Powerful Storytelling for Organizational Success

Learn powerful storytelling techniques to help inspire others and transform your organization!

Organizational change is hard, but truly transformational change is even harder. To take an organization from one state to a completely different state can be a daunting task for leaders. To make matters even harder, many change efforts rely on logic and methodical processes, where employees are explained the benefits of changing in ways that may seem intangible and perhaps cold. If leaders fail to connect the change efforts and desired outcomes in an emotional way employees can relate to, true change and improvement efforts may meet a brick wall. On the other hand, if leaders engage with employees and try to make emotional connections, tying the change efforts and goals to something workers can feel, their efforts may have more impact. Additionally, when workers are given a platform and allowed to share their stories, peers and leaders may understand their perspective in a more comprehensive way. As John Kotter describes in his book The Heart of Change, people need a “see, feel, change approach” to help them gain deeper understanding. Storytelling can have a powerful impact on leaders’ abilities to connect with and influence mangers, supervisors and team members and can provide a means for employees to connect with their leadership on a deeper level as they share the context and perspectives of their work.

Additionally, when investigating events, such as mistakes during project planning or performance, product development or implementation, accidents, near-misses or failures during operational execution, it can be tempting to point to human error as the cause. However, with every near-miss, accident, mistake, or failure there is a story to be told and a context behind the error. Even when organizational performance is successful it is often the actions of employees and teams that achieve this success, and these people have a story to tell. If organizations do not find a way to elevate these stories and tell them in a constructive way, they may be missing out on key opportunities to learn and improve.

In this online course Randy Cadieux, the Founder of V-Speed, will describe some foundational principles of effective storytelling and will describe how storytelling may help improve organizational learning. Randy will also illustrate this concept by going into storytelling mode and using examples from his keynote presentation “From Cowboys to Ninjas: A Story of Improved Human Performance.”

The Course Learning Objectives are:

  • Define aspects of storytelling techniques leaders, managers and team members may use to help inspire and motivate others.
  • Develop strategies for helping key personnel understand the power of storytelling to help minimize the gap between the way work is designed and planned vs. the reality of actual work as it is performed.
  • Design strategies to get the audience involved into stories and presentations by making meaningful connections during the storytelling process.
  • Create a model for storytelling to help leaders, supervisors and team members get their message across to the right audience for influencing change.

At the end of the course we hope students will have a new perspective on the power of storytelling, knowledge of how and where to find important stories, a framework for choosing the right kind of story archetype and an understanding of the step-wise process for creating and telling stories to influence positive change in their organization or with their customers.


Your Instructor


Randy Cadieux
Randy Cadieux

Randy Cadieux is the Founder of V-Speed, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in team leadership and organizational resilience coaching and instruction. He is also an Instructor for the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Master of Engineering in Advanced Safety Engineering and Management program and the author of Team Leadership in High-Hazard Environments: Performance, Safety and Risk Management Strategies for Operational Teams. Randy holds a Master of Engineering in Advanced Safety Engineering and Management and is a graduate of the US Navy Crew Resource Management Instructor School. Since Randy has been teaching online at the master's level for over 4 years he brings his teaching expertise and experience to this course. Randy has an audacious goal of helping organizations improve their operational performance and resilience. Storytelling plays a big role in this process!


Course Curriculum


  Welcome and Course Overview
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  Course Syllabus
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  End of Course Survey
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  Terms of Service
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