Category: Article

The 3Ms: shifting the culture of an entire country

Posted on by Daniel Castro

When it comes to shifting culture, here at The Storytellers we know that continuously providing the ‘3Ms’ – motivation, means and momentum – is absolutely critical towards making real change happen. So it is with interest that we hear news this week of South Korea making their own efforts to shift culture, on a country-wide scale – could the same principles apply?

South Korea is known for having one of the most workaholic cultures in the world. Essentially, there is very little balance about it – people there typically work up to 68 hours a week, working around 400 hours extra a year compared to people in the UK. This working culture extends to students too, and South Korea is also notorious for the highest suicide rate in the developed world.

So we can see that there is a great motivation to change – not only will a shorter working week benefit everyone in terms of getting personal time back, but it also stands to establish a healthier culture for generations to come. You might wonder if the people themselves were genuinely motivated by this. Well, the promise was a key part of President Moon Jae-In’s campaign – so while it is by no means the only reason for his electoral success, it surely shows that he struck a chord with this motivating idea.

But what about means? President Moon Jae-In had this covered too – alongside promising a reduction in working hours, the President also promised a massive raise in the minimum wage, a 16% increase – the highest since 2000. This meant that the plan to reduce working hours would not affect the means of South Korean families to continue living to the standards they are accustomed to. Without ensuring that people were materially supported through this massive cultural change, President Moon Jae-In’s promise of a reduction in working hours would simply have been hot air – you have to give people the means to make the change.

Finally, how about momentum? Momentum is perhaps the most intangible of these three critical factors – but again, there is real evidence that South Korea as a country has grasped the cultural change, and run with it. Some businesses have started to turn off computers on a Friday, in order to force people to go home. Other business turn off the lights in an office past a certain time of night, again, to support the wider change. While these might sound like small, insignificant events, they are in fact a sign that people are starting to make the country-wide change their own. These are the green shoots of change that need to be shared and celebrated if momentum and a real sense of a movement is to be created behind a change.

So while applying the 3Ms to a country’s sweeping cultural changes may seem far-fetched… in reality, when it comes to shifting culture, there are some principles that really do apply across the board.

Daniel Castro
Senior Producer

Creating your own cultural revolution

Posted on by Marcus Hayes

‘Marks and Spencer needs a cultural revolution’ said the Sunday Times. In an interview with Chairman Archie Norman, he remarked that many ‘competent people, smart people… the glitterati of the British business establishment’ had come and gone from M&S’s board in recent years with very little impact. ‘There’s a reason for that’ he said. ‘The organisation and culture has made it very hard to change.’

It’s hardly surprising. When you’re running a business that’s 134 years old, and operating with nearly 85,000 employees, the Board must sometimes feel like they’re steering a great big supertanker, when what is needed in today’s retail environment is an agile speedboat. And good old M&S is not alone. Over the last couple of years, we’ve worked with large businesses in over 20 different industries. They are all having to respond to seismic changes, and creating that speedboat culture is a consistent challenge for their Executive teams.

But 85,000 employees is nothing compared to the size of the wider society we live in. And here we seem to be going through a purple patch of cultural revolutions. Mindsets and assumptions are being challenged and changed on a daily basis, leading to real changes in behaviour. Look at the changing views about immigration that influenced the Brexit vote. Or the ‘Me Too’ movement that is challenging sexual behaviour at work. Or our view about the environmental effects of plastic and how it’s affecting the way we shop.

What can we learn from these movements of change? Looking across all three examples we can see a number of consistent factors that are, unsurprisingly, also at play in businesses that are successfully creating their own revolutions. Here we’ve identified eight…

1. At the heart of each movement there is an emotionally compelling narrative that challenges previous assumptions and creates a rallying cry for change. As with all good stories, these narratives come with an inciting event that engages us and motivates us to rethink. For the environmental effects of plastic we have to thank the wonderful BBC series Blue Planet. Week after week it led us into the incredible world of our oceans, and enabled us to befriend its creatures. Then at the end it dropped its bombshell, as the consequences of our disposable plastic lives was laid out for all to see (and sea). ‘Me Too’ didn’t start with Harvey Weinstein, but the revelations of what he got up to propelled this movement into the wider consciousness. And the same could be said for the news coverage generated by the displacement and migration of refugees from Syria, North Africa in recent years.

2. A charismatic leader steps up to say ‘follow me’, and provide a figurehead for the revolution. Who didn’t feel motivated when a 92-year old David Attenborough called us from the side of a precarious bobbing boat? You may not have felt the same about Nigel Farage, but many did. And if you’ve not heard Oprah Winfrey’s speech at the Golden Globes, then do… and makes notes. It is highly compelling.

3. Each movement also takes on an identity; like ‘Me Too’. These identities not only help to build awareness of the movement, but they also give us something to be part of; a community or tribe we can belong to. They play an influential role in how we behave. The violence at football grounds in the 70’s and 80’s demonstrated that we are motivated to act in ways that protect our identities. And studies in political voting have shown that we often ask ourselves, when making decisions, what would people like us do.

4. Meanwhile, these narratives are reinforced by a drip feed of illustrative stories, cleverly curated by supportive news editors. At the hight of the migration crisis, hardly a week went by without the Daily Mail sharing another horror story about what UK immigrants were getting up to. These stories have a clever effect in allowing us to discover for ourselves how the narrative is developing. Our own ideas and views are, of course, the ones we cherish most and tend to act on

5. Which leads us to the critical factor that all cultural movements, in business or society need – an invitation to people that they can make a difference. Climate change has had its narratives, its stories and its leaders over the years. But, certainly in the past, most people, however motivated, have felt powerless to do anything about it – at least without radically undermining their lifestyles. When Attenborough called to us from that bobbing boat, there was already in place a way of taking action – reusable shopping bags. Now we can all be ‘cultural activists’. Farage gave his movement a party to vote for, and through it a route to a referendum. The ‘Me Too’ movement offers a range of activities, from marches and social media to rethinking office etiquette.

6. But shifting established behaviours is not easy. We are, after all, creatures of habit. So sometimes movements need a little help. Nudging behaviours has become a hot topic in Government and a great example is the 5p tax on plastic bags. The tax is a consistent reminder that every time you use a disposable bag, you and the environment are paying for it.

7. Now the activists need to the support of other leaders: people in positions of power and influence that can make change happen. In these examples they respond in a number of different ways. The UK Government forces companies to publish measures on sexual equality. Supermarket chiefs publish goals for reducing single-use plastics. And the Conservative party instigates a referendum on Europe and implements controversial policies on immigration. Hollywood studio bosses drop ‘A listers’ with allegations hanging over them, and reshoot films to edit them out of existence.

8. So a new set of illustrative stories start to emerge; stories that illustrate symbols of change; stories that show the effect that activists are having; stories that reinforce the belief that they are not alone, that others are thinking and acting like them: stories that create cultural ‘heroes’. Women wear black at award ceremonies. Political parties change their policies. Major food brands pledged to eradicate unnecessary single-use plastic, radically change their packaging as a result. Britain votes to leave the EU.

Back to business. Large companies, like M&S, are masters at systemising the way they do things. They know it produces faster results at greater scale. Yet this thinking is often not applied to driving culture change. Many of these factors are in play. They are part of human nature. But they are not co-ordinated in way that maximises their pace and effectiveness. The cultural revolutions that are taking place outside business, are indicative of the pace of change that is being embraced by the customers and consumers that businesses rely on. To survive, businesses have to match this pace. If companies want to be as proud of their future as they are of their past, they need to work on their own cultural revolutions.

Episodic storytelling: beyond the myth

Posted on by Daniel Castro

“Life is a spiral staircase… the journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.” – Y.B Yeats

When it comes to understanding the power and influence of episodic storytelling, there are perhaps few better examples than Star Wars. For over 40 years, Star Wars has delighted and entertained billions of people across the world, and the franchise shows no sign of stopping. So far: we have had two complete trilogies; we await the finale of the most recent, third trilogy; and there is another subsequent trilogy planned. There is a Hans Solo spin-off in the cinemas right now, and there are at least three other ‘anthology’ films in development. From its humble beginnings in the 1977 film ‘Star Wars’, the story has grown to a point that surely was beyond even the wildest dreams of its creator. It truly is storytelling on a grand scale.

So what has made Star Wars so successful, and given it such incredible longevity? The answer can be found in the art and science of a particular kind of storytelling: episodic storytelling.

In the broadest sense, one could define episodic storytelling as the art of telling the story of an epic journey via a series of interconnected, smaller episodes that link together thematically, and that each have meaning and value in and of themselves.

The original Star Wars trilogy is a crystallised example of how this works: each individual film has its own ups and downs, trials and tribulations, and evolving cast of characters. But over the course of the trilogy, there is a more profound narrative that emerges: a battle of good and evil on the grandest of scales… and of course, a particularly difficult relationship between a father and son.

As each episode adds a new layer of meaning, the story gradually unfolds before our eyes – it’s incredibly engaging. The challenge that Luke Skywalker faced in the first film was real, but the true test only revealed itself in the second – and the compelling nature of what it meant to overcome this challenge was only meaningful by the time we arrived at the third, concluding film, when we finally came to know who Luke had now become. To put it bluntly, without ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and ‘Return of the Jedi’, Luke is a pretty forgettable hero. But by the end of the trilogy, we understand that he is someone who has not only overcome mortal and existential challenges, but who has also come of age.

As an audience, this kind of understanding and meaning is only possible through an evolving, episodic journey. Each of the three films in that original trilogy has a beginning, middle and an end. The beauty of episodic storytelling is that as we follow the mini beginning-middle-end of each chapter in the overall story, the key messages become both focused and magnified. In this way, episodic storytelling takes an original, monological ‘myth’, and makes it real, meaningful, deeper and altogether more human.

So what does any of this have to do with The Storytellers? Is there anything we can learn from Star Wars in this sense?

At The Storytellers, one of our main goals is to perfect the art and science of storytelling in business. For over fifteen years, we have developed and refined narrative frameworks that help our clients answer a primary, yet deceptively simple question: ‘where are we coming from… and where are we going?’

Our experience in engaging people in these ‘strategic narratives’ tells us that the key to how an organisation moves towards its goals and destination can almost always be found in the centre of that story – whether it is a key opportunity that must be seized, or a crisis that must be resolved.

However, in an era defined by constant and continuous change, we are seeing an ever growing need for clients to be increasingly agile, responsive and compelling in how they describe the changes that are happening around them – and it is only really through episodic storytelling that this is achievable.

What constitutes the central challenge of any journey is constantly and subtly shifting, and this can only truly be countered by consistently updating what that journey really means now. Deciding to climb Everest is one thing, but does the journey look the same when you arrive at Base Camp, months after that initial decision? Does it look the same when you are 100ft from the summit? The destination may be the same… but the motivation that took you from your home to Base Camp – and the true meaning of that journey – is constantly in flux.

To put it simply: it is how we continuously and compellingly redefine what the journey to our destination looks like that makes climbing the mountain possible.

Perhaps more importantly, episodic storytelling also provides a meaningful opportunity to connect the overarching journey to what people are experiencing on a collective level – breathing a new kind of life into that same journey. And again, Star Wars provides us with a great example.

One of the most high-profile decisions in ‘The Force Awakens’ (Episode 7) was the casting of one particular role. Every single Star Wars film before it had a man playing the main hero, but in 2015, for the first time in seven Star Wars films – the hero was played by Daisy Ridley, a woman.

It’s fair to say that we would not have seen a female hero in a film of this size and scale in 1977 – but in 2015, the time had come for a female Jedi. In this one casting decision, Star Wars showed that it was moving with the times, choosing to better reflect reality – and bravely making progress on a very different journey.

Of course, some people were unable to get past the decision to have a woman play a Jedi hero. Unbelievably, one fan took it upon themselves to make their own ‘cut’, and entirely removed all women from the film. This act was met with a withering response on Twitter, with even the film’s director and stars responding directly to voice their dismay.

The point is that while the events of the 7th episode in the Star Wars saga take place ‘in a galaxy far, far away’, down here on Planet Earth another story was unfolding on social media and in everyday conversation that arguably had a much more pertinent lesson. Effectively, episodic storytelling had taken Star Wars beyond a mere parable of good vs. evil, and to a point where, for a brief moment, it became a bonafide force for progress in society.

The decision to go against convention by casting a woman as the hero; the conversation that took place on a global level in response to the casting of Daisy Ridley; and the actions of the filmmakers in defending that choice could well be regarded as the most important achievement of the Star Wars franchise to date. Arguably for the first time in this galaxy, Star Wars had truly shown us what good looks like.

So the power of stories is not only in how we tell them, and in telling the ‘right’ story; but also in the conversation that happens when a population is engaged through storytelling. In and of itself, a story has the power to motivate people to act in service of progress, to move as one towards a common goal – but it also has the power to spark an invaluable conversation about who we are and who we want to be; and therefore, to directly influence reality. In this sense, as a methodology for real change and progress, it is quite unparalleled.

In conclusion, I come back to that wonderful quote from Yeats: it’s true, the journey really is repetitious. Just as in Star Wars, we all know that in life, we tend to circle back round to the same characters, the same themes. The big question is: how exactly do we make sure the journey is progressive?

It is in how a new story builds on the one we told yesterday; it is in how the conversation around the journey evolves in response; and perhaps most importantly, it is in how, as leaders and as individuals, we choose what should stay the same on that journey, and what should maybe be different this time.

At The Storytellers, our aim is to make sure that our clients don’t go round in circles, but that they see real progress. In an era of constant change and shifting values, it is only through episodic storytelling – the continuous connection between the epic, evolving stories that we tell, and the reality around us each day – that real progress begins to become truly possible.

Daniel Castro

The value in Values

Posted on by Anita Krishnan

If you ask people about their values you might hear a slew of words: humility, loyalty, commitment. But what do these words really mean? When we speak of values abstractly, they risk becoming vague categories that mean different things to different people, or worse, carry little meaning at all.

For the past several years I’ve worked with Marshall Ganz at Harvard University coaching Public Narrative, which uses storytelling as a values-based leadership practice. Marshall wisely says, “Narrative is not talking “about” values; rather narrative embodies and communicates those values.” Stories ground our values in experience rather than abstraction, preserving their true meaning and conveying not only what they are but also where they came from.

We’re used to telling stories to other people; it is, after all, how humans have always interacted with each other. But what is often overlooked is the value in looking to our own stories to understand our purpose and motivation. We are often asked about what we do, what we’ve done, and what we plan to do.

Less often are we asked why. Why did we choose the path we’re on in the first place and what choices and events in our life led us there? What calls us to our work and what keeps us committed to it?

For me, delving into my own story helped me see connective threads in my life that years of reflection had missed. I remember sharing three disparate stories – or so I thought: one about growing up moving around (America, Australia, Singapore), one about teaching English to immigrants in New York, and a third about serving in the Peace Corps in Paraguay.

My narrative coach listened, probed with curious questions, then loosely re-capped my stories back-to-back. I suddenly saw it: the value that connected them all. My transient upbringing had often left me feeling like an outsider. When my family moved to Singapore, I was a seven-year-old American of Indian descent with a raging Australian accent.

I grew to value a sense of belonging. It drove me to want to create spaces for others to feel connected across difference, which I saw reflected in my other two stories. Identifying this core value that had been motivating me for years was a powerful realization. It changed the way I talked about my work, making it easier for me to explain why it was important and to better connect to people in the process. It grounded me as both a person and a leader.

I became a teaching fellow and coach of Public Narrative because I wanted to pass it on – to help others connect with their own stories and values as I had. I’ve worked with a range of diverse people from university students to non-profit leaders, and from grassroots organizers to corporate executives. As a coach, I ask guided questions to help people explain what calls them to leadership: to identify key choice points, challenges, and hope, and to share it through the art of storytelling.

But when asked why they chose to do what they do, people often say, “I just fell into this.”

And it’s true, we sometimes fall into things based on circumstance or sheer chance. But the question then remains: so why did you choose to stay?

This usually unearths a different kind of answer and a change in perspective. To “fall into” something is passive, like we didn’t have much say in the matter. Explaining why we “chose” to stay, on the other hand, helps people reclaim their sense of agency, leaving them feeling empowered by their own stories and the values that drive them. Leonardo Da Vinci aptly said: “…people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”

Across all contexts, I’ve found that one thing always holds true: when a person can identify and narrate the experiences that shaped their values, they feel more grounded, inspired with purpose, and better able to connect with others on a human level.

One such person I worked with was an executive fundraiser for an arts organization who had been working effectively at her job for over 10 years. She came into our workshop skeptical, wondering why she was wasting her valuable time on a narrative workshop; she was a seasoned writer who already understood the importance of storytelling, especially in fundraising. But as the day went on and we continued coaching her, she opened up and was surprised by how deeply the process impacted her.

This woman told us about her father – her absolute hero in the world – who had instilled in her a love for music from an early age, and who had passed away a few years before. He was a very successful accountant and business owner, but at the end of his life, he told her that if he could do it all again, he would have been a musician. She remembered how when he was healing after each of his many surgeries, he’d blast symphony music or his favorite French operas from his stereo while laying back in his leather recliner, eyes closed, waving a pen around as his conducting baton.

As she shared these stories, she took us on a journey, helping us understand and connect with her as a person – but she was also journeying herself. She realized how closely her passion for art and music was tied to her love for her father. More importantly, she realized her work of fundraising for the arts was actually her way of honoring her dad.

This woman, who had spent most of her career writing about and celebrating the stories of others, left the workshop with a deeper understanding of how her own story impacted her life’s work.

Another example comes from a man who planned to enter politics. His reasons were simple: he grew up watching the news and politics and always wanted to become a politician. He spoke about his goals rather matter-of-factly and with little personal connection. In short, his political aspirations lacked a human element. As I began coaching him, he skirted my questions about the challenges he’d faced and the times he’d felt vulnerable; he glossed over it all saying everything was fine — it had always been fine.

It took a few weeks (and a great deal of patience on both our ends) before he finally opened up and shared his painful stories of being bullied and feeling excluded as a kid. He had been smaller than his peers and often felt overlooked, like his voice wasn’t being heard.

At first, he found little connection between these childhood stories and his drive for politics. But he eventually realized he’d always wanted to be a politician for the people – not just to be in politics, but to give voice to those who weren’t being heard. This realization dramatically changed the way he spoke about his goals: his focus shifted from “becoming a politician” to the people he hoped to serve, and onto his clear value of using power to give voice to those without. It brought him down to earth in a way, grounding his leadership in his values and helping him communicate that connection to other people through stories.

I have seen so many examples of both personal and professional transformations through this work of storytelling. It is really the point of the business. Stories help us put the value back in our values. There is always something magical in the moment someone discovers their own why; but even more exciting is how it will change their approach to their work, their teams, their leadership, and their life.

*These stories were shared with the permission of the participants. 

Anita Krishnan
Associate of The Storytellers.

 

The three sides of Purpose

Posted on by Marcus Hayes

In this age – where tech-driven transparency, consumer demand for authenticity and our ongoing pursuit of meaning continue to rewrite the rules of corporate behaviour – purpose has become a hot topic among many of our clients. From many interactions of this nature, it’s clear that the motivation for creating or refining purpose is multifaceted,  and at times I sit in meetings with the feeling that everyone seems to be talking at cross-purposes… which is of course a little ironic.

In many ways it’s not surprising. A company’s purpose is at the intangible end of how it describes itself, unlike the visible and physical attributes of what it has, what it does and how it does it, though of course they should be connected. And purpose is a highly emotive subject. A business without purpose is, arguably, just a money-making machine, extracting value from others without giving anything back. In an economy still defined by the results of financial greed, and increasingly aware of the environmental and social impact of corporate activity, it’s increasingly unacceptable – from a social and commercial perspective – to remain disengaged.

Beyond the moral imperative, there seems to be three themes that emerge from the ‘purpose of purpose’ discussions. They’re interconnected, but it’s useful to unpick them.

The first is what James Collins and Jerry Porras, back in the mid 1990’s, called ‘core ideology’. As part of their research into the attributes of long-term successful businesses, they identified purpose as: ‘the glue that holds an organisation together as it grows, decentralises, diversifies, expands globally, and develops workplace diversity’. Simon Sinek took up the theme in 2011 when he shrewdly argued that companies, like Apple, that are more innovative year after year after year ‘start with the why’. In this sense, purpose is establishing a fundamental role for a business within society that transcends its current products and services. Walt Disney may have started with animated mice, but its role in making people happy through wholesome family entertainment is still highly relevant, and has created the foundation for films, theme parks, toys and the rest.

A few years back we, at The Storytellers, defined our own purpose statement: to move more people to do great things. This gives us a platform to not only express the more intangible side of what we do – the connection we help people to feel to their work, and clarity and motivation we help to create across organisations – but also the hard skills we provide through our leadership development and L&D modules, that give people the means to really live the purpose of their organisation. As we are an interdisciplinary business offering a range of services, we found the statement a useful mechanism for expanding and guiding our development. It also really helps us to explain what we do for our clients, which brings us to the second purpose of purpose.

Brands have been extolling the virtues of purpose for many years, as a foundation for building trust and loyalty with customers. Here, a company’s purpose outlines its motivation for engaging with you. It sets out what it believes. Providing you share that belief, you will feel much more comfortable in buying a range of products and services from it – as long as they deliver on that purpose. You’ll also be more willing to pay more, and stick with them through diversification and the commodification of the market. Sinek talks about Apple’s belief in challenging the status quo through beautifully designed products. I’m old enough to remember that pioneering feeling I got when using my first computer from Apple. So it was natural for me to turn to the same company for my first laptop, digital music player and smartphone.

A strong and well established purpose can also help to build that elixir of marketing: a sustainable competitive advantage. This is especially important in an age when what you have, what you do and how you do it can almost always be copied. The difference today is that purpose must be made real in the ‘How’ of the business – the systems, operations, organisational design that truly bring purpose to life. Rhetoric is no longer enough. The smart marketeers like Unilever – who are themselves global leaders in purpose-led business, and have now committed to work only with brands who share their values – know that the world is full of companies making moisturisers, but only one, Dove, is committed to helping improve the self esteem of girls worldwide. Yet consumers are not the only audience motivated by Dove’s purpose. This brings us to the third purpose of purpose.

Talk to any HR Director for long and you’ll get onto the subject of ‘Millennials’. These creatures from another generation are now populating our organisations, and we’re told they are looking for more than money. This is the generation that is motivated by purpose and meaning! Without it, we’re told, they’ll just pull out their backpack and pursue life elsewhere. We know that The Storytellers’ millennials care deeply about our purpose as a business, and so far we’ve managed to help them resist the lure of the open road.

But the bigger point is that everyone needs a sense of purpose. Isn’t it the basic message behind the shocking disengagement statistics and draining productivity and misery we see after three decades of ‘money is king’ corporate philosophy? Gallup’s annual engagement reviews continue to tell us that employees are in crisis. According to its 2017 study, 85% of all US employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work. That’s about $7 trillion wiped off their national bottom line. So maybe the millenials have it right. Dan Pink, the writer on work and behavioural science, talks about purpose being one of the three core motivators for work, alongside mastery and autonomy.

In their new book, The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath refer to research undertaken by professor Morten Hansen into employee performance. He got managers to rank their employees by performance, and then categorised the employees by their passion and sense of purpose for their work. Those without passion and purpose not surprisingly were low performers. However those with high purpose but low passion performed significantly better than the other way around. ‘Purpose trumps passion’ heralds the Heaths. ‘The best advice is not ‘Pursue your passion!’ It’s ‘Pursue your purpose!’

The challenge here for business leaders is not just to define a motivating purpose for their business, but to cultivate a sense of purpose amongst their employees: ‘to unite people who may drift in different directions’. Purpose doesn’t need to be so grandiose, and it doesn’t need to be an expensive branding exercise. It needs to give people a sense of value, and contribution, and connection to something bigger than themselves. This isn’t just about ‘Purpose Statements’. Purpose can be conveyed holistically, through multiple parts of a business: its values, its social contribution, the impact it has on its local community, as well as the world at large.

This is where the power of storytelling comes in. Take a pharmaceutical client of ours, who was going through a difficult transformation. They recognised that their employees where more likely to come with them through the change if they reconnected them back to the ‘why’. So we built a narrative that set the change within the context of the organisation’s purpose and vision, and invited leaders to bring it to life through their own stories. The CEO kicked things off with a highly emotive, personal story about why he had left his earlier career as a doctor to join the industry. This sparked storytelling conversations throughout the organisation that helped remind people of their purpose and meaning for coming to work. Within a year the transformation KPI’s had been exceeded.

 

Marcus Hayes

In defence of story

Posted on by Bex Felton

“It sounds to me that it would be Russia based on all the evidence they have,” Trump told reporters. “As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be.”

 

Most great cultural epochs begin and end with the loss of Truth. The loss of God, of King and Country, Good and Bad, Right and Wrong; of Communism, Socialism, Capitalism. The last century was full of this loss, and now, in the fledgling years of the next, we find ourselves sheltering, a bit miffed, in the ruins of these grand abandoned notions; noting that even in these brave new worlds – in the midst of global warfare, state controlled propaganda, the profound destruction of social values and the industrialised transformation of human possibility – it would still be possible to agree on the facts of the day. Facts were facts, spades were spades. Solid things, inarguable things. Things that just were.

Today, we find ourselves in a new kind of era: one in which my facts are not necessarily your facts; where objectivity crumbles into spin; where Truth is what you make it, if you know the tricks. And it is here that Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality finds us: bruised and a bit sad, quite probably at the end of the echo-chamber we fell down again after parsing the morning news. Like Hector Macdonald, author, long-time friend and writer at The Storytellers, it offers us a smart, insightful guide to this smoke-and-mirrors terrain: astutely observing the dangers ahead, the dangers unknown and the dangers within – all illustrated, of course, by many wonderful stories.

Stories, deservedly, play an important role in Truth. Not simply as a means to demonstrate points in memorable and meaningful ways – which of course is just one great power of storytelling – but as a possible suspect: dealing in the shady art of truth-selection and suggestive construction that has come to figure so prominently in any narrative about the success of Trump or Brexit.

Storytelling, argues Truth, is a form of partial truth. As its opening inscription reminds us, there was a time where this was not a problematic assertion. “To hell with facts!”, iconic 60’s author Ken Kesey declares in its opening inscription. “We need stories!”. But for the modern reader, post-all of it, alarm bells ring. Trouble, we suspect, lies ahead. Because in the construction of this refrain (worthy indeed of the very brashest Brexiteer and the tools Truth itself offers to arm us against such verbal foul play) story isn’t just better than fact (more effective, more emotive, more coherent – all of which believe to be true). It’s counter to it. Worse – it’s superseded it. This is the age of story! To hell with the facts. Welcome to the age of Post-Truth.

Truth defines story as ‘a selective account of a process of change, which emphasises causal relationships between situations and events’. Neutral descriptor or loaded gun? It’s a tough call, in this particular moment, where story stands accused of aiding and abetting a most troubling state of affairs. In the selection, we all know, there is an ocean of agenda to navigate – usually in the micro-seconds our brains have to process such content. We’re shown the power of extreme, but effective, selection in the example of Mervyn King’s story of the credit crisis; a narrative in which the huge, unyielding complexity of that period is chiselled, cleanly, into a coherent domino-effect that most of us could really, genuinely grasp – perhaps for the first time. That’s quite a feat – and for Truth, where the ‘true value’ of stories lie. ‘They make complex stuff simple and clear’; and by ‘seem[ing] to show how one thing leads to another, they help us make sense of a chaotic world’. In Truth’s example of Kew Gardens – transformed, by the act of storytelling, from a lovely irrelevance with no place in Austerity Britain to a vital global hub of cutting-edge ecological research, deserving of public funds – we see the power of this selection for unequivocal good. And yet. There’s a price to pay for this partiality. ‘Real life’, we’re reminded, ‘is rarely so black and white’. By emphasising ‘seeming’ causation, we can attribute significance where there is none. What we gain in simplicity, we lose in complexity. We habitually forgo the multiplicity and difficulty of experience; we over-engineer cause and effect. Worse, we expose ourselves to agenda of another person’s selection. We trust that the facts they string are the ones we need to know. All this is undeniably true, and easily exploited (we agree with mutual head-shaking) in a cynical, cynical world.

But we would like to add another, more wholesome, dimension to story, rooted in countless experiences with our clients, and with the world at large, and even, perhaps, a preference for optimism. For us, a story is a selective account of a process of change which connects our emotional and rational minds: contextualising the relationships between people, situations and events in order to make meaning, take action, and adapt continuously to a changing world.  Storytelling, then – the primary means by which our brains evolved to navigate our environment as a collective, finding patterns that allow us to prioritise survival-critical information – is the process by which we enact that process of change in ourselves and in those around us. The thing about stories, as Truth reinforces, is that it’s innate. We tell stories, naturally, all the time, as our primary means to deny the chaos of life. When no story is offered, we can’t help but find patterns in the mess. For public entities of any kind, the conclusion is undeniable: if you’re not telling your story, you’d better believe somebody else is. And that story might be big – a political campaign, a biopic, a history book – but it might also be small.

The power of anecdotes is profound, as Truth notes, because their defining characteristic is their reality. When wielded by an organisation as a means to share learning and shape behaviours, they can indeed be ‘extremely powerful tools’. But of course, anecdotes aren’t just tools to be wielded. They’re a fundamental form of human exchange, sprung from the well of collective, daily, lived experience. Wherever there are communities, there are anecdotes. And where we find anecdotes, we find multiplicity: realities that contradict the grand origin myths of a nation, or business, or group. When hundreds of these anecdotes come together, each with their own challenge, pressing in on those foundations, the conflict in a society, organisation, or family, can be profound. And these ‘counter narratives’ tell the observant leader (or family member, or citizen) something important about their tribe. The lifeblood of a collective runs through the stories it tells. As Truth shows us, and as we help our clients to practice, by listening to these stories, we can intervene at the root: changing behaviour and shifting mind-sets by through real examples that show a different way really is possible.

Taking control of the narrative you want to tell – the things you believe, what you stand for, why you do what you do – as a leader, an organisation or an individual (all, today, expected to constantly narrate life choices and career paths to expectant employers, employee and peers) has never been a more important or essential part of life. But our discomfort lingers.

It’s a discomfort rooted in the deeply held sense that to tell stories is to fictionalise, or falsify. Indeed, it was this, Truth’s opening pages confess, that originally spurred its creation. Yet here, too, we’d like to offer a different take.

Stories might select facts, but they don’t have to run counter to them. They give meaning to the ones they hold by providing the emotional context needed to make sense of information that would otherwise be overwhelming or irrelevant. In the irresistible logic of the narrative structure – the emphasis of cause and effect that Truth rightly positions as central to the story form – we’re given a sense-checking framework that demands credibility of its author. Just as Truth offers an invaluable set of heuristics to help us assess the information we hear, so, we believe, a narrative framework holds the storyteller to account: shining stark light on the wild or implausible or misconstrued as we move sequentially through the process of change to an attainable, believable outcome.

Yes: we must be alert to the people controlling the narrative. But in today’s environment of mass communication and mass consumption, where the paralysis of information overload frequently numbs us to issues that deserve our attention and comprehension, the bigger risk is that we retreat entirely – burnt out by the analytical burden that must accompany every perspective, every thought, every action. And yes: emotional stories can be abused, as per Truth’s analysis; needlessly included in our news to elicit undeserving or unsavoury responses. But by allowing us to zoom into the emotional experience of the individual, stories neurologically reconnect us to the empathy we struggle to locate in today’s world, powerfully reconfiguring the way we respond to the people around us. By offering us a familiar structure through which to anchor ourselves – the grand narratives that recur time and time again, the stories we seem to hold inside ourselves and tell as soon as we can speak – stories offer us a steady point in a fast moving world; the context we need to stay afloat. It’s this, more than anything else, which perhaps explains why the craft of storytelling has seeped into every part of our culture in recent years. We’re all just trying to connect the dots.

Truth leaves us with an important warning: that stories can often be taken as The Truth, instead of just one truth; and it falls to all of us, in this age, to remain vigilant in the stories we consume and the weight we allow them to bear. We’d also like to propose an additional take: that story can be the framework where we define, discover and sustain a bigger (and constantly evolving) truth – of who we are, why we do what we do, what experiences lead us to this point. Our lives are characterised by the restless pursuit of this small, personal truth: and as everything else falls away, as we move deeper into this Post-Truth world, we can return to this framework, and relocate, and recalibrate, in order to bring purpose and direction and fulfilment to our lives. But Truth also leaves us with an even more important reminder: that ‘eliminating diseases, feeding billions, building global companies, defending nations, developing miraculous technologies, connecting the world: all of this has been done by humans co-operating’ – and this co-operation ‘depends on the ideas we share – the truths we tell each other’. The stories, in other words, that make the world go round. On that, I think, we can all agree.

 

Bex Felton

Burning bridges

Posted on by Marcus Hayes

Over 15 years of working with Executives around the world on their strategic narratives, we’ve had plenty debate about the ‘burning bridge’: the emotional hook that demands people take action before they get burned. In theory, it’s the ultimate form of motivation. But in the carrot-or-stick story of the world, where the pressures of constant change or increasingly mammoth global issues make most of us drag our feet in mutinous bewilderment, it’s tough for any leader to galvanise a community into decisive action.

It was therefore great to welcome Anita Krishnan to The Storytellers from Harvard University who studied under Marshall Ganz, a great catalyst of grassroots social movements that achieved real change, from American civil rights to the United Farm Workers fight for decent working conditions. It was from these models that Marshall went on to devise the organising model that would see Barack Obama win his 2008 presidential campaign. He’s got a very informative YouTube video you can view here.

His starting point is this: ‘strategy without motivation is just theory’. Strategy sets out the rational, logical ‘how’ – but our motivation requires an emotional ‘why’. Regardless of how advanced we think we are, our operating systems are still firmly connected to our animal forefathers. We like emotional autopilot, which means sticking to established – and once-efficient – habits. It’s like we’re still grazing on the Savannah. Our surveillance system is constantly on the lookout for signs of danger that will trigger our anxiety, and stimulate the adrenaline to take action. Hence that ‘burning platform’.

But, as Marshall points out, we all know that our instinctive response to danger is flight, fight or freeze. Hardly productive conditions for strategy execution. Yet we see them all too often within organisations preparing to change. The so called cynics who are up for a fight or the ‘passive aggressives’ who seem to be on board but silently do nothing. In this ‘Catch 22’ it seems that the very thing we need to motivate action is also inhibiting it.

Marshall’s solution is to balance the threat with positive, galvanising emotions. His first is hope: a theme that he used to great effect in the Obama campaign. Hope, he quotes, is the belief in the plausibility of the possible. In business, no one can ultimately predict success, but I’ve had the privilege of working with many leaders who leave you feeling that success is possible, even in the most challenging circumstances.

Next is solidarity, that feeling that we’re in it together, and together we can make it happen. Playing to our identity is a powerful driver. I love that moment in the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ when Al Gore sets out the massive challenge of climate change and then turns to his fellow Americans and reminds them that massive challenges is what we do best (along with emotive images of putting a man on the moon etc.)

But arguably the most galvanising emotion comes in the form of a truly unpronounceable acronym: YCMAD. Try it out on yourself. Think of a burning bridge you need to address and reflect on how you feel. Then add the words: ‘but you can make a difference’. Of course it only works if you can! Again we see this in the environmental debate. Create the motivation without the means and you get nodding heads from people who still drive their cars and fly on their holidays. Show them they can make a difference to ocean pollution by avoiding plastic bags and you get positive action.

It’s a leader’s job to balance these emotions and empower people to act. Luckily, as Marshall points out, this is exactly what makes the narrative form so powerful as a tool to educate, inspire and connect people, even – and especially – in the face of overwhelm and fear. Obama’s closing words remind us always to strive for the audacity of hope. Stories are where we learn how.

Marcus Hayes

Two Years’ Warning: The Customer Centricity Crisis

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Our new research reveals that three-quarters of business leaders believe their company won’t survive beyond the next two years unless they put more focus on customers. Yet, astonishingly, nearly half have got ‘more important business issues to focus on.’

‘Two Years’ Warning: The Customer Centricity Crisis‘ exposes the mindsets that exist around customer centricity in the world’s largest organisations, and the disconnect in attitude and beliefs between leaders and employees. Our study finds that leaders are paralysed by the changes required, and are failing to build companies fit for today’s increasingly demanding customers.

Read more

Can politicians teach business about leadership?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

The Storytellers were featured in an article in Forbes magazine this week.

Whilst many will be relieved that the media spotlight on the General Election is now focused on other news stories, and the debate over party politics has subsided, there are some aspects of the party leaders’ Election campaigns which are worth remembering and learning from. In short, how they came across as leaders.

Whatever your views on their manifestos and political stances, there is no doubt that ‘statesmanship’ belongs more to some party leaders than others. It’s questionable whether any of them inspire trust (!), and of course business leaders are not quite as exposed to the bashing they get from their opponents, including the media, which no doubt influences our perception of them. Yet their ability as convincing orators, and the way in which they deliver their messages, is certainly something we can learn from.

Have a read. We’d be interested to hear what you think.