It’s a classic truism that stories travel faster than statistics. Whilst ‘killer stats’ can make cases convincing, human-centred stories make it easier for the reader to empathise, remember and even share more widely. An example comes out of the #MeToo movement in 2017 where an individual shared their experience of sexual assault which created a deep feeling of empathy from individuals worldwide and compelled many to share their own stories.
Influential stories present information in a way that people actually want to process and make it easy to understand. Our brains are hardwired to remember stories and people share them so that they live on. This demonstrates the powerful nature of stories as people absorb them and they can shape our collective understanding of the world: they inform who we are, the places we work, or even how we understand how the economy operates.
At Uscreates — now a member of the FutureGov family — we’re focused on how we can create change leading to positive impact. We see storytelling as central to creating this change and it’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot recently. For the last 6 months, we’ve been working with Bloomberg Philanthropies on their Mayors Challenge, telling the story of 35 cities across the US as they embrace design and prototyping whilst tackling complex and sometimes messy challenges.
Story as a light
Describing the role of storytelling in changing systems, Ella Saltmarshe, in her article “Using Story to Change Systems”, describes the concept of ‘Story as light’. In Saltmarshe’s words, stories can:
“Highlight the fault lines in a system and make visceral cases for change.
Illuminate outliers and build a cohering narrative around their work.
Shine a light on visions of the future that change the way people act in the present.”
It’s a useful framework to think about being more strategic in our use of stories. Making the case for change by bringing the reality of problems to life through the people who are directly experiencing them, sharing exciting ways that ideas are having a positive impact and collectively visioning what a better future might look like.
How we’ve been using storytelling in our work
Storytelling to make the case for change
We normally start by understanding problems — be it homelessness or someone living with cancer or demands on front line staff — from spending time with the people who are experiencing these issues and using this to inform our understanding of what needs to change. Following an ethnography or interview, you’ll hear the team sharing anecdotal stories (without direct references) of what they heard. It’s an informal way for everyone to empathise with the reality of the problem and align themselves on the issue at hand.
But this shared understanding shouldn’t and doesn’t stop with our team. We’ll communicate these with the organisations we work with, at Show and Tells with clients and sometimes with the wider world. For example, when we worked with Guys at St Thomas’ Charity on better understanding how certain characteristics of Lambeth and Southwark Councils in London — densely populated, diverse and transient; with pockets of deprivation and affluence living side by side — impacted on people’s health. Through film, we shared different people’s perspectives on urban health and wellbeing. These stories provide a deep human understanding of people’s experiences and motivations — which can help shape relevant health interventions.
We experiment with how we tell these stories of people’s experience — at this year’s CityLab exhibition in Detroit we wanted to bring to life how residents and front line staff are affected by some of the huge and complex challenges cities are facing. Through a series of interactive objects, attendees can listen to constant call-outs responding to Opioid overdoses a firefighter can expect to receive in one day in Huntington, or the radio updates on flooding that Charleston’s residents are all too used to waking up to.
Stories help everyone — from senior staff to other stakeholders — see the world through other people’s eyes and experience the human realities of the current situation. They make a compelling case for why a new service, organisational or wider system change is needed.
Storytelling to illuminate impact
For any idea to scale and sustain, it requires people behind it. How can you bring an idea to life so that people can understand its potential impact and galvanise support? By collecting and sharing stories of positive impact as they emerge.
As part of the Mayors Challenge, Charleston, South Carolina, piloted their FLOODCON app to help their residents live with constant flooding. During this 10-day trial, one Uber driver used the app to plan her route to avoid flooded roads, another hairdresser rescheduled her appointments. Stories like this offer a glimmer of how this solution might affect Charleston’s residents.
Beyond stand alone ideas, we have used storytelling to illustrate the impact of a way of working. For many people who are interested in what ‘design’ can do, it can be a confusing field to get to grips with, smattered with lengthy or contradicting definitions. We brought to life the impact of design in solving tricky social problems — such as the housing crisis or boosting junior doctors morale — during last two years as part of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Fix’, partnering with the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). In one hour episodes we told the story of what it feels like to move through a collaborative design process. Bringing together participants with diverse backgrounds including Junior Doctors, school students, service designers and future speculators as they wrestled with the problem at hand and developed potentially transformative ideas to tackle them. The show was engaging and something that could be shared with anyone — from grandparents to CEOs — allowing them to quickly grasp what design was about the potential impact it could have.
Storytelling to shine lights on visions of the future.
Finally, how can stories be used to build a collective vision for where we’re going, with a service, as an organisation, or as a sector? Stories not only help to bring strategies to life, but also inform them.
For example, Uscreates teamed up with GrandParents Plus, a leading UK charity, to use storytelling as a way to re imagine new systems of care. We worked with the charity, academic partners, researchers, partner organisations and grandparents themselves to develop a series of possible (a.k.a speculative) scenarios exploring care systems of the future. As part of a national conference bringing together over 100 carers, academics, charities, policy makers and legal experts, we used the provocative scenarios to co-create actionable ideas that could better support kinship carers across the UK. We speculated future scenarios ranging from an ‘empathetic care assistance robot’ who acts as a supportive companion to new kinship carers in their first year, to a fictional business model called ‘Kinship Friends’ where wealthier kinship carers pay a larger fee to access support services, which subsidises support services for financially vulnerable carers.
EU Policy Lab invited us to become lead designers in a material exploration of near future scenarios of Blockchain technologies. We joined designers, policymakers, lawyers, ethicists and tech specialists to create a series of speculative prototypes to show how Blockchain could be used by EU policymakers — to secure delivery chains, to automate machines, to improve health — helping policy makers examine the sociotechnical implications of emergent technologies. Our final prototype, Bloodchain, is a fictional blood donation service set in 2040. The prototype is a 3D systems map, allowing policy makers to explore the fictional service through provocative artefacts. Each stage is accompanied by PESTLE questions — sparking critical discussion about the technology’s socio technical implications.
‘Speculative design’ is not about fantasy, there has to be a possible path to the potential future. But technology is complex and people can’t always understand it. This type of futures design can humanise technology. It can make complex solutions understandable to non-technologists, so we can engage in them and get excited about the possibilities they bring. But by making them discussable, we are also thinking through the ethics and experience of their use and engaging in a conversion not about what could be but what should be.
So we called the blood donation drone Florence, we made gave her a soft felt cover and a smile, she played soothing music — as we were thinking about how you or I would like to experience a drone landing on your sofa, there to help you donate your blood.
Being more deliberate about capturing and sharing stories
It’s easy to get lost in the process and details, after all these are hugely important. But successful storytelling keeps a firm spotlight shone on the people involved, their experiences and hopes for how things could be different.
Storytelling has a powerful place in society to showcase hidden truths, effect real and impactful change and re-imagine a better future. The trick is to be more deliberate with how you capture stories as they emerge, envision what your story could be and share that story with the world.
If you would like to know more about the power of storytelling and how it can benefit your organisation, email marialuisa@wearefuturegov.com.
