Chapter 15
For this exercise you will need:
- Awareness of a strategic message you wish to communicate with impact; or one in which you would like to engage the best thinking of the team to help define and develop.
In the previous chapter, we explored how leaders move people forward with creative tension. Here, we will add some additional levels of meaning to the story. Between the current reality and the desired future state is the strategy—the journey that will get us from here to there.
Think about the next critical strategy message that you need to share with your team, one that will require everyone to rally and align to make the work happen. How do you intend to share that message?
Many leaders are tactical, make-it-happen kinds of folks, so it is very likely that your message will include the key metrics, goals, and accountabilities that people need to meet. That's a great start.
What if you communicated that message as a narrative?
I have spent much of my career helping organizations position their strategic imperatives in a way that generates high engagement, and I'm about to share one of my secret recipes with you. Strategy is a story, and it is defined by aspiration, goals, heroes, and monsters (which, more often than not, are our own ways of thinking). Articulating strategic messages as a story extends an opportunity to your people to step into the story in a way that can be deeply meaningful and energizing.
It's a lot better than telling them they'd better hit their sales goals or else.
There are two ways to use Strategy Is a Story. The first is as a communications platform: a way of becoming clear on the message, and its many supporting message points, which you will reinforce with consistency on numerous occasions to your team or organization.
The second is as an ideation tool using storyboarding. This is a process that invites you (or a team) to think critically about the strategy in creative ways that will generate new possibilities for taking action.
First, let's look at the template for the strategy story.
A Journey of Heroes
In Chapter 12 of Circle of the 9 Muses, we explored Joseph Campbell's classic construct, the Hero's Journey, as a framework for sense making in the organization. Here, that archetypal template appears again as a framework for the strategy story you are presenting to your people. When I develop strategy communications for my clients, I often use this shortened, simplified version of the Hero's Journey as a sort of checklist for defining critical message elements in a strategy story. First, let's look at language and images from the Hero's Journey to define the steps, and then we will look at an example.
Think of a strategy that you need to communicate to your team, and then reflect on how you might connect each of the following movements to your message.
The Call to Adventure
Don't bury it. Let people know you are going on a journey together. Your strategy story starts with the invitation, right up front. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker was called to action when R2-D2 played a hologram from Princess Leia: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope!” Note that I've seen many strategy messages begin and end with the call. (“Okay, people. Here are the new goals. Time to get on board.”) But we're weaving a narrative, and our strategy story is only warming up.
The Ordinary World
The call doesn't exist in a vacuum. You are asking people to step away from the comfort of the hobbit hole in The Shire because of a darkness that is lurking. There are tough realities in your world or marketplace that people need to understand. So tell them. (In the language of Creative Tension, this would be our current reality.)
The Hero
You've presented a big goal, and a tough world. So who is going to save us in this dire circumstance? The answer is us! We are the heroes we've been waiting for. We must summon our greatest powers—and courageously face our weaknesses—in order to move forward.
The Dragon
There are dragons (or Darth Vaders, or Lord Voldemorts) standing between us and our goal. These may be competitors or marketplace difficulties. Just as often, these antagonists are our own beliefs and mental models, which must be confronted.
The Journey
Like Frodo Baggins on the path to Mordor, you should expect many trials and challenges along the way. We will have to make hard choices, and we will experience discomfort (or worse). There may be times when the journey becomes so difficult that we may feel like giving up hope.
The Outcome or Elixir
But we've been to the mountaintop, and we've seen a glimpse of how good things can be. When we accomplish our mission, a better world awaits us! There will be rewards, both internal and external, that we all can share and that will have made the hard journey worth it.
Of course, when you communicate your most critical leadership imperatives, you probably won't be literally quoting Yoda or evoking the descent of the Death Eaters over Hogwarts. (Although who's to say you couldn't?) Your message will consist of your real-world equivalents.
Here is a typical strategy story that I might develop for a client. (This one is an example I just made up and is an aggregate of multiple messages that I typically encounter.)
Call to adventure
We are inviting you on a journey! We have set a challenging goal: to achieve metric X and to be recognized as a leader in Y.
Ordinary world / current reality
We've been successful in the past, but we can't count on that success to carry us into the future. Our context today is [more complex/more competitive/more regulated] than ever before.
The Hero
But we are the people of Company Z! Our legacy of [innovation/resilience/whatever] has been a part of who we are since our earliest days. Today that spirit is alive in your work.
The Dragon
However, we are often the victims of [our own success/our own ways of thinking/our deeply siloed organization/etc.].
The Journey
That's why today we must adopt new mental models about our work, new tools and processes, new ways of working together. This will feel uncomfortable to us. It will be hard. But this is how we will achieve our mission.
Outcome or Elixir
When we do, the result will be [new opportunities/new markets/new innovation/a better place to work/etc.]
As you might have already sensed, each of the statements in this message demands detail. Stories are fractal, and every element maps to a network of additional stories and supporting points.
One of my colleagues was the director of communications for a Fortune 100 company, and she showed me how to create a message house that organizes these cascading messages and subpoints in visual form. (Once again, I'm making this one up for the sake of example and tossing in everything but the kitchen sink.)
Example: A Strategy Narrative “Message House”
An example of a strategy story “message house.” In the top row you can see the six “chapters” of the message which correspond to the Hero's Journey elements described on the previous pages. On the bottom you can see supporting points. Note that this is an example with a mashup of messages that I encounter frequently. One developed from your reality would surely tell a more coherent and specific story.
Share the Story
This Strategy Is a Story chapter is a framework (and not a process.) That is, it is a way of clarifying your thinking around how to articulate an important strategy message. For next steps, you have many choices.
- Align the leaders. Share the framework (perhaps in the message house format) with other leaders who share responsibility for implementing the strategy. This will ensure the leadership team is reinforcing a consistent message.
- Say it. You can certainly share the strategy story verbally when you communicate with your team. Do the supporting points belong as part of this verbal presentation? You decide, based on the audience and context. Often, the main narrative works best as a standalone, high-level orientation, and will elicit questions, which you are then prepared to respond to using the supporting points.
- Visualize it. Hire an artist to create an image, infographic, or storyboard of your strategy story. I have a team of artists I reach out to for capturing strategy stories as infographics, learning maps, storyboards, and more. Illustration is an incredibly engaging way to draw your people even deeper into your strategy with a high level of engagement, retention, and emotion.
Strategy stories lend themselves to landscape and journey metaphors, which are ideal for depicting from and to states—as well as the gap between them. For the most polished presentation, I engage my design partners to render the story with beautiful artwork.
Sometimes I find it just as effective to use my limited art skills and draw it myself. Here is an example I developed for an organization that was centralizing its HR function and needed to engage team members in a conversation about the intent and implications.
I sketched this one out on paper with rough stick figures, and then reworked it and cleaned it up a bit using Adobe Illustrator. It ain't a masterpiece, but it generated a rich dialogue for the organization's strategy conversation.
With the help of a learning partner, this can be presented as a detailed learning map—a table-sized graphic that invites your people into a deep exploration of the strategy narrative over a 2-hour to 4-hour learning experience.
The dialogue is the true deliverable! The learning is always participant-driven as the content of the map prompts team members to tell their own stories and generate new insights.
The ultimate visual expression of a strategy message is a learning map—a table-sized visual that is used in an organizational learning context. Members of the organization gather around the image and analyze the stories, metaphors, and quantitative data. Complex strategic messages are presented with compelling simplicity in a way that invites all members of the organization to participate.
Strategy Is a Storyboard
Let's get the whole team involved! After all, they are the heroes of this story, so they should have a hand in defining the narrative.
This is another storyboarding exercise, very much like those presented in the Creative Tension Pictures, Innovation Storyboarding, and Storyboarding Frameworks chapters. That means it is a generative exercise that will produce new ideas. It should not be thought of as the final word on your approach to strategy, but as a mind-stretching exercise that can be used in the process of defining the strategy. You can conduct this with the leadership team that is responsible for defining the strategy or with the team that will be responsible for executing the strategy. Either way, the team will come away from the exercise with a deeper, archetypal awareness of its strategy.
Explain the Hero's Journey to your teammates, similar to how this chapter explains it. You should spend a few minutes on this and on drawing your team into the Hero's Journey. They need to understand this context so that they can create the storyboard. Don't worry—if you spend just a few minutes with the Hero's Journey, they will get it quickly.
Tell the team that its task is to create a storyboard of its strategy and that it should follow the steps of the Strategy Is a Story template (The Call, The Context, The Hero, The Journey, The Dragon, and The Outcome or Elixir). Members will illustrate each chapter of the story with colored markers over a series of flip chart pages. At the conclusion of the exercise, they will tell their story to an audience of your choosing. Thus, they should think about how they will present their dramatic strategy epic.
There are a few important principles to reinforce, some of which I always say whenever inviting a team into a visual-thinking exercise.
- Rough is good. People are almost always anxious about visual-thinking exercises. It is good to keep reinforcing that this is a communication exercise, not an art contest. And, in fact, rough images are often more effective at communicating than finely rendered ones. Stick figures, boxes, and arrows will go far. (In the Appendix, you will find an Icon Cheat Sheet with ideas for images that participants can easily copy.)
- Think by drawing. Tell the team not to spend an hour planning every detail members will draw. That defeats the exercise. They should spend around 5 minutes talking about their general message and approach—but it is important to put pen to paper as quickly as possible. The process of drawing will trigger new ideas. They will discover what they want to say after they start drawing, not before.
For one team of leaders from a global retail products company, envisioning their strategy in a storyboard resulted in a paradigm-shifting conversation. They imagined themselves as Peter Pan, overcoming threats in a sea full of competition and marketplace pressure.
- Use as few words as possible. Words can be used for titles, labels, and quotations. Participants should not fill the page with lists or dense blocks of text.
- Use at least four flip chart pages. More is okay. This is to prevent participants from thinking too narrowly and squeezing multiple chapters onto a single page (with a resulting loss of message detail).
After you have explained the Hero's Journey and gone over the simple ground rules, the team is ready to get to work! I find that 2 hours is about the right amount of time for teams to complete and rehearse their presentation.
The previous pages shows a strategy storyboard developed by a leadership team at a global luxury brand company. The team presented its marketplace challenges as a sea filled with sharks and pirates preventing it from gaining market share. And who is the ideal hero for defeating a bunch of sharks and pirates? Peter Pan, of course!
Like many teams do, this team became especially invested in the presentation of its story. Using a digital music player, members downloaded a bunch of MP3 songs to serve as the cinematic soundtrack to the presentation. It's hard to communicate just how effective this was. When the team revealed that the hero (us) was Peter Pan, the audience erupted in delirious applause.
The strategy story presentation often generates a rather profound insight that, if it emerges, you should certainly call out. The team or organization often shows up twice in the story: once as the dragon and again as the hero. We are both antagonist and protagonist in our own story. We are part of the problem, and we are the solution.
The idea that the problem is us can be a touchy one to discuss in organizations, even though it is almost always true at some level. Presenting this tough truth in a metaphorically driven story has the fascinating effect of neutralizing defensiveness. When we see it rendered in the story, it feels removed from us, less personal, and even entertaining.
Even better, this hero story redeems us. Sure, we are the problem and helped perpetuate our dilemma, but we are also the people who are going to save the day. Indeed, the most beloved heroes are flawed, such as Indiana Jones and his fear of snakes. Overcoming the flaw makes the victory so much sweeter.
Where Do I Go Next?
Note that this exercise can also work individually. However, it can take quite a long time for one person to fill four or more flip chart pages with detailed drawings. If you choose to work individually, simply create the storyboards on several sheets of standard 8.5 × 11 printer paper. This will scale the exercise to more manageable dimensions and speed the process.
After defining the strategy or creating the strategy storyboard, the next step is to invite others into the conversation. Remember—a story is always the beginning of a dialogue and not the end. Now is an opportunity to invite your people into a conversation about how they personally connect to the strategy narrative you have presented.
One possibility is to have other teams create their own strategy storyboards to illustrate what their piece of this journey looks like. After all, they will have to take action to deliver the strategy, which will send them on their own Hero's Journey with its own set of dragons.
Creative Tension Pictures (Chapter 14) are another way to invite people into the conversation by defining the current reality and desired future states for the change.