How do we develop strategic narratives?
Since 2012, WAALD has been guiding people and organizations, institutions and brands through their transformation toward a better future. In doing so, WAALD creates meaningful strategic narratives for clients in business, politics, science, and culture.
Driving transformation together through strategic narratives
Business strategies and business models – brand and communication strategies – strategies for innovation, change, and transformation – we often experience strategy development as static, mechanical, and linear processes. And usually, only those directly involved in creating them truly understand them. For other key stakeholders (employees, markets, media), they often remain vague, uninspiring, and ultimately not mobilizing enough.
At WAALD, we see strategy differently:
- Strategy is narrative!
- If a strategy cannot be told, it isn’t a strategy!
- To think of strategy as narrative means to act differently – across all core areas of organizational activity.
A typical WAALD process
- Storylistenings – Interviews with members of the organization and relevant stakeholders, followed by transcription.
- Social Listening – Narrative-based market and competitor analysis.
- Semantic Space – Visualization of the findings in a semantic space, highlighting areas of tension as starting points for narrative development.
- Strategic Narratives – Dissonance-relevance analysis and formulation of strategic narratives: from transformation narratives to purpose narratives to competitive narratives.
- Strategic Agenda – Action planning, project development, and rollout strategies that bring the narrative into the organization at an operational level.
- Implementation – Accompanying the strategic agenda through to its full implementation.
