Post Written By: Nancy Dearman, founder and Vice Chairman of Kotter International. She was in the right place at the right time to capture this story on a Sunday morning because she is also friends with Kotter and McCaskey - and wife of the former.
On a rainy day not long ago, two old friends sat talking. I was lucky enough to overhear and then quick enough to whip out a recorder to catch what they were saying.
John Kotter is founder and Chairman of Kotter International and Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. In June, he published his 19th book - a fable titled That's Not How We Do It Here!. Ten years ago, he and Holger Rathgeber teamed up to pen their first fable, international bestseller Our Iceberg Is Melting, which featured an unlikely cast of characters--talking emperor penguins in Antarctica--to teach the world how to embrace changing conditions. The authors have collaborated again, this time using meerkats in the Kalahari to show how organizations can be structured to enable people to both manage today's business and lead the changes needed to prosper in the future.Michael McCaskey, author, photographer and former President of the Chicago Bears, has been friends with Dr. Kotter since their years in graduate school. His forthcoming book, a moving exploration of end-of-life issues in photos is called, You Don't Get to Write Your Own Fortune Cookie.
The conversation began when McCaskey asked Kotter about why he used the fable form in his newest book and it ranged widely from there - spanning 100,000 years and including Darwin, Aesop and Bettelheim. I bring it to you in its entirety:
Michael McCaskey: You've used a wide variety of ways as a teacher, professor, coach to try and inspire new thinking - to motivate people to take on difficult tasks relating to changing organizations. Why do you think fables occupy a special place in that range of instructional opportunities?
John Kotter: I think we have to go back and start off with a broader category of stories: fables being a sub-category of stories. I think there's enough evidence today that the brain is hardwired for stories and by that I mean that they can easily slide into our minds with a bit of emotional punch that keeps them memorable and 'sticky.' If the story holds some basic lessons, then they have a chance of staying around over time and modifying what we do: changing actions, reinforcing behaviors, making us do what we do (or need to stop doing) with more confidence.
McCaskey: The long line of storytellers goes back to Homer and The Iliad...Aesop's fables...the short stories Benjamin Franklin told. They somehow approach people through stories differently than someone giving straight out advice.
Kotter: I think it goes back even further - before even written language. If you think about it...if we've been around for 100,000 years or so, then way before written language - books or anything like that - one of the ways that people must have instructed the next generation is not only by showing them things like: 'Come here. See this berry? This is the way you pick this berry...', but by telling stories: 'Once upon a time...'
McCaskey: Why are stories so effective in that way?
Kotter: If indeed there was a Darwinian process going on during those 100,000 years and indeed the people that survive best end up living longer and having more children and so on, eventually you end up with brains that just like stories.
McCaskey: Is that why figures like, say, Abraham Lincoln told so many stories?
Kotter: I'm sure. I figured this out by chance early in my own career in the classroom. I found myself gravitating toward storytelling and I don't even think I noticed it until some students began saying, 'That was a terrific class. The story about such and such I don't think I'll ever forget.' I've had students come up to me 10-20 years after they've left Harvard and say some very gracious - overly gracious, I think - things to me and if they ever talk about anything specific, it's not about a PowerPoint slide - it's a story I told that was done in a way that was fun, interesting, emotionally capturing.
McCaskey: What's the vital element of success that you add to the equation to bring in the emotion?
Kotter: Back to the stickiness element in the brain. Any story that a) you don't listen to or b) you forgot in ten minutes is lacking some dramatic elements. You cannot otherwise relate to it. But, if you can immediately start identifying with some of the characters and their problems, it is less threatening to engage, frankly, because it's just meerkats we're talking about (in the case of the newest book). If your real-life situation is, on some level, a little scary, people walk away from scary very easily because who wants to sit around being afraid? Fables make it easier to engage and remember something that is actually quite important to you. They can get you to think about these things and start doing things differently.
McCaskey: This sounds to me like what Bruno Bettelheim said about fairy tales and the important role they play for children. There are real hardships, real struggle, but he argues that the child is not scared to the point of being unable to pursue exploring them because they know it's just a story.
Kotter: It's exactly the same thing. One of the reasons that significant problems are not solved in organizations is that they don't get talked about. They don't get confronted. It is not because people are stupid and they don't see these things. Some people do, but one reason why it is a little scary to talk about the reality of the issues is because they think: I could be fired. My whole group here could be decimated by this. My pride in my work and my career could take a real bullet. This is high stakes stuff.
McCaskey: I'll wait and see if they're still employed here next week.
Kotter: Absolutely. Now we're stirring things up, and stirring things up in a way that you can always fall back on this little 'it's just a story - don't panic.'
McCaskey - Why meerkats in That's Not How We Do It Here!?
Kotter: Why meerkats? They're cute. They don't look dangerous. They have the cutest little face! They're very approachable. And how often do you see talking animals in your regular week? If it doesn't come across as dumb and the animals are interesting, then you might realize that you identify with the animal - that you know six people just like the animal...then the use of penguins or meerkats starts to engage the reader and it's more memorable because you don't have 23 stories about penguin colonies or meerkat clans sinking in your head. You have 900+ stories (books, white papers, training programs, articles, etc.) about organizations doing well today and why and others who are not doing well today and why.
McCaskey: Let's talk a little bit about how a tale told about meerkats helps make real life challenges less frightening?
Kotter: The fable is dramatic too, but, unlike the drama in real life which can be scary enough that you don't want to confront it so you push it aside - this is just a book. This is just a little story. It's a lot less threatening. What we've learned from the first book is that people pass it around and then talk about it. It often starts off with some laughter, sometimes nervous laughter: a wonderful way to begin a conversation if you're dealing with a deadly, serious subject like 'our market share is in the toilet and we're all going to be out of a job if we don't fix it.'
McCaskey: Do you think people have long appreciated that there's been something wrong or threatening and the fable gives them an avenue to bring it into the discussion?
Kotter: Sometimes I don't think people will think that consciously about it. They may think 'If I can convince all these people to read it and we can sit over lunch for a couple of hours and talk about it, there will be a good outcome. Even so-and-so, who seems to not want to get near this stuff, maybe we can even suck him into a real discussion for the first time.'
McCaskey: You're unleashing the power - the emotional power - of a fairy tale for children, but what we're learning is that a fairy tale is for any age.
Kotter: Yes - a fable for any age.
(This interview portion of this piece was first published on Forbes.com.)