This is the seventh installment in my series on the art, science, and ethics of storytelling in the “age of big content and fake news.” The first six articles were about theory. The next four -- beginning with this post -- will be about practice. What they all have in common is a point of view that I have developed throughout my career as a communications consultant to both commercial and civic organizations that are seeking to reimagine themselves in the digital world.
The operative word here is digital because digital has changed the game for communicators with regard to the expectation for scale. In many parts of the marketing mix -- say PR, advertising, email marketing, social media -- scale is an obvious goal. But it’s not so obvious when it comes to storytelling, a discipline that is regarded as having a lot of art but not much scaling science. As I will show, however, there’s an emerging approach to collective storytelling that not only aims for scale, but that also is suited to leveraging technology -- some simple, some advanced -- for helping to scale its reach even further. Specifically, I will look at how organizations can scale their reach by broadening their view of stakeholders, deepening their understanding of the problems they are solving for those stakeholders, and defining the solutions they can provide.
Reimagining the stakeholders
If you caught my reference to the Joseph Campbell title -- “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” -- perhaps you see where I am going with this. I am not referring to the famous mythographer’s concept of the “monomyth” -- the idea of a single meta story that unites us all -- but rather the simpler and perhaps more defensible idea that a story well told can unite people with different perspectives and different walks of life. What makes this possible is the basic structure of a story, which begins with an understanding of what someone wants, what’s standing in their way, and what enables them to overcome that challenge and find a resolution. If you can find a compelling common thread for a quest, conflict, and resolution for all of your stakeholders -- all of your “heroes” -- then you may have the elements of a story which indeed can scale. As I noted in an earlier post, we call these kinds of stories “narratives.”
Sounds easy, but it’s not. The work begins with getting consensus on who in fact is a stakeholder for any organization. In client engagements, I’ve often been surprised to learn the divergence of opinion of whether they should be speaking to customers, partners, investors, employees and influencers, or just some of these stakeholder groups. More often, I work with clients who have not thought of speaking constructively with organizations who they might be competing with or with organizations with which they might actually be in battle (a common scenario in the political arena). For those scenarios, I generally recommend a second set of processes for storytelling (namely, community building and conflict engagement) because developing a narrative with “friendly” groups can be challenging enough.
For this first challenge -- developing a narrative with the friendlies -- I recommend a simple process that can actually be done live if the organization can find a way to convene its functional leaders in one place, in real time (forget trying to do this virtually). To get things started, the leader of the exercise should ask the people in the room to divide up into small groups. The leader should then ask them to devise a list of all potential friendly stakeholders and go as deep into identifying groups as they can. Give them thirty minutes to do this, then tally the results and display them on a screen which, for all intents and purposes, is a "digital storyboard."
Storyboard -- no doubt, many readers will recognize the term which originated in the pre-digital age. The storyboard back then was a visual aid for the movie-maker and TV advertiser for outlining and testing the assumptions of a story before committing a lot of money to it. Today -- with the aid of so-many tools -- it can serve as a visual-and-technology age for outlining and testing the assumptions of a meta story before committing a lot of money to it. As noted, it starts with identifying all the heroes in the story, but continues through each “act."
Understanding the challenges
To gather the data for act II, ask the participants to break into the same groups and to perform a slighter harder task: to identify the chief challenge that the organization helps each of the stakeholders to solve. For groups that great in identifying many different subgroups -- for example, employees in new territories that are now part of the organization after a recent acquisition -- ask them to prioritize. Again, give them 30 minutes. What matters most is that the problem they identify can be quickly summarized and tabulated because this data too will go on the storyboard.
Defining and synthesizing the solutions
And here is where the real work gets done. There are two steps. First, have the groups break out for a third time, this time with the purpose of defining simply worded solutions for each of their stakeholders. Again, give them thirty minutes. Then tabulate the results and take a look at the board, which gives everyone in the room a sneak peek into what’s to come: a creative synthesis of all the results, with the benefit of third-party sentiment data, assuming that’s available. As I noted in my last post, the availability of this type of data can be valuable, particularly if it can actually be shared during the live session. But whether the data comes before or after the session, it will factor into the creative synthesis that will need to take place to come up with a strawman narrative, i.e., a hypothesis of the organization’s meta story that leaders in the organization can debate and vet before implementing.
It’s a top-down counterbalance to the bottoms-up session that drove the digital storyboarding. In any case, it helps to fortify the narrative which can then be used again experimentally when reaching out to groups with which the organization might want to partner. That’s the subject of my next post, where again the digital storyboard can play a role in helping the organization’s storytelling scale its reach.
