Category: Change

The state of storytelling

Posted on by Jack Roberts

So much of our world is wrapped up inside the constancy of change. Only a few short years ago we had no smart phone. This is just one example of many innovations and progressions that have impacted our society. Think about how our daily story has changed since that time in 2007 at the launch of Apple’s iPhone. We now hold the whole of the world’s organised information on a device in our pockets and use it to argue with strangers or adopt an endless scroll of news we did not curate ourselves. We have greater access to data and solutions to large scale problems than ever before. But, how do we make sense of this?

Concurrently to information becoming the moniker for an age, the next age is emerging. Throughout human history each age seems to hold the seeds or perhaps the needs for the next age within it. This has been true of the information age. We are entering the age of stories. According to creativity author Daniel Pink,1 the information age will be supplanted by the conceptual age, the age of ideas. He posits that “right-brain”or “creative” people will be the next group of leaders in power in business and culture. Once all of the information is aggregated and we know what must be done, one of the only differentiators that will emerge is how it gets done. Pink believes this is why creativity will emerge and the conceptual age will begin. We see it happening today. Two companies may have similar products, similar market share, even similar values but the one engaging their audience creatively accelerates performance. This presents new challenges, too. A company may have extremely innovative concepts, may even be on the cusp of disrupting the market, but, without an inspiring way of communicating their ideas there’s no way to transform the concepts to measurable results. As we move past the information age and need to figure out what to do with all of this big data, we need ideas. But, without storytelling the ideas just become another kind of data point. And what happens in a world of competing ideas?

This is where storytelling comes in. Storytelling could well be called the craft that takes information into the form in which we can assimilate it, and do something with it. In this sense, then, concepts alone, ideation alone, is simply not enough in today’s changing and volatile world. With so many ideas and concepts to choose from in any given moment born from the sheer volume of information how we tell our story is more important that ever. Because this will become our differentiation in a sea of people speaking up for their ideas to be heard.

The Storytellers exercise these specialties for our many clients around the world bringing strategy to life through the power and influence of storytelling. One method in which this can be achieved is through the adoption of bespoke story-driven creative campaigns. By placing creativity through print, video, film, or television within a wider strategic narrative, our approach connects people to a bigger journey and motivates them with a purpose. Distilling the story down to a simple creative idea can amplify the essence of the overarching message, inspire people to learn from the ideas of their peers and make connections to their own. By equipping people with the means to challenge mindsets lasting behavioural change can be accomplished. By adopting a multi-faceted creative campaign alongside the launch of their Purpose, Vision and Values, one of our clients accomplished 2.1% volume growth and increased its trading margin by +30bps to 8.8%. In turn, the approach received industry wide recognition and remains integral to their strategy two years later.

We help inspire, accelerate, and transform their performance in the marketplace. Story or narrative is the power that will carry concepts forward at the end of the information age. The power of visuals drives a compelling narrative communicating to the feelings of people looking for a connection with your organisation. After all, data without a story is simply a set of numbers. Information without knowing how it best fits into the pressing needs of your customers is only idea competing with so many others. Stories create context and connect hearts and minds. These connections remind us of our needs and we then link those needs to the organisation telling the story. At The Storytellers we build these kinds of narratives everyday. At the end of the information age, we will need more than concepts. We need the power of narrative to communicate them. Perhaps then, we are entering into the Age of Story.

 

1 Pink, Daniel. (2014). A Whole New Mind. Riverhead Books.

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

This is not about accelerating change

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

You’re probably familiar with the image above: it’s pretty simple. What we have is a pipe, and a caption in French below that tells us that, well, that this actually isn’t a pipe.

So is it or isn’t it?

The thing is, there’s no easy way around this. Even if you think it is, or isn’t a pipe, you’ll always have a lingering doubt. Even if someone gave you an elegant explanation, you’d never really be comfortable about whether there is a pipe or not, or what the point of all this was in the first place.

In fact, it would have been a lot easier if Magritte had just told us it was or wasn’t a pipe, wouldn’t it? Some of the more cynical among you might even think it would have been easier if he just hadn’t shared this painting with us at all.

This is the frustrating point that Magritte makes so eloquently: sometimes, words and images can betray each other… and then life can get pretty confusing. This may or may not be a pipe, but what we can certainly say is that Magritte’s painting is a cautionary tale: it’s no accident that this painting is called “The treachery of images”. This is a story of the terrible things that happen when you get the messages absolutely right… but forget to make sure that the fine words are reflected everywhere else.

So, what does this have to do with accelerating change? Unlike the painting itself, it’s actually quite simple:

When it comes to inspiring and accelerating change, just getting the words right is not enough.

Leading change is never a question of just telling people what you want to happen: if you really want to accelerate change, inspiring belief is crucial… and the only way to do this is to make the message come alive in an utterly consistent and complete way.

It’s a set of visuals that make an audience’s pupils dilate in wonder, as they realise someone has listened and understood. It’s seeing the same new consistent branding across everything you touch, the penny dropping that change is happening. It’s feeling the electricity in a room when a leader walks out on stage, lifting everyone onto the same hymn sheet.

It’s the dawning feeling you get when everything you see, hear and feel over an extended period of time clicks into the same place and tells you that this change is for real.

So the next time you want to make things happen, remember Magritte’s exasperating painting of a pipe. It’s not enough to tell people, it’s not enough to show them – make sure your change lives everywhere, in everything, and for everyone.

Is employee engagement a fad? Maybe. But does it matter?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

I went to a stimulating discussion event earlier this week at the Groucho Club in London, hosted by Engage for Change. The event took the format of a debate. The resolution? ‘Employee engagement is just another management fad’.

An audience poll at the beginning revealed around one third to be in agreement that employee engagement is nothing more than a fad. And in the end, the speakers in the ‘yes’ camp apparently won some converts. About two thirds of the raised arms were in support of the resolution.

The sad thing is, even if employee engagement is a fad, it’s not much of one. The ’employee engagement crowd’ can at times be quite far from C-suite execs. The concepts of employee engagement and its relevance to business performance can seem self-evident to its advocates in HR and organisational development circles, but they often struggle to gain an audience with those at the top of organisational hierarchies. A fad implies that everyone’s trying to get a piece of it, and that’s just not happening right now.

And here’s another problem: what’s the opposite of a fad? Surely something that’s not a fad would be concrete and obviously meaningful. Employee engagement, on the other hand, lacks anything resembling an agreed definition. David MacLeod’s report identified 50+ going definitions. Perhaps executives’ reluctance to engage with employee engagement stems in part from the fact that no one really knows exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about employee engagement.

But, at the risk of sounding a bit mystical, just because we can’t define something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You can argue over whether increasing employee engagement is worthwhile, or even possible. You can debate whether engagement is a means to an end (i.e. business performance) or an end in itself (i.e. the normative argument that employees should have positive feelings towards their work). But you can’t really argue that it isn’t a good thing (whatever ‘it’ is, exactly).

At its worst, employee engagement is nothing more than a manufactured “dark art that gives HR people something to do”, as one speaker put it. But that of course is a very limited vision of what engagement is all about. As we continue to discover in our work, there are so many things that affect how an employee feels about his or her working life, and it’s not something any single department can take on on its own. It’s not the narrowness of employee engagement as ‘just’ an HR function that keeps employee engagement from flourishing, but rather the breadth of the challenges is presents.

In our work, we’ve seen over and over again the transformative power of getting an organisation’s people genuinely behind a new initiative, new behaviours or new ways of working. Our goals aren’t simply to increase engagement—that’s a by-product—but rather to make the organisation seem more human, leaders to become more authentic, goals to become more realistic, to allow people to collaborate and discover better ways of working. These are just some of the aspects that inform whether employees are engaged, and it varies immensely from company to company. So I’d in fact agree, at least in part, with the resolution. Employee engagement is faddish in its vagueness. It’s not nearly enough to just say ‘we need to increase our employee engagement’. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of things companies can and should do that will end up doing just that.

For a more thorough breakdown of the arguments presented at the event, check out Gloria Lombardi’s excellent write-up. And for a rousing employee engagement call to arms, check out the RSA’s Matthew Taylor in his 2013 lecture (researched by yours truly).

Feeling like a number?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

There seem to be many consultancies and operational experts who take the view that businesses function purely as systems. To improve the business, the logic goes, you must make the system more efficient. Cut out waste, grease the cogs, make everything more predictable.

Efficiency certainly has its place, but I wonder whether the days when businesses could get a clear competitive edge through operational improvements alone are behind us.

Take the example of Ford Motor Company. It made radical innovations in vehicle assembly, which put it far ahead of its competitors. But businesses now operate on a much more level playing field – with similar rules, market access, products and methodologies.

These shifts that have taken place allow us to see the roles of people and the roles of business systems as separate but complementary. Systems and technology have freed people from tasks related to implementing the system, allowing them instead to refocus their efforts on creating valuable experiences for customers. The question shouldn’t be ‘How can humans compete with robots?’ but rather ‘How can we quit trying to make humans and robots share the same roles?’ What seems to allow a business to distinguish itself from competitors today is its degree of human engagement – the extent to which people apply their own discretionary effort to the needs of the business.

For most companies in the globalised economy of the 21st century, drawing out the ingenuity held within their people should be a core leadership priority. The clients whom we’ve helped to achieve the greatest success in fostering behaviour change have been those who understand this approach, and who are willing to invest in their people in order to stimulate their discretionary effort and willingness to change. This cannot happen when employees feel their jobs are just one technological advance away from redundancy. We are approached by many organisations facing acute change challenges that they know revolve around the engagement of their people in strategic change – and not just in improving systems.