Storytelling enables different swaths of the population to all care about the same issue by meeting them where they are and drawing them in.

—Liz Fosslien

As organizations disentangle from the mechanistic worldview rooted in the Industrial Revolution in favor of a social systemic worldview, storytelling rises from extracurricular to a core means of leading social systems.

In this context, the effectiveness of leaders can be predicted as a function of the quality of their vision multiplied by their ability to translate that vision into a compelling story and draw others in.

Since the development of language, stories have been foundational to social systems, creating shared meaning, belonging, and purpose. They have also been among the most powerful agents of change throughout history, forming central themes and mantras around which people have connected and taken action.

Storytelling as a Strategic Organizational Imperative

In the context of an organization, story is foundational, with conscious and subconscious influences on individual and group behavior ranging from purchasing decisions to collaboration style in meetings, front‐line behavior, and employee sense of purpose and belonging.

More than ever before, due to the ubiquity of the Internet, people are able to create and sustain connections all over the world, which equates to a new degree of visibility to other jobs, workplace cultures, salaries, and the societal impact of organizations.

This elevates the importance of story within the organization, as people are increasingly leaving jobs when they do not feel connected to the company's mission, values, or leadership.

Story also has an impact on recruiting. When I was considering working for Underwriters Laboratories (UL), I looked into its history and was excited at the prospect of being a part of an organization whose founder had been hired to examine the safety of the electrical wiring in the Palace of Electricity in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, one of the last stages in the war of the currents between Edison and Westinghouse. My interest grew when I read on and learned that in the early days of electricity, whole city blocks were burning down before UL developed standards that quietly set the stage for the safety we take for granted in the twenty‐first century. When I learned that UL was privately held, controlled by a nonprofit focused on safety, security, and sustainability, I was sold. I was so excited about the stories around the company that I recruited a friend of mine to join the company with me, and convinced him to join on the basis of the same set of stories and what I had observed about the organizational culture throughout the interview process. He started a few months after I did.

Within the organization, the pride associated with its impact on and place in history was palpable, together with stories about delighting in the process of applying science to test and certify products for safety before they go to market.

The stories at technology companies, which do not all have the same luxury of longevity, are based on symbols for shared values and identity, often tied to the tangible work product of the organization. These elements of story and symbolism, represented either physically or virtually, have the power to shape the tone of an organization.

As someone who has held a badge for both Amazon and Microsoft, I have often been asked about the difference between their organizational cultures. What I typically share is that when I worked for Amazon, my experience of the organizational culture was that its intensity was viewed internally as an asset, and took the tone that not everyone could cut it, whereas Microsoft took the tone that emphasized inclusion and empowering everyone within the organization to do their best work.

A story that I often share that is subtle, but representative of the difference between these two organizational cultures, is about the first time I received an email reminder to update my password at Amazon. On the first notification that I received about it being the time of the quarter to update my password, there was a small table that listed the names in my organizational hierarchy up to Andy Jassy, who was then the chief executive officer of Amazon Web Services, with a date by which each leader in the hierarchy would be notified if I failed to update my password.

Microsoft's password update notification, on the other hand, had no such table, and a manager would be notified on the final notification before the deadline. This is a tangible example of how easily a short story—only two paragraphs—can have the potential to color one’s perception of two of the most powerful companies in the world. Organizations that recognize the economic value of stories and symbols within their organization are best potential to achieve or retain market leadership in the twenty‐first century.

Closing the Story Circle

When an organization espouses a set of values, members of the leadership team must be consistent in their interactions with their team members and in interactions with front‐line workers, and they must close the story circle from the boardroom to the front line.

The story circle opens when leaders communicate a vision and a set of values for the organization. The circle is closed when stories from across the organization and from the front line are shared back with the rest of the organization or publicly. This communicates to your organization that you are paying attention, and ultimately that what they do matters.

The opposite of this can be observed in cases when a senior leader shows up for a meet‐and‐greet that is published broadly, but the senior leader is not interested in hearing from front‐line workers or the company is not adequately addressing front‐line worker needs.

Most leaders assume they should communicate what is going to happen, but take it to the extreme in an attempt to appear confident and decisive. In the case of the COVID‐19 pandemic, many leaders decreed the change. Others communicated the options that had been considered, leadership awareness of employee concerns, various options being considered to address those concerns, and whom to reach out to with any further questions or concerns.

Liz Fosslien, author of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, shared with me that research shows that if you frame change as an experiment, people are much more willing to adapt. Ironically, many leaders, when attempting to communicate decisively, are actively working against the psychological foundation required for meaningful change.

The application of this lesson in the context of Autonomous Transformation and initiatives involving advanced technologies is that silence from leadership generates uncertainty, which triggers a fight‐or‐flight response in workers. Organizational leadership teams need to define and communicate their values and their vision for the future of the organization. Once these have been communicated, consistent adherence to those values must be observable and communicated, with organizational directives framed in the context of the ongoing conversation between leadership and the broader organization.

But a conversation between leadership and the organization alone is not enough to shape a social system around stories. This can be observed in the context of political systems, where the top leadership communicates visions and values, but subgroups below the top level of the system maintain subsets of values, shared symbols, and stories in which they find community, identity, and belonging.

Within an organization, if a change is to be accepted in the social system and subsystems of the organization, the same story will need to be communicated differently and by different people. Leaders need to communicate a specific story to board leaders. A different version needs to be crafted for leaders to communicate to managers. Depending on the change, leaders also need to announce to individual contributors, but in parallel, managers need to personalize the story to their teams, appealing to their values and cultural contexts.

Storytelling as an Agent for Change

Investments in storytelling should go beyond executive communications to define an underlying set of frameworks and symbols for sharing ideas (the most formal representation I have observed of this is at Amazon, where written communications such as the “backward press release” and the “6‐pager” have become embedded in its social system). This will eliminate wasted time and the untapped potential of additional ideas from across the organization.

In other words, if someone does not get an idea, they cannot give feedback, resulting in a loss of the potential of additional value layered on top of the ideas. This is why most leaders are good storytellers—it is not a result of becoming a leader. Becoming a leader is a result of communicating effectively and rising through the ability to stand on the shoulders of those who have come before or from having benefited from a diverse set of perspectives across the organization.

In the context of future solving and organizational reasoning, it is important, in socializing theories, hypothesis, data, assumptions, and tests for feedback, not to assume there is shared understanding. Immediately after communicating a vision, strategy, or tactical plan, test for understanding and chart it to the level of understanding necessary to get to the desired future.

When communicating across generational or cultural lines, when a label is not resonating with the audience, a story can substitute as a vehicle for the underlying message. When Liz Fosslien gave a copy of her book, No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, to her father, he told her he was not sure he would ever understand her generation. After he began reading the book, he called her back and told her that he wished he had understood the concepts she had written about before he retired. The label of emotions mixed with work was anathema to his generational context. The stories, however, were relatable and were able to resonate with him.

Nancy Duarte is among the foremost experts on story, communication, and persuasion. In 2022, Nancy was gracious enough to spend 90 minutes with me, and I got to learn firsthand about the power of story and persuasion from her.

A powerful storytelling framework, modeled by Nancy Duarte through analysis of the greatest speeches through history, is called “The Secret Structures of Great Talks” (see Figure 20.1).

When presenting the case for change, whether from a leader to a board, a manager to a team, or an individual contributor with a vision for a new idea within the organization, this storytelling framework can be leveraged after determining an envisioned future (“What could be”), initially by contrasting “What is” with “What could be” to bring others into the organizational reasoning process and subsequently at the onset of each chosen initiative to provide clarity on the purpose of the initiative and to generate momentum and a story around which the social system of the teams assigned to the initiative can form bonds and cohesion.

As Duarte frames it, this begins with understanding who the hero is in a business story. When presenting, the hero is the audience, not the storyteller. When leadership tells stories about culture and initiatives in which they are the heroes, the result is disempowerment and disconnection. When leaders frame stories around initiatives the organization will undergo in the context that the people who make up their organization are the heroes (think nurses and front‐line workers during the COVID‐19 pandemic), they can light the fuse on meaningful and lasting change across their organizations.