A to Z of Business Storytelling -08

Humor

Most business meetings are comprised of serious discussions. With heavy arguments and debates, people get stressed out. When the listeners are in a stressed mood, they would never ready to actively listen to the speaker and follow what he/she says. It is the onus of the speaker to relieve the pressure of the listeners, if their message is to be seriously taken.

Humor is a great tool that can relieve the pressure. When the speaker takes a conscious effort to bring in the humor, the bond between the speaker and the audience is greatly enhances.

Let us see how humor can be aroused in business storytelling. Some of the key techniques are as follows:-

Record and Reproduce Funny Real-time Incidents: One of your friends might have shared a freak or a funny incident that had happened in their office. If you are sure that the incident can bring humor among audience, you can just go ahead and paraphrase it without much of effort. All you have to do is to store such stories in your story file. You may never know when you would be using it.

“Several decades back, in a guest house of a government office, the audit team went to perform their audit. They started the physical verifications of the assets. One of the line-items in the asset register was read as “Stone”. The audit team wanted to verify the item, the manager of the guest house promptly opened the cupboard and showed him a big stone.

Audit team became further curious to know about the purpose of the stone in the guest house, but the manager could not give any convincing reply. He said that the stone was there in the cup-board for more than three years and no one ever raised any questions about it. The audit team further investigations by going thru all the past records. Finally one person of the team found that there was typo regarding the item description.

Actually few years back, the guest house had a brass stove for the purpose of preparing tea and coffee for guests. One of the previous managers of the guest house silently took away a stove and replaced the same with a stone and made an entry for it in the asset ledger. (Stove was replaced with a Stone). Unfortunately no one noticed the theft. Every year the audit was only bothered to verify the items as per the ledger and never asked about the rationale of its presence.

The above story can be narrated on multiple occasions in the corporate environment. May be to highlight the significance of integrity, or not to blindly follow processes, or to highlight the importance of clean manual entries in the ledgers.

Exaggerations: One of the psychology of humor methods is exaggeration. You start with something for which there’s a grain of truth and stretch it further and further to some ridiculous extreme. Exaggeration can be a surprisingly simple and effective means of making material funnier, as well as more memorable.

CK, one of the leading trainers of an Indian IT organization and my friend used to tell about the size of the organization, he worked.

“Our company is one of the largest employers of the country. We used to recruit any type engineers whether their discipline is IT, Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical. We were desperately recruiting all kind of engineers. In fact in our compound wall there used to be sign boards saying, “Trespassers would be recruited.”

Use of Pun / Juggling with Words: Sometime when you play with industry jargons, the humor may not make any sense outside your organization. But if your team members can understand the meaning, please do not hesitate to use it.

“In my petroleum refinery days, we have the flexibility to increase the yield of certain products based on market demand. The directives for the same would come from the ministry. One such directive was to increase the production of Liquified Petroleum Gas i.e LPG. This program was called as “LPG Maximization Program”.

At that time, I used to say that the most respected product from the refinery is LPJi” (In India, when we want to respectfully call some one, then we add “ji” as suffix. e.g Sundarji)

Unexpected Twists: Sometimes a plain statement in a specific situation would bring laughter, depending on the timing. One may keep eyes and ears open to capture such moments.

I was editing our departmental newsletter and asked my team members to contribute some jokes. There came an instant reply from three of them instantly without any delay. All shared the same joke. Curious to know the joke. Here it is…

“Sorry boss! I am working now!

Self Deprecation: Try to be vulnerable and crack a humor on yourself. Not only your team members like the humor, they also may like your vulnerability. As a leader when don’t show yourself in a pedestal, team members would start interacting with you freely without inhibition.

“When I was with an IT organization, our team developed a Proof of Concept (POC). I gave a demo of it to my boss and my team members. As you know, a POC is not a full-fledged solution. A POC is just to demonstrate your customers that you have the understanding of their domain and their pain areas. You also knew how to address the pain areas using appropriate technology. Moreover a POC would help the customer to get to know the look and feel of the solution. Since the solution was for a nascent business, much of the customer requirements could not be shown even in the screens. Hence my boss made a remark saying, “Sundar your solution does not have enough meat!…”. I could understand what he meant. But in all the subsequent meetings, every stakeholder started repeating the phrase “no meat in Sundar’s solution”. I felt bad. But nevertheless I consoled myself that there was no meat in the solution, not just because it was a POC, but because I was a vegetarian.”

If you want to leverage the power of humor in your business storytelling, a word of caution.

• Never force fit a joke, especially a canned joke from public domain. People would have listened to those jokes umpteen number of times. It is not only that. Humor shall be natural and seamlessly woven into your speech.
• Also a big no to any jokes that are sexist, racist or political. You may not know the implications.
• In the name of sarcasm, never try to insult others.

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