Storytelling & Business

		What are all these links?
	Why storytelling about work?

	Over the past ten years as consultants and casewriters, we have heard hundreds of people speak about how they make sense of their work - what they see needs to be done, how they attempt to contribute to something larger than themselves, how they come to accept their own limitations, the pain they feel when they are misunderstood. We have heard stories of effort, compromise, acceptance, flexibility, sacrifice, and dramatic risk. These conversations are a testament to the power of people's intentions, and the energy that sharing stories can set in motion: and they almost universally contradict the notion that people in business are strictly motivated by greed. It is in the moments just after the telling that we've found the opportunities for inquiry, for discovering coherence, to be most available. And, after successive tellings, we've watched extraordinary movement in the power which people bring to their own stories and how they know themselves. We've felt the threads of resonance that draw us into connection with those who speak, and the opening for speaking that listening creates. This leads us to believe that the power of story could be tremendous for fostering learning, building confirming communities, and leading us to new approaches to work.

	What do we know about stories?

	Storytelling is universal to humans; every culture we know of has some form of it. Stories arise from our need for meaning and coherence, out of our desire for a knowable future. It is through hearing stories that we learn from experiences we have not personally lived, because the story is a natural unit of memory, allowing us to encapsulate an incredibly complex set of relationships across generations and distance. And yet, we don’t know why storytelling is so powerful, really. Perhaps it is because stories are at the boundary of action and consequences. They are not just about the facts and not just about our analysis, our thoughts – but instead they are at that point where we take an experience to mean something, down at that moment where we learn. There are many kinds of stories – myths, legends, and cultural histories; the stories leaders tell us of how things are supposed to work; there’s the complaining or blaming story, and many, many other kinds. And there are personal stories, which are a form of reflection that brings coherence to our lives. In fact, James Hillman says that experience isn’t really even lived until we’ve reflected on it. And what moves us about personal stories, both as the teller and as the listener, is the story honestly told – so honestly told that its telling changes the truth. But more than that, by telling stories in community, we are literally creating shared experience – we are making what is important to us more real, more accessible. Through our speaking and listening, we are piercing the cultural myths that limit our thinking. We are situating knowledge, removing it from the realm of the disembodied statement of truth, putting it back into context. And this has powerful implications because, as Ruth Sawyer describes in the Way of the Storyteller, there is a natural progression from hearing stories, to telling them, and on into action.

One of my clients once told me story that shocked me. He had just taken over the Traveler's Check division of a large bank, and went through an in-depth strategy review. Afterward, he made a presentation to the executive team of the holding company, sharing his team's daring conclusion: they shouldn't be in the Traveler’s Check business. After the presentation, the executives accepted his recommendation – but rather than rewarding him for taking a risk on behalf of the company – they let him go. They no longer needed an executive in charge of Traveler’s Checks.

One day I was interviewing a team about their experience using organizational learning practices; the responses were building on each other, confirming the power of those practices. There came a natural break in the conversation, when I could put down my pen and think with them a moment. "Let me ask you," I said, "Could it be that these practices worked because they helped you feel good about working together? Would any framework have served just as well?" There was a moment of silence - it was a risky question. I half expected them to repeat their earlier answers. But something had happened, somehow I felt that they knew their story had registered, and they were comfortable learning together - so they reflected a moment, and slowly drew the links between the organizational learning practices and the specific challenges they had faced. I don't think they had reflected on or verbalized those links until that moment.

"Am I driven to do something helpful for humanity or the endangered planet because I feel deeply achingly apart from it all? ...Can separation be healed? Maybe it needn't be healed at all. It may not be true! "

We had just sat quietly for a few minutes before the meeting was going to start. It was an organizational meeting, one I was afraid would turn into an arm-wrestle between structure and energy. As we went around the circle to checkin, one man shared about his upcoming vacation in Washington DC. He got somewhat emotional, describing what it meant to him to finally see the Viet Nam Memorial. To him, that war represented the epitome of dysfunction in organizations - individuals who wanted to be proud of their country, joining an organization, and participating in horrors that they would never have stomached as individuals. There was quiet as we took in the power of his words, adjusting the context from committees and dues, to questions of belonging and integrity. As the check-in circle came all the way around, a woman shared that her brother had died in Viet Nam, and she was so moved that people still remembered what we learned from that war. Though we didn't expect it, their stories put a whole new perspective on the organizational structures we were about to create.

"..It is out of this play of action and consequence that storytelling has developed."

"No matter how vivid a story is in the landscape of action, if it is to have meaning, it must also be developed in the landscape of consciousness. By the 'landscape of consciousness' we refer to that imaginary territory where people plot the meanings, desires, intentions, beliefs, commitments, motivations, values and the like that relate to their experience in the landscape of action."

"Despite having read much of his writing, I was unprepared for what I learned when I first saw Chris Argyris practice his approach in an informal workshop with a half-dozen members of our research team at MIT. Ostensibly an academic presentation of Argyris's methods, it quickly evolved into a powerful demonstration of what action science practitioners call "reflection in action." Argyris asked each of us to recount a conflict with a client, colleague, or family member. We had to recall not only what was said, but what we were thinking and did NOT say. As Chris began to work with these cases it became almost immediately apparent how each of us contributed to a conflict through our own thinking - how we made sweeping generalizations about the others that determined what we said and how we behaved. Yet, we never communicated the generalizations."

"...Deconstruction has to do with procedures that subvert taken-for-granted realities and practices: those so-called 'truths' that are split off from the conditions and the context of their production; those disembodied ways of speaking that hide their biases and prejudices; and those familiar practices of self and of relationship that are subjugating of person's lives....We cannot be completely outside of dominant practices, but we can take responsibility for working to see through dominant cultural stories. This requires that we deconstruct our practices and situate our ideas in our experience. "

"It is in the process of sorting out the pieces of the self and of searching for a unique and authentic voice that women come to the basic insights of constructivist thought: All knowledge is constructed, and the knower is an intimate part of the known. At first women arrive at this insight in searching for a core self that remains responsive to situation and context. Ultimately constructivists understand that answers to all questions vary depending on the context in which they are asked and on the frame of reference of the person doing the asking."

"Here's a novel concept: The best way to teach someone something is to give them information they need to do something they already want to do. That's so obvious that nearly everyone has forgotten it. So says Roger Schank, 48, and he should know. ...Currently he holds three separate professorships at Northwestern University in the departments of computer science, psychology and education... Actually, his notions don't seem as unorthodox as they really are. One-year-olds learn to walk, Schank says, because there are places they want to go. Two-year-olds learn to talk because they want to communicate. Learning is fun for them because they are in charge of the process. It is when they go to school that they stop having fun. There they are forced to follow a curriculum that does not take their interests into account. 'Natural learning goals that have to do with increasing one's power to operate successfully in various endeavors get replaced with artificial learning goals that have to do with acceptance and approval.' ...So what would Schank recommend? Well, he would begin by throwing out the curricula at most schools. If a boy was interested in trucks he would let him study them full time for years and years. ... Schank's basic premise is that many things can be taught in the context of a student's main interest. 'An interest is a terrible thing to waste, ' he says. Take trucks, for example. In a Schank school a truck major would learn to read by reading about trucks, about economics by examining the trucking industry, about physics by smashing trucks together, and so on. At the advanced level, a student might have to propose legislation that would help the trucking industry, learn to run a trucking company or be able to design a new, more fuel-efficient engine for a truck."

--"The Simulator Classroom: Why corporations are betting heavily on sophisticated new simulation software", Srikumar S. Rao, published in Financial World, 1/17/95

"We hardly have the language to describe the fundamental shift of mind that permits us to participate in this unfolding creative order. A story is the most powerful way, indeed, the only way I know to begin."

"...A story is a map that extends through time....Different maps lead to different interpretations of 'reality.' No map includes every detail of the territory that it represents, and events that don't make it onto a map don't exist in that map's world of meaning."

"An event becomes an experience, moves from outer to inner, is made into soul, when it goes through a psychological process, when it is worked upon by the soul in any of several ways. ... Outer means simply we are outside looking at it; it is closed in its factual literalism. This and this happened, and then this. Inner means we are taking it in; it is open to insight. Ingestion slows down the happenings for the sake of the chewing. Hidden in this fantasy is a tenet of my faith: soul slows the parade of history; digestion tames appetites; experience coagulates events. I believe that had we more experiencing there would be need for fewer events and the quick passage of time would find a stop. And then I believe that what we do not digest is laid out somewhere else, into others, the political world, the dreams, the body's symptoms, becoming literal and outer because it is too hard for us, too opaque, to break open and to insight."

"In telling our story we talk about what is important, meaningful, confusing, conflicting or painful in our life. We risk, share, interact, discover, and more. And by so doing we heal ourselves. While we can listen to the stories of others, and they can listen to ours, perhaps the most healing feature is that we, the storyteller, get to hear our own story. While we may have an idea about what our story is whenever we tell it, it usually comes out different from what we initially thought."

--Andrea Dyer, from the Hearts & Minds Collaborative Race Dialogue, November, 1999

'A fascinating tale.' And he was fascinated, though careful not to show it; so much so that he paid no heed when I let myself move at last, the slightest shuffle, more to the side than backward. 'Even if the thief's only other choice was death. Meaning no disrespect to your ancestor's daughter.'

'Ah, but that wasn't the case at all.' And with that I had him. He forgot to play with the swordcane and stared at me; and for the first time he looked like a human being, round-eye with blessed human puzzlement and my dear, dear, precious, beloved human hunger to know what happened next....Even then I could not be sure that he had taken the right bait, for all that he kept blinking from the swordcane to me and back again.... But he had to know, you see, and what's a foot more or less of distance between one person and another when you have to know how a story comes out? ...I was half-singing myself now, as completely fallen into the manner of storytelling that I was taught almost with my name as he was into the tale itself. But I have learned other things since my name, and I knew that I must slow everything down, everything - not merely my movement away from him, but my breathing as well, my pain and by banging blood, and even my thoughts - slow all down to the rhythm of the cold, quiet moon... I can still do this, what I was made to do, it has not left me. I can still tell a story.

"Strong and universal as the urge has always been to listen to a story, the urge to tell it has been stronger. And back of these has been the primal urge to do something -- to adventure."

"It's the children. All the children. They play Wrinkly Grandma Posey, and then they grow up and don't play anymore, so the actual community of these particular five or six children doesn't exist any more - but other kids are still doing the dance. Chanting the poem. For ten thousand years! ...Story and ritual - it doesn't die with the tribe, it doesn't stop at the border. Children who never met face-to-face, who lived so far apart that the light from one star still hasn't reached the other, they belonged to the same community. We're human because we conquered time and space. We conquered the barrier of perpetual ignorance between one person and another. We found a way to slip my memories into your head, and yours into mine....Not just language, not just tribes of chimpanzees chattering at each other. Stories, epic tales that define a community, mythic tales that teach us how the world works, we use them to create each other. We became a different species, we became human, because we found a way to extend gestation beyond the womb, a way to give each child ten thousand parents that he'll never meet face-to-face.

"B patted the ground in front of her. 'This is where storytelling began, Jared. This is where people began to read the world as a collection of stories. ...human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't... which accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally. ...To return to the traces on this patch of ground before us: in order to make sense of them, you not only have to recognize that they're traces of past events, you have to recognize that they have a direction in time: beginning, middle, and end. The beetle's story begins here, progresses to here, and ends there, where it intersects the mouse's story. We can see that the mouse's story continues, - into a future that we can make predictions about. ... If we follow those tracks, we know we're eventually going to find something standing in those tracks - and that something is going to be what?' 'A mouse.' 'A mouse, Jared, that we have never laid our eyes on until that moment! You see what I'm saying? Sitting right here, we've gained the capacity to foretell the future. '"

"Language researchers studying how high school students learn found that the story-based style of Time and Newsweek was the best way to learn and remember. When the researchers translated American history textbooks into this format, they found that students recalled up to three times more than they did after reading traditional textbooks.....A good story...defines relationships, a sequence of events, cause and effect, and a priority among items - and those elements are likely to be remembered as a complex whole."

--'Strategic Stories: How 3M is Rewriting Business Planning', by Gordon Shaw, et al, published in Harvard Business Review, May-June 1998 (p 42)

"Myth is not just 'any old story,' it is THE story, which gives shape and focus to Spirit, and makes everything make sense. ...[It is] a likely story arising from the life experience of any group, through which they come to experience their past, present and potential....Superficially, mythos is 'about' the organizational Spirit, but in reality, mythos becomes the medium through which the Spirit may be experienced."

--Harrison Owen, Spirit: Transformation & Development in Organizations (p 12, 16, 23)

"Stories are medicine. ...They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything --we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. Stories engender the excitement, sadness, questions, longings, and understandings that spontaneously bring the archetype, in this case Wild Woman, back to the surface.... Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. ...[They are] a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community. "

"We aren't seeking meaning so much as seeking an experience of being alive...through finding resonance between our life experiences and our innermost being which is depicted in myth. " "Myth breaks our notions, but it's fascinating because it's concerned with me as a part of us."

"In his 1936 essay 'The Storyteller,' written when fascism was enveloping Europe, the renowned German literary critic Walter Benjamin outlines how the capitalist market system creates enormous barriers to the free exchange of experience. One of the key roles of storytellers, according to Benjamin, is to be subversive, to pierce through the myths of the ruling elite in order to free people to recognize who they really are. ...By challenging and exploding the putative truths of the myth of freedom, we can make room for truthful and imaginative expression. Here is where genuine storytelling comes in. Benjamin maintains that the ability to exchange experiences is at the heart of genuine storytelling. ... The German word he uses for experience is Erfahrung, which denotes the experiential moment in which one learns something about oneself and the world. In his view, experience is a learning process through which one gains wisdom, and without the passing on of wisdom there can be no genuine community or sharing. "

--"Tales Worth Telling", by Jack Zipes, published in UTNE Reader, 9-10/97 (p 40)

"Michael White argues that even in the most marginalized and disempowered of lives there is always 'lived experience' that lies outside the domain of the dominant stories that have marginalized and disempowered those lives. He and David Epston, along with others, have developed ways of thinking and working that are based on bringing forth the 'discontinuous, particular, and local' stories of individuals and groups and performing meaning on those stories so that they can be part of an effective 'insurrection of subjugated knowledges,' an insurrection that lets people inhabit and lay claim to the many possibilities for their lives that lie beyond the pale of the dominant narrative."

"[Wild Woman] comes to us through sound as well; through music which vibrates the sternum, excites the heart; it comes through the drum, the whistle, the call, and the cry. It comes through the written and the spoken word; sometimes a word, a sentence or a poem or a story, is so resonant, so right, it causes us to remember, at least for an instant, what substance we are really made from, and where is our true home. These transient 'tastes of the wild' come during the mystique of inspiration - ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wildish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dreamtime, too little time to one's own creative life, one's life work or one's true loves. Yet it is these fleeting tastes which come both through beauty as well as loss, that cause us to become so bereft, so agitated, so longing that we eventually must pursue the wildish nature. Then we leap into the forest or into the desert or into the snow and run hard, our eyes scanning the ground, our hearing sharply tuned, searching under, searching over, searching for a clue, a remnant, a sign that she still lives, that we have not lost our chance. And when we pick up her trail, it is typical of women to ride hard to catch up, to clear off the desk, clear off the relationship, clear out one's mind, turn to a new page, insist on a break, break the rules, stop the world, for we are not going on without her any longer."

"As she tells these stories and I listen, thoroughly eliciting details, we are engaged in a ceremony; we are performing meaning on the stories, allowing the emotions, actions, and beliefs associated with them to become part of the official record of Jessica's life. ...If people constitute their preferred selves by performing their preferred stories, then it is important that there be audiences for those stories. Once they exist, such audiences make up local subcultures which construct and circulate alternative knowledge - knowledge that provides new lenses through which to interpret experiences. As preferred stories are circulated and shared in a subculture, ALL the participants in that subculture construct each other according to the values, beliefs, and ideas carried in that subculture's preferred stories."

"In our tradition, people do not simply speak about the world, they speak the world into being. What we say is intricately intertwined with what we are and can be.... This concept of speech and voice is based on a notion that the voice does not speak alone, but generations of voices speak. ...We add our voice to story so it shifts, changes, renews with the multiplicity of meanings and the variables of possibilities. ...You guarded your words. You made them count in the oral tradition. You spoke them responsibly. You kept in mind that what the speaker says affects the speaker as much as the spoken to."

--"Speaking the Corn Into Being", Diane Glancy, published in UTNE Reader, Sep-Oct, 97 (p 43)

"None of the windows was his window. He tried to think where his window ought to be. He made some more windows. He made a big building full of windows. He made lots of buildings full of windows. He made a whole city full of windows. But none of the windows was his window. He couldn't think where it might be.... And he walked along with the moon, wishing he was in his room and in bed. Then, suddenly, Harold remembered. He remembered where his bedroom window was, when there was a moon. It was always right around the moon. And then Harold made his bed. He got in it and he drew up the covers. The purple crayon dropped on the floor. And Harold dropped off to sleep."


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