Category: Change

Countering contagion: storytelling for the VUCA age

Posted on by Imogen Wallersteiner

How do you protect your teams from contagion? How do you do business while ‘self-isolating’? How do you risk manage the systemic complexities and co-dependencies of global markets? How healthy are your supply chains looking right now? 

From biblical African locust swarms to the outbreak of epidemic, the new decade has already served business leaders with multiple opportunities for sober reflection. Besides the worry for global staff in at-risk areas, organisations everywhere are also uneasily eyeing up supply chains, trade routes and international prospects as economic shocks and death tolls continue to dominate international headlines. 

Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Four words that constitute today’s new normal. To lead in whatever capacity today is to occupy a context that lurches dizzyingly between hyper-vigilance and blinkered laissez-faire. Prepare for everything, all at once, all the time – or give up the reins of control completely. 

Neither, of course, are tenable (though the last four weeks alone may be enough to leave many Executive teams tempted by the latter). The balance that must now be struck is how to navigate the unknowable; to set direction, without destination; to become, borrowing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s definition, ‘anti-fragile’: able to absorb shocks with ease and turn them into advantage. How to do all this while navigating your personal fears, hopes, strengths, and blind spots. And how, of course, to do all this through others – maybe five, maybe fifty thousand – each with their own complex reality to sail through as you seek to steady the ship. 

As the recent HRD Summit proved, the business world is alive to these profoundly liminal questions. What is the solution, it asked (over two days, multiple stages and feted thought leaders in the presence of more than a thousand UK leaders) to a world that can no longer be predicted?

VUCA was a term coined by the US military to breakdown and risk manage the deadly unknowables of war. Leaders at the Summit and beyond have long been urged to deploy similarly robust and carefully plotted defensive strategies. They must embrace agility; decentralise; become ‘emergent’. Importantly, they must select a philosophy, a method, a trademark of change. Then, they must swiftly embody and embed. 

At the HRD Summit, we talked about storytelling and narrative. Because while the language of change will come and go, the story of change will always stay the same.

Change is the essential human process. Second by second, it’s the thing we never stop doing; it’s how we’ve survived to become the dominant species on the planet. But it’s also the thing we mentally resist the most: prepped by our ancestral brains to seek the safety and efficiency of the known, the stable and the predictable. 

We’ve become dab hands at ‘embedding’. We have built an industry to design systems of change at great opacity, complexity and cost into which people are meant to fit. 

Along the way, we have forgotten to ‘embody’. 

Change starts inside your own mind. As leaders, this means your success in the VUCA world is largely a question of mindset. Yes, there are always myriad complicating factors; things that spin out far beyond the locus of your control. But in the VUCA world, it’s about what sits within the locus of your control, and what you do with those things, that counts. 

As Professor Richard Wiseman shows, this process starts by taking control of the story of change you tell yourself. Control becomes power when this story is visible in every action, every day. Power becomes empowerment when you can invite people into a shared narrative and give them the tools to shape their own story as you go on the journey together. 

To embody change is to lead change. To pay lip service to change is to fail. As Deborah Rowland emphasised in her keynote address, ‘if leaders stay stuck in their habitual response, so will their organisations’. 

The language of change will come and go, but the story will stay the same. And the story of change starts with you.

HRD Summit 2020 – ‘Harnessing Human Creativity’

Posted on by Alastair Hagger

It’s 2020. The corporate landscape is more volatile than ever. At The Storytellers, we see this as an exhilarating challenge. Live in the now, look to the future, and ask yourself: is your organisation ready to be the hero of its own story?

On February 4th– 5th, the annual HRD Summit plays host to the most senior HR and business leaders on the globe. And we will be there. This year, at the ICC in Birmingham, 150 speakers – including our Co-Founder and Director, Alison Esse – will discuss the theme of ‘Harnessing Human Creativity’. 

Here’s the Summit’s ‘call to action’:

“The pace of change is more rapid than ever. Economically, politically, socially; as the world changes, it’s the organisations that can transform right along with it that will find success. Organisations are being required to rethink it all or risk being left behind, from their basic business models to their core identities. What is their purpose? Who do they want to be?”

What is your business’ purpose? Who do you want to be? Alison will be giving a masterclass at 12.30pm on the 4th of February titled ‘Resetting Your Organisation’s Narrative to Inspire Change’. At The Storytellers, we harness the power of storytelling to move people to accelerate change and transform business performance. How do we do this, and how can it help you harness the creative potential within your organisation?

Alison will be discussing:

  • How storytelling brings meaning and purpose to work,
  • Why people resist change (and what to do about it),
  • How leaders can use storytelling techniques to inspire change, and
  • How to construct an emotionally compelling strategic narrative.

We make meaning through stories. As Alison will show, an organisation can utilise the universal power of storytelling to identify and articulate its struggles and endeavours, create a hero’s ‘call to action’, and help its people to contribute to something bigger than themselves. All great stories – from Aristotle to Ad Astra – use this narrative framework to develop and foster a deep and satisfying emotional connection. Why? Because when people feel empowered and inspired by storytelling, they want to become the hero of their own narrative. They feel they can change.

In a business context, storytelling helps us to recognise and celebrate what we have achieved, understand what is possible, and engage us all in the role we need to play. Great storytellers are thus great leaders – because they inspire us with what we can achieve together. By creating the motivation, means and momentum essential to shifting behaviour, we’ve helped leaders at over 170 major organisations move their people to accelerate change and transform business performance – through the power and influence of storytelling. 

Want to know more? Attend Alison’s masterclass on the 4th of February and drop by for a chat at stand 27 in the ICC. We’d love to tell you more about how we can help you use the power of storytelling to navigate more effectively through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that characterises the business landscape today.

Here’s our ‘hero’s call to action’: See you in Birmingham! 

Welcome to the next episode…

Posted on by Marcus Hayes

The new year has already brought a spate of major events that have signalled what is to come in the third decade of this millennium. Climate change, Big Tech, Brexit and the upcoming US election are all big issues that are likely to dominate our headlines in 2020 and beyond. At The Storytellers, we not only work with narrative structure, but we think in it. And as we launch into the next decade, we have a distinct feeling that we are moving into the third episode of a story. 

We know that all great stories have underlying structural similarities. Since humans started telling stories at the dawn of time, motifs in fiction have reoccurred time and time again. As John Yorke has written, ‘all stories are forged from the same template’. The three-act structure, or the trilogy, can be traced through epic stories ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, to George Lucas’s film franchise Star Wars. Such works are defined by their episodic style and diversity of self-contained journeys. Indeed, episodic storytelling is the art of telling the story of an epic journey via fractural, smaller-scale episodes that are interconnected and link thematically. This tripartite narrative structure is often referred to as having three acts: the Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution. 

So, how did this epic story start? In narrative fiction, the first act sets up the world in which the characters live, and our story starts with a party. The first decade was welcomed with a swell of optimism and positivity; we all remember the worldwide celebrations that brought in the millennium. 

However, this ‘ordinary world’ is then disrupted by an inciting incident that confronts the protagonist and challenges their way of life. The legacy of the 2000s has been defined by two major, inciting shocks to the world: 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash. It would not be exaggerating to argue that these two events changed the world. They revealed the dangers of technology, incited widespread outrage and long-lasting pain. 

The way global leaders responded to these events has defined our present. After 9/11, in the U.S., Bush launched the War in Afghanistan and a new narrative of foreign policy for the West was instigated. The costs of the attack have been estimated at $2.126 trillion including the immediate physical damages of the attack, the long-term increased defence spending and the general war costs (Amadeo, The Balance). 9/11 can be seen as part of a chain of events that led to the U.S. debt crisis and exasperated the 2008 crash. The implications of the austerity and inequality that followed arguably drove voters to populist politics – resulting in the presidency of Donald Trump and the ascendancy of right-wing ideology. 

These global shocks took us out of our ordinary world and threw us into the second episode. In this act we find the ‘rising action’ as the protagonist attempts to resolve the problem initiated in Act One, but often finds themselves in even murkier waters. Consider the second novel in Tolkien’s trilogy, The Two Towers; the book sets up multiple conflicts and creates even more questions for the reader. As the journalist John Lanchester states in a seminal article about the 2008 crash, ‘the crisis exacerbated fault lines running through contemporary societies, fault lines of city and country, old and young, cosmopolitan and nationalist’ (The Times, 2018). For the UK, these fault lines culminated in a final battle: Brexit. Ultimately, the 2010s were a bit of a slog, an episode of hardship during which protagonists were unable to resolve their problems. Since 2010, the UK has been dominated by austerity measures that have cut nearly £30 billion to welfare payments, housing subsidies and social services (Mueller, NY Times). In addition, businesses have been hurt and their confidence rocked. This period of stagnation is dramatized in the final imagery of The Two Towers. As Frodo lies paralysed and comatose at the end of the book, he is a far cry from his heroic self. 

So we arrive into the 2020s armed with new knowledge and new questions. We may be exhausted, but we are ready to fight again. We now know that as a nation we will live outside the EU, we hope to come out of austerity and find new ways of working with technology. The government has pledged to reinstate the 20,000 police officers lost during austerity and deliver 50,000 more nurses. The Australian bush fires have demonstrated the true scale of climate change, and we know that we must work fast to halt further global warming. Businesses will move towards sustainability and act to reduce their carbon footprint more than ever. We have seen the impact of technology and recognise the need for positive innovation. Already, social movements such as ‘tech for good’ are helping businesses deliver sustainable development goals and social value through technology. 

The third act is one of resolution and the tying up of loose ends. Of course, no final film or book ever goes without its major battles or dramatic events – we expect lots of these in the next decade. However, we are now at a point where we are looking for solutions, rather than inciting drama. Y.B. Yeats said that “Life is a spiral staircase… the journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward”. Indeed, just like every chapter, every decade has its own arc – a repetition that is mirrored throughout our own lives. And while sometimes it feels like we are stuck in a rut – like the unwitting hero Frodo Baggins during The Two Towers who is wracked with doubt and loathing. In reality, we are always learning, moving forward and progressing. In this new decade we might just see the hero resolve the journey, and the ongoing battles finally subside.

The previous two decades have reiterated that change is an inevitable, posing a continual challenge to both organisations and wider society. This ongoing sense of turbulence and change has developed the notion of ‘VUCA’, the concept that we live in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times. Leaders have to keep pace with the world around them and need new approaches to do so. We’ve found that narrative is an essential component for businesses to embark on a successful change journey. In this world of episodic stories, businesses can anchor themselves with a strong narrative that connects them to reality and the everyday stories that surround us. If the epic journey is made clear, then the path forward into the highly unpredictable next decade will be less foreboding. Rather, we can see the future as an exciting challenge for us all. 

Happy 2020!

The new story of leadership

Posted on by Bex Felton

Our interest is transformational leadership. Inspired by the work of Professor Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD, we define transformational leaders as individuals who are willing, able and entrusted to articulate, embody and help to realise a story of possibility and, in so doing, build a model of mutual prosperity for employees, customers, shareholders and society.

At The Storytellers, we believe that there has never been a more important moment to cultivate transformational leadership.

Our contention is simple.

The last industrial revolution fundamentally disrupted and mechanised the meaning of leadership, moving dramatically away from classical notions of peoplecentred leadership.

Now, as we move into the fourth industrial revolution and the deep technological disruption that it brings, human mindsets and behaviours have unexpectedly emerged as the final frontier of advantage and the truest form of resilience. In response, people-centred leadership — which emphasises shared purpose, emotional connection, influence and authenticity — must come to the fore once again. A new paradigm is emerging that will determine who thrives and who dies. For leaders raised on the techniques of management science and confronting unprecedented amounts of personal, interpersonal and systemic change, the transition is profoundly challenging.

To create a lasting mindset and behaviour change, leaders must cultivate emotional motivation, means and momentum — both continuously and simultaneously. We contend that story is the most effective and coherent delivery mechanism by which to meet this need, which, when applied strategically in the form of integrated story-driven change programmes, holds the key to successful transformation.

Download our white paper in full by completing the form on this page.

Leaders! Kill the conference, make a moment

Posted on by Bex Felton

If ever there was a month where business as usual seemed more doomed than ever, April 2019 was it. Extinction Rebellion campaigners turned London’s busiest street into a post-apocalyptic refuge and blockaded our financial centres. A mass-movement of truant British schoolchildren shamed political inaction with 16-year old climate activist Greta Thunberg at the helm, who reminded Parliament that the UK’s oft-cited 37% carbon emissions reduction is actual a paltry 10% when aviation and shipping are accurately accounted for. Needless flying or travel of all kinds – in the days of sophisticated technology and tight budgets – is an increasingly indefensible business cost. Time is being called on the once-yearly, high-cost, low yield leadership conferences of yore as the pivot is made toward more agile, low key models of commune. 

There’s little to mourn in this outdated model. But leaders everywhere should hesitate before abandoning collective experiences entirely. Here is the debate as perfectly laid out by two passionate climate activists on the weekend news. 

The first, a lifelong Greenpeace member, has not flown for 20 years. He sees no choice in the matter: the only solution is for individuals to be the change they seek in the world without compromise. The other is a UN climate change advocate. Her work, she argues, necessitates flight; she relies on moments of face-to-face exchange and human connection to push through the policies that would otherwise remain as lifeless as a Skype screen.  

Change makers of any kind know the power of face to face moments and harness them to great effect. For business leadership teams recalibrating to the pace of change and the pressures of the VUCA environment, these moments are arguably more essential than ever – and the time is ripe to abandon the status quo and yield dramatic new levels of ROI. 

So what are the benefits of real-world face time and how can we ensure we’re maximising its advantages? 

The big benefits 

 1. Contextualised understanding

We’re all familiar with optical illusions. The letter B suddenly looks like a 13 when surrounded by a 12 and 14; the vase that becomes two faces in profile. Strategy, much like optical illusions, looks very different without the right context. Shared context is the key to shared understanding. Shared understanding is the key to aligned and accelerated execution. In these disruptive times, some messages just need space to be shared, explored and absorbed. Exploring as a collective also allows leaders to broaden their own horizons and reframe the paradigm in which they operate, reinforcing their own connection to the strategy and to each other. Miscommunication and disengagement are hazards that can drastically slow down execution.

2. New mindsets

It takes a lot to break patterns of thought and see the world differently. But being plunged into a new environment, new ideas and new experiences is a surefire way to fast track the shift. Hearing real stories and having real exchanges in thoughtfully curated ways, with thoughtfully curated people, is another. The value of this sustained immersion is something no amount of high speed broadband can beat, and high impact events harness environment, storyline and activity to amplify this impact. 

3. Collaborative momentum

The manager of a major logistics business once proudly told me about his innovation plan: ‘Our team is going to spend the first four years evaluating where we need to innovate’. World champion sports teams know that off-site events are the best way to rapidly deconstruct tribes and build new ones, emphasising a common identity and agenda to break down silos and forge powerful new bonds. All team work is about trust and relationships; businesses looking to tap into the power of teams and global collaboration rely on these alliances just as much. Events also catalyse collaboration by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd to unearth barriers, solutions and opportunities in real time – giving leaders an unparalleled view of what can be done, and how best to organise to collectively achieve it, yielding value long after the event is done. 

The why

In their book The power of moments: why certain experiences have extraordinary impact, Chip and Dan Heath illuminate why certain events have such a disproportionate impact on the way we think, feel, act and behave, and how we can all harness these qualities to become authors of defining moments that create powerful shifts. 

The most powerful experiences leverage four key components. 

  1. Elevation: experiences that rise above the routine; that make us feel joyful, engaged surprised and motivated; that ‘break the script’, heighten the senses or raise the stakes.  Elevated experiences create an emotional peak that goes the distance – something organisations dramatically underinvest in, according to research. 
  2. Pride: experiences that commemorate people’s achievements by recognising others and celebrating meaningful milestones; that help us ‘practice courage’ by ‘preloading’ our responses to moments that require us to step up and meet a challenge. 
  3. Insight: experiences that deliver realisations and transformations – for example, by building in learning opportunities that help people ‘trip over the truth’ and experience revelation; activities that challenge us to stretch to new goals and get comfortable with the risk of failure. 
  4. Connection: experiences that bond us together by uniting us in the struggle towards a meaningful goal; create a synchronised moment of endeavour; and forge new relationships by responsiveness to each others’ needs. 

At The Storytellers, we use narrative structure and story-led design to leverage these components, creating meaningful experiences that help leaders all over the world kick-start movements of change in their business.

Three opportunities to unlock pace in your organisation

Posted on by Robert Tennant

The Storytellers work with a diverse range of large organisations from multiple sectors. We help businesses leverage their people as a competitive advantage – to engage their teams in a compelling journey and to provide the motivation, means and momentum to drive change. In short, we work with organisations to move more people to do great things.

Our teams thrive on this purpose – it keeps us sharp and enables us to see themes across clients, sectors and geographies. We see on a daily basis the challenges businesses are facing in a world that is experiencing continuous and often unanticipated change.

One of the key themes this year will come as no surprise. Pace. Urgency. Acceleration. If “the pace of change will never be this slow again”1 businesses need their teams and people to be proactive, to innovate ahead of the curve, to make decisions in a smarter, empowered and efficient way. 

Many clients have approached The Storytellers this year because they recognise that to unlock pace in their organisations they need to engage their people in the changes that need to be made. It is no longer enough to show the way and expect others to follow; teams that move at real pace and perform at the highest level have real ownership, purpose and clarity of intent. The way is clear – as is the part everyone can play.

When a business manages to successfully accelerate change they tend to take an integrated approach – there is no silver bullet. Over the years we’ve identified a set of success factors that have resulted in quite incredible transformation stories. Of these success factors there are three which are critical to driving change at pace. They also represent three areas that organisations often either miss altogether or treat as a tick-box exercise:

1. Set compelling context and generate real alignment

In the pursuit of pace many businesses and leaders don’t set context or ensure alignment. It is often seen as an unnecessary “step” in the change process, especially when there is pressure to move quickly. In fact, setting appropriate context brings clarity, vision, purpose and engagement. All absolutely critical ingredients to accelerating change. Ensuring real alignment around the change journey speeds up decision making, builds sponsorship and allows teams to more easily identify blockers and create collaborative solutions. Our experience shows that the use of narrative is one of the quickest ways to reach alignment and a sense of shared ownership. Research has shown that leaders who used a consistent change story to align teams around transformation goals were nearly 4x more likely to be successful.2

2. Build capability to engage rationally and emotionally

Great leaders have the tools and capability to engage their teams in change. Most leaders communicate in a rational manner, aiming to land the essential information. However, leaders who can communicate and connect with people both rationally and emotionally tend to see huge shifts in performance. People are more engaged, motivated to change and willing to shift their mindset in order to adopt new behaviours. This radically reduces the time between people rationally understanding something and actually taking action. We find one of the biggest challenges is the ability of leaders to be influential – to inspire and help their teams through change. Leadership modules that integrate into a narrative-led approach and help leaders spark action at a team level make the change relevant and relatable across functions.

3. Start a movement that generates urgency and builds momentum

As with social change, creating a movement can utilise peer-to-peer influence to spread messages and behaviours from every corner of the business, generating urgency and pace from the bottom as well as the top of an organisation. This needs to be supported by key functions such as Communications, HR and L&D, but it should be people led. Movements need networks and networks need collaboration. The movement needs to be inspiring and accessible for the network to thrive and stimulate positive change. It needs to build energy and momentum by recognising the heroes of the movement – both those activating the change and those responding to the call.

Business transformation: routine to ritual

Posted on by Daniel Castro

Engaging hearts and minds is one of the most vital elements in any business transformation. Here at The Storytellers, we often talk about the elephant (the emotional) and the rider (the rational) – if the elephant is not on board, then even the best laid plans of the rider are unlikely to happen. It’s a simple fable but it’s very true – unless people are both emotionally AND rationally engaged in the change that needs to happen, it’s very unlikely that any real improvements will be seen.

So when coming up with a campaign that engages large employee populations for our clients, we need to get to the emotional heart of what makes an organisation tick. But so often, finding out what the right emotional engagement for each organisation is can feel ephemeral, ethereal, out of reach – ‘fluffy’. As change experts, we have our own challenge then: how to take the essential goal of emotional engagement and make it more of a tangible, measurable process? 

One of the key questions that we ask our clients in this respect is as follows:

“What are your employees’ routines and rituals?”

At the ground level, this question reveals insights that tell us how things currently are, and therefore the space in which we can begin to introduce new elements that will drive the emotional engagement, and therefore, business transformation. Once identified, these existing routines and rituals become the framework for development, improvement, and measuring the success of the quest to create real emotional engagement.

But what are routines and rituals? Are they the same as each other? And why are they so significant when it comes to lasting change?

A routine is defined as “a sequence of actions regularly followed; a fixed program.” In other words, it’s a process, a procedure, a drill. A series of steps that are followed with little question. One might say that they represent the objective of change – to make the conscious unconscious, so that the efforts and energies of employees can be turned to other immediate challenge.

On the other hand, a ritual has a far more elevated significance: “a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.” So although there is the same element of a prescribed sequence of actions, a ritual is by definition a heightened, conscious and mind-expanding experience. It represents the experience that delivers understanding, and connotes a much-more collective moment in a group than a mere routine.

Stories and storytelling are, of course, rooted in this concept of ritual – and in many ways, our responsibility to our clients is to help them deliver these ritual experiences, from which the collective emerges enlightened, engaged, and ready to face their duties differently. To put it simply: it’s the first step to making the extraordinary a matter of routine.

There are relatively few accurate synonyms for ‘ritual’. However, there is a phrase that captures perhaps the most critical element of what constitutes a ritual: liminal experience.

We have written previously on the importance of liminal experience, particularly in terms of live events, but liminal experience is a concept that very much applies to workplace rituals too. An anthropological term, ‘liminality’ comes from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”. It means the quality of ambiguity that occurs in the middle stage of rites, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. In other words, it is the moment in a ritual when change happens, the moment when the path towards making improvements part of the everyday begins to be glimpsed.

Broadly speaking, it’s this quality that we are looking to create – whether at a leadership event, or as a key driver of change in the workplace. Practically speaking, it’s a matter of taking the existing logistical framework that exists within a business and seeing where this can be disrupted, by making a ritual out of a routine. But what does this look like in practice, to create this liminal space in which individuals can find new meaning? What does it mean to give what was routine that special, ritual quality? Here are five key transitions to look for:

Tedious and meaningless to symbolic and meaningful

Operational communication is essential – it’s not a question of replacing this, or trying to make this something it’s not. It’s a question of introducing new elements that create that ‘round the campfire’ feeling – and there’s no better way of doing this than through stories. It’s stories that create that sense of being on the threshold of understanding what we do in a more sophisticated, complete, effective way than we did before.

Making this experience symbolic and meaningful must be with respect to the overarching journey that a business is on – it’s having this clearly defined bigger picture that creates the opportunity for anecdotes to become enduring symbols of the change that needs to happen. Sharing stories of progress on a regular basis as part of existing meetings is sure to shift the dial from tedium to meaning.

Externally motivated to Internally motivated

The key words here are proactive, discretional and voluntary. As a manager, call out instances where your employees have gone above and beyond – it’s these instances that crystallise an internal motivation to succeed on the journey. What is routine is what is expected – it’s the outlier examples that show a greater determination and alignment with the strategic journey. It’s so important to actively search for these, and visibly give credit where and when it is due.

The most useful asset here are the company purpose and values – tying real life examples back to these pillars of identity and ‘how we do things around here’ will bring to life exactly why certain examples deserve to be celebrated above others. Finally, be sure to proudly pass on these stories of outstanding motivation – they are the icons that build momentum behind a movement of change.

Work as a duty to work as a celebration

Rituals are inherently a form of celebration. Whether it’s solid, consistent performance or outliers of excellence, rituals elevate appreciation it to a superior level, making us feel proud of what we have collectively accomplished. 

It’s important to think creatively and proactively on this aspect – particularly where it comes to operational areas of a business. Finding the connection between what can be regarded as ‘day-to-day’ and the deeper purpose of why a business exists can be difficult, but it’s so important in terms of creating a complete purpose-led culture.

Consider whether you are hearing stories from ALL areas of your team. Not everyone can be the hero every time – but everyone needs to be the hero sometimes. Fostering an atmosphere of celebration by championing the people who consistently perform, as well as the outstanding moments of excellence, is the catalyst for future stories of success.

Little sense of belonging to increased sense of belonging

Talent retention, and avoiding the debilitating effects of attrition, are key, measurable drivers of many of our clients’ programs – and this is an area in which the need to create a feeling of ritual is particularly crucial.

Rituals are all about creating a circle – of trust, of belonging, of commitment. When we share experiences collectively, we feel that we belong to something bigger. We feel powerful, and capable of changing the world. 

Gathering around at least once a week in order to share stories of progress, challenges and success might seem a little strange at first – but over time, this becomes a ritual that cements a deeper sense of belonging, of a collective experience that we go through together. If you’re struggling to keep hold of your brightest talent, make sure that you are nurturing a sense of belonging. Getting together as a team more often, and doing this around a culture of story-sharing, is an excellent place to start.

Focus on completion of tasks to focus on performance of tasks

Perhaps more than any of the other dimensions, this one epitomises the shift from routine to ritual. Completing a task is a binary action – it’s either done, or it’s not. Introducing a performance-based approach elevates this to a richer, more nuanced learning experience. It’s not just about ticking off obligations – it’s a much more qualitative, transformative approach.

As customer experience begins to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, it’s so important to introduce a more user-focused approach to all areas of a business, not just the customer. Highlighting and drawing out the elements of a story that vividly bring to life the key qualities that we are searching ensures that this CX focus is consistent throughout an organisation.

Encourage your team to focus on the small steps that happen towards the completion of a task. Taking the time to tell the story of what is seemingly simple, boring and run-of-the-mill can reveal hidden emotional depths – and shift the culture to one that is proud of how we do things, not just what.


Taking your ordinary, well-worn business routines and turning them into something meaningful, memorable, and a key driver of change is to create the feeling of ritual. By doing this, it’s possible to make the extraordinary routine, and for businesses to take the first steps over the threshold to a brighter future.

Searching for service excellence at Ikea

Posted on by Daniel Castro

A wonderful case study of how to improve customer experience and reinforce brand culture, Ikea USA’s recent organisational changes have had a profound impact on employee engagement – for the worse. A recent Business Insider article paints a picture of employees left confused, disillusioned and demotivated by the changes that have been rung in. 

The statistics are damning: Glassdoor reviews have dropped from 4.5-4.7 in 2015 to 4.1 in 2017, positive reviews have dropped from around 90% to less than 70% – but it’s the employee quotes that really tell the tale:

  • “I get yelled at at least once a day because a customer couldn’t find an employee and I’m the only person in that department. It’s like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m with 12 other customers.”
  • “We were their biggest cheerleader. Now we’re kind of hesitant to answer questions from customers.”
  • “I’m this new employee taking this test and they’re asking me questions and it’s like — I don’t even know what this question means. I don’t even know what this role does.”

While this is undoubtedly wince-inducing reading for Ikea leaders, the direct commentary from current Ikea USA employees makes an absorbing case study for those investigating the dos and don’ts of handling organisational change on a nationwide scale. And this is the first thing to note from this cautionary tale – while the statistics frame the problem, it’s the verbatim feedback that really hits the hardest. The salient words spoken by those who are customer-facing represent Ikea’s biggest problem and, interestingly, they also point towards the solution.

Essentially, Ikea moved to effect two key areas: customer experience and reinforcing its brand culture. The introduction of the ‘O4G’ policy was intended to meet both these needs by redefining worker roles. According to Ikea, the objective was to “empower our co-workers to meet customers’ expectations in today’s multi-channel environment, and strengthen our position in the fast-changing US retail environment”, which all sounds sensible enough.

The challenge for Ikea therefore was to simultaneously create a radically customer-focused culture, whilst simultaneously retaining the internal and external culture that had made them one of the strongest brands worldwide. On paper, the customer-centric approach was simple: at a high level, employees previously specialised by department were now distinguished according to how customer-facing they were. Of the new roles, ’active sellers’ were carefully selected from existing ‘sales employees’ as the most customer-facing, sales-oriented team members. The other major structural change came from merging employees from restaurant, returns and cashier departments into a single ‘customer services’ function.

So what did employees take from these changes? The comments and anecdotes available to us are strikingly focused on certain topics, and those topics are predominantly negative in nature: pay disparities, lack of understanding of the new roles, lack of clarity from managers, and perhaps most importantly, a lack of understanding of the purpose of the new roles. 

It is this final topic that is worth most investigation. Purpose is perhaps never more important than when experiencing change, and this is surely one of the reasons why in the 21st century more than ever businesses are telling themselves to start with ‘why’. Starting with the ‘why’ would have been highly recommendable for Ikea in this instance. When restructuring roles, and changing well-grooved, intuitive understandings of team dynamics, it is essential to go back to the simple idea of ‘why’ we act and behave in certain ways at all. To underestimate the importance of this while roles were being combined represents a major oversight on Ikea’s part.

Moreover, it seems in this case that employees were largely left to create a new sense of purpose for themselves – it should be highly worrying for the senior leadership in the business that managers are mentioned by employees as being equally confused about the purpose and meaning of the new roles too. Engaging this key layer of the organisation is a critical factor in how the rest of the employees find a sense of purpose in their designated roles. It’s quite shocking that any manager leading a team through change would be so spectacularly unequipped to give context to team members as to what those changes meant, and how the team should respond – and yet this is exactly the story that is emerging from inside Ikea USA.

So the fact that the majority of the organisation was seemingly left to its own devices to understand the purpose of their newly-formed roles is undoubtedly a root cause and contributor to the other issues Ikea face. But the wider issue is the impact that all of this has had on Ikea USA’s brand culture. Here again, we hear more stories and quotes that underline the sense of rot that has set in. While Ikea has maintained a consistent brand voice externally, the different employee accounts suggest that internally, the tone has changed: “they’re doing all of these tiny things that are all adding up to us not being a good company to work for anymore” said one. So the external voice is maintained, but the employees feel forgotten and marginalised. If the idea is that the same demoralised employees are the ones expected to go out and deliver the bold new vision of customer centricity, it’s hard to see this playing out well for Ikea in the long run.

The notion that the internal and external brand of a company are two sides of the same coin is not a new one, and clearly there is room for difference between the two – but it is apparent that Ikea is not getting this balance right. Room must be found for customer-centric organisational change to accommodate employees and the idea of ‘what’s in it for me’, and it’s clear that Ikea did not sufficiently speak to this. Whilst one could attribute this to oversight, or analyse the quality of the company-wide discourse that ensued following the introduction of the O4G initiative, the critical factor is this: were managers equipped with a framework for the conversations that would inevitably take place through the changes?

The sense is that the leadership contingent of Ikea USA was simply not given the preparation, tools or training to properly guide their teams through the restructuring. ‘A framework for conversation’ was lacking – a roadmap to guide employees through the journey that lay ahead, and to enable dialogue that simultaneously crystallised the new sense of purpose that the changes entailed, the new behaviours that were required, and a sense of what new benefits employees could look forward to. It’s not enough to just define those aspects and communicate them over time – it’s the synthesis of these different elements into one idea that enables leaders to clearly and consistently make sense of the everyday for those around them. If you want to improve an area of your business like customer experience whilst consolidating and reinforcing brand culture, you need this framework for your leaders. It’s fundamental.

The feedback and thoughts from the actual employees on the shop floor at Ikea attest to an internal concept of customer experience that is at best delivering incremental improvements, and at worst, is the early warning signs of a crumbling brand culture. So while the stories are undoubtedly worrying for the leadership, the good news for Ikea is that the employee comments give an honest account of the problem, and this is where the manifestation of the problem can become the solution.

Illustrative stories of this nature are vital to an organisation. When times are bad, they illuminate problems and make strategy very real. When times are good, they serve to show why the changes are to be believed in, and indicate to those who are not quite there yet that there is a place for everyone. So one key approach for Ikea would be to focus on identifying stories that validate the structural changes, present the case for why everyone can feel a new sense of purpose in their new capacities, and also ensure that the picture is a holistic one. Embedding a storytelling faculty of this sort becomes both a barometer and a loudspeaker for company culture.

It’s the synthesis of the illustrative stories with respect to a single, dominant, strategic narrative that gives managers the chance to maintain clarity for their team during times of change. Time and time again, we have seen that an integrated programme that puts these two key storytelling pillars at the heart measurably delivers for our clients, and creates a long-term internal capability to manage future change too.

At The Storytellers, we know that listening to employees, ensuring that everyone has a voice and is recognised, and celebrating the everyday stories that inspire and give meaning through times of change are the key factors in how structural change can deliver on the lofty promises of new strategies.

Ikea would be well advised to keep the conversation going – and make their next goal to create and celebrate new stories that truly show the benefits of change for all.

What can we learn from the Yellow Jackets?

Posted on by Marcus Hayes

We Brits are not the only ones facing a political crisis. Whilst we endlessly debate our exit from Europe, the good folk of France have been taking to the streets to vent their feelings about their government. ‘Who are France’s ‘Yellow Jacket’ protesters and what do they want?’ headlined NBC News. The question was prompted by the lack of political leadership behind the protests. This is no legitimate government opposition; it’s a real movement of change.

Putting aside the politics, and the antics of the protesters, what interests us at The Storytellers is the identity this movement has adopted. We know that creating a strong and emotive identity can help to motivate and mobilise people behind change efforts. And this is a great example.

They’ve taken the neon vests French drivers are obliged to carry in their vehicles in the case of roadside emergencies and use them to create a visual symbol of solidarity: the ‘Yellow Jacket’ activists. By donning their ‘high vis jackets,’ this disparate group of people, whose only physical connection is through social media, now feel like a united force. The jacket says, ‘“I belong.”

The identity is both practical (most French people own one) and symbolic. This is something you are supposed to keep in your car. It’s decreed by government. Unleashing it from its usual role feels like an act of rebellion which is just what the protesters want to create. And the ‘Yellow Jackets’ have now become a short hand for the media to use, communicating to others and raising awareness of the cause.

In a recent talk, Michael Bierut, the designer of Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign, talked about physical symbols being the ‘new logos’. Reference the women in America who donned their ‘PussyHats’ when displaying their displeasure of President Trump’s behaviour. Of course, physical motifs are not new; just think of the power of the Poppy. Maybe the shift is how these identities are developed. After all, if you want to create activists, why not give them an active part in its creation?