“Telling a story is like building a sandcastle in the sand instead of drawing a line in the sand. You invite curiosity, build interest, and encourage participation so that in their enthuiasm your listeners end up on ‘your side’ without ever having to acknowledge that they’ve crossed a line. Likewise, if you tell a story and it doesn’t engage them, there was no clear ‘no’ and you are free to try again with a new story. Without an us/them line there is no adversary so no one loses.”

Annette Simmons, The Story Factor

Here’s the scenario. We’re trying to engage with an audience we’ve not met before. They are likely to be against the basic premise of what we’ve been asked to talk about (why do we accept these challenges?). Moreover, in our increasingly polarised world, they’re as likely to not agree with one another either. We’re reminded of the expression, ‘people love change, they hate being changed’. Our job is to convince them to change. What do we do?

Here’s what the challenge looks like as a conflict mapped onto the business version of the Contradiction Matrix:

Suggestion 1 (Principle 2, Taking-Out/Separation) – draw a line in the sand and talk to the people on each side of the line separately.

Suggestion 2 (Principle 24, Intermediary) – build a sandcastle.

Whoever builds the best (line-crossing) sandcastle wins.