…there was a meeting. And everyone at the meeting was bored! Why? Because the speakers and presenters failed to connect with their audience, engage them, and make them feel like they were part of something greater than themselves.

I’ve been thinking a lot about story lately, especially its power to touch our emotions and create community. We all need more narrative, more magic, more story in our lives. Nowhere is this need more dire than at meetings, where too many professional speakers deliver canned speeches and novices are challenged just keeping up with their slides.

So I thought to myself, ‘where can you hear great storytellers today’? And then it hit me. National Public Radio (www.npr.org). If you’re not a fan already, dial into your local public radio station. They’re all over the place. You can even tune in over the Internet or download podcasts of your favorite programs via your favorite online everything store.

To get my story fix, I attended the 3rd Coast Filmless Festival (http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/) held recently in Chicago and listened (really listened, in darkened rooms and everything – not a PowerPoint in sight) as some of the best producers in the story business explained how they do what they do.

I had the opportunity to speak with Joe Richman from Radio Diaries (http://radiodiaries.org/) who has been producing audio documentaries for over 15 years and won nearly every major broadcasting award. You might have heard some of his work on NPR like Thembi’s Aids Diary (http://www.aidsdiary.org/). 

For Joe, Thembi’s story was a way to bring the mind-numbing statistics of the AIDS crisis to life. “It’s easier to connect the personal with the historical using story”, says Joe.

When asked about utilizing audio at meetings and events, Joe notes, “Audio has some natural advantages. It’s more active, engaging listeners to connect the dots and create their own personalized imagery, often drawing from their own experience. This means the story lodges deeper and is more permanent.”

Many meetings capture audio and video of their events and archive them for future reference. Conference Publishers (http://theconferencepublishers.com/) take a radio-like production approach to meeting content, enlisting a team of writers and creating newsworthy stories which stick. Founder Mitchell Beer discovered that these concise summaries of presentations and discussions, “helped maintain a conference's momentum, spurring further discussion among participants and spreading the meeting's message to the larger community.” I’ve heard some samples of their work and was impressed how effective they conveyed knowledge and meaning beyond listening to a re-recording.

Another story-centric business is Story Corp. (http://storycorps.org/). Deidre Ross of the American Library Association (ALA) used Story Corps portable recording booths to capture the history of the ALA by interviewing her members.

And for those of you who want to mix it up with some real storytellers, check out The Moth (http://www.themoth.org/). This NYC-based group hosts regular StorySLAMs locally and in cities like Detroit, Chicago, and LA. Anyone can get five minutes on stage to spin their yarn. Past storytellers have included authors, artists, actors, poets, policemen, (former) pickpockets, neurosurgeons, and regular folks like 5th grader Thomas Sosa. Samples are on their website. They also do corporate events and storytelling training. Disney and Maritz are former clients.

Story has a long and ‘storied’ history. Its power to help us connect at a deeper level, form common bonds, and build community is what attracts us and keeps us coming back for more. Couldn’t meetings use more of this?

Now…tell me a story.