Why storytelling is the most important tool for organisations
I started my career back in the mid 1990s as a storyteller. I had visions of directing movies but I ended up writing, directing and producing corporate videos and the occasional documentary.
I tried to retain the creativity that it haven me such pleasure since I was a teenager but the more I got involved with the world of business the more I got sucked into a world of hierarchy, ego, models, frameworks, and endless jargon. But to hold a conversation with these people who I was often interviewing meant learning their world.
As such, my employer sent me to a reputable management college to study an MBA. At the time it felt good to be among management grown-ups and talking about strategy, operations and value propositions as if they were templates to be completed. Now I realise that this was the time I ceased being a storyteller and became a walking textbook. I now also appreciate that it’s in the interest of business schools and consulting firms to push the idea of frameworks, gant charts and models because they want organisations to become dependent on them.
Storytelling and communication are still major challenges
However, after 20+ years of working with organisations – usually at a fairly high level – I know that at the core of most issues that organisations have – by which I mean problems with trust and challenges regarding influence, engagement, change, performance and productivity – all of these issue can be traced back to a lack of effective communication and a lack of effective and impactful communicators.
I’ve always believed that the we are most influenced by the experience of others. Most people don’t actually live their lives according to to models and frameworks, it’s about instinct, mindset, and character, which is why stories of experience are much effective than a business school academic’s research paper. Once upon a time we produced a video case study with client testimonials almost on a weekly basis. Now it seems that stories with real people have been replaced by the Net Promoter Score.
Alas, Michael Porter’s Value Chain model is not nearly as inspiring and motivating as a story about the organisation and what makes it different. Likewise, graphs and charts used to report a commitment to sustainability will not engage an audience as much as a story or case study will.
Tapping into emotions is more effective than data and models
Emotion is core to being human. Comedians make us laugh, photographers have made us cry, authors can raise our heart rate, an oil painting can cause us to reflect and become nostalgic. Why don’t businesses don’t tap into these range of emotions in the same way? The artist, photographer and author are all story tellers – the content, tone, delivery and style are what make us laugh, cry or have palpitations. Businesses and organisation should be harnessing the ability to connect with their audiences on an emotional level – particularly when it comes to non-customer stakeholders.
I’m a visual storyteller and I also write but visual storytelling is particularly compelling because of our ability to read images much faster than text – this stems back to days before the written word when the most effective means of communication was to draw on the cave wall.
Today, each of us has the ability to look at an image, interpret the meaning and therefore ‘read’ it, in just milliseconds. With a sequence of carefully crafted images we can literally read a visual story that might require reading 2,000 words or watching a ten minute video to comprehend in the same way.
We live an image saturated world so we should be using images to tell more stories.
Let’s get back to storytelling and engaging audiences and solving today’s organisational challenges in a more effective way. After all it was storytelling that was key to Steve Jobs’ turnaround of Apple where he turned a niche computer business into one of the world’s largest companies with a growing and loyal customer base.
Andrew Cameron – I help with storytelling
I am a writer and documentary photographer. I work with NGOs, and corporate sectors including retail, finance, technology, construction and manufacturing to engage audiences through stories and case studies.
Find out more about the services I offer here.
I have written a book, Making Documentary Photography, which can be downloaded here.
