Narrative Strategy: Making Complexity Compelling
We live in a world of volatile variables, demanding disruption and compounding complexity. Our relationships with ourselves and others are evolving, moving beyond simple binaries and easy labels. We need to embrace complexity, without letting it overwhelm us. This is where narrative strategy comes in handy.
Narrative strategy uses storytelling to achieve outcomes. Leveraging our innate story-driven experiences, narrative strategy provides context, sense and meaning making for the abstract, intangible and multi-dimensional. Narrative strategy makes complexity compelling.
Let’s take something like the space industry. An industry that is regulated, highly technical, and rapidly evolving, it requires a narrative that understands the many relationships and needs of all stakeholders. Space has gone from government-funded scientific endeavor to the wild west of advanced infrastructure and hard tech. Some liken it to the internet right before the dotcom boom. It’s complex, to say the least.
So how do we create a narrative that makes that complexity worth engaging in? Especially when were engaging a diverse group of stakeholders in highly technical subject matter?
Here’s how we can use narrative strategy to make complexity compelling:
1. Map the Existing Narrative
First, we engage in story-listening or story research to identify the current narrative. For an industry like space, it helps to both visually map all the relationships, but also collate the current narrative in a document with key distinctions. This requires both qualitative and quantitative research, capturing the stories being shared by stakeholders, and identifying the desires and challenges they face.
2. Identify and Codify Shared Language
One of the most critical elements of complexity is ensuring there is a shared understanding of key concepts and language. For instance the term “telemetry” has different meanings depending on the industry. In healthcare, telemetry is used for remote monitoring of a patient’s vitals. In aerospace, it can mean the transmission of any data from a spacecraft/aircraft to Earth. If you have a healthcare professional working alongside an aerospace engineer, you want to make sure they know what they mean when they say “telemetry”. Context matters and it gives a more macro picture to the minutia of technical subject matters. Creating a lexicon or ontology is often helpful for shared understanding.
3. Co-Create a New Narrative
Engaging a diverse group of stakeholders requires understanding the desires and challenges of each group. In the space industry, we’re working with governments, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, international regulatory bodies, business owners and more. They have explicit desires and challenges unique to them. To co-create a new narrative requires both courage and comprehension to see where desires align and challenges can be solved. A new narrative takes the silos of complexity and unites them with the threads of possibility. The new narrative is co-created with each stakeholder group, giving us a view of the future we are building together and how each stakeholder group has a role to play.
Narrative strategy makes complexity compelling by identifying the story threads that drive our relationships and interactions, enabling us to engage and leverage complexity to achieve our objectives. It allows us to embrace the multidimensionality of our selves and others, moving beyond the short-sighted approaches of traditional management and mobilizing us to our desired futures.
Ari Mostov is a narrative strategist. She works with leaders to make complexity compelling. Learn more www.wellplay.world