study to test this method’s effectiveness, students who kept a parallel chart had better relationships with patients—and better interviewing and technical skills—than their counterparts who did not.
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Stories alone won’t cure the sick. But combined with modern technology, they have an undeniable healing power. This may be the future of medicine: physicians who can both think rigorously and feel empathically, physicians who can both analyze a test and appreciate a story—physicians with a whole new mind.