Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

by Brené Brown

The conspiracies and confabulations that we tend to make up in the face of limited data can tear away at the heart of organizations. Allowing fifty employees to come up with fifty different stories about a leader’s cryptic email is a tremendous waste of energy, time, and talent. Instead, we should put in place a system where people can go to their managers and say, “We need a rumble on that email about the new evaluation system.” Curiosity, clean communication, circling back, and rumbling become part of the culture. Just like people, when organizations own their stories and take responsibility for their actions, they get to write the new endings. When they deny their stories, people on the outside, like the media, take over the story’s authorship to write new narratives that could come to define the organization.