The Admissions team embarked on a half day program to learn more about the art of telling stories, something all of us enjoy doing. Anjali Sharma is an accomplished storyteller who equipped the team with the tools to enable us to tell stories that will create a deeper personal connect with parents of potential students and the school.

We started the day with a video about Saroo Brierley’s ‘Homeward Bound’ journey. This video was to engage us through a format of time, place, setting, a plot that we did not expect, the string of events that happened and finally the key message. It was a story about how Google Earth reunited a man who was adopted and moved to Australia only years later to find his biological mother in India.

This was followed by a quick practice session and we soon realised that is was not easy coming up with stories and telling them effectively, and that it takes a lot of practice.

‘The Burger’ was an interesting image to help us conceptualize the way to make a point with a story. We had to visualise an event or an area at the school to format our story. The ‘top bun’ was the main point we wanted to make, the ‘patty’ was our story and the ‘bottom bun’ was the key message we would reinforce at the end. We had to ensure the story would hold our audience’s attention during our tours and help them visualise an  event that had occured at school. Generally, we would weave in 4-5 such stories during an hour-long tour.

One of the key points we learnt was that it’s important you do not start a story by saying, “Let me tell you a story” as this naturally leads  your audience to think you are about to go into a fictional world. This creates disbelief. Using the elements of time, place, dialogue, a twist, and a resolution helps in creating a visual story where you can transport your audience into a time and place, giving them perspective and making the story believable. We need to identify the key events of the story and make the rest of the story our own; every twist and turn of what happened is not relevant.

We were shown 3 videos that captured the 7 key elements to telling a story that we could organically weave in during a conversation. The one that clearly stood out was the way Indra Nooyi, the Pepsico CEO, narrated how the company’s investors were initially not very pleased with her for changing the company product model, but just a few months later, questioned why she wasn’t going faster in implementing the change.

One of the most important lessons we learnt was how counter-stories help defuse ‘anti-stories’, or negative perceptions, and make it right for your company again. The simplest and most powerful approach to tackling an anti-story is to acknowledge it and  apologise for it. Arguments don’t work. Humor sometimes can work to your advantage to tackle these stories that are working against your strategy. It is appropriate to tell a story to counter the anti-story or to say that you have learnt from a mistake and then fixed the issue. Steve Jobs, after explaining that MobileMe had failed to live up to Apple’s user-friendliness and that it had many glitches, said “It wasn’t our finest hour. Let me just say that. But we’ve learned a lot.”

Thanks to our departmental workshop with Anjali,  we are now equipped with a toolkit to hone the art of being storytellers.The half day program felt like a teaser, leaving us yearning for more.

By Alpana Kale, Admissions Officer