The action-based guide to powerful, influential organizational storytelling Circle of the 9 Muses captures the best practices of the world's most influential story consultants and knowledge workers to help you find, tell, and draw value from your organizational stories as impetus for action.

GET THE WORD OUT WITH THIS ACTION-BASED GUIDE TO ORGANIZATIONAL STORYTELLING

Circle of the 9 Muses offers any leader a guide for finding, telling, and drawing value from their organization's unique stories. Once your stories are refined and voiced they offer inspiration to those both inside and outside your company to become springboards to action. Written by David Hutchens with contributions from the world's most influential story consultants and knowledge workers, this vital resource includes a step-by-step guide for creating powerful and transformative stories and contains the best practices of organizational storytelling. The ideas presented have been developed, tested, and refined in the practices of some of the most innovative business and social initiatives of our time.

With this practical guide, storytelling can become a powerful managerial asset in your management toolbox. Hutchens reveals which stories are the right ones to tell and clearly shows how stories can bring employees, customers, and other partners together. Filled with illustrative examples and helpful templates, this innovative road map explains how stories can connect with your company's most urgent initiatives such as change management, knowledge management, culture and identity, engagement, branding, innovation, attracting talent, articulating vision and purpose, generating marketplace support, and more.

Circles of the 9 Muses offers concrete and actionable guidance for understanding and mastering the most effective storytelling techniques. This book is your ultimate field guide to influential storytelling.

The action-based guide to powerful, influential organizational storytelling

Circle of the 9 Muses captures the best practices of the world's most influential story consultants and knowledge workers to help you find, tell, and draw value from your organizational stories as impetus for action. This rich toolbox is loaded with fun, graphical instructions and dozens of unique, replicable, and facilitated processes that require no special training or expertise. You'll discover your organization's hidden narrative assets, use different templates and frameworks to tell the stories of your past, present, and future and then draw team members into rich meaning-making dialogue that translates into action. These activities can be exercised in endless permutations, and expert advice steers you toward the right activity for a specific purpose, including managing change, setting strategy, onboarding, defining the brand, engaging supporters or customers, merging cultures, building trust, and much more.

Organizational storytelling is a powerful managerial tool and an essential change management technique. This is about your influence as a leader. Knowing the right story to tell and how to deliver it effectively gives you and your organization enormous influence, and helps connect employees to strategy by providing understanding, belief, and motivation in their personal contribution. This book is the ultimate field guide to becoming an influential storyteller, with concrete, actionable guidance toward all the storytelling fundamentals.

• Identify your organization's "narrative assets"
• Craft an elegant, well-constructed organizational story
• Capture, bank, and share stories with extraordinary engagement
• Facilitate a dialogue to draw out meaning and induce change

The growing interest surrounding organizational storytelling has many change agents focused on "trying to tell better stories," but goals are useless without a plan of action. Circle of the 9 Muses helps you weave narrative wisdom into organizational development activities, engaging employees and driving change.