10 Storytelling Techniques For More Effective Change Management
10 Storytelling Techniques For More Effective Change Management · 1. Start With A Hero Who Reflects Your Audience · 2. Craft A Shared History.
hero's journey
When beginning your story of change, chose a protagonist that resonates with or inspires your audience. This is not necessarily a person, but a character who embodies the values, struggles and triumphs shared by your team. By doing this, you're not just telling a story that aligns with your change objectives but one that speaks to the very essence of who your team is or wants to become. The classic <anchor>hero's journey</anchor> is a structure that rarely fails to capture attention because it resonates at a deep, fundamental level.
The Hero's Journey: How To Tell Your Company's Story And Make It Interesting
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# The Hero's Journey: How To Tell Your Company's Story And Make It Interesting

By Chris Myers Former Contributor
I write about my journey as a first-time CEO and startup founder.

Jun 27, 2016, 12:58pm EDT

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This article is more than8years old.

When you’re an entrepreneur, you find yourself having to tell your story over and over again. Traditional thinking has taught us to master an “elevator pitch,” quickly describing what it is your business does.

While the elevator pitch certainly has its place and time, I think that it has started to lose its luster. After a while, all pitches sound the same, and while they usually do a good job of describing what you do, they almost always fail to explain why.

A better framework for storytelling is “The Hero’s Journey.” Introduced in 1949 by Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey (also known as a monomyth) is a narrative found in classic literature, pop culture, and even religious texts. The hero’s journey involves a protagonist who goes on an adventure, wins a decisive victory after a crisis, and then returns home transformed.

If that structure sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve undoubtedly heard it a thousand times before. From Beowulf to Star Wars, the hero’s journey seems to resonate deeply with the human psyche and transcends time and culture. Over the years, I’ve adapted this structure to fit my needs, and use it to tell the BodeTree story to clients, investors, and new hires. It makes an otherwise boring story seem interesting and helps people to connect with our mission on a deeper level.

The Call To Adventure

Like the moment in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker meets Ben Kenobi in the desert, every hero’s journey starts with a framing moment when the protagonist is called to begin a new adventure. I use this same story telling technique to frame my company, BodeTree.

Early in my career I worked as a consultant, helping small and mid-sized businesses value their operations. It was a soulless experience where people were merely numbers, and nothing mattered other than the end result. To make matters worse, our services were so expensive that people only took advantage of them when they were suing someone or being sued themselves.

Then, one day I was meeting with a client going through a particular nasty bankruptcy when something happened that rocked me to my core. Upon reading the report I had put together, the client burst into tears. When asked if she was OK, she responded that had this kind of support been available to her earlier, her world wouldn’t be collapsing as it was now. It was at that very moment that the idea for BodeTree was born. I knew that I was being called to help improve the lives of small business owners, and that is how my entrepreneurial journey began.

Ordeal, Death, & Rebirth

The later phase of the hero’s journey is where things get interesting. Nothing of value ever comes easily, and that goes doubly for entrepreneurs. In this phase, the hero faces challenges, encounters death, and then experiences a rebirth that sets them on the right track for ultimate victory.

When we first launched BodeTree, the platform was exclusive to Intuit’s QuickBooks ecosystem. Users had to have up-to-date accounting data in order to take advantage of what BodeTree had to offer. We launched with strong media coverage and a lot of fanfare in 2011, but the initial excitement quickly faded. We saw a tremendous amount of so-called “top of funnel” interest, with a lot of people going through our initial setup process. However, that flow of interested customers was reduced to a trickle when it came to actually using the system. We were perplexed, to say the least. It seemed as though there were only two reasonable explanations: either we weren’t delivering on what we promised, or people didn’t have good enough data to use the system.

After digging deeper, we discovered what we came to call the 90% challenge. Essentially, 90% of all small businesses didn’t have the good accounting data that we needed to run the system. It was an existential threat to everything we had built. At times, I considered giving up and abandoning the project altogether. However, in the deepest valley of despair, the team and I had a revelation. If we couldn’t tap into good accounting data, we’d have to find a way to create that data ourselves.

We went back to the drawing board and decided to focus on the one data source every business had: bank accounts. We would sync with their bank and credit card accounts to do the SMB’s accounting for them to power the system. It was a total rebirth, but we emerged stronger than ever. Our failure and subsequent transformation helped us create something better than we ever imagined.

The Triumphant Return

One of the final stages of the hero’s journey is the return home. For BodeTree, it wasn’t so much a return as a path forward. Now that we had discovered product/market fit and gained traction, we set out on a path to execute. We entered into the market older, wiser, and prepared to face any challenge that came our way.

When I tell this story to people, I can see that it resonates in a way that a typical elevator pitch does not. The hero’s journey framework makes things personal, relatable, and interesting. The key is to tap into the archetypes and monomyth structures that we all know and connect with in order to make connections with people’s emotions. Adopting this structure to tell our story has been transformational, and I highly encourage my fellow entrepreneurs try it themselves

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