What metaphors do you live by? You may see life as a struggle, an adventure, a maze, a canvas, a roller coaster or even a box of chocolates. Whatever your particular metaphor – and however unconscious it may be – it will profoundly influence what you focus on and how you understand and engage with the world.
And as Gareth Morgan at York University in Toronto has proved, what’s true for individuals is equally true for organisations.
In Images of Organization, he argues that all theories of organisation and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that persuade us to see, understand or imagine situations in useful but inherently partial ways. Seeing the organisation as a machine, for instance, leads to entirely different insights and outcomes than seeing it as an organism, a brain, a culture or a political system.
There is much to say about the power of these implicit metaphors within organisations, and in particular how they manifest themselves through dominant language and behavioural codes, value structures and ways of doing things.
But that’s for another time.
My observations so far have been designed to lay the groundwork for a bold thought experiment that I hope you will join me in. Here it is: let us assume that all of Morgan’s organisational metaphors are in fact subsets of a much more useful higher-order metaphor:
Namely the metaphor of ‘Organisation as Story’.
This may seem like a logical leap, but Gareth Morgan goes some way towards validating this view in his subsequent book, Imaginization, when he writes:
“The challenge facing the modern manager is to become accomplished in the art of using metaphor: To find appropriate ways of seeing, understanding and shaping the situations with which they have to deal.”
The implied constructionist impulse in this statement is clear: to be effective, organisations must be understood as human constructs. And this feeds directly into to my belief – articulated in my earlier articles – that Employer Brands are created and sustained through the stories people tell each other both inside and outside the organisational walls.
So what happens if we accept that brands don’t simply use stories, but ARE stories that address our need – as human beings – for meaning, coherence, community and direction? What if we recognise (as Steve Denning and many others have) that story is one of the most powerful forces in knowledge management, effective leadership and the navigation of change? Then I hope you experience the same small epiphany I did on reading David Fleming’s words way back in 2001:
“The dull organization has lost its plot, devalues its characters, and long ago exchanged its narrative urgency for the status quo. A thriving organization sees its mission as an ever-emerging story with all the necessary twists and turns.”
Much has been written on the power of storytelling in business and branding, but the key challenge for Employer Brand practitioners is this: how can we consciously use story and narrative to achieve practical organisational outcomes – whether engaging our existing workforce, communicating the values we live by, differentiating ourselves in the recruitment marketplace, implementing organisational change, responding to crises or sharing collective learning?
In other words, it’s not enough to know that organisations and employer brands live through story; we must know how to instrumentalise, nurture, coordinate and deploy story in ways that differentiate the organisation in an authentic, engaging and relevant way.
In my experience, many in the HR community have been slow to recognise the rich possibilities of integrating authentic storytelling into their Employer Branding initiatives. And yet, ironically, many of these same professionals have already ushered carefully coordinated storytelling into their organisations without knowing it.
Storytelling has entered through a side door, unaccompanied by Employer Brand experts or marketeers, in the form of the increasingly popular change management process known as ‘Appreciative Inquiry’.
Let me explain.
Appreciative Inquiry is a consensus-based method of organisational change that builds on collective strengths instead of focusing on overcoming problems. It starts with asking employees the question, “What gives life to our organisation when we are at our most inventive and alive?” And responses to that question take the form of authentic stories about when the organisation and its people have been most capable, inspired, responsive, pioneering and empowered.
These stories – and the insights they offer – form the bedrock of the entire Appreciative Inquiry process.
The process itself is all about discovering who we are when we are at our very best – and then using that insight to “bridge the best of ‘what is’ with collective aspiration of ‘what might be’” (Cooperrider et al, 2003) – and this in turn leads to a compelling statement of strategic intent, a powerful purpose and a coherent, inspiring and do-able vision of the future.
In other words, it uncovers and delineates a multi-faceted and evolving story to be lived, owned and guided by. A story that defines who we are, what we believe, why the organisation exists, and how each and every member of the team can contribute to fulfilling its promise. A story that engages people emotionally and shapes the way they think and behave.
Above all, a story that is powerful precisely because it has been co-created by employees themselves, transforming them into agents of change and heroes in a story of their own making.
Almost sounds like the definition of a successful Employer Brand, doesn’t it? Certainly, an effective Appreciate Inquiry project will cover the same ground as any Employer Branding exercise – including vision, values, purpose statements, aspiration statements, mission, behaviours, and so on.
The difference is that it does this through the medium of story and storytelling. In so doing, it evokes ownership, builds understanding and inspires a level of participation, engagement and collaboration beyond the reach of more conventional research-based Employer Branding approaches.
For those who stubbornly balk at the use of storytelling in branding and who insist on dismissing storytelling as nebulous and fluffy, Appreciative Inquiry offers a powerful counter-argument. The number of major brands using it – British Airways, Verizon and NASA among them – is testament to its effectiveness and its relevance to the bottom line.
For example, when global agricultural equipment company John Deere used Appreciative Inquiry to turn around the performance of its combined manufacturing unit in 2000, morale soared and one project alone generated by the AI process saved the company $3 million.
Put simply, companies that implement Appreciative Inquiry initiatives have, in a very real and tangible sense, confirmed their status as storytelling and storymaking organisations. In each case, the process brings latent stories out into the open and focuses on their positive, aspirational and life-giving aspects. These stories are more than a medium for communicating meaning; they are in themselves active agents in the collaborative construction of meaning, an emergent result of real dialogue and conversations within the organisation.
So here’s a radical suggestion: why don’t we abandon conventional Employer Branding models altogether and use the Appreciative Inquiry protocol instead?
This would not only offer an infinitely more effective starting point for engaging with the employer branding process at an organic, bottom-up and organisation-wide level; it would also provide a truly generative framework for the discovery, elicitation of communication of powerful and positive stories within and about the organisation.
And those shared stories – of relationship, community, culture, values, ethics, behaviour, mission and vision – are surely what effective and authentic Employer Brands are all about.