

Can you tell us about the role storytelling plays in leadership and organizational development?
Well, I think that leaders, whether they recognize it or not, are leading through storytelling. And if we really understand what an organization is, an organization is fundamentally a shared story. Everyone has agreed to the narrative and to the premise of the story about “why we come to work” and “why we do whatever the work is we do”. And the only way an organization can cohere and somehow maintain a sense of continuity over time is through sharing stories. Because what happened yesterday in the organization doesn’t exist any longer. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist. The only way it exists is in how we represent it, in the story we tell about what happened. Whether it was an event with a client, or the delivery of a service or a product, or something in the manufacturing that went wrong, <laugh>, or went right. Fundamentally what it is exists as a story.
Organizations are driven by narratives. And when those narratives break down, or if there’s not an adequate narrative, organizations generally struggle. And if we think of new people joining an organization, how do they know what they’ve joined? They can go to the orientation, and if it’s a good orientation, it’s probably filled with stories. In another lifetime I used to work with a former division of Disney and we also developed some things for Disney University along the way. When people came to an orientation in the old days at Disney, it was two days of orientation training. Fundamentally, what it was, was telling stories about Walt Disney,“why Walt did this”, and “how Walt did this”, and “how Walt sort of had his insight about the parks and what it would be like if children and adults could play together”. By the time people got done with that orientation, they felt like they had been there from the beginning in the early days of the organization, they felt like they had a hand in it.
If people are not telling stories, they’re missing a great opportunity. One of the concepts I’ve played around with for a number of years is a notion that an organization has narrative assets, and those assets and leaders have narrative assets as individuals and professionally. If an organization doesn’t tap into those narrative assets and use them in a powerful way, they’re failing to inculcate the story with new people, but also to revitalize the organization, to remind us “why are we doing what we’re doing?”
Things are hard right now – the market has changed, the politics of the world have changed, whatever’s going on, that creates uncertainty. What is it that keeps us on the right course or allows us to right the ship? Stories act like a ballast of sorts – they keep the ship weighted at the bottom. Or think of the keel of a sailboat – it goes deep into the water and keeps the boat from flipping over in the wind. That’s the function stories can play powerfully for organizations. Once leaders know that, then they’re in an amazing position. And one of the things we talk about in the workshops I do with you all is that leaders need to know and tell three powerful stories.
One of the stories is about “who am I?”
Who Am I
I’m much more inclined to follow you as a leader if I know who you are. And if I have a sense that you know who I am, and that we have something in common – that you’re a human being and not just, someone up on the 16th floor who’s pulling levers. I think Plato said it, but probably every major philosopher or religion says it, “know thyself”. And if you don’t know who you are, how do you know how to lead?
And where are the lines? Where do you have clear ethical standards? And where do those come from? It comes through your life experiences and the stories of your life. So it’s important for leaders to know who they are, and they need to be able to articulate their story and why that story positions them to be a good leader for the people around them.
They also need to be able to tell the story, “who are we?”
Who Are We
If you can’t articulate who we are in a coherent fashion, how are people gonna know what it means to belong to the organization? That’s best done through stories – stories about when we were at our best, stories about when we faced challenges, stories about something profound that completely changed the landscape for our company, stories about how we rose to the occasion, and stories of how people banded together and came together to make it happen.
Then the third story, which is perhaps the most important, is “where are we going?”
Where Are We Going
We sometimes call that a vision. You might call it a strategic plan. The best visions are ones that can be articulated in a story. It might have different kinds of subplots, maybe a more complicated story the bigger the company is. The more it’s articulated as a story, the more people can go, “oh, okay, I know how my team’s work fits in with that bigger story”. If all you have is a strategic plan filled with bullets and goals, it’s really hard for me as someone, as a middle manager, say, to understand where I fit in. I might be more likely to say, “what do I do with my team to accomplish that? I’m not sure where I fit in the story”. What stories do is they take abstract goals and they ground them in a way that people can relate to them.
Those are some of the fundamental ways that story plays a key role in both organizational development, leaders actions, and helping organizations succeed.
Why do you think storytelling resonates so strongly with people, especially during uncertain times?
I was thinking about this when you first approached me about this interview, and I was thinking about the topic of uncertainty and uncertain times. I think all times have always been uncertain. We like to think that our time is just, is somehow special, you know? I think that stories can remind us that the human condition is one in which life is filled with uncertainties. Filled with things we cannot see and cannot know. What we need most in the day-to-day of addressing the challenges of living in a world that is by its very nature uncertain, is that we need stories that remind us of our resilience. We have to be reminded that we have the capacity to face difficulty and face difficult times and uncertain times. The way you do that is through remembering experiences, stories of times where you face something else that was uncertain, something else that was a really big challenge, and were able to overcome it.
There’s some great work that was done over the last years at Emory by two professors, Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush. They were interested in intergenerational storytelling – storytelling that happens across generations. And they found something that is so profound. Children aren’t born with a story, right? We come into life with actually quite a bit of things determined already – your personality, and likes and dislikes. We can see it with kids, if you have two siblings, you can see how different they are. We come into the world with a lot already, but we don’t come in with stories about facing uncertainty and challenges. And so, how do we learn to face uncertainty and challenges? It’s through the hearing of stories from our parents and grandparents about times they faced uncertainty and challenges. And so they found that growing up hearing those stories was the number one predictor for having resilience and high self-esteem. They can face a challenge and they go, “What do I do here? Well, I remember when grandpa said, when he was walking across Europe to escape the Nazis, these are the things he did to survive. Well, if he got through that, which was really difficult, I guess maybe I can get through this.”
So that kind of story becomes important organizationally. Organizations and leaders need to be able to remind their teams when they face big shifts, challenges, changes in organizational structure, a new competitor, a new technology that’s come in, whatever it is that’s happening that creates, angst for everybody, they need to remind people of their capacity to rise up and be creative and innovative and solve problems. That’s where the role of the leader becomes really important, is that they can’t afford to give into despair. <laugh> They have to be the ones that say, “Let me remind you about four years ago when Covid hit and the supply chain blew up, and we didn’t know anything – talk about uncertainty, okay?” When you tell a story about how we got through that, it becomes a touchstone for people to allow them to begin to envision that we can face this. Sometimes it’s just the decision to embrace the idea that “I have the capacity to deal with this is enough to help people get moving”.
There’s a wonderful little book called Sensemaking in Organizations, which is a great book by Karl E Weick. In it, Weick tells a story about an event that happened in World War I.
The Storm
He was in the south of France, in the mountains. And he had sent some of his men out for what he thought was gonna be a one day excursion to kind of check out where the enemy lines were. Within an hour after they left, a snow storm moved in, the storm of the century. It started snowing and it didn’t stop for two days, it dropped around two or three feet of snow.
And so these guys are suddenly caught out. They didn’t go out prepared for anything like this. They were planning on sleeping in their sleeping bags back at camp that night. All of a sudden, it’s a white out, they can’t see anything. But they eventually find a ledge where they’re able to get some kind of protection from the storm. Days go by and it’s still storming, and they’ve gone through all their rations, and it’s now going into the third day, and they’re looking out but they can’t see anything. The snow finally stops falling, but everything is totally white. There’s no landmark of anything that they could recognize, a rock or a fallen tree. Those things are all covered up.
They thought they were going to die, they were so despondent. They didn’t know what to do. One of the guys is reaching for his pack, and he’s digging around saying maybe there was something they could use at the bottom of his pack. And he finds a map.
So pulls the map out and this gives everybody a second wind. Everybody got around and said, “I think we’re right here.” Pointing at the map.
“And I think this is where our guys are camped, so we need to head in this direction.”
So they started going out and making that direction, and they would look at the map every once in a while, occasionally would see something that might look kind of familiar. And sure enough, they got into camp that night and their lieutenant was so happy to see them. They know warm rum by the fire and get these guys warmed up and wrapped up in blankets.
So the lieutenant is talking to the leader of the group. He says,”How did you get here?”
“We had a map.”
He says, “Let me look at that map.”
He looks at the map, and he says, “Do you realize this is a map of a whole different mountain range from where we are?”
Sometimes any old map will do. It got them acting and moving and making sense of their situation moment by moment. Stories can act like maps in a way. No two situations are ever the same, something that happened four years ago and what’s happening today are different. You would make a terrible mistake if you tried to do exactly what you did four years ago to solve your problems today. But that story can act sort of like that map in a way that gets people moving and remembering.
There’s one other story that I love that I’ve been telling for years, and it’s called The Remarkable Horse.
The Remarkable Horse
This story takes place in China, and there’s a small village, and there’s a man who lives with his son. His wife had died a few years previously, and the son does most of the hard work on their little pot of land. The old man is getting old and he has arthritis and can’t quite do the things he used to do. And one day, a remarkable horse comes riding into their paddock, and the father goes, “quick, close the gate”.
This is a magnificent wild horse, one that brings with it enough wealth to change their lives. So a friend comes by and goes, “ah, such good look, such good fortune that this happened”. And the old man is somewhat circumspect. He says, “maybe yes, maybe no. Only time will tell”.
A few days later, that horse jumps over the gate and is gone, and his friend comes by to commiserates, “oh, such bad luck, such bad fortune”. And the old man says, “maybe, yes, maybe no, only time will tell”.
A few days later, they hear what sounds like rumbling thunder, and they look out their little window, and that remarkable horse comes riding back into the paddock with 20 other horses behind it. And the young man goes and closes the gate. This is wealth beyond anything they can imagine.
And the friend comes by to congratulate him and says, “such good luck, such good fortune”. And once again, the old man says, “maybe, yes, maybe no. time will tell”.
And a few days later his son is trying to ride and break one of those horses, and is thrown and shatters his leg. And of course they didn’t have orthopedics in those days, but there’s a healer in the village who comes and is able to put a splint on it and says, “you’ll walk again, but you’ll probably always walk with a limp. You’re not gonna be any good for anybody for a while”. The friend comes by, says, “ah, such bad luck, such bad fortune”. And the old man says, “maybe, yes, maybe no, who knows? Time will tell”.
Two weeks later, the army comes in and conscripts every young man in that village and takes them off to fight in the wars, except of course, the son who broke his leg.
And none of those young men return from the wars.
So we never know whether the story is finished or not, because it’s never finished. It’s always changing. What I like about this story from the standpoint of a leader’s perspective, but for anybody working in an organization, is that things will always be changing. And there will be times where things look wonderful, and there’ll be times where things look really like the end of the world, you know? What we have to be careful with is the story we tell about that event.
What is one key takeaway about storytelling you’d like our readers to remember as they navigate uncertainty in their own lives or organizations?
Well, I want them to embrace the power and value of storytelling and to recognize that it offers incredible value to leaders and organizations that is often unrecognized and unseen. And so, when leaders and organizations consciously embrace the idea that story is an incredibly powerful tool, maybe the most powerful tool in the universe, then they are equipped to always ask the question, “what story are we telling and what story, uh, do we want to be telling?” Once you know that you can’t ever go back to being a victim of uncertainty and change again, you can become an actor within a world of uncertainty, you can be empowered to make a difference.