Storytelling can help solve social issues and help businesses

At the end of last month I was invited by Graham Dover to sit in on the last session of his Social Innovation course at SFU. I'd met Graham when we both judged on the Social innovation Business Case Competition back in June. The format of this last session was that the students, who had been divided into teams during the course, presented their ideas to a selection of guests.

I've said, if not blogged a number of times, that the fact that the students are even thinking about such social problems as homelessness, addiction, the environment and so on is greatly encouraging. Students of today are tomorrow's leaders and the ability to look at some of these long-standing problems with fresh eyes is crucial if they are ever to be solved. As I watched I learnt a lot about what they wanted to do, but very little about why they would do it. They seemed to be caught in the glare of public speaking and trying to work with PowerPoint slides.

Talking about presentations and slides, Graham kindly shared the graphic he had produced by Aftab Erfan at Whole Picture Thinking. I love these kind of images, they really can communicate a lot of information in an effective and engaging way. I also saw this back in February when I attended the Northern Voice Conference. There it was Nancy White who did a pictorial representation of Rob Cottingham's entertaining keynote as he delivered it and also went on to do the same for a session called Say it/blog it with pictures.

All this made me think. Sometimes it's as if we are looking for that great new way to present something, almost as if the method is more important than the message. Other times I think the message is lost because it's not communicated well enough. Never is this more true than when it comes to numbers. The fog that suddenly appears in front of someone's eyes at the mere mention of numbers is similar I think to the fog that appears when people try to talk about social issues such as senior poverty, the personal safety of sex workers and many more.

When it comes to numbers many people are able to shut out the important stories of what is happening in their business, much the same way some shut out social problems. There are some great people trying to break down the latter at the same time as I try to address the former. Much as you can only ignore your own personal finances for so long, in a business the need to understand the numbers is arguably more acute.

The interesting thing here is that in both cases, storytelling is the key. If you translate the financials of a company into a business narrative it can be easier to make the right decisions and move forward. If you translate social issues into personal stories your communication can be far more effective.

That said, there is of course a limit to the comparison between financial storytelling and solving social issues; I will summarise by saying that the latter is obviously a lot harder than building a business narrative. Links can be made between the two, but I do respect the fact there can be a major difference in terms of perspective at least.

It's this difference in perspective that brings me back to the students of Graham's Social Innovation class. I'm sure some of them will go on to run successful businesses, some I hope will work to solve some of the social issues they presented in the final class. All of them will in some way need to be able to present, show slides/graphics which communicate the story they want to tell, but all the time they are thinking about the issues rather than the method is time well spent.