This is a draft excerpt from the intro/overview for the new book, Narrative Nexus.
The inspiration for this book emerged from workshops I’ve done over the years on the power of storytelling in the practice of leadership. What struck me in working with leaders across industries and communities is how we are losing our capacity to be a narrative culture. When I ask leaders to tell me stories that could convey their values or most significant character traits, they come up with few stories. The ones they do produce are “stories” that offer no narrative qualities, only lists of facts and opinions. When someone asks me if I want the “long” or “short” version of a significant life story, the long one maybe lasts four minutes. I grew up in a narrative culture where the abridged, Cliff’s Notes version of the story would last four minutes. We want to know why some of our connections are superficial and short-lived, lacking the sustainable power for a life-time. We are at the same time not surprised by the connections that survive decades, even decades of silence, connections deeply rooted in shared stories. Connections that are instantaneously ignited by even a few of the stories that today continue to form the basis of our unconditional bonds. We live in a culture where it has become more acceptable to speak in lists and sound bites than in stories, even though lists and sound bites have no surrogate power. Even when the public media publishes “stories”, they are accountings of facts and opinions. When I started doing these workshops with leaders who somehow believed in the power of stories over the power of emails and policy manuals, I knew that in order to be authentic to the learning, I had to present my own stories. To my amazement, I found I had to spend a significant amount of time creating my own stories that could convey what would have otherwise been the conceptualizations of lists and sound bites. This crafting happens naturally in the repeated and evolving tellings around the kitchen table, the stoop and across the fence. We’ve now moved into the golden age of connection. Every day more people on the planet are connecting with familiar and new faces, voices, and posts in every media possible. We have become clear that the quality of our lives and the quality of our connections will forever be inseparably related. And as the earth continues to “flatten” in connective opportunities, the quality more than the quantity of our connectivity will become more important. We are finally realizing that we will only survive, and thrive, as a planet to the extent that we replace competition, isolation, and fragmentation with connection. The message of this book is that the most powerful way we connect with each other is through our stories. As it turns out, a single narrative has more power to connect us than a thousand facts and opinions. The power of facts and opinions is simply in their potential as story fragments. There is something about a story that creates the kind of resonance we associate with high quality connections. When we weave the facts and opinions of our experiences into narratives, our stories are born. Whether we’re talking about our most mundane or dramatic life events, our experience does not automatically self-organize into stories. The only stories we have are the stories we create. Networks and communities that thrive are those where people spend time together creating, inviting, and sharing the gifts of their stories. The core of the book talks about storycrafting, storytelling, and storylistening. Storycrafting is how we draw from the fragments of our experiences to create our stories that express narrative richness and reveal something significant about us. Storytelling is how we select the stories that have the best chance of connecting us and how we tell these stories in a ways that engage each other’s sense of anticipation and imagination. Storylistening is how we co-craft each other’s stories with our reactions and questions and participate in the story-world that encircles both listener and teller alike. My hope is that your connections thrive because of the rich narrative qualities of these connections. Live large, story on.
