Story telling seemed to be the natural topic for this week's blog. Why?
First, because today (6 August) I've started a one-week residential creative writing course focused on short stories. It's got a daunting amount of homework and is described as 'intentionally rigorous'. I'll let you know how I got on with it.
Second, last week I was reviewing the book Design a Better Business which has a whole section about storytelling as integral to organization design work and offers a downloadable template + instructions on how to construct stories.
Third, also last week I started a new assignment and am listening to stories people tell about the organization and the piece of work that I am doing with them about why we need to change. Some people specifically said 'we need to be better at telling the story of why we have to change'.
I am a bit sceptical that stories consciously designed to be 'tools' can change organizations. Possibly they can help change organizations or contribute to changing organizations – depending on how you constructed them, but how would you know any changes were due to the stories being told, and can you design or contrive stories that work well alongside the naturally occurring sort that get told in organizations?