Thought Experiment #30: Every company needs a Head of Stories

Update (10th July): What your colleagues are saying:

"this article (in my humble opinion) is your best one yet. Especially like your phrase "Stories are the vehicle to drive empathy, and empathy helps to drive sustained change".

"the ideas posed in these articles are provocative, and remind me how different the digital world is. "Stories of the moment, stories of failure, stories that show, not just tell."...this sharpened my thinking about new ways to make and publish stories. " Director, Consulting

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In previous posts, I explored the need for new roles inside organisations – Head of Experimentation, Head of New Relationships and Head of Role Design. These roles are not common, they rarely come with an established norm or business case, and don’t sit neatly in any one department or function.

This is the final post in this series, and in the next five minutes, I will explore the need for a Head of Stories.

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First, some context: The insights I gained into this role were born three years ago, when I personally helped to create a new Head of Stories in an organisation in which I was previously employed. An international organisation in 30+ countries, with circa 100 staff. I realised that even FTSE 100 companies don’t have a Head of Stories. So, this was no edit-copy-paste job – I went from frustration, to validating the problem, designing and redesigning the role by hiring freelancers for small projects, to building the hiring case, interviewing the new hire, and onboarding the role.

My thinking was, and still is, that many companies have a Head of User Experience (UX) or Customer Experience (CX), so why not a Head of Stories that brings the critical power of video stories to help accelerate the change inside organisations.

Second, what this role isn’t: Most large organisations have dedicated marketing and communication teams, but even then they probably don’t have a full-time storyteller. Many companies hire agencies and videographers, but they are usually freelancers and focused on specific, highly briefed and scoped-out work. This represents the tip of the iceberg of stories that are worth sharing inside organisations. This role is not just a videographer whose job is to (just) create yet more content, but it is to leverage stories as a key mechanism of change.

Third, what the role is: In short, a Head of Stories is part producer, part ethnographer, part videographer, part editor and full-time storyteller. This person searches, creates and scales stories which deliver strategic value for the organisation. He/she will do everything from connecting with people, identifying stories, writing scripts, storyboarding ideas, building capabilities in others, and elevating the voice of the unseen to inspire viewers to action.

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Now, let’s look at the different types of stories that the Head of Stories role should focus on:

Strategic stories, not operational stories: All too quickly, the Head of Stories can become bogged down in creating internally facing stories which don’t generate a real return for the business. If you look at Kickstarter, it’s essentially a storytelling platform, where early adopters are essentially buying into the story of a product and its founders. One way of leveraging the Head of Stories as a strategic role is to use stories as a tool to run experiments on new value propositions. A (video) prototype is much easier to create than investing ￡200K into a product development that may fail at launch. Most products and startups fail because of a lack of market need. Video stories can be used as a way to validate desirability in a relatively low-cost way. The Head of Stories’ job is to use stories to serve a strategic agenda, to impact the top-line growth in sales, and to help co-create the future.

Bottom line impact, not just a cost centre: Similarly, it's all too easy to turn this role into a yet another cost centre. The Head of Stories job is to look at how to use stories to impact the bottom line. For example, by creating videos that educate customers to solve their own problems, rather than call the help centre - and thereby improve operational efficiency. There is an immense, unrealised potential, of using stories to improve bottom line impact.

Growth stories, not promotional stories: Most organisations use ‘internal’ stories in a very superficial, promotional sense. There’s an event and a videographer is hired to go in and capture the energy and some buzz. It’s usually a static, unengaging, and passive story. The viewer does not feel better after watching it, and little, or no, learning or action is evoked from the story. We all see too many stories that show the end-result, with a focus on telling (not showing) us only the successes. When was the last time you saw a video story of a failure (and the learning from the failure) inside your organisation? In 99.9% of cases, you see a version of the story that doesn’t capture the messiness, the failures, and the frustrations that had to be overcome to reach that success. Without visibility of the journey, you are not really inspiring others to keep pushing for the change they’d like to see. The Head of Stories’ job is to search for and capture the right content, which will invoke a change in knowledge, skills, mindsets, or actions.

Near real-time stories, not sterile stories: There are a hundred and one change initiatives, new strategies, offsites, values, customer insights, new product features, client wins, and, crucially, problems that stop the organisation from functioning to its optimum. This humdrum of activity is often captured in Word or PowerPoint documents locked in ‘knowledge portals’ and rarely ever read. There isn’t a real-time visual view of what’s happening across the organisation. The Head of Stories’ job is to create such a visual view of these stories as they are happening, not just the filtered finished articles.

Customer stories, not just internal stories: In the recent HBR post, Erica argues for using stories from customers to highlight your company’s purpose. There is a strong argument made that stories are a key tool for scale. People are already telling each other stories all the time inside your organisation, but they are not magnified, they take time to reverberate, and as new people join old stories simply get buried. The Head of Stories’ role is to find and capture customer stories:

• Which focus everyone on a common purpose, and help them to collaborate around who the customer is and what story the company is telling. Consistency is key.
• There are many departments in an organisation that are not customer facing. As a result, the customer’s voice is communicated, if at all, in a pile of written documents, without any emotion. Next time there is a screw-up with a customer, the Head of Stories should follow what happens to the story, the consequences and impact on the customer. To elevate the disenfranchised and their unmet needs through stories that move employees and communities to action. stories are the vehicle to drive empathy, and empathy helps to drive sustained changed.
• The whole organisation needs to hear what the customers are saying, learning, doing, and finding frustrating. The Head of Stories doesn’t just own the success stories, but the problem stories, too. These can communicate complex problems as short, simple, and poetic videos that persuade action.

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There are a number of barriers to the creation of this role:

Where does it sit in the organisational hierarchy: In large organisations, one can envisage each of the four roles reporting to an executive function. So, the Head of Stories reports to the COO, the Head of Experimentation and Head of New Relationships report to, say, a Chief Growth Officer, and the Head of Role Design reports to the Chief Human Resource Officer. It’s important that, initially, this role starts reporting to the executive function in order to ensure it remains a strategic role. I can virtually guarantee that if the Head of Stories role was created the person would be inundated with demand from across all areas of the business and, therefore, would need to prioritise on high added-value stories.

Internal capability vs external capacity: Most departments in every organisation would love to use more video stories. However, it is largely an external capacity that they buy in for discrete pieces of work. This means that an inordinate amount of time is spent on creating the budget, the scoping of work, the endless backwards and forwards of scripts and editing. Anyone who gets involved in a video project like this will be reluctant to try again. To overcome some of these barriers, I argue that this needs to be an internal capability in most big organisations. Then, this person is not just a servant to the business owners, but an active co-creator of the stories.

What can one person really do: As with the other three roles, it’s the job of Head of Stories to create a function. In my previous organisation of a 100-strong staff, after seeing the value of this role, there are now two storytellers (filmmakers). I imagine the same would happen inside your organisation. The Head of Stories’ job is not just to create the stories, but also to build the internal case to meet the demand that will inevitably come flooding in. Crucially, it’s their job to upskill the rest of the organisation to search and create their own (video) stories.

Approval of the role: Simply creating a powerpoint version of the business case for this new role is unlikely to lead to a clamouring of support from executives. And, as for the other three roles, I’d recommend a three-step process to create this role.

Step 1) validate the outcomes of this role through experiments.

Step 2) create the hiring case, job-spec, and bespoke interview process.

Step 3) incubate the role for the first 90 days to ensure the problem, purpose, people and progress aspects of the role are solidified.

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In summary, the Head of Stories searches, creates and scales stories which create strategic value for the organisation. Here, you can find a draft one-page hiring case for the role to help you kickstart the creation of this role inside your organisation. Please email me for the PDF copy at [email protected]

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I'm now turning this "why every company needs a Head of X role" series into a book. This book will explore five more roles as well as the tools, the hiring cases, case studies and thought leadership behind each of the roles. If you're interested in receiving excerpts from this book, or if you see value in these posts, please like, share, comment or tag others.

With thanks in advance, for engaging with this post.