How Do You and Your Organization Master the Art of Storytelling? 2040’s Ideas and Innovations Newsletter, Issue 93
Issue 93, February 2, 2023
Origin Stories
Storytelling and narrative have become the buzzwords of modern marketing. You’ve heard it before: What’s your organization’s brand story? Make your organization come alive through narrative. Help customers relate emotionally to your business by telling a story. And possibly the most ominous: Tell your story, or else your stakeholders will write it for you.
Storytelling has been around as long as humans; the 50,000-year-old cave paintings and petroglyphs tell stories and validate “I was here.” What those stories mean is still a matter of debate. We recently visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York and saw an exhibition on Guillermo del Toro’s making of Pinocchio, nominated for one of this year’s Oscars as a best-animated feature film. Aside from the fascinating models and videos of stop-action technology, there was a storyboard about the arc of Pinocchio’s life that caught our attention. When we studied the production notes, we realized that we are looking at the blueprint of the story of an organization’s life, from birth to old age, and life after death when it transitions to another level.
Life Stages
Although it’s popular to look at any organization’s (or stakeholder’s) timeline by demographics and chronological age, we advocate looking at and relating to customers and the workforce, and yes, even organizations, by life stage.
We wrote extensively on that topic in our book, “The Truth About Transformation.” And have focused from time to time on helping our newsletter readers in understanding the importance of “life stages”.
In that spirit, we took del Toro’s storyboard and applied it to the life stages of an organization. It is a useful exercise for your team to give context to your organization’s current story, its origin story and subsequent history. One might also call it a cautionary tale as a time capsule of the life of an organization, its system(s), market orientation and shared purpose.
Birth
An organization’s origin is built on a foundation of optimism, excitement and promise that manifests hope, commitment, faith, stability, trust, bonding, and love. Optimism often begets lofty aspirations and risks are easily dismissed or overshadowed by the optimism of perceived possibilities. Not unlike how a parent relates to an infant, a founder, who is charismatic, often brings an organization and its teams to life with that same optimism and promise.
Childhood
As the organization enters its metaphorical childhood stage, it is driven by wonder, joy, purpose, loyalty, naivete, obedience and the promise of success and impact. The childhood stage experiments with fantasy, game-playing and adventure. Sometimes it even quickly dismisses what isn’t working or what isn’t going well and focuses only on what is working and/or going well. This stage is still powered by optimism.
Adolescence
The years of maturation of an organization evolve into acceptance, pride, success, and fame. But the same as young fearless adults, the organization can also experience manipulation, exploitation, and conceit as it grows, and leaders become guilty of hubris. Adolescence also brings confusion in determining who the organization is, has become and wants to be. This is especially true when it wants to be different than what its market (stakeholders) expects.
Adulthood
Reaching an apex of success and maturation in an organization’s life brings clarity, freedom within expectations, and control. But this is when taking things for granted can become a risk resulting in anxiety about survival along with the frustration of what adulthood demands: the expectations of what maturity should be. Tension develops across the organization when the journey from birth to adolescence and adulthood is less exciting, more routine. Risk is a road less taken, performance is set at a high standard, and there is little tolerance for failure.
Death
If an organization falters and is failing, the culture and ecosystem become desperate, confused, fearful of loss, and longing for the past. The culture and ecosystem include not just the internal organization, its workforce and leaders, but all stakeholders whether they be customers, shareholders/investors or even governments. At this point, it’s a wide-open field for all stakeholders to transition from influencers to analysts seeking to determine what went wrong with their own advice on how to fix what is broken. At this point, the organization and its story heroes can simply die and disappear, or they can find a way to radically transform into something changed or completely new. As humans, we may not have the same opportunity for rebirth given our natural limitations, but collectively an organization comprised of many individuals working together for a shared purpose can seek to be reborn shedding what it once was and becoming something completely new and vital.
Life After Death
Transformation can be liberating for an organization as it faces a rebirth. With experienced leadership, an organization can reinvent itself through balance, recognition of lessons learned, and hard-won wisdom. And the life stage cycle repeats itself with the caveat of learning from the past, bringing forward and leveraging what still remains relevant, embracing a new or renewed shared purpose, and most importantly having the courage to be forthright, if not critical, in ensuring mistakes are not repeated.
Who Is Your Story For?
Typically, we write our stories for our customers as a marketing strategy. As Inc. states, “It’s no secret that storytelling is a powerful force for driving learning, retention, and engagement, which is why it is so central to the marketing that you do as a business.” To inspire what informs your organization’s storytelling, one approach is to remember what it took to start your organization, and is that journey still an anchor to who the organization is today? Another is to identify is there is a moral to your story. Does the purpose and promise, according to the organization’s origin story and birth, still exist? Is it still relevant? And how does your story relate to your workforce, workplace culture, your organizational system? Your shared purpose?
Writing the Story
Using del Toro’s storyboard, try writing/rewriting your story from this different perspective. Learn how by exploring the full article>