Storytelling has become a powerful tool in modern business, playing a pivotal role in shaping vision, building trust, and guiding organizations through the complexities of digital transformation. As businesses increasingly turn to digital solutions, strong leadership is critical to ensure successful transitions. Research shows that only 20% of organizations achieve more than three-quarters of expected revenue gains, while only 17% achieved more than three-quarters of expected cost savings from digital transformation projects (McKinsey).
Markus Gull, founder of The New Story Academy, is a renowned expert in storytelling and leadership, with decades of experience helping businesses craft narratives that drive change and innovation. In this interview, Markus shares his insights on how great storytelling and effective leadership can drive effective digital transformation and empower businesses to thrive in an evolving digital landscape.
What should leaders keep in mind when crafting a story in a business context?
First, a story is the natural way humans think. It’s how we explain the world and our relationship to the world and each other. We even build stories when we sleep – we call it a dream. Stories create images in our mind which feeds our growth because we always believe the stories we tell. So, if you have an internal story of a wonderful future, your brain will grow a positive view. If you have a dystopian picture, your brain will grow into that. We also always tell the same stories from different perspectives.
Leadership is about story. It’s about decisions and transformation because if you don’t move, you don’t need a leader. As the philosophers say, leadership is about potestas and auctoritas. Potestas is your title – chief, hero, C-suite. Auctoritas is the skill, charisma, and power of story; how you can get people excited for something. Stories are the best way to explain, engage, and make an endeavor part of everyone’s life. This is the pivotal point of why leaders need stories.
Plato said, “Those who tell the stories rule society.”
If you have the right story, you can bring motion into people, and people into motion.
Another giant, John Steinbeck said, “If the story is not about the hearer, he will not listen.” Make your audience the hero of the story, not the company. Make the goal you want to achieve and the meaning behind it part of your team’s lives. That’s leadership.
As a leader, you are not responsible for the outcome, you are responsible for the people who are producing the outcome. You are responsible for setting their potential free, being the interpreter between the goal and the team, and telling the big story.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Success is not about building ships; it’s about using our tools and skills to leave the island and sail towards freedom. Great speakers and leaders like Barack Obama and Steve Jobs know how to frame a purpose and make it everyone’s purpose to lead them into a better future. They were good storytellers.
How can good storytelling help with digital transformation, particularly with AI?
Digital transformation is huge, including AI and the problems we have with it. The principles are universal and apply to digital transformation as much as anything else. The overriding principle is to turn those affected by change into participants of change. They are not victims but drivers of change for their own good. Make them a hero in their own story and your mutual story.
Another principle is that change never happens by fighting the status quo, but by always offering a new option that makes the current one obsolete. It’s about framing. People hate change for a simple reason: change is always dangerous. Our brains are programmed to keep our bodies safe, and we are safe in what we know. That’s why people are averse to change.
The next principle is that the story changes before the change itself happens. For example, if you get a new job, you are telling a different story about this new job before you start. In other words, the story you must change is: What will be better for me as the participant? What will be better for me if I jump on the train of transformation? How will my status improve? What can I do about it?
There are 10 parameters for status improvement including possibility, economic status, sense, and intelligence. Choose at least one and frame the change around it.
If you can’t enhance a status, you have no change, no transformation, no story.
It’s the core of every story. If you don’t have a different picture at the beginning than at the end, then you have no story. Storytelling is simple but hard to do.
You’ve said that AI teaches us about the importance of questions. How does that relate to business?
AI is a blessing and a curse, like Pandora’s Box. What we can learn from AI as humans is that when we use it as a tool, the better our outcomes. However, the quality of questions defines the outcome.
That’s a wonderful metaphor for leadership because the best leaders lead with questions. We have many answers but ask too few good questions. This is what we can learn from AI: how to ask good questions.
In my company and workshops, we use the technique of questions when giving feedback. People giving feedback are not allowed to comment or make suggestions. They are only allowed to ask questions. Those presenting are not allowed to answer the questions. Instead, they have to go back and think about it. That enhances the outcome of a project.
In one of your articles, you wrote that the direct path to self-inflicted immaturity is a dependence on profit as a purpose. Could you expand on that?
There are two big schools on how to run a business. One is driven by shareholder value and the other is driven by purpose. To clarify, the latter is not about charities or philanthropy. I’m talking about a business-driven purpose.
Businesses are about profit, but if you are directed and driven only by profit, everything goes astray. Anyone – and every company – whose only goal is profit will sooner or later have an exhausted soul – also known as burnout. You no longer know why you’re there because there is no sense of purpose anymore. You’ve lost your meaning – if you ever had one – and are looking for happiness on the outside. People buy things or distract themselves with pleasure, companies look for a substitute for meaning in growth. Neither works. There’s nothing wrong with consumption and growth, but as a substitute for meaning they are extremely dangerous. This is how the poison of the unlived life arises – for people and companies alike.
We see it everywhere – people have more money. People have never been better off, material-wise, than they are now. But the numbers of mental illnesses are exploding. It’s because our world started to become profit-, money-, and material-oriented. We lost our meaning and purpose.
The story is wrong. We have a lot of wrong stories and one of them is that we must grow every second, every day, every year. It’s growth for the sake of growth – like a cancer.
An effective brand or company story has a positive effect, both internally and externally. The company has a deep, important purpose that is not only profit. People we admire so much for their careers, be it Steve Jobs or Jane Goodall, had no career. They had a purpose that they fulfilled and that fulfilled them.
Profit is never the goal but a result of meaning, purpose, and excellent work.
*The interview answers have been edited for length and clarity.