Whenever we do one of our Exceptional Presentation workshops, and we get on the subject of storytelling, we are invariably asked the same question. “Would an executive audience be as moved by a story as they would if they were presented well-researched statistics and charts to support our value proposition?” For me, the answer is pretty obvious, but I’ll let you decide.
Here’s an excerpt that has been shortened and editorialized a bit from the book, “Influencer” by Grenny, Patterson, Maxfield, MacMillan and Switzler, copyright 2013 by VitalSmarts, LLC.
To set the stage, Dr. Don Berwick wanted to start a campaign to save 100,000 lives over the next year by a specific date. The problem he was addressing with his campaign was that 250,000 people die every year from medical errors, making it the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States. This is how the book describes what went on when he asked for the backing of 800 senior healthcare executives.
“Dr. Don Berwick walks to the podium to address an audience of healthcare leaders. They’ve been listening to speakers all morning and look a bit lethargic. Berwick isn’t about speeches. He’s about influence. He wants people to leave this room ‘behaving’ differently. He wants them to take steps to ensure they and their colleagues save lives from the half dozen medical mistakes that most often kill or injure patients. In the allotted time, and given the circumstances of an afternoon presentation, what does he do? He decides to forget most of the PowerPoint deck and instead, tell them about a little girl by the name of Josie King.
Josie King loved to dance. She was 18 months old, had brown eyes and light brown hair, and she had just learned to say, “I love you.” In January 2001, Josie stepped into a scalding hot bath and burned herself badly. Her parents rushed her to Johns Hopkins Hospital where she was admitted into the pediatric intensive care unit. Much to her parent’s relief, Josie recovered quickly. She was transferred to the intermediate care floor and was expected to be released within days.
But Josie’s mom noticed that something was wrong. “Every time she saw a drink, she would scream for it, and I thought this was strange. I was told not to let her drink. While a nurse and I gave her a bath, she sucked furiously on a washcloth.” Josie’s mom told the nurse Josie was thirsty, and she asked her to call a doctor. The nurse assured her that everything was okay. She asked another nurse to check on Josie, but this nurse confirmed that everything was fine.
Josie’s mom called back twice during the night and was at her daughter’s bedside by 5:30 the next morning. By then, Josie was in crisis. In her mother’s words, “Josie’s heart stopped as I was rubbing her feet. Her eyes were fixed, and I screamed for help. I stood helpless as a crowd of doctors and nurses came running into her room. I was ushered into a small room with a chaplain.” Two days before her scheduled release, Josie had died of thirst. Despite her mother’s repeated pleas for help, this sweet little girl died of misused narcotics and dehydration.”
That was the story that successfully launched “The 100,000 Lives Campaign.” That campaign is still going today. It’s now global and measures success in the millions of lives saved each year.
Hindsight is of course 20-20. But in my view, he took the mistakes being made in the hospitals and gave them a face, a name, and in the case of Josie King, a soul. Dr. Berwick had ‘humanized’ the problem for all of the 800 health executives to see.
The story of Josie King continues to be repeated over and over again. That’s the power of a great story.
If you want to stand out from your competition, I challenge you to find ‘your’ story. We all have them. Companies have them. And you can believe that even executives love to hear them.
About the Author: Joe DiDonato – As Chief of Staff for BCI, my role is to help our customers and internal teams achieve world-class performance. We believe that world-class performance never happens by accident. We also believe it’s achievable for everyone. So what we do is help sales teams like AWS, VMware, T-Mobile and companies like yours become world-class performers.
