So many of the great organizations I work with across the country are delivering services, developing policy, and providing leadership within a landscape of complexity. The authors of a great book on social innovation, Getting to Maybe, describe the connection between complexity and social innovation:

“We must move from seeing the world as simple, or even merely complicated. To understand social innovation we must see the world in all its complexity… Complexity science embraces life as it is: unpredictable, emergent, evolving and adaptable – not the least bit machine like… Using insights about how the world is changed, we can become active participants in shaping those changes.”

One could have the view that people, for the most part, resist change. But when we take the time to understand this resistance, often it is resistance to a particular process of change, not so much the change itself. Whether we are working in areas such as education, equality and justice, sustainability, engagement, good governance, or health, bringing in the use of story can effectively bring people inside the process and create a shift toward social innovation. As storyteller David Hutchens puts it, “A story is a narrative that illustrates complex interconnections between agents, ideas, events, and even abstract concepts.”

Here is why stories can be effective ways for creating change within complex systems:

• They offer listeners the opportunity to get inside the process of change, and by doing so, help an idea take root and grow.
• They create an opportunity to co-create knowledge or identify what needs to be done in a given situation.
• They can make complex issues like inequality comprehensible.
• They offer an accessible structure in which to place analytical information and data.

Stories, however, are not a panacea for all of your communication and engagement efforts. But narratives are a power tool for co-creating the future, for bringing your audience into the process of change, and creating an alternative way of knowing by positioning your listeners as agents of change in the story of the desired future. When a story takes hold, you are then able to access the knowledge of your listeners in the organic process of social innovation. People want problems to be solved, and stories provide a structure where they, as author Stephen Denning puts it, “can dip their mental toes into the water of alternative approaches.”

One of the most effective ways to lead your audience to the “water of alternative approaches” is through story. As communicators, I would invite you to begin to incorporate story as a method of growing your own knowledge, co-creating change with your constituency, and planting the seed for ideas of social innovation to begin to take root.

Pattie LaCroix has provided strategic leadership in crafting integrated communications and fundraising strategies to nonprofits for more than a decade. As CEO of Catapult Media she is passionate about the power of storytelling in engaging your audience and building support for your work. You can reach Pattie at www.catapultmedia.ca.