Story 2

Why We Can’t Stay Here

A Case-for-Change Story

Much of leadership is managing change. If nothing needed changing, we wouldn’t need so many smart leaders running companies. They’d all be on autopilot.

But human beings are creatures of habit. And that’s a problem. Change means letting go of comfortable habits and familiar routines. And that creates fear, uncertainty, and doubt: “Should I make this change? Can we do it? What if I fail? ”

As a result, change is hard work. And that’s why convincing people to change is hard work. Fortunately, storytelling is one of the best change agents leaders have at their disposal.

In that effort, the first challenge a leader faces is typically to convince the organization that change is necessary. It answers the question, “Why should I make this change?” The best story, then, will be a story about whoever stands to benefit most from the change.

Here’s an example :

In February 2015, National Public Radio aired a story about Joey, a ten-year-old boy in Gainesville, Florida, suffering from a rare form of kidney cancer. ix When Joey was diagnosed in March 2013, the cancer had already spread to his abdomen, chest, and neck. He went through two surgeries and five rounds of oral and intravenous chemotherapy, none of which worked for more than a month or two. Eventually, he’d exhausted all the available treatments.

So, his mother, Kathy Liu, tried to get treatments that weren’t available. She heard several new immunotherapy treatments were in clinical trials, but none of the trials were accepting children. Those cancers are rare in children and it complicates the testing to include them.

Kathy petitioned the pharmaceutical companies for what’s called a compassionate use of the latest experimental drugs. Despite receiving seventeen thousand signatures on her petition, Joey wasn’t approved. x His condition continued to deteriorate, and he was losing weight. He was down to forty-four pounds.

By mid-2014, with no remaining treatment options, the doctors told Kathy to take Joey home and enjoy their remaining time together.

Kathy was desperate.

“We can’t just go home ,” she said. “For us, that means giving up.”

Then, in September, the FDA approved Keytruda, created by Merck, the first in the new class of immunotherapy drugs called PD-1 inhibitors. Despite being approved for use, his doctors were hesitant to try the new drug on Joey because it wasn’t clinically tested on children.

Kathy called doctors across the country to find one willing to try. Dr. Jim Geller, an oncologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, answered that call.

So, Kathy, her husband Luke, their three-year-old David, and Joey all packed their things in Florida and moved to Cincinnati .

Joey got the first injection of Keytruda on October 14, over a year and a half after being diagnosed. The tumors in his neck shrank significantly. And the ones in the rest of his body stabilized. Keytruda was working!

Less than a month later, the day before Thanksgiving, Joey died.

It turns out, Joey was just too weak when the treatment started, and the cancer had an eighteen-month head start.

Kathy told the NPR reporter, “If Joey could [have gotten] this drug last year, even just a couple of months earlier, maybe it [would have been] a different story.”

Kathy lost Joey that day. But she hasn’t given up her fight. Today, she runs a foundation called Joey’s Wings (joeywings.org) that raises awareness and money specifically for pediatric cancer research .

When that story aired on NPR, one of the people who heard it worked at a company that had just retained me as a storytelling coach. The industry they worked in produced lifesaving products but took a notoriously long time to get them to market—sometimes a decade or more .

So, like most of their competitors, one of the things they were working on was how to get products to market faster. But changing a complex, decade-long process is hard work. The motivation to earn profits faster didn’t seem sufficient to move the organization to make the radical changes necessary. My job was to help them develop a case-for-change story.

When one of the participants in my workshop shared NPR’s story of Kathy and Joey, it immediately became the basis for our story—our case for change.

Think about that. Keytruda wasn’t their product. And Joey wasn’t their customer. But it did become their story—or at least a fictionalized version of it. Because they knew the same thing was surely happening with the lifesaving products they were working on. And having a human reason to do all this hard work was a more effective motivator than higher profits and a growing stock price .

Tips to help you craft your own case-for-change story

Start by asking yourself: “Who stands to benefit from this change?” Surely, it’s good for someone or something your audience cares about, or it wouldn’t be a priority for the company.

Once you know who that is, talk to them and ask these kinds of questions:

What’s your life or work like today (prior to making this change)?

What problems or frustrations do you experience?

How would your life or work be different once we implement this change ?

What are the tangible ways you’ll know the change is working?

Sure, not everyone will have a story as compelling as Kathy Liu’s because not everyone’s job is curing cancer. But whatever it is that you and your company are trying to do with this change will surely benefit someone. The point is, a story about the human impact of the change, whether that’s a benefit to the employees who have to go through the change or to your customers or to the community, will likely be more compelling than just telling people how much money it’ll save.

Craft your own Kathy Liu story. That will be your personal case for change.