Power Thinking Skill: Find & Tell Stories, pt 13 of 13
One of the ways Google keeps it’s personality in the face of explosive growth is by letting people speak their minds in public places ... a form of corporate graffiti. Dozens of common area whiteboards form places where people can swap ideas about products or add their comments to the 30-foot-long whiteboard dedicated to "Google’s Plan for World Domination."
Mary Catherine Bateson once said, "Our species thinks in metaphors and learns from stories." You can learn a lot about Google from the short story above. You can imagine their hallways rich with whiteboards where people express themselves freely and openly. You can contemplate what it must be like to work at a place with an open vision of "world domination."
Pat Kelly, CEO at PSS/World Medical has a unique view on the power of stories. His quote which follows also winds up being a mini-corporate story:
We've never had a policy manual.
The way we pass along our values is
to sit around the campfire and tell stories.
If you want to ignite action and change people's hearts and minds, begin to find and tell stories that capture the essence of the change your want to create. These should be true stories with a positive outcome. They should give the listener an opportunity to put himself into the story. For instance, with the Pat Kelly story above, you may have immediately reacted in one of the following ways:
-- Oh, we could never give up our policy manual.
-- I wonder how he got away with not having a policy manual.
-- How could I use stories to pass along our values.
-- Wouldn't it be great if we could sit around a campfire and really talk to each other.
Regardless of how you reacted, you were probably more engaged than you might be with an academic, statistically meaningful study of "1400 companies and their approach to using storytelling as part of their efforts to extend their values throughout the organization."
How could you engage hearts and minds through stories?
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Find & Tell Stories: engage hearts and minds in order to stimulate commitment and action. Find & Tell Stories is one of the power-thinking skill sets of the new Innovation Igniter Thinking Wheel series of 13 innovative thinking competencies.
The 15-minute learning module for this competency is presented by Stephen Denning, author "Leader’s Guide to Storytelling" and other books on corporate storytelling. These thinking skills are critical for innovation and for the creative work required for today’s world. A 15-minute video module on "Engage Energy" is available at http://innovationigniter.com.
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