Navigating Change through Story-Telling

Part III

Navigating Change through Story-Telling

A great story always deals with the questioning of the status quo. The protagonist suddenly can no longer act as he did before, faces a big challenge, discovers tragic news, becomes part of a conflict, etc. In other words, daily business is put on hold and a specific challenge should be tackled first – and it won’t be easy. Whether or not the protagonist succeeds in tackling the challenge, the uncertainty about it is what makes the story exciting.

Story has many different qualities that make it useful for the work of systems change. It’s a direct route to our emotions, and therefore important to decision-making. It creates meaning out of patterns. It engenders empathy across difference. It enables the possibility to feel probable in ways our rational minds can’t comprehend. When it comes to changing the values, mindsets, rules, and goals of a system, story is foundational. While the quantitative data is important for demonstrating impact, the stories are important for getting at the root cause of a problem.

Stories are also a useful diagnostic tool, and play a key role in decision-making. When you actively listen to the stories being told throughout your organization you can gain a deeper understanding of a situation. You also gain insight into what is influencing, shaping and guiding the behaviours and activities of your employees.

Storytelling has a useful and important role in your organizational change efforts, but it’s not a silver bullet. On its own, it will not carry a change initiative to new steady state. It’s also both simple and complex at the same time. At the simplest level, a story is an example that is relevant to the audience, true, evokes a clear image and taps into the emotional context of the situation. However, using it well in your organization takes effort. It requires more than simply throwing a few examples into a power point presentation, and it’s not just about telling one story and you’re done. Using story telling requires planning, commitment, and courage. You need to be willing to engage emotionally and intellectually in the conversations that create stories and move with them as they evolve.

Telling stories can inspire people to make change happen in organizations. By co-writing the company’s future story you can embrace current strengths to explore future opportunities. It’s not sharing anecdotes in the bar on a Friday night. Storytelling in organizations is using the innate and ancient capacity of people to inspire and be inspired through narrative. And if leaders, or any professional, want to have impact they should not neglect this capacity.

Different purposes require different stories. For instance, if you want to let people know what type of leader you are, then you need to bring a story that reveals some strength or vulnerability from your past, a story that let listeners experience how you see the world and how you deal with challenges. Or when it’s about transmitting values, you need a narrative that sketches a dilemma. You don’t necessarily need to reveal how you dealt with it. On the contrary, your story should describe in a recognizable and believable way the difficulty of navigating through this moral turmoil. Storytellers should step into their story to become their story whilst telling it.

When co-writing the company’s future story you don’t select springboard stories based on coherence with a given strategy. Based on a reflection of the shared past, you start imagining potential futures that embrace current strengths and at the same time envision future opportunities. These few examples were considered seeds or germs for something bigger and when co-writing future scenarios for the organization, these small events from the past were projected as compass for the future. Their future story was about taking care of these rare seeds so that they would become the dominant vegetation in the future. Anecdotes from the past became the organizational narrative for the future, thanks to a deliberate process of story sharing.

It’s often amazing to see how much energy and entrepreneurship emerges when people experience that they can hold the pen of their own shared future. Change spawns stories and stories can trigger change. Stories can also block change and can define what constitutes change. These are a powerful means of passing messages!

(This is Part III of the series Organizational Change through the Art of Story & Story-telling)