Tell Stories

Storytelling for Sustainability

When people within organisations communicate, they often do it through stories. Combining research with stories from practitioners working to embed sustainability within their organisations, our “Storytelling for Sustainability” guidebook was developed through the Embedding Project's Community of Practice process to help you:

• Understand what storytelling looks like in practice, and reflect on this in the context of your organisation

• Develop a sense of why stories are important for embedding sustainability

• Learn from other practitioners’ experiences with storytelling to better plan your own efforts

Shaping Your Organisation’s Narrative Infrastructure

Stories matter, they have an enormous influence on decision-making in organisations.

How often do you stop to reflect on the collection of stories that get told in your organisation and whether you might need to shift them to better embed sustainability?

This guide builds on our work on Storytelling for Sustainability and is based on four years of research and over 100 interviews in twenty different global companies exploring the impact of organisational narratives and how change agents helped to shift them to better support strategic decision-making aligned with sustainability. As with all of our resources, the ideas and guidance presented here have been piloted with several of our partner companies and we welcome your feedback to keep improving them.

The FrameWorks Institute

The FrameWorks Institute uses social science methods to develop techniques that will help you to explain sustainability-related topics more effectively, including racial and economic justice, climate change, and health equity. They provide articles and reports on these topics, as well as toolkits, which include practical framing strategies that communication specialists can immediately put to work. These toolkits offer a nuanced assessment of the issue and clear recommendations on first & next steps.

The Greenwashing Hydra

This report from Planet Tracker can help you understand and identify the nuances of greenwashing. It explains the problem of greenwashing, identifies six different types of greenwashing, and provides an overview of the global regulatory crackdown on greenwashing. The report may be of particular value to sales, marketing, and procurement professionals.

Advertising Guidance - misleading environmental claims and social responsibility

This guide by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) is designed to help organisations comply with sustainability-related advertising regulations. It covers a wide range of environmental and social claims while providing practical examples. Marketing and communications teams who want to advertise responsibly will find it most useful.

Although this resource was created specifically for businesses within England, it provides helpful insights for any organisation that wants to ensure it does not mislead customers.

Sustainability Communications and Disclosures Handbook 2024

This handbook from edie can help your company improve its sustainability-related communications by avoiding common greenwashing pitfalls. It offers guidance on navigating the challenge of effectively communicating sustainability nuances and explains how to engage different audiences, including consumers, colleagues, investors, your board, and suppliers. It also summarises both the UN’s recommendations on greenwashing and key disclosure frameworks. The guide is intended to support sustainability professionals working with internal communications teams or external PR firms.

Transforming the stories we tell about climate change: from 'issue' to 'action'

This article explores the misconception that climate change dread is a necessary precursor for action and behavioural change. It will help you to take action-oriented approach to storytelling that supports people's agency and leverages their stories as a positive narrative structure.

Selling Sustainability: Primer for Marketers

Consider passing this primer to your marketing department. It offers insight into how they can be more strategic when communicating the functional, emotional, and social sustainability-related values of your products. The primer was published by the Futerra and BSR Sustainable Lifestyle Frontiers Group, a collaboration between Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, Waste Management, Carlsberg, Walmart, L'oreal, McDonald's, eBay, and Disney.

Stories for Life

This website, created by the Green Economy Coalition, the Wellbeing Economy, and The SpaceShip Earth, can help you understand and talk about the flaws in our economic system that are driving the sustainability crisis. It consists of eight webpages, each one its own chapter, and explains how inaccurate stories are holding our outdated economic systems in place. They argue that re-designing the economy begins with updating the stories and deeper narratives that shape it. These insights will be most useful to communications, sustainability, and finance professionals.

Decolonisation in Imagery and Language: Guidance and Resource List

Imagery and language play a significant role in shaping how the stories we tell interact with the perceptions of others. This short resource offers general guidance and a resource list for remaining mindful when invoking images, stories, and narratives of peoples faced with historical and continued colonial oppression and it's legacies with your work.

Storytelling in Organizations: The power and traps of using stories to share knowledge in organizations

You can leverage stories to share knowledge. This brief from the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory offers insight into how we learn from one another's stories. For practitioners working to embed sustainability, the most insightful part of the brief may be “The Traps of Knowledge Sharing Stories,” which explains why stories sometimes fall short of their intended objectives.

Language, Please: Style Guide & Resources

This free, living resource can help you reflect on the deeper meanings and implications of the language used in your business communications. It provides style guidance for six topic categories: borders and populations; class and social standing; disabilities, neurodiversity, and chronic illness; gender and sexuality; mental health, trauma, and substance use; and race and ethnicity. It will be most useful to your communications and marketing teams.

The Science Behind Storytelling

Carl Alviani understands the importance of a good story: "…our instinct for story is a survival skill." Humans think, interact, and remember through stories, and yet businesses often overlook this significance when communicating. This article unpacks a simple, effective, and familiar narrative structure that will help you to connect with your audience and grow your understanding of the innate benefits of immersive storytelling.

Story Structure: 7 Narrative Structures All Writers Should Know

This resource can help you to quickly understand the fundamentals of narrative structure, and provides a detailed review of seven well-established story-telling structures, such as the Hero's Journey and Dan Harmon's Story Circle.

Using Story to Change Systems

This article from Stanford Social Innovation Review will help you understand the power of storytelling as a tool for systemic change. It highlights three ways that stories can create change. First, stories can shed light on system fault lines or envision the future. Second, they can act as glue by connecting people, creating shared understanding, and encouraging collective action. Third, stories can be used to rewrite the web of narratives that shape peoples’ worldview and behaviour. These insights will be most relevant to change agents and communicators seeking to advance sustainability.

Orienting Together: Mapping your Narrative Landscape

This article from Narrative Initiative introduces the practice of narrative landscaping and can help you better understand the harmful and helpful stories related to a particular issue. It outlines why you should map your narrative landscape, and explains a six step process to get started. The steps include 1) identifying key stakeholders, 2) talking to stakeholders to identify relevant narratives, 3) documenting stakeholder insights, 4) looking for deeper worldviews underlying identified narratives, 5) creating a list defining each narrative identified, and 6) sharing results with stakeholders and discussing next steps. This practical guidance will be most useful to communications professionals or anyone planning a narrative change project.

Changing Our Narrative About Narrative

This white paper from American civil rights leader Rashad Robinson can help you understand how narratives can be used to create culture change. The paper argues that impactful narrative work is not just about developing stories - it is about deeper dissemination through “narrative infrastructure.” The author breaks down this narrative infrastructure into three key elements: getting your message out (and, more importantly, keeping your ideas in circulation by finding different ways to retell the same story), investing in people and networks of people to help spread your message, and using a “brand narrative” to engage people on an emotional level. This guidance will be most useful to communications, marketing, and sustainability teams seeking to harness the power of narratives to shift norms and rules.

Telling Your Public Story: Self, Us, Now

Narratives are a series of “choice points" that often follow an arc, or journey. Marshall Ganz, Senior Lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government and prominent community organizer, explains this arc in this worksheet. Although written for students, this is a good introduction to storytelling for practitioners, and contains useful questions that will help you reflect on how our personal stories are connected to those of the groups we affiliate ourselves with, and more broadly to the stories that shape our society.