Storytelling at the Watering Hole: listening, engaging and re-distributing power to mold organizational culture

Today, business leaders are more aware than ever of the correlation between a company’s productivity and the health of its culture. In the private sector, strong, positive organizational cultures are synonymous with growth and sustainability. And at the heart of culture is story, which grows out of a community's dominant narratives.

Yet, these dominant narratives are not always the same as the stories that reach the ears of top-level decision makers. To discover the stories actually shaping employees’ attitudes, thoughts and behavior, we must go first to the watering hole of that organization. A watering hole is a physical or psychological space where community members gather naturally each day, and the story exchanges that take place at a watering hole reveal the narratives that mold, shape and build organizational culture.

These stories, however, often go unnoticed and unheard. Business leaders don’t often have the capacity to recognize the importance of these daily story exchanges for coherent leadership, and if leaders don’t create spaces to listen, those who aren’t in power are only able to tell their stories among themselves, not to the top lines. When employees then hear stories from their leaders, in meetings and town halls, videos, and communication strategies, which don't reflect or partially reflect the stories told around their watering hole, the dissonance leads to cycles of distrust and disengagement. A human-centered and healthy company culture must therefore be a story-centered culture: one where the stories of all employees, on all levels, are heard and addressed.

And that is the aim of this workshop: to explore how we can help redistribute power and take steps towards creating story-centered organizational cultures by finding and reclaiming the watering holes. Specifically, we will do activities in large group, small group and partner format to explore and uncover:

1. the raw power behind the storytelling done collectively and naturally at every company's watering hole(s) and the implications of these stories for an organization's culture, effectiveness and future

2. how the watering hole can be found and reclaimed positively, through analyzing a case study

3. three specific techniques you can use to train leaders to listen, engage with and address the stories individuals tell at their company watering hole(s) in order to bring about coherent and positive organizational culture change.

Creative Ways to Harvest and Share Stories

Some stories are like matches, they burn bright for a moment and can never be heard again. Others need to be remembered, retold, and spread. For groups who are shaping their culture by shaping their narrative, it is important that the stories stay top of mind. If you are curious about using stories as a group’s collective memory, this session is for you. Especially if you are concerned about the integrity of stories. No one likes their personal story to become the slogan for some campaign they don’t believe in. In this session, we will explore:

- how to spot the stories;

- how to shape the stories;

- how to share the stories.

And how to do this in a way that feels creative, fun, and authentic. At the end of the session, we will harvest our own story, and debrief the session as a #DialogueExperiment.

Turning unhappy endings into stories of power: grief and forgiveness in organizations

This workshop explores the difficult experiences of grief in organizations. We will explore both the story of power and the power of story in situations of loss, defeat and disappointment; and look for ways to overcome these difficult experiences as a community and as individuals.

What doesn't kill us, doesn't always make us stronger; if we do not find ways to recover, it might even make us weaker and less equipped to cope with adversity. We run from grief and forgiveness and have difficulty letting go, because in organizations grief mostly remains quiet, unseen and denied. Difficult experiences, defeats and losses might lead to a feeling of powerlessness and smallness, they might impact our self-worth and our trust in other people, especially those in power.In the workshop we will use storytelling and storylistening techniques to step into our power even when we need to go through grief.

In organizations, grief often isn't tangible. It's not necessarily about a loss in the »real world«, it might be about a loss of an idea, a dream, an ideal, a perception – a loss of a story we believed in and built our world around. Grief is also about longing and yearning for something we cannot have or we might never get. In situations of grief over ideas we have about power we long for somebody powerful to take care of us and protect us, we also feel lost and out of control. Grief is also a big part of forgiveness.

For forgiveness to happen, something has to die. In organizations, what has to die is the idea of who we were as an organizations. The old story needs to die and be buried before the hew story can be born.We might use different storytelling techniques to explore; participants will get the opportunity to explore their own situations of grief and forgiveness at work (with an emphasis on boundaries and not opening what we cannot close within the 90 minutes), we might discuss a case-study of a client, and use action based techniques of storytelling to bring about new endings to difficult stories.

Stories of Change Writeshop – Learn to write and write to learn

The stories of change writeshop offers a guided writing experience in which you have the opportunity to write and share a story of change that you experienced, and feel is worth sharing. About a change in which power played a critical role, either for the good or as an obstruction for the desired change.

Writing is best learned through writing. This mini-writeshop introduces you to a collective, creative and structured approach to reflect, learn and document stories about social change. The step-by-step method guides you through a series of prompts that enable you to freely download all the ingredients of your story. This includes both tangible elements (such as location, characters and outcomes), as well as intangible aspects (such as feelings, relationships and hidden agendas).

Short feedback-rounds with co-writers will help you to sharpen your thoughts, get to the essence of the story, inspire each other and gain new insights together. You experience ways to give and receive open, honest and transparent feedback on writing products. By fleshing out a conversation and/or using images, you learn ways to bring your story to live.

“The absolute silence of everyone simultaneously writing on their own stories is magical.”

We start by asking you to zoom in on a situation in which power was a main influencer. In the reflection rounds we will explicitly address this and explore the underlying forces that are at play.

For both gifted writers and those with writer’s block. 

Creatuals: Breaking patterns, moving minds

In this workshop, participants will get to know an approach to change and transformation based on Creatuals – a unique approach to create tailor made rituals to mark important transitions, break patterns and move minds.

The group will be invited to use their individual talents in order to find new direction and collective innovation on a given issue or situation. And all together, you and the other participants will search for new perspectives and associated rituals.

STEPPING INTO STORY ACTIVISM

We all use stories as a frame for how we see the world and as a filter for our actions. They tell us how far we can go, what “people like us” can expect and who has the power.  So what happens if you want to change the story you’re living in? So many people want to get good at storytelling so they can influence others.  But stories can do so much more than this!  They are a foundation stone for changing our experiences and expectations and the doorway for new possibilities.

This session offers ten practices of Story Activism and how you can use them first to take back the power of your own story and then to work with others to change the stories we’re all living in together.  This will be a highly practical and fun session aimed at providing a roadmap for taking action in areas that matter most to you.

We Are All Chimeras: Promoting Unity, Diversity, and Ingenuity through Metaphorical Storytelling

We will share an experience of using a mythological creature (the Chimera) and organizational metaphor analysis (see, e.g., Gareth Morgan’s Imaginization) to guide people through the process of crafting stories about how they envision themselves and their organizations as multi-faceted or hybrid organisms—reflecting on their past, present, and future possibilities—with the aim of valuing the diversity of that community while also promoting a collective, collaborative identity.

During the workshop, facilitators will briefly share the case study behind this workshop (10 minutes) then lead the participants through a series of interactive storytelling activities to reflect on the “chimeric” characteristics of themselves and of their organizations (70 minutes) and close with a time for reflection and further discussion (10 minutes).

The background of this workshop is a case study at an Art and Design college with a diverse international student population (California College of the Arts in San Francisco, USA). Students, faculty, and staff adopted as the school mascot the Chimera: a fantastic beast from Greek mythology—part lion, goat, serpent, and dragon. The term “chimera” in English has come to mean any dazzling, seemingly impossible, or ingenious combination of things, so until recently there was no single visual symbol for this mascot and no single definition of it; instead, our artists composed many different chimera. This seemed fitting for a community where everyone celebrates their own uniqueness. But when a symbol can mean almost anything, it can become vague rather than unifying. Student Life leaders developed a series of campaigns to help people at all levels of the organization see themselves as chimera, using visual and verbal storytelling to bring people together to compose and communicate that message.

What participants will get out of the workshop is: 1) A critically reflective and creative learning experience regarding their personal and professional identities; 2) a set of tools and examples for facilitating hands-on “maker-space” type experiences with colleagues (using visual methods such as collage along with creative writing prompts) for metaphorical storytelling and dialogue within their organizations; 3) an annotated bibliography of resources for further reading and exploration about this approach. 

Developing the future stories of companies – open and closed storyworlds

Convincing future stories of companies and organizations (Where will we go? What will we do? What will be our place in the world?) are crucial for the value of companies in (stock) markets, as the sociologist Jens Beckert showed in his book “Imagined Futures”. But future stories are as well important to give employees and executives of company a deep understanding of the meaning of there everyday work: What is the goal of our company? And what is my contribution to this goal? Where am I situated in the common story of our organisation?

Future stories of companies can be situated either in an open or a closed storyworld. To explain what open and closed storyworlds are let’s take a sidestep into screenwriting. In his screenwriting guide “First save the cat” Blake Snyder identifies 10 types of stories told in movies. One of these he calls “Monster in the House”: The main character of these stories is locked in a closed setting with monster he has to fight. An example for this story type is Ridley Scott’s film “Alien” (1979): Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is fighting a murderous alien in a spaceship; she will only survive if she can kill the monster. Closed stories like “Monster in the House” are based on fear. Companies often tell there future stories in such a closed setting: The globalization, the digitalization, an economic crisis can be the monsters in the house, and the survival of the company will depend on how they deal with these monsters.

Future stories of that type can motivate by fear, but only on short term; they lack a perspective for the time after the monster is killed. They are focused completely on the monster and don’t have a compelling vision. An example of an open storyworld setting can be, according to Blake Snyders types of stories, the “Golden Fleece”: Jason ant the Argonauts in Greek mythology have the vision to find a treasure, the golden fleece. This story is situated in an open storyworld: During the Quest for the treasure a lot of things can happen, and maybe the Argonauts learn on their way, that they have to change their vision and seek another treasure. Future stories in an open setting include spontaneity, adaptation on the needs of new situations, change and re-authoring of the goal and the outcome of the story while telling it.

Based on this difference between open and closed storyworlds in the workshop we will discuss the building of successful future stories, look into examples, and see how we can develop future stories beginning with the stories of the past and the present.

Workshop Host