"You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan.
We come with it." - Margaret Atwood
Storytelling is central to life. Shared beliefs are crucial to our success as a species. Money, god, justice, equality and security are all ultimately intangibles that exist because sufficient people believe in the concepts. Storytelling is hard wired into us, going beyond the intellectual deep into human emotion. This makes it powerful—and often dangerous.
The avalanche of information we receive every day needs coherence, so we process and organise by creating internal narratives — essentially stories. All this is largely unconscious and can apply equally to how we think of a simple glass of wine or a complex organisation. From the outside looking in, an organisation is regarded not as an inanimate object but as a person. To make sense of it we assign personal attributes, both good and bad—trustworthy and reliable, for example, or shifty and duplicitous. Marketers have long understood this, weaving ‘brand stories’ around products.
The problem with stories is that they become very sticky very quickly. Once taken root they are rather immune to logic or fact:
...facts and figures have no power to displace a persuasive story. The only thing that can replace a story is a story. You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. [1]
We are prone to various biases that ensure our stories or world views are not overly challenged. Filtering out sources of information likely to contradict our firmly held views (confirmation bias) is all too easy to do. But stories are just stories. As Daniel Kahneman notes, [2] the only thing you know about an argument delivered with passion and conviction is that the speaker has formed a strong internal narrative. Essentially, he has convinced himself—but that’s all you know.
Active filtering and application of biases mean that the story told and the story heard can be two very different things. Truth in its raw form can be very inconvenient—comforting lies are far easier. It is said that an American presidential candidate who tells the whole truth about the nation’s history is 100% guaranteed to lose the election. [3]
Although maybe not described in these terms, stories are central to the work of a board. Purpose binds the organisation. Stakeholders and customers require a story. Information flow to the board is best framed as narrative. We look at each of these in turn.
The Why story
Understanding purpose is central to success. All organisations exist for a reason—to serve a need external to the organisation. This is equally true in both the for-profit and non-profit worlds. Boards can be viewed as guardians of purpose. This core duty ensures that the reason for the organisation’s existence is central to thinking and that the business does not drift from its ‘true north’. Many writers have explored this essential concept.
Governance thinker Richard Chait [4] suggests boards commit to a ‘dominant narrative’. Described as an organisational saga, this outlines a unified set of consistent beliefs (values) that talks about achievement over time—a journey outlining intended change: ‘We started here and are moving to a future that looks like this’.
The quest is one of seven themes from which all our stories flow. [5] Simon Sinek describes purpose as a ‘just cause’—the sum total of values and beliefs reflecting your contribution to a better world. [6] This is not about money. That most entrepreneurial of American business founders, Henry Ford, noted ‘a business that makes nothing but money is a poor business’.
There is a somewhat odd excitement about IKEA finally arriving in New Zealand. Founder Ingvar Kamprad’s ‘just cause’ was serving people who neither inherited furniture nor could make it themselves—the primary options for acquiring furniture at the time. From this assessment of need has sprung a global business.
The question in the non-profit world is: whose lives are we improving and how? The answer is the starting point of the story and leads to: what social value are we creating that gives us the right to receive funding, donations, tax relief and the gift of people’s time?
The why story binds organisations. It engages employees, attracts partners and customers and, in the contemporary world, engages influencers.
The How story
Clear purpose is a strong start but how we get there is the hard part. ‘Promised land’ statements are all very well but without a map and forty days of water, things can go badly wrong. Fully understanding how a company makes money is something investors and the board should be very clear about—not so apparent with Enron, for example.
A non-profit organisation requires a clear theory of change. Funders are increasingly interested not only in what you intend to do but how it will be achieved. Understanding the necessary preconditions for success is another way of framing this. Working back from the ideal future state, a board should understand what must change and be done differently to achieve this result. The board’s ongoing interrogation of the change story is its central function.
Cathy Trower [7] talks of the ‘emerging story’ in the boardroom. The strategy story is an evolving one and needs redrafting as more observed data is built into it and it is subject to repeated robust criticism. As such it becomes a better story, increasingly credible.
Narrative in the boardroom
I am sorry for writing a long letter, but I did not have time to make it shorter.
First credited to the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero
Writing well takes time. Too many board packs are the result of laziness, containing volumes of information largely irrelevant to the governance function. A board is not a bucket to dump data into. Directors’ time is poorly spent if they must make sense of poorly presented material.
Many boards have retreated to bullet points, summary lists and PowerPoint presentations. These have their place, but the benefits of bullet points are ‘illusory and their application potentially dangerous’. [8] Bullet points and slide decks can become a series of unconnected fragments. Bulleted lists give equal weighting to all points. In a long list, the reader remembers the first and last point; the middle tends to be a bit blurry.
There is a trend back to narrative. Netflix and Amazon use short, well written narrative papers. Narrative delivers nuance, connection and weighting. The information should support and lead to the right questions: what’s the story here? What does this mean for us and what options are open? Bullet point reporting and its ilk embody cognitive weaknesses that undermine board effectiveness by jumbling the ‘nice to know’ with the ‘need to know’.
It is far easier to assemble large ill-disciplined board packs than add value through good writing.
Research indicates that past 120 pages (equivalent to 4 hours reading), attention starts to fade [9].
Two sides to the story
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard Shaw
The problem with stories is there at are least two parties involved. What the teller of the story thinks she said and what the receiver finally logs after filtering and applying bias are likely very different.
A computer comes pre-loaded with operating software. Adult humans come with pre-loaded stories and narratives. Many of these are like slow-setting concrete, getting more solid over time and therefore very hard to chip away. Someone’s strongly held story is very connected to ego. To make space for your story, it must have context and relevance and the receiver must have some trust in the teller of the story. Without a context, facts are neutral. People add their own meaning depending on their world view.
Understanding these realities should cause us to reflect on several matters. As George Bernard Shaw observes, the fact that we sent some ‘stuff’ out to some people does not mean we have purposeful stakeholder communications going on. We need to check how our key partners view us and whether our communication is contributing in a positive way.
Our recent review of Adam Grant’s book Think Again suggested opinions should be in perpetual beta mode, always open to upgrade. Daniel Kahneman comments in the book that he was always delighted when proven wrong on something as that meant he was therefore, in aggregate, now more right across all things.
This state of perpetual open mindedness is an invaluable boardroom attribute. Together with a good understanding of information biases, it provides a solid base for a board searching for learning.
Passionately delivered stories may not always be the whole truth.
Bad stories
Stories need not be true. They can prey on age-old fears. Blame is shifted to a class of outsider: ‘build the wall’.
In recent months we have seen misinformation in Aotearoa New Zealand reach unprecedented levels. A recent detailed analysis by Stuff [10] opens with the statement that ‘misinformation can kill’. Seeing doctors refuse to support vaccination stretches credulity for the vast majority—but here we are. It is possibly of small comfort to know that this has always been so. The smallpox vaccine faced noisy opposition from ragged alliances of the vaguely malcontent, and thousands marched against mandatory vaccination in Britain in the nineteenth century.
There is a widening gap [11] between what it described as the informed public and the broader population. The fact that your story is true does not guarantee any form of impact.
But worse, if you make no attempt to tell a well-crafted story, people will simply construct their own narrative to make sense of you, your organisation and the things you seek to do in the world.
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Notes
We acknowledge SportNZ as the commissioner of the longer opinion piece from which this article is drawn. The full discussion can be found here. Two sides to every story—The power of narrative
- The new political story that could change everything George Monbiot, TED Summit, July 2019.
- See Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Penguin Books. 2012
- Maxwell, R and R Dickman. The Elements of Persuasion. HarperCollins, New York. 2007
- Chait, R P, Ryan, W P and Taylor, B E. Governance as Leadership. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
- Booker, C. The Seven Basic Plots. London: Continuum, 2006
- Sinek, S. The Infinite Game. London: Penguin Books, 2019.
- Trower, C. The Practitioner’s Guide to Governance as Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.
- Nahkies, G. ‘Would your board be better off ‘dodging the bullets’?’ Board Works, 19, 2019.
- Pinder, Billy. ‘In The Boardroom, Size Matters.’ Board Intelligence, 9 March, 2017
- The Age of Misinformation is Here . Michelle Duff. December 7, 2021.
- See the Edelman Trust Barometer https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer
