Written by The nurse sighed, went back to the cart to check her computer, and turned to the woman in the bed next to mine. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said. “Would you be all right if I went and got a colleague to take a look at your veins?” The woman said that was fine, and soon more nurses came in, studied her arms and talked through the different ways they might get a needle in to take bloods. It took a lot of teamwork and collaboration, but they finally got what they needed.
I am always fascinated by watching people work, communicate and collaborate to solve problems. Later that evening, I chatted with a nurse who asked what I did for a living. I told her I help people and organisations find the right story to make complex information easy to understand. She smiled. “I know what you mean. I’m a casual at a mental health organisation that’s rolling out a new digital platform, and I often miss meetings while I’m working here, so my experience of the change has been disjointed.”
She said the leadership was doing a lot right, with the manager and the CEO showing up far more, putting in face time and making sure questions got answered. She also thought the messaging about when changes were happening was clear. But she still didn’t understand how the new system worked.
I asked, “So you know what is happening and when, but not why it matters to you or how it all fits together?” She paused. “You’re right. It’s all information. There’s no story; that makes it difficult to put things into context.” She added that the bigger problem was how busy everyone was, with little time beyond quick conversations to absorb anything.
This is a perfect example of the intersection of an individual’s life and an organisation’s complex system. Each of us is living our own story inside a larger system of interconnected stories. The rollout was one story moving through that organisation, and the nurse was living her own story, dipping in and out between her shifts. Updates arrived on the organisation’s schedule, so they only reached her when the timing happened to line up, and the pieces never joined into a story she could follow.
Even well-designed communication frameworks often overlook these moments, especially in complex environments like healthcare. A delay like the woman with the tricky veins beside me can change how much time people have from one minute to the next.
This is why stories connected to a change program are critical. Think of the last time you opened a book to the wrong chapter. You immediately sense that something is wrong; the story feels disjointed. Then you look back at an earlier page and think, oh yes, that is where I left off. A narrative throughline gives the chapters an order, so people can tell when they have missed something and find their way back.
It is impossible to know every story in a complex system. But with planning, you can map where the stories intersect. That is the gap most communication strategies leave open.
The standard steps for developing a communications strategy are stakeholder mapping, crafting personas, developing a messaging architecture aligned to persona values and then producing a comms schedule. It is a sound, time-tested process, and it works until it doesn’t.
So the real challenge is building a schedule that fits the realities of a complex system.
The gap in the plan
The standard communication schedule is built around organisational cadence. The problem is that complex systems don’t have a unified approach to time. Each player has their own rhythm and is not in sync with the larger organisation. Work rhythms can differ drastically by day, role, unit and team. This seems like an impossible problem to fix. Except that even complex systems have patterns.
The typical approach to building personas and messaging is to run interviews or collect data from a pulse survey. The communication schedule is filled with messages developed by the communications function. That process uses consultation, when what we need is co-design.
What is co-design?
The process of conducting interviews and discussion groups is common in engagement and communication practices. This is an incredibly valuable activity and provides insights into the lives of the audience we want to reach.
Co-design asks for the same kind of input you would gather in an interview. People share stories about what matters to them, what is going well or wrong. The difference lies in what happens next. Instead of taking those stories away to interpret on your own, you work with your audience to develop the messages. You draw out the themes that come through in their stories and validate each step together as you go.
A simple four-part process
I use a four-part process to achieve this. The best way to show how it works is via a co-design session I ran with a local council to develop their culture change narrative and messaging structure.
Share stories
The first step is to get into a room together and listen. At Central Goldfields, staff from different roles and sites shared stories about their work, teams and community.
Two stories stood out in that session: one about a business support network formed in a single week during the pandemic, the other about a whole office cleanup day. The following are the final lines of each of those stories:
“It didn’t cost anything, and everybody got a sense of being a part of the cleanup day, which created a really good vibe within the office.”
“Really proud that our team contributed and what our shire had done to support the local businesses during the pandemic.”
Find the big themes
Once the stories are shared, as a group evaluate the major ideas or themes that keep repeating. In the Central Goldfields stories, there was a major theme around small, resourceful changes making a real difference to the workplace and the community.
Choose the theme that resonates most
The group then decides which themes matter most to them. At the council, the group landed on the theme of ‘improvement is possible’ as a core communication pillar of their change narrative.
Explore why, then flip it
In the final step, get the group to explain why that theme is important and how it benefits them. Those benefits become key messages. Improvement Is Possible became a key message sitting beneath the council’s overarching narrative, Working collaboratively, creating a community we are proud of. The benefits outlined by the group became the core messages we used on their change journey:
- Continuous improvement can be implemented effectively within resource constraints.
- Creative problem solving is encouraged.
- Reward the benefits of changes as they occur.
- We believe that there is always an answer.
- Look past obvious solutions and take extra time and effort for better outcomes.
Every one of these statements can be traced back to something staff said in the room. The cleanup day story shows continuous improvement happening within resource constraints, since it cost nothing and still lifted the whole office. The story about supporting local businesses during the pandemic shows the pride people feel when their team finds a creative way to help. That is the advantage of building communication from messages that already resonate, because they come from the people you are speaking to.
Co-design when nobody has time to sit down
A session like the one at the council happens when people can step away from their work for a few hours. In a hospital, a mental health service or any other high-pressure environment, it is not possible to run a three-hour workshop. But that does not put co-design out of reach. It means the first conversation needs to be smaller and focused on where your system and theirs meet.
When I asked the nurse whether anyone had checked how she liked to be communicated with, she said no, and admitted she would need time to think about what would work for her. Two questions I would have asked are: when is the best time to reach you, and what is the best way to do it? The answers you receive will help you build a communication schedule that fits their working day.
Watching the nurses work through the tricky veins together showed me how they operate. They were always time-poor, but made time to check in with each other many times a day. I could hear a lot of laughter, and they always seemed to know what was going on. Teams that work quickly together can only do that because they have multiple touch points through the day. Those touch points are the patterns hiding inside even the most complex system. So how do you codesign quickly within a complex system, full of complex people?
Bring it into the check-ins and conversations they already share rather than adding another meeting to their day. Look for the points where people already gather, such as a handover or the start of a shift. Find the overlap between your communication and the way they already work.
Talking in person is effective, and those leaders were right to make time for it, but it relies on a lot of variables lining up at once. In an environment where one difficult blood draw can throw out a schedule, those variables rarely cooperate. For most people, the answer will not be email either. The goal is to find the touch points where you enter each other’s stories most easily. And to shape them with the people on the other side of the system rather than on their behalf.
Micro moments of co-design
This is why I built the Storytelling Challenge. It is a program of short, fill-in-the-blank prompts that people answer in a few minutes on their own time, so it fits into the gaps of a working day rather than competing with it. In a hospital or mental health setting, the prompts can be timed to the moments nurses already share, such as a handover, a shift change or one of their many quick check-ins.
For more competitive or fun-loving teams, the challenge can be gamified with leaderboards and prizes. Give people the chance to play and have fun while building out the strategy.
Because the prompts arrive at existing touchpoints, people can share a response at handover or talk it through with a colleague. The stories keep flowing without anyone being asked to attend another meeting.
Over the course of the challenge, those responses become the same material we would gather in a co-design room. The difference is that, in the challenge, the collection of stories in people’s own words is sorted into themes and qualitative data is accessed through a dashboard. This data can be used to access feedback, habits and belief systems. All of this can be fed into creating communication content and developed into key messages.
When the co-designed messages are released back into the organisation, it hits differently. Staff who helped shape a message don’t need to be persuaded by it, because they recognise their own words and priorities in it. That recognition does the work a campaign would otherwise have to do.
Working with complexity starts with understanding the points where you can overlap. That means getting insight into what people are actually doing, finding where you can intersect with their story and their system. Using low-touch, high-impact digital platforms like the Storytelling Challenge to gather insights and turn them into data that shapes your communication. The aim is to meet people where they are, then co-design, learn, iterate and repeat. The only way to do that is to recognise the complexity of their system and your own, and find the places where an intersection will really pay off. Get that right, and nobody on your team will say what that nurse told me: it’s all information, and there’s no story.
