Ep. 246 - Susan Lindner, Cultural Anthropologist, Founder of Emerging Media, and Author of Innovation Storytellers on Storytelling for New Innovators

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Susan Lindner, cultural anthropologist, founder of Emerging Media, and author of the upcoming book, Innovation Storytellers. Susan, and I talk about the importance of storytelling to the new innovator and what companies can do to have their stories resonate and spread in today's changing media landscape. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Susan Lindner, Cultural Anthropologist, Founder of Emerging Media, and Author of Innovation Storytellers

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. We have Susan Lindner. She is a cultural anthropologist, disruptor and founder of Emerging Media, which is a brand marketing and PR agency. And we're very excited to have Susan on the show. Welcome. 

Susan Lindner: Thank you so much, Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you on the show. I want to get you on because a lot of your work is really focused around this concept of storytelling. And it's so important. And so maybe we'll start off with why is storytelling so important to innovators and entrepreneurs? 

Susan Lindner: It's so critical. And 20 years of working in tech and innovation has taught me this as the golden rule. Stanford has been very helpful to us. They have shown that a story and statistics together are 22 times more memorable than just statistics alone. And that is because the human brain is wired to receive story, not Excel spreadsheets. Not even bullet points.

So, it's critical. If you want someone to remember that fantastic innovation that you're pitching, that you actually wrap it in a story with a hero, with a plot, with a conclusion. That if you want funders, investors, stakeholders, to remember it, you had better wrap that incredible data, in a story that people can take with them and actually act on it.

Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. And obviously we've seen a lot of companies that have done good at that. Telling stories that work. And others that have flamed out because they couldn't really communicate effectively with what they're doing. What's the process of developing a story? Especially at that early stage, when you're trying to get somebody to notice your new creation?

Susan Lindner: For Innovation storytelling, which is different than every other kind of storytelling, right? We're not talking about soap. Or maybe you're innovating soap, fantastic, give me a call, happy to help with a new, the next thing that will be soap. Great. But Innovation storytelling takes a different look. And so, I'm an anthropologist by training, but I was also a religion major in college. And I was fascinated by how the profits moved the word around the world.

How did they get the word to move? How did they get all the early adopters? How did they get people to convert in the midst of great danger and peril? Right? Every considerable, social, racial, economic, lions eating you alive. Who got these people to adopt an idea that was not even provable right, in the empirical sense?

And yet people did it. How did they do it? And so, I looked at the prophets, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, and tried to create the framework to understand how do you move a message around the world? How did the prophets do it? And it turns out there's five clear steps that all of the profits employ. So, step number one is history.

You'll notice that Jesus didn't say that Judaism was wrong. Right. He certainly saw himself as a Jew called himself a rabbi. He was referred to as a rabbi, as a teacher. So, you take, what is historical about what came before us and say, this is the foundation of what the story is built upon. We all come from a common shared history.

That makes us a group, right. That makes us a try step one. It is the same reason why we employ the term email to describe transatlantic electronic correspondence that goes through a tube under an ocean and arrives in my computer. Right? It's why we call it an inbox. Cause there used to be one sitting on your desk.

It's why we use the save icon. Or it used to be a floppy disk. My kids have never seen a floppy desk. They don't even know what it is. I was cleaning out my house actually, found a floppy disk and showed it to my son. Twentytwo years old, goes to the Rochester Institute of Technology and looks at me and said, why did you 3d print a copy of the save icon from work? Because that's what I'm doing in my spare time, Brian. I'm printing a copy of the save icon. 

Brian Ardinger: You can bring those back along with the AOL CDs. 

Susan Lindner: Which, you know, some archeologist is going to have to explain one day. So, step one is the history, right? It makes it really easy to understand where we all came from. Cause that's how we transitioned into change.

Step two, what are our values and our purpose? So, the prophets were really good about describing the shared values, not just the place we come from, but the value surrounding that Innovation and our purpose. What is it that's really driving us today? That may be a little bit different than what was driving us historically.

So, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Could be one of those, like it's always been done that way. That's one of those things. So, as we shift out from what was to what could be, what are the values and the purpose. Can we get that really clear for the listener? Step three is the message, right? This is when we burn all boats.

This is when we say we're taking what works and we're leaving what doesn't. So, we're going from an eye for an eye to turn the other cheek. That's the shift we're making. And the next is finding those early adopters. So, we know that we only need about 13.3% of the market, right? Our innovators and our early adopters who are going to go forward and go, I'm going to take a risk.

I'm going to take a chance on this Innovation. So, who are those people who now that we have the message, will carry it forward? And it's not always the cheerleader in the room. In fact, better when it's the biggest skeptic. I said, gosh, I never thought that could be, but now I'm standing outside of the Apple store for three days before the iPhone comes out.

And the last is viral language. Step five is using viral language. So, we really want to look at the things that you learned in English class. Alliteration, tagline designer. We want to think about rhetoric that actually moves people. And does it incorporate emotion? We know that the way a story sticks is actually by activating brain chemicals, adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, fear, anger, lust. Name all of the seven deadly sins. Right? 

If we can actually generate emotion, the story now has a biological marker, a physiological marker that says it's in my body and I can take it with me. And that's how stories are powerful. I was just giving a talk and I was asking people to remember the first time they...