Strategy and Accountability: How to Use Stories to Get More of Both

We recently worked with an executive team to reveal their new North Star to their senior managers. A North Star is a winning aspiration that should bring the whole organization together in a unified strategic direction. They crafted it with care to make sure it captured everything and didn’t make anyone feel left out. The response from their senior managers was one of disappointment. They understood it, it made sense to them and yet it also didn’t take a tough (enough) stand and inspire a new future.

In working towards the North Star each of the executive leaders developed a Future Press Release and the President developed a Future Annual Report.  These are visualizations of the future in story format that express what it will be like to experience the outcomes of a successful strategy.  Amazon popularized the technique for product strategy.

The team felt stuck, so we had the President read his Future Annual Report and the room erupted in excitement.  The context became clear, people could imagine a much different future and while it was all consistent with the North Star everyone understood what needed to happen. The story unlocked their passion. 

Visualizations that vividly describe the future are key storytelling tools that help develop vision at the front end of a strategy.

Narrative stories provide context to effectively cascade your strategy

Strategy is all about making trade-offs for what an organization should prioritize for what’s in and what’s out.  Through the strategy development process priorities are often reduced to a quick phrase or label such as unparalleled customer service, partnership culture or operational efficiency.  The priorities may be well understood by executives who were involved in developing them however our leadership job is not complete until the rest of the organization understands and buys in. 

In working with another Executive team on their strategic priorities, they were struggling to identify measures of success and which projects would be in and which they ought to stop.  We worked with them to draw out the story of their priorities and in doing so they immediately saw numerous ways to measure progress, found ways to get moving, and developed the narrative needed for creating buy-in with the organization.  Here is how we worked with them to build an effective narrative story to communicate their strategic priorities.

Six steps to build a strategic narrative:

The idea: Describe what the priority is about.  Great ideas are built on successes of the past and powerful narratives honor what has been successful to get here.  Include new information that makes change relevant now.  We don’t pay attention to things that stay the same. Call out the contrasting change between the current state of today and the successful future of tomorrow.

The problem: Describe the problem that this priority will solve.  What’s at stake if nothing changes?

The opportunity: What is the unique opportunity available to us right now?

The practical first steps: provide some direction with the very next steps that are practical and feasible.  They likely won’t solve the whole problem yet get people starting to think about action.

The longer-term challenges: provide some insight into the unsolved challenges that lie ahead.  This is an opportunity for a call to action for the organization to solve these challenges.

The promise: if we get this right, here is the amazing result we will create.  Every strategic priority should have a measurable or observable result that can be used to gauge progress.

Storytelling has a remarkable ability to connect people and inspire them to take action. They provide context and structure that aid in understanding complex ideas. By presenting information within a narrative framework, storytelling helps people visualize concepts more effectively. People remember stories when they include both positive and negative emotions.

The most compelling narratives honor the past, help us understand the need for change, and offer practical ways forward.   They are a crucial step to harness your organization’s energy and direct it toward strategic change.