Meet the members: Stronger Stories
Stronger Stories was co-founded by Guy and Will — ex-colleagues from the PR industry who’d done their time making big bucks for some of the biggest name brands in the world. Separately they both had their ‘the-world’s-in-crisis’ epiphany moment and came together to form an organisation through which they could offer their strategy and communications skills to help solve the problem.
The place where their passions intersected (as one is more strategically focused and the other creative) was storytelling and early on the two created a practical tool to help anyone create and tell a better story which they named the ‘Lean Story Canvas’.
As it lives and breathes today, Stronger Stories is a consultancy and School driven by the mission to democratise storytelling power, with love, to ensure diverse ideas and voices can cut through and create the change we need in the world.
Why we think storytelling is such an important part of running an organisation.
Storytelling is an important part of all of life, including running a successful organisation! Humans have been telling stories to share information (and ensure that information is remembered) for thousands of generations — the cognitive revolution.
Global studies have proven that the rhythm of storytelling — the peaks & valleys delivered by heroes, villains and challenges — appeal to our pattern-seeking brains and trigger chemical reactions that move us: Happy endings give us a hit of dopamine, stories of cooperation — oxytocin and stories involving danger — cortisol. We may have more versatile and creative channels through which we can communicate than ever before, but storytelling is innately human and a deeply powerful tool to spread good ideas.
As long as we’re trying to communicate and create change in some way; storytelling is an inevitable component of creating change because only storytelling can command us, move us, inspire us, frighten us and enlighten us in the most natural way.
What storytelling means to us.
For us here at Stronger Stories, we think the best part about storytelling is it’s beautiful ability to fire up our imagination.
Stories do not need to be bound by reality to feel totally real. They can help to spell out what we’re missing in a way that intuitively makes sense or keep us guessing - Wooing us into deep curiosity. Stories can be predictable and joyous like Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Woods, or add unexpected layers to the things or people we think we know, like the beautiful eulogy Fleurie’s Dad gave at her Grandma’s funeral about her dancing merrily in the rain in her nighty.
Storytelling is the best part of any conversation, proven in the way you take it and retell it in your own way to the next person you meet. That’s one small element of the magic (science) we create for system fixers.
How did Stronger Stories come up with the concept of launching the Stronger Story School?
By coming back to our mission over and over basically. Our team is small in number, but we are mighty and the story-as-strategy we deliver for large-scale, global organisations comes at a fair but significant cost.
However with a mission to democratise storytelling power, we had to figure out a way of sharing our knowledge and tools with everyone that has a good idea, regardless of their income.
The School is the result of 24 months of hard work condensing all of the learnings and insights we’d gathered from workshops, accelerator programmes and strategic consultancy into simple, beautiful lessons. School membership and access to the full and ever-expanding decoded stories database is £199, for life, visit: www.strongerstories.org/home/school
What advice do you have for organisations who want to improve their storytelling methods and processes?
Sign-up to School today! You can join as a free member to access the Lean Story Canvas and 3x decoded and recoded story examples that show you how famous Hollywood & Silicon Valley moguls have worked their magic on us.
You can start your story-telling and story-crafting journey for free, and access all of our insight articles and details of upcoming webinars in the Hub. Visit: www.strongerstories.org/home/school
What common problems do you see companies make when it comes to creating and sharing their stories with others?
In our opinion the top challenges are:
- Being unaware of, or completely ignoring the stories your audience is already telling themselves.
- Not considering the values your audience hold as their expression of self and which do not resonate in the slightest.
- Missing out on key components of the story pattern altogether.
- Making their target audience the villain! (it happens more often than you think).
Storytelling is very psychological, but luckily all of the models and methods we use to navigate these challenges are available…you guessed it… in School today.
