finding stories

In order to have powerful stories to tell, you first have to find them. We know how to listen stories out of people and help them to listen stories out of each other.

A typical programme would comprise a mix of workshops (you can read about one of these under our work for Cairngorms National Park Authority), face-to-face and phone interviews. To get at the truth we might focus on one or a combination of:

• fact | people’s experiences of working for your organization, for example what makes them proud to be an employee
• fiction | this can give people a way of talking about uncomfortable issues that they might not be prepared to discuss head on
• faction | a story that combines a number of experiences in a way that accurately represents your organization although the story itself never happened like that.

And/or we might help you run a story competition. Story competitions can involve the whole of your organization, sowing the seeds of buy-in at an early stage.

We then use those stories to interpret your organization back to itself in new and surprising ways. Or we can encourage your organization itself to make sense of the multiple layers of stories and perspectives and points of view that make your organization what it is.

Finally we work with your leadership team to develop from those stories a narrative for the organization as a whole.

story in a word

Story in a word is an exercise that brings to life the values of an organization by asking people to tell stories of times when they experienced those values at work.

Often organizational values are just words and sound hollow if not backed up by lived experience. In that sense, you could call story in a word the no-bullshit exercise!

Story in a word was developed by our friend Madelyn Blair at Pelerei.

photograph by thorinside