When people come across a good story, they tend to pass it on. In our conversations with practitioners about storytelling, they often mention someone in their organization who has a reputation as a great storyteller. Maybe it's a former CEO, or someone they know in operations. We found that people are also curious about how they can become better storytellers themselves.
While storytelling may seem like something that comes naturally to some people, it is also a skill that can be learned.[20] We looked to storytellers in a wide variety of contexts such as film, radio, novels, non-fiction writing, and even viral videos to understand how people tell good stories. We also engaged with practitioners experimenting with how to tell sustainability stories in their organizations.
Below we synthesize what we've learned into five key tips. We've also provided a worksheet that you can use to think through how to tell a sustainability story that you're hoping to share.
While it's nice to tell people about how many kilograms of materials were recycled or how many children in the community benefited from a new playground, we've learned that focusing on outcomes like these is not necessarily what makes a story impactful. Instead, try to articulate the choices people in your organization made to help these outcomes happen.
Don't forget to share that a decision was made to change a policy or that management saw the value in spending more money now to save money in the future. These choices pave the path for a pattern of decision-making that supports the sustainability behaviours that you are trying to highlight in your storytelling. It's not just about saying a choice was made. It's about describing the options the main character had, and giving a sense of how they engaged with these different alternatives to come to a decision about what action to take. Without this, stories tend to fall flat.
It is important not to gloss over the challenges people face in the stories you tell. We've learned that people often find that the stories they hear about organizations or individuals contributing to sustainability come across as too easy or too convenient. They hear the story but they are thinking: "well, they may have done that, but it's not that easy in our department" or "she managed to do that but that's because she is much more senior than I am." Make sure you don't gloss over the challenges along the way. Challenges are inherent in good stories;[21] don't forget about them.
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We have seen practitioners find value in shifting the dominant narratives in their organizations by surfacing stories about times when things did not go as intended.
One organization where we have seen this willingness to reflect on challenges commissioned a film maker to go to its different sites. The film maker worked with employees to get them to give their perspective on a safety incident that happened at the site. Many of the stories are about close calls or near misses that could have been fatal. In the films, different employees are seen candidly sharing their perspectives about mistakes that were made that led up to accidents.
The films were shown at monthly crew meetings for all employees at all of the organization's different operations. They often responded to seeing the films by relating what they saw to their own experiences and sharing personal stories about similar situations. Candid dialogue like this has helped the organization cultivate new thinking on safety.
When it comes to failure stories and sustainability, frontline employees frequently pointed to an inconsistency between their experiences and the "storyline from corporate."
For example, employees in one organization talked about the contradiction they felt when they consistently heard about the company's commitments to conserve energy, but were unable to turn off the lights in their own office when they leave.
These contradictions can turn into powerful narratives and it may be necessary to give a voice to these perceived "failures". Surfacing perspectives that counter the dominant storyline is necessary for new core narratives to emerge.[22] It is also important for resolving the inconsistencies that can hold companies back as they try to embed sustainability.
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Good storytellers "show" without telling. They don't tell us what they are going to tell us, tell it to us, and then tell us what they told us. Instead they provoke us to think critically about a story and come to its meaning on our own.[23] When we can't grasp the meaning right away, sometimes we play the story over and over in our head. Sometimes we talk about it with friends and family as we try to make sense of it. It might take an evening to figure it out, but once we get it, it sticks.
We've watched as companies produce videos that tell sustainability stories, complete with a narrator in the background carefully explaining the meaning behind the story. We have all seen examples where a company profiles the story of an employee that came up with an idea to reduce waste that ends with the message "At X company, we're committed to sustainability; it's the right thing to do, and good for our business." Instead, try to cultivate a sense of curiousness in your audience. If you spoon-feed your audience the moral or meaning of your story, they have no motivation to engage with it and the message won't stick.[24]
Stories that feature the "organization" as the hero in a story tend to be a bit boring or sometimes even make us roll our eyes. That's not to say that your organization won't have a role to play in a story which is about sustainability and the people in it. Instead, try to position your organization in a facilitating role in your stories. Have the organization sit in the background, supporting the journey of the main character or protagonist.[25]
When we hear a story and feel like we could possibly encounter a similar situation in our own lives, we experience it like a "surrogate";[26] even though "it" didn't happen to us, it is like we were there. This allows us to potentially learn from the experience as if it was our own. Help you audience to see what they have in common with the characters in your story.[27]
In our conversations with practitioners, it has become apparent that the stories that they have tried to tell are not always broadly relatable across their organization. For example, a practitioner at a global organization broadcast a story about an innovation developed by a manager at its head office in North America. The story seemed to resonate with its North American employees. However, it didn't gain any traction in Asia, where the majority of its employees are located.
As an earlier attendee at one of our storytelling workshops, he thought about the relatability of the protagonist in his story. He tried again, this time sending out a story about an idea developed by a group of mid-level employees in the company's Thai operations that resulted in a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Within weeks, multiple people from the company's Asian sites were coming forward with similar ideas of their own.
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