With the shock waves from Thomas Cook’s demise still reverberating around the travel industry, news this week that Hays Travel, run by husband and wife team John and Irene Hays, will be buying 555 of Thomas Cook’s retail shops has given a teeny glimmer of hope to 2,500 ex-Thomas Cook employees who might otherwise be job-hunting.
Whilst this might have been a terrific injection of positive PR for Hays Travel, let alone a huge sense of relief for many ex-Thomas Cook employees, the task of doubling the size of a company overnight is a daunting task.
On a human level, once the initial relief has passed, the reality will kick in. Mr and Mrs Hays have already acknowledged that poor-performing shops will ‘swiftly be dealt with’. Uncertainty about the future will linger on for many, not to mention the pain of being ripped away from a much-loved brand to be adopted by another lesser-known business, triggering a massive sense of loss of identity and disgruntledness of losing its employer, could put significant pressure on the morale, energy, and overall performance of its people. And with the high street already suffering as a result of the internet, the reassurance of the need for bricks as well as clicks may be met with scepticism in many quarters.
Hays Travel has a fantastic opportunity lying ahead. But it also has a job to do, once the TUPE process is done and dusted, to motivate its new workforce, and excite them about its ambition for the future. In any post-merger or acquisition situation, without honest and clear communication, the negative rumour mill can start with a vengeance. If people are operating in a vacuum of communication, they will simply make it up themselves.
Creating and communicating a simple, clear and compelling story that celebrates the pride and talent of its collective workforce, acknowledges the pain of the circumstances in which they find themselves, but equally spelling out the huge opportunity that lies ahead, will be vital. People will need an anchor – a ‘north star’ to hold on to in the face of uncertainty and change. An inevitable period of mourning needs to be quickly replaced by a shared sense of teamwork, purpose and values, with everyone – whether existing or new to the business – understanding the contribution they can make to its success.
We have a packaging client which doubled the size of its company through the acquisition of a much larger rival a few years ago. By communicating an honest story of ‘Leading Together’ from the first day of the combined entity’s existence, it was able to engage its people from in the ambition and journey the business was on, despite the ‘tsunami’ of questions and maelstrom of information-sharing that followed the acquisition. It didn’t lose a single customer either. Such is the power of storytelling.
In early July Deutsche Bank, the biggest bank in the eurozone’s biggest economy, announced it was cutting 18,000 jobs – part of sweeping measures to reduce costs by approximately 6 billion euros over the next three years. Founded in 1870, the bank currently has 78,000 employees in over 70 countries. Any organisation about to lose a quarter of its workforce faces a painful process of transformation, but financial sector upheavals can have a particularly long-lasting and far-reaching impact if the transformation isn’t informed by a positive, inspiring story that looks ahead to a fitter, more profitable future.
Huge institutional changes create fear and uncertainty in a workforce, triggering a downward spiral of disengagement and plummeting morale. Highly skilled employees begin looking over their shoulders and investigating opportunities elsewhere; client confidence begins to dissipate rapidly as the waves of uncertainty ripple through the organisation to the public periphery. So the Executive team needs to galvanise behind a new strategic narrative – and quickly.
Deutsche Bank’s share price is currently at its lowest since 2007, so the stakes for its management team couldn’t be higher: tell a new story, and tell it well, or accelerate the metastasising perception of a business in terminal decline. Get this story right, and the transformation can rewrite an organisation’s history – it can even transform an entire economy.
Britain, February 15th, 1971: Decimal Day. After hundreds of years of fruitless discussion and stubborn inertia, Britain had at last accepted it was being left behind in a global monetary system that had embraced decimal currency centuries earlier. The rouble (1704), the US dollar (1785) and the franc (1795) were the envy of progressive economic thinkers who feared that Britain’s currency was stuck in a romanticised heyday. British currency was a complicated throwback to Roman times, where a silver pound was divided into 240 pence; over two millennia, it had spawned an idiosyncratic and complicated family of British coins which included the farthing, the shilling, the florin and the crown.
The idea of a decimal silver currency had been first floated by mathematicians over 400 years ago. In a debate on decimalisation in the House of Commons in 1847, the MP Sir John Bowring argued that “every man who looks at his ten fingers saw an argument of its use, and an evidence of its practicability.”
But the longevity of this archaic coinage was now deeply rooted in British culture, and its denominations were affectionately defended by its public. The ‘five farthings’ of the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ nursery rhyme, and the ‘thrupenny bit’ (three pence coin) hidden in the plum puddings served at Christmas, were intertwined strands of the country’s economic and cultural DNA. In addition, the changes to day-to-day structural minutiae required by the mooted new currency – telephone boxes and electricity meters would have to be refitted nationwide – made the public suspicious about how it would interfere with their lives. “I have not got the extra money to find for something I did not vote for and never would,” complained one guest house proprietor to her MP in 1970, a year before the watershed date now archly referred to as ‘D-Day’. “This has been forced on the public whether they want it or not.”
Either way, the public got their brand new pounds and pence on schedule, and without the disruption predicted by the new currency’s opponents. Given that the decision to convert to a decimal system had only been officially made in 1969, this success is a tribute to the efficiency of the government’s strategic storytelling and its willingness to listen to the concerns of its public. The unveiling of the new coins was staggered, and piggybacked on iconic cultural celebrations such as the 1969 FA Cup final, where the new 50-pence piece was used in the pre-match coin toss a full six months before its release into general circulation. By 1971, three of the six new coins were already in use, and a blitz of media publicity had prepared the public for the transformation, dissipating much of its fear (the sixpence, the UK’s most beloved coin, remained in circulation until 1980, so that the cultural habits of the past could dissolve more gently into the future). The broadcaster ITV aired repeat viewings of a short educational television drama, Granny Gets the Point, while the BBC createdan information film for schools called New Money Day. The messaging in this brilliant narrative was distinct and easily digestible: if Granny and the grandkids can happily welcome this transformation, so can you.
Through meaningful emotional connection, storytelling can reassure an anxious grandmother with unfamiliar coins in her purse, or it can re-motivate a disengaged and fearful workforce faced with the uncertainty of significant transformation. For the first time since the financial crash of 2008, Deutsche Bank has an opportunity to reset and refocus, uniting Executives and the global workforce around a new strategy as they chart their way through a complex and uncertain global business landscape. A narrative-driven approach to landing the transformation, and the resulting strategic shift, can ensure that everyone is part of the story of this organisation’s journey towards a fit financial future.
“Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand,” wrote the Scottish essayist Thomas Caryle in 1820 of the First Industrial Revolution. “Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.”
He was addressing a fear which seems eerily familiar today, as we embark upon the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an epoch delineated by Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. This is the era where the lines between the physical and digital are becoming blurred: automation, artificial intelligence, and mobile supercomputing of a power unimaginable to a previous generation, let alone the world of the 18th and 19th centuries.
It is the age of the ‘superjob’.
Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report identifies the ‘superjob’ as the apex evolutionary offspring of the ‘hybrid job’. Hybrid jobs marry technical skills with ‘soft’ skills; superjobs “combine parts of different traditional jobs into integrated roles that leverage the significant productivity and efficiency gains that can arise when people work with smart machines, data, and algorithms.”
The advent of the superjob creates a significant challenge for the leaders of today. Organisations need to be actively ‘recoding’ their activity, i.e. “integrating machines and humans in the flow of work and creating meaningful roles for people.” Without this crucial shift in perspective, businesses risk falling behind in the race to re-skill existing staff with the tools they will need for the future, and opportunities to recruit new employees already comfortable with this changing work dynamic – the ‘architects’ of the revolution – will be lost. By proactively replacing traditional job descriptions with inspiring new ‘job canvases’, in which the benefits of automation and augmentation to an individual’s productivity become central to the organisation’s story, a company can recode risk into reward.
This will take collaborative organisational imagination, and a shared vision of how man and machine in tandem can bring about exciting new outcomes – less Carlyle’s ‘mechanical’ men than humans using machines with their whole heart. Technologically-enhanced super jobs can be heroes of this revolution, not the villain.
In 2016, the creators of DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence company acquired by Google, challenged 9thdan professional South Korean Go player Lee Sedol to a five-game match against its AlphaGo program. ‘Go’ is the notoriously difficult 2,500 year-old board game played with black and white pieces on a grid of 19 x 19 lines. It takes years to master, with a quantity of potential moves that famously outnumbers the entirety of atoms in the universe.
Sedol, a boyish hero of the game ranked the second greatest player of all time, accepted the challenge with the nonchalant swagger of a champion at the peak of his powers. He positioned himself as the torchbearer of human intelligence entering the valley of this dark shadow of automation, the redresser of a balance lost by Gary Kasparov in his defeat to the IBM chess computer Deep Blue a decade earlier.
The story would be different in this sequel; now it would be the humans striking back. Sedol emphatically predicted that AlphaGo would not win a single game.
In the second game, and already ahead in the series, the program played a maverick winning move so exquisitely odd, so alien, Sedol was frozen in its otherworldy headlights. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he said.
Sedol was crestfallen at the defeat, and apologised for letting mankind down, but at the end of the series he said that he was overwhelmed with gratitude to AlphaGo for allowing him to see the game he loved from a fresh and exciting new perspective. The program was not the obstacle, or the enemy – it was a catalyst for novel ideas and possibilities.
Sedol reworked the story of his interaction with technology from one of hubris and defeat into a narrative of hope and possibility. Fear of the unknown had become the joy of potential; man and machine had created a strange and exhilarating shared adventure. This is the impact of the storytelling perspective – the “efforts, attachments, opinions” of your workforce protagonists can be transformed into a dynamic shared vision of a prosperous future.
This fluid labour pool of 2019 is changing in remarkable ways. In some countries, the pool is shrinking because of declining birth rates, to the extent that 45% of employers surveyed by Deloitte* worldwide say they are struggling to fill open positions – a number that rises to 67% among companies with more than 250 employees. In the meantime, freelancing is growing faster than overall employment in the United Kingdom, while longer working lives, new employee expectations and progressive parenting policies mean that flexible working packages which don’t skimp on benefits are now the mark of the world’s leading talent organisations.
Organisations are now faced with a challenge. How do they accommodate a fluid workforce without compromising on productivity, standards or ethical integrity? How do they pair a dispersed and ever shifting talent base with the needs of the agile era?
The world’s highest performing organisations know the answer is not just operational. It’s cultural: a matter of the values, behaviours and sense of purpose that binds everyone together. The narrative, in other words, that everyone is sustaining, and the individual stories that spring from their daily lived experience to reinforce this. Together, this narrative and these stories are an organisation’s roadmap. They are the touchstone for shared values and aspirations, and the catalyst for the core questions of inspiring leadership. Where do we want to go, and why? Why should you join us on this voyage?
Professor Brad Parkinson is one of the creators of GPS – the Global Positioning System that we all now take for granted as we embark on a journey to remote locations.
And Professor Parkinson prefers to use maps.
“Most people don’t pull out maps anymore,” he told the BBC in 2014. “They pull out smartphones. And then tend to blame GPS if the directions are wrong.”
Invented in 1973 by the US military, GPS relies on a network of satellites transmitting radio signals containing their current time and position, in a constantly evolving reappraisal of relative locations. In other words, there is no single ‘home’ – no fixed and commonly understood physical touchstone. My GPS says I’m ‘here’ – so why does it feel like I’m ‘there’?
Professor Parkinson laments the loss of the skill of map-reading, where travellers on a journey refer together to a shared destination.
The oldest map in existence, the Imago Mundi, dates back to between 700 and 500 BC. It is a carved clay tablet, depicting Babylon in the centre; a cuneiform text tells tales of the Babylonian mythology of its outer regions. On display at the British Museum, it is more than just the abstract depiction of a physical location – it is the story of a civilization. A shared identity.
Everyone embarking on your journey needs to be looking at the same map, however fluid your team becomes. Invite them on your journey – and then bring them home – with storytelling.
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.
In one simple phrase, the US equivalent of Alan Sugar had galvanised a decisive section of the American public like no other political slogan ever had. As the Obama era, with all its hopes and dreams drew to a close, ‘Make America Great Again’ powerfully made a promise to a vociferous, empowered contingent, inflamed some of the worst civil unrest the USA has seen for decades – and played a crucial role in delivering the presidency to Donald Trump.
Two years later, President Trump is half-way through his first (and possibly last) term as the domestic and international leader of the world’s biggest economy – and the time has come to re-evaluate the MAGA promise and draw some key lessons.
‘Make America Great Again’ is a phrase that invites analysis from all angles – political, social, psychological, historical and more. But what does MAGA mean from the holistic perspective of storytelling? What can business leaders take from this extraordinary example of storytelling and leadership, and apply positively to their own circumstances? How can business leaders win the hearts and minds of their own people – at the same time as scrupulously leading towards a positive future for all?
Let’s start with the words themselves – what part does each word play, and what is it about these words that make it such a powerful rallying cry?
Lesson 1: Give your rallying cry a simple and empowering verb.
‘Make’ – it’s interesting to note that the phrase does not start with ‘Let’s’ (more on that later). Instead, the phrase is a powerful directive to the individual: emboldening rather than unifying. Every individual has a role to play in this rallying cry, and that’s very empowering. So the verb selection is excellent – it tells people what they need to DO, and this is an essential element for any business rallying cry. When considering your own rallying cry, you need to ask yourself: what is the simple verb that essentially describes what we want people to do?
Lesson 2: Identify the one or two stories that really define your business and refer directly to them.
‘America’– this puts the whole phrase in a powerful, patriotic context. It’s a word that has been shown time and time again to resonate with Americans in a way that far exceeds the way British people respond to the word ‘Britain’. Consider how many films have the word ‘America’ or ‘American’ in them… and in contrast, how many films that feature any other nation in the title. The word ‘America’ represents an entire mythology – and referring back to this is incredibly powerful storytelling.
While using ‘America’ in any title has widely become a shortcut to interest and engagement in the USA, for businesses it’s much more a case of a listening exercise to identify what their own ‘origin myths’ are. Effectively, every business has its own language and stories from the past – stories that are meaningful to those that work there, and take on bigger, iconic meaning. Simply put, it’s critical for business leaders to use the language and stories of their own people in communications. America wasn’t Trump’s story – it was the American people’s.
What’s are your business’s’ origin myths? Find them and use the same language in your rallying cry.
Lesson 3: Set out an ambitious vision that doesn’t undercut where we are today.
‘Great’– the qualifier that sets the required goal. Necessarily vague (but usefully having the double meaning of both ‘excellent’ and ‘large’) and again, a simple, memorable word that keeps the syntax tight. For businesses, getting this qualifier right is so important – it goes to the specific kind of ‘good’ that is sought, and inherently reveals the perception of where we are now.
More often than not, the qualifier needs to reflect positively on where we are today, as well as speaking confidently to the heights we can reach tomorrow. As a business leader, if you’re going to include any negative element in your rallying cry (whether implicit or explicit), it’s so important to be thoroughly honest, clear and frank about any shortcomings that need to be addressed. By using the word ‘Great’ with all it’s negative implications in such an unqualified way, Trump implied that America was not good enough without speaking to the measurable change that was needed. One can see today’s unrest as a direct consequence from this. Shrewd electioneering – terrible leadership.
Qualify ‘what good looks like’ – and where there is a need to be critical, be utterly honest, transparent, and measurable about what the change looks like.
Lesson 4: The rallying cry must speak simply to the journey that a business is on.
‘Again’– the most important and contentious word of the four. In terms of storytelling, this goes directly to one of the most powerful archetypal journeys: rebirth. Positioning his campaign as the resurrection of a better America, Trump aligned his candidacy with a narrative that spoke of returning to a better time.
By consistently aligning his rhetoric around this simple, primal narrative, and condensing that narrative down to just four words, Trump powerfully used the principles of storytelling to audacious effect. He set out a journey for America to go on – and MAGA spoke directly to that journey.
The rebirth archetype is a powerful narrative that has precedent in the political sphere. Consider the memorable title of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography: ‘Long Walk to Freedom’. These words encapsulate the dramatic story of Mandela’s story: the years in prison, the return to the outside world, and his quest to unite South Africa in freedom. Not only was it a story that grabbed the attention of the entire world, it remains one of the best-known political biographies – the fact that those four words speak so clearly to the rebirth narrative is surely one of the reasons why.
The key difference between Mandela’s resurrection narrative and Trump’s is that while Mandela’s subsequent leadership fully focused on taking a divided country to a happier and more united time for all, Trump’s leadership has focused almost wholly on using existing divisions for political gain. There is still time for Trump to turn things around – but as things stand, it’s difficult to envisage a better America post-Trump, and all too easy to imagine one that is actually worse as a result of his leadership.
Defining the journey that your business is on is an essential part of business leadership. Understanding how this fits to the basic archetypal stories that feature again and again in human life and art is critical to how leaders speak clearly, confidently and concisely to the big shifts that need to happen to achieve success.
When defining your own rallying cry, consider: what is the essential journey that our business is on, and how can we speak to this directly in our rallying cry?
Lesson 5: Understand the dominant, and often unspoken, narrative
So Trump apparently uncovered a magical combination of words that spoke to the American people. But here’s the scoop: as a political slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’ is not new or original. Ronald Reagan used the same words as his official 1980 presidential campaign slogan, albeit with an inclusive ‘Let’s’ at the beginning. Even Bill Clinton used the phrase in a 1992 speech – so this certainly wasn’t a lesson in creativity from Trump. The phrase was already out there.
In terms of winning the election (interference and other subterfuge aside), the key difference was that Trump really tapped into a key dominant narrative in American culture. Namely, the swathes of white, lower-class Americans who had been bottling up disgruntlement, disenfranchisement and disaffection over many, many years. No-one had truly spoken about this narrative, or to it – but Trump and his team recognised this, and were able to communicate in a way that truly tapped into what for many people was an unspoken truth.
When we help our clients define their own rallying cries, it’s so important to really understand where their business is today. It’s one thing to define a strategic narrative and create a slogan that matches it – but it’s only by speaking to the current mood in the business that storytelling can generate renewed engagement and action.
So the question is: what is the dominant, unspoken narrative in your business, today?
Lesson 6: Think carefully about where your rallying cry is manifested – and try to make it physically iconic.
So far, we’ve just discussed MAGA in terms of the words themselves, the historical context, and how Trump deliberately created a powerful narrative that those words directly spoke to. But when it comes to designing a successful rallying cry, thinking about the physical space in which the slogan is manifested is just as important.
Purely in political terms, the MAGA baseball cap was a stroke of genius. Wearable, clearly identifiable with the Republican party, pointing to an everyman image, cheap to reproduce and purchase… and worn with formidable frequency by Trump himself. The MAGA cap has become a divisive icon of all that Trump represents, but from a design perspective it’s simply brilliant.
There’s a very simple lesson for businesses here: it’s not enough to just have the words of a rallying cry. It’s not enough to use them on printed materials or at one-off events. So often, businesses overlook the power of ambient design – any campaign must champion and celebrate the central messages, and making sure that this happens in physical space is another essential lesson from the MAGA campaign.
Where are the physical spaces in your own business – and how can you bring the story to them, and make it alive in their day to day?
Lesson 7: Use storytelling to deliver purpose, direction and fulfilment
MAGA was undoubtedly a successful campaign. When it came to making a rallying cry successful, Trump and his team overachieved, scoring a result that few political experts thought possible. When it comes to businesses coming up with their own rallying cries, there is clearly a lot that can be learned here about how to engage large and diverse populations in a movement for change.
But the divisiveness of Trump’s leadership raises serious questions about how storytelling ought to be used. We are widely held to be living in the post-truth age, and Trump with his MAGA cap is undoubtedly the poster boy of this. So, is it even ok to use rallying cries any more, and use the power of storytelling to engage people?
Firstly, the fact of the matter is that America generally does not feel that Trump is making it great again. Trump’s approval ratings are the lowest of any US President post WWII, and that is something that no amount of campaigning or catchy slogans can hide. It’s all well and good making promises, but what we currently see is a President holding back a very large tide of reality. Storytelling can help you be a more compelling, engaging and clear leader – but it cannot and should not ever be used to pull the wool over people’s eyes.
As a business leader, use storytelling and strategic narratives as a sincere, honest opportunity to progressively unite a leadership team behind a positive vision of the future – not to mask failures and inadequacies.
Lesson 8: Storytelling is the most important tool for empathy we have – let’s not degrade it.
The final lesson is perhaps the most important one, and where we need to be more emphatic than ever.
All around the world, leaders have a responsibility to use the power of storytelling towards a better future. From bedtime stories to Netflix box sets, stories are how we interpret the world, make sense of it, and take our cues for how to behave in it. Above all, it’s the most important tool for empathy that we have – and as we collectively navigate a world of increasingly complex challenges, we need storytelling more than ever to help us relate to each other across strange new boundaries.
However, it was clear from Trump’s narrative that the new America he promised was not for everyone – and this wretched worldview has been borne out in his post-election decision-making and rhetoric. He may have got the technical aspects of storytelling and a good rallying cry spot on – but his words have deliberately appealed to a latent bigotry, racism and fear in America, and this was purely for personal and political gain. As we look back on two years of utter chaos, hate and fear, it’s impossible to conclude that Trump has delivered, as a leader, on those promises.
As business leaders, it’s so important to inspire without overreaching. Finding that happy medium is a challenge – but here at The Storytellers, it’s one we’re used to. By defining an agreed strategic narrative, ensuring that the human value of the story is loud and clear, and creating a rallying cry that is both inspiring AND real, these are pitfalls that can be avoided.
Ultimately, storytelling is an enormously powerful way to engage hearts and minds. The potential that a deftly created narrative and a well-chosen rallying cry have to create real change on a mass scale continues to surprise the world – but there is a science to this that can be learned.
At The Storytellers, we are well aware of this power, and work closely with business leaders to define strategic narratives, rallying cries and powerful campaigns that engage whole organisations and make better leaders. By seeing storytelling as the perfect alchemy of logos, pathos and ethos, and by accepting our responsibilities as leaders in this, we truly can make storytelling great again.
Skid Row is many different things, depending on who you speak to.
At the level of moniker, it is a space defined both by placelessness and haunting, visceral proximity: a catchall catchphrase for the streets of deprivation and misfortune that squat, omnipresent, behind more comfortable, more affluent lives. To others, it’s an icon of the failed American Dream. To most, as the downtown LA for the down-and-out, Skid Row occupies a far more literal, yet equally impermanent, geography. For nearly 100 years, since 1920’s itinerant workers first flooded its streets, it has been the largest, most enduring homeless community in America; never officially designated, never planned, never provided for – yet searingly, undeniably, stubbornly manifest across the single square mile it occupies. In this exposed, juxtaposed world – around which skyscrapers and glossy apartments are emerging at speed, fuelled by the building boom that’s cannibalising remaining affordable housing – thousands of people have settled; many more since the credit crisis, which has seen a 23% spike in the county’s homelessness. The luckier ones have tents, makeshift shelters and trolleys. Many simply sleep in open air, enduring the relentless desert sun throughout the day.
To local officials, it’s a public health hazard and huge economic drain. Filthy needles litter the floor; gangs pitch tents and shift drugs; arson attacks on tents arise often from embittered neighbourhood feuds, damaging surrounding warehouses. The stench in the air is a reminder of the silent killers in the streets. With barely any accessible sanitation– around nine filthy cisterns to over 1,800 people – open-air defecation and urination regularly lead to deadly outbreaks of hepatitis, E. coli, meningitis, tuberculosis and much else besides.
The people of Skid Row are vulnerable, largely unemployed, often addicts, often suffering from poor mental health, sometimes ex-convicts. Yet to residents, Skid Row is also a community, with a strong sense of social injustice and agency – as evidenced by the thousands who last year voted to form their own council and unofficially elected their own mayor, known locally as General Jeff. Their problems, like the problems of all homeless people, are complex, interconnected and entrenched. There is no simple solve, and no clear political agenda to drive change through. And this pattern of soaring need, political obfuscation and frustrated efforts is replicated across western nations – at enormous economic, social and individual cost. So what is to be done?
Alex McDowell is not a politician, social worker or an urban planning expert. He has no expertise or experience with homelessness or poverty. He is more commonly known as the celebrated designer producer of films from Minority Report to Fight Club. Yet his work may be the answer to this mass social blight. By designing and realising complete, data-driven, alternative futures for the visionary projects he has shaped (Minority Report alone spawned multiple real-world patents), McDowell has forged the practice of world building: a blend of design and storytelling through which we are able to ‘prototype the future and provoke change’. Now, under the remit of narrative designer, McDowell heads up both the USC World Building Institute and Experimental design studio – a team governed by the belief that ‘[we] have the power to build the futures we want to inhabit. Not by following the trends set by our current constraints, but by leading each step forward through imagination and ingenuity’. At the heart of this discipline is the power of collaboration ‘to action the collective vision of our shared future.’
This may sound like lofty stuff, and it could be easy to dismiss in the face of such a grimy, glaring, immediate need. But for millennia, fiction has been the site of our most radical social revisioning. And today, technology-driven worlds mean we don’t have to stay on the page and in the individual mind to see a different world. At the Future of Storytelling, the softly-spoken McDowell urged us to see the deep power and pragmatism of this next-generation approach. The world’s problems, he said, are design flaws, not inevitability. They are a failure of collective vision. By listening carefully and learning from the wisdom of lived experience and diverse expertise – ‘coming to the table ignorant’ – we can take our current trajectory and imagine a new, better path forward. We can design a complete world by breaking down its structures – broken, in McDowell’s framework (‘The Mandala’), into context, scales, domains and ecologies. And when we can collectively tell a new story about what could be possible – when we can experience it as a vividly, coherently designed world – we can extrapolate backwards to solve the problems of the present.
For storytellers everywhere, for anyone involved in change of any kind, the potency of this practice cannot be underestimated. We can shape the future, instead of being shaped by it. We can build the world we want, not the world that will be. But we have to believe in the future we imagine before we can take action. We have to share the vision. And this is where storytelling becomes empowerment in its rawest form. To tell the future story – to build belief – to make it happen – has always been the art of leaders everywhere. At The Storytellers, this is what we help our clients to enact across their organisations. But in our VUCA world, where so little can be promised or known absolutely, this is no easy task. World-building is future storying born in volatility and speed. It draws on the wisdom of crowds to build the spaces we don’t know and can’t individually imagine. It allows for rapid prototyping and iterative testing. It uses virtual spaces to tests outcomes, not just imagination. It draws on the power of fiction to reform reality in ways that entirely redefine human agency.
Through this practice, the Experimental team has helped a Bedouin tribe of Saudi Arabia envision a sustainable future community; native Alaskan tribes engage the next generation in the story of their future and develop new food practices; biologists collaborate at quantum scales by allowing them to enter the world of a cell. Now, McDowell and his team are working with the Skid Row community to help them build their own better future as a self-sufficient, empowered community. Watch this space.
On paper, the story exchange doesn’t look like much. Sit with a stranger. Tell your story. Listen to theirs. Take on their story as your own and tell it back to a group. Such simplicity, in this age of bio-hacks and cognitive reprogramming and empathy increasingly understood as a neurological response triggered in specific conditions, and increasingly not at all.
But with this simple technique, Narrative 4 – a not-for-profit founded by author Colum McCann – have led an empathy revolution through the world’s schools and conflicted communities; giving young people bridges to each other and repairing the wounds of religious division, gang violence, gun crime, racial and sexual violence. Their model is fearless hope through radical empathy. They ask you to ‘dwell in someone else’s body, dwell in someone else’s country, dwell in someone else’s skin and mind for a while’.
They do this because as an organisation, they believe that if we can see our own story as valuable, and we know that the story of the other person across the wall is valuable, then we can begin to put right the vast majority of ugly things in the world. At The Storytellers, we powerfully agree, and have long admired the work they do.
Because of this, I was thrilled to have the chance to take part in a (dramatically accelerated) story exchange at the Future of Storytelling festival. With only an hour, we were paired off and given seven minutes each to share a story about ourselves; an experience that is, in and of itself, worthy of reflection (where to begin? How to choose? What do your choices say about you?). But the important thing to note here is the immediate gravity of the experience. The knowledge that you will take responsibility for a stranger’s story weighs heavily. You listen harder than you’ve ever listened. You try to piece together the things your partner says and does not say, and understand the silences between them. You build a bond in seconds because you know you have entered into a pact, however momentary, to protect the story of them. And as you re-enter the room, and begin to hear the stories being shared, you feel this bond in the wider group. Everyone listens respectfully, quietly. And this is part of the Narrative 4’s expertise. They create the conditions for people to share in unguarded, unusual and unselfconscious ways by laying the ground rules of respect, privacy and equality. Everyone’s story matters, however small or banal; however heroic or cruel, remote, or emotional.
We all carry around an inner story: who you are, why you are, what you’ve done – all contained in the single story you’ve just told your partner, however inarticulately. This inner story is an expression, not of fact, but of belief: a castle we construct from the fragments of experience, interaction, and outcomes we accumulate as we move through life. We experience this narrative, consciously and sub-consciously, as the fact of who we are. And this narrative, in big and small ways, determines much of our lives: how we conduct ourselves in the world, what we have the courage to pursue, how we treat the people we love.
When we’re young, this story evolves as elastically as our neural pathways. We learn from our interactions and reshape our sense of self accordingly. By the time we’re 25, this story is synaptically engrained; it becomes our short-hand to the world around us, making it harder and harder for us to change as we get older. To listen to another person tell your story is to see the same ray of light refracting through different prisms. You realise, in the most literal way – and perhaps for the first time in many, many years – that the story of you may not be quite what you thought it was.
For some people in the room, the experience illuminated a new sense of cause and effect; a new linearity; a different emphasis that betrayed an undisclosed truth. A new clarity on an unsolved riddle of lost love; a new accountability for actions taken or not taken. Those who had their story retold said it felt like a very powerful form of therapy: like walking around themselves in the therapist’s chair.
But above all else, the story exchange is about empathy in action. And in the care of the retelling; in the kindness of the details; in the fluidity of the story arc, taken so deeply to heart; in the visible connection between partners, who flinch and smile and steady themselves in synchronicity, there is something undeniable and wordless and true. Every story matters. Every story is different. Every story is the same.
It’s a messy business, the work of intergenerational definition. Almost impossible to do in real-time, the work falls latterly to the older cohort – tasked with setting the parameters that shape the next through the cloudy lens of age. These parameters are increasingly subject to anxious scrutiny from businesses concerned with the needs, wants, moods, skills and yet-unobserved deficits of the future workforce in a world that faces – in the short-term at least – a battle for competent new recruits.
The millennials – the most debated, disputed and denigrated generation to enter the workforce in living memory – will soon be the most dominant presence in the workplace, accounting for a third of all employees by 2020. At the same time, this 1.8 billion-strong demographic will also become our most dominant and voracious global consumers – making them the target market for the majority of the worlds’ increasingly millennial-led enterprises. Together, this is a decisive moment for the way we work, the work we do, and the things we consume. The millennial moment has arrived.
But as one generation gives way to the next – as the rule-breakers become the decision-makers – the anxiety persists, lacing questions of legacy with endemic categoric confusion about just who it is that will be taking up the mantle. Because despite the millennial moment we are now in, despite the presumably now-commonplace presence they exert on the office, markets and society at large, questions persist among politicians, business leaders, managers, marketers, media. Who are the millenials? Are they forty, or twenty? Entrepreneurs or flight risk? Selfless socialist or entitled brats? Woke or lit? Pink or yellow? What do they need? What do they want? How do they think?
By the Pew Research Centre, the line has finally been drawn. Those born in 1981 will be the first millenials. Those born in 1996 will be the last. The new post-millenial cohort – who have never known a world without smart phones, the war on terror, extreme partisan politics, austerity, immigration crises, and everything else that shapes a generation – present the next big headache. And just when we thought we were all getting comfortable with the new status quo.
I’m a millennial. So are many of my colleagues, and my clients. So, probably, are you.
So what do we want?
Spanning nearly two decades, the millennial experience, drivers and values will be as diverse as the life trajectories we’ve known. But there are some things we do all share. Our first, inescapable bond: we’re all post-recession. One way or another, as Pew observes, the credit crisis hit us with a ‘slow start’ – either losing us more developed careers altogether or stalling the ones we’d been promised.
A decade ago this month, my own breed of squarely mid-millenial watched Lehman collapse from the cloistered world of college: bankers in suits on sidewalks, clutching cardboard boxes and dazed faces. We didn’t understand sub-prime mortgages. We had finals. It was a ripple, we thought, in a world very far away from us. When we graduated, it was into an economy with almost zero opportunity. To be paid for work was a luxury that suddenly did not fit the new world order. Those with means could work for free. Many, most, could not. And to be young and unemployed – or young and underused, or young and exploited – is a bad thing for fledgling minds. So yes. We’ve been delayed. Because of this, we’re impatient. Where 62% of our boomer forebears were married with a house by the age of 34, this is true for just 31% of us. We are statistically unsettled, forced to place value on different things in life. We’re reformers, because we’ve had to imagine something better.
And because we’ll be working for a long, long time – to plug the gap between our lengthening lives and our shrinking pension pot – we need our work to be meaningful. Meaningful in the sense that we have a clear and positive impact for our teams, for our clients, and for society. We expect our work to support and align with our values, because we see our work as an extension of ourselves: the place where the majority of our time and experiences will be spent, for most of our lives. We demand authenticity because, after decades of unfettered capitalism, we’re highly attuned to the gap between brand and reality. We need to feel invested in, because work will be our life and our life will need to be enhanced by our work in ways that keep us engaged and productive in an economy where no one can ever afford to stop learning. We seek purpose because the great myth of money is no longer enough to sate our freer, more restless, more educated and global-minded appetites, in a world full of problems we can no longer afford to ignore. We crave a story to tell ourselves and our peers about who we are and what we do because this is the currency of our times, and we know that no one else is going to make our meaning for us.
So who are the millennials? What do we want? What do we need?
Meaningful work. Positive impact. Opportunities to learn and contribute. A story we’re proud to tell.
