From journaling to continuous storytelling

It is fairly common knowledge that many successful leaders keep a regular journal. Journaling provides clarity to thoughts, and ensures that we slow down, taking more time to process the information that we take in.

It probably doesn’t have to be a journal, as there can be other rituals that achieve the same goal, such as meditation, walks or other joyful activities in calm environments.

But do these practices provide clarity to the team or just the leader? This is a reflection on how to make sure that both happens.

One thing that journaling does to me: It creates a clear boundary from all the stories around me. Obviously I work on a computer, and I have one social media account on LinkedIn, I regularly check my email account, infrequently check some news websites, and I occasionally check soccer results of my favorite club. I just cannot stop myself with that last one.

As a result of just this exposure, I feel bombarded with stories that are getting into my bones. Taking some dedicated time to process information through journaling, feels like a necessity to me. It helps me to get clear on who I am, who I want to be, and what I think the world says “I should be”. I want to lead my life, so I need to make sure that the stories that are brought to me, guide me but don’t lead me.

Probably my consumption of external information sources, is fairly light compared to many others. And when – on top of consuming sources of your choice – you work in a business 5 days a week, you are also exposed to a lot of stories from inside of that organization. Not that this is a bad thing. It is a great thing, because you want to listen and learn from all the smart people that you have chosen to work with. But, as with any group of people that is homogeneous over some time, stories can become “truths” that everyone believes in.

And as we know: What is true now can change. Good leaders keep a keen and suspicious eye on those “truths”. Great leaders make sure that all the other smart and well-paid team members also keep an eye on those “truth”-stories. It is the same process as journaling, trying to find out what serves and what needs to be let go.

But why only journal for ourselves? Why not publicly or even more importantly with the team? The story for the team needs to be constantly processed and re-told as well.

Many business leaders limit the re-telling of their company’s stories to big events, such as monthly or quarterly company meetings, off-sites or trust that information trickles down from regular C-suite meetings to everyone else. The problem with the latter is obvious to everyone who knows the “telephone game”.

But even relying on company meetings or off-sites has its issues, because re-telling stories can be very difficult, especially if the changes are too big for the audience to process in the allotted time of the event. As decisions have to be made in-between those huge events either the last “strong word” from the CEO (or the loudest contributors) will become guidance, or the least common denominator of what has been agreed upon.

Such agreements might be as motivational as “we all want to get X amount of dollars by next quarter”. It doesn’t take an MBA to know that this doesn’t serve as a distinctive mission statement for a successful company.

Fortunately there seems to be a solution for difficult problems. I have worked as a software engineer for long enough to see that the engineering response for difficult problems was always the same: Do it more often.

When the integration of individual teams’ work happened every four months, it often meant that organizations spent some unspecified amount of time fixing integration problems thereafter. Costly, annoying and deadly to reliable planning efforts.

What solved the problem? Doing it more often! Making sure that the work teams produced didn’t conflict after every change made the integration work measurable, and eventually unproblematic. The same happened to software testing, UX design, deployment, monitoring and planning.

So, if it is a challenge to communicate changes about a company’s structure, direction, mission and vision, what is the answer for an easier process? Do it more often.

Continuous storytelling can be as simple as a weekly practice of gathering and processing mission-relevant information, and then publishing the parts that your team needs to know. Over time this can evolve into targeted publications for different parts of your team. But if done right, company meetings, off-sites and other events will be free of sudden surprises and transform into celebrations of collaboration.

This week, I will publish a new worksheet: The Continuous Storytelling Guide, which lays out an effective path to implement such a process in your company.

Send me an email or respond to this newsletter, if you want me to send you a copy.

And when it comes to change: I will implement some of the continuous storytelling practice myself. If you received this newsletter as an email list subscriber, you might have noticed that the title of this publication changed to “Being ready for change” - newsletter. This newsletter is now exclusively targeted to leaders who want to create an environment in which their team can thrive - especially during times of big changes.

If you read this publication on LinkedIn and you are interested in the “Being ready for change” - newsletter, you may want to consider subscribing to my email list.

I will continue to write on LinkedIn, but the content will be more about my own transformation – distilled into stories that I consider interesting or helpful for a broader audience. So, I’ll be writing more often, because producing a weekly newsletter helped me get clarity on what I want to build and it is still difficult. And if something is difficult and useful, I want to find out what happens if I do it more often.

With care,

Martin