Sometimes when I get an especially meaty comment on this blog, I publish is as a blog entry since comments don’t appear very prominently on A Storied Career. Such is the case with this comment by Paul Stewart of New Zealand’s On Brand Partners, who commented on my entry about strategy and story:
There is no doubt the wave around [strategy as story] is building. We use stories and narrative a lot in our work, but for our friends at Anecdote, it’s their bread and butter. They are doing fantastic work working with CEOs and their teams to help them build stories which explain their companies’ strategies. [Here, Paul referenced a piece on Anecdote’s site about story and strategy.] for a small insight. Interesting to think ‘why’ stories are so effective in this context? Sure there’s the usual thought – stories tick the box on many of the principles of effective communication. Go deeper, and science tells us that stories actually change the way we think and the way we act. For example, neuroscience highlights to us that it is through “stories” and the “experiences” people have that new pathways are created in the brain (by discovering insights for themselves), which ultimately influences how we make sense of the myriads of data — such as in typical strategy documents — we are exposed to in the world (or in this case the organisation).
The CEO’s perspective is unique — I often say that he or she is effectively the
only person in an organisation who will really lose sleep over ‘how does everything integrate, or fuse together’. It’s a question I often get asked by CEOs — “what’s the glue? How do I get everyone aligned and engaged.” Of course they can’t do the “fitting” or the “gluing” — they rely on everyone else to do that. Think of culture as the neural patterns of the organisation.
Stories illustrating and reinforcing vision and strategy are an important conduit in creating new organisational mindsets (c.f., neural pathways at a company level). They allow everyone to have those ‘aha’ moments – an insight that connects what they do to the “something bigger.” As that happens a different pattern of behaviour starts to emerge from within the organisation. Whenever CEOs (and any leader for that matter) ask themselves “How do I create the right mindsets?” rather than “How do I change behaviour directly?”, stories start to become the key tool in their kit. It’s even better if they use the stories as a stimulus to develop dialogue with and, amongst, their people. I suspect that in each of the examples you’ve highlighted, the CEO has either consciously or unconsciously adopted that starting point.