April
07,
2026
Improve engagement, adoption, and performance through stories.
“This new system is going to eliminate our jobs.” “This system will increase my workload.” “I don’t need to use this system – I have everything I need in Excel.”
Sound familiar? These are the messages your people tell themselves about your project. They sabotage your implementation. It’s time to change the narrative.
What Stories Do for Your Initiative
Create the right mindset.
We naturally tell ourselves stories to make something new seem familiar. What’s familiar can be either good or bad – we’re subconsciously looking for context to interpret the experience.
For years, the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences chose their Oscar nominees by paper, submitting ballots that had to be manually counted. But in 2012, they decided to introduce a new system for electronic voting. When the team asked members what people were saying about the new system, they learned that people were comparing it to the movie “Recount” – a story about the 2000 US presidential election, and controversy over voting machines.
That story was familiar, but not helpful. The team needed Academy members to have the right mindset. So, the team began telling members stories about the evolution of film — moving from silent movies to talkies to digital – like the movie Avatar. This familiar story reframed the change as something good, exciting, and inevitable.
If our goal is adoption of a new system, we need to create an openness to what’s happening next by capturing imagination, taking users on a journey, and cultivating a positive emotional response.
Promote organizational culture and values.
Your initiative is happening in the context of your company’s culture. Telling a story that aligns with that culture reduces resistance and further strengthens what’s best about your company.
For example, when Kindercare introduced a new service system for child check-in and payment, they could have told stories about employees being efficient and operationally excellent. They didn’t. They instead told stories about employees being able to care and connect – which synced with their values and culture — and how this new system would make care and connection possible.
Boost engagement and motivation.
Great stories answer the question, “Why should I care?” Stories make technical content more compelling.
When Netflix moved to the cloud, they shared stories about common issues with their current infrastructure, like outages during peak viewing times, and the need to scale during new season releases. They used relatable metaphors, like “packing for a move” or “expanding a living space” to introduce technical IT concepts.
By framing information within a story, we illustrate how new systems or processes impact the real-life work of employees, making the content more relatable and interesting.
Help employees remember what they learned.
The human brain is naturally wired to remember stories better than abstract concepts or isolated facts. This is because the brain’s visual and sensory processing areas – which we use when we’re listening to stories — developed long before the parts that handle language and symbolic thinking.
Our brains use two systems, verbal and non-verbal (visual), to process information. When we hear or read a story, we engage both systems. That’s because stories often create mental images. Lists, acronyms, or data, tend to activate only the verbal system. Engaging both systems makes recall much easier.
One study showed that people are up to 22 times more likely to remember information when it is embedded in a narrative rather than in a list of facts.
This means that employees who learn about new systems through stories are more likely to retain and use the information effectively.
Why Stories Work
Brain Evolution
We evolved a brain with three parts: the reptilian survival brain, the limbic emotional brain, and the neocortex thinking brain. Information flows from the inside out – from survival, to emotional, to thinking. Emotions come before thoughts. We make decisions based on emotion and come up with reasons afterward. So, stories, which stimulate emotions, are great for persuading people to make a decision or take an action.
Mirroring
Research using fMRI demonstrates that listeners’ brains sync with the storyteller’s brain; areas of the storyteller’s brain that are active while telling the story become active in the listeners’ brains after a short delay.
Dopamine
Stories are great combining emotion with information. They trigger the brain’s reward system, which releases dopamine and makes us feel good. Dopamine is linked to memory, so it helps us remember the information in the story.
Cortex Activity
Stories activate multiple areas of the brain, emotion centers, motor cortexes, and visual processing centers. To some extent, when we hear a story, we live it. Our brains simulate the events and actions in the story, including the sensations and feelings that go with it. A story we hear becomes our own experience, and that rich experience sticks with us.
How Should You Begin?
- Ask yourself, what stories are already out there? Better yet, ask people around you. People are telling stories about what happened before, what is going on now, and what they expect in the future. You need to know what’s out there to either use it or address it.
- Determine what familiar things you can hook into. What do your users have in common? What are their shared experiences? Start there – your stories will gain momentum more quickly.
- Don’t be afraid of negative stories. They capture attention because of our innate fear of risk. Can you tell a story about the consequences of failure? For example, if your users all experienced the same failed cutover you can, and must, explain how this time it’s different.
- Grab their attention. Include detail, names, and real-life struggles! The more specific it is, the more memorable it will be.
Stories just work. They are fundamental to how we operate as humans. If we tap into the stories our users are telling themselves, and guide them to the right stories, we can shape the narrative and make IT implementations easier and more successful.
Click here to download our quick reference tool to help you build your own stories.
Want to explore this topic in more detail or learn more about Emerson? Hop on his calendar: Book a meeting with Rich
