Stop Storytelling your Organisational Culture

Storytelling Obsession to Promote

Storytelling is more than telling stories to promote. Still, when we look at how organisations and entrepreneurs have been using it, it might as well be defined as an ‘art to tell stories to promote with embellishment’.

There is power in declaring your story and future based on what you believe made you where you are. So why not find the perfect personal or collective description of you, your company, or your product?

But that is not the first – let alone the only – thing to do. If we don’t start looking around and listening before telling, we will drown in fantasy.

The obsession with telling (and promoting) generates narratives that are just deepfakes, strongly partial and void of the complexities of life.

Storytelling can be strongly monologic

Your communication agency or personal story coach will give you the techniques to tell a better story. And you do, looking at yourself and what will impress the audience.

In many ways, the focus on impressing your clientele and social media feed is flooding the world with the artificial. It is less about what you want to say and more about what you think others want to hear.

Not listening generates stories perpetuating fake news that impacts the real world more than ever. All you need is something surprising, emotional or told a million times for it to be ‘good enough’ true. 1

Unprincipled marketing has made fake the norm within businesses while creating a catchy story for a brand. When exposed, one brand that created a fictional artificial origin said, “Although fictional, it is inspired by ‘true values'”. 2 Right.

Stories to Understand

We can work with stories to understand and to listen. We listen to multiple voices from society or an organisation to avoid our monologic creation.

When we want to influence complex environments, rather than using trends or decontextualised big data, we ask for experiences.

When we collect perceptions of reality from multiple eyes rather than creating an overarching story that will rule them all, we dance with diversity before we make choices.

Instead of storytelling, we first want to storylistening.

We explore what is before changing it simply because assuming we know what we want to change is as delusional as thinking we can fix it.

Think about your company’s culture. You have a good idea of what you would like to see differently, but can you identify what needs to be changed? If you do, you might as well fix it, but it’s likely a bit more complex than that.

A call for change that does not investigate the present is widespread. And more often than not, a change of clothes does not influence behaviour as you would have wanted.

Leave Story Creation for Later

That does not mean creating a collective story representing a collective is not influential. When we do it, we can tap into being creative in areas that have been invented anyway, so why not give us the best version of it?

It is an excellent form of organisation, identity and projection. Still, it can also be a glorified form of bureaucracy, especially when it happens too early, with the power to condense and define acts as a drive to the status quo.

So, if general stories, full of signifiers and archetypes, are great for expressing the desired intent, direction, or aim, they are not good for understanding people in relationships.

The type of stories we want, which make society before they become a movie blockbuster, is multifaceted and multi-voiced. There are many stories; they may be paradoxical and often contradict each other. And they are stories that we can read in a multitude of ways.

Storytelling is a form of organisation and can generate a needed standard reference. However, culture or society is only partly made of shared past connections. Telling stories of past organisations, on the other hand, shows the self-organising side of community, the emergence of relating to each other.

Storytelling and telling stories

Only the ones holding the organising power can do storytelling. In contrast, everybody can tell stories.

We need organisation and self-organisation to be surfaced to tackle a complex issue.

In the end, if you want to organise or if you want to send a message, go ahead and tell, but if you decide to listen to understand, you might want to ask for stories rather than go out telling them.

Listening can help you identify the underlying stories and genuine things you want to influence and change. So keep tuned for some accounts of working with stories in clients and the underlining narratives we have discovered.