Denise Withers: Storytelling For Problem Solving

“I firmly believe that culture is essentially just a collection of stories that define how we think and how we behave. In a very simple organizational example, if you're sitting in a meeting and somebody speaks up to question what their boss says and their boss tells them to shut up, that's a story that everybody's going to remember, everybody's going to file away in their own story database and that story is going to define the way they behave and it's going to influence whether or not they decide to speak up the next time in a meeting. And so you can come up with all the nice sayings that you want about how your organization works, but it's the stories that we tell each other, it's the stories that we see, it's the stories that we experience that we actually internalize and remember and use to guide our decisions and our behaviors going forward.” -Denise Withers

In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Denise Withers about her journey becoming a Story Coach and helping leaders drive change.  She shares the importance of developing your Narrative Intelligence to improve our abilities to learn, solve problems, and make sense of the world.  We then discuss stories' influence on culture, change initiatives, and leadership development.  Listen in to learn more about why we need to think beyond just telling stories and start noticing the problem the story is solving.