Ethos3 recently had the opportunity to chat with Andy Goodman, a nationally recognized author, speaker, and storyteller. You can read our discussion below.
Andy’s Bio: Andy Goodman is a nationally recognized author, speaker and consultant in the field of public interest communications. Along with Storytelling as Best Practice, he is author of Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes and Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes. He also publishes a monthly journal, free-range thinking, to share best practices in the field.
Andy is best known for his speeches and workshops on storytelling, presenting, and strategic communications, and has been invited to speak at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton, as well as at major foundation and nonprofit conferences. He currently serves on the faculty of the Communications Leadership Institute, which trains nonprofit executive directors and grantmakers.
1. What gets you up in the morning?
Besides my ten-year old daughter? Right now, I’m working to establish The Goodman Center as the go-to online resource for nonprofiteers who want to get better at what they do. Not everybody has the time or resources to attend workshops or conferences where they can get good training in communications. So, if you can learn from your office (or home), and sharpen your skills in just a few hours, I think that’s a real advantage. So I’m hoping to create the place where they’ll want to spend some time — or, as we like to say, where they can stay on top of their game while sitting on their bottom.
2. What was your inspiration for starting a goodman?
I spent five years running a small nonprofit (the Environmental Media Association), and this introduced me to many smart, dedicated and altruistic people, and not only in the environmental community. What I saw, however, was that many of these people were not trained to be professional communicators. They were steeped in the knowledge of their particular field, and they were passionate about their cause, but they didn’t always do the best job of talking about it to the public or the media. They tended to default to jargon, acronyms, and technical language that wasn’t going to make an emotional connection with their intended audience.
My entire professional background is in communications — advertising, radio and television — so it occurred to me that maybe the best use of my time would be to take what I know about getting attention, and to put that expertise into the hands of people who actually have something of value to say. So that was the inspiration for a goodman, which started as a one-man firm doing marketing and communications exclusively for good causes.
3. Being a “professional storyteller” how do youapproach telling stories to Gen X and Gen Y?
Human beings are natural born storytellers. It’s in our DNA and it’s been there for literally thousands of generations. I don’t see members of Gen X or Gen Y as any different from Baby Boomers or other age groups in this regard. What we all tend to have in common is that when we enter the working world, we put on this professional straightjacket that constricts the way we communicate. We start talking in charts and graphs and using the arcane inside language of our field, and we stop telling stories because we’re told it’s “soft”, it’s “anecdotal”, it’s not the sound science or hard numbers that will make the case. And yet, storytelling remains the most powerful form of human communication. I think you can make the case that it’s the fundamental unit of human communication, assuming you define communication as two people actually relating to each otherin a meaningful way. So again, if you’re talking about Gen X and Gen Y in the workplace, I don’t see why you’d approach them any differently.
4. I know you had the opportunity to work with former VicePresident Al Gore, can you tell the readers what that was like?
First of all, it was an honor to be part of The Climate Project and to help Mr. Gore train 1,000 people to tell the story of global warming. I had the chance to workside-by-side with him over a 6-month stretch, and I came away with one very strong impression: the man was miscast in his own life. He was born into a political family, so it was his destiny to serve in Washington whether he wanted to or not. And the fact is that he’s really not a politician at heart, and I think he’d tell you that himself. He’s really a teac
her. He loves to get inside a subject, tear it apart, and reassemble it from the ground up until he understands it thoroughly. And then he wants to make sure you understand it, too. For him, global warming has been the uber curriculum, and learning about it and teaching it has redefined his life. If you see him teach, you see him ina state of pure “flow,” and I think that says everything about who he is.
5. You have had the opportunity to speak at several universities, do you feel students are given the opportunity to learn storytelling and use it as a practical application?
If students take courses in narrative literature or screenwriting, then they are probably getting training in storytelling. But outside the English, communications or theatre departments, I don’t think it’s happening, which is a shame.
6. Being an author, what books do you recommend to our readersthat relate to storytelling?
The Story Factor by Annette Simmons, Telling True Stories, which is edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, and Tell Me a Story by Roger Schank are among my favorites. And if you want to give yourself a nice gift, Listening is an Act of Love, is a lovely compilation of personal stories captured by the StoryCorps project.
7. If you could provide our readers with one piece of advice forgiving their next presentation, what would that be?
Numbers numb, jargon jars, and nobody ever marched on Washington because of a pie chart. If you want to connect with your audience, tell them a story. It’s what they’re waiting for.
