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Communicating to Transform: The Tools of Great Communicators with Nancy Duarte, CEO, Duarte Design and Author, Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols
Symbols
If you look back to earliest artifacts from civilizations, a lot of them were used in a ritual. They were shared around some sort of a ritual, and what happens is, in cultures, in communities, in kingdoms, there’s these things that become precious to us. Sometimes they’re physical things, sometimes they’re places. It might be a sound or a song, something that gets infused with so much meaning that it becomes of high value to a body of people. And what we found is that same thing happens in corporations; there’s these things that will rise up with incredible meaning, and leaders need to identify the symbols in an organization. Some of them need to be amplified, so they get more meaning and infuse the organization with more meaning, and some need to be dismantled. Some of them are so sacred they need to be dismantled in a very meaningful way because they need to be stripped of their power. So you can’t just come into an organization and be dismissive of the elements that are already there; you need to actually study the same way that someone would anthropologically study any culture and identify the things that are infused with incredible emotion.
Speeches
My first journey through storytelling was when I was trying to figure out, why is it that the greatest communicators over time, that their speeches had like a rhythm and a cadence to it. That you wanted to lean in and you were engrossed in the same way that you would a great story. And what they would do is they would actually create a gap between our current realities and the future. So the gap between what is and what could be became a story tension device, where they would build tension and then release it, as a structural device. So communicating through speeches is very important, because there’s a lot of information to convey as you’re leading people into the future. And using a persuasive story pattern while you’re communicating will make people be more engaged, and by amplifying the gap between what is and what could be, suddenly it makes the current realities of ‘what is’ not appealing, and the future state of ‘what could be’ more alluring, which creates longing and helps people want to go there and make your vision become reality.
Ceremonies
Ceremonies are a lesser known and lesser utilized communication device in organizations today. So, back as far as you can study human behavior there has been ceremonies in some way. What we did is we looked at the rights of passage. Most, even religions, have some sort of right of passage ceremony. What happens is you could be single one moment, you go through a 10-minute marriage ceremony, and suddenly you’re married. So this moment, this ceremony, transforms you: I am no longer this, I am now that. When you graduate you go through a graduation ceremony, you know, and there’s these moments – a Bar Mitzvah, a Quinceañera – where it’s like, I was once a young person and now I’m an adult. Only difference is like, this small ceremony happened to show transformation. But what that ceremony does is it says, “I am no longer this, and I am now that.” Especially when an organization is leading really big change, they need these moments where they pause and say, “We’re not that anymore, and now we are now this.”
One of the great examples from the book that I love is, we covered when Steve Jobs was leading the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS 10. He’d just come back to Apple and that was what they needed, that’s why they bought NEXT, his company, was to have the next operating system in place. And the developers were so skeptical; he even did a talk called Apple’s hierarchy of skepticism because everyone was so skeptical that they could actually do it. He had so much skepticism, then he started to get momentum. And there was this moment where he had this new dream, where he really wanted everybody connected to a digital hub, and he was getting frustrated with the last stragglers – all these stragglers hadn’t made the decisions to come on. So there was an opening scene at WWDC, the big developers conference, where he actually had a coffin under the stage. This coffin rises up from the stage, smoke billows out, stain glass slide up there. He walks out with an oversized box of Mac OS 9, and a red rose. He puts the box in the coffin, shuts the lid, puts a rose on top, and he eulogized the death of Mac OS 9. It’s not a speech, it’s not a story – it was a ceremony. He never talked about the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS 10 ever again. He was telling the developers, “It’s done, move on.” Or, “It’s just done.” And it was a really important ending so that they would all understand, that, you know what, I need to begin again. And that’s what a ceremony does.
There was another kind of ceremonial thing he did, because the developers were so frustrated. They didn’t believe that Apple was going to stick with one single software strategy, because they’d been through a decade of confusion and fits and starts and multiple tries at an operating system. So, the WWDC before the one he did the actually funeral at – mock funeral – he had actually done a vow, and he pulled out an oversized piece of parchment paper and he made a public vow to the developer community that they were going to stick with a single software strategy. So it was very dramatic, and he unfurled this piece of parchment paper and made a vow. And a vow is like a wedding vow, right, it’s a covenant and a promise, and that’s a ceremony. It’s not a speech, it’s not a story; it’s a ceremony. So it was about endings and beginnings and commitments, and that’s what ceremonies do.