There are three reasons why we start by seeking out real life workplace stories: helps us understand the current culture, provides examples of what the future might look like and creates a set of examples for managers to examine and work out the behaviours to encourage or disrupt.

Can your leaders tell the story of your strategy? This is our starting point. We help your senior leaders create that story and also help them develop the skills to tell it. It’s about crafting the strategic story.

All your leaders, at all levels, need to know and be confident telling the strategic story. They will also have their variations based on their experiences, and we welcome that. So we spend time helping them learn it and get comfortable telling it. We teach your leaders to tell your strategic story.

Now we get your employees involved in the strategic process by collecting anecdotes that both illustrate where the strategy is already working (positive examples are great to motivate others about how the future could look) and where things could be better. These anecdotes become the triggers for initiatives that employees design and implement and in the process become more involved in executing the strategy.

Most organisations have them: stated organisational values or behaviours. But if you are committed to say, integrity, then your company should be teeming with integrity stories. Embedding values is not about ‘saying what we value’ – it's about employees ‘seeing those behaviours in action’.

Like any new habit, it takes time and practice to adopt the new behaviours. So this phase is about putting the initiatives in place, learning from what happens, adapting the initiatives, and executing again... and again. Here we engage everyone to work out what needs to be done and harness this energy to get things done.

Art Kleiner, in his important work on people with power in an organisation, made one of those statements that appear obvious but that we ignore at our peril: “Without an energetic and effective Core Group [those with power], all efforts to spark creativity and enthusiasm sputter out.”

So to make your change strategy stick, special attention must be given to those people in power—the senior leaders, managers and influencers—who’ll have an inordinate impact on whether the desired strategy, vision or values really come alive.

We accomplish this by running a leadership program for these people. Most leaders already know what to do intellectually: they could pass any “change management 101” exam easily. The trick is getting them to feel the need to adopt new ways of working. This is accomplished with stories collected from the organisation, in combination with innovative methods for them to work out for themselves the key areas to be addressed.

We also teach leaders to be better storytellers. Check out our popular storytelling program.

And we can help everyone in your organisation be better mentors.

The end result is a Core Group who really understand, in their gut, what the strategy means for them and the organisation, so they can communicate this by their actions and their attitude as well as their words.

Of course things rarely work as we plan them. The world is too complex and fast moving to expect otherwise. That’s why we need to regularly monitor our progress and adapt. We will reinforce those things that are working and disrupt what’s not.