Reflection 18 of 52: Can you tell a better story?
May 05, 2014
Most organizations spend extensive time and energy creating their vision, mission and values, all great essentials for guiding action plans. Where many groups get challenged or blocked is taking those important concepts along with their unique attributes and turning them into "their" story.
I attended an Executive Storytelling workshop last week run by storyteller, Bill Baker and executive coach Linda Oglov. The conversations at this event reminded me how much we are attracted to compelling stories when they resonate in a meaningful way.
Part of the workshop included practicing our stories in smaller groups and getting immediate feedback from our table mates. Rarely do we get such a rich opportunity to share our story with strangers and find out what stuck. We also heard about what did not resonate or make sense to the listener. Priceless.
Bill Baker used the African term Ubuntu*, quickly translated, "I am because of you" to illustrate the key ingredients of connection and humanity in storytelling. The Ubuntu philosophy has been central to the good works of people like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and organizations such as the Clinton Foundation.
For all those organizations out there creating vision, mission and value propositions, please take the same time and care with your stories. As we all know your brand is not what you say about yourself, it is what others say about you.
Think Ubuntu.
And, yes we can all tell better stories.
*According to Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of ubuntu can best be summarized as follows: “ 'A person is a person through other people' strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance”.[7]
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