Our Method
At onto[story], we have developed a model that describes how to move a company with its employees, clients, and stakeholders through a complex transformation. As a hands-on tool, we apply storytelling – but not as a marketing tool. We use storytelling as an activating tool to create participation, ownership and actively move people.
First we need to know in which direction to go: We move toward the North Star (located in the upper right). From a business development perspective, the North Star must reflect and contribute to the strategy, structures, processes, culture, and behavior. It must provide orientation and exert a clear pull. Then, depending on whom we want to influence and move, the employees, teams, customers, or society (bottom left) need to be engaged. To ensure they understand how relevant and desirable the North Star is, we need strategic storytelling.
Strategic storytelling can be done through various channels like events, speeches, presentations, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, intranet messages and more. They originate from a single source, from a single direction, and require no interaction. They form a storyline that makes the North Star sparkle alluringly and highlights its relevance to us.
With that we’ve hopefully presented the Nand its narrative in an appealing way. Everyone involved is looking in the right direction – hopefully, they love it! BUT no one is moving. In our complex world, we are constantly surrounded by a flood of information, from climate crises and wars to shopping and fun facts, all vying for our attention. As a result, communication often does not move beyond informing. But transformation requires everyone, collaboratively, to actively move toward the North Star.
Collaborative storytelling is the first step inspiring people to take action. This requires activating formats with integrated, ongoing triggers. These triggers will get people moving and involved. Subsequently, the storylines of the individual participants are interwoven. Only in this way can they strengthen each other like the fibers of a rope, enabling powerful, collective movement. Weaving means that individual storylines draw attention to one another, reference each other, combine their insights, and underscore their shared focus on the North Star. This makes it clear from the outside that they are essentially telling a common story.
In the third step, we analyze all storylines and thus the progress of the transformation using semantic analysis. The insights gained are fed back into the cycle, allowing for the continuous improvement of strategic and collaborative storytelling.
All three aspects together constitute the Story-Driven Transformation Process.
By including all existing perspectives in the transformation discourse, the available knowledge and case studies become visible. This leads to an understanding that opens up options for action. These can then be discussed and reflected upon. This, in turn, leads to further understanding and new options for action. This process repeats itself, thus forming a feedback loop. The iteration guides us step by step through the transformation and toward a jointly developed, new reality – toward the north star.
Since companies themselves are complex, sometimes globally dispersed entities where learning progress through personal exchange between all participants becomes impossible, this process requires a mechanism – a dramaturgy – that bundles the narratives so that shared understanding actually opens up shared options for action.
But organizations are not the only ones who need a transformation, also the way we think and lead as managers needs one. The industrial age has trained us, that efficiency can be measured in numbers. It reduced people to numbers. So, if today, we reduce our staffing, we speak about competitiveness and effectiveness. While, if we think about it personally, we think of efficiency, when a process runs smoothly, when all expertise is at hand, when everything is playing together perfectly. So, we are trained in numbers, but feel like normal human beings. What a relief!
Many companies understand this and are lifting behavior and how we work together, learn from each other, to the same level of importance as their numbers. Doing so, these companies are also way more adaptive in the integration and usage of AI and becoming a learning organization.
At onto[story], we support companies in their complex transformations. But not only as a consultancy, leaving a clever slide deck and the sentence, “Now you just need to do it!”.
We are used to consulting and implementation, project management and creativity. We are used to standing at your side, in whatever role is necessary and useful, to move the transformation, and your people step by step, iteratively, toward the North Star.
That is what we love and fight for!
