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The Start We All Want

How storywork can help you onboard new people

Laust Lauridsen, MD
7 min readFeb 24, 2023

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In many companies, welcoming and onboarding new people is routine. Professional, predictable and perfectly boring. It may answer questions, fill information gaps and introduce the culture, but it is rarely designed to raise enthusiasm and deepen relations.

Here is my advice if you want to include people in your team, organization or community: Turn your onboarding procedure into an adventure, game or quest — any type of story-based experience that will engage people and make them ask for more. Storywork is already used in marketing and sales, but can also be applied to accelerate employee and partner engagement.

The magic of story

The stories we tell are the world we live in. I am sure you have heard this before, but have you considered the meaning behind the words? What is the magic of story that can turn things upside down, chaos into order, and fantasy into reality within a few sentences?

When I say story, I mean an actionable meme, an account of events linking subject and object in time and space. Story is fiction that brings perspective and priority to life by connecting dots of experience to strings of insights. It helps you find patterns in the raw data picked up by the senses. Story guides you to make sense of…

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Laust Lauridsen, MD

Help leaders and teams go beyond to transform and perform. Writer, speaker and facilitator.