INsight/ Stories for Change

Photo by Jacob Mejicanos on Unsplash.

Manila, 24 November 2021 — What if they shared the story you told them?

Story

It happened this week and some of it goes back to a hundred years ago. On the days that I don’t exercise in the nearby park, I do it at home while watching a documentary or episode of a series that allows me to learn something new. Some grab me, others don’t. This week, I wondered why I didn’t get bored watching the historical drama of Downton Abbey. Or of watching people adapting to a colleague with autism in the contemporary drama of Good Doctor (by the way, I prefer the Korean original over the US adaptation). 

Then I realized that I didn’t get bored because I could identify with the characters as they struggled to make changes happen in that particular time and place. Next, I reflected that how these stories grabbed me was not so different from when, as a child, I hid in bed with a book. There was tension, and not just in the stories. As I read it under the sheet with a flashlight, I was hoping that I wouldn’t be caught by my Mother, who would regularly come to check if I slept on time.

The truth is that we all like a good story. And we can tell them too. The urge and desire for stories, together with some basic storytelling skills, are practically built into us from when we were children. However, somewhere during our schooling and as we started climbing the career ladder, we lost our intimate connection with stories, replacing it with the skill of making presentations that involved data and bullets. And so we practiced improving our public speaking skills to talk at others and convince them about our view or project. And, as we worked so hard at that, we lost our way to the hidden treasure!

Challenge

This week in Grow3Leaders, the participants in the 8-week challenge are starting to rediscover what it takes to tell a good story, including a dose of tension and drama, like what they watch in their favorite series. The stories they are creating are their own, and they are about how they have, together, influenced a positive change in their workplace in the past few weeks. The stories will surely be more exciting when we hear about the tensions and the ups and downs they have experienced along the way.

Such storytelling is part of what we call the Multiply behavior that leaders practice to influence other people for change. One of my mentors in storytelling for leaders is David Hutchens, and he describes storytelling as helping to “move ideas through organizations.” I like that metaphor. To get this to happen, we need to overcome several hurdles. The first one is to actually start telling stories rather than just thinking about it.

So why does all of this matter to you? Using your everyday skills of observation, you already understand that there is a need for change to happen in your organization if only to adapt and thrive in our time of increasing uncertainties. Just like we understand about the need for Climate Action after being informed by the latest scientific reports and COP meetings. However, more data and a better understanding do not make change happen, as shown by researchers Kotter and Cohen (2012) in The Heart of Change, and by Dellaert and Davydov (2017) in their work on using the Head-Heart-Hands model.

Question

What these researchers found is that change will not happen in organizations until people start making a deep personal connection with their emotions and their behaviors. Until then, they will just keep talking about scientific, economic, and other factors with an objectified, 3rd-person perspective, which is what we normally do in our Observed World, meeting after meeting, and conference after conference.

To make change happen, however, we need to move our arguments from this impersonal 3rd-person perspective of It and Its into our Personal World of I and our Social World of We. And that, precisely, is what stories and storytelling allow us to do. By connecting at an emotional level, a story can move us to action. We can discover it as a therapy for change. Just as Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalyst, did when he famously exclaimed “Where It was, there I shall become” (my italics). 

So my question for you this week is about getting going to make ideas move through your organization. What story for change will you craft and tell to get people touched and hooked in a personal and emotional way, thereby opening the door to action? Remember, presenting data and knowledge won’t make that happen. It’s telling the story about what the data shows that matters, with a personal aspect about you, and an explanation of why it matters. What if they shared the story you told them, what would happen then?