Insight article
Tangibility and Big Brother
Articles like this one from Australia’s The Age are valuable endorsements for our approach. We agree wholeheartedly that storytelling is a critical and valuable component of change.
However, they give little insight as to how to actually go about storytelling in organisations. Experience tells us that there are many who yearn to develop a storytelling culture (because it makes total sense), but when you have an organisation of 50,000 people, perhaps dispersed all over the world, that yearning turns into a great big bear of an issue.
The answer is to make storytelling practical. Create tangibility around it, with a clear process, with creative tools that make it easy to implement and sustain. Everyone has a talent for storytelling, so you have a captive audience ready and waiting, but like any business you need a plan to make it work. You need a clear structure and process.
You may think I’m deviating here into a big ramble but what I’m about to say about structure is relevant. I don’t watch Big Brother (am I the only one in the country that loathes it?) but I found to my surprise that I was watching it with my 15 year old son the other evening. From yet another evening of drifting, nothing-to-do mindlessness in the House, one of the older ladies (Lesley?) took it upon herself to lead a meeting where they passed a banana round as a symbol to represent ‘my turn to speak’ and discussed the chores and gripes that each one had. Sudden structure. A meeting place (sofas) was agreed, Lesley the Leader facilitated the discussion, hands went up, the banana circulated. An agenda was formed. Actions were negotiated and agreed (even if they did go to pot later – I’ll never know and don’t really care). The discussion was opened up to include everyone – they all had a chance to make their voice heard.
So structure and tangibility (even if it is via a banana) can help make things easy. You’re on our website so if you can’t find another company that does storytelling in structured and tangible way, point your cursor to the top of the screen and have a look!
