Story telling as a medium for leading cultural change;

So we have now had circa 15,000 views of our Story of Organisational Change : The Butterfly Effect posted on The Cultural Change YouTube Channel . The Butterfly Effect is a light-hearted story of organisational change enabled by leadership development and personal transformation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCIa0eQw3mc

The story is based on change management principles and contains many relevant insights for change leaders throughout the world.

The basic principle of the fable is The Butterfly Effect; If I as a leader change aspects of my leadership style these may be adopted by the wider team throughout an organisation thus stimulating substantial change in organisational culture.

 We initially developed the fable as a social media marketing tactic, and thereafter we have translated the fable into a unique training programme to introduce management teams and business students to the principles of cultural change work through the lens of storytelling.

Whenever we invite clients to watch the video and analyse its episodes and share their learnings about change management /leadership the quality of dialogue is always super impressive.

Human beings are culturally wired to engage in storytelling.  

We love metaphors and we respond to learning that is playful.

Something special happens when you are confident enough to use fables to teach what is generally treated as an awfully serious subject e.g. leading change in organisations and especially leading cultural change.

It is impressive to learn that ‘Who Moved our Cheese’ a fable by Dr Spencer Johnson  about change based on cartoon characters (the mice and the little people) has sold in excess of 30 million copies.

Professor John Kotter’s fable ‘Our Iceberg is Melting’ a story of a colony of Penguins living on an iceberg  explores through the penguin characters multi-faceted aspects of coping with change has sold in excess of 1 million copies

‘A Peacock in the Land of Penguins’ a fable about a community of penguins adopting a peacock into their culture and the journey towards embracing diversity by Bj Gallagher and Warren H. Schmidt sold over 400,000 copies in 23 languages.

These 3 books were inspirational for me and if you have not yet explored these stories then when you do you are in for a treat.

Please do watch our video ‘The Butterfly Effect ‘ and consider the relevance of the themes for leading teams in the Post Covid era.  You can check out our training programs at www.culturalchange.co.uk and if you would like to chat about our approach to training and consulting cultural change then please contact myself [email protected]