One of the strongest effects of storytelling is the emotional impact (stimulating the right hemisphere of the brain, simultaneously creating a second story in the hearts and heads of your listeners and therefore being much easier to remember and to understand) versus abstract, complex information (stimulating the left hemisphere of our brain and being much harder to visualize and to remember).

What happend here? This first sentence was abstract information. Can you easily recap it? Nope?

OK - let me try this again, using a story with sensual pictures:

In an Austrian company I previously worked, they performed a corporate identity change a frew years ago. They did this by changing the corporate design and by communicating the new values to their employess mainly with picures. Once I held a workshop with a group of junior employees of this company. I wanted to talk about one of the core corporate values: Lively. I asked them what this value means for their daily work life. Nobody answered. They sat there with their arms crossed, giving me a pretty bored look...

After a while one employee broke the silence: “We were once shown a video about ‘the spirit of spring’ to understand this value. A video with pictures of nature - a river, flowers, meadows. Really beautiful! But to be honest: I didn’t understand what they mean.”

So I said: “ok - let me perhaps tell you a story that I experienced a few years ago:

‘An airline hostesse working at the check-in hall at Vienna airport received a phone call from a customer. The man on the phone told the hostess with a nervous, excited voice, that he just took the morning flight from Vienna to Geneva. Apon arrival he realized that he has had forgotten the key to a safe deposit box at Geneva airport. He desperately needed to get into the deposit box, because in there was a very important contract which he needed for his business meeting that afternoon.

The hostesse normally had no business with this at all. Still - she realized the need of the passenger and saw a way of helping him. She asked him where he forgot the key and if he had a contact person in Vienna. He gave her the phone number of his assistant in Vienna. She called the assistant and asked him to bring the key to the airport. Meanwhile the hostess found out about the next flight to Geneva and quickly asked the crew and the airport crew in Geneva if they would - exceptionally - take care of the key and hand it over to that gentlemen (which - with all the safety issues in the airline industry nowadays - was not a certainty!). They agreed. When the assistant arrived at the airport half an hour later, the hostess took the key, ran to the departure gate of the Geneva flight and handed over the key just shortly before the doors closed and the plane took off.

Two hours later she received a relieved phone call from the passenger. He got the key, could get the contract out of the locker and could bring off his big deal successfully.’

When I finished telling my story I saw that all employees in the room were attentively looking at me. Some had a smile on their face. They asked questions about the story and we started an inspiring discussion about the concept providing lively service to customers.