Stories, pledges & movements: bringing emotion to strategy
In a previous organisation, at a senior leadership team session, I introduced my new service, and right up until the day before, I wanted to crowdsource their needs to see how best we could support them. But something wasn’t quite right; I couldn’t put my finger on it…
Until the day before, I thought this exercise felt too dry and didn’t. As senior leaders, your insights and experiences are invaluable in this process. Get people to think differently…I started thinking about what it is deep down that mobilises people for policy change — it’s stories like Cathy Come Home I’ve written before about how you can develop story-based strategy and how I try fictional writing to practice my storytelling, its movements like Black Lives Matter or pledges like the Living Wage Campaign.
So I decided that instead of crowdsourcing their policy & research needs, I’d ask them:
1. How can we better use stories & evidence in the strategies we develop?
2. How can we build movements around the strategies & activities we develop?
3. How can we create better ways for organisations to pledge specific commitments to improve our communities? This question was not just a suggestion but a call to action, a reminder of our collective responsibility to our communities.
What stories, movements or pledges have stuck with you?
How have you used them in developing strategies?
How would you use them?
