Communicating Change

Abstract

When it comes to communicating change, too often managers rely on plain, boring text emails that nobody reads instead of treating change communications like a marketing campaign and using all of the same tools that the creative, strategy, and data/analytics teams at a marketing agency might use.

StoryDoing® and Organizational Change

Ben Horowitz famously said, “A company without a story is a company without a strategy.¹” We couldn’t agree more. Having a clear and distinctive story is critical in the bottom-up, transparent, socially dynamic business world today. However, there’s a distinction to be made between broadcasting your story—storytelling—and living your story or what we, at co: collective, a strategy and innovation company, call StoryDoing®. In a world where actions speak louder than words, where what you do is more important than what you say, placing your story at the center of your business and organizing around it makes the difference between a good company and a great one.

Building a Great StoryDoing® Organization

1. Start with a Quest

There’s nothing greater than the power of an idea to transform an organization. Great StoryDoing® companies are on a quest, one that everyone in the organization can rally around and adopt. A good quest defines an ambition for the business, beyond commercial aspiration; it captures the narrative and purpose of the brand. That kind of quest has an expansive view of the business in question and thus enables the people working there to challenge category norms and open up new options. A quest is a tool that people inside the organization use every day to make decisions and build the future.

Target’s story is about democratizing style and elevating the everyday. The company is on a quest to make sure that everyone, regardless of budget, has access to fabulous style. The organization turned that quest into action by breaking the conventions of big box retailing and partnering with icons in the design and fashion world. By partnering with companies from Michael Graves to Liberty of London, Target proved that a champagne taste could be had on a beer budget.

2. StoryDoing® for the Organization Starts with the CEO

Employees will not fully commit to a quest until they sense the full support of leadership. Gary Hamel, in his book the future of management, says that “Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it’s the whole game today.²”

One of the most famous story-doing CEOs is Steve Jobs. The story of Apple has been told through every action the company takes, from the breakthrough products to the visionary advertising. In addition to his obsession with world-changing products, Jobs famously spent two hours a week with his marketing partners looking at the concepts in development. He did not do this because he was a particular fan of advertising but because he considered everything that Apple makes, from iPhones to ads, a vital part of conveying the Apple story and therefore worthy of his personal attention. This is still rare behavior for a CEO today.

3. StoryDoing® Organizations Build Their Story into Their Culture

You can copy a product, but you can’t copy culture. For example, Tony Hsieh founded Zappos on an audacious quest to deliver happiness. The key to making that story true was building a culture where making the customer happy was the ultimate metric of success. The old metric of just getting customers off the phone again as quickly as possible was replaced with the new one of keeping them on until they were truly satisfied. Building a relationship and rapport was as valued as making a sale. Traditional hierarchies were eliminated, and the folks on the phone were empowered to solve problems in real time without checking with the supervisor. To make sure of hiring people who could make that really happen, Zappos offered new hires four weeks after they had been hired as customer service representatives several thousand dollars to quit. Thanks to the company’s belief in its employees and the importance of making customers happy, Zappo has become a $850 million business and has one of the happiest workforces in the country.

StoryDoing® organizations don’t tell their story so much as live it. They express it through every action they take—from the products they make to the customer service they provide to the way they incentivize and reward their people. As a result, StoryDoing® companies are nimbler, more efficient, and tougher competitors than traditional storytelling companies.

4. StoryDoing® Companies Are Organized by Shared Purpose

Great StoryDoing® companies build their story into everything they do—these companies don’t follow the latest consumer trends or try to outpace the known competition. Such companies imagine their future based on their quest, a vision that becomes a blueprint for organizing the company.

Nike has been in the business of quest-led innovation for more than 50 years. It started out small, making shoes for people who loved to run, but its ambition was much bigger. Nike’s quest is to bring inspiration and innovation to the athlete in all of us. That ambition has always framed and focused all of the company’s innovation, starting with technically superior athletic shoes and the famous waffle-tread shoe and most recently expanding into the digital platform space with Nike+. Nike no longer just builds great shoes for runners; it builds and creates the software that enables runners—seven million worldwide—to track, measure, compare, and share their runs. This has demanded new capabilities, a digital sports division, and new investments in talent. These investments are made all in service of the company’s quest, a quest that brought both focus and the freedom to expand outside its original product category.

In a world of finite resources, organizing your company’s talent and resources around the quest of your business brings focus and helps separate out the right ideas from the good ideas. On this basis, you can create cross-functional teams united by a shared purpose and identify opportunities that may not seem immediately obvious but represent the potential places where the big battles will be won or lost. As you focus your precious resources on fewer things, you can move faster in the right direction and get ahead of all potential competition. Organizations implementing StoryDoing® make anything possible in a world where everything is not.