How To Navigate The Change Management Journey Through Storytelling

Stories have immense potential to effect transformation and facilitate alignment vis-a-vis organisational purpose.

- Indranil Chakraborty

Among the various subjects on which I have searched for books on amazon.com, the largest result has always been for those on change management.This is clearly an area of struggle and concern for most leaders. In 1995, John Kotter, the guru of organisational change, published a paper on the eight largest errors that can doom a change exercise. After studying over a hundred companies that had attempted transformation, the eight major challenges he identified are: generating a sense of urgency, establishing a powerful guiding coalition, developing a vision, communicating the vision clearly and often, removing obstacles, planning for and creating short-term wins, avoiding premature declaration of victory, and embedding change in the corporate culture.

My last five years of work with stories have proven that at least three of the eight challenges can be successfully addressed using stories or story structures.

Whether it is your corporate strategy, your culture transformation programme, your merger strategy, or even one of your business line strategies, change is most acceptable when one understands both what the change is all about and the reason for the change.

Change is energised by three things:

an inspiring purpose

the leadership team’s ability to engage and influence

a process to regularly share stories on the correct implementation of the change

All three parts are needed to succeed. Let us explore how various story skills can be put to use in each of the three critical areas identified above.

Creating an inspiring purpose

Studies across the world have shown that in most companies, less than 5 per cent of employees can answer the question, ‘what is your company strategy?’ or ‘what is your company’s mission/ vision?’, or ‘what is the essence of Change 2020 that the CEO recently launched?’