tools. They show how context can mislead people to make the wrong
decisions. Stories illustrate causal relationships that people hadn’t
recognized before and highlight unexpected,
resourceful ways in
which people have solved problems.
Medically, the story related above teaches important lessons. It in-
structs people in how to spot and treat the specific condition pneu-
mopericardium. More broadly, it warns medical personnel about
relying too much on machines. The heart monitor was functioning
perfectly well, but it couldn’t substitute for the insight of a human
being with a simple stethoscope.
These medical lessons are not particularly
useful to people who
don’t work in health care. But the story is
inspiring to everyone. It’s a
story about a woman who stuck to her guns, despite implicit pressure
to conform to the group’s opinion. It’s an underdog story—in the hi-
erarchical hospital environment, it was the
nurse who
told the chief
neonatologist the right diagnosis. A life hinged on her willingness to
step out of her “proper place.”
The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowl-
edge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). Note that
both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are geared to generating
ac-
tion. In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a
credible idea makes
people believe. An
emotional idea makes people care. And in this
chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.
S h o p Ta l k i n t h e X e r o x L u n c h r o o m
Photocopiers are perhaps the most complex
machines that most of us
will ever use. What other everyday machine combines optical, me-
chanical, chemical, and electrical technologies? It’s a wonder copiers
work at all. And often they don’t. When there’s a problem—and it’s
not one that a cubicle-dweller can fix by opening and shutting the
paper tray a few times—it takes a very sophisticated repair person to
troubleshoot the situation.
206
M A D E T O S T I C K
Researcher Julian Orr spent a lot of time among Xerox copier re-
pairmen and found that they spent a lot of time swapping stories.
Take
the story below, which was told by a Xerox copier salesperson
over a game of cribbage at lunch. (We’ve provided some explanatory
comments in brackets.) The salesperson starts with a reference to a
recent mechanical change made by copier designers in an attempt to
prevent an ordinary power surge from frying multiple components:
The new XER board configuration won’t cook the board if you
had an arcing dicorotron. Instead, it now trips the 24-Volt inter-
lock on
the Low Voltage Power Supply, and the machine will
crash. But when it comes back up it’ll give you an E053 error.
[This is a misleading error code that refers to an area of the ma-
chine that is unrelated to the real problem.]
That’s exactly what I had down there, at the end of the hall,
and Weber and I ran for four hours trying to chase that thing.
All it was was a bad dicorotron. We finally got it running long
enough so that we got an E053 with an F066 and the minute we
checked the dicorotrons we had one that was totally dead. . . .
[Orr reports that there was a long pause for cribbage.]
Yeah that
was a fun one.
T
hese cribbage-playing guys in the lunchroom are simply talking
shop, as we all do. A misleading E053 error may not constitute
drama in your world, but no doubt we all have our equivalents.
Why do people talk shop? Part of the reason is simply Humanity
101—we want to talk to other people about the things that we have in
common. Xerox repairmen work with photocopiers,
so they talk
about them. But that’s not the only factor at play here. For example,
the storyteller above could have shared the general arc of the story
without the details: “I had a real bear of a problem today—it took me
four hours to get to the bottom of it. I’m glad that one’s over.” Or he
S T O R I E S
207
could have leapt straight to the punch line: “After hours of hassle, I
traced the problem back to a measly burned-out dicorotron. How was
your morning?”
Instead, he tells a story that’s much more interesting to his lunch
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