A brief recap of Stephen Denning's Leadership Storytelling TEDx talk

As Stephen Denning says: 

The most important role of leadership is to tell stories. Why? Because nothing else works.

Characteristics of a good story:

1. Share a True Story - not a Titanic story that hides important negative details
2. Be Positive in Tone - share a story with a happy ending, not to trigger the reptile brain of your listeners
3. Be Minimalist in form - let the listener imagine, envisage and discover how to implement details, because it's when s/he internalizes the idea as her own idea. And that’s what you want, that’s when you are off to the races. If it’s my idea only, says Denning, nothing much happens. Once it becomes their idea it is when they become champions).
4. Contrast pre and post change worlds - the story need to contrast the situation before the idea was implemented with the situation after the idea was implemented.

With big complex ideas you can easily get lost in the story and miss the point of the story.

For the full story one definitely wants to read the Stephen Denning's book: The Secret Language of Leadership.