The need for narrative

”Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”
–Albert Einstein.

During the Getty Center convening on leisure time and culture discussed in my last two posts, one theme kept emerging (at least in my head): the power and positive place of narrative in a fractured and complex world.

Commercial marketers are increasingly discovering the role of stories and personal narrative in placing products and services in context (it’s not about the product anymore, but about how the product fits into your life). In a world of distractions and constantly shifting focus, narrative can often provide the arc of meaning and the throughline of context to otherwise drifting days.

Smart managers are extending that idea beyond marketing. For example, a conference participant from a major auto firm talked about commissioning filmmakers to distill and convey key concepts from a 2000-page strategic report for their engineers, salespeople, and management team. The same company now hires illustrators, rather than technical designers, to prepare graphics for their reports, as illustrators know how to convey meaning, rather than just schematic fact.

It struck me that arts organizations are all about reflective narrative in the broadest sense. Actions and artifacts of creative expression can be little maps of place and identity, even as all our other maps recombine and fall away (corporate hierarchy, social infrastructure, traditional work and life norms, and such).

This is not to say that arts experiences make life easier or more clear, just that they give us context in an increasingly decontextualized world. There’s got to be something of value and purpose in there for the cultural manager.