90: Thaler Pekar on Capturing the Stories of an Organization
An award-winning expert on organizational storytelling, Thaler Pekar works with visionary leaders to build and sustain cultures of excellent communication – cultures in which people can effectively speak and listen to each other, and to their audiences. For 20 years, she and her team at Thaler Pekar & Partners have advised leaders on strengthening trust, alignment, and influence through speaking, listening, narrative, and story. Working across sectors, Thaler delivers her four trademarked communication processes; produces multiplatform media; and develops oral histories and story collections.
Recognized by both the BBC and the Smithsonian Institution as one of the world’s leading experts in applied narrative, Thaler has delivered keynote speeches on five continents to thousands of people. Her influential work on the ethics of working with story, participatory narrative, story elicitation, and persuasive communication is featured in seven books.
BOOK: Lifting Up What Works®️: An Oral history of the First 22 Years of PolicyLink
The Atlantic Philanthropies communications compilation of oral histories
Thaler Pekar & Partners' Narrative Garden®
”What Will Replace the Hero’s Journey?” - SSIR essay
Quotes:
“Things are constantly shifting our perspective, our wisdom's growing, and ideally the stories are polyphonic.”
“A great leader, a great communicator, can tell a story that connects the past, the present and the future, and creates spaciousness for what comes next. It's sensical. Great storytelling is placemaking, meaning making, sensemaking, and it invites people to see themselves in the future that’s being created.”
“I don't think of legacy as what's left behind. I think of it as what is carried forward.”
“One thing about legacy is the danger of a hero narrative and just shining the light on one person, when there are other people in the shadows. And in fact, you're creating those shadows if you're shining the light just on one person.”
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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
“A great leader, a great communicator, can tell a story that connects the past, the present and the future, and creates spaciousness for what comes next. It’s sensical. Great storytelling is placemaking, meaning making, sensemaking, and it invites people to see themselves in the future that’s being created.”
Transcript:
Thaylor P Car is an award-winning expert on institutional storytelling. Thaylor guides visionary leaders in building and sustaining cultures of excellent communication for 20 years. She and her team have advised leaders on strengthening alignment and influence through speaking, listening, narrative and story working across sectors.
Thaler delivers her four trademarked communication processes. She produces multi-platform media and develops oral histories and story collections. Recognized by both the BBC and the Smithsonian Institution. As one of the world's leading experts in applied narrative, Thaylor has delivered keynote speeches on five continents to thousands of people.
Her influential work on the ethics of working with story participatory narrative and story elicitation is featured in seven books, and I am very excited to have this conversation with Youth Baylor. Welcome. I'm so happy to be here, Naomi. So happy. Yeah. Yeah, same. I would love to start with the question, uh, to ask you what is the difference between a story that we preserve and a story that we protect?
And I'm also curious in there, is there a line that we could cross when we no longer honoring the past and instead we're defending it against change? I believe that we need to honor history and not propagandize it. And I believe in. Encouraging people to be reflective, not to be extractive when working with stories.
There's far too much of a extraction culture, uh, that's going on, but I wanna make it clear that protection doesn't necessarily mean. Defending something against change. Everything changes in, in fact, we need to create the spaciousness for stories to change, for new voices, to add onto those stories for new contexts, uh, in which to understand the stories.
I think what we're getting at is making sure that we're protecting the vulnerable in the telling of the stories and. That's really necessary and that needs to be front of mind. I'm not even sure that we can perfectly preserve a story. There's always a listener and good storytelling, uh, good story sharing and certainly even all good communication is co-creative.
Yeah, there's the context that two people are bringing to the story and it's invitational communication. When it's done right, you are inviting somebody else to see themselves in it, to connect what you are saying to their web of knowledge. That's how we reach understanding. We did, we, we had the tremendous privilege to work with the.
A steamed organization, policy Link, which is really the seminal racial equity organization in America. And we came in at a moment of succession when Angela Glover Blackwell was stepping into a founder and chief position. A Michael McAffee was stepping in as executive director, and Michael made it very clear that there are incredible values that the organization was founded on.
Proceed. The organization that go back to. Ideas of equity that, you know, predate our nation. And Michael said, I don't want people sitting around thinking that they need to reinvent the beginning. There's an incredible platform that exists here. I wanna honor Angela and our, uh, predecessors and the founders of this organization, and I want people to come in at a level where they can take off.
They don't have to spend any time going backwards. That is so powerful, and I'm, I'm just hoping that as you're listening to this, maybe that's a spot that you stop the recording, rewind, stop your playback and listen to that again, because I think as you're listening to this, that has so much resonance to things that we can decide on a daily basis.
It doesn't have to be a, a massive institution like PolicyLink. You can implement that in your own life. And I think the other thing that's beautiful Thaylor is when you were talking about story, having more than one vantage point or one lens. I have been doing some story collection about our family history and I will remember something one way my siblings remember something an entirely different way.
And so I think about that when you spread that across organizational knowledge and storytelling. Oh my goodness, so many, so many vantage points. I'm curious about, and I'm gonna change this question just a little bit, Thaylor. What happens when we end a narrative or we try and complete a story before it's metabolized?
And I think that kind of goes into what you had just been talking about is, is there a point at which I'm guessing I know the answer, where a story is complete. Can I ask what you mean by metabolized? So I think that when I say that, I mean, I think that we try and wrap things up with a bow. I think we, we try and make sense of something to then either move on from it or to have the successor story, the founder story, um, or even if we we're ending a program or a certain initiative.
And I think the ripples of impact. Often go on so much longer. So I'm just curious what happens when we try to like package it all up and say this is done before it's even had a chance to breathe and, and have its true impact. And you're probably right in thinking that I'm about to say that there isn't those neat and closed endings.
Um, if I could geek out for a minute, uh, the incredible academician, uh, David Bogie talks about anti narrative A NTE and the idea that there's. An interplay of past stories, narratives, and living stories, which are in the present. And then these anti narratives, which is the ending that we don't know yet, that the story webs in which all of this occurs are full of relationships.
And again, we wanna bring people's voices. In, and there's a lot of emergence. And when I, when I teach people to share a story, I, I coach them in knowing a first line and knowing a last line, but that's an individual story. That's not a big overarching narrative. One of our trademarked processes is called the Narrative Garden, and it is this idea that you have a culture, if you want to think of that as the entire garden.
And you've got stories that you wanna grow and stories that you wanna tamp down. And there's stories at the edges, and that's the most interesting, biologically diverse part. And that's where innovations occurring and that's where new plants are trying to break out and new stories are, are trying to be heard.
Your interview with, uh, Dr. Uh, joy John. John. Yeah, John. Um, he talked about, he made an allusion to a garden where he said, if you have good things growing, the weeds don't have space to grow. And that's part of the work that we do with helping leaders and organizations. Look at their narrative landscape and be intentional about the stories that they want, because it also in, in appreciative inquiry, there's this idea known as the anticipatory principle that we move towards the good stories that we.
Create as well. If you think of a sunflower growing up towards the light, there's a story. 20 years ago, I nearly drowned on a beach in Costa Rica and I had to be, I had to yell for help and I had to be rescued. And for a long time I told that story as the story of my near drowning. Then I was coached through a story exercise, and I realized that story related to the starting of my business, there was aspects of facing fear, of asking for help of my husband, having my back in the aftermath of that, and so that story was shifting and changing.
Then a few years later, I got up the nerve to go swimming. Again in the ocean, and the story changed again, and now approaching my 25th wedding anniversary, that story's changing again in the way my husband tells his reaction of what he remembers that day in the story. So things are constantly shifting our perspective, our wisdom's growing, and ideally the stories are polyphonic.
You're inviting. Your siblings in to tell their view of the story as well. I love that. And I, I think too about when you, when you said that, you know, asking your husband or hearing your husband, it just makes me think about so many organizations that don't invite in those stories from other people to truly, I think about all the evaluation that happens and it's very internalized, uh, and it's not inviting in that rest, the rest of the story.
I am curious, as you work with clients in helping them with their storytelling, what do you see folks avoid the most when it comes to telling stories about endings? And I'm curious if it's like grief, guilt, truth about power. What do you see? I find this such an interesting question, Naomi, because you are apparently hearing people be avoidant.
And I think that's just so interesting. I, my guess would be that it's uncertainty and people are frightened to tell a story because they're uncertain. But I, I like the name of your podcast and your work, your book leaving. Well, it's not an ending. You're, you're leaving and ideally, I would like leaders to tell stories of continuity.
So people talk about. Resisting change, and of course we're changing all the time. Everything's changing all the time, but we tend to get our backs up and and resist it. But a great leader, a great communicator, can tell a story that connects the past and the present and the future, and creates that spaciousness for what comes next.
And. It's sensical, and so great storytelling is placemaking, meaning making sensemaking, and it invites people to see themselves in that future that's being created. I love that, and I think part of why I have that. Vantage point is because when people come to me, the very narrow focus is the ending of something, the, the ending quote unquote, of something.
Uh, whether that's that's an organization that's sunsetting them, leaving their role. Sometimes I'm even working with organizations as they end programs and whether that's a merger partnership where they're passing the program off or it's wrapping up. Um, so I think that that's probably part of it is that they come into it with that lens of.
Uh, angst and uncertainty. A lot of organizations don't make their intrinsic practices extrinsic, and they don't make their extrinsic practices intrinsic. For people to understand the values and the reasoning behind it, it's important for people to know why things were done the way they were. I did. It, it had the great privilege of conducting 176 interviews for the Atlantic Philanthropies as they were sunsetting, and it was fascinating.
Five and a half years, uh, and six countries in four continents. These interviews were conducted and seeing the shift in how the stories were told. As people in five and a half years in saw people landing and that the, the so-called ending was really an opening up in a beginning versus the very beginning and, and what people, uh, were experiencing because this was so brand new and so scary.
And Atlantic was incredibly committed to sharing that knowledge. Uh. Not just at the end looking back like this is our legacy, but what the process of ending of leaving. There's a wonderful compilation video I did of interviews with people in the comms department who were creating a website that was going to live on after they were gone.
It it really, really interesting and thoughtful and. There's probably a term for future reflective work, vision, visionary work. Oh, yeah. Well, and it's, it's a visioning and it's a memorializing, but then it also lets it still live. And I think there's so many opportunities for that. I'm so glad you mentioned that because there's a woman named Camille ac, um, who is doing composting and hospice work inside of organizations.
And so one of the things that she has brought to light is how does your website live on, you don't have to shut it down. There's ways that you can. Intentionally design it so that it can, uh, continue to bless gift impact folks. Uh, so I'm glad you brought that up. I think the other thing that comes up when I'm thinking about that last question is around the topic of legacy.
A lot of folks are nervous about their legacy. Um, they think that it's something that they can control. I always say that it's about 50 50. We can control about half of it, and the other half is what other people assign or ascribe to our legacy. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about leaving things unexamined and what happens when there's stories that have, maybe it's not unintentional, but harm regardless.
Um, there's a lot of invisible labor that happens in movement work and in nonprofit work, so that's less of a question and more of just, I guess, an invitation to have your thoughts on kind of that general set of topics. I think you're really generous in saying that you can control 50% of it. Probably true.
I think it depends. I mean, there's a lot of politicians out there who are known for one gaff or a lot of, uh, entertainers whose legacy is one moment in time. I think that everyone. Everyone owns Legacy. That's how the Atlantic Project came up. They came to me and I was doing a Stories of Impact project because their board had said, Hey, we're getting all of this data at our board meetings, but we need stories.
We still don't get this. Can you, can you give us story? So I was going around the world collecting, gathering stories and presenting them and then. I heard the Atlantic people, the comms department saying We're figuring out the legacy. And I said, you don't get to figure out the legacy. You can listen in, give people the space to think about it, to reflect on it.
And that gets to your point about things that are unexamined. Right. Open it. I, I would encourage organizations to open it up because you're gonna be surprised by what people are saying unless you're listening in on it. What's, what rises to the top, what you think might be important from your position of power?
Might not be what everybody's talking about. And then you can listen in and be intentional about which ones you want to amplify, which ones you wanna share, which ones you wanna dig deeper on. Um, but I think that everybody holds the legacy, and I don't think of legacy as what's left behind. I think of it as what is carried forward, the, the culture carriers.
That's why I love my work so much. It's this culture codification and it's using polyvocal, um, oral history methodology to invite everybody to be heard and own internalized metabolize, to use your word, what? The experience has been and what the, the lasting impact on them. To your point, one thing about legacy is the, uh, danger of a hero narrative and just shining the light on one person when there's always other people in the shadows, and in fact, you're creating those shadows if you're shining the light just on one person.
You're creating that shadow as opposed to broadening that light, opening up the curtain, letting the people who are in the wings also take the stage as well. How might their stories be told and how can they be invited to share? I love that thought so much, especially because. The power dynamics are so present and something that's still not talked about on a regular basis and that that ha that it impacts how we equitably tell stories, how we invite storytelling in.
Um, I hear all the time board of directors will say. We actually don't understand, like to your point about the data and we need stories to go along this. Boards are always like, we don't really understand what's happening because you're giving us this report or this dashboard. There was a podcast I listened to yesterday where the executive director was new and she brought the staff in, uh, on a regular basis to tell stories to the board instead of data reporting.
And the board was like, this is what we need. We needed to understand the actual work that was being done in their storytelling, in their voice, um, not related to dots on a, on a graph, so. It's really powerful. I am curious what you have encountered around ruptures and contradictions and things that don't resolve cleanly.
I'm guessing in some of the work that you've done capturing the stories of an organization as they are pivoting or or closing or ending, how does rupture come up? Or is it something that folks want to sidestep or does it. Are you how, I guess maybe my question is how do you wrap that into maybe human nature, wanting to have things neat?
I'm lucky. I'm not lucky, but we, my clients appreciate emergence and have the respect for a multiplicity of, of voices. You do your best as a communicator to. Make a story neat in the sense that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Again, I'm talking about a distinct in individual story that your listener can see themselves in the story, that it resonates with them and they know they're part in that future and that they know the part that they played.
So as a communicator, and, and this is uniquely where my work intersects because we bring decades of strategic comms experience and on the policy side where you need to be getting quickly at policymakers to have action taken, persuasive communication where there's something you want done. High quality, crafty ways of getting stories out, whether they're books or they're documentaries or they're, they're short stories.
Um, and we bring in this incredible ethics and respect that comes out of our journalistic and our oral history, academic oral history background. So we work at that intersection. And communicatively, you can make things understandable. I will also say that I don't think that people have enough respect for the fact that human beings are messy and they like messy stories.
So when something is too neat, people will push back. People will smell that lack of authenticity. You know, my life is. Really messy and if you make something too neat, I am not going to relate to it. So allowing for that paradox, we all live in unbelievable paradox. And I think that part of the problem, this is kind of a huge statement, but part of the problem with the divisiveness and everybody talking about.
Divisiveness is, we're really yes, and we are both and of of it all. And we need to create more space for that paradox to be told. More respect for the contradictions. Back to bogie. Bogie talks about spirals and they're, they're emergent and it's polyvocal, and more and more stories are going to be added.
Look at the story of America right now that we're, we're understanding there's far more to it than we might have been taught in. I also think that that reminds me too thaylor about. Polish and professionalism in storytelling and how a lot of us want to have stories told in a certain way. Um, you know, I think about some podcasting and NPR stories and journalists where they've developed this way of storytelling that we're drawn to.
And then what happens if someone's not quote unquote polished or professional in their storytelling? How do we make space to also listen just as intently to those. I wanna ask you kind of the final question, but also wanna hold space if there's something that we haven't gotten to. So my final question is to ask if you could encourage a leader or a founder to, uh, to answer one storytelling question at the moment of ending, what would it be?
So if you could answer that, but then also if there's, if uh, there's anything that you haven't shared or that I haven't asked that feels relevant, I would ask What is ending? Because the leader isn't ending, the work isn't ending what? What's actually ending? The people there aren't ending. The, uh, leadership expert Michael Watkins talks about working with leaders or coaches.
Leaders when they come into a position to think about what will be true and what will be possible when I leave. Working towards their legacy, and he sees those questions as strategic tools upon entry to a job. And I like to flip that and think about it as you're leaving what is now true and what is now possible and what a gift and what an incredible legacy to say, I have worked to make this possible.
I've invited you all in. To make this possible, because of our work together, we've, we've opened up these possibilities. We've enacted, uh, these solutions, these stories have emerged and we're going forward to implement them. In such a way. Yeah, I think I'm so glad you referenced that because Michael Watkins and his books are part of the reason that I really leaned into the leaving wall part of it because he addresses so beautifully the start, the first 90 days, how do you get up and going?
And then I was like, well, what about the end? What about the end? And I love that you just said that about like actually what. Is ending. Um, I also think it's beautiful to think about, there's a couple of podcasts, uh, episodes that as you listen, I would love you to go back and listen to Kemi, AMI, uh, and then an upcoming one with Nani because as you mentioned, Thaylor, the design intentionally about what does it mean to co-create and co-write.
The next version of this impact. I love when most of them are women, I will say, or have really feminine leadership when they enter a space, knowing that they're there for five years or seven years or I'm here for a project. Um, that's just really beautiful and juicy to me, and I'm excited to see more of that coming.
I'm so excited to have had this conversation with you, Baylor, like we are just barely unearthing so much good stuff. Maybe we'll have to have another conversation at some point in the future. Always and ever. I so enjoy talking to you and Yeah. I've, I'm taking lots of notes. As you were talking, you talked about a colleague who's doing composting work.
Yes. I find that fascinating. Yes. Camille ac and she also, I also have a podcast interview with her. Camille's work is stunning. She's bringing work from the hospice world, the natural ecosystem of our, our ground and our soil, and really exploring that in organizations when we were. Rebranding THA P Car and Partners during the pandemic.
Uh, we were thinking of perhaps changing the name and we thought about compost, which wouldn't work. Right. But it was this idea of we take the richness Yeah. And we take, we're taking all of these stories and creating something. Out of them. We're, we're meaning making, we're, we're making the soil out of them.
Um, so I love the idea of composting. Um, and I, I work with an in an incredible organization, resource Recycling Systems, and there's a woman, Renee Lewis, who I need to connect you with. Right. Um, who teaches DEI as love and compost as love. You, you guys would connect. Um, thing that I, I think is relevant to this conversation is the idea of stories nesting that a story doesn't exist on its own, and that they all nest and they work off of each other.
And the more you have, the more meaning you can make, the more sense of place that you get. So we'd never wanna quash a story. So to your point about, you know, a story that isn't ended or a story, here it is, it's baked. Go take this and go forward with it. That story exists inside a lot of other stories, and we've gotta create the space for that and, and the understanding of that.
Yeah. Baylor, thank you. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Yeah. This was fabulous. So excited. Thank you. To add you on and we'll share all of the links and places that people can learn more about the things that you referenced in your work, um, and learn more about what you and your, your colleagues do. I appreciate you.
Thank you for your important work. It's greatly appreciated. Thank you. If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the leaving while assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype. It's quick and easy, and you can find it@naomihattaway.com.
Slash assessment, it's Naomi, N-A-O-M-I, hattaway, H-A-T-T-A-W-A y.com/assessment. To learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace. You can also see that information on my website. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system.
We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hadaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a Navigation Guide for Workplace Transitions.