Vanessa Rogers: Welcome, folksy folks. Welcome to fabric of Folklore. I'm your hostess, Vanessa Y. Rogers, and this is a podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. This podcast is created for those who love stories, those who love folktales and mythology. We love a good story, but what we're really after on this show is understanding the understanding of story, the history, the importance, the significance, and the origins. We want to understand the why and the how behind the folklore, but also the differences and similarities across cultures. For example, in America and many places in the west, the bat is seen as a symbol of darkness. It's associated with witches and vampires. But in other places, bats are seen in more positive light, such as in ancient Egypt. Egyptians believed bats could alleviate or cure ailments, including baldness, fever, toothache, and poor eyesight.
Vanessa Rogers: And so, to prevent the demons carrying these diseases, bat dung was placed over a door opening as protection. We explore folklore not because it's fun to learn facts like this about bats, but to help thread connections across divides. The more we understand about ourselves and about others, the more willing we are to break down those walls we build to protect ourselves, but really just keep us isolated and lonely. So if that sounds like a show that you are interested in listening to and following, make sure you hit that subscribe button. Whether you're watching on YouTube or if you're listening on your favorite podcasting platform, hit that subscribe button so that you get notifications every week when our podcast drops. And if you are a longtime listener, make sure you're giving us those stars and reviews. Those are so helpful for new podcasts like ourselves.
Vanessa Rogers: Our show today is going to be so awesome. We're exploring the why and how the science of story matters, not just in life in general, but to each of us in our own professional and personal journeys. Our guest today is Kendall Haven. His research story coaching work and two seminal books, storyproof the science behind the startling power of story and story smart using the science of story to persuade, influence, inspire, and teach have revolutionized our understanding of stories, of the science of story, of the relationship between the human brain and story, and the power of story elements to transform communications. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Kendall Haven: Why that. You're most welcome. That was quite an introduction.
Vanessa Rogers: Well, you've done a lot of work on story. I have, and I'm really excited to hear all about this journey. So, can we talk a little bit about. So I read on your website that you were the only Westquate graduate to ever become a professional storyteller.
Kendall Haven: Yes, and of course, many would say, oh, heavens, most people. Technically, of course, we're all storytellers. Professional storyteller is one who gets paid specifically to tell stories, not for the content of the stories, but for the stories themselves. But, yeah, that's true. That happens to be true. And, of course, the real question is, what in the world was I doing at West Point if what I really should be doing is telling stories? But that is another story for another day, perhaps.
Vanessa Rogers: But before you got into professional storytelling and doing research into the science behind storytelling, you work for the Department of Energy as a senior researcher, is that right?
Kendall Haven: Exactly. My doctorate's in oceanography, and I was looking at the energy implications of ocean policy and how to convert, well, a number of areas around both the environmental implications of ocean energy technology and of then ocean policy. And ran into story quite unexpectedly. That is to say, I was dating a woman. Now, my wife has been for many years, and she has a sister who had a single mom with a four year old, then five year old boy that I would usually take. I would regularly take to the park. Take the park and you play and you run around. And then we'd to have a little break from running around. We'd plop into the sandbox, and I would always make up stories. I didn't think anything of it. I'd just make them up as I went along.
Kendall Haven: My goal was to keep this kid quiet for 5 minutes. Wasn't really to communicate anything about the stories, but we routinely gathered crowds with these stories. And I started to watch the crowds. And what I found was that people strolling by this park in the general San Francisco Berkeley area in the middle of their busy days. It's like I was, in science terms, a gravity well. And as they were going through the universe, they'd just get pulled in, and you could see them leaning in toward the stories. They got within earshot. Had no idea where the story started, had no idea where it was going, had no idea if I was telling it well or not. And it didn't seem to matter. And I started to realize how attractive, that is to say, how stories were able to attract attention and attract engagement.
Kendall Haven: And so at one point, decided that was a much better way to communicate. Then were science reports and long 300 page reports that we would send into the Department of Energy that would disappear into the bowels of a large building back in Washington and so dropped out to become a full time storyteller. At that point, what I found was that I was the first person in the US and as far as I knew, in certainly the western world, to become a professional storyteller who came out of a background in science. And so instantly for the National Storytelling association and the International Storytelling Center, I became the person to lead the effort into the science of stories. We'd ask questions like, why do people listen to stories? Why do they bother to remember stories?
Kendall Haven: And by the way, information placed in the structure of a story is remembered much better, much longer, much more accurately, and recalled much more readily than is the exact same information delivered through some other structure in some other medium. And there's a lot of research on that one. So over the years, what that kept leading to is the question, what happens inside the human brain when information goes in through some sensory organ, mostly eyes and ears? And so that when I finally got a hold of some fMR money, actually, it's money that you need to get a hold of things like EEG machines and fMRI machines, and I could wire up test audiences and watch their brains on story. That's when we started to unravel the science of story. There's always been the art and the craft of story.
Kendall Haven: What lay behind it is really all what happens inside the brain of the audience, and that's really the science of story that I'm sure we'll be talking about a lot in the next few minutes.
Vanessa Rogers: So was your first book the one that was a collation of all the research that had previously been done?
Kendall Haven: Mostly, yes. Storyproof is actually the way that started was with a challenge. I was in Goddard Spaceflight center, which is one of the NASA spaceflight centers in Maryland, and doing a talk with their communications people on the value of story and how story is a better way for them to structure their communications, especially if they were going out to the public outside the agency, outside of NASA, and how that would be more effective. And I finished my talk, and it was a big auditorium, and there were probably 350 somewhere around there, people in the room, and a number of them afterwards came up onto the stage.
Kendall Haven: They actually had a stage, and I was up on the stage, which I don't like that much, but that's the way they had set up that room, and people were asking questions, and then they all sort of parted. And this one person who was the only person in the room with a tie on, and not only had a tie on, he had a three piece suit on, and everyone sort of parted for him as he approached with a scowl on his face. And what I found out later was that's the cue for someone who came from inside the Beltway from NASA headquarters, not from the techie research lab. That was Goddard, where everyone wears very casual clothes and doing work. This is one of the people from headquarters.
Kendall Haven: And as he came up to me, he said, so you think stories are better way for us to communicate? And I said, not only think it, yeah, that's absolutely true. It's a better structure for you to use because you'll be engaging people better. And he said, oh, yeah, prove it. Turned around and stormed off. And I thought, okay, can I prove it? At the time, I had probably 1000 to 1500 anecdotes from teachers from all sorts of people around the world who just a second, apologize for that. That was a phone call coming in from who knows why. I just stepped it to voicemail. So I had these anecdotes, teachers and librarians and pastors who had used. But does that constitute proof?
Kendall Haven: So that was 2002, and then I spent two years going through 16 fields of science, from really anything related to story to narrative, to psychology to neurosciences, and found that although no one thought they were talking about story, actually everyone in all those fields was really talking about the power of story. They just didn't use that vocabulary. So that's the first book then. The second book was, once I had some budget, could I go into labs, fMRI, EEG labs, other test facilities and prove it? Could I show it? Once we knew that was it, and that's the second book. And what got left on the table is what were able to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the human brain thinks in storied terms. Why do we gravitate toward folktales? Why do we use them?
Kendall Haven: Ultimately, they are a memorable roadmap to how to live your life and stay alive. Think of all the tales where character a does action a and he dies and he has to come back to life. You could do the same thing with a blackboard in writing in do these, don't do those. Except. But what would happen is that people would go out of the room and they'd go, wait a minute, was that on the left side of the blackboard or the right side of the. Am I supposed to do that or not do that? All those cultures died out because everyone died because they couldn't remember what they were supposed to do. They put them in terms of story because it works. Well, what was left on the table then, as even my second book in 2008, was, why does it work?
Kendall Haven: And that's when we got into the labs and into the. Into the research. The reason it works is because of the way our brains are physically structured and wired. We make sense of incoming information in very specific story terms.
Vanessa Rogers: Okay.
Kendall Haven: It is the way the brain is hardwired to make sense of experience as well as information coming in. So it's not that we use stories because they work. We use stories because that matches the way the brain naturally makes sense of incoming information. And then, having made sense out of it, creates meaning from it. It's amazing to be able to show people, and it's fairly easy to do, how your brain forces information to make sense in very specific, storied terms. Quick example. You're at some kind of a function, I don't know, party convention. And you overhear a conversation. Just overhear a conversation. You don't have to know who the people are. One person says, hi, John. The other person says, I'm not here. You never saw me. I'm not here. First person says, oh, that's okay. Carol's gone home.
Kendall Haven: Now, if you heard that exchange, you'd know exactly how to make sense out of it, right? You would assume person number two is, in fact, John. And what John is saying is, keep it quiet. There are certain people I'm a coward. There are certain people I'm afraid of I don't want to bump into today. First person who seems to understand the situation said, it's okay. Carol's gone home. You're safe, you wimp. You don't have to hide anymore, right? Not what it says. In order to make it make sense to you completely, 100% reversed the meaning of every sentence that person number two made, and you did it in a heartbeat, and you did it without any conscious thought. Why? Because at a subconscious level, your brain is hardwired to force the information, incoming information, to make sense in story terms.
Kendall Haven: So you look for character, goal, motive. You look for those story elements, and without any conscious thought, forced your brain to accept that makes sense version, even though it completely violated every sentence that was said by person number two in that little exchange. And we do it automatically. We do it without conscious thought, because we're putting information into story form. That's the way our brains work. And it is only that makes sense version that you create that then is subject to creating meaning. In other words, what does this mean to me? Well, you don't say that off the original. You say that off the self created, makes sense version of the original.
Kendall Haven: The original is what reached your sensory organs, so that we're making sense of the world and creating meaning around it in very specific story terms, because that's the way our brains are set up and function.
Vanessa Rogers: How fascinating. When you were doing the very first book, no. What was the first one? Story proof.
Kendall Haven: Story proof, yeah.
Vanessa Rogers: So what questions did that one answer for you?
Kendall Haven: For me, it answered, is there information out in the world beyond the anecdotal information that I had that supported the notion that our brains work in story terms? And if so, the question that I wanted to answer that didn't quite get answered is if that's true, that everyone seems to be talking about the way that the brain works and really talking about it in story terms, even if that's not their field at all, and that's not what they're trying to talk about, why isn't story? And this actually is the question that still hasn't been satisfactorily answered, why isn't story at the heart and soul of the way we approach education and the way we cognitively approach communication? Now, a lot of people say, well, tell your story. Get it out there.
Kendall Haven: But at the same time, no one talks about, well, what does that really mean? In order to create a story? What are the informational elements that engage an audience? What are the informational elements that hold their attention, that cause them to remember this messaging that you want to get out, or somehow in their minds, warp it around and change it? I work with companies a lot, and usually when I work with a company, it's because they just had a communication disaster and are scrambling to try to fix it. They thought they were sending out some message, either internally within the company to employees or out to the world, and they would thought they were sending out message a, and everyone heard almost the exact opposite of it, message b. And now they're scrambling to try to recover their brand and control their messaging.
Kendall Haven: And it's not that this is all that complicated. No, because every human brain is hardwired with that narrative structure, the structural elements of story built into it. It's not like we don't know. We all know. But the part of your brain that knows isn't your conscious mind. It's in your brain. You have a number of processors in your brain. Think of it in computer terms. You have a number of processors. The slowest of all of them is your conscious mind. So anything that you do that you can dump out of your conscious processor and into another one of these subconscious, automatic, high speed processors, you do. Luckily, we don't have to stop and consciously think about, should I have my heart beat? Yes, I should. Should I have it beat again. Yes, I should, because we'd all be dead.
Kendall Haven: So that kind of information isn't handled by conscious processors, but we also dump repetitive information or repetitive actions that you do all the time that you just don't think about, you just automatically do. We dump all those out of the conscious processor because it's so slow and inefficient and save that for things we really need to think about. Story is the same way because you've used it for all your life. Because it's the way every day, at every moment of every day, you're making sense of the world around you. You don't house that information in your conscious mind. You dump it down into subconscious processors that are so much more efficient. But that also means when you stop and think about it, you don't really know how it is that you form a story or make sense out of it.
Kendall Haven: So that typically, people who say, I don't tell stories, I'm not any good at it. And when they stop and think about it, are really lousy at it. But when they're with friends and family and not thinking about it, they can be quite effective and quite engaging with their stories because they're using information straight out of those subconscious processors and not their conscious minds.
Vanessa Rogers: So the thing about how you were saying that we really need to be making stories or utilizing stories to communicate, that brought me back to. I had a guest on Dr. Andrea Kidda. She's a folklorist, and she studies public health. And she was saying, I think that folklorists should be in every public health communication department because they're the best ones to really be communicating these things, because they have the information from the community and the culture to be able to tell the best story so that the people that they are communicating to have the best understanding. So I just thought that was such an interesting.
Kendall Haven: Absolutely. I would agree completely. Of course, I wouldn't limit it to just public health. Again, we are really not. We keep calling ourselves homo sapiens. No, we're homo narratives. We're story animals. That really is what we are. Story is a filter. And when I say story, I mean the elements, the effective story structure. Those elements are a filter through which information travels in order to get into our brains. Nothing gets into your brain from the outside world without going through the elements of story structure, because the subconscious processors that handle information before it gets to the conscious mind. We can see when we're in the labs and light wiring up test audiences and watching their brains, we can see those subregions back in the lower back part of the brain.
Kendall Haven: The subconscious, automatic processors light up that are the same ones that would generate story related information. If you were trying to consciously create something. So it's that because it is so intrinsically human. Using those elements is the way to bypass misinterpretation. And the way to bypass forcing the audience to infer and imply a lot of those Story elements. And feed them directly into your audience. So that they make sense of it the way you want them to. When you read something, for example, information is coming into your eyes. Then what happens to that information is it goes down the optic nerve. Words don't go down the optic nerve, right. It's little impulses that go back down to these little centers that you can see light up in the lower back part of the brain.
Kendall Haven: And so then in those little centers, it's a dot pattern that kind of goes down. It's sort of like the old tvs with a cathode ray gun. That sprayed information one pixel at a time across the Screen. Just does it real fast. It's that same kind of Information that goes down the optic nerve gets down on the back part of the brain. And these little centers reconstruct those Dot patterns and say, oh, that is a line. And that goes to other little centers in the back part of the brain. Say, I recognize that line. We call it a letter or a number, right? And send that information back. That first little center says, well, I got five or six of those little things all lumped together. And that goes to another center that says, this is a word.
Kendall Haven: Sent that over to the dictionary and says, I know that word. So these are all little centers. At the same time that those centers are trying to make Sense of a word. Bit by bit, we can see the centers light up that the brain at a subconscious level uses to try to figure out how to make Sense out of the String of Words. And those are all story based. And that happens before the Information is ever first sent up to the Conscious Mind. So by the time the information gets to the. To your Conscious Mind. And you think you are hearing it. Virtually simultaneously with when someone else is saying it or when your eyes are reading it. No. What gets to your Conscious Mind is this self created, story based version of that source information.
Kendall Haven: Distorted from the original in order to make it make sense to you. And that is what reaches your conscious mind. It is a story based version. So if you want to communicate, the more you can use massage your information into that form, the more directly your information gets to the conscious mind of your audience, because they have to do less inference, less interpretation, and less distorting reforming of the information in order to put it in story form. Hence the dominance of story for communicating information.
Vanessa Rogers: Okay, I have several questions. You were talking about how we're story animals. Have any studies been done on animals at all to see if they are affected by stories? Obviously, it would not be in the same way, but I'm wondering if they recognize cool like that.
Kendall Haven: Very cool. And the answer is, I haven't looked into it, so I'm not sure if I would be the best person to answer that question. But I am thinking of some work that I have read about that is done with primates, and I've forgotten now exactly which primates, which says that, yeah, they're thinking in the same, very similar to the way that we're thinking of information, as once they're taught to communicate, so we can get the communication that there are. But the question, as I recall, and this may be old, it may be well answered, I just am not aware of it. The question was, are they communicating that way because of the way we. The fact that we've taught them to communicate with us? And so learning to communicate influenced the way they think and the way they make sense?
Kendall Haven: Or is it that we've given them this communication tool, and so it's really reflecting what has always gone on in their minds. But I would think that certainly the form and structure of story is global for human beings, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if that was also true for the higher order thinking animals. That'd be really cool. Actually, it's a really cool question. If I had another decade, I'd say, oh, that's a great idea. Let's go look at that one.
Vanessa Rogers: Well, if the answer comes up, eventually, you can share it with us, if you ever find it. So you were talking about in your original book, the one that collected research, you said that they were not using the vocabulary that you were using that pertains to storytelling. What vocabulary were they using?
Kendall Haven: Oh, whatever's true for their own field. Can you give us some examples? When you think about story, the terms we're looking at are character, goal, motive, then problems, conflicts, obstacles, struggles, those kinds of things. It's just that if you're trying to see how does the brain drive memory, so you're looking technically at what happens in the brain, what gets remembered, what doesn't get remembered. Or if you're looking at, say, what's a real simple example, you're looking at one of the cognitive fields and looking real technically at how the brain processes information. The terms that you're using come out of your field, and you don't notice that the concepts are exactly the same as happened in some other field until you start to look at across fields and look at how information relates from one field to another. And right now, suddenly, I apologize.
Kendall Haven: I'm not explaining it very well, but the idea is, even looking at math, the idea of math, they're looking at. How do students learn math? Well, it turns out that a lot of their research on how students conceptually learn math functions, even the simple ones multiplication up through differentiation and integration, once you get up into higher math, are all understood, it turns out in story terms. And the mathematician, people were really saying that, but because they weren't thinking of story related vocabulary, they're saying the same thing, but it doesn't sound like it, because none of the vocabulary words they're using are those that we would use if we're talking about story. But from math to psychology, to almost name the field, as people are talking about and why human beings do what they do, they're talking in story terms.
Vanessa Rogers: And that makes me think of the whole idea behind TED talks. That's why they were created, so that people were sharing their research across fields, and they might actually be talking about the same things, but not know, but notice the conversations.
Kendall Haven: Yeah. And that's a great way to look at TED talks. I like that a lot. And certainly it's true. It certainly is true about story. And it's just that story wasn't set up as an academic department.
Vanessa Rogers: Right.
Kendall Haven: And story wasn't, hasn't been. Hasn't been set up as a recognized major academic discipline. So it then diffused itself across all those different disciplines and therefore doesn't get noticed the same way it should.
Vanessa Rogers: Do you think that it should be recognized as its own discipline in collegiate.
Kendall Haven: Courses, collegiate courses, in kindergarten courses, in elementary school and high school? Because you're talking about how the human brain is wired to make sense of incoming information and to create meaning from it. That is to say, learn. So you're talking about how the brain is wired to learn, and any communication winds up being story dependent. Even if I'm a robber and I stick a gun in your face and say, hand it over, you interpret that in story terms. What does he want? Why does he want it? What could happen? What should I do? We start to create scenarios and stories around it in order to understand the situation and then be able to make sense out of it and then act appropriately.
Kendall Haven: If we're smart enough and are lucky enough to have been around where we get a lot of folktales and fairy tales at that time, you'd say, oh, this is just like your mind starts to go through different scenarios that come out of stories that you've heard, fictional, fun stories. But because they set up those kinds of situations and responses, in a quarter of a second, your brain can run through eight or nine of those and try to decide what's the best thing for me to be. Do I yell for help? Do I whimper and drop on the ground and cry? Do I just throw all my money at this person? Those were all story responses. I think that story should be at the heart of all academic fields and.
Kendall Haven: And therefore recognized as an interdisciplinary specialty that almost was mandatory if you want to successfully become an adult human being.
Vanessa Rogers: Let's see your book, story smart. Who did you write it for?
Kendall Haven: The first one. Story smart. I'm sorry? Oh, story smart. That I wrote for anyone who wants to use story in a conscious and thoughtful way, that's to say, for those who have to communicate with purpose. And that actually doesn't rule out very many people, since most of us do that all the time. But the real audience there was people who know that they have to communicate for purpose and for whom that communication is, if not critical, at least important.
Vanessa Rogers: And you said, I was reading the introduction to that book, and you said that I think a third of people end up sabotaging their own stories.
Kendall Haven: Yeah, that's some research that some other people did, and I did part of it, then repeated part of it to see if it was actually true. It is amazing how often, without intention, people do that. A lot of that research was done with nonprofits, and nonprofits are easy to study that way because they have specific campaigns that they run, and usually on annual basis. And so we can look at the messaging that they send out and the audience, a known audience they send it to, and compare then what they actually send out, and then we can select members out of that audience, revise the message that they send out, and see if they would get a different response measured by how many dollars are you willing to donate into that charity or that cause whatever it is.
Kendall Haven: So it's easy to measure and then document the effect of a change in the messaging and whether the messaging that they put out really accomplishes their purposes or actually acts to defeat their purposes. And that third actually winds up being pretty conservative. It is just phenomenal how regularly people trying to communicate wind up miscommunicating. The most common reason of it is if you're the one who wants to communicate something, you know exactly what you want to say. Whatever words you write down on a piece of paper, whatever words come out of your mouth in your mind, will sound exactly right to dredge up all the correct images in your brain. So you can't possibly look at those words the way someone will who doesn't know them already, the way someone will, who has a different viewpoint and perspective than you do.
Kendall Haven: And far too many people, in trying to communicate, and this is also, by the way, true of stories. Look at a story and look at their communication and say, this is exactly what I want to say. That's what I want to say, and put it out. But it's never what you want to say that matters. It's will they hear what I need for them to hear that matters. And the same is actually true with stories. When you go to translate a story across cultural lines, the way that it is interpreted, the structural elements of story don't change.
Kendall Haven: We've been able to show that, worked with some other folklorists and done stories on cultural folklores and compared folklore from different cultures and historical stories and myths and so forth from different cultures, enough to be able to say, the elements don't change, but the way they are typically expressed and what assumptions typically get woven into the expression of those elements does change from culture to culture. So that if you don't account for that, when you take it across cultural lines, you wind up forcing the reader to imply, to infer, to invent a lot on their own. And as we say, we always do that wrong. So it's the same with corporate communications and nonprofit communications and government communications.
Kendall Haven: The worst mistake you can make always, in trying to communicate, is to say, I know exactly what I want to say, and I'm going to say it. It's always, will they hear what I need for them to hear? And then know that you got to adjust your story so that they will hear actually what you need for them to hear. And that's one of the ways I keep coming back to story. It's one of the reasons stories are so incredibly powerful is because they minimize the amount of inventive inference work that the audience has to do and maximize the way that they will look at the story the same way you do and gain the personal perspective you want them to gain on that story.
Vanessa Rogers: So is there a specific mistake that you see time and time again that these companies or people are committing? That is causing the miscommunication.
Kendall Haven: Miscommunication. Usually the most common mistake is back up one step. If we look at stories, a story really is watching a character struggle, facing real risk and danger to overcome problems and obstacles, to achieve a goal that is important to them and relevant to the audience. Character struggling, facing risk and danger to overcome problems and conflicts. And as information is flowing from a source, be it something you're reading, a podcast, a lecture, so it's coming from a source into you. You're trying to create those elements in your brain, and you're building up sort of an information hierarchy and saying, here's a little piece of information. They said first, it kind of fits in over here. The key is who's the story about? Main character.
Kendall Haven: And the biggest mistake that people make is putting themselves and their organization in his main character and their audience, in trying to interpret it, flips the story and makes themselves the main character. And usually what that does when an audience flips a story that way and starts to interpret it, this is really about the story I care about is the one about me and how does this affect me? The story you're telling is about you and what you're doing. When I flip the story, what usually happens is that the company, the person who's telling the story and making it be from their own perspective, instead of being the hero of the story, main character, and sort of I'm providing this we're doing gets flipped in the mind of their audience into the role of antagonist. They're the bad guy.
Kendall Haven: And so people look at it backwards, and it happens all the time.
Vanessa Rogers: Oh, interesting. Are there any concrete examples that you can give us that has a case study?
Kendall Haven: Actually, unfortunately, most of my case, let me think of one that I can do. Generally speaking, when I come in and work with a company on this, then I don't have permission to use their company names in doing it out. Okay. One that I just a couple that pop into my mind. I don't know why this one came up. First oil company, a very large oil company who wanted to say, wanted to go public and let the world buy in on their, buy shares on theirs. And they also wanted to buy a large refinery, actually the biggest refinery in the Houston area, coast of Texas. And so said, in effect, we're the biggest oil company in the world. We can run products everywhere we want, so we can take care of anybody's oil needs because we're the biggest. We're the best.
Kendall Haven: We want to come in and take over this refinery to provide oil and it blew up in their face. And every from the county to the state to the feds here all said no and wouldn't even let them have a seat at the table. And they couldn't understand it because what they said is perfectly true. And instead of looking at it from the viewpoint of those people and that area and saying, you have a refinery, you have a need for oil, you have customer, you want to ensure that all of the people in your jurisdiction you cover have ready access to cheap energy. That's what you want, we can help. Instead of saying that they said, we're the biggest, we're the best. So forced their very audience that they were trying to convince, to support them, to turn against them.
Kendall Haven: It is just amazing that it happens all the time. A snack company, a very large snack company makes snack foods in this country, us based, wanted to put out a video about change. And so they had a change office, and so they wanted to put out a video for all the people about change happens. And they put out a video and the idea of it was to say, change happens and we always manage change and we keep going and that's a good thing. And they put out this video that was like, and they went and interviewed not quite hundreds, but certainly dozens of workers, people who ran a potato chip making machine on the floor, salespeople, office people, drivers who drove around to different convenience stores and put bags of their stuff on the shelves about change.
Kendall Haven: And they put out the video and within a week were beset with a mass resignation and couldn't understand it at all. Started interviewing people and what happened was everyone saw this video and said, uhoh, they're going to do something, they're going to make a big change and I better get out while I can. They heard exactly the opposite of what they left. On the floor of all these interviews were people saying what they valued about their job and being part of this company. And as soon as they redid the video and said, this is what we value, this is what. Like the relationship. I love coming to my work, I love the people I work with.
Kendall Haven: And then said, therefore we, the company are pledged to do whatever we have to do and change whatever we have to change to support and maintain those things that you care about the most. I got a different reaction.
Vanessa Rogers: Yeah.
Kendall Haven: It's about thinking not about what you want to say, but how your target audience is going to make sense of it, understand it, and then internalize it and create meaning from it. And luckily that's what folktales are designed to do, is to create that sense of common perspective and understanding. So we all derive a common meaning from them, and that's why they survive year after year and generation after generation.
Vanessa Rogers: Yeah. And I have that experience. I'm in a couple of book clubs. And one of the things that I notice that a lot of times people interpret things entirely differently based on their own personal experience. And so that's one of my questions, is people are coming from all these different directions and experiences in their own lives, and they read the exact same book that I read, but they have an entirely different interpretation and reaction to that book. How is it that you can bypass, is that possible to bypass those no. Divides.
Kendall Haven: In a sense, no. All effective communications are target audience specific. But if you know that and look for what are the commonalities of the people to whom now back up in a book written for entertainment? They're not worried, really, about making sure that everyone gets the message that they want to put out the way they want to put it out. Having written some of those fiction books, the big thrust is make sure I engage you and that I hold your attention and you'll get out of it what you get out of it. And that's okay. When you're communicating for purpose, that's not okay. And so then you start to look at who do I really need to communicate with? Whose minds do I really need to change? Whose behavior do I need to affect?
Kendall Haven: Who are the people that I need to either do something they weren't going to do or not do something that they were going to do? Those are the people I really need to communicate with. And how can I characterize them in common? And knowing that then I have levers, those commonalities to use in gathering them together to a common perspective point so that I can then build my story to communicate with them. That's really then using story science for your communication.
Vanessa Rogers: So in your book, let me start. In your book, you talk about story IQ. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Kendall Haven: Yeah. When we talk about story IQ, it's something that I went to because I thought it would be a little hook that everyone would be curious about. Oh, you never. Story IQ. What's my story IQ? And really what it is a way to show that our conscious awareness of story is typically very poor compared to our subconscious or automatic awareness of story. And so it's a way to help people, to motivate people to get to the point where they can say, there's something here that I thought I knew, that I really don't know as well as I thought I knew. Everyone thinks they understand story. Everyone thinks that they just automatically know it. And the fact is, we really don't know what it would engage another person. We don't know what holds their attention.
Kendall Haven: We don't know how to anticipate what they're going to get out of our communications. And yet, from the time you were two years old, you've been studying it. You've been studying it, and how do I get what I want in the world? Even when children have the most rudimentary sense of language, they get that if they want that, whatever that is, they have to figure out how to get someone else to give it to them. They have to motivate someone else to get it for them. They're thinking in story terms, character, goal, motive, objective, obstacles. So they're really structuring that. Even though their language might be me milk now, but those are the only vocabulary words they have. But it reflects a story that's building in their minds.
Kendall Haven: So even kids that young, at that automatic level, understand the elements of story and how to use them. I think the whole idea of every storytelling class I've ever taught, every story writing class I've ever taught has mostly been about trying to get people to dredge up from their subconscious mind what they already know and move it up to their conscious mind so that they have better access to it. It's not that you need to learn anything new. It's that you need to change where you're housing it inside your brain.
Vanessa Rogers: And are there exercises that you can do that to move these?
Kendall Haven: Oh, sure. Become consciously aware of the elements, those core elements. Character. The information about a character that makes that character be memorable, be sufficiently of interest so that you'll remember that character. Character. And they're called character traits. Goal. What a character is physically after in a story, not what they do, what they're really after. Something tangible and physical. Motive. Why that's important to them. This is where values, beliefs, attitudes, norms, prejudices, all that little petty stuff that we hide down. That's where it all lies as motive. It lies behind why we do what we do. Then there are conflicts and problems. Anything that blocks a character from achieving a goal is a problem. If this problem puts our character in direct opposition to some other entity in the story, we call it a conflict.
Kendall Haven: We like conflicts better as consumers of story because they create risk and danger better than other kinds of problems typically do. Risk and danger are two that are very misunderstood, as is motive. Risk is risk. Danger is what happens, is what could happen to you. If you're walking across the street, the danger is you get splattered by an 18 wheel truck and you're dead. The danger is you could fall into a manhole if the manhole cover was off, and suddenly you're down in the sewer and trapped. That's danger. Risk is a mathematical probability that the danger will happen. So it's just the likelihood that something's going to go wrong. That's risk. Risk isn't what happens. It's just how likely is it? That's why we look both ways when we cross the street. It doesn't reduce the danger.
Kendall Haven: If you get hit by an 18 wheeler and you're splattered and you're dead. You're dead. But if you look both ways and there isn't one coming for three or four blocks, the likelihood that one's going to suddenly materialize and run over you is very low. Risk goes down. Danger doesn't. Those are independent things. Risk and danger and then struggles. What we really want to watch is a character struggle. But we don't understand that what a character is doing is a struggle and a struggle that we care about until we understand the goal and the motive and the problems and the conflicts and the risk and the danger. And then lastly, we want to see it all. We need the details. Details are what our senses would gather if were actually there, wherever there is.
Kendall Haven: So sound, sight, smells, that's the details that we need about the characters and about the events and about the settings, so that we can visualize it vividly in our own minds and build this story and place ourselves inside the story, those are the elements. So they're real simple. And yet, if you take the time to consciously consider them when you're watching a movie, watch a movie and afterwards think in those terms and talk about the movie, critique the movie in those terms. Just when you're doing what you do in your life, when you're thinking about yourself and what you're going to do today, think consciously in those terms. And what you'll find is that it becomes sort of an automatic habit to be aware of those terms.
Kendall Haven: And that starts to make it a conscious tool that's there and available for you to use whenever it suits your purposes.
Vanessa Rogers: That definitely makes sense. And you say you structure your book into four parts. The neuroscience of narrative, your story tools, how narratives exert influence, changing beliefs, attitudes, values, et cetera, and the straightforward process of creating story smart stories. Can you talk a little bit about those four different parts.
Kendall Haven: Wow. I should have prepped for a book talk. Well, looking at the science of stories, what goes on in your mind? Okay, fine. So the question is, so what? It's nice to see that. But then you get from the science to the craft, what are you going to do with that? How does that then help you shape the stories? So as we go from understanding what happens inside the brain, what comes out of that are the individual tools that you use, those elements. Okay. And so that's, then the second part is to look at those individual tools and say, okay, what does that mean? What does it look like when I play with goal, change goal? If I said, if I'm going to start making up a story, and said.
Kendall Haven: He walked down the street and paused in the middle as dust rose up around his boots, and he pushed back the brim of his hat, looked up at the sun, raised his hand and shook his fist at the sun, lowered his brim back down, sighed, shook his head, stepped up on the sidewalk and reached for the doorknob. Okay, now, that's just an event. And so think about what was going through your mind, and you're thinking, okay, why do you do that? Why do you race this citizen? What doorknob? Why did. You're looking for goal and motive, right? So the more you start to then play with those individual terms and look at those individual terms, you start to see how they affect the way that you make sense of the world. So you become more personally in control of those elements.
Kendall Haven: Then you start to say, well, okay, well, let's then say, how does that play into when you start to combine them all together? You start to say, all right, now I want to just build a fabric of my own story in a way that's going to be compelling.
Kendall Haven: And then when you're doing it, the endpoint then is to be able to make it look like you're not consciously thinking about those elements and structure, and you're just spinning a yarn and telling the story so that you're going from the depths of neural science into this thing that seems the surface to be so incredibly natural and automatic, telling a story, but going the pieces from the science to the specific tools that you then use in practice, so that you wind up being in a position where you tell a story and people say, wow, that was a great story. He or she is such a great storyteller. And yet, really what it is a very conscious pathway that you're following to go from one end of the book and neuroscience to the other.
Vanessa Rogers: Has anything really surprised you while doing all this research, has anything like, really.
Kendall Haven: You know what surprised me the most? It occurred to me this actually was with story proof, about two thirds by the time that I wrote that book. I had been doing workshops for a number of years and saying, here's the way stories work and here's the importance of story, and this is the way it is. And it suddenly occurred to me as I was going through the research, what do If what I find contradicts what I've been saying in workshops for the last five or six years? Do I admit it? Do I just quietly leave that part out?
Kendall Haven: What surprised me the most is that I couldn't find anybody in any field that really contradicted what I had been saying of and what seemed intuitively correct to me about story, that everything always supported those elements of story and the role and function of story. There just isn't any information that doesn't aim at story and say, this is the way we make sense of the world. And that, probably more than anything, is what surprised me, because all of science, you have these people that say one thing and those people that say something else, and then eventually you look for the preponderance of evidence. Well, there is no opposition here. It's just 100% of the evidence points in one direction. And yet, amazingly, we don't, as a culture, tend to use that information very much.
Kendall Haven: We don't rely on story and think, well, this is really important. We should be focused on how to understand this and make sure that all human beings consciously understand the way that it works. So I think more than. That's what surprised me more than anything.
Vanessa Rogers: Yeah. One of the things that came up for me when were talking about this is when I think of comedians and how they do their work, they often, before they go to a big stage, they'll test out their jokes, right? They'll go to different, smaller venues and they'll do test runs. And I feel like they're kind of running science experiments, right?
Kendall Haven: Oh, they are. They're running comprehension experiments. Most humor requires either a sudden perspective shift. You're looking at it this way, and suddenly we're going to shift and look at it the whole way another way, and then it seems funny, or there is information that is intentionally omitted, so you're starting to build the pieces together, and then they add in some other piece of information that shifts the way you look at everything.
Vanessa Rogers: Right.
Kendall Haven: And so the key part then is for them to know what you're building in your mind as they provide the information that they provide to set you up for the shift that then is going to be interpreted as humor. And so it so much is anticipating. Do I provide enough information? Do I provide too much information? Do I shift too radically so they have to stop and ponder for a minute and then don't get a chance to react in the way we call humor and think it's funny, but have to really stop and think, wait a minute, let me think about that. I don't even know if I get that yet. And then eventually go, oh, yeah, I get it. That was funny. Ha.
Kendall Haven: It's about knowing exactly how your audience is making sense of and interpreting what you say so that you're always in control of setting them up for what comes next. Yeah. And that's much more critical for comedy than it is for other genre of story and of story based communication.
Vanessa Rogers: Horror is the same though, isn't it? I think it's very much on timing. Or does it have.
Kendall Haven: Yeah, well, store two ways it can work. One is sort of shock value, and that's the more common way for movies to use. And it's also the cheaper and the less effective sort of the jump sort of a thing. But the other is anticipation. The more I can make you anticipate something that you think is going to happen, really what I'm doing is I'm making you anticipate the danger. And then during the way that we're playing the story, I keep increasing the risk. I make it more and more likely that it's going to happen. Right. If we're out at night and what do you know? We're not going to a well lit department store. No, we're going to a haunted house or it's a night where all the power is out, so there are no lights on. Increasing risk.
Kendall Haven: And we're going to go down to the basement. Why go down to the basement? Because it increases risk. You think go down to the basement, it's more likely something bad's going to happen. Right. So I'm playing with risk. I set up the danger in your mind and then keep cranking up the risk until and then usually start to play with time. So I'll crank up the risk and then we stall a little bit. And then we crank up the risk a little more. And we stall a little bit. So I'm playing with your sense of time and risk, holding the danger. And that's the really best horror works on those elements, but they're just the same elements of story.
Vanessa Rogers: You just have to know your genre and what you're trying to accomplish and.
Kendall Haven: Know how to anticipate how your audience is going to make sense of and internalize that information and use it to build the emotional response that you want to get out of the audience.
Vanessa Rogers: Well, we're running low on time, so I wanted to ask you about your education work. Tell us a little bit about you're working with children as well, not just corporations, right?
Kendall Haven: Oh, yes. I started starting in 85. I mostly went to schools, go to schools, and I would say more elementary schools than anything else. But then there are more elementary schools than anything else. And the idea was to go in and do performances, but a lot of it was in class workshops where we're looking at what are those elements? Because it's so easy for them to see them if we're building a story. Once there was a frog sitting on a lily pad and three little bitty frogs around him. So you set up a situation and then we say, end. The end. Is that exciting? No. Well, what do you want to have happen? And without having to consciously start and write essays on it from four year olds, they can tell you what they need to have happen and slowly build those same elements.
Kendall Haven: It's just that now what we can do is put names on them as we're building stories. So that would be the kind of workshop I do a lot with school. I do the same thing at high school level. We just change the story to one that would be more relevant to them. So a lot of those workshops that I would do over and then do workshops with teachers for what are the tools to use? How do you incorporate that awareness of story and those elements of story into everything else that you're doing so that it becomes part of your teaching without having to stop everything and say, now we're going to talk about story. It just becomes part of the way that you communicate everything else. And so that's the education part that I still do and love to do.
Kendall Haven: It is so much fun.
Vanessa Rogers: Is there anything that stood out for you while doing that? Has anyone said anything in particular that you is memorable or.
Kendall Haven: I don't know. It happens. It's so, there's so many. I mean, you know, you go to a hundred schools a year or so and pretty much every you know, pretty much what you're going to hear. I remember. Where was I? Franklin, Pennsylvania. Small little town in north central Pennsylvania. The part of the state that if you look at a map of Pennsylvania and the major roads, it's the part that doesn't have any? It's just out in the middle of the open, so, very rural part of north central Pennsylvania. And this was a 6th grader. I was showing them. We're building a story. And she threw down her pencil once and looked at me, and she said, I've been in this school three years, and no one's blown my mind yet. Well, you just blew my mind. She. She expressed it.
Kendall Haven: But it's a real common sense, a real common reaction, because what you're showing them is what's already in their brain and the way they already think, they just cognitively never stop to think about it. And that's what makes it so cool, is it's not like I'm saying, okay, here are the equations for planetary physics and the way that planets and asteroids move. Learn this. And they're saying, okay, here's something new I got to learn. I'm saying, okay, here's what's really going on inside your brain already. You just didn't notice it, and you give them suddenly conscious control over that, and it's something powerful, something very powerful for them.
Vanessa Rogers: Well, this has just been so enlightening. I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Kendall Haven: It's been my pleasure. Been my pleasure. Hopefully, everyone will now say, look at stories with just a little more respect and a little more enthusiasm, and realize they are the most powerful communication tools you have, and use them accordingly.
Vanessa Rogers: And we'll definitely add your links up to on our website, ww dot fabricoffoclore.com. We'll put your links up there for anyone who's interested in purchasing any of your books, because I'm sure there will be people on this podcast that will be very interested in those books and your education workshops.
Kendall Haven: Wonderful. And thank you for bringing me on. It has been a delight.
Vanessa Rogers: Thank you, folksy folks, for joining us on this science of storytelling episode today with Kendall Haven. What did y'all learn today? Is there a story that has changed your life? If you have a comment, make sure that you are sharing it either on YouTube or you can join our Facebook community group page and continue the conversation. We want to hear from you because it's so much more fun when you're doing a podcast, when you're hearing from your listeners and your audience and you're getting this interaction. So make sure that you're commenting and you're continuing that conversation. We're on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and all the podcasting platforms. And if you are enjoying this podcast, I would like to ask you a favor. It is so helpful if you can give us a rating.
Vanessa Rogers: Give us a rating with stars, preferably five stars, and also a review so people can understand what they're getting into. If people hear from real people, not robots, it is so incredibly helpful. So please consider giving us those five star reviews and sending us a review. And as always, if you're watching on YouTube, please, like, comment, subscribe, and share. Share it with whoever you want. If you want to share it with your bat messenger friend to your next door neighbor, go ahead and share that information about our podcast with your friends and family so that we gain audience members and we can continue to produce content like you are enjoying. Thank you so much for unraveling the mysteries of folklore on the podcast fabric of folklore. Once again, I'm your hostess, Vanessa Y. Rodgers. And until next time, keep the folk alive.