 In this episode, we'll be talking about two kinds of thinking about what's true. We'll talk about what happens when you forget about morals and how to use storytelling to build emotional connections and business benefits. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Annette Simmons and this is a service design show. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to do more things that make you proud by designing and delivering services that are good for people and business. My guest in this episode is a writer of four books on storytelling and the first book has been in print since 1997 and has been translated into 15 languages. I've read one of her books which really inspired me as a service designer so I needed to invite her on the show. Her name is Annette Simmons. The main theme of this episode is what is the price we pay as a society when we miss you storytelling just for profit. That's what this episode is all about. If you're new to the service design show, be sure to subscribe as we bring new videos every week. And if you haven't done so already, make sure to also check out our Instagram page where we post behind the scenes what happens here on this show. So that's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Annette. Welcome to the show Annette. Thanks. I'm really excited to have you on your an atypical guest for the service design show and I really like that. I'm atypical across the board but okay. We'll see if that's true in this episode. For the people who don't know who you are, could you give like a 30 second introduction? Yeah, I wrote a book called The Story Factor and it really hit. That was back in the year 2000. It was only one of the four books I've written but I started working on story from the point of view of how to get people to tell the truth to each other. And then because I had a marketing background I began to see how story works to frame something as either good or bad. And so then I wrote whoever tells the best story wins and now the story factor is coming out in the third edition in October. That's one of the reasons why I invited you. I read The Story Factor in my early days as a service designer and it had great influence on me. So yeah, it inspired me in that sense. And I think more service designers should be aware of storytelling. That's what we'll be talking about today in our ramp up for this talk. We were emailing back and forward and you said I actually never heard of the term service design, although you use the word design thinking. And this is really funny because I always ask my guests what was the first time you came in touch with service design. Well, the answer is pretty short this time. We'll be learning a lot from you and maybe you'll learn something from our community this time. Already have. You sent me three topics that are related to the upcoming edition of The Story Factor. So it must be dear to your heart what we'll be talking about. And we'll be doing interview jazz. Are you ready to start? I am, I am. Let's go. I'll pick the first topic that you send me. And you have the notorious social Q question starters. So the first topic we'll be talking about is two kinds of thinking. Yeah, yeah. And so my approach is how can we keep both of them strong? Let's start with what are the two kinds of thinking? The way I think about it, and of course, this, this is a fundamental that some people may even call it right brain, left brain. Some people, but I call it objective versus subjective. And basically all I'm saying is there's two ways of knowing something is true. The objective way is to measure it and then you understand the metrics and then you can make sure you're accurate and proof is very important. Well, the subjective way of knowing, just knowing that your child loves you. That's a sensory experience and it's an internal experience and it includes emotions. And so our subjective experience is really where we decide whether we have, we feel like this is good service or not. So subjective things don't operate by the same rules as objective things. If they did, we could analyze, slice and dice and hack it. But you think about, okay, a kitten is cute. So I can bring a kitten into a hotel lobby and all of a sudden I'm making people happy. But if we then go in there and we try to figure out how do kittens make people happy? Perhaps we need to take a kitten, slice it and have an examine both sides. We've just destroyed that, which we seek to understand. And so the subjective aspects of service are the things that are variable in the specific. And you can't program that out. You can't program happy. And so protecting this concept from the rigid sort of, you know, and then the idea of consistency. Consistency is only quality when it's consistently good. Consistency by itself is just the hobgoblin of little minds. So subjective things need their own tools. And storytelling, barn on, is the best tool I've ever run across for understanding the subjective. And, you know, if you think about storytelling, storytelling is an evolutionary aspect that we talk about, okay, and it's as big as religion. It's actually in terms of trying to grasp storytelling, it's actually bigger than religion. I would say religion is a subset of storytelling. So what are the tools we use? Well, we're talking art instead of science. And there's a problem when you're trying to science the shit out of something. And one of the things I love about service design thinking is that it balances what should work, which is the objective world, with what does work, which for me is the subjective world. And so, for instance, customer service in a hotel, one of my favorite memories of really brilliant customer service was I was frustrated, I was tired, I was exasperated, and I was in a country where, and I didn't even know what country I was in. And I can remember going up, pulling the card key, it didn't work in the door, and you're like, oh crap, now I have to go back downstairs. Go back downstairs. I show her the key, and I say this key doesn't work. Now her response was, oh, that might be because this key isn't for this hotel. And then we both laughed. But another way to solve that would be someone say, oh, you're right. And not even a mention it was the wrong key, wrong hotel key, right? And deliver it. So being kind, being nice is very situationally specific. And so when we use a story, like the one I just told about the key card, my hope is that our customer service people understand that they can use their sense of humor. It is possible. And so that they have a very autonomous approach to be a nice, if we're going to use that one. So many things that already sort of crossed my mind. And one of the things is the way you're talking about subjective and objective thinking. It reminds me, and I always mess them up or misline them, is abductive thinking and deductive thinking. And deductive thinking, like those are like almost parallel with what you're describing. And the thing... In a way, but chopped up. Keep going, keep going. Okay. Well, the other trigger for me was we as a sort of service design community always struggle to prove, feel the need to prove the value of our work. And we know that it's valuable. And we know that it helps to create a better world. But, you know, we can't quantify it. We just feel that it is so. And the harder we try to quantify it, the less believable it becomes. Absolutely. You kill the kitten. You kill the kitten as soon as you start. And that's really hard if you're in a business setting. Yeah. But just to give an example where we were sort of, again, in the email conversation leading up to this interview, I said we sort of embedded storytelling in every aspect of what we do at our studio and also like in the proposal stage. And I just tell stories from past projects. And like people see that as evidence. They don't need numbers. Absolutely. They don't need hard data. They just hear stories, real life stories, and then that's enough. And that's really hard to explain to other service designers that it works their way, but it works. I would, you know, I would even go so far as to say trust is a subjective experience. And so when we tried to hack trust, and hopefully most of us have moved on, then what we looked at is proof, you know, and that's a linear format. And that works in the objective world. But in the subjective world, experience is what works as well as proof. So experience, my definition of story is if experience is the best teacher's story, a second best because it's a simulated experience. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And when we find those stories that have that strong emotional pull, then we're starting to understand what matters to people. And just because we can't slice it and dice it and put it into a quantity does not mean that it's not the most important thing if we're actually going to give good service. That's a great point, making the distinction between trust and proof. Like, you don't need proof to build trust, right? That's right. Well, by definition, trust is without proof. Is that so? So, yeah, well, think about it. And faith, trust means that you are willing to move into a collaborative situation without any guarantees. Otherwise, that's called a contract. So trust is, so when I first wrote the story factor, one of the things that I said is that, you know, people do not want more information from you. What they want is faith. They want faith that you're a good person, that you're here for the right reasons, and that if all hell breaks loose, you're on their side. Yeah, yeah. And that's, by definition, I would also call that trust. And so to be able to understand that we're not, we're out here where the buses don't run, you know, when we're talking about trust. Ah, so many things. But I know we have, there is a build-up in the topics we have. So let's use our time wisely and sort of try to move into, from this conversation about trust, move into the second topic. And not sure if I narrowed it down to two words correctly, but I have moral systems as a topic here. Well, let's just start at the beginning, which is why do we need morals? Why do we care? That's a big question. So I'm pretty sure no business person is going to say, you know, my job is to save the rest of the world, even though frankly it is. But morals, it's just like that faith. You find morals where you find emotions. And you find emotions where you find morals. And so if we're talking about, you know, what is it to be kind? What, you know, how do you define not? It's different in every single situation. I would give one specific circumstance. If I am going to be providing good service, I need to work in a community, and I really love that y'all get that it's about the community. I need to work in a community where I'm not afraid to make a mistake. I need to work in a community where I think things are fair. Okay? Fair is a huge driver for human beings. So here's, let's look at fair. Fair is whoever needs it the most gets the most, like the people after the hurricane. Well, no, no, no, fair is that we all share equally. Well, wait a minute fair. I worked my butt off for this. I just spent 10 years working on it. Fair is whoever spent whoever worked the hardest. You just came in here. You want to monetize me. Well, no, no, no, no fair is whoever brings in the most bucks, right? Yeah. Or fair could be, and I always forget the fifth one, fair could be, oh, whoever got there first. It's been here the longest. You know, I get the most because I've been here the longest. Well, in our communities, create a situation where we understand the concept of fair in a shared way. That takes stories because if we make it tactical and, you know, well, fair means that everybody gets the same, which is what HR would do, right? Everybody treat the same. Well, people out in the field, they're like, are you crazy? You know, I've got some really talented people here. Fair is, you know. And so storytelling is the way for us to look at these moments where we feel connected and we feel connected when things are fair. We feel connected when people are kind, when they're tolerant. And so understanding these, okay. So one of the things that I talk about is the King Midas. King Midas as a spreadsheet. And basically the story is that, you know, King Midas wanted everything he touched to turn the gold. And then he touched his daughter and he killed her and turned her into a gold statue. Well, as a story, that's real clear, the knowingness of what is right and wrong. You put that on a spreadsheet. Man, you got return on investment, infinite. And all you have to do is, you know. So understanding that the morals are where people care. Not just that I would like the world to continue to exist, which I would. But we need morals if we want people to feel connected. Because the function of disconnection is immorality. And stories are the way to share morals. Okay. Well, here's my idea. And it's not just my idea. Evolutionary psychology has demonstrated that, you know, evolution invented emotions for a reason. And evolution invented this whole storytelling thing where you tell circumstances where you have strong emotions of what you do want and strong emotions about what you don't want. We learn how to be human beings with these stories. If evolution was reinforcing stories so we continue to survive, its agenda would be the good of the many over the good of the few. So when we look at this profit, you know, sort of frame and everything has to have a return on investment by the end of the first quarter, then all you're doing is reinforcing the individual is more important than the collective. And you can see what's happened in American politics, all these fear stories. That's what happens when you optimize the individual. And to everybody who doesn't live in America, I'm terribly sorry. We're trying to get our act together. We hope that gets better. How would, because this is a really important point and I think on a daily practice, I don't think about a deep level like morals and the way stories impact that. Now that you've shared this, how do you, could you give us some advice to the design community? How we could use or leverage this in our day to day practice? Right. First of all, I would recommend that you go back to the original source. So all of these old myths and that sort of stuff existed for a reason and they carry in them these collaborative frameworks and lessons and all that sort of stuff. So recently I was looking at the way that people are treating stories right now and so there was a TV show that talked about hero stories and the hero story they chose to tell was, they called it Ivan and the Deathless Wizard. Well, I know that story as Maria, I can't remember the last name. It's a Slavic story. And through the hero story, they just went straight to how Ivan has to go and capture this wizard who has captured Ivan's wife, Maria. Well, the way I heard the story was number one, Maria is the queen of the castle where they live. Maria is the warrior princess and Maria had to go fight a war and so she told her husband Ivan to leave that door locked and then she went off. Now we know what happened. Ivan can't stand. He's going to open the door and that's where the wizard is and that's how the wizard got out in the first place. The next thing they left out was the three, what I call the three creatures. When you leave the hero, when the hero leaves, they don't just leave the unknown and go into the, I mean the known and go into the unknown. All of these templates leave out the three creatures, which is there's a little bird that needs some food or there's a baby fawn that needs to help rescue. Now the hero traditionally does these three acts of random kindness generosity and the reason he does it is because way down the road those three little creatures are going to be, you know, saving his ass. So if we look at these random kindnesses just by studying the myths in their form before they got digitized, we will find some amazing beautiful ideas about, you know, what does it take to create random kindnesses and how do we develop stories that associate these long-term benefits when there's no argument that there's a short-term cost. And so a lot of the, oh, and, okay, I'm going to be diplomatic here. I have an issue about the term cognitive bias. Okay. The term cognitive bias, like loss avoidance and all that sort of stuff, actually to me is evolution's little guidelines for how emotions should be biasing our actions in ways that the literal truth wouldn't necessarily. And so loss avoidance is not an error in judgment. It is a pattern of survival. Yeah. And I just get, I just think that if we would take all the cognitive biases out of the error box and put them into the examination and let's see what the benefit is there, I think the ideas would just flow. So what I, for instance, get out of this is, maybe it's too simplistic, but you said go to the source, but also take, when you're crafting a story, take the time to tell the whole story and cut to the chase and make sure you tell the whole picture, right? Not just... One of the things for me that's missing from communications is the human presence. And so when I teach communications at Brookings Institute, for instance, one of the things I do is I use design thinking as the framework for understanding how to design the communication. So most of these people are in workplaces where, you know, a lot of tension, a lot of stress are in me right now. And so the discovery phase is understanding everybody else's story, what makes them think what they think. The patterns, I mean, that's obvious, but the guidelines, I would also say, is a place where we put a moral, ethical guideline because it's good for your image. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's put the video out just recently about toxic masculinity, Nike. They're the ones that put Colin Kaepernick. So ethics, if for no other reason, do actually heighten your visibility. Let's... We already touched upon this. So let's just move into the third and last topic. And again, you touched upon this and this is profit and connections, emotional connections. Yes. So what's the relationship is one of things, connections will show up as inefficiencies. Back when, in the 80s, when I worked for Ericsson, we had tea breaks. And the tea lady with a little cart and you could hear the cups, you know, that real thick glass clanking and all of us would like little lemmings come and get our biscuit and our tea. And that experience of sharing information, we were in exports so we weren't always in the office at the same time, that was a functional exchange of information and positive feelings. Now, I get paid now to come in and teach storytelling and teaching storytelling is fun, but also the way I teach it help people to understand what each other's stories are. We move so fast. We don't know the story of the person in the, you know, cube next to us. And so if you look at it by removing that tea break, we've had to actually add financial investments because we didn't realize we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And so this whole idea that you've got to show a return on investment on every single little detail is, we won't do it. Morals are going to require personal sacrifice. If we're going to solve climate change, right? We're going to have to change the behaviors. And so the way that we can actually make our businesses more responsive and more inclusive is also going to be a way to contribute to whatever behavioral changes we're going to have to undergo before we get our act together on big global challenges. So the de-emphasizing this, you know, every single little detail, like with cars, you know, when they make cars, every one cent, you know, this counts one cent. And if you can take three cents off it, I don't know if you worked in automotive. Then you've made a million dollars. Well, we're going to have to start to look at the long-term payoffs. And we have to budget for morals. If we don't have a budget that takes care of ethical behavior, then, I mean, because ethical behavior is always expensive. It costs you time, or it costs you money. And if it hasn't lately, I'm not sure you still have it. So you're trying to enter it. Well, that's an interesting point that ethics are expensive, right? That's what you say. Yes. What is the price of, like, not doing it, right? That's the bigger question, because eventually we'll die. Well, see, I do a lot of community work. I do a lot of social justice work. And so what I do is you can't connect with somebody if you can't identify with them. And so I'm usually in a situation where people are underserved, and they're trying to communicate to whoever is basically oppressing them, or who's saying they're not worthy of a place to live or whatever, because they don't work hard enough. What I'm trying to do is to understand for them, in order to get into their creative intelligence, they've got to have some positive story to tell themselves about whoever they consider to be the bad guy. And here's the story I tell myself. To be an exploiter, to actually exploit every opportunity without leaving something on the table, turns you and dehumanizes you. And it isolates you. And it makes you afraid. And we call that anxiety in today's world. And so that's the price we pay when we don't allocate, when I don't have enough cash in my pocket to give a homeless person while I'm walking down the streets of Durham downtown. I know what it takes for me to continue to love life. I think that we want our employees and we want our consumers to love life. But that does take a budget. What would your, if you could give an advice regarding storytelling and then your book is full of them, so I would recommend everybody to buy the book and just read the book. Well, October is when the third edition is out. So until what tip would you give? Like if you're going to learn about storytelling or embrace storytelling in your own practice, what would you say? Okay, I believe that in order to learn how to tell stories, the best place to start is how to tell your own story. So your story of who you are and why you're here. And what that will force you to do is to blend integrity because almost everybody's who I am story is a story of some sort of integrity. I mean, that's just the way we're made. I'll admit I've run across a few who I am stories and they were like, you know, I have this killer up and it really screwed all these people and now I'm a millionaire, but okay. That's not the kind of people I want to help. So who you are. And then I get four buckets. A time you shined, a time you blew it, which is also a really good time that shows what you'll never let happen again. A book or a movie, which is letting someone else who's an artist. And by the way, this is the story, the art part of story is the hard part. If you try to science story, all you get is a descriptive definition. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, which is like that's useless. So find your who I am, why I'm here story. Tell it to somebody else and you'll begin to get the skills for what it takes to cause a story to do its work, which in this case would be instead of you saying, my name is Annette and I'm trustworthy. I can say, this is what I did last week and then you decide whether I was trustworthy or I am trustworthy. So that's, is that advice helpful? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's sort of, it feels like what you said, learn storytelling by telling your own story. Absolutely. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, too many people approach it in some sort of way that technically should work. But as we know in design thinking, it doesn't. So this whole idea of testing stories as a tangible whole rather than trying to build elements of stories and then cram them all together. Awesome. I know you haven't prepared for this question, so you're going to have to improvise, but is there a thing you'd like to ask the viewers or the listeners of the show? Is there a thing you'd like us to think about? I think this whole idea about budgeting for morals or else using morals to find secrets for service. I would like to know if that, I mean, I imagine that would be helpful, but I'm not sure whether it is. I'd really like to hear back if you think that has lags. Let us know in the comments. I'm really curious what people will say. Great topic for the design community. Perfect topic for the design community. Annette, I think we could spend another two hours talking. I think I'll try to address storytelling much more on the show in the coming episodes. Who knows what will come up, but you did a great job sharing your perspective. So thanks for making the time. Well, thank you. Thanks for letting me be part of the community for a bit. We embrace you and welcome you to our tribe. Thank you. So what is your biggest takeaway from this episode? And what is your perspective on Annette's question? Make sure to leave a comment down below. And if you know somebody who might benefit from the things we've just discussed, please share the link with them and help us to grow the community. And speaking about storytelling, if you'd like to learn how to explain service design in a way that anyone understands, make sure to check out the free course that I've got for you over here. Thanks again for watching and look forward to seeing you in the next video.