Every organization has its own unique stories that are shared and told. While many of these stories are trivial day-to-day conversations, other stories are richly codified with information that reinforces certain attitudes and beliefs around topics such as: Who are we as an organization? How did we come about? What do we do? What’s our purpose? Where are we now as an organization? What have we achieved? What does our future look like? How do we treat our customers? How do we stimulate innovation and creative problem solving? How do we fight? How do we party / celebrate our successes? How does innovation pay in our organization?
It is the network of meaning created by these stories that drives and reinforces values, expectations, focus and behaviours. And there’s no better way of heightening awareness around a particular topic than a good story. I you want to find out what these stories are, if you want to use this existing story-sharing network that you already have in your organization and tap it for its usefulness, let us help you access these simply and efficiently.
We can help you capture the hearts and minds of your staff using a combination of anecdote circles (up to 12 people sharing stories which we record and curate), interviews and web-based questionnaires. The approach allows you to focus on stories related to particular topic areas – examples of these could include:
- How does innovation pay in this organisation?
- What do we do that exemplifies our customer relationship promise?
- How do we achieve cost efficiencies? What cost efficiencies are achievable?
- What do our clients think of us? What tells our clients that they’re having a great customer experience?
Once we facilitate access the stories in the anecdote circles, interviews and web-assessments, we use the best story lines as feedback into the culture, using internet media – in other words we advertise the key virtues, values and behaviours by using your own stories.
Why we should do the story harvesting for you: While it is possible to run anecdote circles using in-house facilitators, it’s important to note that because of the weight of history and politics, participants may not be free to share freely if the work is being done by an insider. We’re highly experienced in this work and can access key stories quickly and efficiently and find novel ways of feeding them back into the culture both effectively and with impact.
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