FULHAM ROAD -- It's a little after eight and the sun is out, bright and strong like a midsummer day.  The traffic is flowing.  You can see bleary, flip-flopped antipodeans ducking quickly into pub doors.  The Tri Nations rugby tie between Oz and the All Blacks started at 8 am.

Surely that calls for a round of beer.

Above the street through half open windows you'd assume there are sleeping children, young and old, with wizard hats pulled over their eyes.  The new Harry Potter, just about 9 hours old, lies creased and damp at their side...

Whatever will they do now?

***

I have been known to obsess about words.  And 'culture' and 'storytelling' are two of them.

Phil's taken to calling storytelling the 'narrative'.  Not happy with that, I wrote a paper last night calling it 'experience sharing'.

And why not?

Whatever it takes to get it going.  Because, let's be honest, storytelling sounds a bit wet.  But it works.

[Let's be clear.  We're not talking about gathering you staff together like the children in the British Council picture above...]

Today is the 21st of July in London.  Are you more likely to remember that, or remember the sleeping magicians and addled rugby fans described above?

My old boss Bill used to love to say that we are not really a literate society.  We have really only been reading and writing for about 100 years.  But we have been telling stories for thousands and thousands of years.  Yes, we have evolved.  But not that much.

So why would you need to use storytelling in your business?

Because something else isn't working.  Storytelling is a means, not an end.  It is an educational tool.  It is an experiential way of changing behaviours...

That means: a good way to get people to do something new.

And so I am told by clients: "But that would never work here.  You've got to understand how things happen in this place."

And I say: "Ah-ha!  So, now we are talking about corporate culture."

"No, no.  You can't talk about culture here.  Can you imagine what the CFO would say about that?!"

So we run into trouble with another word.

Organisations are social entities.  That makes them harder to define and harder to manage.  The way that you communicate creates an organisational culture.  Shh!  It's a secret.

If you do things differently.  If you change processes and you change the way people interact (the way you communicate), you can change the organisational culture.

I'll stop.  I can hear Neville Hobson saying I go on too long.

/df