Storytelling for Shaping Change

Stories as powerful tools in times of uncertainty & change

The world of work is undergoing fundamental transformations. We see technological developments such as digitization and automation in an ever increasing number of sectors and intensity. Companies have to reshape their value creation processes and pushing their employees to new job roles, creating an uncertain outlook.

Not only companies, but also individuals struggle with these changes so that we often see resistance to change, stressful conflicts, and lack of openness. To address those, we also need to look at a deeper level of learning. Employees need to rethink their job roles, the relationship to others, and what good work means to them.

In many situations, it feels most natural to express and work on the uncertainties with stories: stories we tell about ourselves and our experiences, stories we tell about others, and stories told about us. And these stories are not only about neutral facts, but carry emotions with them and help to empathise.

Facilitating storytelling

However, employees often do not find the spaces to tell the stories, or even co-develop them. Organisations do not give sufficient attention to the insights they convey and how they could help others in their sensemaking process.But in these kinds of stories lies essential potential and resources to shape change and uncertainty.

Storytelling Process

By combining innovative visualisation techniques with socio-scientific methods, we have developed a facilitation process for productive use of narrative methods. It is particularly targeted towards forms of knowledge that are difficult to grasp:

• Phase I. In the first phase, knowledge of individuals is captured. Employees are encouraged to tell stories about experiences and events. This is further analysed to uncover potentials and resources to shape change.
• Phase II. To make them more accessible, they are edited using narrative methods und visualised with a range of tools.
• Phase III. In the third phase, the goal is to trigger learning processes in the organisation and implement change. Towards that end, the stories are distributed to form part of a collaborative sensemaking process.

OUR OFFERS

We can facilitate unlocking the power of narratives and guide you through the stages of using that power to understand and transform identities:

• Capturing & analyzing narratives inside organisations, such as interview techniques, event curves, hero’s journey, visualisation techniques, metaphor analysis, qualitative data analysis and Grounded Theory.
• Editing & Visualising for telling the stories in accessible forms to a wider audience, such as experience stories, business cartoons & visual storytelling, videos, podcasts, and
  simulations.
• Distributing & implementing to achieve sustainable use of narrative techniques for learning & development, e.g., with workshops, trainings, coaching, event planning, project support, and many other forms of advice.
• Use of narrative techniques for other areas of learning, such as project debriefings, capturing experience of leaving experts, and as part of transformation process of corporate cultures.

The methods are both proven in practice and based on scientific methods and results.

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