Author: Alastair Hagger

Welcome to the age of meaning. 

Today’s world is like nothing we’ve ever known.

The forces of change – health, technology, globalisation, demographics, climate – transform the way we work, live and learn.

In an age of staggering human connection, networks thrive, world-views are overturned, the power of personal testimony builds empathy with billions. But by living plugged-in lives, we struggle with isolation, anxiety and a rising politics of division; physically disconnected from our communities, we battle to connect action to the moral imperatives of our time.  

Our future is fragile. As nation states withdraw their benevolence from our lengthening lives, we look to work as our long-term security. Yet our skills are threatened, in a talent pool expanding at the rate of digital connection. 

It’s an astonishing shift. As the digital divide disappears, our ability to adapt will see us sink or swim. 

We urgently seek meaning: new narratives to anchor us in disorienting waters, to give us a reason to evolve. We’re sceptical of the myths that bind us to thoughtless work, to old forms of power. We distrust, but we hope. There is a new social contract to be struck.

We need authenticity from our leaders: we’re tired of the gaps between words and action. We want our work to align with our values: we see it as an extension of ourselves. We seek purpose: we’ve watched the world burn in the name of profit, and we want to be part of something more valuable than a pay check.

We crave a story about who we really are.
A story we’re proud to tell.

Welcome to the new age of leadership.

The currents are unpredictable. Old maps are useless, hierarchies invalid. You will navigate transformation, disruption, upheaval; shocks, disasters, pandemics. The rise of the new, the decline of the old. 

And shareholder expectations haven’t shifted. The City never sleeps. 

Your business has responded. The engine of management has kicked into gear. The air feels thick with change, but it’s hard to see open water in the darkness. Your teams are overwhelmed. You sense panic gathering like a storm: whispers of fear and frustration, gaining a momentum that just might breach the hull.

There is no going back. Your crew need to see the epic potential of the voyage. New lands of possibility are ahead. New territory to claim. An opportunity to make a difference.

The game is transformation, not just tenure. Sustainability, not just shareholders. Purpose, not just profit. You can lead a revolution – and that power resides in your people. In the face of automation, true resilience lies in human capital: communication, creativity, and collaboration; the ability not simply to compute, but to empathise.

It’s a battle for hearts and minds – and they’re looking to their captain. They need a vision of a world made better because of the part you help them play. 

This is our new normal. And you need a radically new way to lead.

Welcome to the age of Story.

We call it the age of possibility. The age of resilience. The age of engagement. 

Leadership is not just a toolkit. Storytelling is not just a skill. 

Storytelling is fundamental, because the leaders of the new age can articulate, embody and realise a shared story of possibility.

Storytelling is coherent, because it provides the motivation, means and momentum to shift behaviour, take action and navigate complex journeys of change.

Storytelling is smart, because it empowers people, your biggest source of innovation. 

Storytelling is sustainable, because its dynamic structures help us adapt, while anchoring us to the meaning we need to stay afloat. 

Storytelling is human advantage, because it helps your teams align behind a shared mission, enabling the collaboration that fuels real progress.

We are The Storytellers. We move people to do great things through the power and influence of storytelling.

Our approach is simple. Stories are survival, our most primal means of learning, communicating and evolving. Every story takes us on a journey of change, using the universal structures of all cultures. 

To lead is to be the storyteller: to create the conditions for a journey of change. This is no easy task. But there are three simple conditions that need to be met.

By helping us find meaning and purpose in a shared context, stories give us the emotional motivation we need to take action.

By teaching us the lessons we need to navigate change, process complexity and retain information, stories give us the means we need to adapt.

And by defining and amplifying the norms that shape our identity, stories build momentum behind the behaviours we need for a new world.

The Storytellers’ unique approach helps leaders inspire their people to transform and accelerate performance.

Our integrated storytelling programmes are delivered by an interdisciplinary team of experts in narrative and narrative-driven events, virtual events, leadership development, learning solutions and award-winning creative campaigns.

So step aboard. Navigate the thrilling seas of this challenging new world with us.

Join the movement. 

To find out more about the power of story, download our e-book: Storytelling: how to reset an organisation’s narrative to inspire change, and get in touch with our consultants today: connect@thestorytellers.com.

There is hope in stories.

Our journey to the ‘new normal’ has been an arduous one. There have been times for all of us when our destination has seemed out of reach: a distant light in the darkness. What will this safe haven look like, and what will our role in it encompass? Are we, and our world, forever changed? 

Businesses around the world are now faced with challenges unimaginable barely months ago. As we slowly emerge from the lockdown, we may still struggle under the weight of so many personal and public memories, at work and at home, full of sadness for what we have lost and fear for an uncertain future.

How do we regroup? How do we ensure that we do not lose disengaged employees to companies who are committed to making a greater contribution to society? How do we reassure team members that we too have a clear purpose and vision in this startling new world? In a reconfigured employment landscape of remote working, are we fully cognisant of the pitfalls of failing to create fully collaborative teams, and the catastrophic drops in performance that may follow?

We all have a story to tell from the last few months. Stories record the worst of times. And they lead us, renewed, into the best.

Multinational brewery and pub chain Brewdog understands this better than most. Famous for its craft beers and lagers, Brewdog has benefitted from the 30 per cent increase in alcohol sales across the UK during the lockdown. But it has also pivoted to a new model that embraces the needs of a new reality, with ‘Business as a Force for Good’ as its narrative. Its Aberdeen distillery now produces hand sanitiser, with over £1 million pounds’ worth of these supplies being donated to health care charities, key frontline workers & NHS Hospitals. Its founders are all foregoing their salaries for 2020 to protect the jobs of its employees. Its Colombus, USA operation is donating canned water to food pantries and homeless shelters.

None of these innovations would be possible without a common understanding throughout the entire organisation of how Brewdog can both continue to thrive and contribute to a greater good. The message from its CEO, James Watts, is a pithy one, but its simplicity tells a bigger story: “United we will get through this.”

The most inspiring leaders – the game-changers who can navigate our passage to and through the new normal, and bring everyone along with them, with a shared and humane impetus – are the ones who can connect people with story.

Our multi-disciplined team at The Storytellers has the unique narrative tools to assist you in articulating your company’s own clear, compelling purpose. You’ll achieve collective ownership of the story in a truly connected organisation: united in its vision, and full of hope for the future. 

There is hope in stories. The Storytellers will help you tell yours. 

To find out more about the power of story, download our e-book: Storytelling: how to reset an organisation’s narrative to inspire change, and get in touch with our consultants today: connect@thestorytellers.com.

In Feel Like a Number, 1978’s plaintive rock paean to crushing corporate anonymity, the American songwriter Bob Seger roars about life as “just another spoke in a great big wheel, like a tiny blade of grass in a great big field”.

It’s a story that endures. Musicians, like all creatives, have long bemoaned the white-collar world and its structures – its need for order where art seeks chaotic, free abandon. It’s easy to see leaders as villains in this narrative: the wheel crushing the butterfly, the field of uniformity swallowing up the unique and the unusual. But the paradox is that creativity often thrives between the parameters marked out by robust leadership. Great music is just a powerful, emotive narrative told by great musical leaders, and the same power of story can be harnessed in business to inspire, accelerate change and transform performance.

In this era of uncertainty and ambiguity, the leaders of the 21^st century must embrace new ways of imagining the traditional management story. This is not the management landscape of Bob Seger’s 1970s – or even of a decade ago, when “topics such as inclusion, fairness, social responsibility, understanding the role of automation, and leading in a network were not part of the leadership manifesto” (Deloitte, 2019). The future is now – and story is an essential tool in shaping how your organisation embraces that future.

The 21^st century organisation is no longer judged on just financial results. It must be diverse and inclusive, or risk alienating both staff and consumer; it must be involved with and empathetic to its wider context in society, or be dismissed as regressive; it must understand the advent of the ‘superjob’ and its symbiosis with artificial intelligence and automation, or risk falling behind in an accelerating technological arms race; it must access and exploit the ‘alternative’ remote personnel, or risk leaving unfillable gaps in its workforce.

We sometimes refer to the ‘symphonic’ C-suite, an ideal balance of leadership talents which can overcome any obstacle when deployed effectively. But to address the challenges of the 21^st century we need to tell a broader story – one that gives a voice to the orchestra, not just the conductors.

At The Storytellers, we focus on the 3Ms of behavioural change: building motivation through meaning, connection and personal storytelling; giving people the means to help them learn independently through storytelling; and creating momentum to keep this new shared story alive.

Leaders need to provide motivation to their ‘orchestra’, through the inspiring power of story. They need to give them the means through which they can achieve a collective mission – the organisation’s platinum album, its sold-out world tour, if you will. And they need to maintain the momentum of success, so that the unforgettable ‘song’ isn’t remembered as merely a ‘one-hit wonder’.

Story can bring your strategy to life, and help you lead like a maestro. 

In a 2009 TED Talk on the musician-management styles of some of the 20^th century’s most famous conductors, the Israeli musician and leadership expert Itay Talgam likens the concert hall to the ‘little office’ of the orchestra leader. “Or rather a cubicle, an open-space cubicle, with a lot of space,” he says. “And in front of all that noise, you do a very small gesture. And suddenly, out of the chaos, order. Noise becomes music. The joy is about enabling other people’s stories to be heard at the same time.”

The key is treating these people as members of an emotionally collaborative creation, rather than just instruments in a room. “When it’s needed, the authority is there,” Talgam says. “It’s very important. But authority is not enough to make people your partners.” He warns against the heavy-handed authoritarianism of the Italian conductor Riccardo Muti, who received a letter from the 700 employees of the Teatro alla Scala opera house in Milan which read: “You’re a great conductor. We don’t want to work with you. Please resign.”

Get this balance right, however, and Talgam says you will unlock irresistible potential. “You’re telling the story,” he says. “And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to.”

The music journalist Tom Service spent hours watching how these leaders work with their musicians while researching his book Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and Their Orchestras. His conclusions draw obvious parallels with the personalities of the business world, where human dynamics are equally delicate; like Talgam, he cautions against didacticism. The best leaders tell an inspiring, inclusive story in which everyone has an important role.

“The last thing the best conductors do is to force a group of musicians to do their bidding,” he told The Guardian. “Performances are constructed through patient hours of listening, so that each player has the chance to build up a similar mental, musical and emotional map of the piece in question.” He cites Simon Rattle’s relationship with the Berlin Philharmonic, in which he is “continually shaping and moulding the orchestra’s sound”, rather than directing or controlling it, and says that while every musician he spoke to wanted to be valued both as an individual as well as part of a collective, “they also would not tolerate a lack of inspiration or leadership from the person on the podium.” In other words, empathy without direction, and vice versa, will hit a bum note. Your workforce – your ‘musicians’ – need to be connected to their purpose through the story you tell as an inspiring leader.

The history of music is peppered with blood-curdling tales of tyrannical leaders, the autocrats whose musicians were in bondage to the story rather than free agents within it. For every Simon Rattle, there is a James Brown, who kept his band in a permanent state of groove-tight performance anxiety with mid-gig gestures equating to dollar penalties for every missed beat or imperfect riff. Thankfully, there are also leadership heroes aplenty in this tale, inspirational creatives who knew how to get the best out of their musicians by finding ways to touch their emotional core, and by successfully involving them in their creative story.

Reeves Gabrels, who founded Tin Machine with David Bowie, says that the iconic pop genius told his band members the story of a new song by giving them visual prompts to help them pursue a fresh sound.

“The first time we worked together he said, ‘Maybe you could build German gothic cathedral architecture out of guitar’”, Gabrels explained to the music website Quartz.  “Other times it was, ‘This should be like Jackson Pollock,’ or ‘This should be like ‘The Persistence of Memory’ by Salvador Dali, but with melting guitars instead of melting clocks.’ The reference points were rarely specifically musical. They were almost always visual or about feeling.”

Bowie was inviting his collaborators to fashion the musical story with him, to be architects in this cathedral of sound rather than just builders. Like all great storytellers, he wanted you to participate; he chose the creative tools, but then placed them in your hands. He inspired belief in the story, united his team with this creative inspiration, and accelerated their performance to new musical heights.

Academics at Warwick Business School have taken this to its logical extension – that good leadership fosters greater productivity regardless of discipline – by correlating the leadership skills of jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Art Blakey with the best practice of successful entrepreneurs. In her paper Leading Entrepreneurial Teams: Insights from Jazz, the school’s professor of Entrepreneurship, Deniz Ucbasaran, finds the mightiest giants of jazz history have much to teach us about business leadership. Ellington inspired decades of loyalty in his musicians through the alchemy of motivation and respect for their freedom; Blakey preferred an avuncular warmth, a paternal concern for his team’s well-being. Their success is less about a particular management style than striking the right balance between a leadership role and a collaborative one; by being able to articulate a vision, to tell a story about a musical destination and how it can be reached.

“If you have a creative process, you have to have talented employees,” Ucbasaran tells The Guardian. “But talent is not always easy to manage. You have to give them freedom and space,but direct them in subtle ways so that the end result comes together harmoniously.”

The true leaders of the 21^st century can conduct the tricky ambiguity of modern business by telling a story that inspires a shared emotion that people can connect with – like the harmony in a beloved album track, or the last shared chorus of that unforgettable tour. Storytelling provides the motivation, means and momentum to help you strike that perfect chord.

In early July Deutsche Bank, the biggest bank in the eurozone’s biggest economy, announced it was cutting 18,000 jobs – part of sweeping measures to reduce costs by approximately 6 billion euros over the next three years. Founded in 1870, the bank currently has 78,000 employees in over 70 countries. Any organisation about to lose a quarter of its workforce faces a painful process of transformation, but financial sector upheavals can have a particularly long-lasting and far-reaching impact if the transformation isn’t informed by a positive, inspiring story that looks ahead to a fitter, more profitable future.

Huge institutional changes create fear and uncertainty in a workforce, triggering a downward spiral of disengagement and plummeting morale. Highly skilled employees begin looking over their shoulders and investigating opportunities elsewhere; client confidence begins to dissipate rapidly as the waves of uncertainty ripple through the organisation to the public periphery. So the Executive team needs to galvanise behind a new strategic narrative – and quickly.

Deutsche Bank’s share price is currently at its lowest since 2007, so the stakes for its management team couldn’t be higher: tell a new story, and tell it well, or accelerate the metastasising perception of a business in terminal decline. Get this story right, and the transformation can rewrite an organisation’s history – it can even transform an entire economy.

Britain, February 15^th, 1971: Decimal Day. After hundreds of years of fruitless discussion and stubborn inertia, Britain had at last accepted it was being left behind in a global monetary system that had embraced decimal currency centuries earlier. The rouble (1704), the US dollar (1785) and the franc (1795) were the envy of progressive economic thinkers who feared that Britain’s currency was stuck in a romanticised heyday. British currency was a complicated throwback to Roman times, where a silver pound was divided into 240 pence; over two millennia, it had spawned an idiosyncratic and complicated family of British coins which included the farthing, the shilling, the florin and the crown. 

The idea of a decimal silver currency had been first floated by mathematicians over 400 years ago. In a debate on decimalisation in the House of Commons in 1847, the MP Sir John Bowring argued that “every man who looks at his ten fingers saw an argument of its use, and an evidence of its practicability.” 

But the longevity of this archaic coinage was now deeply rooted in British culture, and its denominations were affectionately defended by its public. The ‘five farthings’ of the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ nursery rhyme, and the ‘thrupenny bit’ (three pence coin) hidden in the plum puddings served at Christmas, were intertwined strands of the country’s economic and cultural DNA. In addition, the changes to day-to-day structural minutiae required by the mooted new currency – telephone boxes and electricity meters would have to be refitted nationwide – made the public suspicious about how it would interfere with their lives. “I have not got the extra money to find for something I did not vote for and never would,” complained one guest house proprietor to her MP in 1970, a year before the watershed date now archly referred to as ‘D-Day’. “This has been forced on the public whether they want it or not.”

Either way, the public got their brand new pounds and pence on schedule, and without the disruption predicted by the new currency’s opponents. Given that the decision to convert to a decimal system had only been officially made in 1969, this success is a tribute to the efficiency of the government’s strategic storytelling and its willingness to listen to the concerns of its public. The unveiling of the new coins was staggered, and piggybacked on iconic cultural celebrations such as the 1969 FA Cup final, where the new 50-pence piece was used in the pre-match coin toss a full six months before its release into general circulation. By 1971, three of the six new coins were already in use, and a blitz of media publicity had prepared the public for the transformation, dissipating much of its fear (the sixpence, the UK’s most beloved coin, remained in circulation until 1980, so that the cultural habits of the past could dissolve more gently into the future). The broadcaster ITV aired repeat viewings of a short educational television drama, Granny Gets the Point, while the BBC createdan information film for schools called New Money Day. The messaging in this brilliant narrative was distinct and easily digestible: if Granny and the grandkids can happily welcome this transformation, so can you.

Effective strategic storytelling of this kind enables behavioural change through tools The Storytellers identify as the 3Ms: motivation through meaning, connection and personal storytelling; giving people the meansto help them learn independently through storytelling; and creating momentumto keep this new shared story alive.

Through meaningful emotional connection, storytelling can reassure an anxious grandmother with unfamiliar coins in her purse, or it can re-motivate a disengaged and fearful workforce faced with the uncertainty of significant transformation. For the first time since the financial crash of 2008, Deutsche Bank has an opportunity to reset and refocus, uniting Executives and the global workforce around a new strategy as they chart their way through a complex and uncertain global business landscape. A narrative-driven approach to landing the transformation, and the resulting strategic shift, can ensure that everyone is part of the story of this organisation’s journey towards a fit financial future.