Category: Blog

About two years ago, I stopped work as a partner, then globe-trotter, for Deloitte (or was it as self-powered carry-on baggage for BA?) but found I didn’t like it. The next two years of sleeping late, failing miserably to improve my golf handicap and gardening provided little challenge. Indeed, some will understand that the golf challenge bordered on depression! I needed a more significant objective in my life.

When Scorpio crossed Sagittarius last year, the juxtaposition of the opportunity of an interesting challenge and the bills for my daughter’s wedding led me to The Storytellers.

This is what I have learnt so far:

• I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to return to getting up at 6:30 am when interested and motivated;
• An accountant of nearly 40 years can fit in with a young, vibrant company of media people, most of whom were not yet born when he qualified, and share his experience for the general good;
• I must be non-threatening and supportive; I may think I know – even know, I know – best, but better to take time to explain ‘why’ than lay down the law and move on.
• Management and leadership style might change, along with workplace attitudes as new generations come in and consumer demand and technology force widespread culture change. But, from an accountant’s point of view, one thing never changes; chase the cash, because cash is king!

I've been talking today to the CFO of a major global technology client on the day it launches the story of the company's future ambition for growth.

How refreshing to talk to a CFO who completely endorses the narrative structure of the story as a means of getting the message across. Numbers and PowerPoint go hand-in-hand, after all, and you might expect somebody in his position – as the chief custodian of 'The Numbers' – to push back against anything other than PowerPoint to present his case. On the contrary, the big picture – and the necessity for people to remember the higher message – are his main concern.

This has particularly relevance for me, having just read an intelligent and thought-provoking article by Juma Wood at The Vancouver Sun on how stories lie at the heart of human motivation, not data. Juma explains how the heart or gut needs to be engaged before people will formulate sensible reasons to act. It's worth a read, and absolutely resonates with us. For any business leader wanting their people to change, a simple and compelling story is the starting point, not a tsunami of statistics and numbers that may well scream a message from within, but will do little to spark the imagination and provoke a human being to really want to do something differently.

When we choose for ourselves we are far more committed to the outcome – almost by a factor of five to one!. Tapping into this unique element of human nature is critical to driving change in organisations today.

In a famous behavioural experiment, half the participants are randomly assigned a lottery ticket number while the others are asked to write down any number they would like on a blank ticket. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offer to buy back the tickets from their holders.

The result: no matter what geography or demographic environment the experiment has taken place in, researchers have always found that they have to pay at least five times more to those who came up with their own number (Ref. The McKinsey Quarterly 2009 Number 2)

This reveals something very unique about human nature. When we choose for ourselves we are far more committed to the outcome – almost by a factor of five to one!.

This offers a great opportunity for change leaders as well as one of the biggest challenges. Conventional change management and strategic communication approaches often focus on the need for a clear and compelling Story – get the message out there and people will understand and act as you wish them to. A clear and compelling Story IS fundamental to driving change, but as an isolated 'push' communication, it does not allow for people to discover and own anything and can steal the energy needed to really drive the change that comes through a true sense of ownership. The big opportunity therefore is to engage people in co-creating the answer. People are always more willing to adjust their actions and behaviours when there is a sense of belonging, identity and personal connection to what a business is trying to achieve.

Celebrating their impressive member numbers, LinkedIn are asking users to submit their own Linkedin related stories:

http://100million.linkedin.com/

Click one of the faces to find out how Linkedin has changed the lives of its users.

I’m sitting in another meeting with a prospective client, talking about the need to develop their business story, when a familiar question comes up: ‘But we’ve got a clear strategy… here on one sheet of paper… why do we need a story as well?’

For inspiration I recalled Peter Guber’s book ‘Tell to Win’.  Yes it’s a book about storytelling, but it’s written by the ex CEO of Polygram Entertainment and Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures.  This was the guy who was brought in to run one of the worlds largest entertainment companies, just after it was bought by the Japanese… in an industry that has to bet millions on big deals to survive.  In that position you are not going to succeed by talking about fairies at the bottom of your garden.

Yet Peter talks about big pitches that he lost despite having all the facts and strategy at his fingertips.  He then goes on to give many examples of how he and other successful business-people have used the power of a story to close a deal or turn round an organisation.  In search of the answer to why this is the case, he talks to Robert Rosen, a former dean at UCLA.  ‘Stories put all the key facts into an emotional context,’ Rosen says.  ‘The information in a story doesn’t just sit there as it would in a logical proposition.  Instead, it’s built to create suspense.’  That story says Guber is like a Trojan horse.  It plants change ideas inside peoples’ minds: ‘Thanks to their magical construction, stories emotionally transport the audience so they don’t even realise they’re receiving a hidden message.

What Rosen and Guber are tapping into is the difference between information and persuasion.  A well presented strategic framework can inform people about what they need to do, and for highly motivated senior management that maybe all that is required.  A story however, by engaging people at both a rational and emotional level, is able to challenge and change peoples beliefs and behaviours.

So the question of strategy versus story is really a question of whether you need to inform or persuade.  The answer is probably in the strategy itself.  If it requires change, from the alignment of directors to the behaviours of those on the shop floor, then persuasion is probably the name of the game.

On March 18th 2011, Charlottee Todd sold a dress she’d made whilst at college for £78,000.  It had cost her thirty quid in fabric and by most peoples view was not the next big thing in design.  But the dress had a story.  It was the one that Kate Middleton wore – the one that caught the eye of the future king.

That story probably added 100,000% to the value of that product, and demonstrated once again that people don’t buy products they buy stories.

But if that’s the case how do major brand owners create the stories that people want to buy?  I remember my first job at J Walter Thompson back in the early eighties.  We’d just created Mr Kipling, that country parish priest, and producer of exceedingly good cakes, as a front for a product manufactured in Hull.  Later that decade I was working with Courage on Hofmeister, a German lager that had never been further south than Reading.  It is possible to create a brand story, or enhance one that is already there.  But over the years consumers have become more savvy and cynical, and brand owners should now tread with care.

Another way of looking at this is the idea that a brand is the sum of a million stories – the stories of every interaction that customers make with the product and service you sell.  The sum of these stories creates the promise that the brand offers – not the one that the marketing team has dreamt up, but the real one.  The one that exists in the consumers’ minds.  The one that determines whether they buy the product or not.  In the past these stories have had less power, but now of course there are many mechanisms that can connect them: Trip Advisor, Amazon, Chat rooms, Twitter and Blogs galore. 

So how do you get tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees to deliver consistently great, brand differentiating stories every day, through every interaction with the customer?  The challenge is enormous, and the consequences critical.   Most business start with process and rules.  However these are highly limiting.  Often the stories that matter are the ones where things have gone wrong, or the customer has an unusual challenge.  Almost by definition, these situations sit beyond the process.  What's more if you just run a business by rules, you disempower people, force them to focus their energy on compliance and create demotivation and inefficiency.  The alternative is to build a winning culture based on shared beliefs about the way we do things around here.  With people that are really connected to what the brand is trying to achieve, and feel empowered to create their own story.

What is at the heart of making change happen? If we could narrow it down to a few fundamentals what would we focus our efforts on, or at least aim never to lose sight of?

Sometimes a simple message is the best clarification. Today a quote by Javier Bajer (Munro and Forster) did this for me on the topic of culture change.

The way to change temperature is by opening the window or by turning the heating up or down. You don't 'do' temperature, you do something else and a change in temperature is the outcome. It's the same with culture. You can say 'be more innovative' – but it doesn't just happen. Humans don't change because you tell them to. You need to create an environment to make things happen.