Leading Business Change Through Storytelling

Implementing high-impact change requires you to challenge the purpose and goals of a business system. This process starts with changing your organisation’s narrative. Guest lecturer on the Leading Sustainability: High Impact Leadership online short course from the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), Ella Saltmarshe, discusses how storytelling can shed light on existing problems, create a vision for the future, and influence widespread change.

Transcript

Story is really important in the work of changing systems.

I think about three qualities of story that are important. So, story as light, story as glue and story as web. 

When I talk about story as light, I talk about the illuminating power of story. So, the way that story can shine a light on the cracks in a system, can help us see the existing landscape in a new way, and can help us see the future differently. So, for example, brilliant investigative journalism is an example of using story to shine a light on the cracks in the system. But it’s not just enough to tell individual stories of pain, say. Those stories have to be connected to the wider causes and solutions for it to be systemic. But, so great investigative journalism is an example of using story as light. 

The second way you can use story, is thinking about story as glue. And that’s really about the cohering power of story. So, you can use story as glue in the context of bringing very different stakeholders together. You know, a lot of high-impact change involves doing that. And one way of starting that conversation is by getting people to share quite personal stories. So, you begin with empathy before you have to start to try and bridge the difference. And story is also an important cohering force when you’re trying to build movements, or you know, even trying to build movements within organisations. Story is essential for people having a sense of belonging, a sense of believing in something bigger.

And then finally, there’s story as web. And that’s about the nest of narratives that we live in. And working with that is about looking at the personal narratives we might have around an issue, the cultural and even the mythic narratives. Then it’s about authoring a new story, preferably co-authoring that story, with the communities you’re wanting to work with, and then finally it’s about pollinating that new narrative out into the world, so it exists in lots of different places. 

The reason that they’re so important is because when we want to change a system, often if we want to have the highest impact change within a system, that’s about changing the purpose of the system, it’s about questioning the goals of a system. And if you want to work on that level, the narrative is foundational. If you start to change the story about what that system is supposed to do and why it exists, then many other changes will flow from that.