Description
The action-based guide to powerful, influential organizational storytelling
Circle of the 9 Muses captures the best practices of the world’s most influential story consultants and knowledge workers to help you find, tell, and draw value from your organizational stories as impetus for action. This rich toolbox is loaded with fun, graphical instructions and dozens of unique, replicable, and facilitated processes that require no special training or expertise. You’ll discover your organization’s hidden narrative assets, use different templates and frameworks to tell the stories of your past, present, and future and then draw team members into rich meaning-making dialogue that translates into action. These activities can be exercised in endless permutations, and expert advice steers you toward the right activity for a specific purpose, including managing change, setting strategy, onboarding, defining the brand, engaging supporters or customers, merging cultures, building trust, and much more.
Organizational storytelling is a powerful managerial tool and an essential change management technique. This is about your influence as a leader. Knowing the right story to tell and how to deliver it effectively gives you and your organization enormous influence, and helps connect employees to strategy by providing understanding, belief, and motivation in their personal contribution. This book is the ultimate field guide to becoming an influential storyteller, with concrete, actionable guidance toward all the storytelling fundamentals.
- Identify your organization’s “narrative assets”
- Craft an elegant, well-constructed organizational story
- Capture, bank, and share stories with extraordinary engagement
- Facilitate a dialogue to draw out meaning and induce change
The growing interest surrounding organizational storytelling has many change agents focused on “trying to tell better stories,” but goals are useless without a plan of action. Circle of the 9 Muses helps you weave narrative wisdom into organizational development activities, engaging employees and driving change.
Rebecca began her career as a strategy consultant at Monitor Company, honed her skills as a systems thinking facilitator at GKA Inc, worked as VP of Affordable Housing Acquisitions for Boston Financial, and built her own Systems Thinking consultancy through which she was a key contributor to the ReThink Health Initiative, Climate Interactive’s Agritopia, and Dialogos’ work for the US Forestry Service. She has spent more than 25 years supporting corporate and philanthropic clients including Vistaprint, Elizabeth Dole Foundation, AT&T, Ford, Smithkline Beecham, Shell, Amoco, and USDA. Her expertise is using collaborative causal mapping and System Dynamics simulation models to help multi-sector collaboratives think together better. Rebecca trained in Systems Dynamics in Jay Forrester’s Pre-College Education Project and John Sterman’s class while pursuing a BS in Civil Engineering and an MBA from MIT. She has served on the Society Policy Council and been a guest lecturer at MIT, Wharton, Dartmouth, and Brown. When not working as a systems thinking evangelist, Rebecca loves to travel the world. Pre-covid travels included Mexico, Chile, Morocco, Brazil, Uganda and Iceland to spend time with school children, whale sharks, camels, street art, gorillas and waterfalls. When stuck at home, she enjoys gardening, swimming, dancing, and renovating properties.