Being Entrepreneurial in Your Storytelling

People often remember stories, and telling stories can be an effective way to communicate success. But, as researchers have found, there is a craft to organizational storytelling whereby the story must work in conjunction with both logical-rational elements and the emotive and motivational features of the people involved. This lesson is an important one for small businesses and startups seeking to gain traction and staying power with their audience or customer. It also resonates for TBED practitioners who often struggle with clear and concise messaging in promoting economic growth. Researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) Ross School of Business examined storytelling's role in entrepreneurial endeavors as part of a working paper released in September. The paper concludes with a set of take-aways for researchers, small business owners and entrepreneurs, including tactics for telling better stories.

In Being Entrepreneurial in Your Storytelling: An Institutional Tale, authors Lianne M. Lefsrud of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at UM and P. Devereaux Jennings of the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta rely primarily on existing research and examples from organizational theory, strategy and entrepreneurship to consider the types of stories told and their direct and indirect effects.

Choice of storytelling and approach depends on recognizing what the authors have deemed the four proximate set of reasons for stories in institutional contexts. Stories are told, the authors say, to reinforce or build identities, to project an image, to transfer identities across contexts, or to break up identities and images, creating cultural detritus that allow for new stories to emerge.

Determining the audience for the story is an essential part of the process. Small business owners and entrepreneurs generally report having several competing audiences with different messaging needs. To balance this need, the authors put forth two options: telling a similar core story, but in a different way to each audience, or telling fundamentally different types of stories to different audiences. However, a more recent version of storytelling to emerge focuses on reframing. In this case, the audience gives the story to the storyteller, who then retells it in a more applicable way. The authors point out that identifying audience segmentation, or framings, allows for crafting messages that are best able to resonate with each audience.

The paper also discusses fitting the story to context and considering direct and indirect effects of storytelling. An indirect effect could be whether the audience uses a type of story in another context to garner legitimacy or support. As an example, the storytelling process may feedback into future storytelling within the context, thus shaping new stories and reinforcing the tendency to use those particular stories.

In considering storytelling tactics, the authors discuss two related sets examined by academics that may be of use to small business owners and entrepreneurs and are described in detail and illustrated in a chart. They also remind the reader that there is an art to storytelling to consider, and sometimes the most authentic voices come from clients or investors.

For storytelling in small business and entrepreneurial contexts, it makes sense to start with the end in mind, according to the authors. That is, working backwards, determining which audiences and types of stories would best help to achieve the desired effect. The authors are not above borrowing from existing story designs and delivery, advising entrepreneurs to identify and pull apart stories they admire to make it their own. Other tactics include simplifying and focusing on your own story and creating drama through great characters and likeable heroes — specifically giving characters goals and vision that the intended audience cares about and identifying something they are trying to accomplish.

In a final note, the authors warn that an inauthentic story may be worse than no story at all.

Being Entrepreneurial in Your Storytelling: An Institutional Tale is available for download at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2340100.