The danger is that storytelling can sometimes become a cliche and in so doing lose its underlying power. How many times have we heard the following sentence thrown about – man is a storyteller…

To avoid sounding like gossiping house husbands over the garden fence, story telling needs a sense of context to ensure the meaning shines through.

This sadly means most strategy is told as lines of text projected onto a wall.

PS Marc – great facilitation tip. thanx

There is a vast difference between a storyteller who recognizes that what they do is an interactive form of engagement vs one who goes on autopilot and tells the same story the same way regardless of who they are with. Yes, it is easier on the trainer to tell their stock ‘driveway story’ at 10AM just before the break because….well, they always tell the driveway story at 10AM before the break. Less mental processing but the shine comes off that story sooner or later. You see much the same thing in customer sales reps who have developed a few great stories but mistake their telling the story for focusing on the impact they are having on those with whom they are speaking.

Great stories are compelling; we retain more of what we hear when we have an opportunity to resonate to the story, if not with the storyteller directly then with someone who accompanies us on this spot in the journey. And if not at that time, then we need to retell some part of the story to savor its relevance.

Here is one exercise on corporate culture and storytelling that I like to facilitate: in a group setting I ask the group to help me reveal the story of the company culture, but with a twist…I’ll ask one person to begin at the beginning and soon ask another person to pick up where that first person’s story left off. As we go around the room, the challenge is to build on the story so far. At various points I’ll interject with comment like “As these events were taking place, under the surface people in the company were thinking…” or I might offer up, “Not everyone felt this way. Tell me about the divisions in the culture because people had different events occurring in their parts of the business”. As the story unfolds the group typically gets engaged in building this shared story, some even interject their own questions to the group, and at some point I ask them to now summarize for me the core attributes of their culture as revealed in their collective story. Perhaps you’ve don’e something like that with your own clients…

….but that’s another story!

Marc

All the best,
Madeleine

Social media has fundamentally changed the traditional customer service paradigm. It has opened up what was traditionally a closed one-to-one transaction and made it publicly available to all. Anyone who can be bothered can now take an active (or passive) role in someone else’s query or complaint.

The adoption of Twitter by an increasing number of companies within this space to provide a more immediate and transparent communication/feedback channel is truly innovative.

First, it was your very last comment that really captures the distinction between innovative companies/people and others that simply dream big: that is, innovation is the capacity for both novel ideation and execution. Execution without novel thinking just aspires to become operationally excellent; novel thinking without execution often stops with just dreaming out loud.

Second, so often I see companies become nostalgic for ‘the good old days’ when everything was simpler but seemed impossible, with necessity driving the innovations that led to early success. This ‘back to the garage’ mentality (as in HP’s effort to recapture the founders’ experience) is admirable, but misses the opportunity to leverage the benefits of size and experience.

I’m with Adrian in his comments on leveraging new technologies that enable collaboration and with it foster innovation. Just look at our little nascent blogging community, the connections and the springboard it provides to our own innovations.

So glad to see your post!