I’m in the middle of deep community listening right now with a client. We’re building a strategy, and something keeps coming up in conversation after conversation with community members and partner organizations. People are telling me they’ve shown up before. They’ve gone to the listening sessions. They’ve shared their insights. And then they never heard back.
There’s consensus in their community about what’s needed and wanted, and they just don’t know where to actually get that insight listened to.
And so here I am, in this role right now, able to say: we’re building a strategy based on what we hear here. We are committed to this. And the relief in people’s faces when they hear that is something I keep sitting with.
Because what I’m witnessing is the aftermath of urgency. Urgency is the thing that creates short-term engagements with no long-term accountability. It’s the thing that makes organizations seem like they’re in and they’re out and they’re in and they’re out. Flighty. And when communities experience that pattern enough times, they stop showing up. Not because they don’t care. Because they remember.
That’s listening fatigue. Repeat engagements with no visible outcomes. Community members treated as data sources instead of co-creators. People who have something real to offer and nowhere to put it.
What Changes When You Lead with Listening
With this client, the deep listening is built into the process before the strategy. It’s a part of data gathering for the strategy. And so I can say to every individual who participates: our strategy is going to reflect everything we hear here.
Now, that doesn’t mean every person’s individual reflection becomes a one-to-one strategic priority. But their voice is heard, recorded, and added to what their peers are saying, what others in the community are saying. And from that, we create something that reflects all of them. They will see themselves and the people they care about in the strategy that emerges.
And something magical is happening. People are coming to contribute because they heard from someone else that this is a good project to be a part of. Word is traveling. Trust is being rebuilt through the process of building the strategy itself.
So much trust rebuilding can happen in the process of also building a strategy that will build trust. I know that sounds circular, but that’s the point. It is circular. It’s a cycle. And each time around, the trust compounds.
What Urgency Does to Stories
Here’s where urgency really shows its hand. In the story gathering phase, when we’re listening to inform the strategy but also collecting stories that will become communications tools and assets, urgency does something specific: it makes organizations hand people talking points. Make sure you talk about this, this, and this.
I say this all the time, but the best stories happen when we release our grip on them. And we can only release that grip if we don’t have this fear-based urgency running the show.
Great stories don’t come from telling people how to tell their story. Great stories come from opening up and creating a space for people to share, and then finding the stories that meet your communication goals afterward. Not trying to reverse engineer it by forcing stories into your communications objectives.
And you’d be surprised. Sometimes we think things need to be said a certain way to meet our objectives, and then someone says something in a way we never would’ve thought of. But it works. It moves decision makers. It becomes an advocacy tool. We never would’ve gotten there if we’d handed them a script.
When stories are met with urgency, we lose the nuance. We lose the context. We lose the dignity. And storytelling, as I always say, is a trust building exercise. Add fear-based urgency, and you lose that trust.
Urgency Reinforces Power Differentials
When an organization with power in a community, like a healthcare organization or a nonprofit with direct services, comes to someone and says I want to hear your story and we have three days, it rushes through a process that necessarily needs some honoring of power dynamics. It doesn’t take into consideration the impact of saying yes or no on somebody who seeks services from your organization.
Urgency disregards community readiness. Community safety. Community sovereignty.
A story-driven strategy approach builds that deep listening into the process from the start. You know it’s coming. You have this cyclical system of deep listening and story recording so you always have a bank of stories and you’re never in a position where you have to rush and grab.
Strategic Pace Is Not Slow
I want to be clear about something. This approach is not taking any more time than a traditional strategic planning approach. It’s not slow. It’s efficient. And then it’s even more efficient, because once you’ve done the listening well, you have trust and buy-in to move forward with less friction, less frantic energy, less staff burnout.
You save time. You save money. You save your team from burning out. You open up new opportunities for funding, for grant cycles, for ways to show your boss what’s possible. There are just endless things that come when we start with listening and start with a story-driven strategy.
We always hear that we have to work at the pace of trust. A story-driven strategy starts with trust and trust building, so that everything from there comes from that foundation. And trust compounds. Your next strategy has even more buy-in because you’ve had more impact. Funders get excited. The cycle keeps going.
You have time to listen in the beginning, because everything comes from there. And if you do that right, you save yourself so much on the other side.
Both Are Possible
I understand what it feels like to have urgency in your body. I’m someone with an immense amount of urgency all the time that I just need to contend with and meet and be in conversation with. So I get it. And I’ve seen over and over, for over a decade with clients, what happens when we take urgency away, honor the need for speed, and honor the need for trust at the same time. Both are possible. And we get where we want to go.
If this resonates and you want to talk about what a story-driven strategy could look like for your organization, I’d love to hear from you.
Sending you so much care in the weeks to come.
Okay, let’s get serious about bringing story & strategy into your organization. Below are a few ways we can partner, and, of course, you can reach out if you want to collaborate in a remixed sort of way:
+ Story Lab Sessions: Tailored strategy mapping to chart your organization’s storytelling journey, followed by a comprehensive brief with guidance to implement the findings from our session. These sessions are perfect for organizations ready to take their first steps or needing focused guidance on specific initiatives.
+ Story Hour: Real-time support, guidance, and peer learning through a suite of trainings and regular calls. These group sessions provide ongoing support and practical insights for implementing storytelling initiatives in your organization
+ Customized Collaboration: Long-term, tailored support for comprehensive organizational transformation. We’ll work closely together to integrate storytelling deeply into your existing processes. This is designed for organizations looking for in-depth support designing, implementing, and learning from storytelling initiatives.
+ Intensives & Retreats: Individually designed intensives for your staff retreats and training blocks to engage your staff in a process that centers their experiences and connections to their work through story. Great for organizations looking for a unique, connective experience for their team.
Entangled Health can be in your ears, too! Listen to the show wherever you tune into podcasts.
Urgency Breaches Community Trust
