CHAPTER
7
Story as Core Communication

Story is a map of human experience. It has chronology, character, scene, and insight. A teller needs a listener; a story needs to be “caught” to be complete—and circle provides the perfect container for “catching stories.”

Stories anchor learning. Human beings are storytelling creatures. The well-known twentieth-century anthropologist Laurens van der Post is said to have proclaimed, “Ninety percent of everything we know about being human we have learned through story.” We are the only species that relies as deeply on communication of experience as on actual experience. You can teach a child to look before crossing the street by the power of a story—by explaining consequences and telling stories of what has happened before. Learning though association is part of van der Post’s 90 percent: our chances for survival are greatly enhanced by this capacity to change our behavior through listening to the passed-along experiences embedded in the stories—of others.

The ability to learn vicariously, to communicate our accumulated knowledge and understanding, and to share both previous and anticipated outcomes is the essential definer of our humanity. Not only can we share what we know, but we can also share our dreams and aspirations and our grand imaginings of what the universe is and our place within it.

Understanding the power of story to create a self-educating and self-organizing community is as old as the circle. In On Dialogue, David Bohm notes the power of story in indigenous cultures:

From time to time, [the tribe members] met … in a circle. They just talked and talked and talked, apparently to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader. And everybody could participate. There may have been wise men or wise women who were listened to a bit more—the older ones—but everybody could talk. The meeting went on, until it finally seemed to stop for no reason at all and the group dispersed. Yet after that, everybody seemed to know what to do, because they understood each other so well. Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or decide things.¹

Bohm is describing an experience people have in circle all the time. The willingness to see story as a partner in circle process depends on our understanding of its power as a teacher and our trust that people will grasp the metaphor. Assuming that van der Post is correct, people learn more efficiently, more holistically, and more indelibly through story than through any other form of communication—whether the story is spoken or written. We are practicing our belief in the power of story throughout this book—illustrating the infrastructure of circle and bringing concepts to life through story.

Story Shared

In the fall of 2008, the Tacoma, Washington, Fund for Women & Girls, under the auspices of the Tacoma Community Foundation, provided a grant to support facilitated circles for women living in extreme stress and poverty. These women were selected by social service providers as having enough stability to show up for seven consecutive weeks. The intention question of the fund in its fiduciary role as grantor was quantitative: “How many women would enroll in schooling as a result of the investment of the grant?” The intention question of Catherine Place, a small Catholic women’s center that coordinated the participating agencies and helped solicit facilitators and participants, was qualitative: “How might the circle experience lead to greater personal stability and encourage education?”

PeerSpirit offered two days of circle host training for sixteen women leaders from agencies ranging from Goodwill and the YWCA to the Tacoma Urban League and several drug abuse treatment houses. Our question was both qualitative and quantitative: “Could we effectively prepare these hosts to embrace the circle concept and trust the circle to hold the women?” The newly trained hosts left the practicum with a sense of excitement and anticipation, carrying the Women’s Leadership Circle Kit developed by the Berkana Institute and PeerSpirit. Though each participant was eager to experience the circle as a social container, they also had many unanswered questions about how they were going to work with their respective populations. Courageously, they stepped into hosting and guardianship and followed the format and conversational topics laid out in the kits. We reunited with the circle hosts after the completion of their seven-week programs to review how the experiment had gone.

While honoring the confidentiality of their participants, the hosts shared experiences from their circle groups. The enthusiasm in the room was palpable. Here are some of the hosts’ reports:

“The Hispanic women in our circle came together from half a dozen different countries. Women from different Latin countries don’t usually mix socially, so we weren’t sure how the diversity would meld. But the stories did it. The women told the circle about experiences they had never whispered aloud because the circle offered support and not judgment. After the third session, something shifted because we noticed that they were doing things together outside the circle meetings, such as going shopping at Goodwill as a group.”

“In our agency, getting the women not to physically fight or emotionally abuse one another has been a huge challenge. So, of course, setting agreements was a big deal. However, once they began to share their stories, we saw violence disappear. Women bully each other when they perceive scarcity—which has been everywhere in their lives. The circle structure bypasses that dynamic, and if bullying came up, they called each other to the agreements to intervene.”

“Even with women who were slightly more stable financially, the biggest barrier to education is low self-esteem, a woman’s sense that she’s not capable of learning or that she doesn’t have the right to better herself. The circle began to serve as an esteem builder, with a dozen outside voices pouring confidence into one another.”

A universal statement from all the circle hosts was that the success of their circles was at least partly dependent on the fact that quality child care had been available during circle meetings. “No woman can relax into any kind of story sharing or listening if she is concerned about her child’s well-being. This was crucial to the program’s success,” said Judy Mladineo, program director for Catherine Place.

In addition to their enthusiasm about the depth and quality of stories shared, the circle hosts reported that from one-fourth to one-third of the participants enrolled in a next level of education for themselves—ranging from food handler’s license to driver’s education to English as a second language to the GED and even community college. Perhaps one of the strongest statements about the program’s success is that many of the circles elected to continue meeting after their seven-week cycle ended.

Story Defined

Just as circle is a slightly more structured form of communication that employs understood rules of engagement—such as speaking one at a time, using the center, and listening without judging—story is a slightly more structured use of language that employs narrative structures of chronology, character, scene, and insight. Not every word out of our mouths is story: story is the narrative heart of language. The stories from the Tacoma experience enable us to look at the four characteristics of all stories. Story has a character—one or more persons who are the focus of the narrative. It has chronology—a beginning and an end. It happens in a particular place: the scene. And it offers an insight or lesson.

Some of the stories from the Tacoma experience involved the scene of arriving in this country penniless, unable to speak English, and getting raped or beaten. The individual characters experienced similar chronologies based on their lack of economic and educational resources. The insight that most of them experienced in their circles is that other women were experiencing similar challenges. Together they could offer one another verbal encouragement and even support in things like child care, bargain shopping, and meal sharing.

Story is a powerful medium. It creates relationships in that other people become real to us through story. It leads to insights we cannot access through thought and opinion because our emotions, as well as our intellect, are activated. We read statistics such as “less than 25 percent of women entering drug rehabilitation houses recover from their addictions.” That is a fact. Our minds take it in, and we categorize it as “not a good thing.” However, when we hear Elissa tell the story of being in treatment for the fifth time, wanting to stay drug-free yet having to return to live with her drug-using partner because she has nowhere else to go, we want to help. Facts do not lead to action as often as a poignant story that bonds us to another human being. Through story, a statistic becomes a face, a personality, a woman with a heartrending life who hasn’t given up on herself.

Story leads to insights that we cannot access through thought or opinion, facts and data. It was a risk for the Tacoma Fund for Women & Girls to trust a process as “soft” as circle. They hired a professional evaluator who surveyed and interviewed the women before and after. They were relieved at the statistical percentage (80 percent) that enrolled in next-step schooling during this time. This data support the heart of the experience—that the women gained confidence by sharing and hearing each other’s stories.

In the WE-CAN Women’s Circles Project Report, the evaluator noted:

Despite the challenges, the co-conveners reported that the circles had clear benefits to both the organizations that convened the circles and the participants. A primary benefit to the convening organizations was forming new partnerships with other organizations. These partnerships increased the capacity to fill a gap in the availability of supportive services for women. The key benefits to participants were that the circles offered a safe place for women to come together, tell their stories, and experience a supportive community of other women to help them on their life-changing journey.

Making Time and Space for Story

Understanding how rare it is to have our stories witnessed with support and without interference, on the third day of our training seminars, the Circle Practicum, we invite participants to take the afternoon off for reflection, rejuvenation, and preparation for an evening of Story Council. By this time in our process, the group has studied circle components, the art of working with energy in circle, and creative responses to tension and conflict. We have combined cognitive theory, stories, and experiential learning. The closing day will focus on setting a clear intention for integrating circle into their professional and personal lives, so before that shift into application, we gather for an evening to honor story.

Maybe it’s spring at Stanford Valley Farm in the rolling hill country just up the coast and inland from Cape Town, South Africa, with duiker grazing in the pastures. Maybe it’s summer at the Aldermarsh on Whidbey Island, Washington, with miles of sand flats and tide pools on the nearby beaches. Maybe it’s autumn in the color-blazed forests of Canterbury Hills at the edge of Toronto, Ontario. Or maybe it’s winter on the snow-sculpted beach at Oceanstone Inn south of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Over and over, the Story Council is the apex of our time together. Everyone is fully present, the synergy is at work, and there is enough familiarity with one another to want to share authentically. We are here. We are together. We are held in the flow of the seminar, in our sense of community as peer-spirited learners, and everyone in the group is ready to lead from the rim.

In the Story Council, we send a talking piece around the circle three times. Something different happens in carefully held circles when the talking piece is passed around more than once. There is a stretch break in silence between each round, and a different guardian serves each round. The group hosts itself through the question, usually an open-ended invitation, such as “What story is on your heart right now that you would like witnessed in the safety of this particular group?” or “Now that you’re here, what is the story you’d like to speak to this fire?” Sometimes a common theme emerges; sometimes we notice our eclecticism. Always the sharing has been profound.

When people are speaking with a powerful level of intention and others are listening with a corresponding level of attention, the quality of story creates a possibility for healing that engages us at the heart level. It is exactly this heartfelt quality of engagement that will be so hard to explain once people leave the retreatlike environment of the training session and head into the mainstream settings where they will offer circle process.

A Story Council takes time. It is a donation of presence to one another. The experience of being heard does not come from direct response or advice; it arises from the pure act of having one’s story received and held in the center. Someone speaks of a hidden joy or a terrible burden he or she has been carrying, and as the person lays it down, it is as though the heart of the group—residing in candlelight, residing in a vase of flowers, residing on the placards of their intention statement—receives it respectfully and does not interfere with the speaker’s journey toward insight. The circle provides a kind of alchemy—to transmute sorrow, to highlight joy, to open empathy where there had been enmity.

In the practicum in Cape Town, we sat with two members of the Xhosa tribe, an older Afrikaner man, several English–South African women, and an Indian–South African woman—a microcosm of the country’s diversity. Their stories of the apartheid era spilled forth into the center, and we were aware that this may have been the first time they had sat in such intimate diversity and heard, one after another, the burdens of their shared history—including the pain of privilege as well as oppression. In that moment, the stories of wounding started to become the stories of healing.

This ability to transmute experiences into healing is hard to explain in the boardroom, the office, or the community education room—and yet healing through heartfelt listening is needed everywhere. If the conditions are created to sustain it, listening and healing will emerge. Chapter 10 is devoted to three such stories.

The Four Gifts of Story

In meetings that rely on agenda, Robert’s Rules of Order, and fact sharing to move things forward, story may be received with a “get to the point” attitude. At a seminar for elected officials sponsored by the Luke Center for Leadership in Salem, Oregon, Christina found herself in a group of people for whom data and information were more comfortable than narrative. “Data is code,” said one city engineer. “Data is story in another form. When I look at the numbers, what I see is what you call story. The progression of events—how we got here—is clear to me, and I get excited to present the data to others thinking they’ll understand. Some do, some don’t.”

“Yes,” said a city planner, “for me story means a member of the public standing at an open microphone and droning on about some particular concern while I’m looking down at the figures and thinking—I don’t care how heartrending you’re being, we’re not gonna put a stoplight at that corner, ‘cause the money’s not there!”

Christina’s question to these managers was “How could we make space for both the language of data and the language of story?” If the intention is to communicate, then our role as communicators is to become as skilled as we can in each language. Just as circle and hierarchy can work together, so story and data can work together. Here are the facts; here is the story; here is a group process that allows us to offer and hear every contribution that leads toward creative problem solving. She taught them the four gifts of story, and they practiced on real situations in their communities. And Christina learned a new way to view facts and figures.

Let us explore the four gifts of story.

1. Story Creates Context

Context is the setting in which experience happens, so that listeners can come into the world of the story and identify with it. It provides enough framing information so the listener can track appropriately and begin to understand the impact or importance of the story more fully.

A large city school system had to make budget cuts when the funding to keep the current system operating was no longer available from state and federal revenues. Everyone was stressed as the impact of the shifting numbers became obvious. After-school programs would be cut, and six grade schools and two high schools would need to close in the next few years. (This is the context.)

The school superintendent, Dr. Jamie Braslow, was hired in part because she seemed able to enter systems in this kind of transition and work with the volatile reactions of concerned parents and community partners. (This is context that has expanded into story: the superintendent is a character, a real person with skill and background, and the other players in the decision—parents, students, community partners—are being called into the scene.)

2. Context Creates Relationship

When context is set, story starts happening to real people, and those people are in relationship with each other—and also with the listener. We start to care about the situation and what’s happening to the folks in the story.

The facts remain the same: the budget cuts are unavoidable, the charts and graphs and spreadsheets are all in the room—and now, so is story. An impassioned mother speaks into the microphone at a community meeting, “Zora School is named after Zora Neale Hurston. It started out as a colored school during segregation. As our city, schools, and neighborhoods became integrated, Zora was the only elementary school inside a black neighborhood that welcomed other students to come to us instead of our children being bused elsewhere. This is history. You cannot close this school!” (Now character, scene, and event combine to create tension in story: we want to know how it’s going to turn out.)

3. Context and Relationship Create Vicarious Learning

We put ourselves into the story. We evaluate characters’ actions and reactions and anticipate how we would want to behave if we found ourselves in a similar situation. We prepare ourselves for wiser action through imagination, empathy, and discernment: whom do we want to be like if anything like this ever happens to us?

As we observe or engage in this unfolding event around the school closures, we have the opportunity to reflect on community values we may not have thought about recently. We have the opportunity to imagine ourselves in the decision maker position and what input we hope Dr. Braslow is bringing into consideration. We identify with various characters who seem to be speaking and acting as we would want to act, or we practice not acting the way some characters are acting. (As listeners—or readers—we used vicarious learning to transfer insight from this story to another situation that bears a resemblance to this one.)

4. Vicarious Learning Creates Cohesive Action and Expands Consciousness

Though specific in detail, story serves as a universal teacher. The actions of characters expand our sense of choice and our ability to identify with people with whom we may not have previously had affinity.

In this story, the superintendent opened the decision-making process to a World Café and asked 150 community members to think with the board. In the café, community members were encouraged to explore “out of the box” ideas while continuing to honor the necessary budget constraints. When options are explored in an open conversational process, they carry the four gifts of story along with them. Even those who are disappointed with the outcome have a greater understanding of how it was reached.

This is the key: people want to be included in the story. We are much more likely to find ways to support disappointing outcomes—of which there are many in the world right now—when we have been included as much as possible in the story of how information was gathered, what conditions leaders have faced, and who and what were taken into consideration. When people understand how choices were made, they can become carriers of story able to explain the character of the characters, the scene behind the scene, the chronology of events, and the insights of the process.

Circle and Story on the Mountain

Often the most profound impact of story in circle occurs when taking people—managers, lawyers, ministers, consultants, business owners, human resource directors, nurse leaders, and a range of creatively self-employed women and men—out of their usual environments to live in circle on a wilderness quest. With Ann’s dedication to nature adventure and environmental education, Christina’s dedication to journal and memoir writing, and our mutual dedication to helping people make great leaps in the direction of their dreams, goals, and contributions, we have taken the circle back to where it came from—a fire for the night and the power of story to help us make our way.

It is dusk; it is dawn. Sun rises; moon sets. Silence is the conversation. In the shallow valley, the guides come to the Threshold Circle for their evening drumming and praying ritual. Somewhere nearby, each quester is alone—fasting from food, drinking only water, and focusing on the intention and question he or she has brought to the mountain.

There have been several days of eating, hiking, and sitting together in circle to prepare for this solo time. There have been months of communication and preparation and intention setting. There have been phone calls “in circle” between the guides and each quester. There are agreements, there is center, and there are guides and guardian. Each person has the essentials for living outside—sleeping pad and bag, tarp, water, and clothing. Cell phones and car keys are handed in for safekeeping. People have eaten a healthy diet leading up to the fast. There are many moments of ceremony.

Alone, the questers begin to understand that everything stands with them: the rocks, the trees, the wind, the sun and stars, the weather, the mountains, the big and little birds, the big and little creatures. There is time to breathe, time to remember. Through traditional and self-generated ceremony, they explore the larger questions of their lives.

All of us can hurry along from day to day and make a good enough story to steer our way through ordinary events, and sometimes life offers us extraordinary events and we watch our story fall apart. It is necessary for one narrative to shatter into nonsense so that another narrative can emerge to make new sense. At these times, we step aside from busyness to remember that surrender is part of strength, that stopping is part of going forward, that disintegration is part of reintegration, that giving up an old story can be the source of the next story. And we remember that for thousands of years, the circle has held our kind as we turn to the solace of nature with our questions.

The check-ins on wilderness quests before and after solo time are deep and unhurried. There is no place else to go; there is nothing else to do. The talking piece moves round and round: we each speak to the center; we each listen at the rim. We find the universal questions that fuel our individual stories. It is said that if we really understand what is given us on our solo time, we will understand our whole lives.

We two women who vowed to mainstream circle process are also dedicated to taking people into nature, reawakening the fundamental understanding that everything is interconnected—nature and technology; spirit and practicality; past, present, and future. The purpose of the ceremonies embedded in the quest is to experience a willing death within life: to let go of mental constructs and the humancentric and technocentric environments we have made and allow nature to offer us rebirth. This is done by emptying ourselves—of food, distraction, relationship, comfort—and noticing what is present and presenting itself to our wonderment. At puberty, the child dies into the young adult; at marriage, the single self dies into the partner self; at parenthood, the partner joins with the child to raise the next generation; at points of professional shift, the old path dies into the new path; and the adult dies into the elder. Combining an immersion into the natural world with the support of community and time for solitude, a wilderness quest is a powerful way to take the next step in one’s life.

Story and circle are essential elements of questing. Telling one’s story to a community and listening to others’ stories inform the new life being shaped. The power of story in the quest circle is to have a community witness the emerging self and bring it into existence. This happens in the quest, and it happens as the quest shows up in initiatory moments in our working lives. The mountain can metaphorically come to us—in the boardroom, the office cubicle, the community hall, the living room.

If we step into circle as presence beyond methodology, new stories can be born. Members of an embittered team can let go of their grudges and reclaim respect for one another. A dogmatic leader can release himself or herself into shared leadership. A floundering company can find the courage to restore its identity and establish a new direction.

We are all in a period now where our survival depends on our ability to rectify the issues that divide the human family. Whatever else we are doing in the decades of our lives, in the busyness of our work and daily routines, the need to keep mending the world is the story within the story. The storycatching level of circle experience is not about answers and fixes and policy shifts—though that may come out of story time. Storycatching is about opening our hearts to strangers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and family and being moved by the human spirit in all its confusion and courage.