In town only four days, she serendipitously had met the hostess of the Yoga Day USA open house just hours before. Now she stood in the suburban basement, surrounded by strangers sitting cross-legged on mats, and talked about her lineage.

She is a descendant of ancient Jewish high priests and of Dakota Sioux. She told us she could tell we had peace in our hearts and that we sought healing and happiness. A Kabbalist Shaman, she said she possessed energy given to the high priests and conserved over the centuries through her lineage. We will need it. The earth is unsettled, and 2012 is only two years away.

John’s story

A child of the ’60s, silver-haired John talks about the brilliance of Bob Dylan during a break between yoga sessions. “How many times must the cannon balls fly?” he asks. “It took just one war to move us to action back then. Now, we send our children to war after war and we’re proud when they’re killed.”

Things are getting bad. “We’re the frogs in the boiling water, not noticing the gradual increase in heat until it’s too late.” Architects and engineers know that jet fuel alone could not have brought the towers down. Cash for clunkers is likely a plot to get the old cars off the road so electronics-jamming attacks are made more effective. And how can we allow all the cell phone waves to go passing through our heads?

My story

This Yoga Day open house attracted people who sense something is wrong. We’re nervous rabbits before an earthquake; frogs who have noticed  it’s getting a bit hot. Some of us have created elaborate narratives to make sense of how we got here and to map a way out.

I don’t think the narrative need be complicated at all. The bus has no brakes and it’s barreling down the hill. The passengers who are partying have to stop and look ahead; the passengers who are sleeping have to wake up. And if that takes a Kabbalist Shaman, I’m OK with that.

Diane Gage-Lofgren, our national VP of communications and PR, had asked a poet/performance artist  to bring life to our communication team’s new vision statement. A stroke of genius. I will forever have a visual and resonant image to add soul to our vision: To be a model for communication excellence as Kaiser Permanente is a model for the future of health care.

How did Sekou Andrews do it? By story, of course. He became Health Care. He was big, powerful, essential. He was the most important issue of our day. “But no one seems to be impressed with all this,” he said. “Because to the average American I am intimidating, extraneous, inaccessible and even bewildering.”

And he himself had no voice. He needed us to tell his story. He needed us to tell it in 140 characters, in video, in wikis — whatever it took and wherever the audience. And we communicators at KP have the special responsibility and opportunity to tell his story on behalf of an organization that is “offering a solution to the leader of the Free World.

I could see myself in the story — as the hero, of course. “Not observers. I need visionaries who can see as far as I can reach.” He needs me. I’m in.

And that’s how leadership storytelling works.

By comparison, my job as an organizational communicator is easy. Still, I have a well-drawn gameplan, thanks to Guber’s article in the December 2007 Harvard Business Review (you can search for it on my public Evernote folder). His four key principles:

The story must be true to the storyteller, reflecting his/her core values:

“He must enter the hearts of his listeners, where their emotions live, even as the information he seeks to convey rents space in their brains. Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. So although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s-eye. To reach it, the visionary manager crafting his story must first display his own open heart.”

The story must be true to the audience:

Every storyteller is in the expectations-management business and must take responsibility for leading listeners effectively through the story experience, incorporating both surprise and fulfillment. At the end of the story, listeners should think, “We never expected that – but somehow, it makes perfect sense.”

The story must adapt to the moment:

Intensive preparation and improvising are two sides of the same coin. If you know your story well, you can riff on it without losing the thread or the focus.

The story must elevate:

Even in today’s cynical, self-centered age, people are desperate to believe in something bigger than themselves. The storyteller plays a vital role by providing them with a mission they can believe in and devote themselves to.

Tellingly, the guy from Hollywood says the story has its own power, regardless the medium:

It isn’t special effects or the 0′s and 1′s of the digital revolution that matter most – it’s the oohs and aahs that the storyteller evokes from an audience. State-of-the-art technology is a great tool for capturing and transmitting words, images, and ideas, but the power of storytelling resides most fundamentally in “state-of-the-heart” technology.

The stories are more compelling: We all know someone whose breast cancer was caught early. That one life is real to us. The hundreds of false-positives are not. Even if we know an individual who got a clean bill of health after a suspicious mammogram, we don’t question her decision to get a mammogram in the first place.

The stories have and will prevail over the facts, and that is an important lesson for any of us who ever want to change someone’s mind. You want to improve service at work? Get your kid to drive safely? Pass a health care reform bill? Find yourself stories that resonate with the people you want to convince.

The eagle gently coaxed her offspring toward the edge of the nest. Her heart quivered with conflicting emotions as she felt their resistance to her persistent nudging. “Why does the thrill of soaring have to begin with the fear of falling?” she thought. This ageless question was still unanswered for her.

As in tradition of the species, her nest was located high on the shelf of a sheer rock face. Below there was nothing but air to support the wings of each child. “Is it possible that this time it will not work?” she thought. Despite her fears, the eagle knew it was time, her parental mission was all but complete. There remained one final task – THE PUSH.

The eagle drew courage from an innate wisdom. Until her children discovered their wings, there was no purpose for their lives outside the nest. Until they learned to soar, they would fail to understand the privilege it was to have been born an eagle. The push was the greatest gift she had to offer. It was her supreme act of love. And so, one by one, she pushed them — and they flew!

I later asked Frank where he got the story. He said Samantha Ortiz, the dean of students, gave it to him. Sam told me she picked it up from a previous college she worked at, but wasn’t sure where it originated.

An Internet search reveals the story comes from the book, Even Eagles Need a Push by international business speaker David McNally. The search returned more than 100 instances when this story was used, most often in educational rites of passage.

Now that’s a story with wings.

It was easy to see why Jonathan Browser was chosen by the 39 graduates of the Child Health Associate / Physician Assistant program to speak at their University of Colorado Denver convocation last week. Young, witty, and a good storyteller, he no doubt was their favorite professor.

“Even though the father was himself a clinician, he could not suppress the dread as he saw his girl struggling.” The graduates smiled through tears. They knew this story.

“Don’t worry, this has a happy ending,” he said. “Some inhaled steroids and she was sent home the next morning, diagnosed with the croup. If you haven’t guessed already, I was the frantic father of the croupy kid.

“The nurse that night at Children’s did not treat me as just another frantic dad. She was soothing and reassuring, even though she didn’t know the whole story. She didn’t know that my son, my daughter’s twin, had recently died of a sudden illness and that I was reliving that horror once again.

“I tell you this story today, on your graduation, to remind you that the care you give is given in a context – a context you may not know. Try as we might, we cannot possibly know everyone’s context, but we cannot let that stop us from caring as if we did.

“Every patient has a story. It is rich and meaningful even if you don’t know it. Strip away all the technology and what you are left with, fundamentally, is you, your patient, and their story.”

Katharine, who writes my favorite blog on applied storytelling, interviewed job seekers and studied reams of resumes while earning her doctorate. She supplies step-by-step story construction tips and illustrates her points with actual resumes and cover letters gathered in her research.

She clearly did an exhaustive literature search to gather a wide range of expert opinion on the subject. My only criticism is that Katharine could have synthesized the academic literature a bit more and taken a few risks by providing her own opinion.

Katherine puts the issue well for all of us, whether we are in the job market or are building our careers where we are: We should carefully nurture our own personal brand. And we know the best brands are those that evoke intrigue and emotion through the story that they tell.

Jim proposes that someone — internet service providers, perhaps — collect a small fee from Internet users, who then can swap digital music files without barrier and annoying security/tracking codes. This pool of cash then would be divided among labels and artists (much, much easier said than done). His Choruss idea, a skunk works project within Warner Music Group, will pilot the idea at a handful of universities next school year.

Jim’s narrative uses a learn-from-history trope.

In 1847, composer Ernest Bourget sipped coffee in a trendy Paris cafe, Les Ambassadeurs, and listened as one of his pieces was performed. He left without paying the tab, telling the manager, “you did not pay me for the performance of my music, I will not pay you for my meal.’ A court battle ensued, leading to creation of SACEM, the first agency to collect royalties for artists.

The Bourget story is a bit of jujitsu that allows Jim to portray a free and open Net as a nice place, like Les Ambassadeurs, but not so nice for the Bourgets of the world. His use of story is ingenious and ironic, given that the tactic of re-storying a prevailing narrative usually is employed by the little guy (see indigenous people and the Columbus myth).

A detractor all steamed up about corporate greed can glibly dismiss Choruss as a money-grab. But by turning the David-v-Goliath trope on its head and by siding with technology, Jim has brought the debate to a more substantive plane. A recent post by Mike Masnick at techdirt  is an excellent example. Mike gives Jim his due and then turns Jim’s story back on him, saying he is applying a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem. Touche.

Jim and I discovered we both are newspaper refugees and have an editor in common (a good one, Wayne Ezell, now at the Times-Union in Jacksonville).  Jim’s take on the music industry seemed transferrable to print journalism. We both have been watching Steven Brill’s plan to aggregate newspaper content so that readers can be offered to pay for “premium” content beyond that which is found on the newspaper Web sites. I wonder if something similar can be applied at the local newspaper level. Might the Denver Post sell some of its most desirable content, with proceeds subsidizing general coverage and the more granular reporting that will never generate a sustainable market income on its own?

I had to tell him that this is not an issue settled by facts and logic. Yes, facts are important, but in the end people will make up their minds based on how they feel.

How do you impact emotions? Story, of course.

That is why I believe the Foundation for Biomedical Research is on the right track with a new advertising campaign. In the TV spots, you hear about animal research from the people whose lives depend on it: Jen, a scientist and breast cancer survivor, and Gail, whose husband’s life was extended by 13 years so he could raise his children before succumbing to colon cancer.

Weekly, PETA issues e-mails that are centered on a story. They urge action — usually a form e-mail to a list of scientists and bureaucrats, and sometimes a plea for financial contribution to their cause. In recent years, surveys have shown dwindling public support for using animals in research. I think the PETA stories have had an impact.

So does the Foundation for Biomedical Research. Their new ad campaign is fighting story with story, putting the argument for animal research in emotional terms. I think a moral issue properly resides in the realm of emotion, feeling and subjective judgment. But if you also need or want facts, you’ll find them at the Foundation for Biomedical Research site.

I’m blogging about it, and I am usually the next to last person to spot a trend.

Nearly all the seminar/webinar/conference invitations I get these days have a come-on like “harnessing the power of online video…”

The Dark Forces have glommed on to video, and they are usually the first to spot a trend.

Two Domino’s pizza workers found a whole new way to gross out more than 1 million people and get fired — all by harnessing the power of online video. Their YouTube bit involved mucous and cheese and went viral via Facebook and Twitter. The Domino’s legal folks have succeeded in deep-sixing the video, but the PR team admits it reacted too slowly to the viral crisis. Their vain hope was that the nasty affair would be confined to the Twitter fringe, but that is a pretty significant slice of humanity that also includes the mainstream media. And journalists don’t get many chances to write about boogers.

To the PR folks’ credit, they fought fire with fire, putting their president, Patrick Doyle, in front of the camera (and poorly placed teleprompter) and posting a heartfelt apology on their already-established YouTube channel. Unfortunately, they had not yet established their own Twitter profile and fell behind in that lightning-quick medium.

Using video storytelling to build an organization’s reputation is challenging enough; now we have to think about protecting ourselves against malicious video stories. The Domino’s video response had its flaws, but it was up quickly and I think Doyle came across as authentic and sincere. The Doyle video has had more than 600,000 views, compared to the more than a million views of the gross-out video. Train wrecks will atract more crowds than cleanup operations.

My bet is that Domino’s has a big enough reservoir of goodwill to weather this prank. But it had to draw significantly from that well because of the power of visual storytelling.