Your business is a story – a big narrative call out to the world you really want to do business in. So what ARE you calling for? And are you singing?
Everyone is writing a future. Most of us don’t think that’s what we’re doing. Three change makers from very different professional sectors showed me recently that “future” really just means new community – and the way we’re all building the one we’ll end up part of is with regular daily signals of storytelling. So what are people picking up from you?
Are you in a perfect storm right now?
Or are you still muddling on?
Getting one particular business invoice through this morning I can tell you, a perfect storm can arise fast to disrupt years of muddling on.
But to find a sustainable new direction, a new purpose, a new life and energy in your business, you might need to find yourself in the right kind of perfect storm – one of personal realisation.
It’s the era of crisis – the perfect time for terrible weather! – and, between carbon audits and recruitment issues and supposed market trends and supply chain costs, you’re likely to be at least half trying to figure out what the unnerving 2020s really mean for your future – and for those depending on you.?
What skills do you and your people have in order to navigate the unknown and make something new out of it?
Change is an alien land, an “undiscovered country” that always involves a few developmental dead ends to reach. But are you yet ready to hear its call??
“I found, on my long distance walks, that it really helped to sing as I went – and it changed my encounters with the more than human world.”
Dr Kevan Manwaring said this to me. He told me that by learning a song as he paced through the countryside, he’d encounter animal life curious about a human behaving a bit differently.
“Flocks of sheep, herds of cows, they would stop what they were doing and listen to me as I passed and it would change the whole energy of that encounter” he said. “I’ve had a yew and its lamb come towards me and let me stroke them as I was singing Blake’s Jerusalem.”
This is not a call for you to drift through your machine shop performing Tay’s Fortnight or favourite bits of The Mikado. Though, really, I do want to see that. This is rather a key note from the supposedly weird practices of art about embodiment.
The world you really want, you’ll have to show up for with your whole self.
Showing up with your whole self takes confidence. What three recent conversations have demonstrated to me is that it also increasingly makes it.
With everything I’ve been learning as a creative, I’ve become interested in how we develop creative confidence for change. So, as a three-part screen special of Unsee The Future, I invited three different change makers to share with me how they use storytelling practices to shape the world they want to be working in. And the last person I went to was an official “storyteller” in an art school.
The first person I went to is a leader in the property sector.
Right? Confidence.
Meet each of my three guests below, read some of the insights I gained from them and click on each header to watch our lovely full 20min conversations.
Produced by Bournemouth University TV production year two students, including a huge thank you to Kai Schuoler, Sam Lancey Isabel, Reannah, Oscar, Jaden, Tommy and the whole crew for making it a pleasure. With a big thank you too to tutor Adrian Butterworth and to Matt Desmier for the original invitation in to make these shows. Wonderful to meet everyone and get to encourage their talents – they made it a delight and as only second year they could already coach beginners as accomplished storytellers for live screen.
Nella Pang, Omega RE.
Nella Pang MRICS is a chartered surveyor and founder of Omega RE, a B Corp certified property management company. From a corporate background, she may be used to dealing with some immoveable seeming assets, but she realised the story she’s working in is not really about buildings and materials, it’s about people.
“Sustainability is more than carbon reduction, it’s about communities… it’s about how do we bring the next generation with us?”
I know from my own experiences as a brand and events creative, helping people find their voice in a wide variety of not exactly arty-farty sectors, that the technical challenges of a specific market often obscure professional perspective on what we’re really working with.?
“People want to do business with people” Nella says. “Unfortunately, adversity does not discriminate. If you asked a wide collection of people have you lost someone, do you suffer with mental health are you going through an illness, whatever it is, there will be a majority in the room who will be able to relate to that. So when I launched my business I thought, let’s drop the professional mask, let’s be vulnerable, let start to relating and connecting with clients who care about who they’re doing business with…”
And there is the narrative energy – emotional truth. Nella tapped into it in a professional space not at all used to it, despite it being the sector that deals with people’s life environments. She started with her own and shared it with courage. It’s turned into a mission to build new community around the work.
Making change for her means showing up with very defined values, then not being slow to speak up. Mark out the intent, then live into it. It’s live public role play.?
While you might think this sounds like a stretch to describe as “storytelling” you bet this reflects a practice of art, to do what Nella does in her context – making confident marks of conviction in public, partly as test, partly as testimony. She also creates spaces for people to hear stories of different ideas as she works – she instigates a lot of events, to pause the work itself and talk about it from new perspectives.
Mark out the different values, explain how you’re going to live into them, then demonstrate it as openly as you can, learning out loud, and scheduling in the social media and PR telling of what you’re doing. Then invite participation in that process regularly. There’s a change making format. By becoming known as much for creating thinking events and for encouraging different voices to speak up honestly, all with a twist of more creative, less boring experiences, Nella is building a community in property with different expectations.
When she invited me in to host a panel discussion at one of these events, I could see from the middle that this was two things to its audience: curious and likeable. An event tingling some new sense of possibilities.
But while you can maybe choose to be such a leader, cultures change when more and more people in a community feel encouraged to become consciously practicing storytellers with you.
Annie Talboys, Seismic.
Annie Talboys is head of marketing at Seismic . An organisation that helps big corporates: “develop sustainability strategies and embedding them to drive impact” as she explains.
With a strong marketing background, where she worked for a range of creative and strategy agencies helping their clients drive growth, she understands storytelling as a vital beacon of brand. But today as a certified B-trainer as well, she knows what the purpose of any clear narrative really is.
“It’s about a community first. Making sure we’re inspiring our community, keeping them together, and part of the narrative is developing great stories that trigger people at certain decision making points. There’s got to be a thought, a belief there that my role is about helping to trigger that.”
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But between inspiring rhetoric and real change, what’s needed?
“I think a lot of things need to line up, but it starts in the board room.”?
Someone at the old top needs to realise that something needs to change. Couple this with government and market pressures and, says Annie: “it can cause a perfect storm, and that’s the point when I can step in.”
What the right moment of realisation can reveal is a whole new way of seeing the world, and the start of a whole new journey.?
Making change as significant as the demands of the era of crisis, however, means living a kind of conscious narrative, telling and celebrating it in an ongoing habit; the milestones, the reporting, the building of a community that wants to will you on.?
“I feel like it’s bigger even than this, but the B Corp community feels like a real movement.”
Creative change is about more and more people demonstrating that they think they’re in a different story, an idea of how to work that’s bigger than them – something with “a common good, a common mission” bigger than everyone’s own endeavours but made up by them.
I liken it to a theatre or TV production – everyone’s job is a storytelling role. Camera op, sound recorder, actor, writer, director… they’re all there to help each other tell the one story. And so with an organisation’s pitch to become more sustainable, more purposeful – every role in the company is about encouraging that outcome. Which also makes it a storytelling role.?
Projecting, living into, demonstrating, testing out confidently and openly a big idea that a group of people want to come together to stand for. ..Y’know, an idea such as a world that’s not dumpster fire.
“More and more companies are realising it’s just the right thing to do…” says Annie. “The data suggests that B Corps are more resilient, they grow faster and also are able to attract and retain talent which is just a more solid business. But also they’re doing good in the world, which all seems… why wouldn’t you?”
That this is how you develop a fantastic brand is kind of mere overflow of the process. The real truth powering all this is… it’s good for the soul.
Which is the language of poets.
So can we learn some practical things directly from them?
What do you think? In an age of crisis, poets are Six Sigma practitioners at daring to put it all out there.
Kevan Manwaring, Arts University Bournemouth.
Dr Kevan Manwaring is course leader of the MA in Creative Writing at AUB. He teaches literally how to tell stories of better futures in the age of crisis. As a poet, novelist and researcher, he’s always been fascinated with narratives and explored them across comics, film making and crucially, performing. And as he says, everyone has to be able to tell a good story.
“Bardic skills are ancient, they go back to pretty much the dawn of language. We are storytelling creatures, it’s how we make sense of the world. We narrativise, we mythologise. But those skills are as relevant today as ever – we all need to be able to use them.”
He himself was nervous when he first got up at poetry nights as a young man, fumbling with his notes and trying not to look at the crowd. In a move that would have earned him a gold star from Speakery founder Marcus John Henry Brown today, Kevan began to learn his poems by heart and found himself engaging with the crowd much more meaningfully in his performances. But storytelling in the central performative sense is more improvisationary and interactive even than this. It takes great narrative and expressive confidence. But it can transform rooms, streets and perspectives, is the point.
Confidence is just practice. And what you are really practicing as a storyteller is theatre.
Kevan’s new book is entitled: Writing Ecofiction – navigating the challenges of environmental narratives. But what are some of those challenges, does he think?
“The spectre of the preacher…” he says first. “You can’t just preach to the converted. You’ve got to try to connect with people with other belief systems, other paradigms – and do it in a way that is not proselytising or evangelising, and that’s really tricky. Getting people interested, getting them hooked uses all your narrative skills to create that traction and keep them engaged. And if you can do that, you can win over hearts and minds.”
“You don’t have to be too ceremonial and precious about it but if people feel relaxed they’ll listen.”
In trying to do something as grand and imperative and urgent and impossible feeling as encouraging big ideas of change, the pivotal role of storytelling is to create, as he puts it: “a moment of gnosis.”
A moment of realisation in the story. A sudden break in the clouds.
“But it has to happen inside them,” says Kevan. “All you can do as a storyteller is create the conditions to encourage it happening.”
Perhaps starting with, as I originally heard it, a moment of notice.
Art is always about “digging deep into yourself, to find your authentic voice” he says, “and that’s hard, especially in an age of AI. But I think more than ever we have to bring our full humanness. Use our idiosyncrasies and embodied histories in our storytelling and narratives. Bring your full self.”
From my lifetime of working with storytellers, I find myself wanting to encourage creative confidence for change in any leader I fall in step with who just needs a fresh shot of oxygen. But that essential theatre of narrative thinking can be put to significant use by creating a leadership-building moment of notice for a team – a turning point experience. An event to shake up the usual flow, and mark something changing.
I've been saying all my life as a music artist, finish things. Those artefacts of LPs and gig posters are milestones helping you feel the progress, pay respect to your own journey. Feel a little less lost. A little more energy in the next chapter.
The skills I’m used to seeing in action magically in fellow creatives and use myself every day really are essential to helping ordinary us lot unlock new personal energies from the era of crisis, to feel it much more like what it really is – the era of transition.
“It’s about finding myths to live by, changing the narrative that we have, certainly,” says Kevan, “but it’s really about empowering people – activating that vision, that voice of vocation inside someone else.”
I think we should be helping each other create a few more perfect storms.
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With a huge thank you to Bournemouth University.