To get started. And um if our moderator joins us, we'll dive in from there. So today we're gonna be talking about innovation, storytelling and innovation, storytelling is a little bit different than your standard size storytelling.What we're gonna be learning about today is to have the opportunity to think about introducing products, services and ideas that are a little bit different than the mainstream when we're introducing an idea that's wholly different from anything that our audience has heard before, we need to use different techniques.

And so I want to tell you first about my experiences when I went to work with corning glass. Now, Corning was a special type of company um as you may know them, 100 and 70 year old glass company and I was invited to go and speak there to a group of fract. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with fract Gray, as I wasn't um fract studies how glass breaks. So when I went to see them, they told me that they were about to unveil a huge breakthrough idea to the CEO and the board looking for funding for their brand new idea. And unfortunately, they whipped out for me, a 62 page slide presentation that was focused on this beautiful new glass. What you saw on the screen were protons, neutrons and electrons. Um It was pretty much sand at the molecular level. And I thought to myself, what CEO wants to hear this presentation, 62 slides. And there were three more of those sand diagrams as we were talking.

And in the middle of that conversation, when I was learning about how the sand was made and how the glass became came into being um one of the fract groupers wound up having a, becoming an aunt, her sister in Ohio had had a baby and wouldn't you know that little baby wound up taking up the bulk of our conversation.

She passed around her phone, showing us the picture of her baby, um her new niece rather. And after Oohing and I, we went back to the conversation around um around the glass. Well, about 30 seconds later, the conversation devolved back into protons, neutrons and electrons. And I said, Amy, show us that picture of that baby one more time. And I looked at that picture and I said, can you just imagine that little baby? Imagine its pancreas growing at a rate of 10 x. What ours would as teenagers or grown ups, imagine the capillaries forming all over her body and imagine how quickly those neurons are firing in the brain right now. And they looked at me like I had three heads and I said, we're not interested in what actually makes up a baby, right? We're not interested in the components of a baby. What makes us, what moves us is the impact that this little baby is going to have on the rest of the world. When we're talking about an innovation, we have to start with the brilliance in mind and how it will impact the rest of the audiences that it serves the people who actually wind up using an incredible innovation.

So as the conversation progressed, I'm gonna share with you a little bit further about what that innovation, those protons, neutrons and electrons that made up the sand, what they wound up becoming. But I need to let you know in this business, I wasn't always an innovation storyteller.

In fact, my last job before moving into the wild world of innovation. Marketing was as an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control on a grant at the New York City Department of Health. And I was tracking the spread of variant and resistant strains of HIV coming into the United States, not too different than what we're tracking now with COVID. But prior to that, I was a revolutionary. I was living in Central America studying at the University of Costa Rica.

And I decided I wanted to take up la lucha. I wanted to join with the rebels and fight the good fight um that was going on in Central America. Well, while I was there and making my way to the front lines and saw the devastation of war. I decided that that was not going to be the way that I was going to change the world. And instead, when I came back to university, I decided to focus my attention instead on HIV, infected populations around the world. And two years later, I found myself in Thailand working with HIV, positive populations, both Thai populations and indigenous hill tribe populations in rural northern Thailand. And that's where I would spend my time for the next three years. So I want to share with you a little bit about that experience and how it relates back to telling a great innovation story. Now, when I first got to Thailand in 1993 I began working on a campaign that was adjacent to the Ministry of Public Health. They had these incredible billboards throughout the roads of Thailand that basically said in broad letters, get HIV and die, get A I DS and die A I DS is a death sentence. As you can imagine, these billboards were absolutely terrifying and they captivated the attention of the villagers.

And in fact, when I first arrived in my little village in 1995 right on the border of Burma today of Myanmar. Um the first red light district had already gone out of business, the sex workers there and the majority of their customers were already infected with HIV or had passed away. Now, this campaign of Get A I DS and die. This shock and awe campaign that was administered by the Ministry of Public Health was shockingly effective. At first for the first six months of this campaign, we saw HIV infection rates plummet pretty dramatically that shift wound up creating a change in us as public health educators and marketers like any good marketer. When you find a technique that actually works really well. What do you do? You double down on that? So what we saw six months later were HIV, infection rates actually creeping up. It turned out that fear was not as effective a tool in fighting HIV as we had hoped or at least it wasn't enough. And so we needed to find another way after doubling down on an even scarier campaign where we saw the exact same, you know, decrease in HIV infection rates and then six months later, another increase again, we needed to do something different.

Now, unfortunately, the only tool we had at our disposal at the time was the condom. And I'm curious for those of you out there today, how many of you would want to take a guess? How old do you think the condom is if you could put your comments into the chat? How old do you think the condom is? How long has the condom been here in the, in, in the world? And you can just post your post your guests in the chat. Well, I'll give you a little hint. It's not 200 or 500. The first evidence of the condom was actually found in the caves of France 10,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. So, as you can imagine, we're fighting one of the most deadliest epidemics of our lifetimes at that point. And yet the only tool we had at our disposal was a 10,000 year old public health device. The condom, it was easy to find. It was easy to teach how to use it. Nothing too complicated there, but it turned out it didn't have the impact and the boom that we hoped it would because people frankly, after that fear peak had plateaued got really tired of using them and especially in the setting where I was.

So at the time, I was working in a brothel, I was spending my time doing A I DS education with sex workers and their customers in this brothel setting. So as you can imagine, I had three main markets for my message. Number one were the mama. Sos, these were the women who owned the brothels. Number two, it was the customers, predominantly men who would come in looking for a good time. And finally, the sex workers themselves, male and female and trans. And so if you think about it, what are the most in intriguing propositions for each of these core audiences? What do you think was in it for them. I can tell you for the Mamasan those who own the brothel, they were certainly looking to make money off of the transaction for the customer. They were looking to have a good time and for the sex worker, they were truly looking for survival, survival. It really wasn't more than that. Imagine having, um, sex with your customer eight times in the night and needing to use a condom each and every time, needless to say, we faced a lot of opposition and a lot of pushback when we were trying to save women's lives. And that is where it dawned on me that we needed to. We couldn't change the epidemic and we couldn't change the tools at our disposal. Uh But we could change something that underpinned all of it. And that was the story.

What was the story that we needed to tell and the shift that needed to happen in that storytelling was to make each of those three audiences, the mama. So the customer and the prostitute and the sex worker herself, we needed to make it them the heroes of their own story in doing so we could really change everything. And so we started off first with empathetic listening. What is the most important thing that we needed from each of those individuals was to figure it out. What mattered most to them in trying to save their lives. And as it turned out, what mattered most to the Mamasan in addition to making money, was saying to them, what if we could instill in this community that your brothel had the cleanest reputation? What if if we could say to the customer, we could send you home as a hero, knowing that you would be the protector of your family and of your Children and those Children to come and finally to the sex worker herself. What if we could offer her that she could be the hero that she could be in charge of her own destiny rather then lay at the hands of the people who came into that brothel every night and leave her fate to chance.

When we started asking those questions, what matters most to you? What's the outcome you really want from this interaction? And where do you see yourself in the future? Suddenly that condom had a transformative property that allowed people to get to that point where they wanted to be.

And in fact, we need to ask that all of us need to ask that especially those of us in tech. How can we make the listener the hero of their own story through whatever product service or idea we're trying to convey. And so in addition to being an anthropologist, uh I was also a religion major in college and I was fascinated by the way the prophets were able to move the word around the world. How were they able to do that before there was Twitter before there was social media or tiktok. How exactly were these prophets able to move millions of people and still do today? Move millions of people by the word alone? And that's why I started to see the prophets as the greatest viral storytellers of all time thinking about them in this way, really shifted my perception of how they communicated. And so I started to study them and how they actually spoke to their communities. The greatest storytellers were unassuming individuals. They started off oftentimes from quite humble beginnings or humbled themselves along the way, they decided to make very courageous choices in their lives. And as a result, stood by their belief systems in a way that perhaps the most of us might not.

But what was most compelling about them were their stories. And as I began to examine them more and more, I began to find that there were five essential rules of innovation storytelling that these prophets had a desire to innovate their entire society for a better life. And so the rules around innovation, storytelling come directly from the way the prophets spoke to us. So let's take a look at what actually makes these stories so great. They begin. Number one with a shared history. Step. Number one in innovation storytelling is knowing your shared history.

Where do you and I both share the same background, history. Maybe it's coming to work for the same company together, maybe it's understanding how a technology has evolved over time, maybe it's a desire for the greater good to change something to make people's lives better. Step one, step two is what are the values and the purpose that you're trying to convey within innovation. So for the prophets that values and purpose aligned around their own core values and the ones that came from that shared history. So think about those parables that we think about with Jesus Buddha, Muhammad. Um Moses, where are those core values and purpose? So step one asks of us, what are the values that we come from? And when we're trying to make a shift, what are the new values that we need to incorporate and the purpose that we are taking people on? Where is the future that we are guiding people to? Now? Step three is probably the most challenging for most of us. It's coming up with a really concerted message that rallies people around that idea. So think about the shift that has to take place when you share something like an eye for an eye to turn the other cheek. That shift is massive. It's a change in thinking it's a change in behavior and it's a change in the way that we treat the person next to us.

So that shift is radical and it also means we can't go back to the status quo, we can't go back to the way of doing things any longer. A change has taken place And so all of this depends on not just where we want to take our audience, but also thinking about what the listeners experience would be, think about how you take that story in going from an eye for an eye to turn the other cheek and what it means for you.

How quickly can you conjure up an example of when you've done that forgiveness, when you've decided to opt out of another way of doing things that might be more vengeful and to choose a way that might be more passive, that shift or courageous. Even that shift is what you're asking your listeners to take. When you're asking people to make a change. Anytime, you're asking people to make a change, you're going from a shift from the old to the new and the values need to go along with it. Next up in the shift is identifying the early adopters. You'll notice that all of the prophets had a band of followers tagging behind them who take in the message, they get the message instantly. They are those converts to the idea and that they're now able to share the message in their own words. This is a really part, a really important part of innovation, communications overall is can the listener take in this cool new idea, make it their own and repeat it to someone else? And that takes us to slide to step number five, creating viral language around a great story.

So what is that thing that makes people identify with the message that something that allows them to hold on to it. So, viral language is things like alliteration, rhyme metaphor, simile, those things that get that idea into our mind and it won't leave, read my lips, no new taxes, right? Things like that that allow us to hold on to that ba, ba, ba, ba, I'm loving it ways that we can reach into and grab on to an idea that holds us. So I want you to think about that. And if you would actually like a copy of these five eternal rules of innovation, storytellers, feel free to text me at is story 66866. And I'll be glad to send it to you. And in fact, I'll put it in the chat momentarily so you can text me there and I'll be glad to share it with you. So why are stories so powerful? Why do they work every time? Well, frankly, it's because that's how our brains are hardwired to receive information we're not accustomed to three bullets and an Excel spreadsheet and figuring it out from there. And in fact, Stanford University has done the heavy lifting for us.

We know that stories are 22 times more memorable than just giving people facts alone. So they actually did the research where they did an experiment where they asked people to memorize or they were told a column of facts short easy to remember. They thought and then another group was given the same set of data but wrapped in the story. And as a result, they were able to remember all of those items six minutes after leaving the meeting. And in fact, those people who just got the uh list of uh the item list of items to remember, forgot them almost instantly. So I'm thinking about all of you and the changes that you're trying to make. I want you to consider how these, how stories can become your greatest productivity tool as well as your greatest memory making device. What good is having to give all of this information to people? Only to repeat it over and over again and not have it stick a great story captivates your emotion. So let's talk about emotion for a little bit because it is the principal mechanism of getting people to hold on to information. Now, perhaps one of the greatest stories of all time, Walt Disney was a master of getting into our emotional space.

And how many of you can probably remember the opening scene of Bambi within the first five minutes of the Walt Disney movie, Bambi about a mother and a mother and child deer who go off into the forest? Mother Bambi is shot by hunters and Bambi is left orphaned and alone watch this movie with any little kid and you'll see the abject horror on a child's face as they take in the fact that they've just lost their mom. Now, this story was incredibly close to me as I um and the mom of two step kids who lost their mom very young. And so I foolishly decided to show them the movie Bambi not making the connection in my mind. And when I brought in a tray of snacks to them to see the horror on their faces struck me forever, those emotions stayed inside. It's how a story gets inside of us and stays there is through powerful emotion. And what Walt Disney does after presenting us with this horrific event, he now takes us to the next level, which is introducing Bambi to all of Bambi's new forest friends where they can learn how to survive and thrive even in difficult circumstances. The message of Bambi is resilience and friendship, but it starts off with a horrible bang that gets all of us jarred. And why does it work so effectively?

It works because what Walt Disney and all of the great storytellers do think of any action movie that begins with a car crash or any other great story that leads with tremendous suspense. We go and see a horror movie and our palms are sweating and our hearts racing fast, emotions trigger neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin adrenaline that get us going. And when we can tell stories that actually wind up creating a flood of neurochemicals in the body, we are triggering a reaction that allows a story to stay with us, it actually gets into the bloodstream. So a story sticks with us. And the other things that's happening when you're telling a story is that the listener is actively looking for a memory that sounds like the one the storyteller is offering from their own experience. So while I'm talking to you and telling you stories, you're also searching your own mental database to see where you have an experience that parallels that. So when you tell a story with great emotion, you're more likely to make that story stick. That's why a story needs great drama in order for us to hold on to it. And more importantly, to share it, great stories get shared because that emotion triggers us to tell it and retell it over and over again just like the prophets did thousands of years ago.

So I want to talk a little bit now about what's going on in the innovation world and why it's so important for you to tell great stories when introducing an innovation. You know, when I first got started in this business in 1999 at the height of the.com boom, it was a whole different world. Every company was a revolutionary. Every start up, every.com was proclaiming itself to revolutionize an industry and frankly, it led with fear just like my wonderful public health campaign that I participated in back in 1994 revolutionary sounded like buy my product or you won't be able to remain competitive in the next 10 years by my company, Mr Fortune 500.

And you won't be or you won't be on the Fortune 500 in the next 10 years. And for me, as a publicist, I was calling journalists and saying you had better write about this revolutionary start up or I'll take my story to the Washington Post and you'll be the laughing stock of the newsroom. Well, I can tell you that revolutionary approach, that approach by fear doesn't really work. In 2022 we are overwhelmed with fear. What works in the sharing economy is actually telling a story of goodwill. What do I mean by that? If you leave, not with nothing else from this presentation except this concept is know that goodwill stories, the act of making someone else's life better is the game changer among great innovation, storytellers, a goodwill story lights up the brain. It actually changes the neurochemistry because fear is powerful, but it's not powerful enough. And that fear works only for short periods of time. When you're actually trying to change behavior, it doesn't actually create a lasting behavior change. But goodwill is completely different.

Making someone's life better has a physiological effect on both ourselves and our customers, the audiences that we speak to. So when the brain senses that it's involved in social support, it experiences reduced stress related activity, greater reward activity and caregiving activity, what does that mean?

This is like a generous biological design that's probably key to our survival as human beings overall. But a powerful goodwill story, something that makes someone else's life better is akin to our tribal selves. Saying to someone eat this mushroom, don't eat this mushroom, maybe try this other funny mushroom a little bit later. But if we can tell someone this mushroom will kill you. This mushroom is delicious and will nourish you. You are actually making someone's life better. You are contributing to their societal existence. You are continuing their longevity. So today, this looks like a modern day Yelp review. Eat at this restaurant. Don't eat at this restaurant. I'd like to save you money. I'd like to ensure that you have the best dining experience of a lifetime when we give goodwill like that. When we give back to our community, our brain as the storyteller lights up and the recipient's brain for receiving it also lights up with those good serotonin dopamine related feelings. That's the rush and we actually know it works because we know that when someone else tells our story for us, we know that user generated content as we call it today. Someone else telling our story that among millennials is 20% more influential on purchases.

It's 35% more memorable and it's 50% more trusted then content that we share ourselves. If it comes from our corporation or organization, getting other people to share our story is vital and showing them that we care about them is the number one trigger to generate a share. I mean, just think for yourself, what is the difference between liking a story and sharing a story? How much of you do you need to invest in yourself? You need to invest in order to just like something on social media on linkedin, on Instagram. It doesn't take a lot if you decide to share it. how much more invested are you? Are you looking at what the source was that your friend found this on? Are you sure that, are you thinking about how your own followers will respond? Are you thinking about whether or not that will change your status? If you decide to share it, will you come out publicly and support a very particular cause in front of your community? Think about how you invest of yourself. When you share every time we ask someone else or someone else magnanimously shares our story. We're doing something amazing work creating a connection with someone that says, I'm ready to make the change with you. We're creating an alliance and an allegiance and that's really what we want with our audiences when we're sharing an innovation story. So I want to take you in the next 10 minutes that we have together through seven quick ideas on how to do this.

Well, so first off, remember the greatest tool of storytelling step. One is becoming a phenomenal listener, ask yourself the question, what does my audience truly need to hear in order for me to make their life better? Do we even know what motivates our listener? Because we might have one person who's really excited about our product or service, but each one of them can have very different motivations for why they love it or hate it. So, first off, are you doing the requisite work to find out what matters, what motivates your listener and how will you make them the hero upon hearing your story? A person who will be so excited that they'll wanna share it? So that's one, become an empathetic listener. Step one, step two is where do you and your listener have a shared history? What rituals do you have in common if you're coworkers, right? And you're trying to create change internally? What are the shared, what is the shared history that you have at the company? If you're trying to compel a customer, where do you have a shared history in your industry, the things that you like and probably things that you don't, these bumps in the road that we experience together? Right over the last 20 years, we've seen the.com boom, we've seen the mortgage crisis. We have seen um the rise of an incredible economy over the last 10 years until just recently we're in this COVID related and coming out of COVID funk economically too.

Our worlds have been upended. So where do you share a history with your audience. If you can get those points clear, you can create conviviality, you can find a common ground with one another. Now, the next I want you to think about is once you understand that shared history, your core values that you shared in the past and the values that you'll need to make change and the purpose you want to set people on. Now it's time to talk to folks about the shift. Anytime you're going to induce change into the people around you, a customer, your coworkers, an innovation that you want to bring to market um or even your constituents with a big new idea, you have to be able to name the shift that's taking place. Why is this innovation or change arising now? And why is it this change that matters the most this product service or idea why now what's happening? And if you can gold star, can you name the shift? Where's the change that's taking place? Why now are we now looking at, for example, the work from home economy and how that's impacting all of us? Are we looking at shortened work weeks? Are we looking at a whole shift around climate change and how we behave?

It can be a global shift or it can be something that's happening very acutely a big switch in technology. For example, going from regular software based conclusions and data analytics to A I, we're all seeing a shift in what's happening, big and small around us, you'll be better apt if you can name that shift about why it's taking place. And this is the part where we talked about the message. So now thinking about that shift, remember that this is the place where we burn the boats. This is the place where we say we can't go back to the status quo because of the shift that's taking place in the world. We can't go back to doing things the old fashioned way. If it's your contention and the desire to make a change to introduce an innovation, you now must make the case for why this future is going to be better. And in fact, as an innovation storyteller, it's your job to paint a picture of a future that will be better if we follow your vision. So paint a picture for us. Now of what that future looks like.

Now, the way to do that is by dropping little breadcrumbs of thinking about how I get people from point A to point Z and it's by dropping breadcrumbs of, let me tell you how far we've come so far this far, we've already taken giant steps in our evolution along the way. So map them out. If I'm in software, for example, I might say, you know, back in the 19 seventies, we used to sell products and services just as a transaction, somebody would sell you a computer and you would walk away especially at the enterprise level. But by the 19 nineties, products and software, let's say began being sold with products plus services. The software was too complicated to operate on its own. And as a result, a consultant would come along with that software. That was the next step in the nineties. And if we look in the two thousands, the diy movement was fast upon us, user experience, customer experience improved dramatically with the advent of folks like Apple who taught us a different way of looking at technology and that customer Centricity meant that our products had to be better and they could operate without a consultant, right?

But they had to be great and they had to have support. And then finally, until we get today, we're at a Sass based economy, right? Where everything is on subscription, I wouldn't think about giving up my Netflix. But that means that companies also have a long term relationship with us when we're selling technology this way. And as a result of having that long term relationship, we expect constant upgrades. We expect new features and benefits that come along all the time. But if we can show a customer the incremental steps along the way, we're doing something amazing and we're helping them embrace technology in a way that doesn't feel like a revolution, it feels like something easy, the next logical step. And then, and only then do we really begin to tell them about our products? And services. And when we do, we back it up with testimonials. Don't believe me about how great my product or service is. Hear it from my customers directly. And so I'm looking specifically for our doctors and allies, those 1st 12 apostles, those first original customers or our core customers who have been transformed by what we're doing, right? Innovation is the science of transformation. And so we want to really begin to understand and share how our customers lives have been transformed.

Once we can do that, we can showcase the win, win, how both sides of the equation are winning me as the technologies, let's say, creator, owner, salesperson, the innovator and how the recipient has benefited. And as that continues, dear, Mr Customer, you've allowed me to keep innovating and I've allowed you to transform your business. This reciprocal relationship creates an environment where we are constantly sharing and generating new content. And that's what we want more shared viral language in the marketplace of ideas and in the marketplace of our pocketbooks. Now, I wanna just bring the story back around one more time to my friends at Corning Glass and my fract, you'll recall that they, we started off with a 62 page slide presentation with two atomic uh diagrams of how that sand was created and the glass that it would become the innovation story we wound up telling was actually about this incredible new windshield that was going to take the place of the windshields that we know today.

And we said, imagine a 55 inch television that now replaces your windshield as your own entertainment center. Imagine drifting home in traffic in your self driving vehicle where you catch up on the second half of Bridget Jones Diary where you catch up on some emails on your long commute home. That's what that silicon diagram would eventually become as we told the innovation story. So, and I just want to leave you with one famous quote from Steve Jobs who said the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller because the storyteller sets the vision, the values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come. So, thank you very much, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this presentation and please feel free to connect with me. I'm Susan Lindner from Innovation Storytellers and you can find me on linkedin or at Innovation storytellers.com. Thank you so much.