The following article in the important Scottish newspaper, The Herald, in Glasgow was kindly passed along to me by a colleague Tony Quinlan.

Make your company a real success story
Adrian Murdoch explains how true fables can transform corporations.
May 18, 2004

What unifies every religion, from Christianity to Islam, from Judaism to Buddhism, and even all of those slightly odd wiccan beliefs that it’s best not to ask too many questions about, isn’t just the promise of a get-out-of-jail-free card for eternity, it is their reliance on parables to get their point across.

It’s a tradition as old as mankind.  You can be pretty sure that when men returned to the cave after a hard day’s mammoth hunting, the long evenings were whiled telling tales about the one that got away.

Now the strength of stories is being harnessed within the corporation.

Organizational storytelling

Too many companies spend thousands of pounds and many months designing the five key messages of X or the seven lessons of Y.  Before the inevitable PowerPoint is booted up, most of the audience is in a coma.  But people understand and remember stories – Little Red Riding Hood is succeeding where the mission statement failed.

“How many of the Ten Commandments can you remember off the top of your head?” asks Tony Quinlan, chief storyteller with Narrate, a consultancy specialising in the use of stories in companies.  “And these are commandments that carry rather more weight in society than any corporate mission.”

But then, he says, look at parables.  The prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the Gadarene swine – all of them can be recalled, even by those who have not set foot in a church since their school days.
At first sight, the idea of storytelling within an organisation may appear a little on the touchy-feely side.  But the list of people and companies who take it seriously as a management technique is impressive.

In recent years, luminaries such as the management writer Tom Peters, and Howard Gardner and John Hunt at the Harvard and London Business Schools respectively, have all identified storytelling and narratives as crucial to the culture – and success – of organisations.

The World Bank and IBM have run storytelling programmes, Hewlett-Packard has created a corporate mythology – key stories that illustrate company values – while Nike executives tell new employees tales from Nike’s history.  In Britain, the Countryside Agency, Royal Mail and Met Office have all looked at this too.

But most convincingly of all, NASA uses an online journal to share knowledge throughout the space agency’s project managers through the use of storytelling.  Alexander Laufer, its editor-in-chief, says: “Generating, sharing and discussing stories is an excellent way of converting tacit knowledge, and an effective method for quickly assimilating new learning.”

Well, if rocket scientists are looking at this, then there must be something to it.

Why now?

Why now?  Quinlan believes it is an idea whose time has come.  Corporations have placed too much emphasis on scientific management in recent years.  If you can’t measure it, then it isn’t valuable.  He thinks the way forward is to look at what he says is generally called the “soft stuff”, such as innovation, loyalty and passion.

There is a growing interest in and awareness of emotional development.  Not, he emphasises, that you have to ignore rational elements, “otherwise you would be hippies passing round talking sticks”, but if a company wants to be strong, it needs to look at both sides.

What Quinlan tries to achieve when he goes into an organisation is for people to understand where they are going.  It is worthy of note that all the companies which have used these techniques successfully are hefty behemoths.

“Small organisations still have their own myths,” he says.  At its most basic level the “us against the world” mentality keeps everyone facing the same direction.  He adds: “The companies we work with have been through divestments, mergers and acquisitions where it hasn’t quite worked, plans where people don’t fit in anymore.”

There is inevitable cynicism, but Quinlan’s technique is to get people to explain where there company is by telling a story.  Although many feel self conscious at first, they tend to come round.
In a recent project, he was working with the division of a larger organisation whose job it is to make redundancies.  He got the management of that division to talk about where they saw themselves and the company going.  The head saw himself as a gardener pruning out dead wood.  His number two saw the team as ants, living in an anthill and about to be hit by a meteor.  “And that’s with people in the same boat,” says Quinlan.

The key is to find what people believe, then to understand where the company wants to go, and finally to create the story that binds them together.

Quinlan uses the metaphor of the hero’s journey from status quo, to the event that causes the change, the tests and finally the resolution.  It is a narrative framework that covers virtually every story from Greek myths via The 39 Steps to Star Wars.

But rather than Odysseus travelling around the Mediterranean, Richard Hannay fighting his way round the Highlands or Luke Skywalker taking on Darth Vader, the obstacles here are regulatory issues, technology, market share or problems with management.

The importance of telling the truth

While metaphor is an incredibly powerful tool, what companies have to be wary of if they use this technique is not telling the truth.

As Steve Denning, former director of the World Bank’s knowledge management programme, now an independent consultant, emphasises: “When I say true, I do not mean factually accurate, but rather authentically true.”

The example of a story that is factually accurate but lacking in authentic truth he gives is “700 happy passengers reached New York after the Titanic’s maiden voyage.”

While no-one could disagree with the facts, the real truth is that the ship sank and 1500 passengers drowned.  The problem, says Denning, is that many corporate communications take this form.  “The story is accurate, but there is lurking below the surface some negative element that totally undermines the intended impact of the story,” he says.

Over the next few years, Quinlan sees these techniques being increasingly adopted in the public sector because there is a growing recognition that a new approach is needed and organisations are prepared to try new ideas.

“What is more natural than stories?” he asks.  “They get hardwired into you on your mother’s knee.”

To contact Tony Quinlan: telephone 44 (0) 1525 861590 or email tony@narrate.co.uk

To read The Herald (Glasgow)

For more examples of Storytelling in The News, go to the Archive