9 wonderful ways to weave more story into your work
From data engineering firms to local councils, organisations — regardless of their size, sector or the nature of their work — are beginning to understand that story is the key to unlocking greater sustainability, scale and fulfilment. Here are a host of wonderful ways to weave more story into your work and help you better measure your impact, engage your community and navigate these uncertain times. Let’s dive right in!
1. Celebrate or commemorate a moment in time
With the world the way it is right now, we should be looking for any excuse to celebrate, and what better way to celebrate or commemorate significant milestones (like a birthday, start/end of the year, or the wrap of a campaign) than with story?
Recently, global software company SAP marked 10 years of its Social Sabbatical program, an industry-leading volunteering initiative that connects the skills and expertise of its employees with social enterprises and non-profits globally.
Embarking on a story-driven strategic process, SAP wanted to distil the impact of the program to reinvigorate stakeholders, increase awareness and improve outcomes by putting stories at the centre. This is the result:
Like SAP, there are so many great examples of organisations using story to foster a sense of belonging and pride and celebrate or commemorate key milestones. From the deep richness in the ritual of storytelling itself, to the process of listening, reflecting and distilling a narrative, we can use story to help us bookmark moments in time – both the good and the not so good.
2. Hold a Reflection Circle or Virtual Campfire
In today’s fast-paced digital world, it is increasingly difficult to build meaningful connection and engagement, particularly as workplaces move to predominantly virtual environments.
And while it’s no secret that story is how we as humans digest and retain information, it’s lesser known just how much story-driven processes can activate learning and help your team surface reflections and unlock continuous improvement. One way to do this is by hosting a ‘Reflection Circle’ or virtual campfire like project management company, Workfront.
Hosting a fun, interactive discovery and bonding 90-minute ‘Virtual Campfire’, team members gathered together to share stories and reflect on the tumultuous year that was 2020. Guided through a process of individual reflection, sharing in small groups and open discussion, participants learn to use story as a sense-making tool, helping us collectively transform pain into growth, harvest insights and re-imagine a better way forward — or as we like to say: from heal to whole.
3. Create a regular story ‘touch point’ to boost culture
Stories give people the chance to interact and connect, while reflecting back to us a more expansive vision for the world. But just like brushing your teeth, storytelling is not something that we can just do once, and never again. Instead, we need to make it part of our culture in order to unleash its enormous potential.
Cultivating a storytelling culture is the difference between having one person dedicated to storytelling (e.g. the Marketing Manager) and having everyone take a level of responsibility for gathering, telling and sharing stories as part of their contribution to the greater whole.
One way to do this is to kick off your weekly check-ins with the chance to share a recent story of your work. You could end your meetings by giving staff an avenue to submit a story of their favourite client interaction or community ‘win’ for the week. You can even apply the narrative ‘beginning, middle and end’ arc to your meeting structures.
Another way is to hold a ‘Story Café’ or ‘World Café’ — a method based on the design principles of non-formal education and experiential learning to provide an effective and flexible format for hosting large group dialogue.
The idea behind the Story or World Café (available under Creative Commons Attribution 3 License) is to allow participants to confront their story and weave them together with the stories of others. It is a way to encourage people to ‘own’ their story and take responsibility for their actions, all the way harvesting insights from the collective to help you move forward.
It is an open methodology, a system by which each storyteller can bring value, and co-create the process, tapping into the human need for connection and collaboration as you make meaning and plot the course of the future together.
While there is no ‘one’ way to harness the power of story for your organisation, by taking a whole-of-organisation approach, and doing it regularly, not only will you harvest more powerful stories, but you will better be able to articulate your purpose, vision and culture in a way that brings people closer.
4. Host an ‘Unconference’
At the height of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, with just two short weeks of rapid planning, around 200 people from across Australia, New Zealand and even parts of Asia and Europe (pet dogs and cats included), came together for a gathering of minds and hearts to ‘Explore – Discover – Respond’ to COVID-19.
Using what is called an ‘Unconference’ structure, rather than having a predetermined agenda, attendees were given the space to generate topics for facilitated sessions that were meaningful to them at that moment. Once set, the afternoon unfolded as a series of rich, relevant, and stimulating conversations and breakout sessions delivered by the participants themselves.
Mobilising community-driven leadership, sense-making and co-ownership in this way, serves to promote innovation and deepens how an experience can land for your participants by offering an increased agency and heightened sense of involvement.
“We’ve all been there – a conference with a less than exciting keynote speech, panel discussions that don’t connect with the audience and PowerPoint presentations that are more confusing than a Rubik’s Cube. We leave these events frustrated that we wasted our time, thinking there must be a better way to exchange innovative ideas and get advice to take our businesses to the next level. It turns out there is a better way. It’s called the ‘unconference’.” — Rebecca Bagley (Forbes)
5. Make a story out of your Strategy
As we know, stories are effective at distilling and charting change that’s occurred over a long period of time and conveying it in a cohesive narrative and making progress visible. They are also qualitative, narrative-driven, and highly useful points of data that can be coded in the same way that quantitative data can. So, why not use story to bring to life otherwise dry and data-driven strategic roadmaps and plans, by making them more relatable, tangible and actionable?
A great example of this was Queensland Health’s recent work. In a desire to better capture the stories of those impacted by paediatric sepsis and improve its diagnosis, care and patient outcomes, the team used story to reimagine a Five Year Sustainability Roadmap, centred around personal stories, to help them continue their life-changing work.
Another ‘wholesome’ example is the Regen Melbourne movement, who continues to use story as a driving mechanism to reimagine systems change and localise an approach to ‘doughnut economics’. By incorporating story-driven processes in their meetings, Regen Melbourne uses the power of narrative to simultaneously crystallise a shared vision, spark imaginations and influence actions by providing a bridge between ‘the problem’ and ‘the solution’ and help chart a course (or roll a doughnut) to get there.
READ MORE: Using story to imagine a more regenerative economy 
6. Tell the story of your data
In a similar way to using story to bring a strategy to life, stories can give a human (or animal!) face to quantitative data. They are dynamic and provocative in a way that numbers and reports can only hope to be, because — even if your work is hard to understand, everyone understands stories.
Rapidly growing data engineering firm, BizCubed, helps organisations make better decisions each day using the power of their data. And while it might not have seemed obvious to begin with, story quickly loomed as the most effective way to embed a deeper connection to purpose and enable their customers to see why they approach their work in the unique way they do.
“I had been thinking a lot about narratives, and the story that we wanted to tell in our business. I think of this as a challenge that any business has to confront, but it’s made all the more difficult for deeply technical products and firms. Using narrative is definitely one way that we’ve tried to close this gap and improve our ability to connect with our community.” — Maxx Silver, BizCubed (Engineering a great story)
By uncovering the story of their people, their unique approach and their inherent passion for what they do, then articulating it as a compelling story narrated from the heart rather than the head, organisations like BizCubed are starting to experience the power of story to organise, synthesise and share your work.
7. Use story to demonstrate your impact
Speaking of sharing your work, another wonderful way to more effectively weave story into your everyday, is to use it to measure and demonstrate impact. Because we’ve established that story can be used to bring strategy and data to life, so why not impact as well?
It’s true that the work of uncovering, distilling down, and encapsulating the various inputs, outputs and outcomes of your work can be a helluva lot of ‘work’ in and of itself. So, in order to measure your impact efficiently, you need to be able to use what you have at your disposal. And, if there’s one thing most organisations who are doing great work don’t have to go far to find – it’s a good story.
Take The Benevolent Society. Following the launch of their Social Benefit Bond, designed to keep children with their families and out of foster care (where safe to do so), they wanted to find a compelling way to measure and communicate the impact of the program for investors.
To accompany what they feared would be a relatively dry report outlining a series of ‘quantitative outputs’, they also chose to tell a story that would engage both the minds and hearts of investors, and educate their community about why this particular program would take time to deliver on financial returns.
The next time you need to measure or communicate your impact, remember that taking a story-driven approach enables you to encapsulate the often intangible, but very real, ‘essence’ and ‘unspokenness’ of your work by bringing words off a page and to life through colour, facial expressions, movement and multiple dimensions.
8. Document a day in the life of…
One barrier that often stands in the way of greater brand loyalty, affinity or a seemingly impenetrable distance between you and your customers/community, is a lack of understanding and empathy. That’s why another wonderful way to weave more story into your work is to use narrative to humanise your people and show the day-to-day realities of their roles and responsibilities just like Waverley Council did with this story on ‘a day in the life of a Garbo’.
It’s easy to see a bank as a nameless, faceless greedy corporation but how many of us actually know what the people behind the desk are trying to do to support us? It’s also easy to take for granted the often vital work performed by council workers, garbage collectors and even parking inspectors, but there is rarely an empathy gap that cannot be bridged by story.
9. Host a story screening
Having a vibrant storytelling culture means that we also have a plethora of living, breathing stories, from different perspectives, to draw on whenever we want or need to share our message. And one really engaging way to do this is to host a story screening or presentation night to showcase your stories, and elicit even more of them.
The (re)Generation Project is a Macquarie University research project, aiming to uncover what inspires young people to engage with nature. Part of the research process was to ask 22 young people to tell stories, through film, about what they believe would inspire their peers to adventure into that natural world.
Following a six week program, 11 films were produced by the young storytellers, many of whom had no prior experience in film, culminating in three ‘sold out’ screenings at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Circular Quay and Parramatta Riverside Theatre.
Similarly, the Social Enterprise Network of Victoria (SENVIC) initiated a program in the midst of 2020 to bring the sector together under a shared vision and purpose to tell their stories. With 14 diverse social enterprises learning the skills to craft their own stories and capture their impact using everyday smartphone technology, the program was wrapped by a heartwarming YouTube Watch Party.
While you might not want to hire out a whole theatre or have video stories to share, hosting an open mic night or story sharing session for your team or community helps to nurture your story garden and ensure that stories are being grown, seeded, told, and continue to be told, both now and into the future.
There you have it — nine wonderful ways to weave story more effectively into the fabric of your organisation! And there are plenty more where those came from.
We are always keen to hear the ways in which your organisation is using story to ground, galvanise and share your work with the world. Please drop us a line and share how you are weaving stories into the fabric of your work.