The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative
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The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative
Think back for a moment to the last memo or essay or journal article you wrote, or the last time you gave a presentation. If you followed the traditional model of communication, you went through a familiar trinity of steps. You stated the problem you were dealing with. Then you analyzed the options. And your conclusion followed from your analysis
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Giving reasons for change to people who don’t agree with you isn’t just ineffective. A significant body of psychological research shows that it often entrenches
Stephen Denning • The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative
something new. While the participants were considering the inconsistent statements, the part of the brain associated with reasoning revealed no signs of activity at all. “We did not see,”
Stephen Denning • The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative
Enabler #2: Committing to the Story of Change Managers are appointed by other people. Leaders appoint themselves. Deciding to be a leader is a choice we have to make on our own. No one else can do it for us.
Stephen Denning • The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative
In 1979, a psychologist named Charles Lord and his colleagues at Stanford University published their classic research on what happens when people are presented with arguments that are at odds with what they currently believe.
Stephen Denning • The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative
One clue comes from the work of Frank Luntz, the legendary Republican pollster, who in 1992 was running a focus group in Detroit to test television ads for Ross Perot, the presidential candidate. There were three ads: a biography, a Perot speech, and testimonials from other people. In these sessions, he set out to find the consensus and then see
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The confirmation bias helps explain why the traditional approach of trying to persuade people by giving them reasons to change isn’t a good idea if the audience is at all skeptical, cynical, or hostile.
Stephen Denning • The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative
And if that is so, then narrative intelligence—the ability to “think narratively” about the world—is central to leadership.32 But what exactly does it mean to think narratively about the world? It means the capacity to understand the world in narrative terms, to be familiar with the different components and dimensions of narratives, to know what
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By contrast, the true language of leadership feels fresh and inviting, energizing and invigorating, challenging and yet enjoyable, lively, spirited, and fun, as when equals are talking to equals.