As companies emerge from the Global Financial Crisis with a fresh strategy they are looking for better ways to communicate their strategy and to really engage their people in it.  To move from the false ‘nodding of heads’, to a stage where employees really understand the strategy, remember it and can retell it.  Understand, remember, retell – universal challenges in business highlighted by Dan and Chip Heath in their book ‘Made to stick’,

Organisational storytelling or business storytelling is fast becoming one of the key tools to achieve this. Noel Turnbull Adjunct Professor in communications at RMIT university was recently quoted in BRW as saying “The most successful business leaders excel at storytelling – using simple clear language to set out their vision and explaining what they mean for employees, customers, investors and other stakeholders’.

Strategies are normally quite complex, with dense complex messaging.  So how can leaders communicate in a way that connects with their people?  Getting people to understand is difficult enough, but to get them excited and engaged….that is even more challenging.

So how can companies use business storytelling to engage people in their strategy?  Clients often start at the point of ‘we need a strategy story’.  One single ‘strategy’ story that explains everything a company is going to do, and how they are going to do it, does not exist.  Because strategies are complex it cannot be explained by one story.  What organisations need is many stories to explain the various aspects of their strategy and they need a variety of stories for their various stakeholders.

What they also need is their leaders narrating these stories on a day to day basis to constantly engage employees and customers in their strategy which is often implemented over a long period of time.  Check out what Ericsson and the NAB are doing with story to bring their respective strategies to life.