Storytelling to lead and influence innovation

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.- Robert McAfee Brown

Stewart D. Friedman is Practice Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia. He is the founding director of Wharton’s Leadership Program and of its Work/Life Integration Project, and the former head of Ford Motor’s Leadership Development Center. His book, Total Leadership, offers a model for sustainable change that is directly applicable to the world of innovation.

He notes that a good leadership story has the power to engage hearts and minds. It has these six crucial elements:

1. Draws on your real past and lessons you’ve learned from it.
2. Resonates emotionally with your audience because it’s relevant to them.
3. Inspires your audience because it’s fueled by your passion.
4. Shows the struggle between your goal and the obstacles you faced in pursuing it.
5. Illustrates with a vivid example.
6. Teaches an important lesson.

These same six elements are essential ingredients in positioning innovations within organizations. They each reinforce your intent in the minds of the recipients of your story. And in the telling, you are helping to build a coalition of supporters who will help nurture and carry your innovation across the social network of the organization. If processes and systems are the information and data circulatory system of the formal organization structure and its hierarchical components, then stories and dialogue represent the knowledge and wisdom circulatory system across the social network.

Neurologists have discovered that our brains are actually much better at remembering stories than they are at remembering facts and data. The narrative structure provides a very effective framework for memory and the drama and dynamics of the story provide multiple “hooks” that help lock the concepts being presented in our minds. Storytelling is certainly gaining prominence and credence in many areas of business.

The use of story in sustaining organization culture is not new or surprising. The fashion retail store, Nordstrom, and Ritz Carton Hotels both use storytelling to convey the positive customer experiences that they want their employees to provide in a consistent fashion. Storytelling is the bedrock of their communication practices. In fact, Ritz Carlton’s website states: “You can’t be a legend without a great story.” The use of targeted storytelling to specifically improve innovation and new product development performance is not as common.

The power of an effective story cannot be underestimated in carrying your innovation to successful implementation and market launch. Most organizations consider storytelling a part of the external market messaging. It encapsulates the way we present our brand to the world through advertising copy and other media. But this ignores the most important audience for our new ideas – ourselves. If we cannot be engaged by our own efforts how can we expect to take the innovation to the world? If we don’t recognize and explore the application of storytelling inside our organizations, do we really know how many great ideas are dying for want of a lack of audience?