Storytelling with Thought Leadership | Adam Zuckerman, Mary J. Cronin, Michelle Mellon, and Christopher Brace | 495

Adam Zuckerman, he's at Willis Towers Watson. One of the things that I'm excited to talk to you about is how you have intentionally shaped the voice of your thought leadership. I know you have training as an academic and that you look at a topic, employee engagement, which can be very quantitative. But you often use a personal approach to storytelling. And if I can put you on the spot a little bit, I want to relate to something that you posted this morning as we're recording about your experiences when you were 11 at sleepaway camp. If you could maybe summarize that story, and then let's sort of dig into it from a thought leadership perspective.

Sure. Yeah, thanks for that. Well, that post was about a summer I was 11 years old, and I volunteered for something called Survival, which of course subsequently became a television show having nothing to do with that. But this was years before, this was 1980, I think. And, um, they had a program at sleepaway camp called Survival where you would leave, leave the camp and they would take you off into the woods and leave you there for 24 hours. They give you some basic training about how to build a shelter and so forth, and you got very limited supplies, and they would basically drop you off. And if you made it 24 hours, they'd come back in 24 hours, and if you had made it, then you got this cool necklace and you had survived. And so I volunteered to do this. In retrospect, unwisely, but it seemed kind of cool.. And it was a total disaster. I didn't pay attention to any of the training they gave. And I wound up— it wound up raining. I mean, torrentially, biblically raining all night long. And I hadn't prepared at all. And it was a really incredible, indelible, kind of enduring experience for me. And I remember with great clarity They gave you a whistle, a plastic whistle that you blow in case of emergency. You know, the camp leaders weren't that far away, obviously. It seemed like it when you're a kid, but— and if there's a problem, they come and get you. And when the rain came, I blew that whistle like you wouldn't believe. And the guy came out and said, "What's the problem?" I said, "I want to go home, back to camp, you know, right now." And he wouldn't take me. He said, "You can do this." The post was about that experience and how— and I did do it and I did make it. In retrospect, how much I valued it and I valued him and what he did, which was he believed in me more than I believed in myself. I was panicking. I was essentially in tears. He was saying, "No, it's all right. You can get through this." He was right. That's what the post was about. It was about leaders who believe in employees sometimes more than they believe in themselves, and how powerful that can be.

So what I loved about that at the end is, I realized as I got older, I wanted to be that leader, right? And so you were speaking to the experience of your younger self, and then connecting it to who you wanted to be today. Talk to me in terms of the conscious choices you're making in creating the voice for your thought leadership? Because as I said, it could be sort of very academic or very metrics-oriented. You've led with story, and you've led with narrative. That seems a choice.

Yeah, I mean, it is. And I think, I mean, part of it is I'm, you know, I'm a frustrated writer and And to some extent, and I know that story resonates with people. But I mean, but that's also just how I experience it. It's how I experience work in the world. And so yeah, I have academic training, and I have extensive training in statistics and methodology. And that's all valuable. But ultimately, I do think it's the experience we all have and the emotions that we all have around work that really are important and make the difference. And I mean, I wouldn't exactly say this, but it's a little corny, I suppose. But I mean, all the academic literature and all the research adds tremendous value. But to me, a lot of the best decisions and the right kind of judgment is intuitive. It's sort of, you know what to do in the moment. And so I guess that's partly what I'm relying on as well, right? It's just the research and all that and all the statistics are great and inform the creation of best practices and all the rest. But ultimately, I think it comes down to your own experience and your perspective. And a lot of that is sort of more fundamental than even the research and the quantitative data.

So a friend of mine, he uses the example that Often research provides data and validation for things which are intuitive, but you're not certain of. And I think making that invisible instinct visible, whether through story or data, is really some of the heavy lifting work of thought leadership.

Yeah, I agree. I think the data makes it— the data confirms it, as you say, the data validates it. But the data also makes it, you know, sort of requires that it provokes action. I mean, we do employee surveys for companies all over the world, and I've done this work for a very long time. And very, very, very rarely do I come in and run an employee survey and share the results with executives and share something they didn't already know. I mean, and the thing, you know, they pay a lot for the service and they put a lot of effort into it and it's valuable. But at the end of the day, most of what we come up with, they already know. Validates it, it quantifies it, it puts it in front of them in a way that provokes action. And that's where a lot of the value is, right? It's not necessarily saying, here's something you, you really had no idea was going on in your organization and we've uncovered it. The fact is, you know, a lot of these things already. We're putting, we're putting some language around it and some terms around it that allows you to understand it maybe a bit better and focus it and focus action. And that's really what all that data does, I think.

Dr. Mary Cronin. She's a research professor at Boston College. Many entrepreneurs are visionary, but you don't have to be a visionary to be an entrepreneur, right? But that sense of building the future, of making something new or serving a need that hasn't been served before, requires storytelling, especially if you're doing something like creating a new market and you're doing category creation where you have to convince people this is not only a problem, but it's a solvable problem.

Yes, and right away you are posing some questions that I think we want to debate a bit, because I agree with you that it is not necessary to be a visionary to be an entrepreneur, and I also agree that it is essential for any successful company at any stage to be able to articulate their story in a compelling way. So storytelling is a component of entrepreneurship success, and I believe also of thought leadership success. What I think is different in my perspective is that the bias towards change, towards action, towards actually being the person that makes the change happen is so much stronger in the entrepreneurial mindset. And in the thought leader mindset, it's articulating the change, uh, so that whether or not that change that a company wants to bring into being is completely solving a problem that no one else has tackled yet and making the world a better place as a result, or simply changing customer behavior so they buy a product from this startup or this company and not another company. Those kinds of changes that take place in the market, in, in society, and everything in between, they have to be high on the list for entrepreneurs to master to start a company that survives and thrives in this highly competitive business world. And to get back to your storytelling point, storytelling maybe is at the heart of thought leadership, but it's only one component and often a neglected component of entrepreneurship. And that has raised in my mind, as I thought about our conversation, a paradox. Why isn't every entrepreneur in essence a nascent or an accomplished thought leader? If entrepreneurs are out to change the world, if they're out to solve a problem, if they want to accomplish something through action, it is in their interests, I believe, to be able to articulate, uh, why they are doing it in a way that can be understood by the broader market, by their customers, by their employees, or the talent that they want to attract, by their, uh, potential investors and partners. And yet I see a lot of entrepreneurs who don't even put thought leadership on their priority list. When they're beginning to start.

That's an interesting thing because one of the things from my side that I've seen is I've seen startups that have been going on a fundraising tour, basically using thought leadership as one of the designated uses of capital for the thought lead— for the fundraising, right? So that they are going to position themselves in the market to create demand or distinguish and tell their story. And so I think from a very savvy perspective, it's a way to grow and get attention rather than say, okay, we're going to talk to industry analysts, we're going to talk to— we'll do some traditional PR, etc. That only goes so far, right? How are you going to change the conversation from the way that the world is working? And if you can show investors that you've got a plan for that, that's useful.

I agree with you, and I would also remind you that we started this conversation saying that entrepreneurs don't have to be visionaries and that not all entrepreneurs are in fact visionaries. The parallel to that is most entrepreneurs are not out on fundraising tours, right? Or booking analyst conversations. They are busy trying to bootstrap their companies and to achieve their vision that way. And those are the entrepreneurs I think I am mostly thinking about. Of course, I'm interested in those who can make a big launch with a nice, uh, fundraise, but in in terms of the number of entrepreneurs who are entering the marketplace every year, the vast majority are not raising that kind of investment. And yet I feel strongly they would still benefit from and be very well served by thinking about how to create a thought leadership position for themselves and their companies.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Michelle Mellon. She's the thought leadership director at Salient MG. She's also written and published short stories. When you're talking about speculative fiction or horror, it begins with a what-if question, right?

Exactly.

And so I think that's a great place to play with the intersection of thought leadership and storytelling is where do you begin with the what-if?

I think in terms of the thought leadership that I'm working on for clients, You know, when I'm helping them develop their platform, their strategy, their ideas for what they're going to talk about, it's always going to be this what-if scenario. So we know what's happening in the world right now, but with thought leadership, we want to dive a little bit deeper. We want to say, what are the trends? What is coming around the corner? What if this thing that's happening now turns into this thing that's happening tomorrow? And so I think there's always a very strong speculative element to thought leadership as well. And that's something that I want to encourage my clients and other thought leadership practitioners to embrace, but then also want to make sure that the basic elements of storytelling are also included in that. So that there's a beginning, a middle, and an end to whatever clients are trying to convey with their thought leadership.

Well, and I want to get to the narrative journey in a moment, but I want to pull out a little bit of a thread that you mentioned. So you talked about what if and what could be, but often much of what we read is what is, that's the news today, or what was, right? We read things from the past. And so it is a little bit of a different focus to be able to ask the question and say, Let's write the story of the future and figure out how to get there.

I think that's a difficulty for most people. I mean, I, like I said, I love speculative fiction, but sometimes it's difficult for me as a fiction writer to sit down and say, okay, what is the world going to look like in 50 years or 200 years? What does the world look like on, you know, another planet somewhere? And then you go into that as a writer and you figure that out and you create that world. I think there's probably a hesitancy on, in terms of thought leadership, to do that because you're going to be judged on what you're placing in front of people. And it's not going to be a different world in another galaxy 100 years from now. It's going to be something that business leaders and innovators and the founders are looking at as a guidepost for where they can be in 10 years. And there's, I think there's a lot more pressure on them to do that.

And with that timeframe, some thought leadership may be 10 years out, it could be 5. You could even be talking about a transformation, an issue, 12 to 18 months, depending on what industry or sector you're in. And so your proof point comes a whole lot sooner, right?

Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. But I think if you're, if you're telling the right story, and you're engaging people in that vision that you have, then they're a little more likely to buy in and say, okay, maybe I don't get every single point, or maybe I don't agree with every projection that you've made, but you're telling it in a way that makes me think. And I think, you know, obviously thought is part of thought leadership. You want people to think. You want people to think in new ways. You want them to think about things that they haven't thought of before, and you want them to think, maybe this is something that I can apply in what I'm doing or what my organization is doing. And we can make a change and can turn things around.

Absolutely. And as a genre, speculative fiction, for example, doesn't have to be 100% correct. In thought leadership, you don't have to be 100% correct either. You have to just be able to peer around the corner into the future to see something that's valuable and say, okay, If this is true, here's what you should do today.

Right. And I think that, I mean, I think that, that point is really key for storytelling in general. It doesn't have to be correct. You have to communicate an idea and you have to communicate it in a way that it resonates with someone and that they can engage with it and embrace it. But it doesn't have to be perfectly correct. It doesn't have to follow all the rules. It doesn't have to follow the predictable path. It just has to reach one, at least one person to bring them in and get them on board with what you're thinking.

So earlier you laid out a predictable path. All stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the beginning's what comes first, and then comes the middle, and then comes the end. But you just said that sometimes breaking those rules is what makes a story interesting. How do you tell engaging stories in thought leadership? And how do you either follow the rules or break them?

That's a great question. I think, I mean, to go back to what I said, so the beginning, the middle, and the end, those are the elements of storytelling. But I think we're seeing more and more that when you mix those up, maybe you start in the middle and then you have the end and the beginning, or you start at the end and then you work your way backwards. That's playing with the format of the narrative can also be interesting and engaging. And, you know, like we just said, there's no right or wrong in storytelling. And so I think you also have to let yourself go when you're, when you're doing storytelling and thought leadership and think, I don't necessarily have to tell this in a way that everyone else has. If I'm writing an article or I'm doing a podcast or, you know, whatever format it comes in, I don't have to do it in the way that everyone else does. So I think that you know, you have to remember that there's these elements you want to include. You want to have some sort of central character or protagonist or issue or challenge, and then you want to talk about the effect of that protagonist, issue, challenge, whatever it is, and you want to offer some sort of resolution, or you want to leave people with the idea that there are multiple option for resolution to that issue, challenge, or whatever that protagonist is going through. So I think it's more about a focus on the elements of storytelling and then figuring out how they come together to best tell your story. I don't think there's a prescriptive way to do that. I mean, I think if you read my stories, you can tell by my voice that they're all by me, but I use different formats for them. I might use first person in this, I might use third person in that. I might start at the beginning for this one and it's a very traditional narrative. I just wrote a short story that's entirely in tweets. And so I think the story is going to tell you how it needs to be told and you just have to listen.

Christopher Braced has spent his career in the marketing and agency world working on projects for global food and packaged good brands. From a marketing perspective of building that relevance, that resonance, that connection, which we've talked about about is that first step. How do you do that? And, and what could a thought leadership practitioner learn from the world of CPG?

So I think this is probably the one of the biggest struggles brands have, which is how do I understand what that deeper emotionally resonant story is that my brand can tell? So we're going to go in a little bit of a different direction here, because I'm going to, I'm going to talk a little bit about the word story. I'm actually right now working on a new project, and I'm doing a ton of reading and academic studies about the importance of stories intergenerationally across families and how vitally important they are in creating a very strong sense of not only self-identity, but identity for the family. And so if a brand wants to understand what is that deeper emotionally resonant story, what you need to do is you need to talk to your consumers and get them to tell you the stories that they have that are, uh, related to the different emotional territories that that brand owns or sits in. And most researchers and brand people know what those emotional territories are. But what we often do is when we research, we research the surface of that rather than researching the depth of it. And it is the depth of it. That's where that emotionally resonant story sits. And I think the reason that we do this is because we focus too much on the product rather than the bigger emotional idea that sits above it. And I think too few brands know what this is.

So let's unpack that a little bit and let's stay using sort of the CPG world, the focus group as an example. I can imagine plenty of focus group conversations where you sit up on top and you're talking about different brand promises or packaging or positioning and that sort of thing. How do you, focus group or not, go after getting someone to tell you the stories that align to that territory? How do you draw them out? What sort of questions do you ask and in what environment? Because it almost sounds anthropological in nature.

It is, it is absolutely. And that's a great way of saying it. Well, the process that we used, and it was a research methodology that I kind of created and evolved over time, is what we call facilitated storytelling. And basically we don't do it in a focus group because I read this study years ago, is two really smart women did a study and they said that it takes an average of 22 minutes of the typical, what I would call facilitated dialogue in a typical qualitative setting where the moderator asks a question, there's some discussion, they ask probing questions, and then you get onto the next question. In that setting, it takes an average of 22 minutes for any one person to actually get beyond their conscious rationalized explanation, and then get down into the deeper emotional territory. So what we need to do is we need any type of research methodology that skips the first 22 minutes and gets right to minute 23. And the best way to do that, I found, is by engaging people in telling stories about their lives. You know, sociology and anthropology has taught us that People reveal their non-conscious emotional truths through the stories they tell about their lives. So really, it's a matter of how do you ask the right questions to get the right stories? And then how do you listen with that storytelling ear to understand what is that story telling me about them?

So can you give me an example that opens that up a little bit more and flushes it out?

Yeah, I mean, we did a— I, I'm going to use, I'm going to use Serta Simmons Bedding because I know you interviewed, uh, Melanie Hewitt, and I worked with her on, on their brands. And the question, the fundamental question was, how do we sell something more than a mattress? And if there is something more than a mattress, what is that?

So the mattress, you think of it in many ways as a commodity, right?

Yes, exactly. I mean, and when you look at the competitive analysis, it is— they all say exactly the same thing and they use the same terminology, and it's all very confusing and it's very hard for consumers to sort through it. But there's— I mean, you think about this: what do we spend a third of our life, a third of every day doing? Sleeping. So it's pretty important. So there is an immense amount of stuff to talk about there. So what we did is we, we actually did qualitative research, but where we interviewed people in friendship dyads. So these are two people who have a very close emotional relationship. What that does is it allows them to be much more vulnerable and honest, and you get such deeper research results. And what you, you know, what we did is we talked about things like, so I want you to think back in the past, like 2 to 3 months when you woke up feeling great and you were ready to tackle whatever you had to tackle that day. Shouldn't be a special occasion, not a wedding or anything like that. Just, it was an everyday Monday through Friday. You had to go to work. You woke up and feeling really great. And then you just, now tell me about that experience. What did it mean for you? How did the people around you react to you? Your significant other, your kids, your coworkers, your boss, whatever it might be. And it's amazing what you find. People observe very deep things about themselves as they tell those stories. And then really, once they tell the story, the role that the story plays is it makes— it opens them up emotionally. It makes them vulnerable. So then the researcher can start asking those questions that you really want to start asking at minute 23. Not minute 1 through 22, but minute 23. And that's when they reveal all the gold.

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