A web discussion at SocialEdge, a program of Skoll Foundation, is exploring the idea of strategic storytelling — or the promise and challenge of creating more compelling narratives about our work. While all agree that narrative is a powerful force in conveying purpose and meaning, it also has a controlling side that should lead us to be cautious and thoughtful in our telling. Says one participant:
Stories are the prima materia of identity, culture, and social order. Every relationship, every experience, and every object – is stored in the mind with a story attached to it. Cognitive science supports this with extensive research on the mechanisms of narrative and sense-making.
So, on the one hand we are completely lost and direction-less without our ability to construct, organize, and remember stories. We need stories in order to know who we are and where we are going.
Yet on the other hand, consider how quickly we can become enslaved to the stories that we inherit from our parents, school, religion, society, and our organizational peers….These same stories also impose limits on what is ultimately possible, leading to a self-defeating pattern that keeps individuals and organizations stuck from moving forward.
Many arts organizations I’ve seen aren’t even aware of the many stories they already tell — to their customers, their audiences, their artists, their boards. Every spreadsheet they present is a story, as is every policy they draft, and every description they give of an upcoming event or an event gone by.
If even these little stories were told with intent, with purpose, and with clarity, imagine how much more compelling an organization would be.
This is great! I’m in public relations and I always like to describe my job as storytelling. Presidents get elected with stories, products get sold with stories, but art, above all, is storytelling.
I agree that every message from an organization is telling a story. A story can be just a sound bite, it does not need to be an epic hero’s journey. But I believe it is important that the sound bite fits into that epic story, the meta-narrative of your organization.
I’d like to illustrate the importance of just one message in the meta-narrative with an anecdote I read in Annette Simmons’ book The Story Factor:
“A man came upon a construction site where three people were working. He asked the first, ‘What are you doing?’ and the man answered, ‘I am laying bricks.’ He asked the second, ‘What are you doing?’ and the man answered, ‘I am building a wall.’ He walked up to the third man, who was humming a tune as he worked and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ and the man stood up and smiled and said, ‘I am building a cathedral.'”
What tune was he humming …”Onward Christian Soldiers”? Apparently the smiling builder was delighted to be helping the Church with it’s rapacious work on earth; enslaving peasants, enriching and empowering the clergy, oppressing women, slaughtering non Christians, burning heretics, and rewarding the faithful with short, brutal lives. That’s the story.
Wow, how about missing the point?
Well, I thought I was dead on. What am I missing?