I would impose some guardrails so that the contributors don’t take the story too far from my vision. I’m sure I would reserve the right to reject changes, but I haven’t figured out how much poetic license I would give to contributors for the sake of the experiment.

A part of me recoils at the thought of putting myself out there over and over again. On the other hand, in the more traditional approach, I put years of blood and sweat on the line with just a handful of book editors. Do I want to be crushed all at once by experts, or tortured drip, drip, drip by readers? At least I would have readers.

BTW, for a Yahoo community discussion about the expression “BLANK walked across my grave,” go here.

A marketing professor had a set of subjects memorize a 2-digit number and another set memorize a 7-digit number. All were told to go down the hall to the next room and recite the number. Along the way, though, they are offered a choice between chocolate cake or fruit.

Amazingly, the 7-digit memorizers overwhelmingly chose cake while the 2-digits chose fruit. The theory: two parts of the prefrontal cortex — a rational and an emotional — are in a tug of war. Occupy the rational one with a job like remembering a 7-digit number and the emotional part gets a free shot at calling the shots. The theory explains why when we’re tired, at the end of the day at work, we are more prone to yield to temptation of a snack or an extra martini.

You have to hear the Radiolab creators dramatize the war of the cortexes to appreciate this excellent example of news storytelling. I also like NPR’s rewriting of audio stories so that they are appropriate for the online reader. In this case, the Web account retains the humor but executes in a completely different way.

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.

The main point: Fear, facts and force are the favored approach for those who want to facilitate change, but they never work. Doctors know that even the threat of death is not enough to influence eight out of nine heart attack patients to change their lifestyles. Instead, successful change agents rely on a mixture of:

• Relate – Establish a new, emotional connection with a person or community that fosters hope.
• Repeat – Use this new relationship to learn and practice the new skills and behaviors you need to sustain change.
• Reframe – Allow this new relationship to help you see your situation and the world in a new light.

Good doctors have the first one down. To reframe, they need to help patients see the benefits of healthy changes today – healthy food can be delicious, exercise can give them more energy, meditation can reduce their stress symptoms. And they need to help them savor short-term wins so that they will repeat the behavior over and over until it becomes their new habit.

Best part about this book: The writing. Deutschman is a magazine writer (Fortune, GQ, Fast Company) and book author (The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) who has a raft of stories at his disposal. He never tells, he shows. He has spent quality time with the change leaders he profiles — so much so that you find out, for example, that 35 years into her successful program to rehabilitate criminals at San Francisco’s Delancy Street, Mimi Silbert still has days when she doesn’t have that fire in the belly. Her solution: act “as if” she does, and eventually the fire comes back.

Favorite quote:

I don’t think a leader can accomplish major change without being willing to slice yourself open and become part of the change. I say, ‘You guys force me to be my best self because I live in a glass house.’ — Mimi Silbert

Bits that stuck:

• Quick wins reward the hard work of change, nourish the faith and keep critics at bay.
• When stuck with a problem I haven’t been able to solve myself, the first step is to seek out a new relationship with someone or some group that has had success in this area.
• When the spirit flags, “fake it until you make it.” Act “as if” you have the spirit and it will come to you.

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.

Kai gives Granny a knitting lesson from Steve Krizman on Vimeo.

What I’ve learned so far:

• Video is not as forgiving as written storytelling. If you don’t get the beginning, middle and end captured in video, your story will stink. You either have to stage a reenactment, or you resort to a silly text card.
• Sound is the most important part of video. I’ve had decent visual, but lousy sound. Nothing you can do with that. Conversely, with good sound you can get by in editing.
• On the scene, you have to work harder on a video story than on a written story. You snooze, you lose the one piece of action that would make the whole story.

I uploaded several months’ worth of video capture to my Vimeo account today. Rather than use the feature-filled, but molasses-slow CyberLink software, I slapped segments together using FlipShare. I am satisfied with the FlipShare results — the editing quality matches the Flip capture quality. We’re not talking Cannes here.

The video I chose to embed in this post is my favorite from a video storytelling standpoint — a finger knitting session between my Mom and my 9-year-old daughter. No written word can match the close-up of my Mom’s gnarled fingers, or the quiet exasperation on Kai’s face, or the poignant moment between Mom and my wife Karen, or Kai’s feet-kicking thrill when Granny thanks her for the help. It doesn’t cover a lot of territory, but it is a hint at the special power of video storytelling.

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.

Jared Diamond excels at putting human flesh on the archaeological bones left behind at the scene of ancient societal collapses — things like trash heaps and fossilized pooh. His book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, lists several factors at play in the typical societal implosion. But the common denominators to all were resource depletion and slow-footed decision-making. I couldn’t help but think of today’s global warming deniers and drill-baby-drill chanters when reading of society after society that methodically drove themselves off cliffs.

Diamond notes that in nearly all the collapsed societies, the end came quickly — within a few decades of the point where consumption outstripped the environment’s capacity. He doesn’t put an expiration date on our civilization, but he worries about the future of his children. These things worry him: global warming, fossil fuel depletion, deforestation, soil erosion, and hunger. This week the official tally of the world’s hunger exceeded 1 billion for the first time. When the people in Third World giants of China and India reach First World consumption levels, will more go hungry elsewhere or will First World consumption fall? If the latter, will that be voluntary or the result of strife and boycotts?

A modern collapse may unfold country by country. It may already have begun with the collapse of Afghanistan, Somalia and the Solomon Islands. Are North Korea and Pakistan next? We could sit back and hope it doesn’t overtake us. That’s what the last rich Greenland Viking did.

(NOT advisable for Kindle users — lots of maps and photos you can’t see).

UPDATE 10/24/09

Watch Yale Environment 360 video on West Virginia coal mining. We haven’t leveled the last Apalachian mountaintop, but the moral/value questions are being raised. A  government   says it isn’t the government’s job to decide what people do on their land. Isn’t it?