Catch up with our event: The Year of 3 Stories
We believe that the art of storytelling in business has got lost.
Storytelling should influence every aspect of a thriving organisation - its direction, how it builds culture, and how it communicates its value to the world. Somewhere along the way, that broader application has been overlooked, and storytelling feels like it’s been locked into a tactical marketing bubble.
But that’s underestimating just how powerful story is in bringing people together.
Storytelling is innate to people. From the moment we can talk, we engage with and understand the world through stories.
And yet, in a business environment focused on short-term performance, it’s become too easy to dismiss storytelling as ‘the fluffy stuff.’
But storytelling is not a soft skill. It’s one of the hardest and most essential skills today. At a moment where setting a clear vision feels hard, where aligning teams feels like an uphill battle, and where selling anything requires instant connection with your customer, good storytelling is absolutely indispensable.
We see three stories as fundamental to the success of any organisation:
Future Story. How do we get our organisations moving in the right direction? How do we use storytelling as a tool to make decisions and as a filter for what we do, and what we don’t do?
Culture Story. What are the stories that teams tell each other? Not just the official narrative handed down from leadership, but the lived stories that shape the organisation’s culture from within?
Selling Story. How do we take our story to the market in a way that resonates? How do we ensure that it’s not just about what we want to say, but also about what our audience wants to hear?
We brought nine experts together to discuss these stories and how they’ve used them to drive success in their businesses.
1. How do we make the future feel as real as the past?
Talking about the future is easy, and often quite exciting.
But the present and the past exert a heavy pull. If you don’t connect your vision of the future to the right-now, it will never materialise.
We brought together three brilliant people with very different perspectives to put Future Story development under the spotlight: Charlotte Matier from the Alzheimer’s Society, Kian Bakhtiari, Founder of THE PEOPLE (and author too), and Chris Gough, Director of Brand and Marketing at 3 Mobile.
Our panellists are working with very different Future Story challenges: getting society to engage with the seemingly impossible task of beating to dementia; getting organisations to open up to fresh perspectives of young change makers; wrestling with integrating an organisation that is simultaneously building 15 years in the future and under pressure to deliver sales every single day.
But there’s also commonality to how they are approaching these challenges:
Creating visions of the future that are really relatable and believable
Recognising how hard it is to let go as an incumbent, and listening to other voices
Breaking the journey down into stages, and multiple stories along the way
What emerged from our discussion felt like a new attitude to building organisational vision. One which is less strident, and more empathetic, less theoretical and more tangible. The best Future Stories will bring people along for the ride.
For the full video of our sessions on the day, and to find out about the other two panels, check out the full piece on Substack here.