What is the relationship between the narratives we construct and propagate and our organisational brand, culture, and ability to innovate? How important is storytelling to the way we work and the outcomes we achieve?
Earlier this month we started to explore the theme of storytelling by selecting it as the topic of conversation for the October Bromford Lab Twitter chat - How we might leverage the power of storytelling to improve outcomes for both our customers and business?
Over the past few weeks, we have been considering how we might continue to explore the theme with colleagues from around the business and we’re now just about to start a new 6-week piece of work to look into our own organisational storytelling - the types of story we tell, the reasons we tell them, the narratives we create, and the people responsible for both constructing and communicating them.
As part of this work, we will be looking to find out more about how we might use storytelling to:
Unify a transforming organisation in terms of purpose and culture;
Bring key performance indicators to life by adding richness and a greater understanding of both our customers and our business operations;
Dispel the myths which surround social housing and move beyond the social housing stereotypes which place housing associations as saviours and tenants as vulnerable.
Two of the key questions we want to explore include:
How might we enable our customers to tell their own stories (i.e google glass, DITLO, Video Diaries etc)?
How might we tell the story from a colleague perspective (but without a hero spin)?
We plan to take an initial 6-week approach to this work, broken down into three 2-week sprints. Each design sprint is comprised of five key stages:
Stage 1 - Understand: Explore the opportunity space;
Stage 2 - Ideate: Generate ideas and devise a series of possible solutions;
Stage 3 - Decide: Vote on which concept to prototype (could be a combination of the best parts of multiple ideas);
Stage 4 - Prototype: Create a prototype and prepare for user testing. Prototypes can be low fidelity - this approach is about learning, not taking an initial idea to scale;
Stage 5 - Test: Present the prototype to five end-users in order to gather feedback and ideas.
At the end of each design sprint, there will be a review to inform the next sprint. By the end of sprint 3, we aim to have delivered:
A prototyped framework or toolkit to enable colleagues to measure/understand their impact;
A business model canvas for storytelling which places a focus on the what, how and most importantly the WHY of our business;
A set of new narratives which tell the story of Bromford now, and a clear understanding of how we update those narratives to reflect the changing needs of the business and our customers as we move forward.
I’ll be posting updates on the Blog as each sprint completes - sign up to the Bromford Lab News Letter to ensure that you don’t miss them.
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Cover image by Fallon Michael on Unsplash