Can Storytelling Catalyze Culture Change?
A project of UNHCR’s Innovation Fund aims to prove that the stories we tell have the power to shift mindsets and norms.
By Amy Lynn Smith, Independent Writer + Strategist
Humans tell stories every day. It’s been that way since the beginning of time. Even before language existed, people painted their stories on cave walls to share their life experiences.
Storytelling is a way to teach and learn, to communicate meaningful actions, to express the deepest sorrow or the most soaring joy. It’s a way to break through our emotional walls and reach each other at the kind of visceral and cognitive levels that can open us up to new ways of thinking or help us understand the lives of people we will never know. Stories have the power to rewire the way we think and drive us to take action.
Storytelling has always been a way to transmit culture. Why else would our ancestors gather around a fire to tell stories, to pass down traditions, to impart knowledge to younger generations? But what if we could use stories to drive culture change by shifting the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) mindset from one that prioritizes hierarchy to one that places just as much value in the organization’s diverse workforce? A team at UNHCR believes that one way to do that may be to let staff at every level tell their own stories.
The idea to experiment and test this theory through the Storytelling & Culture project supported by UNHCR’s Innovation Service Innovation Fund was initially inspired by the call for submissions to the 2019–2020 Fund. One area of emphasis for the Fund was the use of creative stories and anecdotes to harness the powerful role emotions play in driving decision-making, and which can lead to sustained, positive behavioral change.
Caroline Harper Jantuah, UNHCR Senior Inclusion and Diversity Adviser, admits she’s always loved stories and tells them often. And once she teamed up with Natalia, a UNHCR Donor Relations Officer, and Joel Nielsen, Chief of Section, Leadership Development at UNHCR, they saw even more clearly how they’d been witnessing the power of stories even before launching their project.
“We had discussed how different organizations and companies use stories to shape and cultivate a consistent company culture across many geographic locations,” says Natalia. “Caroline, Joel, and I had been having informal coffee chats, where we discussed leadership development, organizational culture, and change management — and Joel has always used stories as part of leadership development. So it all coalesced when we saw the call for Innovation Fund submissions related to storytelling and culture.”
The team they formed, which gradually grew to six people, had a specific vision of how storytelling and culture could benefit UNHCR as an organization: They saw a need to encourage people at all levels of the organization to tell more stories about inclusion rather than exclusion. For example, employees might tell each other stories about times they felt uncomfortable speaking up or felt like they weren’t fully included in an assignment at work. In particular, influenced by Caroline’s role at UNHCR, the first phase of the Storytelling & Culture project focused on encouraging people to tell positive stories about workplace inclusion at UNHCR, while the second phase emphasized stories about internal courage in an organizational context. The team believed that by focusing on more positive, inspiring stories about work, they could create a counter-narrative that would help foster a more inclusive working environment at UNHCR and ultimately empower employees as part of driving decision-making closer to the field.
“The goal of each story is to bring alive a concrete example of what inclusion looks like for the person who felt included,” Natalia says.
“As an organization, we show a lot of courage in the field in terms of what we do in service of refugees and displaced persons, but internally there was a lot of concern about freedom to speak out and the sense that it takes a lot of courage,” Caroline adds. “There’s a feeling of being vulnerable in a way that could put you at risk, so we wanted to counterbalance the narrative about the riskiness and extend appreciation of what both internal courage and inclusion look like.”
Understanding the science of storytelling
Throughout the project, the team has called on people with advanced knowledge and experience with storytelling, not only as a creative medium but also as a science, to better understand behavioral change theories that could help change the way decisions are made.
First, the team turned to the Center for Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida, which has a partnership agreement with the Innovation Service. Members of the Center’s team — including Director Ann Christiano and Managing Director Matt Sheehan — visited Geneva twice in 2019 to share insights on communication frameworks. They taught the project team about the Science of What Makes People Care and The Science of Story Building, both created by members of the Center to delve into what makes stories most effective.
One of the principles is to tell stories with intention, which can apply to stories both formal and informal. For UNHCR’s Storytelling & Culture project, the Center created what they call “The Guide to Storytelling in the Wild.” As Ann explains, the tool was designed to help people who want to use the principles of what behavioral, cognitive, and social science says about how people take in and process information — which is the foundation of much of the Center’s work — to tell their own stories.
“Building on the frameworks of what we’d written previously, this is an actionable guide to how culture is really built: Stories are the vessels of culture and culture is networked, so if you want to change an organization then you have to change the stories you tell,” Ann explains. “We came at it from the perspective that culture is really built not from the top, but from conversations that are informal — happening over lunch or in hallways or at the water cooler, which are the stories that are often ignored but are really the moments in which culture is manifested.”
Intentionality is critical to this interpersonal form of storytelling, she adds. “We can be intentional about both sharing stories in these soft moments, but also challenging narratives that are inconsistent with the culture we’re trying to build.”
This means both pushing back on potentially harmful narratives and finding ways to retell those kinds of stories in a more constructive way.
It may sound unrealistic to expect people whose work has never involved storytelling to not only tell stories but tell them with intention, but as Matt explains, one of the principles of Public Interest Communications is that everyone is a storyteller.
“So often, particularly with a very hierarchical organization, certain people are allowed to tell the organization’s story,” he says. “We envision this tool as a way to equip everyone to engage in that activity, and not just leave it within the realm of the few that either by job title or innate ability have that power.”
Experimenting with strategies to shift norms
Armed with strong scientific evidence of how storytelling in the workplace can help build a networked culture to promote inclusion and internal courage, the Storytelling & Culture project team spent the next few months testing ideas, conducting focus groups, and having informal small-group sessions with middle management to determine the best way to carry out their project.
The project ultimately launched in 2019 with two workshops in Kenya and Ethiopia, led by a master storyteller, Jan Blake. According to Joel, if the team had stuck to UNHCR’s typical processes they never would have been able to recruit a storyteller without an academic degree, despite her 30 years of experience and international renown. He considers having to battle internal processes in order to bring in the best person for the job as the “low point” in the project.
“In the end, though, we went on to have some very successful workshops and presentations,” Joel says. In fact, the first two workshops yielded enough good results in terms of participant engagement that the team agreed to move forward.
As the next step, the team put out a broader call for stories across UNHCR — in English and French, UNHCR’s two official working languages — asking people to submit a three-minute video telling a personal story about inclusion. They didn’t receive quite as many submissions as they anticipated, but that may have been because inclusion can be a difficult concept to grasp. According to Mariko Hall, UNHCR Special Coordinator for Internal Communications, who joined the project team at the implementation stage, “inclusion” means different things to different people.
“We did work hard to break down what inclusion means,” adds Natalia. “So instead of saying ‘Tell us an inclusive story’ we said ‘Tell us about a time you felt seen, heard, and valued at UNHCR.’ So there was also intentionality there.”
Of the submissions the team received, they chose the eight strongest with the help of Jan, their master storyteller, and a panel of 10 colleagues from all of UNHCR’s regional bureaus, who served as reviewers. The storytellers received individual coaching from Jan and their work culminated with a special event at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, where the eight participants presented their stories in the atrium. The event was attended by many in positions of leadership, including UNHCR’s High Commissioner and Deputy High Commissioner, and was broadcast across UNHCR’s offices worldwide.
“This was one of the first times someone who isn’t in senior management presented in that space, which sent a very strong message that this is not just a space for people at that level,” Mariko says. “The whole workforce can share their stories of inclusive behavior to bring about the kind of culture change we want to see.”
What’s more, the event reinforced the importance of intentionality. Caroline says after the Geneva event, some people asked why none of the stories were negative, and she explained that those are the stories everyone knows very well. The stories told in Geneva were inspiring — eliciting uplifting emotions — which is why they chose to tell them.
“Because we want to positively influence culture, we talked about being very mindful about the stories you tell and what you hear, because culture lives in stories,” she says. “To shift the balance to the positive, you have to be mindful.”
Infusing storytelling into every aspect of the organization
Traveling to Geneva was a thrill for the first eight participants — including one who had never flown outside his home country. They attended the event with the full endorsement of their UNHCR Country Representatives and also formed a tight bond with each other. They engaged through an online chat program during the program and continue to interact there as a community to discuss storytelling.
What’s more, the participants returned to their operations ready to share their experience and encourage others to engage in one-on-one storytelling. Some participants are still figuring out the best way to accomplish this, but at least one has embraced the concept wholeheartedly.
“One of the storytellers came from the Democratic Republic of Congo and was our only French-speaking storyteller,” says Mariko. “He has so much charisma and he’s so passionate about the work that he returned home and held storytelling sessions. He encouraged his colleagues to submit their stories for phase two of the project and three of them were selected.”
Clearly, word about the project spread quickly across UNHCR, because the call for submissions for phase two of the project yielded more than 100 applications. Although phase two was intended to be a series of regional workshops, COVID-19 forced the team to make it a virtual offering, but that didn’t discourage people from signing up.
“I’ve never seen as high a participation rate in anything virtual as I did with this,” Joel says. “I don’t know if it’s a proxy of success but it’s certainly a proxy of interest.”
Ultimately, 137 participants from 54 different UNHCR operations participated in a virtual storytelling masterclass with Jan in June 2020, where the focus shifted to testing whether storytelling can be used as a remote leadership tool to foster internal courage at UNHCR. The four-week masterclass included two stages. In the first stage, participants engaged in a webinar where they heard about internal courage, and learned about the elements of good storytelling and a good story. Following the webinar, participants submitted three-minute videos of themselves that were reviewed based on how well they followed what they had been taught about storytelling and how well it illustrated internal courage in UNHCR. Twenty submissions were selected for additional individual coaching and the creators presented their stories at a live event.
Although the team is still evaluating the masterclass for measures of success, they’re looking at how engaged participants were in the process, if they completed all three main components — attending the webinar, submitting the assignment, and attending the live event — whether they gained knowledge of internal courage, and if the project built storytelling capacity. Yet they continue forging ahead, not wanting to lose the momentum they’re building by having participants share their experiences with their colleagues.
“We’re going to ask those who participated in the masterclass to upload folk tales on courage, providing a bank of cultural stories we can draw on in the future,” Caroline says. “We’re also going to do a call for more stories.”
What’s more, moving forward the team wants to offer coaching for leadership to inspire others to follow their example of storytelling with intention. “We have a lot of very formalized meetings where you come in with your talking points and I think sometimes it’s difficult for leaders to break out of that mold and adopt a different style,” Caroline adds. “I’d like to think the art of storytelling would be something in their tool bag they feel comfortable drawing on, knowing they can retain their authority and have a human story side-by-side.”
Seeing the value in the ripple effect
For Joel, one of the most significant benefits of gathering positive stories of internal courage is demonstrating that people shouldn’t hesitate to stand up to authority — and how that transforms people in the process, extending beyond those who speak out by setting an example for others to do the same.
“I picture standing on a beach and throwing a handful of stones in the water and watching the water ripple out,” Joel says. “We’ve asked people to make commitments to tell one story in each team meeting for the next six months, and then we’ll see what happens, but it will be a way of clearly seeing results.”
The team admits success may be difficult to quantify. But if the Storytelling & Culture project grows exponentially as it moves forward — which the growth from phase one to phase two indicates is likely — that will be one indicator that the concept of storytelling as a way to shift cultural norms is catching on.
“The stories we tell in these informal settings are sort of like the couch change of narrative,” Ann says, describing the loose coins that can fall in sofa cushions. In similar ways, when we are at the office, we really don’t think about those stories we tell on the way to get coffee. But I’m excited by the opportunity to recapture those stories and make meaning of them in a way that could positively affect the organization, particularly for people who are marginalized within the organization but could be making extraordinary contributions if their stories were heard.”
Matt nicely sums up both Ann’s metaphor and the potential that exists in the kind of ripple effect described by Joel: Just like pocket change — or any kind of culture change — every little bit adds up, including the stories we tell in passing, until they add together to make a meaningful difference.
