Deep Dive: Going with storytelling to power innovations
Can distributors rally their people to create unbounded innovations by sharing stories of success and failure?
Innovators cannot innovate without foresight, and innovations cannot succeed without storytelling. Storytelling has the power to build awareness, change minds, motivate people, foster collaboration, and start movements. I’ve written about storytelling before, and recently found a compelling article that makes an even stronger case, “What 80 Innovation Leaders Say About The Power Of Storytelling,” by Katie Taylor. Taylor has launched the Untold Stories of Innovation podcast, a must-listen for B2B innovators. In this edition, I share four essential insights from Taylor’s article and add my thoughts on how they may apply to B2B innovation and the future of distribution. Taylor often focuses on startups, but I hope her insights can help B2B innovators re-start their established companies. Her work may help mine. I will soon be announcing my next project as an NAW Fellow, a Facing the Force of Change® initiative branded as Innovating with Customers. In Innovate to Dominate, I reported that the most potent distributor innovations are those that help customers innovate. I believe the future of B2B is collaboration and integration to better serve the customer’s customer. In my new NAW Fellowship project, I will work with next-generation leaders to make it so. With Taylor’s help in this edition, I make a case for storytelling. In future editions, I hope to offer methodologies for telling stories, as always, in the context of B2B innovation and the future of distribution.
Unleashing the power of innovation
Storytelling can unlock the potential of business innovations, and a lack of storytelling can lead to suboptimal results—or worse, defeat. Taylor kicks off with this salient insight:
The stories we tell about our innovations hold the potential to “make or break” the adoption, success, or failure of innovation initiatives. Yet the techniques, skills, and systems required to successfully communicate innovations—both internally and externally—are often not taught or prioritized among innovation teams.
I have found that storytelling is a craft—that is, art with a purpose. Storytelling requires patrons, starting with the leaders of every B2B innovator’s company. But, to gain support for storytelling, B2B innovators need to make their case. Taylor’s four insights, offered below with my added observations, are an excellent start.
Insight 1: Storytelling inspires and unifies innovation cultures.
Distributors are facing a clash of cultures. As they charge forward, transforming to compete in the virtual world, distributors are adopting a digital-age culture that values speed, automation, data analytics, transparency, and automation. At the same time, they are discovering that physical operations in the real world are still valued by customers, giving new life to distributors’ long-standing values of personal connections, community commitments, the importance of skilled workers and manual labor, and a vision handed from one generation to the next. As digital and real-world cultures collide, organizations lose alignment—and great ideas for virtual and physical innovations are lost.
In his famous work, The Crack Up (explored here), F. Scott Fitzgerald offered a relevant insight: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Distributors do not have a choice. They must continue to operate, holding opposing ideas of digital and physical business models in mind, even as they innovate both. Leaders must inspire, bringing the new and the old together in a single vision that makes sense for their company and its people. Taylor argues that storytelling can be an invaluable tool for creating alignment, building a shared vision, and moving forward:
Several interviewees reflected that nothing can kill a great idea faster than organizational misalignment. Storytelling, they said, is an important mechanism for building a shared understanding of innovation across the institution—and upholding key priorities, beliefs, and values.
I do not believe that raw, first-rate intellect should power distributor innovations. Rather, the best distributor implementations of e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and automation will be guided by a deep understanding of customer challenges and opportunities in human terms, understood as goals, purposes, commitments, accomplishments, and values. Real and rational business empathy will give direction to distributor innovations designed to step up and help customers.
Insight 2: Storytelling is a mechanism for creating and soliciting innovative ideas—both internally and externally.
As explored in this Deep Dive edition, distributors suffer from a crisis of ideas, driven by a single-minded and self-limiting pursuit of best practices. Embracing ideas as a core value is an immense task and perhaps best thought of as a moon shot—an expensive, challenging, and risky task of enormous importance and impact. Storytelling may help, and Taylor reports that NASA agrees:
In our interview with Steve Rader of NASA, he explained that storytelling is critical to gaining internal buy-in for new approaches to innovation. For example, it wasn’t until NASA’s rocket scientists experienced and shared stories of success from projects involving cross-disciplinary experts and even everyday folks that open innovation was genuinely adopted and scaled.
Moreover, as storytelling helps rally a company’s leaders, teams, and employees to attempt the impossible, telling stories on the outside is essential:
Externally, when innovation stories are shared across industries, innovators think of new ways to push the boundaries of what’s possible in their own fields. Our interviewees shared stories about how a violinist uncovered a way to remove grease from a potato chip and how the insights of a young Chinese chef inspired the strategic brand position for the Shanghai Disney Resort.
As a $7 trillion industry in the United States, distributors have an outsized and largely unrecognized impact on the economy. Telling distribution’s innovation stories may help distributors receive the credit they deserve. But more importantly, future-focused storytelling may create the expectation that more is possible, encouraging every distributor to step up, lean in, and do more. And by telling stories, distributors may enlist suppliers in their cause, working together to help customers and strengthen the economy.
Insight 3: Institutional stories of failure accelerate innovation.
Listening to this episode on Taylor’s podcast, I learned about the power of failures done right. Failure should not be courted, of course, but every failure is a learning opportunity. By sharing stories of failures, innovators can help mitigate the natural inclination to avoid risk and, more importantly, build a foundation of what doesn’t work to discover what does. Taylor explains:
Stories of past failure encourage innovators to learn from one another, avoid repeat mistakes, or bring new ways of thinking about old problems. Failure narratives can also, extremely importantly, create a culture that understands the innovation process is not as simple as going from A to B. Teams pave the way for future leaps when they document past “missteps.”
Failure stories may be told within a team and without, and within a company and without. As I reported in Innovate to Dominate, the best innovators attract the best minds to volunteer their time and effort, helping to build a dynamic ecosystem of advisors and resources. By sharing stories of failure in public, innovators gather solutions that may not otherwise be considered.
Insight 4: Innovation storytelling is an act of identity-creation that motivates the innovator.
Many distributors are intentionally reinventing their business model as providers of customer experience, moving away from a legacy reputation as a business that only takes orders to satisfy demand. This transition will take time and effort to take root among employees and in markets. In markets, positioning as an innovative company has positive advantages beyond undoing precedents and strengthening relationships. Stories of innovation attract new customers and accelerate growth. Taylor advises:
When shareholders and customers hear innovation stories, they feel more confident that they chose the right investment or solution. That’s not an insignificant fact, as 56% of customers actively seek to buy from companies they perceive as being innovative. It’s why we see such powerful external innovation storytelling from companies like GE, Lowe’s, and Nike. The list goes on and on. [Emphasis added.]
Earning new awareness and respect in the market may help pull employees forward to accelerate progress. Telling stories in public creates expectations and motivates employees to step up. Taylor argues that telling stories is about reinventing individual identities:
But let’s also look internally at the individual level—where innovation storytelling, in fact, has a significant effect on our identities. Employers want to encourage all of their employees to see themselves as innovators—to be creative, inventive, and bold.
It is often said that today’s workers are actively evaluating employers on their consequential pursuit of a purpose, one that aligns with their personal belief system. Through storytelling, distributors may achieve a cultural two-step—attracting new employees and, at the same time, encouraging existing workers to build a shared identity, focused on innovation and doing good for customers, communities, and society.
Join our community by asking questions
Taylor concludes her article by offering five recommendations for leaders to direct and accelerate innovation initiatives. I rework her suggestions as questions to help readers embrace storytelling as an essential innovation capability:
Does your content strategy include storytelling as a critical capability for innovating?
Can storytelling align your people and organization to be “all in” for ushering in the future of distribution through innovation?
Are your leaders, managers, and workers skilled storytellers? Do they practice? Can you measure their contribution to innovations?
Do you memorialize stories at the individual, team, and company levels? Do your stories inspire? Do they help strengthen your culture?
Do you have a training plan to develop storytelling strategies and techniques? Do you have communication plans?
If your answer to these questions is “no,” I ask, “why not?” If you have stories to share, please do so. If you have questions, please send them my way. Don’t be a stranger. Click here to schedule a call or send me a note at mark.dancer@n4bi.com