Chapter 11
For this exercise you will need:
- A space for story circles (as described in Chapter 2)
- A large whiteboard or wall with butcher paper
- Multiple stacks of sticky notes with markers
A fractal is any structure that shows similarity at different levels of scale. In this fractal image you can see how smaller branches are structured with the same pattern as the larger ones. A healthy culture is one where the stories have a fractal structure.
The exercise Twice-Told Stories (as described in Chapter 5) makes an impactful and important point: The stories that people in organizations tell do not exist in isolation. They are always part of a bigger, shared story.
Fractal Narratives builds on that idea and takes it one important step further: It is the role of you, the leader, to shape and define what that bigger story is. This is a significant act of leadership. A role of the leader is maker of meaning, which means defining and narrating the larger story that we are all experiencing and living into.
Fractal narratives is my term for describing stories that are purposefully nested within bigger stories, or metanarratives. A fractal is any structure that shows similarities at different levels of scale. In nature, the branching of a tree is an example of a fractal. If you were to take a picture of a large branch, then zoom in for a photo of the smaller branches emerging from it, and then compare those photos side by side, you will see that the branching patterns are quite similar. Or, you may have seen fractal screen savers on your computer: hypnotic, pulsing, often beautiful shapes in which it appears you are zooming into the screen infinitely—and yet the overall pattern stays consistent despite the scale.
Biologically speaking, fractal structures are signs of health and adaptability. For example, the more fractal your bronchial tubes are, the healthier your lungs are. Fractals create infinitely complex systems in highly efficient ways.
An adaptive and healthy organization is one where the individual stories reflect themes and truths that also define the organization's bigger story. That is, to the extent that the smaller stories align to and reinforce the organization's larger metanarrative, meaning has become fractal. Imagine the power and adaptability of an organization in which everyone is creating aligned—though wonderfully varied—stories.
As a leader, then, one of your opportunities is to generate fractal story alignment. It works by first defining the broader story that you as a leader wish to lead people into—and then using that as a structure for harvesting stories from your team members.
If all of this sounds abstract, it's really quite practical. Let's look at some examples to bring this idea to life.
Let's Start with an Example: Values Stories
To give an example of how this looks, let's focus specifically on values stories—which, you may recall, are one of the four core categories of leadership storytelling described in Chapter 1. Say you have identified that as a leader, you wish to create a culture in which the organization's shared values are a real differentiator, and a prime opportunity to define how people will do the work. (And for most leaders, this is surely a worthy pursuit.)
Now let's say you've brought together a cross functional group of four managers. Because of the small size of the group in this example, you'll create a single story circle. (You can, of course, scale this exercise up with multiple story circles.)
Write the company values on a flip chart or on a whiteboard. For the sake of this example, let's say the company values are openness, quality, people, and, oh why not, rock and roll. Create a space for each of those four values. The space will need to be big enough to hold a series of yellow sticky notes.
Prepare your people to begin telling stories around the four values. (See Chapter 2, “Host a Story Circle,” for more details.) Anyone can start, and he or she can choose any one of the four values to begin with. Let's say Mary Alice begins with a story about openness. She tells her story.
Together, she and the group give her story a title, and they write that title on a yellow sticky note and place it in the area under Openness.
Use a whiteboard or flip charts to capture the broader structure for the storytelling session. As team members capture their story titles on sticky notes, they will add them to the framework.
Over a period of an hour, your team of four may tell seven or eight stories. As described in “Twice-Told Stories,” it is an impactful moment when at the end you point out that all of these individual stories are like chapters in the larger story that you are all living together: in this case, the story of your company's values in action.
Let's back up now and look at this from a high level. This exercise is an act of leadership. By choosing to frame the story circles around the organization's values, you have made a dramatic statement: “Our values are important, and they define who we are, and we will be intentional stewards of the organization's values so that they are true differentiators for our business.” By creating a purposeful occasion to come together to uncover and tell these stories, you just gave urgency, vitality, and life to the metanarrative of your organization as a values-driven system. In a very real sense, you just gave shape to the identity of the organization.
You can draw from other metanarratives for fractal storytelling. Let's look at some.
Storytelling and Institutional Memory
I wrote portions of this chapter on a long, round-trip flight to Saudi Arabia, where I worked with an energy company that was instituting story work. After five years of working on a massively complex project, the company realized that it had failed to capture any of its experiences and decisions so that others in the organization's future might learn from them. (Do you think five years is much too long to arrive at this conclusion? Most organizations I know never come to this insight.)
This is a case of historical storytelling and reconstructing the past for knowledge management. The organization's data systems for making these institutional memory stories accessible to future members of the organization are complex. But at its heart this is a challenge of storytelling. And the process is elegant enough for you to use with your team today.
Capture the stories from your past experience -- your institutional memory -- using a timeline to frame the story session.
Draw a single horizontal line on a whiteboard, flip chart, or long strip of butcher paper.
Tell your storytellers to define the beginning and end of the timeline. In most cases, the end will be today, but leave that to the creativity of your participants. (Maybe they will choose to place the ending in the future and tell a future story!)
Likewise, have them define when the story begins. There may be an obvious beginning, such as the date when the project or event was commissioned—but again, leave that up to the tellers. (Who knows? Maybe they will place the beginning hundreds of years ago with some discovery that affects the work today.)
Now have participants begin to identify stories on the timeline. In their work at IBM, Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden found that it is more fruitful if your storytellers begin at the recent ending of the timeline. I, too, have found that it can be productive for participants to start with the most recent and fresh memories and then work backward to rebuild the memory. “What happened before that? And what happened before that?”
If you have already explored story circles in Chapter 2, you should be well familiar with the process. Have members tell the stories, representing each with a title on sticky notes.
In the case of a large group, you may break the story teams up so that you are producing multiple perspectives of the same timeline. This exercise can be quite fascinating as each team recreates the past, tells the stories, and builds the timeline in its own way. The differences between the timelines may be more informative than the similarities.
Yet another possibility is to begin this exercise using a variation of the Visual Timeline process described in Chapter 10. After the team has captured a series of sticky notes on the timeline, have participants reposition the notes and draw a line that renders the highs (good events) and lows (challenging events).
Combine this exercise with the visual timeline (from Chapter 10) to create another level of meaning and narrative data.
The resulting presentation is especially expressive and easily decoded by anyone who wasn't part of the original story session. “Wow, something really awful happened here soon after the Launch Date. Tell me about that!”
Other Fractal Story Frameworks
Cynthia Kurtz points out that there is a nearly endless supply of constructs for collecting stories. It's just a matter of identifying the larger story you want to tell.
You may use the archetypes that you identify for your team or offering, as described in Chapter 8, “Leadership Story Archetypes.” For example, if you identified that your team (or product) has the identity of a prophet/rebel/king
(see descriptions in Chapter 8), write those three words on a whiteboard, and collect stories about times that the team or offering displayed any of those characteristics in remarkable ways.
Have you brought the members of your organization along on a shared path of innovation? Collect the individual stories of innovation using a framework such as Everett Rogers' classic Diffusion of Innovation.
Show the framework on a whiteboard, flip chart, or long sheet of butcher paper—and bring your members together in a story circle to identify and tell stories about each stage of the model, capturing the titles of each of their stories on sticky notes.
Are you a member of a high-performing team? You can capture the stories of your history together using Bruce Tuckman's classic team stages model.
John Kotter's eight steps of change model is another great framework for capturing stories:
It is an act of leadership to name and frame the bigger story that the team is living . . . And then to capture individual stories within that frame.
I know one leader whose team was struggling after a part of the organization had been sold off and downsized. She said, “You know what? I think we are going through a grief process.” She brought the team together, talked them through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's classic stages of grief framework, and had them share their stories of shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. (In this case, the team was still angry and bargaining, so it was a powerful orienting moment to validate where they were in the process and to envision what the pending acceptance and healing might look like.)
The leader observed her team's experience, provided a framework and language to name what was happening, and gave them opportunities to be heard and make sense of their individual experiences and ultimately move forward.
This is one of the highest applications of leadership storytelling: the leader as framer of meaning for the collective experience.
Where Do I Go Next?
Fractal storytelling involves a crucial decision on your part. Your role is to answer the questions What is the broader story I want to define or call attention to? What is the story that we are living right now? This chapter suggests a few constructs that can give shape to those metanarratives. (This section continues in the next chapter with an especially powerful metanarrative, the Hero's Journey.)
As a leader, simply define the larger story, put it up on a whiteboard or flip chart, and then host a story circle to identify the stories within that narrative.
You should also explore all the exercises in Part I, “Fundamentals” (Chapters 1 through 6). These processes will enable you to share and draw meaning from the stories that you identity.