My adventures as a Visiting Professor here in Copenhagen are coming to an end. Teaching at the Business School here has been a fabulous experience – even more so by the realization that I don’t have to explain the importance of storytelling in Denmark. Nor to the international students or faculty who are in attendance. As I found in the Middle East, storytelling is considered foundational to insightful  communication.  It signifies sophistication.  So keeping up with my reading in this area was a double delight.

I have a newly released offering for you. Ty Montague has supplied a welcome addition to the field of storytelling.  Taking the telling into actionable results.  He starts from the premise that all of us have a personal story or metastory. From there, he makes the move towards interpretation of these metastories, as a shortcut to understanding the people around us.  He drives home the point that our stories are about meaning, what we value.

Montague then moves towards brands – also emphasizing meaning over product and the corporate cultures that drive the brands. He speaks of “story doing” and claims this is the new landscape for brands.  He asks an interesting question for consideration: What if you built a process around first understanding the story that needed to be told, and then used that story to inform every aspect of the company? The emphasis to be placed not on the telling – but on the doing. He offers an action map that can be used to drive this process. Everything stems from the metastory – any new products or serves, new experiences, new team structures, new processes and new communication. This new approach? Social innovation by design.

It’s an interesting lens on a powerful proven method. It follows the same logic that Roberto Verganti gave us in his  “Design-Driven Innovation” with a few additional twists. Bottom line is narrative communicates meaning. Narrative is here to stay and for any business that doesn’t realize its potential well – survival is optional.

True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business