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“Dashboard Smashboard” OR “What We’ve Been Up To This Year”

October 15, 2018
For the past six months, it’s been anything but business-as-usual around here, and here’s why. In March of this year, our attention got swept away by a development that originated in Bentonville, Arkansas. My friend Donna, who has been a bigSTORY client at her previous two companies, hosted a party at her house in Bentonville. Donna throws the kinds of parties worth traveling a day to attend. Plus we were going to talk business. I had a double reason for going. While she was effortlessly whipping up a magnificent feast for 20 people who’d be attending the party that evening, I sat at her kitchen counter and walked her through a dossier of bigSTORY concepts, aspects of our offering that we’d developed and honed since she and I last had a meaningful conversation. 20 minutes into our conversation, she told me about a company she’s been advising back in Pittsburgh, her hometown. A tech company that’s been building a platform she thought was perfect to implement bigSTORY at enterprise scale. “We have to go to Pittsburgh and meet with those guys,” she said. This was music to my ears. As my colleagues at bigSTORY will tell you, nearly since our inception in 2015, I’ve been mapping a tool for scaling our work. ‘The Dashboard’ I called it, and defined it as “a way for an organization’s leaders to monitor and direct the story activities of the enterprise.” Or we sometimes referred to it ‘The Magic Compass,’ which we described as “a technology that would give a group direction based on where they are in their journey.” I went into this rap with Donna. She waved her hand dismissively [but not arrogantly]. “Dashboard, smashboard,” she said [or words to that effect]. “Yes, there’s a dashboard [in the Pittsburghers’ platform]. But that’s not the important part. The important part is the inputs. Where does that data come from?” I was gobsmacked. I was Everlasting Gobstoppered! The inputs! Of course! It was a classic cinematic reversal. I’d been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Been on the wrong side of the looking glass. My osmosis had been reversed. The magic would happen on the other side of the looking glass–the inputs! Two weeks later, Donna and I were in Pittsburgh to meet with the engineers and behavioral scientists at Thrive, the small start-up she’d been advising. She led a group of 8 of us in a one-day session focused on the feasibility of our collaboration. It all seemed feasible. To all of us. There was just one thing that, for me, was still a question. A hiccup. The 21-day duration Donna was recommending as the optimal time frame for a bigSTORY enterprise application? I wasn’t quite seeing it. NEXT: How I realized that 21 days was the perfect time frame for our new product. 

The Man in Row 15

April 3, 2018
We don’t care about one another as human beings. Our interests are purely our own. We are oblivious to the pain of others as long as our own comfort is secure. We lack empathy. The fates of those we don’t know, or who cannot help us, are no concern of ours. Our public smiles conceal our private aggressions. What we preach on social media, we fail to practice in person. Our privilege leads us to interpret minor inconveniences as major obstacles. All this is, sad to say, true. The proof of its truth is an experience all of us who travel by air with any frequency have had. Here’s the scene: You are a young mother traveling with a child under the age of one. Her name is Isabel. She has been fussy and out of sorts for the entire flight, which was delayed, and now you’re an hour and twenty minutes late arriving at the airport where you are to catch a connecting flight  to visit your parents, who are going to meet their first grandchild for the first time. As you land at your connecting airport, the clock is ticking. Your heart is racing. Your anxiety level is spiking. Back in seat 35F you’re checking the time every thirty seconds and re-calculating the odds of getting to your connecting flight before the gate closes. Your pilot announces that because you’re late arriving, another plane is parked at your assigned gate, and you’ll be waiting another five to ten minutes before you can taxi in. You ask a flight attendant what gate you’re arriving at. It’s gate 8A. The gate for your connecting flight is gate 112, at the other end of the airport. You feel tears welling up. Isabel, alarmed at seeing your tears, begins bawling loudly. By the time your plane begins taxiing to the gate, you’ve half-succeeded in pacifying Isabel. A flight attendant gets on the P.A. and makes this classic airline announcement: “We have a number of passengers who have connecting flights. If those of you for whom [CITY NAME] is the final destination can please remain in your seats so those passengers can de-plane first and make their connections, we would appreciate it, and I’m sure they will, too.” And then what happens? The truth. With the baby on your belly carrier, you hop up the instant the plane stops and the seat belt chime sounds. You yank your suitcase out of the overhead, conking a passenger on the head in your harried process. People in row 34 let you through. And then you’re stuck. Because nearly every single person in rows 1-33 has ignored the flight attendant’s request. The passengers in First Class exit without a second thought. The rules don’t apply to them. Common courtesy is exactly that. Common. You push past passengers blocking the aisle, excusing yourself as best you can. “Excuse me. Excuse me. Connecting flight. I’m going to miss my flight.” People look annoyed. Like they doubt you. Like you’re

Elizabeth Holmes, Storyteller

March 16, 2018
Want proof that a ‘Hollywood model’ of storytelling is insufficient for business communication?  Look no further than the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes — which, of course, Hollywood is going to turn into a major motion picture. A comedy directed by Adam [Anchorman] McKay, to star Jennifer Lawrence as Ms. Holmes. Holmes has been accused by the SEC of defrauding investors in her company, Theranos, of $700 million. That’s one way of looking at it. Here’s another way. Holmes told a hell of a story. Between these two perspectives sits the issue: In business, and in life, a skilled storyteller can conceal  as much or more than she or he reveals–can, in effect, put one over on the audience. Who, after all, is a better storyteller than an embezzler? Bernie Madoff was a fantastic storyteller. He told a story that long-conned even entertainment industry pros like  Jeffrey Katzenberg [Dreamworks co-founder], Arnon Milchan [producer of Fight Club] and actors John Malkovich, Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon. In a Hollywood storytelling model, when you want your audience to believe in your fiction, you’re asking them for what’s called ‘the willing suspension of disbelief.’ For example, there’s no good reason why, in Home Alone, Kevin could order pizza for himself over phone, but never called the cops to save him from the burglars. No logical explanation for how, in The Shawshank Redemption, Andy could cover his secret tunnel with a poster of Raquel Welch that he would’ve had to fasten to the wall of his prison cell from inside the tunnel. Fantasy, science fiction and magical realism are all genres that ask the audience to take leaps of unquestioning faith. So is a Ponzi scheme like the one run by Madoff. So was Theranos. Holmes, with her ‘dropping out of Stanford to be a billionaire’ pedigree, her wealthy family friends, her fluency in Mandarin and in the lingo of genomics, her calculatedly Steve Jobsian wardrobe–whose cover story was literally a story that covered shit up–excelled at getting her audience to willingly suspend their disbelief. Walgreens suspended theirs to the tune of $140 million, and has had to go to court to recover damages like a jilted spouse seeking alimony. Other willing suspenders of disbelief will spend years, and mini-fortunes in legal fees, chasing down their lost dineros. Now, I should explain, this isn’t a hatchet job on storytelling in business. That is, after all, bigSTORY’s specialty. We’re not going to burn down the orchard because a few trees produce sour fruit. The storytelling skills of a Madoff or a Holmes were, in many ways, underestimated by their victims. That was a part of the con. And we can’t blame fictional narratives, either, as being the problem. Business thrives on fictions. On imagined futures promised and delivered. Elon Musk tells make-believe stories and then builds organizations to make them come true. Every entrepreneur, CEO and inventor, sooner or later follows a variation of this pretend-until-it-happens model. So while we bow down to storytelling and storytellers–they

Viola Spolin Day

March 8, 2018
By the trending on my Twitter feed, it looks to be #InternationalWomensDay. Aside from a skeptical voice whispering to me that this is a day for misogynists to cover their tracks for whatever they’re up to the rest of the year, I do believe it’s good to call attention to worthy women who might otherwise go unnoticed. One such woman is Viola Spolin. I call her the Godmother of Improv. In 1927, she got a $7,000 grant from the WPA to start a children’s theater on Chicago’s South Side, near Hyde Park. And right away, she saw she had a problem. The children living on the South Side at the time, a roiling cultural stew of blacks whose families had moved there from the rural south, hillbillies from Appalachia, Slavs, Bohemians, Russian Jews, and the Irish and Italian toughies who’d been battling it out in the streets for a generation–these children did not like or trust one another one bit. There was no way they were going to perform a play together. They couldn’t even get through a rehearsal without their deep-rooted animosities and prejudices [in Spolin’s etymology, ‘pre-judging’] boiling to the surface, making collaboration impossible. Fortunately for Spolin, she had a mentor, a Sociology professor at Northwestern named Neva Boyd, who’d done pioneering work in the importance of play in childhood development. Boyd and Spolin had already developed a robust set of play-focused learning activities for Chicago’s Hull House, a settlement house started by the renowned immigrant rights activist Jane Addams. And so Viola Spolin, to help her young thespians make the connections and build the trust required for a theater performance, began creating what are known in improv circles as ‘The Games.’ Hundreds of them. The Games became the foundation of improv theater in America. There’s a general perception in this country that improv theater is about comedy, where it has had its most visible commercial impact. This is in large part because in 1959, Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, who’d grown up helping her rehearse and direct her children’s theater productions, co-founded The Second City Theatre in Chicago, where he applied her games to the creation of comedy. Elevated them from rehearsal techniques to stage performance techniques. Created what Spolin called ‘the phenomenal outcomes’ and charged money for audiences to experience them. Today, let’s leapfrog back in time, to before 1959, when improv and comedy began their legendary duet, and remember Viola Spolin’s original intention for her work: productive collaborations between multi-cultural children. Today, what she created is more important and urgent than it has ever been, because today we are all children in a multi-cultural world. And we are not getting along any better than those battling Depression-era kids at her theater. We can all discover, as Spolin’s children did, that structured play is the secret to our success. She said there were three constant outcomes from the playing of improvised games: Communication, Connection and Transformation. In an era where Communication is crazier and more biased than

The Future of the Organization

March 6, 2018
Here’s an excerpt from my book, GameChangers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, on the future of the organization. [The resistance to this change is fierce. I cannot begin to tell you how many times, in the short existence of bigSTORY, we’ve encountered managers who claim they want to embrace the evolution I describe here, but whose true agenda is maintaining the status quo. Note to those managers: Don’t waste our time, or yours. To the rest of you: Let’s go!] Key phrases are my italics: Forces of Nature The old models are giving way today as surely as moun­tains give way to the elements.  The citadels of the Industrial Age will ei­ther collapse or evolve in wave after wave of change brought on by the global digital economy.  The Networked World demands a fluid model, one that can roll with those waves of change.  A new, more flexible and creative type of business organization has become inexo­rably necessary and ultimately unavoidable.  This new business structure will accommodate new ways of working and new genera­tions of employees doing that work.  This new structure is the net­work.  The networked organization communicates, both internally and with the world, via a massive, ever-changing constellation of channels.  It is increasingly non-hierarchical.  It provides fertile ter­ritory for those businesspeople with entrepreneurial instincts, no matter where they reside in the organizational scheme of things. Just as in the Industrial Age, the organizations of the Net­worked World mirror the way products get produced.  The way products get produced today is via networks.  These networks enable the complex web of communication required to connect production lines that may run all the way from Kokomo to Kinshasa; and they open the endless matrix of marketing, sales and distribution points made possible by the internet.  The effectiveness of a com­pany’s performance in this wonderfully chaotic networked environ­ment will ultimately decide the success of the business. Organizations designed to thrive in the Networked World are more biological than industrial.  They resemble their employees more than their employees resemble them.  They are highly adaptive, open, sensitive to their culture and their environment, and ultra-re­sponsive to their audience.  They continuously evolve, nurtured by a steady stream of intelligent input from inside and outside the organi­zational organism.  In this biological archetype, where good ideas originate is not half as important as how those good ideas are nur­tured toward realization and profitability. [A lot of you understand that this is What the organization will inevitably become, not through any particular intention as much as through the forces of nature acting on the business environment. See us for the How.]

Material Matters

February 13, 2018
It’s good organizational practice to express stories in as many different media as possible, and by media I don’t mean the obvious platforms–video, audio, social, podcasts, press releases, books, memes, and what have you, though there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re standard story delivery systems. I mean media the way artists think of the substances they use to make art. Which can mean anything at hand that we can shape and move in the world. We call this stuff material.  Material can be the ingredients of a product or the people and machines who manufacture it. It can be the soil or what grows in it, or both. It can be your fellow human beings, their generosity, desire, intuition or any other emotion that motivates us. Material can be virtual or physical. It can be a fish or the act of fishing. Money is material. So is poverty. Love is material. So is hate. Silicon is material and so is the Valley. The point is, for stories to matter, they must matter materially. That is, stuff has to move in the world as a result of a story getting told or lived. The more materials your organization has in its storytelling inventory, the more ways it will find to tell its story, and the more ways it finds to tell its story, the more successful it will be at consistently connecting with its audience. Here are a couple of examples of bigSTORY clients using materials to produce stories that matter, each in their own unique way: Recently, we collaborated with the co-founder and head chef for our client, Nybll, Kristen Nelson Thibeault, to design a dinner we called Storytelling with Food. Each course of the meal is a different act in the story. The essential communication happens through the senses. This is as direct as storytelling can get. No brain, thought, ego or judgment intrudes on or re-interprets the experience. SalesForce.com executives recently tasted the truth of Nybll’s storytelling at a dinner Kristen prepared for them in Manhattan. Check out the material:     Ron Finley, ‘The Gangster Gardener,’ got to be a world renowned champion of the food justice movement because he told a story with a garden planted where the City of L.A. said you couldn’t do it. He’s currently in the process collaborating with artists in his network to tell a story with shovels supplied to him by the Fiskars tool company.*     *To our dismay, the Fiskars marketing team does not, as of this post, recognize the value of the story Ron and his friends are telling with the shovels-as-art. They sent him 30 shovels and called it a day. They apparently don’t understand the storytelling principle I’m describing here–material matters. The uniqueness of a story about urban gardening told with shovels can be incredibly valuable to them, because it will matter in a way that nothing else in their storytelling repertoire can. We’re still hopeful they’ll come around. Sponsorship support for Ron’s project will get

Eliminating the M-Word

January 29, 2018
Among the most-frequently heard complaints by employees, it doesn’t matter how large or small a company is–is that there are too many meetings. That meetings are too long. Involve too many people, many of whom spend most of the meeting distracted by texts and emails. That they don’t accomplish anything, or that what they accomplish isn’t cost effective. Two stories– From a friend of ours who works in visual effects for an entertainment company: “We were down to the last couple of months on the project. The delivery schedule was super-tight, and as usual at this stage, there was a budget crunch. We were running over, and my team, as usual, was going to pay the price for all the mistakes people had made during production that we were supposed to fix in post without enough time, money or staff to do it. The producer called a meeting to see how we could cut two hundred thousand dollars out of the budget. When I got to the meeting, there were ten people in the room. The department heads, and a couple of studio execs. I told the producer, ‘Cancel this meeting and the next two we’re going to have with this same group. There’s your 200K. Problem solved.’”   From friend who coaches leaders in software development: “I was hired by [A BIG OLD U.S. AUTO COMPANY] to work with twelve leaders of their software development leadership group for two days. These are the people in charge of technology for the entire company, mission critical stuff, and our workshop was supposed to set their agenda for the next couple of years–they call it ‘chartering’–and help them settle on the problems that most needed solving. Big problems, crucial to the future of the company and its products. Everyone brought their laptops, and opened them first thing, which is the last thing I want, so my goal is to see if I can make the workshop interesting enough that it gets them to close their laptops. And I’m doing it. Within the first hour, they’ve all closed their laptops. And then they start getting phone calls and text messages pulling them out out into meetings. I don’t think after the first hour we had a full group for the entire two days. One manager came in, pulled someone out of the workshop, and they have a two hour meeting right there in the back of the room, while we’re trying to do the training! It was awful. You can’t ever get a group on the same page at the same time. I finally asked one of them, ‘What is the work you’re hired to do here?’ He said, ‘Develop software.’ I asked him how much time he spends every day, on average, actually doing his job. ‘An hour and a half,’ he said.’ He said, ‘I spend the rest my time in meetings.’”   You want to know how to have fewer meetings? Call your gatherings of employees something other than meetings.

“Who Do You Think You Are? Obama?”

January 22, 2018
This is a story about a big problem, writ small. The big problem is this: We can’t let go of the scripts and roles that have been assigned to us [or that we’ve assigned ourselves] and see the unscripted opportunities that are often right in front of us. Or, in the story I’m about to tell, right behind our backs. This problem is the reason governments bog down along partisan political lines and become vulnerable to over-confident bullies. It’s the reason marriages break up, families grow distant, and the social compact fractures along the fault lines of its gradients–tribes, communities, religions, states. It’s the problem that keeps teams from becoming better than the sum of their individual talents, organizations from innovating, and start-ups from evolving into sustainable companies. It’s why new ideas fall victim to operational urgencies, and get bogged down by legacy thinking. It’s the reason retailers will continue to feel Amazon-induced pain. The reason Millennial and Gen Z employees, change-craving adaptors, find old systems stifling and grow impatient quickly. It’s why brands find it hard to transform from consumerist marketing into lifestyle and social impact marketing. It’s the reason women and people of color clash with the white privileged patriarchy. The reason so many citizens in a country built and fueled by immigrant energy can’t feel empathy for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free. It’s why heterosexuals are threatened by queer sexuality and non-binary genders. Why we have hard time discerning between sexual assault or harassment and a really bad date. If we could choose only one remedy in order to evolve culturally, this would be a good problem to solve. Here’s how the problem played out in a small story: Last week, a good friend of mine, his date, his son, and I attended the opening of a huge social activist art exhibit called IntoAction in downtown Los Angeles. My friend’s son had a painting in the exhibit. We arrived at around 8pm. It was a good night. We ran into a lot of artist and activist friends. The art was powerful, surprising, inspiring. I got to meet Brandan ‘BMike’ Odums, whose awesome Studio Be exhibition in New Orleans I’d visited last year. BMike’s art was part of the exhibit, too. By 10:30, we were ready to leave. We left the exhibit building through a door that led to a walkway. At either end of the walkway were entrances to the exhibit. The back entrance, which led to the stage area where Van Jones was speaking and The Black Eyed Peas were to perform later, had a line of people waiting to get in. The front entrance had no line. In the diagram, we are the yellow dots. We were directed by two young doormen in jackets and ties [red dots in the diagram] to exit toward the back of the building. There were two problems with this: the street, where our Lyft was waiting, was in the opposite direction; and the line of

Story and Data, Sitting in a Tree

January 16, 2018
Numbers, on their own, represent quantity, and do not guarantee quality. 100 can be a perfect score on a test, an average IQ, or a bad round of golf. What guarantees quality is the story that provides context for the data. Data and stories are co-constituted. One cannot, does not, exist meaningfully without the other. The purpose stories serve, have always served, is to put data (i.e. recorded history) into a useful context and help us make smart bets on the future. Stories make sense of information. They help us choose what parts of our history are most relevant to our present-day decisions and are most likely to shape our desired futures. I wince when I hear leaders or their companies boast that they make ‘data-driven decisions.’ If data is driving your decisions and you don’t weight storytelling equally–if you’re not making [data + story]-driven decisions–you’re rowing with one oar in the water. We know what that means. You’re going to move in circles. When you rely on data alone to make decisions, good, mediocre and bad options for taking action can be presented with equal merit, and leave an audience wanting, and an organization disspirited. Because companies have so much data available to them, the circle may be so big it’ll look like a vector, a direction, for awhile, but sooner or later data will drive you right back to where you began. A recent NPR story about racial discrimination in online dating points out how OKCupid’s sophisticated data analytics can’t tell two people what they need to know about one another for a romance to blossom, especially across different cultural or racial boundaries. As an interviewee puts it, “The good stuff begins where the data ends.” What’s the good stuff? The seduction. The playfulness. The chemistry. The newness. The possibilities. The romance. If it’s like this for two individuals trying to figure out if they have a future together, how much more complex it is for a brand trying to connect with its customers, a company wanting to champion diversity, or a community trying to engage its citizens? Immensely more complex. No matter how much data you have on hand, the good stuff always begins where the data ends. The romancing can only happen if you’re willing to honor stories that co-exist with data. Think of data and story as inextricably entwined, two sides of a coin. Data without storytelling to give it life is like trying to start a fire without a spark. It’s lifeless. Flat. Uninspiring. On the flip side, storytelling that doesn’t respect data is propaganda. It manipulates and ultimately disappoints when the illusion evaporates. Imagine being on an OKCupid dinner date with a person who tells fascinating stories but doesn’t share any information about himself. Check, please! It’s data–where a person went to school, how they grew up, what they do for a living, what music they  like–that provides authentic points of connection, and avenues for sharing. No one tells a credible story without

Why They Play. And So Do You.

December 5, 2017
Corbin Smith  a writer from Vancouver, Washington, the host of the Take It Or Break It podcast, who is described in his logline as ‘a handsome young man of note,’ posted an article yesterday on Deadspin, entitled What I Learned at Phil Knight’s Big Basketball Party. It’s good sportswriting. Good writing, period. Viciously skeptical, profoundly aware and insightful, and at the same time confrontational and questioning, questioning, questioning–Smith gets at the physical and metaphorical guts of the game and people who play it, on the court and off. His writing whips you back in forth in time, and fills its lanes with observations, comparisons, human and mythic characters, and dimensions of the game that elevate sport to sacrament. To sacred quest. And who am I–Hoosier born, with a genetically coded desire to see the ball go through the basket–to dispute that notion? I have excerpted sections of the piece here, having to do with why players play, even those who sit on the bench, and never get into the game. What I would like you to see in these excerpts is the relationship Smith describes between a game and the stories it produces. Specifically, that the game does not have a fixed, pre-determined shape or purpose, it is a container whose shape is determined by the experiences, individual expressions of purpose, and stories it holds. Highlights are mine. I have to confess something, here: I am an NBA writer and NBA enthusiast, and a lot of times the appeal of college basketball is honestly a little lost on me. They’re just so much, like, worse at basketball, and also it’s just weird that they don’t make any money. But watching PSU square off with Duke in the Memorial Coliseum on PK80 Day One very briefly turned me into a believer. Because, here’s the thing: these players are all worse at basketball, for sure. Even the most talented ones are impossibly raw and not even remotely in control of their basketball idiom, yet. But what I had discounted, or maybe not considered, was that the fact that they’re worse doesn’t always make the game worse. Sometimes dealing with these limited and fucked-up skill sets can free basketball from standard tactics. Lately, I’ve been watching and fretting over the NBA becoming more and more uniform at its highest levels of competition—so much pick and roll, so many three pointers. College basketball, where you can’t quite trust anyone to do anything correctly, will never have this problem. And so it was that PSU, a Big Sky squad with no realistic hope of toppling Duke, basically went full gonzo, throwing out three guard lineups that spaced the floor, and pressing nonstop, basically daring Duke to beat them with Normal Basketball. Eventually, Duke opted out, went to a 2-3 zone, and sat around while PSU increasingly found themselves unable to get penetration and watched their small lead wilt into the sea… …Stanford looked logy and discouraged and suffused with dread over the coming year of conference play. PSU, on the

Thank you, Jeremi

December 5, 2017
He will be the first to tell you he’s ‘not going anywhere,’ so let me be the first to tell you that he is. We are losing Jeremi Karnell, the co-founder of bigSTORY as a partner in the company. He is taking a job with a Boston-based start up  that’s as close to a lock as a start-up can get, and their odds got even better now that they have him on their team. He may not be going anywhere, but we will miss him. Will miss the fabo collabos and adventures in Singapore and Milan and Marina del Rey. Will miss the work weeks at his family’s beautiful home Spicewood, Texas, on the part of Willie Nelson’s ranch Willie had to sell to the IRS for back taxes but then got to buy back for a dollar so he came out smelling like a yellow rose, in a deal only Willie Nelson could do. It is a home that comes with stories, and with neighbors who drop by after dinner and bring their guitar and sing by pool as we drink great wine and gaze out onto the moonlit Pedernales River down in the valley. How can we not miss that? We’ll miss the laughs we had on the regular, the agility of our collaborations, and the exceptional work we turned out together over the past two years for our clients. He says he’s not going anywhere, but his aesthetic and talent will be focused on another company’s clients now, and we will miss them. Jeremi brought a sophisticated, compelling signature to everything he touched, and it became our look, our signature, our first visual identity. He may not be going anywhere, but we are going to lose access to his bulldogs, Chloé and Mickey, and we’ll miss them because nothing is more grounded than two bulldogs in a room. It’s like two cops in a bar full of perps. Shit settles down in a hurry with two bulldogs in a room. Our shit isn’t going to settle down half as fast without Chloé and Mickey to settle it. We are losing him at the same time he’s getting back into competitive dancing after 10 years. Coincidence? Who cares? What we care about is that we’ll miss being able to point at his new dance videos on YouTube and say, That dude, the one doing the drop that would snap your spine or mine? — works with bigSTORY. I mean, we might still say it, but with much less cred. And yet, despite the sads we have about him leaving, what we will miss with his going is only a fraction of what he has given us by being part of our lives and our work for the past two years. His legacy is lasting here, and our door will always be open to him and his family and his bulldogs. Because all doors open for bulldogs. Here’s to great success in the new gig, J! Dance on, brother!

The Physics of Fern

August 31, 2017
My mother, Fern, turned 90 years old on Saturday, August 19. My brothers and sisters and I threw a party that day back in Ireland, Indiana, near the farm where we grew up, in a community center that used to be our grade school cafeteria. I think our mother is in her prime today. She is as active as ever. Beautiful as we’ve ever seen her. Her mind as active. It was a very happy birthday party. 200 people of all ages came from all over the U.S. to attend, including five of us from California. The local parish priest from ten years ago drove 70 miles so he could be there for 45 minutes. Her singing group, the Singing Seniors, performed three numbers, with Fern joining for two of them. No babies cried. There was a lot of laughter. Nobody made a snide remark, or expressed any kind of unhappiness or dissatisfaction. About anything. Everyone was extra-kind. Extra affectionate. Even people I know to be in physical pain were smiling that day. Nothing could deny us our happiness. I wish I could say how Fern’s love does its work in the world. Could come up with a formula or insight into how, having experienced an event as drenched in love as her birthday party, we walk on air for weeks. How time becomes timeless. How the nature of light itself changes so that everything we see and touch, and every other human being we encounter, is cast in the glow of that event. I wish I knew the physics of Fern, so that I could understand how love opens doors we didn’t even know existed, and how, when we walk through those doors, what we have been looking for and dreaming about can be sitting right there, smack in our path, like props and effects in a magic act a we had no idea we were capable of performing. I wish I could explain it, but I cannot. What I can tell you about the physics of Fern is that she has been a kind, and generous and loving person for every heartbeat of her 90 years, and on the day of her Birthday Party, and in the days leading up to it, we felt drawn to her and her story in wave after wave of emotion that carried us unquestioningly back to her, to be with her on her special day. It was effortless. Every decision was easy. All our priorities were in proper order. We all felt its lift. It was as if, in celebrating Fern’s Birthday, we were all getting to revisit the best parts of our own lives. I believe that her name, and the idea that ferns grow in fractal patterns is a meaningful coincidence. The two are somehow related, though I have no idea what that relationship is. All I know is that I see patterns emerge from previous patterns in my mother’s life. I see meaning in every connection. Her handwriting and

Total Eclipse of the Story

August 30, 2017
You know how the astronomers said not to look at the eclipse with our naked eyes, or we’d go blind? That’s the way I feel a lot of times about how managers look at data. They stare at it so hard they go blind. If the eclipse itself is all that’s in your frame of reference, your data isn’t worth much, because everyone has that same shot. There’s nothing particularly unique about it, you’re adding nothing new to the narrative, and your data quickly becomes a footnote to history, diminishing in relevance and value with each passing day. Imagine, by comparison, that you’re a six-year-old looking at the eclipse with your fellow Explorer Scouts. The eclipse is part of a story–a context for your data–that can last a lifetime. Over time, the value-creating context for data is story.  Check this narrative about how energy traders mis-played power demand during the eclipse.   I know zero about power grid management. Naureen S. Malik’s report does, however, fit a pattern we see in many organizations, communities and business sectors: An over-reliance by managers on data, in and of itself, to ‘make the call.’ Data is a subset of stories; and stories, not data, are how human beings see and experience the world. Parents don’t describe their children as statistics.  No car lover confines his or her love to cubic inches. The story of the eclipse is what caught everyone’s fancy, and got us motivated and moving. Not the data. The data is part of the story. It’s the rest of the story, the lived story, that includes emotions and intentions, that the traders missed.*  Was the eclipse a ‘distraction to the market,’ as one trader claims in Malik’s piece? No, it was the market. *Per the piece, Alphabet, via its Nest app, claims to have read and load-balanced energy demand in real time, in a private-public collaboration with the State of California. If true, well played, Nest and Cali. Well played.  

The Overproducers

July 29, 2017
I first know Kina as our receptionist. One day my friend, Nina, tells me Kina was The Next Big Thing at Dreamworks Music. It was a huge deal when they signed her, she says. What happened? I ask Nina [about Kina]. Nina shrugs. I know what she means. Dreamworks Music folded and Kina’s our receptionist. End of story. Later that day, I find Kina’s music on YouTube — the song that earned her a following and brought on the Dreamworks deal — Girl From The Gutter.Wow! How strong and certain her vibe, her voice. How defiant she is of any authority but her own. She transcends her setting by shining her light. She is a star! And here she is, sitting here in our midst like like some switchboard Cinderella. You know Kina?! gushes my friend, Stephen, an actor from New York, when I ask him if he’s heard Girl From The Gutter. Girl is the queen of it all! he proclaims. I thought you were the queen of it all, I say. I was, he says, until Kina came along. Then it was ovah! When I see Kina for real, in the light of her calling, we begin visiting at the office, talking shop. She gives me a demo of the songs she recorded for Dreamworks Music. I play them while driving. As I listen, I get sad, then a little pissed off. I hear what happened. The mix. It’s a crime. Buries her powerful voice like it’s a third chair flugelhorn. Like it’s a treasure Dreamworks doesn’t want dug up. They took what was distinctive about Kina’s voice and filtered, honed, equalized, compressed and polished it — until the magic got produced right on out of it. Death by a thousand hugs. David Geffen and Dreamworks Music overproduced Kina, and, ironically, they probably did it out of care and concern. It wasn’t the sole source of their demise as a music label, but chronic overproducing, which included a logo designed by Roy Lichtenstein, and a super-swank, overpriced redwood-heavy office in that well-known home to scrappy start-ups, Beverly Hills, was surely a factor. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Tech. Money. Sex. Furniture. Food. Drugs. Candy. Jewelry. Cats. Design Elements. Overindulgence is almost always bad form, no matter what the medium. Just because you have tools in the shed, doesn’t mean you pull all of them out to do a job. Overproducing Kina’s album cost Dreamworks its investment, and sent her sideways in her music career [though I don’t think anything will ever stop her]. An artist friend who designs movie posters for a living tells me that one piece of key poster art can have over 300 layers in it. 300 layers of what? I didn’t have to ask. I could tell by his tone: Random Opinions Research Says Justifications For My Position Shiny Objects Second Thoughts Redundant and Redundant Additions Respect Mah Authoritah And ultimately, where both audiences and content creators are concerned– Layer upon layer of Who Gives a Shit. Lots of ways to get to 300 layers.

Flag Flap

June 29, 2017
Storytelling Twists Dept: The Washington Post ran a story this week about how a celebration of diversity in Rockville, MD, in prosperous, multi-cultured Montgomery County, did not go as city officials planned. City officials decided to festoon their streets with flags representing the native countries of the city’s immigrant population, alongside American flags. Even the best-intentioned stories can produce shitty outcomes. Iraqi war Veterans in Rockville are disturbed. Iraqi-Americans are confused. Vietnamese-Americans are traumatized. And Rockville’s getting negative press. Probably the last thing they expected when they designed the campaign. There are two identifiable flaws, probably more lurking, in the design of Rockville’s flag game — what we call a ‘story engine’: Rockville city officials apparently didn’t give enough equity to the people in the community in the design of the game; They dropped some of the most potent meta language there is [flags] into story fields that are charged with painful histories many citizens of Montgomery County would like to forget. These are fundamental mistakes in organizational storytelling that we see all the time. In our experience, they can usually be remedied, or at least outcomes improved, with better designs for a group’s storytelling process. When more people can participate in the telling of a story, more people will buy into and benefit from how the story turns out.

There Must Be Dragons

June 5, 2017
If you’re in a business communication role, it can be tempting to insist that your story is all good news. That is, after all, how we are trained as organizational storytellers. We know of companies that are forbidden by their leadership from bringing up issues that threaten the very existence of the business. Imagine a Sears-Roebuck where no one could utter the word ‘e-commerce,’ or an Environmental Protection Agency where the phrase ‘climate change’ is banned. We are so conditioned to describe a Panglossian view of the world that even companies with stellar reputations will lose billions because no one wants to be the bearer of bad news. Messengers get killed on the regular. Everybody knows. As storytellers, it is our job to include bad news in the narratives we design. Why? Because we cannot tell a compelling story without ‘dragons’ — the perils and threats that stand between our characters and their objectives. Adding to the dilemma: the bigger the threat, the more engaging our story. Imagine a superhero film where the heroes win every single battle on their way to the climactic encounter. There’d be no tension. No twists or turns. It’d be a super-yawner of a story. Unless there are setbacks along our heroes’ path, unless there are tests and failures, their story isn’t as engaging to our audience as it otherwise might be. Yet in most companies, a storyteller would have to be looney to include dragons in the organizational narrative. How do you resolve this duality? You acknowledge your dragons in order to slay them. There are two realms where storytellers can slay dragons: When sharing stories inside the organization, your story’s dragons are communication-related business dysfunctions. These fall into six categories:  Strategies & Tactics, Tools & Training, Work Environment, Organization, Collaboration, Delivery. Each type of dysfunction has hidden costs associated with it. These hidden costs can be analyzed and rooted out, and the cost savings converted into revenue-producing activities. For example, a million dollars in cost savings, applied to Sales & Marketing at your current ROI, can return many times the cost savings in additional revenue. Rather than losing a million dollars, or saving a million dollars, you are making ten. When sharing stories with the marketplace, your story’s dragons are your customers’ pain points and market disruptions. While this is probably an easier framing to understand–who doesn’t want their brand to be in the business of making customers’ lives better and turning disruptions into growth opportunities?–it does require one significant adjustment on the part of the brand storyteller: Your story is not your own. It belongs to the customer. You are not authoring the story, you are participating in it in timely and systematic ways. The two takeaways: By identifying and eliminating communication dysfunctions you are not saving the company money you are making the company money. By honoring your customers’ stories instead of imposing your brand’s narrative on them, you’re earning their trust, their loyalty, and ultimately their advocacy. To persuade, participate.        

Know Your Game, Dog

May 9, 2017
You know what the traditional entertainment business is? It’s a poker game with six seats at the table. Five of the seats are taken, and one of the seats is always open. That seat is reserved for you, as long as you have money. Doesn’t matter what stakes you want to play for — whether you’re a multi-national cash machine like Coca-Cola, or an optometrist from Minneapolis who has ten grand to blow that’ll give you and your husband something to talk about at dinner parties for the next couple of years — there’s a game for you, with one seat open at the table. The five other seats at your table will be taken by, let’s say, an Actor, a Producer, an Agent, a Director, and a Distributor. Who they are and what roles they’re playing do not matter as much as the fact that they are all playing for the House. Each of them, individually, can afford to lose more hands than they win, because together they win a lot more hands than you. Eventually they end up with all your money. And that’s the game. The House Always Wins. This is the first rule of the entertainment business. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun and adventurous game if you can afford to play it. Or if you want to have a career playing for the House. Just know the game mechanics of what you’re getting into before you take a seat at the table, that’s all. Same as with any risk you take. The producer/writer Hal Barwood and I once got into a conversation over dinner in London about what to tell young folks from our small hometowns in New Hampshire and Indiana, respectively, who would basically show up on our doorsteps looking for help getting into the industry. “I tell them to give up and go home,” he said. “The ones that have a real chance of making it aren’t going to listen to you, they’re going to do it anyway, and the ones who aren’t going to make it will cut their losses early and go home, and I’ve saved them two or three years of disappointment and heartache.” So take Hal Barwood’s advice when it comes to your dreams. Give up. Go home. And to those of you who stay anyway, welcome. The only dreams that matter are those that come to life. Just know the game you’re getting into. Like this — Edgar Bronfman Jr., heir to the Seagrams fortune, a genuine lover of music and theater, lost control of his family’s company, and today that company is no more — outcomes of a game Universal and Warner Bros. seduced him into playing from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s. Know why wealthy entrepreneurs like the Simons real estate developers of Indianapolis [MGM, Love at First Bite] and big names like Coca Cola [Columbia Pictures] and Vivendi [Universal, with Bronfman, Jr.] thr0w up their hands and storm out of the game after playing it for a few years, and if you mention it around them

Preparing for a Post-Robot World

April 28, 2017
In the machine age, companies were built like machines, because machines are what most companies built and serviced. What companies build and service today are communities and customers. Let me clarify. That’s what the people in companies build and service. The machines [with increasing intensity] build and service one another. Despite that huge shift, and the fast-changing relationship between humans and machines, the machined organization is still the dominant human paradigm. Job titles and corresponding roles are as replaceable as circuit boards. The best job candidates are said to be those who can best “fill a role,” as if the role’s depth and dimensions have already been sized and machined. Consistent and predictable performance at scale is what these machined organizations are designed to produce. That’s not the problem. To stay in business, any company needs consistent and predictable performance, and to grow, it needs to scale. The problem is that machined orgs are not designed to produce anything else. To build communities and serve customers, companies operate in networks, which, unlike a well-built machine, are volatile and unpredictable. Under these uncertain conditions, machined orgs glitch out, and miss opportunities that happen too fast for them to respond. In extreme conditions, they beat up passengers and kill giant rabbits on airplanes, or allow grifters to loot the organization. The behaviors needed to deal with volatile and unpredictable conditions require improvisation and adaptability. In other words, the unpredictability of one’s behaviors must match the unpredictable conditions in which one operates. To a machined organization, these behaviors will look like disobedience or insubordination. Grounds for termination. These same behaviors, in a fluid, networked organization, are the money. They open avenues to creativity, innovation and market disruption. What maintains coherence in a company that incorporates, encourages, maybe even celebrates disruptive behaviors? Stories and the practice of organizational storytelling. Not just a story or a vision. The day-to-day act of building stories together. Organizational storytelling keeps employees engaged. Brands lively. And turns customers into communities. It’s the act of storytelling that accepts and celebrates the square peg that won’t fit the round hole. It’s stories that rise on the energy generated by unexpected events and random acts of inspiration. That remind us where we began, where we’re going, and why. That tell us who we are to one another, and who we are to our machines. That stir us to action. That move markets. That do what robots cannot. And that, as we prepare for a post-robot world, is our opportunity.

Beware The Linear Story

April 18, 2017
There’s a lot of recent buzz about storytelling in business. As a company in the storytelling business, we see it everywhere. Tweets galore. LinkedIn links aplenty. This is a caution to anyone investing in storytelling for your organization or community: Don’t limit yourself to linear story models. As storytellers who come out of Disney, who love the myth and lore of Hollywood, and appreciate and honor L.A., where we have an office, as The Storytelling Capital of the World, we say this on good authority, and as kindly as we can — don’t get locked into the Hollywood model of storytelling! It’s good as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. Here’s the reason why: In Hollywood, a story is the product you’re selling. People pay money for the story. Whether it’s a film, a TV show, or theater, the story is the basis of the transaction, and that story most likely is linear. It has a beginning, middle and end. It has a fixed duration. Half hour. Hour. 90 minutes. 107 minutes. Three Acts. Two Acts and an Intermission. Seven Acts With Commercials Between. Eleven Minutes of a VR Immersion. Where 99% of you are concerned, you are not selling stories. You can’t mimic the Pixar or Disney storytelling process and expect similar outcomes when their product is stories and yours is not. It’s like water skiing behind a swimming horse. Your objective and the horse’s process are mis-matched. So then if the story isn’t a product, what is it? What work do stories do? What is the return on your investment? To most organizations and communities, stories are a means of generating and describing value to a customer or citizen audience. Don’t get us wrong, linear stories still have their uses. They are valuable outputs, and we love them in all their forms. The inputs, however, are multi-linear. They come from infinite sources, and they come in non-fixed durations. They consist of many beginnings, middles and ends [to storylines]. They are heavy on data that lacks sufficient context to be understood and acted on. To have a linear storytelling mindset in a networked environment, with all the complexity it entails, is like trying to eat a plate of spaghetti with a straw. Can it be done? Probably, but your food will be cold and everyone will have moved on by the time you’re finished. And the meatballs? Fuggedaboudit. To turn all these inputs into productive realities, your storytelling process must be designed to address and resolve the complexities of the inputs. Big Data needs Big Story to be fully appreciated, like grapes need wine. Here, in Three Acts, is a [linear] story about why organizational storytelling must be non-linear: ACT ONE: YOU MUST BEGIN WITHOUT KNOWING THE END Organizations and communities begin every day, every quarter, every fiscal year, at multiple stages of multiple storylines. Those storylines will be tested and affected, and their tempo changed, by inputs of data and other communication throughout the the time frame. If you begin a day fixated on

Saving the Gangsta Garden

April 10, 2017
No one has picked up on the bigSTORY concepts faster than Ron Finley, known around the world as The Gangsta Gardener, a leader in the urban gardening and food justice movements. We put one of our concepts, ‘Levels of Meaning,’ to good use in his rehearsals and story analysis for his 2013 TED Talk, which has been viewed at least 3 million times. As his neighbor and friend, we can tell you that his garden is an oasis in our community–a place where people come from near and far to get their hands dirty, and, as he says, “change the community by changing the composition of the soil.” We’ve staged bigSTORY workshops in the abandoned swimming pool that serves as his plant nursery. We’ve had lots of business meetings in his garden. Ron was a guest speaker at our 2015 bigSTORY Conference. He helped us plant the box gardens in our backyard, as he has helped with hundreds of other gardens in our part of L.A. Ron and his assistant, Ashleigh Carter, have been working around the clock to save the Gangsta Garden from a land speculator called Strategic Acquisitions. Ron had to raise half a million dollars in less than a month to avoid eviction. With help from friends like Bette Midler, John Foraker the CEO of Annie’s Homegrown, Nell Newman, the CEO of Newman’s Own, and companies like General Mills–all of whom donated five- and six-figure sums– along with thousands of smaller donations, he did it! Ron raised the half a mil. It is in the hands of the lawyers now, and we hope Strategic Acquisitions recognizes that what Ron has built cannot be replaced by condos, and honors the commitment they made earlier to let him buy back the property. Last night, the CBS Evening News ran a story about Ron and the Gangsta Garden. bigSTORY gets a bit of play in it, too. The graffiti in the background of the interview the CBS reporter, Mireya Villareal, did with Ron was painted by his son, Del, who’s an amazing artist, as part of a bigSTORY workshop. It depicts what we call story formations. The formation Ron used to raise the half a million dollars is an ‘Assemblage’ narrative, whose structure resembles, fittingly enough, a rhizome plant, putting down shoots and roots, and making underground connections, until a field is filled. In this, the spring of a superbloom in the California deserts, it is completely in sync with nature to see Ron’s garden blooming anew in the food desert of South Central L.A.  

Fig Escapes Newton! Read All About It!

March 29, 2017
We’d known and worked with Andrew Strolin before. An early adopter of bigSTORY’s process, he is a fast learner, a nimble marketer and savvy about technology. In 2012, I re-connected with him in a Reno coffee shop to hear about his new job as Director of Marketing for Nature’s Bakery, a Reno-based company with plans to challenge one of the most venerable cookies on the supermarket shelf, the one and only Nabisco Fig Newton. ‘Check it out,’ he said, handing me a box of Nature’s Bakery Fig Bars. I liked the form factor and the branding. A box in muted greens and brown, with a simple logo and type. Inside the box, eight sealed packages containing two bars each, each double the size and weight of your standard Fig Newton. Strolin was excited. This wasn’t necessarily news to us. Excitement is his natural state. The guy can get wound up about re-stringing his guitar (which he plays like the pro he once was). Still, there was something intriguing about a new home for the forgotten fig, which had been locked up with sugar for generations inside Nabisco’s cookie dough prison. Freeing the forgotten fig–it was a good premise. We sampled the goods. Without all that sugar, the fig speaks for itself. The cookie part is pleasing to touch and taste. Not cakey or overly sweet. More substantial and textured, and healthier tasting, with a flavor that complements the fig. Two unique sensations become a third. And isn’t that what good stories are all about? In the beginning, Nature’s Bakery had almost zero distribution, none at all with big retailers, and very little marketing presence in Nevada or anywhere else. Strolin hustled samples out of his ‘office,’ which was his Subaru Outback. If there was a ski competition, a PTA meeting, a running or cycling event anywhere in northern Nevada, he and a small band of hired samplers hit it. His objective, he explained at the time, was to get a Nature’s Bakery Fig Bar “into every backpack and lunchbox in the state.” “We really started at the ground level,” explains the company’s founder, Dave Marson. “We went into local communities and started to build our brand from the bottom — taking it to 5K races, local sporting events. Our first customers were local moms, athletes, sports enthusiasts and healthy-lifestyle bloggers. We were looking for any person looking to be healthier.” Today, nearly five years later, guided by Marson’s vision, Nature’s Bakery is killing the cookie game, and Andrew Strolin’s energy and his skill as a brand storyteller have been a big part of it. He and his team have earned their way into the big retail networks, including Wal-mart, Costco, CVS, 7-11, Whole Foods. They’ve gone from one or two poorly placed shelf facings in their early distribution days to six or eight facings at eye level—prime shelf space—in most of their stores. The brand is current sold in 22 countries. As a privately-owned company, Nature’s Bakery doesn’t release its numbers, and Strolin will only say publicly

Talkin’ ‘Bout Practice

March 10, 2017
With very few exceptions, raising your game to an exceptional level of performance takes practice. It’s a well-worn bromide, as old as the punchline of the joke that goes– “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice!” Great performance artists practice. They rehearse weeks for a performance that will be timed in minutes. There’s no longer an off-season for professional athletes. Year-round practice is part of the job. Surgeons practice on cadavers and other specimens before operating on living humans. We can cite lots of examples of practice paying off in other fields, yet we see that, frequently, organizational storytellers slough off the practice of practicing. They (and their managers) can be so focused on performance that all they do is perform. Imagine dancers only dancing in front of an audience. Or athletes who only want to play competitive games. This can result in what we’d call good ‘street skills’ — engaging solo dancers or flashy playground players — but the fundamentals required to build a repertory of dancers or a team of players are missing, because fundamentals come to a performer in practice, where the elements of the game can be isolated, repeated, perfected, and built into a coherent performance involving multiple players in multiple contexts. The lack of practice when it comes to organizational storytelling isn’t necessarily related to a lack of resources. Training Magazine reported that U.S. companies spent $70.6 billion on training products and services in 2015.  Our hunch is that the bulk of that money is spent on performance. Learning how to use an app. Following a proscribed methodology. Implementing new systems. Our hunch is that the bulk of the training goes toward performance, and not the fundamentals needed to achieve those outcomes. Why is practice important for storytellers, and how is it different from performance? Practice offers space for exploration. In practice, only one path out of many has to pay off. This isn’t true in performance, where every every path or storyline has to pay off. Practice is a place where mistakes can be made. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not growing, because mistakes are essential for learning, and learning is the essence of growth. This is different from performance, where even one mistake can be disastrous. Practice is where our uniqueness as individuals informs the group. It is the space where ‘who I am’ evolves into ‘who we are, together.’ And–it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a dance company or a software company– ‘who we are, together’ is the essence of the brand’s performance. Practice is where we are inefficient. As the author, Kevin Kelly, says in a TED Talk, “Humans are experts at inefficiency. All art, discovery, innovation, creation, are inherently inefficient. Efficiency is for robots, not us.” Increasingly, where business is concerned, performance will be the domain of robots, and practice will be where humans excel. Practice is where we can objectively critique our performance before our audience does. It’s where we spot the weaknesses in our game that can be rectified before we take the stage. Why invite outside criticism before we have critiqued ourselves? So how, in a hyper-competitive business environment, with such heavy emphasis on performance, can

Storytelling Is The New Software

February 27, 2017
We’ve spent years studying with  Organizational Theorists, Rhetoricians, Consultants, Software Developers, Students, Architects, Fractal Theorists, Quantum Physicists, Shamans, Witches, Alchemists, Artists, Enterprise Architects, Dowsers, Gamers, Tribal Elders, Barbershop Proprietors, Performance Artists, Improvisers, Disney Animators, String Theorists, Clowns, Farmers, Cowboys, Bartenders and Storytellers working in every organizational ilk, from start-ups to Fortune 100s, in order to develop new ways of telling and sharing stories. Here’s what it all comes down to, especially now:  We are given choices in our personal and working lives between ‘Power With’ relationships, and ‘Power Over’ relationships  ‘Power With’ relationships thrive on diversity. They know that sharing power is not the same thing as giving it up, that leadership can manifest itself in many different roles, and that much about good leadership is invisible. Power Over relationships call for micro-managing, and demand constant attention. This often means creating a crisis just so a leader can lead in the most visible possible way, by playing the Hero. Power Over leaders play zero-sum games. Every win must be another’s loss. In fact, the ‘wins’ themselves are often defined solely by the fact that someone has else has ‘lost.’ Often, there’s no appreciable progress, no actual gain, instead, it’s that someone else is spiraling down faster than you are that matters to Power Over leaders. It’s all about that leverage. Power Over leaders are on an endless quest for a Dominant Narrative. This means relentless repetitive, monolithic, one-note messaging, and, because the game is win/lose, it also means quieting voices telling any story but the dominant one, and frequent scapegoating of those around you–people falling in and out of favor at a leader’s whim–to set the example of what can happen to any dissenter. And here’s the costly kicker: There’s always only one solution to any problem. No one can afford this approach any more. The test of a Dominant Narrative is how nonsensical–i.e. against the self-interests of those believing in it– it can be and still be believed. ‘Power With’ relationships, by contrast, call on Ensemble Storytelling. This results in leadership in which more voices are heard, resulting in more possibilities, faster, for solutions and productive outcomes. In Ensemble Storytelling, a Situation defines leadership roles, i.e. whose voices will be heard, and whose presence will be made visible, when, in a given scenario. ‘Power With’ leaders use Ensemble Storytelling as a basis for collaborative problem solving, iterative testing and optimization, and the fast pivoting required for complex, fast-evolving networks. Storytelling is the new Software

The Physics of You

February 17, 2017
There’s a good piece running in Scientific American demonstrating that ‘Storytelling is Surprisingly Arithmetic.’ (I’m geeking on how they use the word ‘arithmetic’ as an adjective!) Research done at the U. of Vermont on 1,300 works of fiction claims to have defined the math in ‘Great Literature.’ It’s not very different from what Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in a lecture years ago. Here’s why this Scientific American article is important to you: Your science is different. Chances are, you’re not in the business of writing fiction. You are in a different line of work, and it requires a different type of science. The science your story requires is more like physics than math. Your story can result in a movie or literature, but it can’t result only in a movie or literature. Your story is a play that must be enacted continuously and consistently in the present, in a thousand different locations, by ten thousand actors. It must connect poetry and product, science and magic, experiences and shares, conversations and customers. Across platforms, media, formats and time frames. To be effective with its audience, your story has to adapt every day to unexpected events and opportunities, and for that reason, it has to be more improvised than scripted. Your story is more like distributed software development than a book written by one author. More like jazz than classical music. Your story can be fiction, but only if it includes a roadmap for making the fiction come true. Pixar’s storytelling process is good for producing Pixar movies. You need a storytelling process that distinguishes you, and what you do. If you want the phenomena (products + stories) you produce to be unique, the apparatuses (processes) you use to produce them must be equally unique. That’s the physics of you.    

Every Chief Storyteller Needs a Tribe

January 18, 2017
Ray Wang (@raywang0), the CEO of Constellation Research , and Vala Afshar (@valaafshar), Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce.com, invited me to be on their first @DisrupTVShow webcast of the 2017, alongside my fellow storytellers, Rich Kylburg (@rlkylburg), the CMO of Arrow Electronics, and writer Heather Clancy (@greentechlady). We were doubly honored within 24 hours after the webcast when Vala, who’s got to be the most prolific online commenter I’ve ever known–when does dude sleep???–posted excerpts of our interview to the HuffPost, and titled it Why Every Business Needs a Chief Storyteller. He is 100% on the money. Every Business Does Need a Chief Storyteller. Here’s a reveal: Every Business Has One (And Maybe More) It’s a role most often played by a CEO. The job is telling stories that connect vision to action in a multitude of contexts. It is lonely, precarious high-wire work. A Chief Storyteller needs all the help he or she can get. Chiefs need tribes. The idea that an organization is, itself, a tribe of storytellers, that every employee is somehow responsible for moving the story forward, is more an ideal or an attitude than a reality. In reality, a lot of people are happy to show up at a place where they can share some type of camaraderie, get a paycheck that supports their lifestyle, and have health care for themselves and their family.  End of story. A storytelling tribe lives outside the boundaries of traditional job titles and the silos of a company’s divisions, and its practices extend beyond the messaging and persuading of classic marketing. Such tribes concern themselves with the experience of participating in a worthwhile story. What doors does your organization’s story open, and what will I discover when I walk through them? In this framework, a transaction is a beat in a story, not the end of a story. Members of a storytelling tribe can play a wide variety of roles. They are subject matter experts. Bringers of good news. Community managers. Publishers. Data miners. Enterprise Architects. Educators. Mapmakers. Gamifiers. Influencers. Connectors. Analysts. Animators. Documentarians. Producers. Developers. Synthesizers. Sniffers and Diviners. Intuitives and Empaths. Describers of the Future. Who’s in your storytelling tribe? Definitely a question worth answering going into 2017.  
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