Leading for Organisational Change

Chapter 4Telling Stories

Enough of these phrases, conceits and metaphors. I want burning, burning, burning.

Rumi¹

In his brilliant book, Be More Pirate, Sam Coniff Allende sets out a model for change which has storytelling at its heart. Drawing on lessons from the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ – in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century – Coniff Allende explains how pirates found a cause – a purpose, a reason to rebel – and then created something new instead; they rewrote the rules. Pirates then reorganised themselves so that they were faster and stronger than their opponents and then deliberately redistributed power and decision making so that their purpose could be pursued without the risk of bureaucracy or corruption. Then, last but by no means least, pirates told stories about themselves in order to get attention and further pursue their purpose. Coniff Allende says that pirates ‘creatively weaponised’ the art of storytelling – skulls and crossbones and bleeding hearts on black flags, weaving fierce myths right into the heart of the establishment. Coniff Allende quotes ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham – one of the Golden Age pirates:

A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe … those are the ones that survive.

Now, lawyers are not pirates. But they are, like many of us, autonomous, independent thinkers. They like hard facts and have a profound integrity. They are cynical about obvious attempts to influence or ...