Storytelling in Support of Change: It’s great except for when it’s not.
By Katherine Sanders
I enjoy a good story as much as the next person, but I’ll admit that I’m not the best storyteller. I’m too engineery… I tend to either cut to the chase so that there is no suspense, or I get distracted in the middle of my own story and digress, losing the story line.
But I am aware that storytelling has a long and powerful history for humanity. Leaders use narratives to shape movements and inspire others to action. We make space to hear others’ stories in order to connect and build trust. We share our own stories in hopes of being heard and understood. Storytelling is human.
Some years ago, storytelling started flooding into leadership development programs, sold as a way to shift organizational culture. I heard a story about an attempt of storytelling-as-culture-change from a prospective client.
Their organization had recently hired a consultant to teach storytelling to their people in order to heal their “negative” work climate. The consultant lectured them on the power of storytelling, making sure they understood that people remember stories, that good stories have been powerful change agents, and that compelling storytellers can influence many. The consultant taught them the characteristics of compelling stories and gave the group a list of rules about which stories could be told (only positive stories!) and how they were to be told (repeating lessons learned, appreciation for others, etc.).
A few weeks after the consultant left, storytelling was abundant, but morale was lower than ever. Leadership was not only disappointed but confused. Why didn’t the emphasis (aka, insistence) on telling positive stories reshape the culture?
As an outsider, it seems obvious. A “negative” culture doesn’t exist because of the negative stories that are told. The stories people tell are based on some reality they are living. There is something about the work system that influences people to tell negative stories. True, those stories are powerful and in turn, influence others, but changing the negative stories doesn’t change the negative realities that people are living.
To shift the culture, we have to understand what the realities are and change them. For example, can people support their families on the wages we pay? Is the workload too high to be sustainable? Are we controlling how people work, how long they work, who they work with, etc.? Are the jobs boring? Are there career tracks for professional growth? When we know what the issues are, we can address them. If we have a poorly designed work system, we can expect the people in it will notice and say something about it!
To make matters worse, the requirement that people only tell positive stories – controlling the narrative – was my tipoff that this approach was doomed to fail. If we use storytelling as a device to control others, we’re moving in the wrong direction. We cannot negate someone’s experience and expect to improve relationships. We can’t try to control others and expect to improve trust.
I didn’t end up working with this organization – they weren’t interested in addressing the system issues that were causing their “negative culture.” They were interested in the appearance of positivity, which is not even a band aid, but only a denial of reality.
To read about storytelling from a c-suite perspective, check out my longtime friend & collaborator’s post of the same title, Storytelling in Support of Change: It’s great except for when it’s not at patrickfarrellconsulting.com.
If you’d like to comment or contribute your own view on this title, please join us on LinkedIn at KatherineSandersPhD and PatrickFarrell.
