Storytelling for Change

Advice for writing compelling change narratives

I’ve been asked many times to translate corporate pillars, program milestones and practice goals into stories that motivate people to change — and it’s ALWAYS a time-consuming challenge.

Change management presentations and tools are sometimes packed full of technical information that doesn’t easily translate into user-friendly content — let alone a compelling, people-centric narrative.

So when I recently found myself buried beneath piles of facts and statistics — that didn’t even inspire me to read a full sentence — I knew I needed a better framework for change storytelling.

Here’s my approach for translating project and change management tools into inspiring stories about change:

1. Develop your storyline

Translate project/change management plans and impact assessments into a change journey

Start off by reviewing project management (or executive) milestone presentations and change management plans and/or impact assessments.

This information may be technical — and it will most likely only talk about organization-wide goals — but it will help you create a story outline that highlights:

• the current state of how people work across the company (the beginning)
• existing pain points and their triggers across the workplace (think about process, policy, skills, digital and cultural challenges)
• what future success looks like for the organization if the changes take place (the ending).

2. Identify the main characters

Translate stakeholder/impact assessments and org charts into the different audience groups affected by the changes

Now that you know what your story arc looks like, it’s time to cast the leading roles.

Here are some of the tools that can help identify different audience groups:

• Stakeholder assessments — identify and explain people’s roles in supporting the change program. These will most likely be the people FACILITATING workplace change at an organization-wide level.
• Impact assessments — these should clarify the different employee groups (by practice, function or individual teams) that need to LEARN new ways of working.
• Org charts — it’s also important to distinguish between the types of people that can INFLUENCE employees adopt new ways of working, including the role of trusted spokespeople, workplace mentors and early adopters.

3. Uncover what motivates people

Translate people survey results/verbatims and user interviews into WIIFM statements

Your story won’t progress towards an ending without motivation from your characters, so it’s important to understand what inspires people to learn new ways of working.

The best way to do this is by obtaining/reviewing open-ended feedback provided by employees in either anonymous, peer-to-peer or user interview settings.

This information is crucial for crafting WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) key messages that address people’s HONEST concerns about workplace changes, which normally answer the following questions:

• How do you currently feel about (OR are impacted by) the current pain points that the organization wants to change?
• How might you feel about (OR be affected by) the proposed changes that you need to make to alleviate these pain points?
• What types of day-to-day improvements would you like to see as a result? How will these make you feel?

4. Create a cohesive storyline

Combine your organizational storyline and WIIFM key messages for your characters into a cohesive change journey

One of the biggest mistakes people make when crafting a narrative is talking about how change affects the wider organization without showcasing the day-to-day impacts for people in the workplace.

So now that you understand the change journey for both the organization and employees, be sure to talk about both along all of the key touch points in your storyline.

5. Turn your characters into ‘action heroes’

Translate readiness assessments, training plans and dashboards into actions and rewards

Your characters deserve to work in an environment where change positively improves their day-to-day employee experience — and your ending should bring this to life.

Make sure they have concrete change implementation goals — and be clear on the actions they need to take to succeed.

The following tools can help create a positive ending to your story:

• Readiness assessment — outlines everything that needs to happen before going live with training, systems deployment or other resource launches. This will help set your characters up for success by ensuring they’re taking the right action, at the right time.
• Training plans — normally learning new ways of working involves some type of skills training but it could be any number of things. The main point here is to be clear and specific about the actions people need to take to adopt changes.
• Success metrics — research shows that incremental rewards work best when it comes to implementing long-term changes, so show people how they’re tracking and reward them along their journey.

Rebecca is a change communications innovator, design-thinking advocate and Fulbright Scholar who’s worked across digital, organizational design and compliance workplace transformation programs. She spent the past year trying to solve a billion-dollar business problem (the annual economic cost when 70% of workplace transformations fail) by identifying change communications best practice and translating it into a series of implementation plans, playbooks and templates.