‘The research shows that it’s stories that are the most powerful mobilizers of change.’
What does ‘story’ mean to you? Zoë Arden asked that question of more than 100 people, beginning her research, as she encourages us all to begin our stories, by listening first.
Leaders have at their disposal more facts and data than ever before, but the research and our lived experience confirms that facts and data are not what we need to catalyse real change. Our brains are wired in such a way that only stories have the power to mobilise us into action – they are, in Zoë’s words, both levers of connection and levers of change, so understanding how they work is vital for any leader who wants to gets stuff done.
But stories aren’t just for telling, they’re for living – and we need to make choices about the stories we tell ourselves, more or less consciously, just as much as the ones we craft for others.
Zoë’s own story of finding her voice as a writer amongst the many voices of her interviewees will be invaluable if you’re drowning in reseach, and her remarkable journey to publication might just be the inspiration you need to get started…
Zoë’s site: https://zoearden.com/
Zoë on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoearden/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: I am here today with Zoe Arden, who works at the intersection of leadership and storytelling. What a great place to be working. She’s a former director at BT and a communication specialist. She’s a fellow at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and her new book ‘Story-Centred Leadership: Crafting cultures of change’ illuminates how our stories can engage and motivate and mobilize others for change that matters.
So first of all, I think we’re all here for all of that, welcome, Zoe. You have found your people.
Zoe Arden: Lovely to be with you, Alison.
Alison Jones: It’s great to have you here. And I loved, I’m going to start with the question that you started all the interviews for the book with as well, which is, what does story mean to you?
Zoe Arden: Yes, so great question. So stories to me, I would say that…
Alison Jones: …your question…
Zoe Arden: …and it’s interesting, I started with that question because I had a realization very early on. That, and we know how powerful language is, that it did mean different things to different people. So I really was curious to see what it meant to people.
I have the anecdote that I was talking to my brother about it, and he was like, what do you mean by story?
Alison Jones: And it’s so true, isn’t it? Because we think, you know, we are in this little bubble, as you said, this little echo chamber of leadership and everybody knows what story means and actually no, for most people, stories are what you read your kids at night.
Zoe Arden: Absolutely, and that’s where my brother was coming from, completely. So, stories for me are levers of connection and levers of change. They’re a way of us sensemaking and connecting with others so that actually we can help sort of inspire, engage, and mobilize others to be part of creating the change, the positive change that I think is really important that we need in the world to address the global challenges that we face.
So that’s how I talk about stories. I certainly don’t see them as silver bullets and to be used with care. But I do think they are incredibly powerful packets of meaning making so that people can understand and choose to take action rather than us talking in jargon or in silos.
Alison Jones: Which just sort of goes through us without really leaving a trace. And you do make such a good point in the book, and it’s one of those, I love this about books. You know, you read it and you go of course, of course, but I hadn’t sort of formulated it that way to myself. You say that we are in a world that is absolutely full, over full, some might say, of facts and algorithms and data. We’ve sort of got more than we know what to do with.
So, well, I guess there’s a question there, isn’t it? How is story different from all of that and why is it so powerful in actually bringing about change where the data alone seems unable to?
Zoe Arden: Yes, it’s so interesting and that’s often my starting point. You know, we have the technology, we have the data, we have so many of the solutions available to us to address the huge global challenges and yet we’re still not achieving change at scale, and it’s all down to us as individuals and our very ancient wiring in our brains. That means we haven’t evolved.
So, I mean, and regarding stories, it is interesting, you would think that stories and data would be a great combination, but actually the research shows that it’s stories that are the most powerful mobilizers of change. So really it is just a way of helping people understand, connect with their heart and their head in terms of what are the realities and what do I choose to do about it? So really it’s that translation between the data and the connection.
Alison Jones: Yes, the emotional weight of it and the sense that I now want to turn my energy towards addressing this. That’s the big change, isn’t it? Is I care about this and that has to involve emotion.
Zoe Arden: Yes, and I think, you know, we are all familiar with that term nimbyism, not in my backyard, and often the stories have to be about how do we make it in that person’s backyard. We absolutely, of course, we care about ourselves, our family, our friends, our immediate neighbors, and that has to be our starting point with our stories.
You know, what’s your problem that I can help solve?
Alison Jones: Which is, yes, all about connection, isn’t it? And when you take that into leadership particularly, what’s different about, I mean, it’s a lovely phrase, story-centred leadership, just unpack it a bit for us. What does that mean? Why does it matter?
Zoe Arden: Yes, so I think, you know, I firmly believe that leadership is how we choose to show up as individuals. It’s about breaking through the self-limiting stories that we carry around about ourselves and recognizing that through our energy and intention and action and how we communicate with others, we can have agency.
So I look at story-centred leadership both from an individual perspective, a team, you know what’s the microculture you can create just with yourself and one other human, team, organization, sector, society. So, but it starts with individuals and us believing that we can make a difference.
Alison Jones: And you said something really interesting there, which I just want to pick back up on. You said about the limiting stories that we tell ourselves. It’s almost like, do you know, it’s not choosing to deal in stories. It’s like you are dealing in stories, whether you like it or not. It’s just about being more intentional about those stories because that’s kind of our operating system.
Zoe Arden: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And, interesting enough for me, you know, I was carrying this book around for years before I actually started writing it. So there’s thousands of books on storytelling. I was teaching in Cambridge yesterday and the professor said there are thousand books written on leadership every year.
And I’m like, yes, that’s one of the reasons this one didn’t come out sooner.
Story-centred leadership is about, you know, how we create the stories that we need to, you know, bridge the divides and catalyze action for change.
Alison Jones: And do you, when you’re talking to people about this, did they recognize that? I mean, is that when you were asking people what do you mean by story, did people have that sort of sense that story is an agent of change or were they thinking about it more as corporate comms or, you know, relational?
How did people see it?
Zoe Arden: Yes, people really do have a deep connection with stories. I mean, it goes right back to childhood. You know memories of either being taught stories or sharing stories with friends and family around us. And, one of the biggest joys of writing this book was having conversations with over a hundred individuals, which was never my intention, but really…
Alison Jones: …want to talk about this. It’s so fascinating.
Zoe Arden: Never, never thought I’d go there, but it really highlighted to me the absolute joy of listening. When you really, really listen with that deep intent what can emerge, how you can really uncover someone’s superpower. So that was the conversation I was having. I was hugely curious to see how people had activated stories, what had worked and what hadn’t worked.
Alison Jones: And that does segue us beautifully, well done you, into your sort of five stage model. It’s circular, rather, it’s not steps, but it’s sort of five elements to it. And, you start with listening, don’t you? And I was, which is great, we’ve sort of talked about that. I’m particularly really fascinated by the one in the middle of that circle, which is story living.
And I hadn’t heard that phrase before and I found it very resonant. Tell us a bit more about, well you probably, give us the whole model and then tell us about that.
Zoe Arden: Very quickly. So yes, my virtuous circle of story-centred leadership goes from story listening to story living and as I said, it’s, I’m saying it in a linear way, but it is absolutely circular and listening is starting with our stakeholders. As I said, what’s their problem that we can help solve?
Really walking in stakeholder shoes, building empathy for where people are at right now rather than in trying to impose our version of the world on them. Story building is the ingredients, that’s the bread and butter. Like, what are they taking away having had a conversation with us? Why is it important to them and what are the analogies, anecdotes, examples?
Story shaping is really important. You know, often we just say something in our heads and we think it sounds great, and then it comes out of our mouth and it’s not so good. So that’s really iterating, if you think about the best storytellers, it’s standup comedians who work on their material for years. So it’s really seeing what’s resonating, what’s turning the lights on, practising.
And then story sharing is the cultures of our organization. Recognizing how important stories are in terms of creating purposeful, fearless cultures where people can really be their best and absolutely, story living is us at the center of all of that.
I say that we are speaking volumes before we even open our mouths. You know, often we’re a tiny, tiny little box on a teams call, and I say to people, you know, what’s the energy and intent? Are people convinced by you before you even open your mouths? So it really starts with us thinking through, you know, how we communicate, thinking through what’s holding us back. And we talked about those self-limiting stories or simple stories we say about others.
You know, that’s how we get into this polarization. We decide someone’s wrong, we make them the villain. But actually really starting to try and break out of those habits and those old ways of thinking and how can we start to build a more sort of generative, creative world? How do we imagine that and build it together?
Alison Jones: It’s a gorgeous model and I love that it comes down to the centre to values and authenticity and actually really leaning into to what it is you believe rather than the kind of spinning the story comms view of what this can be. And I love too that you walked the talk when you wrote the book, because you started by listening and we touched on that amazing, amazing number of people that you talked to.
Zoe Arden: Yes.
Alison Jones: Tell me how that came about. I mean, that must have taken you a while and I’m guessing that you started having similar patterns of conversation. Yes, so just talk us through that, how it came about and what you discovered through that process.
Zoe Arden: Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the question, Alison. I asked it of myself many times.
There were not similar patterns actually. It came out of an obsession that I have to get out of the echo chamber and really celebrate diversity of voices. It’s so easy for us to talk to people that like us, you know, be in an echo chamber, be in an ego chamber. Oh yes, you’re fantastic. Well done.
How do we break out into a bigger eco chamber? So I literally had an Excel spreadsheet which was I need to speak to as many different types of people as possible. I really should have spoken to trees and animals, you know. But so it was like literally thinking about how can I really have broad representation, whether it’s people in the arts, activists, academics, business, public sector, different ages. You know, I interviewed my nearly 94-year-old mother-in-law who is a hugely purposeful giant in my life. Thinking about people with different lived experiences, people of color, people of different abilities. So that’s really, really important to me that I can get out of my bubble and think about what story looks like and where it works and where it doesn’t work, and what channels are best.
So that’s how that came about.
Alison Jones: And there is something magical isn’t there about when you tell people that you are writing a book on a topic, it sort of gives you access in a way that it’s quite hard to get otherwise. People see the value of that immediately. They get what you are doing and very often they want to be part of it. Was that your experience?
Zoe Arden: Yes, absolutely. I think it was, people really enjoyed the conversation. I felt like I was shining a light on their superpower, in many instances. I was talking about things they were hugely passionate about, and it just highlighted that we don’t listen like that very often, now our listening is so transactional. And when you really find out, people are amazing, they’re doing incredible things.
You know, whether it was a young black woman in the heart of Detroit, who’s created a book club for young girls and has women come in and talk about what their jobs are. I mean, that’s just such a lovely story and everyone’s put pressure on her to scale and she’s like, no, I’m going to do it at this scale, you know, this is important to me, you know, through to a woman in her nineties who is suddenly, you know, had the lights turned on, that she wants to be part of creating a regenerative community and, using her wisdom and experience but actually, you know, I want to make a difference in terms of transforming the food system in my community.
So those stories were absolutely incredible.
Alison Jones: What a privilege and what I love as well is that, you know, for somebody who’s thinking about sitting down and writing a book, it’s tempting to think that what you’re going to do is basically talk to the world for 300 pages, where actually there’s a lot of listening involved in this and let’s talk about the writing too, because I guess that’s the shaping piece of your model, isn’t it?
I’m almost applying it to the book. Do you see what I’m doing here?
How did you go about taking everything that you discovered in that listening process and crafting your story, but then communicating it on the page? Because you haven’t, can’t look in the eyes of your reader, which is always a frustrating thing, isn’t it, when you’re writing a book. What did you discover about the craft of telling a story on the page?
Zoe Arden: It was really interesting actually. So, you know, I was carrying the weight of these hundred voices and I felt that I needed to do them justice. And actually the advice that I got was, we’ve lost your voice, Zoe. And I had to start in terms of reminding myself that actually I am also an expert in this space.
You know, I’ve worked with literally tens of thousands of individuals around the world to help them create better stories. So I needed to start with that and incorporate all that wisdom and perspective from others, but also honour those voices. So that actually was a really interesting learning for me that I’d completely subjugated my voice in all of this.
Alison Jones: You almost become a journalist. It’s quite easy to curate these stories and forget that actually this is, your book is your story, into which you weave all these different other bits of evidence and story and people’s voices.
Zoe Arden: Yes, Yes. Absolutely. And, the second way that I wrote it, through trial and error, was actually using my own framework. So I’ve got a story-centred framework. I used that to create the spine for the whole book. So for each chapter it was, okay, what’s my takeaway message from this chapter? And why is it important, you know, at a societal level, at an organizational level, and for the individual reader? And then bringing some of those examples, anecdotes, data points in there. So I literally used my own tool to create the spine of the book, so that’s how I went about writing it, bringing my voice to the fore while honoring everybody else’s and actually using my own tool.
Alison Jones: Was it fun, hard, puzzling, what? Tell me about the experience of writing it.
Zoe Arden: I love writing and so that was an absolute joy. To really sort of go deep into something that I’m very, very passionate about. You know, how do we activate better leadership through stories? But I’m sure loads of people say this to you, it’s haunting at the same time, and there’s loads of things I’d do differently.
It’s how do you do the day-to-day work that, you know, puts food on the table alongside the thing that you’re passionate about? So I might have done it in a more concentrated process, as it was, I was getting up at four in the morning and coming up with ideas. So there were lots of people giving me great advice and I had a super little sort of writing group that I checked in with a couple of times a week.
And the writing retreats I did were a huge, huge boost in the writing of the book. So I’d urge anybody who’s writing a book, give yourself that dedicated time where you can be in a bubble for a couple of days, surrounded by other writers, where you don’t have to feel guilty talking about your book, but actually you can really start to grow into that identity as a writer.
Alison Jones: That’s a really lovely way of putting it because it is taking on a new identity, isn’t it? If you’re speaker, trainer, a consultant, you think you know all this stuff, but actually there’s a craft of writing and you sort of almost have to, there’s some imposter syndrome, isn’t there, around the putting yourself forward as an author is an extraordinary thing.
I love that you did the immersive piece because I find that, I mean we say writing like it’s one thing, it’s not, is it, it’s like a thousand different things from researching to thinking, staring out a window, to sort of doing a very, very first dump of something that you haven’t quite articulated to yourself yet, to polishing, you know, all of this is writing.
Where do you find that immersive experience most useful? Is it early stage ideation or is it revising, or when do you just need to get away and immerse yourself completely in the book?
Zoe Arden: I think, certainly at the beginning stage, and I think if you can do it at regular intervals, so I spent over two years writing this, as I said, I was carrying it around inside me for many years before that, and actually the catalyst for writing it was a friend of mine who’d written her first book said, you will have an impact on people you never meet.
Alison Jones: What a great way of thinking about it.
Zoe Arden: Yes, and…
Alison Jones: …goes beyond you…
Zoe Arden: …exactly, and that was like, if I care about the positive impact I’m having, that is such a powerful and liberating way of thinking about it. So that was like, right, I’m going to do it. I’m going to stop talking about it, thinking about it, starting it, and then actually initially it just poured out of me, you know, the experience of the virtuous circle, those five stages, because that’s such a huge part of my work. The anecdotes, the examples, literally just poured out, which was exciting.
So I think it’s not losing that golden thread, in terms of the immersion, where you do get that energy and at the same time living it and absorbing it and who are you learning from? What other voices do you need to incorporate? And pushing yourself through the fear.
Alison Jones: Yes,
Zoe Arden: Now, at one point I was like, I wish I’d never told anyone I was doing this because it’s going to be crap.
Alison Jones: And now I have to do it.
But you know, even putting it in your diary, even saying, I’m going away for two days to work on my book, you know, there’s a sort of level of accountability and commitment and intention there, isn’t there, that’s very helpful. Love that.
Now, I always ask my guests, Zoe, for their one sort of tip for somebody listening who’s maybe at the start of this journey, what do you think they need to know?
Zoe Arden: So I think if you are at the start of this journey, just start. I’ve talked about the things that really helped me in terms of writing retreats and that really was so pivotal. I am a writer. I am writing, I can do this. So just start. And there will be threads going round in your head. Write them down and recognize it’s probably going to be deeper, a deeper process than you think.
So just start and surround yourself by the generosity of friends who will support you. I was amazed at how generous and supportive people were. I had to push through asking, would you do an interview? Would you help me, would you connect me? I didn’t even ask. I wrote to four publishers one afternoon, I thought I’d self-publish, but I was never really comfortable with that and a couple of friends said, look speak to my publisher.
I wrote to four publishers in the afternoon. I was on the train up to Cambridge to do a workshop, and one replied in five minutes saying, we want to publish this. By the time I came out of my workshop, a second one had said, I’m really interested in this.
So that was a Friday afternoon, the Monday I had two publishers that want to do my book. So it’s start and believe in yourself.
Alison Jones: Because if you don’t ask, how will you ever know? Yes, I love that.
And I also always ask, as you know, for a recommendation, you can’t recommend your own book, sorry. But what book would you suggest that people read if they haven’t got it already?
Zoe Arden: I would recommend a book called Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to thrive in complexity and it’s by an author, a leadership practitioner called Jennifer Garvey Berger. Unfortunately, I don’t have it to show you. I’ve listened to it in audio twice all the way through, and I absolutely love her.
She’s got a beautiful style, she’s playful, she’s got a lovely energy. But she is a phenomenon and it made my year when she actually did endorse my book because she’s a huge influencer for me. So yes, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps by Jennifer Garvey Berger.
Alison Jones: Love it, and I have an audible credit, so I’ve been looking for a book.
Zoe Arden: There you go.
Alison Jones: I have to-be-read pile so high I can’t tell you, but yes, that sounds great.
Zoe Arden: And she really brings it to life. So there’s the story but then there’s also a sort of an interesting technique she uses where she has a scenario going through the book where people are working through these mind traps. And of course these are all the self-limiting beliefs and self-limiting stories that stop us moving ahead.
Alison Jones: And to understand them through story. It’s a lovely demonstration of exactly what we’ve been saying. Brilliant. What a great recommendation. Thank you.
And Zoe, if people want to find out more about you, more about the work you do, more about your books, where should they go?
Zoe Arden: Probably go to my website, so zoearden.com and obviously the book’s on Amazon right now as well.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. It has been such a joy talking to you today. Thank you so much for your time and for talking us through not just your model, but also the way you use your model in your book. I mean, there’s just layers of meta-ness gloriousness there. I’ve enjoyed it so much. Thank you.
Zoe Arden: Great. Thanks so much, Alison. It’s been lovely talking to you.
