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Chapter 6: How to ensure that your organisation starts living the narrative

Sharing and embedding your story successfully shouldn’t involve dramatic launches or special events.


Top tips:

  • It takes time to embed your story so don’t expect instant results
  • Develop a forward planner of key internal events where you can share the story
  • Don’t tell the story yourself, use your champions to share the story
  • Ask for feedback and be prepared to adapt and grow your story

If you’ve involved the right people at the drafting stage you should have a readymade champions’ network who understand what you’re doing and why, and who can do the communicating, influencing and persuading for you as you embed your – and their – narrative across the organisation.

Keep your key internal leaders with you as you bridge the gap between the creative drafting process and the finished narrative by testing an early draft of your overall story with them.

Get people to work in small groups with a set of highlighter pens. Ask them to mark-up different sections in your draft story in different colours to identify:

  • fascinating facts or standout statistics that you can’t argue with
  • a dramatic vision of the future or big picture in a new light 
  • milestone moments of change when big things start to happen
  • images that pull on the emotions and provide the human touch 

Does your story include all four elements? If not, do you need to change or amend anything?

It’s a useful final test and a good way of making sure your key people feel they’ve shaped the process from beginning to end.

Sharing it successfully isn’t about getting everyone to learn it off by heart, it’s about encouraging people to understand how it’s relevant to their job, the values and behaviours of your organisation, and, the difference it can make to how the world sees you.

Use your champions to tell their own stories about working with you. Use regular events – team meetings, staff briefings and so on – to tell the story of your story.

Apply behavioural insight principles to checking whether your colleagues can believe in and share your story. Do your people have the:

  • capability (the awareness, skills and knowledge)?
  • motivation (understanding of why it’s important and worthwhile)?
  • opportunity (time, resources and access)?

Review your communications strategies and campaign plans to see where you can weave your story into key messages. Explore how you could use your social media channels to celebrate your storytellers and how you make a difference to the place you serve.

It takes time, patience and determination to embed your story so don’t expect overnight results, and be prepared to be flexible with the story as the world changes.