URSABLOG: Choosing Our Stories

What’s the best way of persuading a client or counterparty to consider a deal that they wouldn’t normally look at? You tell them a story they can buy into. How do you convince someone to join your company, or take you on as an employee? You give them the full story and conclude with the reasons why they should be part of it. How do you say to someone you want them to be in your life? You tell them how it would be if they joined their story with yours. Of course, it helps if you have a convincing and consistent history – the backstory, the prequel – and that you have some confidence you can deliver on the future narrative you are laying out. But stories, narratives, matter.

It is, after all, how our brains are hardwired. We make sense of our lives only having made sense of who we are, mostly by having made sense of our own history and accepting it. Some have blissful, happy childhoods, surrounded by love, support and inspiration. Others have traumatic and unhappy childhoods, punctuated by fear, anger and loneliness. Most of us – I suspect – can identify parts of both extremes in different stages of growing up. Either way these experiences, these stories we tell ourselves and each other, define us and make us who we are.

This is the same for companies: some have a lively creation myth, and look back on the difficult stages with a sense of pride – we got through it – and use it to prove why they are still going strong. Others focus more on recent – mostly successful – times avoiding too much information about a more distant – and troubling – past. All companies, one way or the other, emphasise the inspiring parts, and say little about the periods they are less proud of. And the most convincing have a story about where they are going, and how they are going to do it.

As for deals, in my experience, telling someone you have a great deal for them without telling them a story only works if you have spent a lot of time with them already – doing or trying to do deals – i.e. because you are already part of the story. Otherwise if it is a fresh, or not particularly close, relationship you will have to present why it is a good deal, i.e. tell a story, which usually means comparing the past with the present as well laying out a probable future (especially if it coincides with their vision of the future). The success of the pitch is not about how clever it is, or whether it’s a ‘no-brainer’ (although the people who present such deals are usually hoping that the one on the receiving end of the pitch have no brains, showing little or no imagination, or brains themselves). It is whether it is convincing on its merits.

I think about stories a lot of the time. Maybe it’s because I write a fair amount, or because I read more fiction than the average broker. This is not a boast, in fact it is probably a drawback. Instead of spending many nights alone immersed in The Magic Mountain for example, I could be out in expensive bars, smoking big cigars, and partaking in the real-life fiction of a broking life. But I am not made that way – at least as far as I present my own back-story – and whilst on the one side I do drink and smoke (but not cigars) so I am perfectly able to carry on that way, I would be not be able to live authentically in my story. Believe it or not, authenticity matters in business, and I would go further, it matters especially in shipping.

Let me say however that I have no objections, personally or professionally, to people who authentically want to drink expensive whisky and smoke big cigars. In fact these people are probably better able to get their hands on the kind of business that will come their way in these environments, and by no means unprofitable either. I’m just saying it’s not how I want to live, and want to be seen to live.

This second part, how I want to be seen to live, is very important. I know from experience that once I have written these blogs and published them, I have lost control of the narrative. However clear I tried to make my point, when other people read what I have written they bring their story to mine, and interpret it accordingly. I appreciate that I sometimes open myself up in these articles in ways that others may find surprising. I make no apologies for this; it is part of who I am, part of my story. But I find it in turns amusing, perplexing and mystifying when people – some whom I’ve never met – arrive at conclusions about who I am and what I think which are completely different from what I was trying to say. That is probably the problem of the storyteller rather than the reader, which then leads me to question – consciously, subconsciously or even unconsciously – what it was I was actually trying to say.

Social media, of course, encourages this misinterpretation. We post our photographs, tell our stories (usually through photographs or videos) not only about where we are and what we are doing, but who we are as well. There is a series of memes showing split-screens: on Instagram / in real life. It’s funny sometimes, at others disturbing. Not because it’s fake, but because we mislead others and ourselves by trying to create – and control – a narrative of who we are by posting snapshots of our best lives, rather than just living them. This is why – after a long on-off relationship with Instagram – I am off it, for good. I neither read, post, react or stalk on Instagram anymore. I feel all the better for it, despite sometimes missing it and, if I am honest, feeling slightly isolated too.

Stories are not just individual items that are added to our narrative as we plough on. They bounce off other stories, take over others and can be taken over by others, even destroyed by other narratives determined to annihilate us. This is true in real life too, not just in online life, although the boundary between the two can be blurry. In politics, telling a good story and getting people to buy into it has always been the key to being elected, or simply arriving in power. Losing control of the narrative, or having a narrative that is out of touch, is a certain route to defeat. In geopolitics, where political systems with different histories and cultures are playing in a world with ever shifting tensions, stories are everything. Look how quickly narratives around the Ukrainian-Russian conflict have shifted in substance and direction now we are waiting for Donald Trump’s arrival in the Oval Office.

At the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers Annual Forum in Greece this week, the stories told about the tanker and dry bulk markets were dominated by geopolitical and macro-economic stories – not to mention climate change and technological change – as much as they were about the demand for commodities and the supply of ships. And the biggest reason for market uncertainties and the lack of positive sentiment at the moment? A lack of a convincing story about the future.

Our own stories are extremely important to us and I would go further: to all intents and purposes they are us, at least as far as other people are concerned. When I tell myself the story of my professional life, when I find myself writing about it in this blog, it is not just to tell you what I have done, and how I have arrived to where I am, it is also to tell myself, and convince myself that this is really me. It is also to make some sense of who I am in this sometimes difficult and lonely world.

It is a strange narrative that takes a young man from Coventry, with no background in business, with no formal studies in economics or business – let alone shipping – who ends up a shareholder of a shipbroking business in Greece, and – with a further ironic twist – not only celebrating Greek shipping passionately and publicly, but teaching a lesson on the history of Greek shipping to Greek students at the Greek branch of the ICS.

But if I was to be really honest, the ironies are everywhere in my life, there for all to see, and find, if they are really all that interested. My ex-wife became a published crime novelist after we divorced. That she killed me off – twice – in her second novel and created a clever, believable and damning (and as far as I am concerned, untrue, but I would say that wouldn’t I?) caricature of me in the process is part of her story not mine. The only other long-lasting relationship I have had in my life was some time after my divorce, with a psychiatrist – I’m not making it up, honestly – and I was devastated in its aftermath. But are they the only important chapters in my life? By no means. There are more, and some have affected me more intensely, and caused me to change in more important and significant ways, however slight and fleeting they may seem on the surface and in retrospect. In fact, I do these other chapters in my life a disservice if I consider them any less seriously.

The problem with stories is that they are subjective and subject to change. This is perfectly natural: we think we know where we are going because our story is pointing us in one direction. Then something happens and the trajectory of our lives change, and to make sense of this change of direction we have to re-examine our narratives. This is not just as individuals – personally or professionally – but as families, companies, communities and countries. Adaptability – the key to success – is not, for me at least, about changing your story, but about reflecting on it to find other parts you had not paid attention to, or thought were particularly relevant at the time.

It is in none of our power to create a happy ending to our story. None of us has come to the end quite yet and, I think, the whole story of our lives will not be written by us anyway, but concluded by others, on the evidence of what we leave behind. After we are gone, we will not have the power to alter the narrative, we will be how we are remembered and that will consist of stories. Our job now is to create enough material, to create enough memories – good or bad, inspiring or resentful – for there to be something of us to be remembered by. What they will be is defined by how we wish to live now. I find that thought strangely comforting, inspiring and terrifying at the same time. I guess it’s called being alive. That’s my story, anyway, for now at least.

Simon Ward