10 reasons why the 'humble narrative' is the most important thing in your organisation

Some people are confused by the word ‘narrative.’ They may see it as just a fancy word for a story, or irrelevant to the serious business of running an organisation. So, as the owner of a business called Narrative Insights, a blog on the humble narrative is long overdue. 

Here are 10 points explaining what a narrative is and why it’s the most important thing in your organisation:

1. Narratives are micro-stories that transfer knowledge between people: Ever stood around the water cooler, or on the sidelines of conference or a meeting room just chatting to someone you know a bit? Chances are you shared a number of ‘top of the mind’ things you’d just heard about or seen around your organisation - things you were not yet sure about the meaning or importance of. Some call it gossiping but it’s also called sense-making and is how humans have been making sense of the complex world around them for millennia so they can act effectively in it. It’s how we evolved from the plains of Africa to create civilisations on every continent - communicating with each other to create and share knowledge. The narrative is the universal currency of knowledge exchange  
2. Narratives describe what’s happening - allowing us to pay attention to others: Recall the last presentation you listened to or meeting you attended. What stuck in your memory? The recital of facts and figures or the anecdote, the story about something that happened to someone? The answer will be the latter as human understanding is empathy based (we can picture ourselves in that situation so patterns in our memory start to form around the scenario). A computer will ‘remember’ the former. It’s just the way we are both designed
3. Narratives are often from the past, but not about the past: Events remain ‘top of the mind’ when the individual can’t resolve their meaning. Something may have happened in the past but continues to have relevance for the present and future. For example, the famous thought experiment of monkey’s in a cage being doused with cold water every time one of them reached for a banana results in the monkeys continuing to self-regulate long after the dousing response has stopped. Narratives (to shape action) are links between past events and present (and future) action.
4. ‘War stories’ disseminate knowledge about how to act spontaneously: Narratives evolve into organisational ‘war stories’, transferring hard won knowledge about how to respond should such similar challenges occur again. They are a rich source of peer-to-peer learning and are part of the reason silos exist and should not be destroyed!
5. Narratives allow us to rehearse how we would act in certain situations: More than just gossip narratives are training and development done by the people for the people. They create options for action.
6. Narratives capture and preserve organisational knowledge and learning: Narratives form and disseminate organisational memory far more powerfully and effectively than many a learning and development department because they emerge from the interactions of people on the frontline and who know the context best
7. In original form narratives make people think: Too often there is a tendency to try and tidy up the company’s narratives, turn them into a best practice database or series of case studies. But this ignores the fractal nature of narratives - they have multiple layers of meaning that can be re-configured by different people in different times of need to create fresh breakthroughs. Sanitising them imposes on the narratives the cognitive bias of those doing the sanitising - diminishing the rich, multi-layered value of the narratives (and organisational knowledge). Anyone who has studied history will understand the similarities here to the preference of primary unstructured evidence over secondary structured evidence for exploration and discovery   
8. Taken out of context and tidied up narratives lose authenticity and utility: Faced by a new challenge I would want to explore the raw experiences of those who’ve done something similar (or something very different with similarities of some sort) in order to discover something new that might help me not only survive but thrive. Sanitised cases strip away the potential for serendipitous discovery in favour of a single agenda pushed by someone with a rudimentary understanding of the context. BEWARE the centrally constructed narrative database!
9. Adaptive challenges require voluntary engagement to explore issues: Serendipitous discovery matters because we are increasingly being forced to deal with things we’ve never dealt with before. These are not technical challenges but adaptive ones. Cases and best practice will only give us examples of past practice, which are of limited utility in helping us deal with the here and now. As @snowded points out, people will almost always share their knowledge in a moment of genuine need. Organisations therefore should start organising around facilitating these connections rather than the content of the discussions (think Apple providing the platform but developers creating the apps)
10. If leadership isn’t transparent narratives will be created without their influence: And this brings us to the key point for why organisations must learn what narratives are and start taking them more seriously. Narratives shape and reinforce how people see things. If the dominant narratives in an organisation are that the leadership are only interested in themselves then every decision risks being interpreted around the water cooler with this negative bias. Objective truth doesn’t exist - the world is too complex and every action has too many causes to state categorically that A lead to B - therefore narratives become the reality in the organisation and  shape perceptions and action.

If your organisation is being constrained by negative narratives - what leaders mistakenly attribute to the ‘wrong culture’ - then you need to start with improving your awareness of the narratives in the system. From there it’s a simple case of working out what action you need to take to get ‘more positive narratives like these and less negative ones like those’. 

Little tip though - involve the people in that process.
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Contact us if you want to learn how to do this fast.