Chapter 1: Let me tell you a story...

in this series of blog posts, I want to lay out the importance of storytelling to innovation and system change...

In 2008 the way I thought about innovation changed forever, and with it my career. The scene: me a chemist in a suit stood in front of an audience of casually dressed designers with asymmetric hairstyles talking about sustainability. It was the London Design Festival and I’d been asked to talk about what chemists were doing to solve our environmental challenges. I explained how chemistry is involved obtaining materials, processing them and ultimately recovering and using them again. Materials sustainability needs chemists. But it is designers that make material choices, and these large group of leading sustainable designers hadn’t had a live chemist in front of them before. After my talk they held me there through lunch answering questions for an hour and a half. One even tailed me to the Tube station still asking questions.

I realised it wasn’t so much the quality of my talk that generated the interest, but the lack of connection across the disciplines that was so exciting. The misconceptions on materials were staggering. The designers lacked the information to make good choices. I dawned on me that the last few years I’d spent sat in rooms full of chemists all telling each other they had all the answers to the world’s problems, and then producing documents detailing how, was largely a waste of effort. We should have been telling people that could do something about it.

Perhaps this shouldn’t have been such a revelation. I had already experienced the buzz you get when different experts around a problem/opportunity come together and realise they have all the answers between them. The best innovation really does happen at the interface between disciplines. ?As Iain Gray (the first CEO of Innovate UK- then Technology Strategy Board) used to say: “innovation is a full contact sport”. To do that well requires good communication. And unfortunately, we’re largely awful at that still.

Another story. When I did my PhD in chemistry it was compulsory that during your final year you delivered a talk on your research to the whole chemistry department. Half an hour on what you had discovered and why that was exciting. I confess I often felt like I was a poor chemist because roughly 15 minutes into most of these presentations I was lost. I didn’t understand the technical terms and significance of the results in most cases. Even within the broad subject of chemistry, an organic chemistry such as myself got lost learning about, liquid crystal chemistry.

I’d had a wake-up call communicating my work already. I thought I was pretty good at presenting. I am very happy speaking to an audience and my research had yielded good results from the start. When I gave a talk at a pharmaceutical company as part of their recruitment scouting the feedback was not good. This opportunity had been hard won and I’d failed at one of my strengths. I tore up what I had and went back to the start on structure. I decided to tell the story of my research – each section having a cliff-hanger that carried into the next discovery. I also made the choice to make it accessible. I worked hard on the language I used. The next time I presented was in a competition and I won first prize.

Winning was good, but the real compliment came when I did my final year presentation. As the audience filed out a long tenured physical chemistry professor made his way down from the back of the theatre. He hobbled his way over and peering over his glasses said “In all my years that’s the first organic chemistry talk I have understood and followed from start to finish. Thank you.”

I didn’t realise until years later that this was my first storytelling lesson when it came to presenting research. If other people can’t understand your work, what is the point in doing it? I think many scientists are afraid to ‘dumb down’ their work and that it is important to sound technical and complicated to validate the cost. Worse, I see scientists and engineers thinking they can get attention and change the way the world works through facts and data. That isn’t how humans communicate.

"Stories are data with soul" Bene Brown, academic

We are a storytelling species. Our society is built on collective understanding of concepts. Concepts that are shared through our culture and via collective storytelling. As so eloquently described in Yuval Noah Harai’s bestseller Sapiens: religion, money, laws, justice, and humans rights all rely on our collective buy in. We scientists like to think that science facts can’t be argued with. That somehow, they are separate from imagined concepts. This may be true but how they are adopted into our culture and responded to comes down to how their story is told. Facts need a story to connect. We have been learning this to our cost when it comes to climate breakdown.

As I learned more about the power of narrative to change human response I recognised how I’d used it myself. The revelation that storytelling was thread behind all my successes came recently. I’m proud of the skill I am still developing to explain technical ideas and data in a way that enables others to act on it. It has seen me move from running R&D teams to being customer facing (able to tell them the right story), to supporting innovation (bridging disciplines with the right story), to developing and managing large scale innovation programmes (a business case is really a good story that everyone buys into). I’ve done so with increasing confidence, but it has only recently clicked that what I’ve been doing all this time is storytelling.

“We’re surrounded by a tumult of often chaotic information. In order for us to feel in control, brains radically simplify the narrative” Will Storr, writer

Perhaps storytelling and science always went hand in hand for me. One of my earliest memories was watching Doctor Who and I’ve been a fan ever since. I’m convinced it is what sparked an interest in science solving problems for me. The awesome Russell T Davies (RTD to Doctor Who fans) brought the series back from the dead in 2005 to widespread acclaim. The book on his writing process during the later series, The Writer’s Tale, is a series of email exchanges with a journalist. As with anything he writes, it is impossible to put down and packed with insight. A clear message from the book is the importance he places on the emotional heart of a story. What is driving the characters (and in turn the plot)? Russell has said he is critical of his characters – no one is perfect – and that creates much of the dramatic tension. That’s how he marries ideas and concepts and scenes he wants to do into stories that grip us and we can relate to when the series is about an alien who can time travel.

I found this piece of advice chimed so much with where I see communication about innovation projects, strategy and outcomes fall over. The reasons why are simply missing. I’m fascinated about the why. When you read a book or watch a drama or a film and find it unsatisfying, its likely it’s missing a clear emotional heart. Some elements of a strong story are missing. It is no different with innovation. You don’t need to be a storytelling expert to pick this up – your intuition will do that for you. It’s a bit like watching Strictly Come Dancing and feeling the difference between a good and bad dance even if you don’t understand the technical rules about where toes and fingers should pointing. This is a theme I will return to throughout these blogs, often using RTD as a reference since he puts it so much better than me!

In this series of blogs I want to relate what I’ve learned from applying storytelling to my work. Using examples from my own history, my mentors, and exemplars from the best at this, I’ll go through the following topics.

The power of using story, particularly in explaining science research and innovation. Comms people are jeopardy junkies and need the hooks of overcoming challenges and set-backs that make up the true path of most innovation journeys. And as I have asserted, innovation needs the power to connect across disciplines and that means more accessible language. I’ll mainly examine how it can make your proposals to Innovate UK and other investors stronger and clearer.

How strategy and story are linked. A strategy explains a change journey and needs people to buy in to it. That’s a grand narrative arc made up of smaller stories. Using storytelling tools we can make a strategy more compelling, easier to engage with and more coherent in describing change.

Strategy takes us to system change. To change a system you need to change its narrative. This requires managing the stories that slow around a system. Many large organisations are starting to understand this (of course successful retailers have done this through PR for a long time) and its implications for innovation are worth investigating. As explained in this excellent article by Ella Saltmarshe "The work of systems change involves?seeing?systemically—looking at the elements, interconnections, and wider purposes of systems—and?acting?systemically. Story plays a vital role in helping us do both of these things".?

As an example of system change I will go through how we tried to apply all the above to Transforming Construction. This major innovation programme is coming to an end and we have pioneered a storytelling approach to overcome the myths that has held back innovation in the sector, with the help of the wonderful Stronger Stories.

The huge challenge that remains, and the one I am helping us to focus on next is Net Zero. I’ll look back on some of my experience in sustainability-led innovation and consider what we’ve got wrong so far in telling the net zero story.