Storytelling Categories in Business

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One of the other areas I wish to discuss with you is storytelling. Organizations have the capability to tell stories and they communicate by telling stories about various issues, I am going to show you in a minute some of them. Storytelling is an important part of corporate communication. It's not something that just some companies do, this is what a lot of companies do and they tell stories. Now they are great to the consistency of the communication and the authenticity of the stories, the greater the believability, the greater the involvement and there I say it the greater the engagement with that particular corporation. Storytelling can be seen as myths and origins. Stories can be told at how a company started, what its principles are and how it overcame the early difficulties and achieved success and the example I have put here is HP. HP grew out of two guys working in garage, and the garage became synonymous within HP. It had great vibrance as part of their corporate culture, and then in their recent difficulties, when they took over Compaq, that was a great move to go back to the garage. They went to invent instead, but what that did was to satisfy both parties for those who like the garage and those who wanted to proceed, but Myths and Origins, very strong issue. Secondly, Corporate Prophecies, stories that make predictions about an organization's future or stories that predict great things, great visionary ideas about how the organization is to develop. Another area for categorization of storytelling is Hero Stories. These are about individuals or organizations who have overcome particular events, have been able to confront a dilemma that was facing the organization and perhaps one individual have saved the whole organization from complete and utter disaster. To do this, I'd like to show you a particular idea associated with a recent incident that would hit the world news. So for many of you, you would have seen on your news on the 15th of January, in 2009, an airplane got into difficulties out of New York, and it had to crashland on the Hudson and as you can see here from what has been in front of us, the story unfolded. Unfortunately we didn't have live film of that particular event. Here he is. Here is our hero. He is the hero of the airline. He saved all these passengers. He might say and I believe he did say that he was only doing, fulfilling his professional duties. But, what he did was a remarkable feat of flying, and the positive if you like unplanned communication event that unfolded from this particular sequence of event has added value to that particular organization because of this particular hero, and this story will be told in the future. Sully is now the hero of this particular airline, and will be so for many years to come. There we are. Those passengers were indeed very fortunate that a freak accident resulted in a potential disaster but they were saved. Well, if you like, it was framed in a way in which the positive spin of this event was communicated to the world by the pilot and the airline. But, it is a positive story and we hear so many negative stories about events and what is purported to be the news. Here we have a positive story about something that's happened to other people, and I think that's a good thing. The fourth category is Archived Narratives, archived old stories. So the organization develops a collection of stories which it uses to trace its history and development through time. Now, I think most organizations do have that, some put it on the website, I don't know, when they actually show through time, significant events in the organization's evolution.