The untapped potential of stories in a corporate context State of play
Businesses, organisations and tertiary educational institutions have latched onto the fruitful use of story. They continue to increase their understanding of the psychology of stories and the power of story to raise awareness, capture interest, engage, stimulate thinking, and evoke responses. They have seen that a story can be a small container holding potential for huge, meaningful conversations.
A story might not take long to tell, perhaps little
“Anthropologists contend that 70% of everything we learn is through stories.” - Michael Margolis
more than a few minutes, but the impact can be enormous. Conversations that serve to move their businesses forward. A little like the ‘butterfly effect’ that quantum physicists talk about, and that some companies have used successfully in their advertising. The majority however have still to get to grips with story.
Many businesses and institutions appear to be
stuck on the tip of the iceberg. Their endeavours are largely limited to the “same old, same old” telling of their corporate history and making a corporate values statement, using internal ‘war stories’ during times of transition or to motivate employees by the re-telling of heroic customer service deeds. Their story ‘reach’ in some cases extends to formulating scenarios (possible future stories), the use of case studies by trainers (where more and more trainers utilise story in order to illustrate and impart lessons, and integral coaches invite coachees to re-frame their ‘stories’), and leaders who pepper their talks and presentations with stories, anecdotes, metaphor, phrases that pay.
Contents: Page 2:
The untapped potential of stories in a corporate context
Page 4:
The brain and branding: Build a better brand, boost your bottom line
Page 7:
Collectively making sense of business situations and issues
Page 12: Engaging people through the use of story
Page 15: Tell to win and win and win: A cautionary tale and a traffic light systems for business story tellers
Still others promote internally to employees and
inculcate their values via the use of illustrative and wisdom stories, so that the values may be lived spontaneously. All of this is valid of course, but much more could be done.
The fastest growing area, albeit it off a relatively small base, is the use of story by organisations in order to forge emotional connections with customers. Largely the preserve of the Marketing Department, these organisations collect and tell, or invite their customers to tell stories in order to get feedback, enhance and personalise their brand and product offers. They practise depth - marketing, and some use metaphor elicitation to listen to customers and apply a number of story techniques to convey their message. In the Sales domain, the accent is still on product-success and illustrative stories, although a few enlightened companies are focussing their selling efforts on making an emotional connection with customers. Knowledge Management is another area where the collection of wisdom and the application of knowledge may profitably be spread more widely through the use of story. The practice of using personal anecdotes in order to make sense of challenging issues stemmed from Knowledge Management and Chaos Theory beginnings, and
2 Halo and Noose | May 2012
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