Communicate your strategy as an inspiring story
Why stories?
Excerpts from Sapiens, Yuval Hariri
"The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago constitutes the Cognitive Revolution.... According to the most widespread theory, accidental genetic mutations changed the internal wiring of the Sapiens' brains, allowing them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using languages of a completely different species.... The truly unique characteristic... is the ability to transmit information not about men and lions but about things that do not exist.
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Now, it is fiction that has allowed us to imagine things, but also to do it collectively. We can weave myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myth of the Australian Aborigines or the nationalist myths of modern states. These myths give Sapiens an unprecedented ability to cooperate en masse and flexibly
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It is easy to understand that the "primitives" cemented their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathered every full moon to dance around the campfire.
What we misunderstand is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take the corporate world, for example. Modern businessmen and lawyers are actually powerful sorcerers. The main difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell even stranger stories.
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The ability to create an imaginary reality out of words has enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. But it has done more. Large-scale cooperation is based on myths, and it is possible to change the forms of cooperation by changing the myths, by telling different stories. »
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How impactfully do you communicate your strategy
to your team?
The Problem
Lots of people can’t remember bar charts or figures and complicated business jargon.
No wonder the management speeches often leave them skeptical or confused!
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
– Jean-Luc Godard, film director
My Solution
Everyone always remembers a good story! While they may not recall every detail but they experience the story with all their senses, and their heart and soul. A good story will inspire them to action. It will be relatable when a decision is needed.
Don Norman, author of Things That Make Us Smart, summarises perfectly why storytelling works:
“Stories have the felicious capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions… Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion”.
You too can communicate by incorporating storytelling elements into your internal communication.
I will help you build your own inspiring story to communicate strategic decisions to your teams and motivate them into action.
For more insight on the subject, browse our Brain Food section.
