Power and trust: Power imbalances and a lack of trust can make it very hard for people to share their stories. Sharing stories requires rawness and vulnerability, which will only happen if people feel safe and believe that there is value in sharing their stories. But often insufficient time is dedicated to building trust and respect between those sharing their stories and those capturing them.

The complex nature of the work being described: Systems change is messy work – it involves so many parts of the system working together to drive change, and that can be very hard to capture in a story. As Kerry Graham explained, “we’re trained to respond to linear stories where there’s a problem > action > solution. These stories don’t fit that formula.” This can be a challenge, both because it makes the story more difficult to craft and because governments and philanthropists – who are essential funders of community-led, place-based work – tend to look for neat stories of cause and effect, which these stories are not.

Skills, resources and capability: A key barrier to effective storytelling is simply not having the time or funding to do it well. It is time- and resource-intensive to capture and share stories and, as Nicole Mekler from Maranguka explained, “stories get lost in doing the work”. In addition to a lack of capacity, a lack of capability around storytelling was also highlighted as a challenge. As Melanie Corona from Burnie Works pointed out, storytelling does not come naturally to everyone. With this in mind, Dalit Kaplan suggested that it is important to invest in people’s “story literacy”, which involves building their understanding of the “science” of story architecture, as well as the “art” of a compelling story.

Readiness to receive stories: Another challenge highlighted was that to have an impact, stories need to be heard. For stories to effect change, the right people need to not only listen to the stories, but also hear them. As Fiona Merlin from the HUM Backbone team explained, there’s a difference between listening to a story and hearing it – we need an audience who “listen to understand”. But this is easier said than done. Sometimes listeners aren’t ready to receive the message. Sometimes the timing just isn’t right for the message to land in a way which actually brings about the change needed. Sometimes it’s hard to get stories to the ears, eyes and hearts of people who most need to hear them. Fiona summed this up with a powerful question – “how can we tell stories in ways which encourage the listener to not just hear, but actually connect to a different view?”

The limitations of language: Finding the right language to tell the stories of systems change was also seen to be a significant challenge. As Rowena Cann from the Latrobe Valley Authority highlighted, stories of systems change are about changes in mindsets, practices and capabilities, and these are not the kind of stories government officials are used to hearing. The tendency to use deficit-oriented language was also called out, not necessarily as something which makes it hard to tell stories per se, but as something which makes it hard to use stories to drive systems change. Rona Glynn-McDonald asked, “if we’ve been telling stories based on colonial lenses, deficit mindsets, how can we expect to create new systems?”

Bias: Storytelling is not a neutral exercise. The way that questions are framed, the way that answers are interpreted, what is left out and what is included, all act to shape the stories that emerge. Even as the project team, we make choices about who we’re interviewing, what we’re asking, and what we’re including in this final report. In this way, the project team is shaping the story of our storytelling project.