Stories as the Currency of Culture

How do you know there has been a cultural shift in the organisation you work for? How would you write a business case to determine the benefits of investing in culture change work? Why does culture matter and how can we prove it? These are the questions I’ve been asked in the past when working as a consultant, coach or facilitator in businesses.

I was hired by a pharmaceutical company who had developed a game-changing drug that was set to elevate them from the status of also ran (2-3% market share) to genuine contender (30+% share). Wisely they had forecast in advance that even though the drug could sell itself, the organisation was likely to struggle to deliver the potential. They had guessed that some sort of ‘cultural intervention’ was needed to shift the prevailing mindset from survivor to challenger, oblivion to centre stage. After doing some diagnostics my colleagues and I proposed a series of tool-based workshops designed to get the whole company thinking and acting differently.

Getting the business case signed off exposed the cautiousness endemic in the company. ‘How can you prove this investment will pay off?’ they asked. ‘You will achieve your business objectives’, we replied. ‘Yes but how do we know it will be the investment in culture that did it and not just the power of the drug and the capability of the company?’ they countered. ‘You won’t know for sure, but you will feel it’ was all we could offer. It didn’t feel enough. The work had already begun in this moment of difficulty.

Eventually they said yes and went for it. They had been convinced that stories were the only currency by which they could measure the impact of cultural change. As we did the work we collected stories, tales of what it was like before and how it was becoming. They brought colour and richness in a way that a spreadsheet could not.

This is a story I have found myself sharing a lot recently and so I thought I would write it down. As you’ll know if you’ve toured the resources section of my website, I love a story.

I was facilitating a team development session this week and asked people to share the story of their lives with each other. I often do this as a way to deepen the relationships and also to help bring narrative and meaning to leadership. As usual it was a deeply nourishing experience and I realised that it was only partly about the content of the four stories. What also matters is the process of storytelling; the ritual if you like. For the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence before the written word, stories survived only by being told.

I realise that stories as fake news on social media have a lot to answer for in recent years, and can see how, along with algorithms and bots, they have weaponised much of our political discourse. This is not what I’m advocating. I’m for storytelling as a pro-social ritual that, through vulnerability and intimacy, enables compassion and belonging.

I didn’t realise my story would end like this. So perhaps I’ll finish with the punch line that the pharmaceutical company went to on to be sustained market leader and improved health outcomes for millions of patients.