1. Challenge: Our organization was going through a culture change exercise. We had an

acronym of values that we wanted to implement. To do so we had arranged for learning  modules, culture surveys, employee activities- in short every bell and whistle we could think  of and yet, the culture was not changing on ground. People were scoring well on the tests,  but not changing their everyday actions.

2. Selection: We decided to go with Storytelling approach. The reason was that using more

abstract words to define values was not working and we knew that we needed something  that could capture the ambiguous nature of the problem in front of us and address it by  bringing about changes from inside.

3. Application: We started conducting FGDs to collect stories from people when they saw the

“values in action”. We invited recordings of the stories and opened up the floor to anyone  and everyone. We were surprised by two things- 1. How inaccurately the stories had been  categorised according to the values and 2. How little clarity was there in the minds of our  own leaders about what those values really meant when they were being applied. This led  us to calling together of our leadership in a single room and we asked them to brainstorm on  the stories and fill them in the right category. This process was taken to a companywide  level with the stories being discussed at the start of each month and then each department  was asked to send in stories of their own. Gradually we started getting better stories- better  because now the people knew which behaviour they had to look out for and the desire to  feature their own department in the stories also led them to actually display the behaviour  and that was our intention from the very start.

4. Insight: Objective tools cannot always penetrate into subjective experiences as it is like

converting analogue to digital- some crucial information was being lost. The design thinking  approach was also helpful in kickstarting the process. Initially people were hesitant in even  accepting such an approach- but small groups and beginnings were easy bets to make.  When the results started coming in, it was apparent that the root of problem was always that  the leadership was itself confused about the ‘real’ meaning of the values and our experiment  continued.

5. Approach: I would invite a broader cross section of people for the story telling groups and

further, I would also publicise the stories in a much better way by giving some sort of reward  as that helps build the momentum. Also, crucially, I would invite stories of failure also. That  is something that I learnt much later.

