Flipping the Script: How Story-Based Thinking Powers Successful Transformation
Every story you encounter can be summarized in two words: “something changed.” In the worlds we consume -- from literary fiction to leadership memoir to business case study -- change is a required dynamic to maintain our interest and win our affection. We follow the hero because she’s moving through a landscape defined by unexpected challenges, fresh opportunities, and perpetual uncertainty.
In the world of story, a blend of ambiguity and courage compels our attention, and new surprises delight.
In our worlds of work, however, we’re told that surprises don’t delight; they disrupt. Here, change is unwanted. We seek steady states, new normals, strategic certainty, accurate forecasts, frictionless experiences, tight project management, granular metrics, ever-expanding dashboards. Even our corporate vocabulary demands that if we must do change, certainly we must be able to manage it.
In a paradigm where change is threat, by any measure available the vast majority of change initiatives fail to achieve their stated goals — from digital transformations to operational redesigns to blueprinting exercises to culture shifts. When we approach change as something to be governed or endured, and attempt to discard the dramatic essence of change, we miss more than our organizational targets. We miss the chance to spark the imaginative power of our teams, foster the heroic potential of our leaders, and stimulate the myth-making capabilities of our communities.
Story-based Thinking invites us to view company change through the lens of narrative design, and ask a revolutionary question:
Why can’t organizational transformations capture our imaginations like the stories to which we’re drawn?
Why can’t change happen in a company setting as it plays out in the dramatic arcs of our beloved epics? With uncertainty as virtue, discovery as joy, struggle as formative, and victory secured through the heroism of the collective?
By applying Story-based Thinking, leaders and teams can transform transformation. The psychological, sociological and behavioral dynamics at play in story-building and story-consuming give each us the resources we need to engage fully in the gifts that change has to offer us.
As a result, we can emerge from transformation seasons having secured not only the goals of our business, but have safeguarded our own evolution into a more connected and humane community.
