Business
One of the biggest reasons change initiatives fail is that we assume people are a blank slate when create our strategies and interventions for them. We just expect them to realize how brilliant our big ideas are and buy into them. But the reality is that almost everything we think, say and do is controlled by an existing set of narratives, about how the world works and our place in it. So, what we often fail to realize is that you can't change someone's beliefs or behaviors until you change their narratives. Nobody know this better than Dr. Hans Hansen from the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. He "accidentally" joined a team that used narrative change to save dozens of lives, by transforming the way sentencing works for capital offences in Texas. Simply by changing the "norms" or narratives that guide the behaviour of different actors in the legal system, they reduced death penalty sentences by a whopping 90%. In this episode, Hans shares his story and the model they used, which can create narrative change for individuals, organizations or social systems. A big part of this work is finding ways to make the existing narratives we go by visible, so that we can deconstruct them - then develop new narratives to replace them. If you have an example of how you've used narratives to enact change, Hans would love to hear from you here. And make sure you pick up a copy of his book, "Narrative Change: How Changing the Story Can Transform Society, Business, and Ourselves", to get the full story of the incredible journey he and the team went through as they worked to do the impossible in Texas.