If you want to improve your communication skills and utilize storytelling as a valuable tool, you might wonder how to begin or which story to tell. Try this exercise:

Taking your offering to market requires a clear message that resonates with the audience. Your message is meaningful or meaningless: either your message aligns with the dominant cultural narrative and is accepted relatively easy, or your message must alter the cultural narrative before it gains widespread acceptance. Progressive ideas shift the dominant narrative, often at great cost to the messenger. Martin Luther King, like Moses, did not live to enter into the Promised Land. What makes a message convincing? What is a narrative? What makes it dominant? How does a message gain cultural acceptance? How does one shift or disrupt a cultural narrative? We will attempt to answer these questions by drawing on a number of diverse ideas and integrating them into a practical model.

We realized we were using insider language to describe innovation (as exemplified by internal blog post titles like “Using GIS Technology to Map Shelter Allocation in Azraq Refugee Camp”), rather than communicating what innovation looks like and the benefits it would bring to UNHCR staff (for example, “How UNHCR Used Creativity to Improve Journalistic Accuracy and Collaboration, One Step at a Time”). So, we hit the reset button and asked ourselves these four questions before crafting our internal communications strategy: What do we want to change? What do we want to be true that isn’t true right now? Whose behavior change is necessary to making that happen? Who has to do something (or stop doing something) they’re not doing now for us to achieve that goal? (This is about targeting a narrowly defined audience whose action or behavioral change is fundamental to your goal.) What would that individual or group believe if they took that action? In other words, what does that narrowly defined audience care about most, and how can we include that in our messages? How will we get that message in front of them? Where are their eyes?

Also see author's org: https://www.hope-based.com/ 5 shifts: 1) Fear to hope 2) Against to for 3) Problem to solution 4) Threat to opportunity 5) Victims to heroes