Change Your Story (the Airplane Seat Method)

• Gaurav Rastogi
• 22 May. 2017

A card with heart

I have a friend in India whose father had a sudden heart attack and they had to rush him into the hospital. The hospital insisted on money in advance to admit him, so he swiped his card. It was a high amount, and at 11:30pm, exactly thirty minutes after his Dad was admitted, he gets call on his cellphone. It’s the bank. They wanted to know if the transaction was legit. He said it was.

The agent on the line went silent for a few seconds, then said, “Sir, I notice you’ve swiped at the hospital. Is everything OK”? My friend told him about his father. The agent then said, “Sir, we have a few doctors on our panel that are at this hospital, so if you need a second opinion we can introduce you to them as well. Also, since you have an emergency right now, we will double your card’s credit limit for another thirty days. Please let us know if there’s any other thing we can do”.

This is a real story. My friend is now a loyal customer for life. When I heard it, I was moved too. Stories can do that.

We’re discussing how your company needs to reintroduce itself to your clients frequently to avoid being put into the “friend-zone” that might prevent access to new business opportunities. There are six steps, discussed in my post here, and we’re on the second step. You can read the previous step here.

Can your PowerPoint do that?

Imagine if that Bank was able to do this for more customers? How many other people would hear this story and want to work with the same bank! How many PowerPoint presentations can have the same impact on potential buyers?

Good stories are emotionally resonant, and are memorable and meme-worthy. Does your company tell stories?

Storytelling is an art

"Statistics are dry, and have none of the emotional appeal of stories."

When your business changes, are your stories changing with it?

What client stories are your executives telling their clients? What stories get shared internally? When your business changes, do you have the ability to find the new stories (that validate the new positioning or product), and do you have a way to tell these stories for the most impact? If you don’t, then your emotional appeal is going to be far lower, so I suggest you build a storytelling muscle quickly.

One of my clients was a mid-sized company that wanted to expand out. The problem was that they operated in a very small niche, and the wider market was overcrowded with much larger companies. Making a name for themselves in the larger market would be difficult— how does this company become memorable?

We went through the powerpoint presentations, but realized that things don’t look that interesting when they are reduced to stats and charts. I asked the technical team what they had done, and they came back with except descriptions from a technical point of view. That’s interesting, maybe, but not to too many people. I asked a little more about why the clients had bought their technology, and what were they trying to achieve. It took a little digging, but we found a lot of interesting material back. At last we had found a way to tell our story!

Now, we crafted a story that went, “You may not remember, but chances are that we have met before! If you’ve taken a flight, or dimmed your room lights, or played casino online, you have been touched by technology that we have created. Did you know that when XYZ client needed to build a platform that does 20x the transactions of the NYSE, they chose us…”.Now, we crafted a story that went, “You may not remember, but chances are that we have met before! If you’ve taken a flight, or dimmed your room lights, or played casino online, you have been touched by technology that we have created. Did you know that when XYZ client needed to build a platform that does 20x the transactions of the NYSE, they chose us…”.

The impact of this is immediate, because the conversation has shifted from “do we know you” to “how do we know you”, and eventually (in two minutes), to “that’s interesting work…I’m surprised we didn’t know you earlier”.

As your business model changes, the leading edge of this change should be to find and tell great stories about the change. It’s the best way to bring clients as well as internal teams on board with the change, and for them to stop dreading the change but instead dream of the day when the new story will be theirs.

If you’re doing this in-house, arrange a Storytelling day, and bring a wide range of people into the same room. If you’re into Design Thinking, this exercise is Design Thinking in reverse, because the change has already happened and now we’re looking for ways to understand it. Don’t just bring the senior people in the room, but also people who have had direct hands on experience with the client and the end users. This allows you to get a richer story together, and also to find things that you likely didn’t know yourself.

Then, try out the story. One trick I have found effective is the airplane-side-seat method. Actually sit down with another person on two chairs, side by side, just like airline seating. Now as you’re sharing the armrest and passing the peanut bags, you have a narrow window of time to say hello and get to know your neighbor. Your neighbor asks, “so what does your company do”? You have thirty to ninety minutes to tell them a story. What story will you tell them? Be honest with yourself, and don’t just do an imaginary side-seat conversation— It’s best when you’re sitting real close, and you can feel the stress in the air and the rising dread in your neighbor’s heart that you might turn out to be a bore.

In that discomfort, what will be your story?