For all the chaos and uncertainty moments of crisis engender, they also present the best opportunity for transformative change. In order to achieve real and lasting results, however, leaders must work not only to resolve the specific challenge but to preserve and strengthen the culture of the institution. 

Current neuroscience research demonstrates that one of the most effective tools for addressing crisis and conflict is storytelling. Stories engage us through our emotions and give us permission to explore difficult, uncomfortable, and controversial topics. Stories also create pathways for communication and collaboration, allowing us to overcome our defenses and perceived differences; they connect us to each other. We look to story as a way of making sense of our experience and transforming our learning into something meaningful and transcendent. Good stories help to make order out of chaos. 

This article explores how the ancient tool of narrative and storytelling, combined with modern psychological insights, can help organizations successfully navigate through challenging times. 

Storytelling: An Ancient Craft in a Modern Context 

For thousands of years humans have told stories—stories about the hunt, stories of heroes and antiheroes, stories of crushing defeat and soaring triumph. Why? Because our brains are uniquely wired for story. 

Dr. Paul Zak, a neuroscientist, has found that the hormone oxytocin puts people in thrall to story. In an experiment conducted in Zak’s lab, subjects watched a series of commercials about childhood cancer patients; these commercials were specifically chosen because they told stories with a strong a narrative arc. The experiment subjects saw an increase in their oxytocin and cortisol levels. The change in oxytocin had a positive correlation with participants’ feelings of empathy, which in turn motivated them to donate to the featured charity despite the fact that no overt solicitation had taken place. 

Zak repeated the study, this time using stories about “hot-button” issues, including stories of racism, gun control and terrorist attacks. The results were equally compelling, leading Zak to conclude: “These findings suggest that emotionally engaging narratives inspire post-narrative actions.” In short, good stories are biologically transformative and motivate us to take action. 

Organizations have long recognized the power of story. For example, in major corporations across the world storytelling is now ubiquitous. It is used in branding, strategic planning, customer service training, and to promote more creative and innovative thinking, among other things. Stephen Denning, a former World Bank manager turned business storytelling evangelist, notes that “[t]he choice for leaders in business and organizations is not whether to be involved in storytelling—they can hardly do otherwise—but whether to use storytelling unwittingly and clumsily, or intelligently and skillfully.” 

Crafting Difficult Stories 

The noted Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz once said “[s]ome trouble always comes at the beginning of the story because otherwise there would be no story.” In short, the story only begins when something is out of balance. Layoffs, lawsuits, a management crisis, those are the events that begin the story. How are we to react? Our first task is to stay in the experience and acknowledge its possibilities. Don’t run from trouble but recognize it as a signal that space is being created for something extraordinary to occur. The second task is to construct meaning from the experience–that is, to create stories to help explain how we got to where we are, and how we might go beyond the present experience.

Stories have a way of moving past our fixed positions and into the heart of the matter. They are particularly effective in handling difficult, sensitive and uncomfortable conversations because the release of oxytocin triggers feelings of empathy, openness, vulnerability, safety and trust. Neuroscientist Paul Zak concludes “[t]o the brain, good stories are good stories, whether . . . on topics happy or sad, as long as they get us to care about their characters.”

The tendency in moments of crisis is to construct a hero’s narrative, one in which a lone individual saves a frightened community from a dark and primitive threat. This would be a mistake. The hero narrative might make for an excellent movie, but in reality it undermines the community’s agency—and it makes for a predictable and boring story. What makes for a compelling narrative is a multiplicity of stories drawn from protagonists across the community: employees, managers, customers, local communities. Moreover, the best stories display what Robert McKee, an expert on story structure, calls “the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness.” In other words, the story is in the struggle not in a sanitized final rendering that glosses over difficulty in favor of a triumphant, happily-ever-after. 

What does this mean for a organizatiins facing crisis, practically speaking? The answer is, of course, complex.
Certainly, leaders must create space for the community to tell its stories, and the leadership in turn must tell its own stories while also speaking to stories from the collective. But an authentic approach to storytelling is not about constructing a formulaic approach or “capturing” the perfect story; one cannot enter the story arena with a fixed agenda. Rather, the process is about listening and giving voice to a communal wound. What happens next is often surprising and original. 

REFERENCES

Paul J. Zak, Ph.D., Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative, available at http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2015/ Why_Inspiring_Stories_Make_Us_React__The_Neuroscience_of_Narrative/ 

Marie-Louise von Franz, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales. 

Robert McKee and Bronwyn Fryer, Storytelling that Moves People, Harvard Business Review (available at https://hbr.org/2003/06/storytelling-that-moves-people)