Narrative Leadership in The Age of Meaning
By Kate Chukaeva & Rogier van Kralingen
Narrative Leadership is the ability to inspire your people, your network, your community and your audience to achieve things together that are greater than ourselves. Now that information and technology are commoditizing, more than ever both meaningfulness and storytelling will be your primary revenue drivers. In this series full of fresh inspiration for today’s challenges, we will show you how to reach Narrative Leadership. We will start with the need to shift from goal-oriented to process-oriented. Enjoy the read!
The Innovation Imbalance
The fundamental insight behind Narrative Leadership is that we are shifting from The Information Age into The Age of Meaning. This shift has been a long time coming. It is the result of organizations, brands and leadership having lost trust everywhere on the globe on the emotional side, combined with the wide availability and ‘sameness’ of all things tech and information on the functional side. Ergo, even though many are constantly chasing it, there is little added value left on the functional, data-driven and informational side of things.
Therefore, the main driver behind this loss of trust is what we could call The Innovation Imbalance: in the past decades, too much emphasis has been put on technological innovation, while not enough focus has been on human, sustainable and societal innovation. This has unnecessarily driven up costs on the one side of the balance sheet, while on the other both revenue and profit margins are being squeezed immensely.
We will discuss a wide variety of good and bad practices in our coming writings, but for now we can conclude that tech-innovation cannot compensate for these rising costs. Arguably, it has been the constant chasing of efficiency with tech that has even led to this situation. It has made our challenges more complex and stressful, while reducing the one most important component of all business everywhere: trust.
Tech Is Now Commoditized
Right now, this decades-long focus on efficiency has had the effect that all functionality – technology, data, performance marketing and artificial intelligence – has effectively commoditized. Just think of it: everyone has access to a similar set of tools with similar processes and similar outcomes, resulting in a ‘Red Ocean’ informational environment.
As a rule, success is always highest with brands, organizations and creative leaders who show superior emotional intelligence. Even data gurus like Peter Field and Les Binet argue that 60% of all profit is emotional, aside from Harvard University, or the late professor Kahneman already showing us that the overwhelming majority of all economic decisions are based on emotion (80-95%).
Yet our world has been shifting away from this added value, with stagnating profits as its consequence, and high risk ‘doubling down’ bets on commoditized tech, while societal and personal problems are on the rise. This means that all in all, if you are in this imbalance and lean on the functional side, it is greatly harming your bottom-line, since you are not aligned with the sign of the times that your audience experiences.
The Blind Spot
Yet, many of you who are still chasing the efficiency side, seem to be almost oblivious to how harmful that functional focus is to your potential revenue. It is a massive blind spot. All because you’re missing that single most important insight of this Zeitgeist: a large focus on tech makes tech commoditize faster.
Remember that even when your field is technology itself, it is still the most emotionally intelligent brand that wins. Just think of Apple or Samsung and so many more. Only in the very beginning stages of a new technological category does the one with the best functions win. Yet usually after only a few years, the injection of emotional cues and values in design, interface and branding will ensure you can take the market lead.
Even Ford’s historic dominance over every aspect of its sector disappeared the very moment new colours and auto-designs entered the fray. And we have again arrived at such a historic moment, where our tool- and tech-focus is simply just overblown.
The Enormous Opportunity of Meaning
Do not underestimate the size of this opportunity for you, since in a market with most players chasing the same thing, you will open an incredibly strong revenue-avenue when you address the emotional difference and claim your narrative leadership.
This is primarily done by accepting that organizations are more than the sum of their parts. And even more important, that many of those parts are beyond your control nowadays. There is an irony at play; because there are too many media, tech, influencer, fora, socials and other informational routes your audiences use, a large part of your brand’s reputation is no longer under your control, however much you advertise.
Even more ironically, this is especially true now that people use artificial agents for search. Only when you add true meaning, will all these informational streams turn your way. So, at the very top of your priority list should be to re-build the narrative leadership positions in the minds of our audiences. And the best tool mankind still has for that is storytelling.
Shifting From Goal-Orientation to Process-Orientating
One key principle of storytelling is to embrace friction and challenges, being honest about them, and not to avoid them, as we have seen many businesses do the past decades, leading to the distrusted position we are in today. People are actually attuned to this: life is full of challenges, so our entire physiology and biology are built to recognize challenges. As such, when you are honest about them, people will both remember you and trust you. In practice this means their decisions will favour you.
To (re)gain the emotional connection, our thinking should shift towards the journey, rather than the goal. This mechanism makes the journey a shared experience. Just think of a story in a cinema for instance. But more importantly for business, the shared journey-experience to overcome our challenges, creates feelings of trust and partnership with everyone from your personnel to your partners to your audience.
Another way of describing this ‘journey-principle’ in business terms is to become process-oriented instead of goal-oriented. In essence you stop chasing functionality and start building a shared narrative towards an inspirational goal. The paradox is that the moment you stop chasing goals, you actually start meeting those goals. Or to put it differently: the shared narrative brings your emotional, but also your functional tech goals closer as well.
Belief System Change
Sure, there are some who still profit from the efficiency drive, namely the platform builders who have enough scale. However, everyone else – from creative leaders to B2B and B2C brands to media channels and more – are in a constant defensive fight for attention. Attention that is increasingly siphoned away from us by those very platform holders.
The costs of hanging on to this ‘efficiency belief system’ is too high and increasing dramatically. Not only does it add to complexity, but both leaders and their people are under constant stress, relying on systems that are ‘distant’ from them, creating higher societal costs, red tape and many other negative consequences. Plus, worldwide all marketing costs keep increasing, while trust is decreasing in lock-step. We urge you to see this blind spot now. It is actively hurting the bottom line both directly and instantly.
The problem is now so great, we have even started offering stress reduction techniques and movement-based creativity boosters, martial arts style, to our proposition: anything to shift to the right abundance mindset, and away from the scarcity mindset of chasing the next tech-thingie. We have so far found that the majority of companies are still not ready to let go of this efficiency-addiction. But the ones that do always see the benefits within months.
Your Best Avenue to Higher Revenue
Narrative Leadership is the ability to inspire your people, your network, your community and your audience to achieve things together that are greater than ourselves. The moment you achieve this Narrative Leadership you’re creating a loyal following that is willing to work with you on your vision, share its goals and open their wallets for its added value. Furthermore, such a deeper connection is worth a premium, especially when so few others provide it.
In this Narrative Leadership belief system, technology is a tool that is secondary to emotional intelligence. Efficiency-thinking is still relevant, yet it gets a more natural spot in the thought-construct: technology becomes a tool rather than a goal, that in the process – or journey – helps us achieve a much greater goal; audiences and leaders coming together.
Narrative Leadership is The New Thought Leadership
In essence, it’s a paradox: we come together in the process itself, which in turn will more naturally, even automatically, bring the desired end-result closer. This is not easy to achieve for leaders and leadership teams, since the pressures of today will not change anytime soon. Yet striving for Narrative Leadership is worth it, since it will create an entirely new relationship with today’s complexity, to the degree you will overcome it.
It will shift you away from its stressors, providing clarity and a robust storytelling framework that will finally allow sustainable financial growth in times we all need it the most.
Watch this space for much more inspiration to come, as we will continue our quest for Narrative Leadership and reaching flow within teams, with our next articles focusing on why people follow leaders, what innovations are best right now, how authenticity works, how to reach team flow and why your narrative is imperative in the scattered media world of today.
For now, wishing you the best of positive energies,
Kate Chukaeva & Rogier van Kralingen
For more on keynotes and workshops of Narrative Leadership, check out the description on our Masterclasses, contact us here or Kate Chukaeva on LinkedIn.
Kate Chukaeva is an experienced, top-level personal branding guide, whose life-long quest in martial arts has now put her on the path to help others reach mastery in their fields. With The Chi Team, she leads a select group of creators, combining all their expertise to create positive, focused and interconnected brand narratives for her clients, in order to reach their full potential.
Writer and speaker (MA) Rogier van Kralingen is a conjuror of captivating stories, an award-winning author and university lecturer. He has created, published, and spread hundreds of stories, including for startups, scale-ups and listed companies, personal narratives for international press, while also writing for the public sphere and cultural niches such as music, theatre and film.
