The Powerful Role of Storytelling in Systems Change

by Philippa Namutebi Kabali-Kagwa

The way we view maps has changed throughout history. Indigenous and aboriginal people mapped their worlds through dreaming, story, ceremony and reading the land, sky and weather patterns. These were living maps of the earth. In the 5th and 6th century BCE, the first hand-drawn maps of a flat earth emerged in Europe. Maps of a spherical earth appeared much later, in the 2nd century CE, when Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy developed the blueprint that served cartographers up through the Middle Ages and shaped maps and atlases as we have known them ever since. In the 1990s, with the advent of broadly available GPS mapping — a technology that allows for zooming in and zooming out and presents information in 3D dynamic form — humans’ understanding and visualization of the world around us became altogether transformed.

This is an apt analogy for understanding how efforts to map social change and systems change have evolved. Over time, people attempting systems change have developed a range of frameworks and models that seek to capture the complexity and constant change within a system and to make it visible in ways that inform their work. Yet, most of these frameworks, while providing insight, present a static picture of the system. We believe that one of the world’s oldest technologies — storytelling — when employed in the service of understanding systems change, can provide a much deeper, multidimensional and dynamic view of how systems change happens akin to the impact of GPS on world mapping.

To explore this, let’s first consider why it is that systems, in the context of systems change, are so challenging to understand and map. We’ll then turn to the powerful potential for storytelling in systems change.

The Complex Nature of Systems

Systems interact through a range of relationships and create emergent patterns which are independent of what each element on its own could create. As the various systems interact, and evolve, there are patterns that emerge that influence how the system works. Over time some of these patterns can become entrenched in the system, and the system can replicate and make these patterns dominant and difficult to change. In our modern world, systems like colonialism, capitalism, racism, and sexism have become entrenched and are replicated by policies and practices that are both conscious and explicit, and unconscious and implicit.

The work of systems change practitioners is to identify those patterns, understand the relationship and dynamic forces that are at play which produce these patterns and then discern what interventions could be adopted to disrupt them. It also involves discerning what new conditions could be cultivated to enable new, more generative patterns to emerge. In order to see and understand these patterns we attempt to make them visible to ourselves, to each other, and for the system so it can see itself.

Where storytelling comes in

There are numerous approaches that have been developed for understanding systems — actor mapping, trend mapping, the mapping of systemic conditions to name a few. However, it has been difficult to present the dynamic of human interactions within the system; to capture change over time; to represent the impact of profound events that are either part of or external to the system and the impact that they have. And the frameworks most utilized today do not really enable us to reveal the mental models that inform these patterns and interactions.

Storytelling, as a tool for systems change understanding and practice, enables practitioners to capture all of this. As part of systems change work, the process of storytelling offers the following benefits:

• Enables one to present complex relationships and events in succinct and manageable bites. It also allows for layers of complexity to be presented in an accessible way.
• Allows us to present the system over a span of time — going back to the beginnings, staying in the present, and imagining the future.
• Brings ‘to life’ relationships within the system, enabling one to experience the system in its movement and change, and to see the impact/ dynamism of the relationships at work within the system. Through this, one is able to infer what mental models might be informing the observed behavior.
• Enables the system to begin to see itself, so that shifts begin to take place. Thus the story is both a map, a practice and a process.

Why Systems Storytelling

At CCL, we have developed an approach to utilizing storytelling within systems change which we call “systems storytelling.” Systems storytelling integrates the benefits of storytelling into the process of systems understanding. We define system storytelling as a process for pluralistic groups to come together and make meaning of systems they are seeking to positively influence towards equity and justice.

As a tool for understanding systems, systems storytelling overcomes some of the limitations of many modern modes of storytelling. Modern, capitalistic storytelling often features linear storylines and heroic actors overcoming problems. This has become the dominant way of crafting stories in many industries and sectors, including the non profit sector. These stories exist to influence (e.g. sell) rather than cohere: they position individuals/organizations as powerful agents who address social challenges through single solutions. Often these stories reinforce existing power narratives about who and how social change should happen, ultimately limiting the set of options available for systems change.

Because of system storytelling’s orientation to non dominant themes, it skirts the limitations associated with modern storytelling while fully leaning into the benefits of storytelling as a tool for more accurately perceiving the world. As a mode for understanding systems change, systems storytelling really shines in four powerful ways: offering contextual sensemaking, enabling multiple authorship, presenting in pictures, and deepening relationships. A few words on each of these follows.

Contextual Sensemaking

Systems storytelling combines the content based understanding of the systems practitioner with the skills of the storyteller, allowing the system to be mapped more fully in its relational, contextual and functional depth and nuance. The various parts of the system can be seen as various protagonists, enabling one to look beyond the ‘hero’s journey’ to a multi-voiced telling. Each voice maps the system from its own vantage point, explaining the relationships from the way they experience them. This allows for contradictions and idiosyncrasies within the system to be represented and creates more opportunities for the systems change practitioners to understand the system and identify more informed transformational interventions.

Multiple Authorship

Systems storytelling then creates the opportunity for the different parts of the system to author their story of how the system works. The systems storyteller pays attention to those parts of the system that are not usually heard, as well as those that are part of the dominant narrative. The process of systems storytelling amplifies all the voices, weaving a richer picture of how the system actually behaves by adding the stories of the unheard/ “unimportant” parts of the system. The storytelling allows aspects of the backstories of parts of the system to be told because they contextualize the behavior of the system. In essence, they reveal the mental models that are at play in the system.

Presenting the system in pictures

Those engaged in systems change often try to create visual ways to reflect the dynamism of the system. Systems change practitioners often present these pictures as diagrams or maps, with words to explain the flow. The storyteller tells pictures with words and metaphors. What system storytelling adds is the human aspect of feelings and emotions, and intentions. It embraces the messiness that human beings add to a system, and allows us to experience the system not just as an intellectual idea, but a reflection of the head, the heart and the will that shape the system. This enables the listener to empathize with the different parts of the system and to make choices that make sense in systems that are enlivened by human beings.

Deepening Relationships

Because systems storytelling centers on the human and empathic elements of the systems it depicts, it is fundamentally a more relational tool for systems change than other tools. In this respect, systems storytelling goes beyond a tool for the work of change itself to a tool for action. The act of storytelling about the system can produce the following:

• Understanding: enabling constructive dialogue (descriptive)
• Cohering: becoming a container to hold emotional extremes (both joy and suffering) and creating a cohesive identity (action)
• Co-imagining: finding places “in between” diversity of perspectives (action)
• Co-constructing new narratives: embedding new more equitable and just narratives in the system (action)

In essence systems storytelling becomes a tool for process, thinking and action.

What Systems Storytelling Looks Like in Action

The process of systems storytelling is typically facilitated by a skilled storyteller whose role is to help system players map the system in “story-form.” These facilitators hold space for different parts of the system to make sense of themselves in the system with respect to: their relationships within the system; their roles within the system; what impacts them within the system; and what they impact/ influence within the system.

The storytelling happens at a couple of levels. First each part of the system tells its own story — to itself — to understand itself within the system. Then the different parts of the system hear each other’s stories of the system. In this storytelling they see gaps, areas of agreement, areas of conflict/ contradiction/ tension; they get new information; they develop a deeper understanding of the system. Then with this new understanding of the system they weave a more complete story of the system, with multiple voices — not a hero’s journey. This becomes a new picture of the system around which decisions can be made about where the best place to intervene might be. All of these processes require a certain level of facilitation.

Final thoughts

As we said in the opening to this piece, human beings do better, understand more, and process more accurate pictures when the information they receive has context, nuance, complexity, and connects with our heart as well as our head. As a tool for enhancing understanding and meaning making, storytelling is more than 10,000 years old. Yet, applying this tool to the practice of changing systems remains an infrequent occurrence.

If you are engaged in systems change, our hope is that we may have sparked your interest in the potential for incorporating systems storytelling into your work. If you do, it might be one of the most powerful steps you take towards increasing your potential to foster systems change.

To learn more about systems storytelling as a practice, and Collective Change Lab’s work in systems storytelling click here

In November 2023, CCL launched a 2 year long Systems Storytelling Fellowship programme where we have 12 Fellows, representing 6 Collectives from around the world applying Systems Storytelling to their work in very varied fields and contexts. Please click on this link to learn more about the Fellows and their work.