Strategy and Storytelling
One of the hardest things for a leader to do is to make strategy come to life, creating a sense of urgency and enlisting the voluntary efforts of people to achieve that strategy. A strategic plan is full of details about objectives, goals, performance indicators etc. Ugh. Dry stuff for most people.
What that strategic plan should also be is story about the future. In a lot of ways like a hero’s journey, and in this story the leader is most certainly not the hero. The reality of executing that plan should be that each and every person in your team is that hero and that they will also be reaping some of the benefits of the future state of affairs at the end of the story. In the case of strategic planning it is a form of a never ending or iterative story.
I think the trick though is to find ways in which to describe the future state as a result of achieving goals that kills a desire to stay in the status-quo. Not everything has to be super transformative, and not every single goal will resonate with everyone, but each goal should resonate with someone, making their lives better.
This is where there may be a larger story that everyone hears and smaller chapters of the story can be shared in more intimate settings. Let’s travel to the land of make-believe for a few paragraphs. 😉
We have our protagonist professional services firm that is planning to upgrade their quality management system(QMS). Pretty dull stuff. “Team, we are doing this QMS upgrade to meet the requirements of customers in the power generation industry that will earn our unit increased profit and sustainability, and we will do some interesting work.”
Sounds pretty anodyne.
A story could be told: “Team, I am really excited to tell you about this next initiative, but first let me tell you about this project that Gordon led for Scots Power Generation as a sub to Limerick Industries: First of all the technologies we were dealing with were really cool (expounds on technical aspects for a bit), and the way they are doing power generation and storage is very innovative and is going to create a far more robust energy grid for the country. The project leveraged transferrable skills from John, Priti, and Zhu in hydro-electric with some interesting new twists where we got to be a little more creative. The built systems worked really well, and the client was great to work for. We made a healthy profit on the project giving us a bigger bonus pool for all of you. Let’s hear it for Gordon, John, Priti and Zhu!! The good news is that as a result of this project Scots now wants to work directly with us for some projects in the next 4 months. The bad news is we currently do not have the quality management systems in place that meet their requirements. True to our founding values we are going to pull together an A-team to upgrade the QMS. We can get this upgrade done in 3 months, in time to qualify with Scots. We will look forward to a whole lot more interesting work, and some bigger bonuses for everyone! Gordon has volunteered to lead this, who else is with him?”
Here’s what happened in this story: Gordon’s good work along with others in the team was recognized…meaning the team that gets the QMS done is probably in line for some recognition. Presumably Gordon is someone the team likes, and this gives some social proof to persuading people to volunteer to be part of this QMS upgrade team. There is a new future identified that sounds exciting and it is meaningful as a result of doing something good vis-à-vis the grid, and if the storyteller can work in past successes and thank those that made those achievements even better. Now we have hit on consistency from a persuasion perspective. Telling this story then also shares the big picture with the team and they will better understand the context. To relate that story takes what, and extra 45 seconds or a minute?
Story telling can also be helpful going in the other direction as well, to one’s boss or client, but I’ll expand on that in a future newsletter.
Storytelling is fundamental to how we understand the world. Before the written word, stories were THE means of capturing wisdom and transmitting it across generations. Biologically modern human beings have been around a lot longer than the written word. I think we still make sense of the world through stories.
When it comes to leading, the really great can take that strategy and communicate it so well that people can see that future and pull together to get there. The following article has a great synopsis of some of the reasons JFK was a great storyteller:
I also really liked this slideshare and have added the author’s book to my “books to read” list:
Happy storytelling!
Nik
“If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” – John Steinbeck
