How Stories Break Barriers

This week, I was driving my daughter to school. Along the way, we talked about how politics in the United States work and how people can influence the rules at different levels of government, from lawmakers writing and passing bills to locally elected leaders developing new rules for their local areas. She was interested in how she could make new rules and laws about how people would have to be nice to each other, and while it was a wonderful sentiment for a 9-year-old to share, it got me thinking: laws don’t change the way people think. But stories do. So I told her that if she wanted to change the rules, she should become a politician, but if she wanted to change the world, she should tell a story.

The conversation turned to the different kinds of stories that exist. We can tell stories through writing books. We can tell stories by creating art. We can tell stories through oral tradition. We can tell stories through music. These are all different mediums that help us tell these stories. Ultimately, stories help us break through the barriers of our personal biases and thoughts to develop empathy for others. Facts don’t change people’s minds. It may lead to cognitive dissonance, which creates unpredictable results, but people will often disregard new information to return to a state of comfort in the way the perceive the world.

Stories allow people to associate with a character. When they associate the character, then they can join them on a journey. This journey will help people see the struggles the character goes through and why they made the choices they did. At the end of this journey, the audience gains empathy for the decisions the character made, which allows them to think more critically about their own philosophies and ideas about the world. People associate with people, not with facts. This is why stories are so powerful in changing people’s minds.

Storytelling in Growth Development

One thing I have learned in my 20 years of service in the United States Navy is the power of storytelling in leadership. We called them sea stories. When I was going through my initial training in the nuclear power school, I always looked forward to the sea stories the instructors would tell about their time in the fleet. These stories would help me learn about Navy culture and prepare me for sea life long before I would ever step foot on a ship.

When I did get to the fleet, I started to learn about the culture of the submarine force by listening to the stories of how the Sailors on the ship had dealt with issues in the past. These could have been professional issues such as how the ship operated in different conditions that the crew had experienced, or they could have been personal issues such as marital problems that my shipmates dealt with while being away from home for long periods of time. These stories helped form and prepare me for what would come in my Navy career and helped develop how I would think about my own personal and professional experiences.

After I changed careers from nuclear power to naval storytelling, I learned the craft of finding people’s stories and broadcasting them on a mass scale. While I was adept at crafting these Sailor’s stories for public affairs and getting the Navy’s message out to audiences both within and outside the service, I had not quite developed the connection that I should be using these stories in the training, mentorship, and development of my peers and junior Sailors.

Storytelling in Leadership

My first tour as a Navy Chief Petty Officer, what other services would consider a senior non-commissioned officer, was rough. I was the senior enlisted person in the department and I tried to convince people both senior and junior to me that my ideas were the best. I had the facts on my side, so people should listen to what I have to say. This did a lot more harm than good to those that I was working with, and everyone suffered for it.

When I went to the Navy Senior Enlisted Academy, one of the lessons that stuck out was the importance of using sea stories in leadership. That’s when it clicked. I flashed back to all the Chiefs before me who had used stories to provide context to the decisions that were made. It didn’t matter if they were the best decisions, they were effective and they got the job done. I realized how many sea stories I had heard and how they had impacted my own career throughout my life.

This is when I started to use more sea stories when I was training, mentoring, and developing the Sailors working for me. I spent less time trying to intellectualize my decisions and more time trying to provide story-driven context. I would talk about my own experiences and failures as a Sailor and a leader to try and develop empathy amongst my Sailors for other leaders who had made mistakes. I used stories to talk about how different ideas I had tried in my experiences had either succeeded or failed. I used sea stories to lead.

From this type of leadership, these Sailors have grown to become senior leaders in their own rights. One commissioned as a chaplain in the Navy. Several others have grown to become Chief Petty Officers as well, taking the mantle of the senior enlisted role. And a couple have departed naval service to pursue careers as civilian communicators. Each of these people has become successful, and I attribute a large part of that to using storytelling instead of intellectualizing to help them develop their own critical thinking skills in leadership.

Storytelling to Affect Change

The lessons I have learned throughout my Navy career are being brought to life in the book I am writing. When we learn about Angela, she will be going on her own journey of leadership development. She comes from a line of hierarchical leadership instilled in her through the stories she has learned about her ancestors. The lessons she learned from these stories make her into the person she is, where she has empathy for her fellow Featherfolk, despite the customs in place that have created distance between the ruling class of Pouli and the rest of the society. She looks to her ancestors to break through that hierarchical structure and bring a more egalitarian ideology to her own leadership. However, she will also come across a character who challenges those ideologies of egalitarianism by leading a society that demonstrates what she is looking for, but in a way that is manipulative of the people within.

If you are looking to change the world, or if you are looking to change someone’s world, tell a story.