Chapter 6
For this exercise you will need:
- A context where your team can hear and talk about stories (I suggest integrating these activities whenever you host story circles, as described in Chapter 2, “Host a Story Circle.”)
I remember when my kids were young, and we saw the Pixar animated movie The Incredibles in a movie theater. We talked about the movie in the car on the way home.
“I like how all of the people in the family had different powers,” my son, Ollie, said. “I liked how Dash was super fast.”
I asked, “Why do you think the little boy's power was speed?”
Without missing a beat, Ollie said, “Because little kids are hyper!”
I sensed that we had stumbled on something good here. I pressed: “What about the daddy?”
“He was strong, because all daddies are strong and protect their family!”
“What about Violet, the teenage sister?”
He had to think about that one for a second. “She could turn invisible. Girls don't want anyone to look at them and they get embarrassed. That's why she turned invisible.”
“And the mom?”
“She could stretch! That's because moms have to do a lot. They have to do everything at the same time.”
Pretty impressive. At a very young age, Ollie was already demonstrating an ability to look beneath the surface of a story to draw out its buried meaning. This is called subtext, and in good writing it is entirely intentional.
Some people think they aren't insightful or artsy enough to draw out subtext or interpret stories. “I barely passed my English Literature course in college. This isn't my thing.”
I beg to differ. I often introduce exercises with the teams I work with to prove how easily they can shift from being passive story receivers to active makers of meaning.
The truth is we are all experts at meaning making. You do it all the time—even when you are unaware you are doing it.
Our minds are relentless at taking unconnected facts and filling in the spaces between them with patterns and meaning. If anything, we are too good at this. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize–winning economist and behaviorist Daniel Kahneman shows that the brain's insistence on generating stories from random data can lead us astray. It is responsible for some of our more troubling impulses, from generating conspiracy theories to stereotyping of social or ethnic groups. This tendency, Kahneman says, is also the source of irrational and unpredictable events that drive financial markets.
The phenomenon of pareidolia is one example of this. It is the reason you tend to see human faces in random visual data, whether it is a surprised face in an American power outlet or the face of a religious figure in the specks of a baked flour tortilla.
Sometimes when I work with groups that seem uncertain in their ability for meaning making, I'll start with an exercise. I tell or read a story from an organization or brand that they know well, such as Nike or Walmart.
For example, here's a great one from my friends at The Coca-Cola Company which will serve our purpose well:
I bet your eyes went right to it! The famous image of the Cydonia region of Mars was captured by the Viking I orbiter and released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1976. People instantly saw and were captivated by “the face on Mars.” Many were convinced it was evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but it's really evidence of your mind's brilliant capacity for assigning meaning to data.
I will read the story out loud to my group and then say, “The Coca-Cola Company must think this story is important for people to hear, because a statue of Doc Pemberton greets millions of visitors to the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta. So what does this story tell you about Coca-Cola? What do you know is true about Coca-Cola because of this?”
People will be quiet for a moment, but it never takes long for them to start making connections. For the Doc Pemberton story, people will typically say things like this:
Well, it started in a soda fountain. There's a social aspect to Coke.
It was mixed up in a backyard. It has never been a snooty drink. It's for everyone.
He said it was refreshing. Coke always talks about the feeling.
It was called “excellent” at the very first taste. They make a big deal out of excellence, and their secret formula.
Yeah, it makes me think of the old Mean Joe Greene commercial. Mean Joe drinks the Coke and it makes him feel good and he gives his football jersey to the little kid.
It's kind of ironic that Doc Pemberton was a pharmacist, which implies that Coke “the tonic” makes you healthier but it has high fructose corn syrup and that's bad for kids!
Regarding that last statement above: I find that the audience almost always “goes negative” in this exercise, and starts testing for the shadow side of the story. This is an important part of the process, and there's no reason to be defensive. Wherever stories are being told, you should expect that audiences are evaluating: “Which part of this story can I trust? Where are the dark corners? Am I being manipulated?”
The fascinating thing about this exercise is just how long you could keep going with it. Even after people come up with four or five things, I say, “What else?” and then someone draws out some other fascinating connection that has never occurred to me. The point is they could keep unpacking the meaning and it would be relatively effortless.
After, when I ask the audience, “Was that a difficult exercise, or an easy one?” they will unanimously say “Easy!” It is a wondrous moment to realize how effortlessly the mind speaks the language of story. You almost don't even have to try.
Something important is happening in this simple exercise. The act of having this collective conversation—and of making meaning together—is a significant event. This conversation brings people together. Story practitioner Mary Alice Arthur says, “When we share a story and then explore that story together, we are creating shared wisdom and that acts as a collective root system between us. And people who are a part of that have more commitment to you, to us, and to the work we are doing together. When I experience that, you have more than my mind. You might have my heart, my strength, and my purpose too.”
Now It's Your Turn
To warm up your team's meaning-making muscle, tell a story connected to a famous brand. Again, origin stories work especially well. If you like, you're welcome to use the Doc Pemberton story exactly as presented above.
Then ask the same question that I asked:
What does this story tell you about this brand? What do you know is true about the brand because of this story?
Then simply host the conversation for a few minutes as participants take turns making connections to the story. At the conclusion, call attention to the phenomenon of meaning making, and how easy it was for the audience to exercise. “See? That wasn't hard at all. You are experts at meaning making. In a little while, when we hear stories from one another, I'm going to ask you to continue making connections like that!”
In the lobby at the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, Georgia, visitors can see a sculpture of pharmacist John “Doc” Pemberton mixing up the very first batch of Coca-Cola syrup. The Coca-Cola Company is particularly skilled at leveraging its narrative assets for the purpose of brand building.
Meaninglistening and Storymaking with Your Team's Stories
I don't much care for the word storytelling. To make this confession now that we are this deep into the book feels a bit awkward, but there it is. The word is loaded with problems.
The trouble begins with the first part of the word: story. American businesspeople associate story with the fairy tales they read to their children at bedtime. The associations aren't any better for my European friends, for whom story might be a synonym for a lie, particularly when told with a certain swagger over a pint of Guinness. No wonder there is suspicion toward storytelling in organizations.
But my bigger hesitation is with that second part of the word. Telling always makes me cringe just a little bit, and part of that may be my background in organizational learning, where transformation is never the product of a one-way transaction. Telling is something you do to other people, and it disregards at least half of the complex social transaction that takes place whenever stories are being shared.
I'm a fan of new words (neologisms) that illuminate new possibilities that were right there in front of us all along, and it would be a lovely thing indeed if every member of the team embraced his or her role in shaping the team's reality. How about if we call it meaninglistening? Or, even better would be a word that suggests the active participation of all sides, such as storymaking. Maybe then we might recognize that once a story has been told, that is not the end of the conversation. Michael Margolis, chief executive officer (CEO) of Get Storied, says, “Transformation requires a witness. That's why we have to tell our story.” And that means we have to have a witness. After the telling, we're just getting started. The really good stuff comes next.
Mary Alice Arthur is one of the stewards of the Art of Hosting movement around the world, which is focused on helping people host and take part in participatory leadership that leads to wiser action. Participatory leadership depends on active engagement from everyone, and as with storytelling, conversations that really matter depend on the twin skills of communicating and listening.
“People don't take the role of listening very seriously,” she says. “But it's the most important part of the experience. I love the Chinese character for listen because it has the elements of heart, one, ear, king, and a thousand in it. What if we listened to each person as if they were a king and as if we had a heart of a thousand ears and with one pointed focus?”
“Ting”—the Chinese character meaning “to listen”
“Everyone thinks the teller leads the listeners,” she says. “But it is the listeners who lead the teller. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the listeners expect the best intentions, wisdom, humanity, and beauty of the storyteller, they will receive it. They can help to create a better story. The audience holds the power.”
I especially like how Dr. Karen Dietz boils it down to an unforgettable axiom: Listen the best possible story out of someone.
Today, some of the wisest and most innovative story practitioners around the world are experimenting with social constructs for listening and meaning making. Some of them, such as Mary Alice Arthur and Paul Costello, have been perfecting their crafts over many years of disciplined experimentation and practice.
But you can begin to exercise this capability with your team in a simplified form.
Most often, when I host story circles I use a simple method modified from Mary Alice's Art of Hosting principles. It's called the harvester/witness construct. The advantages of this modified approach are that it is fast (just a few minutes of dialogue for each team member), it is simple (team members can easily embrace the roles and get to work), and it is appreciative (it focuses on what is true and good). As a leader, you don't need to be a therapist or a facilitator to host these conversations.
At its heart, the harvester/witness model is based on a simple principle that drives shared listening and meaning making: Every time you host a storyteller, give your listeners a job. When listeners have a job, they have more focus.
Here's How It Works
Let's say you have a story circle of four participants. If one participant is the storyteller, everyone else is a listener, right?
Thus, in our group of three, we have a teller, a harvester, a witness, and an observer.
Teller
“Let me tell you a story . . .”
Harvester
“I heard something in your story . . .”
“I noticed some themes in what you said . . .”
Witness
“I noticed something about you . . .”
“I noticed something about my (or our) reactions . . .”
“I noticed something about the overall experience . . .”
Observer
For this round, just take it all in and enjoy.
The role of the harvester is to draw (or harvest) meaning from the content of the story. Participants are always intimidated by this role at first, but it is actually quite simple to do. This is where the listener says things such as “I heard something in what you just said,” “That story made me think of something,” “I think that was really a story about trust,” “In your story, I think you revealed the key to why our teams are underperforming,” and so on. (In Aristotle's art of rhetoric, these insights would point to pathos.)
The role of the witness is to comment on the person of the storyteller. The witness says, “I noticed something about you when you told the story.” This is appreciative feedback, not critical. It may be, “I notice you become more passionate when you talk about your team. I can tell you believe in them,” “You have a quiet way of establishing authority,” or “I notice how you are equally attentive to both the people and the numbers in your story.” This has the effect of fostering the teller's self-awareness of his or her own presence and voice. (Aristotle calls this ethos.)
The role of the observer is to remain actively engaged and practice listening deeply to the story while noticing any other dynamics that stand out in this story circle. (I often assign this role to manage time. If you have time for additional rounds of feedback, you can have multiple harvesters and witnesses in place of observers.)
I will project a slide on the wall or create a flip chart to summarize the three roles, because participants tend to feel uncertain about this at first. (“So, remind me what my role as harvester is again . . . ?”)
If you have done an exercise using the Coke Doc Pemberton story (or other story) as described previously, you can use that experience to reassure participants: “You have already demonstrated your natural ability for this! Your responses to the Coke story are the kinds of responses we are looking for again.”
In a story circle setting, each member of the circle will have an opportunity to serve in each role. For round 1, you will be a teller and then receive feedback from a harvester and from a witness. In round 2, everyone will shift, and you will be a harvester for a story that you hear. In round 3, you'll shift again. And so on. Each round tends to last approximately 10 minutes, so a group of four will need 40 minutes for a story circle with harvester/witness feedback.
Here's how I quickly introduce the roles on a flip chart. Because story is a timeless approach to connection and change, it pairs well with “old school” technology. With a few flip charts and markers, you can host an entire session with no projectors, slides, or other digital technology.
Taking It Deeper: A Geography of Meaning
If you are willing to dedicate some more time and exercise some more facilitation, you and your team can dig even deeper into their stories.
Paul Costello is a Washington, DC–based story expert who has been recognized by the U.S. Congress for his peacemaking efforts with young leaders from conflict-torn regions in Ireland, South Africa, and the Middle East. He does this through a hosted story-listening process that he calls narrative room. “People leap to meaning too quickly,” he says, and his methodology seeks to identify where meaning is made. “Not how, but where,” he clarifies, “and yes, meaning has its own geography.” Costello's spatial terminology is informed by theological training and the interpretive process of hermeneutics which says that listening happens in three dimensions:4 from behind the story text (which corresponds to our witness role), from within the story text (which is the harvester role), and in front of the text (which introduces a new role, connector).
In this listening construct, after the teller tells his or her story, the listeners will spend much more time in analysis. Working as a team, they will work through these three sets of questions (which you are free to use as shown here or modify to suit your needs).
This analysis—a witness perspective—plays out in the body of the listener, and it focuses on story as a felt experience before it is a rational, meaning-making experience.
- Who is the teller?
- What does the teller bring with him or her to this moment?
- What is his or her intent? Why did the teller tell this story?
- What did you appreciate about the teller as he or she told this story?
- Were there some parts of this story that you already knew? Were there parts that don't match or that add new information to what you already knew?
- What feelings did you experience during the story? What surprised you?
- Where did you feel the story in your body?
- What metaphors would you use to describe the story? If the story were a musical style, what style would it be (jazz, rock, etc.)?
This is a harvester perspective and is similar to a literary critical analysis of character, plot, and structure. It's a level of analysis that one might normally reserve for a great short story in a college literature class. (“This stuns the teller,” Costello says, “who is thinking all I did was tell a simple story.”)
- What happened in the story?
- What was the conflict or tension in the story?
- (Think about the feelings the listener articulated in the previous stage.) Where in the story did that feeling come from?
- What changed? Who changed? (And how?)
- What were the risks you heard in the story?
- What were the strengths you heard in the story?
- What values did you hear in the story?
- What leadership behaviors did you hear?
- What discoveries happened? Where were the breakthroughs? What made the breakthroughs possible?
This introduces a new listening role that we have not explored yet: connector. Here the audience is transparent about their own reading of the story, and the teller gets to observe them truly playing with the story. (Costello says, “I know it is working if there is laughter, which is a sign of release.”)
- What does the story connect to? What does it make you think of?
- What are the themes of this story (e.g., “The power of collaboration,” “The risk of vulnerability,” etc.)?
- What does it tell you about our team/organization? (To what extent were the events of the story typical or atypical of our world?)
- What does this reveal about us that is unique to us?
- What assumptions, beliefs, or mental models does this story reveal? To what extent are these also present in our team or organizational system?
- What new possibilities does this story have to offer our team? What would happen if some of the key behaviors or mental models in the story were brought to life elsewhere in our team/organization?
- What do we want others to hear from this story?
- If the team is gathered to discuss a specific theme (such as innovation, trust, operational excellence, etc.), where did you hear that theme in the story? What did the story illuminate about our theme?
How deep you are willing to go into this dialogue depends on your time limitations! If you are skilled in facilitating, you could spend a few hours digging deep into a single story, or you could impose time constraints of 30 minutes for each story. Thus, after hearing a single story, the members of the story circle will spend 10 minutes examining the questions from behind, 10 minutes within, and 10 minutes in front for a total of 30 minutes.
Paul Costello says the effect of this experience on the teller of the story can be quite profound. She will experience a phenomenon that Paul calls “story ejection.” That is, she will begin to feel as if she is standing outside her own story, observing herself and the other story characters through a startlingly objective lens, and considering nearly endless new meanings to the story. He even recommends having the teller physically move his or her chair outside of the circle after the telling and not make eye contact with any of the listeners. This gives listeners full freedom to play and interpret, while the teller “eavesdrops” on the response. This is part of the power of his narrative room experience, as young leaders from war-torn regions begin to view one another with a hard-earned empathy, while releasing the fiercely guarded meanings they have always assigned to their stories. “What I have found is that people wake up to the treasures they have in their own stories,” he says. “It gives participants a new space for entering their own story where they can discover the nearly endless fluidity of meaning,” he says.
For Thaler Pekar, an expert in the use of story for identity and persuasion, that link to the listener's story is exactly the point. Thaler bridges this conversation by asking listeners, “What story from your own life were you reminded of?” Thaler told me she shares my distaste for the word “storytelling,” and says she prefers “storysharing.” She explains, “Sharing a story usually prompts your audience to recall similar memories or aspirations. When you hear someone else's story, you are neurologically triggered to search your own memories for resonant connections.”
Option: Use the Archetype Cards
Use the archetypes presented in this book as another easy entry into story listening. After the teller has finished the story, others in the story circle will take turns laying down three archetype cards that call out the voice of the story. “That story you just told, Barry, felt to me like a creator/prophet story and here is why . . .” See “Using Archetypes as a Directed Listening Framework” as described in Chapter 8.
See Chapter 8 to explore using 9 Muse Archetypes in meaning-making conversations.
Now that you've explored some meaning making ideas, give it a try! Lori's story on the previous page is rich with meaning ready to be explored. What are some themes that you hear inside the text? What connections to you make in front of the text?
Here are some of the layers of that Lori says her groups will typically share. What else did you hear?
Go to the source of the problem.
Get information before taking action.
Figure out what's causing outliers.
Listen to the small voice in the back of the room.
Don't be afraid to speak up.
Don't overreact!
Listen closely to the supervisor who created the workaround to solve her problem.
Where Do I Go from Here?
If you have a lot of stories, what is the meaning that is common across them? Story Element Extraction offers a structured process for drawing out and then capturing the deep and surprising metathemes shared by the many stories your people tell.
Review the Leadership Storytelling Archetypes as an additional construct for identifying the identity of stories (or reflecting on the teller).
Other activities in Circle of the 9 Muses will exercise the capability for meaning making, including the Visual Timeline and Creative Tension Pictures.