Getting the right level of detail in your story

A colleague asked me recently what to do about the risk of distortion in stories. “We know,” he said, “ how that happens in the course of human conversation. Remember the famous ‘telephone game’, aka Chinese whispers? A tells something to B, who passes it on to C, who tells D, who informs E. E finally tells A what s/he has heard and A does not recognize his/her own beginning message. This is especially true if the message has some complexity/ depth/opinion to it. What can you do about that?”

1. Get the right level of detail

As it happens, I observed a public version of the telephone game, aka Chinese whispers, at a workshop in UK recently. It was organized by an academic who was, I think, trying to show that stories are unreliable. We were given the original story and scorecards with a list of the key details, so that we could keep track of what happened and check which details got lost in successive retellings. The initial story had a lot of detail: some of it was quite intricate and even confusing.

The result was very interesting: most of the detail disappeared in the first two tellings.

Thereafter with successive tellings, the story stayed more or less the same. What was interesting was that once the story had attained this level of detail, it was remarkably robust. Even when someone left something out in their retelling, the next listener/teller intuited the missing detail and added it back in again, since the story didn't seem to make sense without the element that had been omitted.

It was also interesting that the level of detail that was there when the story was robust, after the first couple of rounds, is roughly the level of detail that I recommend for the springboard story. The practical implication is that if you want your story to be transmitted with as little distortion as possible, then eliminate unnecessary detail before
you start disseminating it. You're going to lose that detail anyway. You end up with the story along the lines of the European folk tale or the Biblical parables, not a "well told story" with all the sights and sounds and smells and colorful detail, as recommended by countless books on storytelling.

The experiment showed that, yes, stories distort, to a certain extent, in the sense that we will naturally lose details that aren’t central to the point of the story, but it also reveals the limits of the distortion to the core of the story, and the inherent robustness of stories, which was to me even more interesting.

2. Use Chinese whispers to test the level of detail

We can put this experiment with Chinese whispers to practical use. Conclusion: if you’re uncertain about how much detail to put in, conduct a game of Chinese whispers you’re your story and see what happens over five to seven tellings. You’ll quickly see what details drop out, and which are central. You’ll also see whether the main point of the
story survives the retellings. You’ll learn whether your story is robust.

3. Avoid “the Titanic Story”

As you strip detail from the story, make sure that the story still has the most important relevant facts in it, so that when people go and check it out – which they will do, if the story has any impact – people conclude, “Yes, that’s pretty much what happened.” I often quote the example of a story that is factually accurate as far as it goes, but is not authentically true: Seven hundred happy passengers reached New York after the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

That story is true as far as it goes. But it leaves out the little detail that the ship sank and 1,500 other passengers drowned. And when those facts become known, if they aren’t already known, then the negative backlash on the story and the storyteller is massive.

Although this is a very bad way to tell a story, ironically, many corporate communications fall exactly into this pattern. They tell a rosy, positive story about situation, but just around the corner, just below the surface, there is some negative element omitted, which once it becomes known, if it isn’t already known, creates a massive negative backlash on the story and the storyteller.

4. Add the telling detail

If you take out all the detail, then the story will seem so bland as to be incredible.

What you can do, without adding significantly to the length, is to add a telling a detail, i.e. a detail that is a little unusual and specific.

For instance, the dog's name, the song title, the brand of the beer, the name of an unexpected town or village, the exact date when the story began. The telling detail doesn’t add significantly to the length of the story but it can stick in the listener’s mind, and can give credibility to an otherwise bland story

5. Use less detail for the CEO

I was discussing recently the use of story in an organization with some practitioners and they made an interesting point. In their experience, the higher up the line, the less tolerance for detail. The shorter the story has to be. With the troops, they are interested in the detail of what happened. But with the CEO, the story tended to be told in the “four sentence version”.

Steve Denning is one of the individuals who shares all his Public Speaking tips and techniques as part of The Great Successful People Package.