Story Driven: You don't need to compete when you know who you are

by Bernadette Jiwa

The decisions we make are subconsciously primed by our biases—our inclinations and opinions, worldviews and prejudices. These biases form the basis of the stories we believe about ourselves, the world and our place in it.

Studies into neuroplasticity—how the brain can reorganise itself and form new connections—have demonstrated that changes in the brain don’t occur only in response to disease or injury. The brain can also adapt to our thoughts and feelings, as psychologist Carol Dweck found; our underlying beliefs about intelligence, learning and failure can affect our choices, behaviour and performance.

Jobs knew that his engineers were driven by a sense of pride in their work. He believed they should and would do whatever it took to turn out their best once he reflected their values-based standards back to them.

Whatever our goals are, we must have a plan and a process for achieving them. Good decisions are a critical part of any strategy. What classifies a decision as the right one depends on the outcomes we optimise our organisations to create. Those outcomes are as individual as the people who want to achieve them.

We must act in accordance with who we say we are and use our narrative to guide us to become the people who build the kind of organisations we want to exist.

we don’t devote enough time and resources to reflecting on how we can resonate with the right people—just as we are. We fail to harness the true potential of our narrative.

The new tools and tactics are easy to learn and automate; what’s harder, scarcer and more useful is setting the intention that guides the work you do, the service you deliver, the attitude you adopt and the meaning you hope to create.

The more deliberate we can be about acting in alignment with our intentions, the more we stand out.

Where are the roots that will enable you to grow healthy branches that bear fruit? How will you show, not just tell? What promises are you intending to keep?

a strategy is a plan for achieving a goal—a bird’s-eye view of the path that will take us from where we are now to where we want to go.

If a strategy is the path to your goal, tactics are the specific steps you take as you navigate that path.

Imagine your business purpose and vision as a mountain peak. Your strategy is the route map—the path you choose that’s going to get you up that mountain. Tactics are the steps you take on the journey to advance your way along that chosen path towards the summit, thus realising your vision.

PURPOSE AND VISION—Where you’re going and why. STRATEGY—How you’re going to get there. TACTICS—What you do along the way.

By failing to also see our narrative as part of our strategy, we’re missing the opportunity to get clear on our purpose, differentiate ourselves from the competition and create affinity with the right customers.

Differentiation begins by showing, not just telling, and every action should serve the purpose of advancing us towards our goal. We make better decisions when we understand why we’re making them.

If you want to empower the people who are helping you to build your company, you must have as much clarity as Jack Ma did from the outset about where you’re going and why, in order to get there.

The very act of questioning your purpose forces you to dig deeper. It invites you to clarify why you wanted to make that particular promise to those particular people in the first place and to create an action plan to deliver on it.

As marketers, we believe that it’s our products and words that create value. But it’s the intention that informs the development of those products and the crafting of those words that delights people and thus differentiates us.

Clarity of intention is where your ...

Patagonia’s goal of using business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis demonstrate that customers support businesses who show what they’re made of as well as selling what they make.

Having a story-driven strategy enables you to adapt in times of change because you understand that your story is bigger than the scene that’s playing out in the moment.

The Story-Driven Framework is designed to help you be less reactive and more visionary, less tactical and more strategic. It’s a tool you can use personally to guide your career decisions or within teams to inspire engagement and enable progress.

1. BACKSTORY: Your journey to now. 2. VALUES: Your guiding beliefs. 3. PURPOSE: Your reason to exist. 4. VISION: Your aspiration for the future. 5. STRATEGY: The alignment of opportunities, plans and behaviour: how you will deliver on your purpose and work towards your aspiration, while staying true to your values.

Being a story-driven company is about more than simply articulating your purpose. It’s about staying true to that purpose as you work to realise your vision.

Retain our focus on building a strong team based in China, while attracting talent from overseas to lead our management team.

Evolve our strategy for countries with low Internet penetration by incorporating online activities with offline operations through local partners.

As we work to get our ideas out into the world and try to find and engage the people those ideas will resonate with, it’s easy to fall into the trap of skimming the surface of our story for the facts we believe will give us some tangible advantage. But if we want to give ourselves the best chance of spreading our ideas and creating an impact, we have to get better at telling our real story and living our purpose.

If we’re to do work that matters, we have to dig deeper in order to understand the connection between our personal stories and the work we do. Because now more than ever, our work, not just our job title, is part of our identity.

Starbucks’ policy of hiring and training veterans, youth and immigrants is part of the company’s wider social-impact agenda.

It is possible for a publicly traded company to drive an agenda that is not only about shareholder value but is [also] about social impact that helps the people and communities we serve.’

We are committed to providing a level of service to our customers that makes us a leader in the airline industry. We understand that to do this, we need to have a product we are proud of and employees who like coming to work every day.

The expression you wear as you greet the customer is a choice. Where you source your ingredients is a choice. What you include in or omit from your terms and conditions is a choice. Investment in design. Location. Creating opportunity in low-income communities, prioritising customer care and empowering staff—all choices we’re free to make. Rather than feeling overwhelmed about the prospect of getting it wrong, consider these decisions as deliberately placed waymarkers on the road to creating the impact you want to make.

Our job isn’t to get everyone to believe us. It’s to give the right people something to believe in.

What every endeavour has in common is time. Time is the constant. This is plotted on the horizontal x-axis. The thing we want to influence, our impact, is represented on the vertical y-axis.

We fail to maximise our impact when we focus on only one or two elements of our story. We achieve maximum impact only when all five elements of our story—backstory, values, purpose, vision, and strategy—are prioritised over time.

You can accidentally build the kind of company or career you want or you can create it on purpose.

‘If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going.’

‘When people understand why we exist, what our foundation is, and who we are today, then they understand that all of our products are still rooted in improving an athlete’s performance.’ Great companies know how and why they started.

‘Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, [and] use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis’.

Our stories are potent drivers of our deepest motivations and biggest dreams. Owning those stories helps us to make sense of our place in the world and of our potential to change it.

In a group dynamic, we need to create an agreed-upon and shared worldview, a set of guiding beliefs through which our decisions can be filtered. This enables us to make good judgement calls even in stressful situations. Shared values allow us to unite around shared ideals. When we agree upon them, we are also agreeing to be bound by the behaviours that support the upholding of them. In organisations, this encourages both responsibility and accountability. An organisation’s culture is a manifestation of its values.

Because Zappos aspires to deliver incredible service, it adopts a customer-centric strategy.

It might be possible to hide behind excuses for a while, but actions really do speak louder than words.

even in a digital world, human capital is the backbone of thriving economies, and humans are intrinsically motivated and have innate psychological needs. Unlike some lower-order mammals, we often do things for their own sake, not simply in a bid to survive and reproduce or for material gain.

The Theory of Self-Determination explains that human nature exhibits the inherent growth tendencies of effort, agency and commitment. We are driven by our innate psychological need for competence, relatedness and autonomy.

We are our best selves when we have a sense of control over our destiny and feel supported by our community to achieve mastery.

If you don’t understand why your business exists beyond to turn a profit, or if you’re not communicating your purpose, then you’re making it harder for people to get behind you. When you know what you stand for, you have absolute clarity about the reason you’re the best choice for the people you want to serve—and so do they.

But my story—or at least how I’ve always told it—was never the kind of narrative that made everyone sit up and take notice. We yearn for that showstopping tale—that one-sentence pitch that captures something magical about America; that hooks you and won’t let you go. Mine wasn’t it.

Yet there is another story of my life; one that I believe is as inspiring as any other. I wish I had claimed it and told it more proudly.

Even if on paper you are the most qualified, even if you can demonstrate that your product is superior, even if you have a watertight rationale to demonstrate that you are the best choice by a mile, people will be reluctant to support you unless they believe you. And they won’t believe you unless they can see you. People need to understand what you stand for, just as much as they need to know how your policies, products and services can help them.