Whether it was in Sao Paulo or San Francisco, our mantra to each cohort of pitch-hungry UK cleantech CEOs we had brought overseas was, “be the right people, at the right time and place, with the right stories”.
A single story wasn’t enough. They needed the skills to share their journey in many ways because the promise of each start-up looked different depending on where it was viewed from. The VC, with an aligned thesis and capital ready to deploy, sees the journey very differently from potential B2B customer who is manging the risk of supply chain integration, or a keen city official that needs to navigate their own constituents, planning and procurement.
At a systems level, it’s a bigger and more complex picture, but the same challenge.
Change, like story, is non-linear, living, and messy. Both are as much about the past as the future, decay as growth. And both change and story work best when, at their heart, they are about the exchange of ideas, agency, and meeting people’s needs. This is why successful storytelling is a key part of successful change.
On our entrepreneur missions, the successful CEOs intuitively understood this. Within a week they might have told their story in dozens of different ways to potential customers, partners, investors, employees, and connectors over three or four events a day. That’s a lot of live testing, adjusting, and retesting based on what they are hearing and learning.
By contrast, many of us working on systems change can spend a lot of our time isolated from the people whose support we need to win, while we are busy honing the story we want to them to hear. Not the one they need to hear.
To help correct that, the Berkana Two Loops is a useful tool because it can simply capture:
The old and new paradigms
Different journeys and stages within them, including a messy middle between them
Critical roles that people play
Note: In the original Berkana Two Loops model, the loops do not touch to represent the separate paradigms that simultaneously exist. However, if new narratives, norms and ultimately mindsets are to shift and spread, it’s necessary to tell your new story about change in different ways and places. To both meet differing story needs and create the diversity of responses from which progress emerges.
By placing people within the system, it becomes easier to understanding what role they play and what journey they are on. As a team exercise, mapping your stakeholders on the Two Loops creates a rich discussion on how diverse their needs might be. You can then go out and immediately test this in conversation.
These insights become a great springboard for starting to plan how to collectively discover and craft better stories. From values-based segmentation and identifying underpinning moral-logics and their emotional activation. To how you ensure stories align enough to pull in the same direction, delivered through a variety of messengers that have the right social and human capital.
For us, the ability to tell multiple versions of the same story is a change-critical skill. Failing to meet a diversity of story needs is one of the most common reasons that stories about change get stuck. And over time, we’ve seen that the persistence of a singular story is an early warning sign that opportunities will be missed and initiatives will fail.
But it’s easy to avoid, if we remember that:
we never tell our story in a vacuum, and our audience is not a blank canvas
people are already telling themselves a story about us or our idea (or people like us and ideas like ours)
the only thing that will replace it is a better one, which starts with understanding their story needs
To get you started, here are common story needs that can be used to start exploring those of different stakeholders and their specific situations:
Get in touch if you’d like to hear more, or if we can help you and your team begin to map your stakeholder story needs across a system.
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