WHY THIS WORKS
This co-creative approach takes a little more work. You need to schedule several hours for the workshop, give the “storytellers” time to prepare some notes, and give the rest of the attendees some tools to capture what they’re hearing. But the extra effort is well worth it. Here’s why.
First, this process forces a meeting of the minds. It helps leaders to not only hear, but personally invest in the story – a story that each of them helps to co-create. Leaders that are able to weigh in on each piece of the story are more likely to buy in on reinforcing it when it counts, even if their edits don’t make the final cut.
Second, it leads to crisper, tighter communication. As part of our storytelling workshop, we explicitly ask for input from everyone, leveraging the group’s eyes and ears to hone in on the key messages that hit on the organization’s most important hopes and concerns. Different teams, different offices all have different questions to address. Input from the entire leadership team helps surface all of those questions and make sure the narrative addresses them directly and clearly. Most importantly, it helps the team frame the work. The idea of framing is central to Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson’s work on building stronger teams and higher-performing organizations.
According to Dr. Edmondson, effective framing “provides a compelling answer to the question of why a particular project exists. What purpose does it serve? What value does the project offer to employees, customers, or society. The leader’s job is to articulate and help people cohere around this shared purpose.”[5]
The three-part structure we use breaks the story down into clear, fundamental, purpose-centric chunks – where are we, where we want to go, and what comes next – and allows the team to shape each piece separately and deliberately. The most important part of the story might be the future state. Asking the organization to accept a change without being explicit about the value the change offers is akin to the exasperated parent who falls back on the excuse of, “because I said so.”