3. Think of how you have connected the sensory clues you receive from the object to the way you think and feel about it. Can you see the connections you have made?
Try this exercise with other objects, maybe objects that you don’t have a particular connection with. What about these objects is different? Why don’t they tickle the emotions?
Developing the ability to consciously select designs that connect with our emotions should help us populate our lives with meaningful, satisfying objects and not just more stuff.
The above from Dan Buchner, director of industrial design, Design Continuum. (More info: www.dcontinuum.com)
Be Choosy.
Choose things in your life that will endure, that are a pleasure to use. Classic clothes never go out of style. Furniture should get better with age. Choose things because they delight you, not because they impress others. And never let things be more important than your family, friends, and your own spirit.
The above from Marney Morris, founder and president, Animatrix, and instructor in interactive design, Stanford University.
(More info: www.animatrix.com)
Five
STORY
Time for a pop quiz.
Back in Chapter 2, when I was presenting the three forces nudging us into the Conceptual Age, I offered some evidence to support my arguments. Let’s see how much you remember with this two-question midbook midterm.
Question 1. In the section on Asia, we learned that large amounts of white-collar work are going to places like India, China, and the Philippines. According to the research I cited, how many dollars in American wages are expected to shift to these low-cost locales over the next ten years?
Question 2. In the section on Automation, we learned that powerful software was reconfiguring, and often eliminating, the jobs of many knowledge workers in the West. Who is the John Henry of the Conceptual Age?
Unless you’ve got a photographic memory or a peculiar fascination with lost wages, you probably missed Question 1 and nailed Question 2.* Why? In Question 1, I asked you to recall a fact. In Question 2, I asked you to remember a story.
Our difficulty retrieving that isolated factoid, and our relative ease summoning the sad saga of Garry Kasparov, aren’t signs of flaccid intelligence or impending Alzheimer’s. They merely demonstrate how most minds work. Stories are easier to remember—because in many ways, stories are how we remember. “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought,” writes cognitive scientist Mark Turner in his book The Literary Mind. “Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining. . . . Most of our experience, our knowledge and our thinking is organized as stories.”1
Story is just as integral to the human experience as design. Think about that loincloth-draped prehistoric guy I mentioned last chapter—the one scraping flint against a rock and becoming a designer. When evening fell and he and his buddies returned home, they probably sat around the campfire trading tales about escaping saber-toothed tigers or renovating the family cave. His brain, like ours, had an internal “story grammar” that helped him understand the world not as a set of logical propositions but as a pattern of experiences. He explained himself and connected to others through stories.
But as important as story has been throughout humanity, and as central as it remains to how we think, in the Information Age it got something of a bad rap. Hollywood, Bollywood, and other entertainment centers revere story. But the rest of society, to the extent anyone even thinks about it, considers it fact’s less dependable younger sibling. Stories amuse; facts illuminate. Stories divert; facts reveal. Stories are for cover; facts are for real. The trouble with this view is twofold. First, as that pop quiz gave us a quick glimmer, it runs counter to how our minds actually work. Second, in the Conceptual Age, minimizing the importance of story places you in professional and personal peril.
Finding facts wasn’t always so easy. Until recently, much of the world’s data and information was piled on the dusty shelves of physical libraries. And the rest of it was housed in proprietary databases that only deep pocketed institutions could afford and well-trained experts could access. But today facts are ubiquitous, nearly free, and available at the speed of light. If you had wanted to find that lost-wages factoid, you probably could have typed a few words into Google, hit RETURN, and looked at what appeared on the screen a few seconds later. What’s unsurprising today would have seemed preposterous just fifteen years ago: an English-speaking thirteen-year-old in Zaire who’s connected to the Internet can find the current temperature in Brussels or the closing price of IBM stock or the name of Winston Churchill’s second finance minister as quickly and easily as the head librarian at Cambridge University. That’s glorious. But it has enormous consequences for how we work and live. When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.
“Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.”
—ROGER C. SCHANK,
cognitive scientist
And that is the essence of the aptitude of Story—context enriched by emotion.
Story exists where high concept and high touch intersect. Story is high concept because it sharpens our understanding of one thing by showing it in the context of something else. For instance, the John Henry parable helps us understand in a tightly compressed way what happened in the early stages of the Industrial Age. The Garry Kasparov tale then relates that story in a new context—thus conveying a complex idea in a more memorable and meaningful way than if, say, I had tortured you with a PowerPoint presentation on the automation of work. Story is high touch because stories almost always pack an emotional punch. John Henry perishes. Garry Kasparov is humbled. To paraphrase E. M. Forster’s famous observation, a fact is “The queen died and the king died.” A story is “The queen died and the king died of a broken heart.”
In his book Things That Make Us Smart, Don Norman crisply summarizes Story’s high-concept and high-touch essence:
Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions. . . . Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion.2
The ability to encapsulate, contextualize, and emotionalize has become vastly more important in the Conceptual Age. When so much routine knowledge work can be reduced to rules and farmed out to fast computers and smart L-Directed thinkers abroad, the more elusive abilities embodied by Story become more valuable. Likewise, as more people lead lives of abundance, we’ll have a greater opportunity to pursue lives of meaning. And stories—the ones we tell about ourselves, the ones we tell to ourselves—are often the vehicles we use in that pursuit. In the rest of this chapter, I’ll examine how the high-concept and high-touch capacity to weave events into an emotionally compelling narrative has become an essential aptitude in business, medicine, and personal life.
But first I need to tell you a story.
ONCE UPON A TIME, in a far-off land, lived a hero who was prosperous, happy, and respected by all. One day, three visitors arrived. They began pointing out the hero’s many flaws and told him he was unfit to remain. The hero resisted, but to no avail. He was ousted from his land and sent off to a new world. There, adrift and alone, he floundered. But with the help of a few he met during his exile, he transformed himself and vowed to make his way back. And eventually he did return, where he was welcomed to a place he scarcely recognized, but that he still understood was home.
Does that story sound familiar? It should. It’s a variation on what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey.??
? In his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell argued that all myths—across time and across cultures—contain the same basic ingredients and follow the same general recipe. There are never any new stories, he said—just the same stories retold. And the one overarching story, the blueprint for tales since humankind’s earliest days, is the “hero’s journey.” The hero’s journey has three main parts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The hero hears a call, refuses it at first, and then crosses the threshold into a new world. During Initiation, he faces stiff challenges and stares into the abyss. But along the way—usually with the help of mentors who give the hero a divine gift—he transforms and becomes at one with his new self. Then he returns, becoming the master of two worlds, committed to improving each. This structure underlies Homer’s Odyssey, the story of Buddha, the legend of King Arthur, the story of Sacagawea, Huckleberry Finn, Star Wars, The Matrix, and, Campbell would have argued, just about every other epic tale.
But there’s something else about the hero’s journey that you might not have noticed—and that I wasn’t conscious of myself until very recently. The hero’s journey is the underlying story of this book. It begins with the knowledge worker, the master of L-Directed aptitudes. She faces a transformative crisis (wrought by Abundance, Asia, and Automation) and must answer the call (of a new way to work and live.) She resists the call at first (protesting outsourcing, denying that things need to change). But eventually she crosses the threshold (into the Conceptual Age). She faces challenges and difficulties (mastering R-Directed aptitudes). But she perseveres, acquires those capabilities, and returns as someone who can inhabit both worlds (she has a whole new mind).
“The story—from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
—URSULA K. LE GUIN
Now, I’m not suggesting that A Whole New Mind has some mythic stature. Hardly. Indeed, my point is just the opposite. It’s to show that stories in general, and the story structure of the hero’s journey in particular, lurk everywhere. Our tendency to see and explain the world in common narratives is so deeply ingrained that we often don’t notice it—even when we’ve written the words ourselves. In the Conceptual Age, however, we must awaken to the power of narrative.
The Story Business
Robert McKee is one of the most influential figures in Hollywood, but you’ll never see his face on the screen or his name on the closing credits. For the past fifteen years, in three-day seminars in the United States and Europe, McKee has taught aspiring screenwriters how to craft a compelling story. Some forty thousand people have plunked down $600 for his Story Seminar. And his students have gone on to win twenty-six Academy Awards. Anybody who hopes to write a screenplay begins by reading his book—Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of Screenwriting. But in recent years, McKee has attracted a following among people whose only connection to the movie business comes when they buy a ticket and a tub of popcorn at the local multiplex: the executives, entrepreneurs, and workers of traditional business.
Why do they seek McKee’s counsel?
I’ll let the irascible master answer in his own words: “Although businesspeople are often suspicious of stories . . . the fact is that statistics are used to tell lies and damned lies, while accounting reports are often BS in a ball gown. . . . If a businessperson understands that his or her own mind naturally wants to frame experience in a story, the key to moving the audience is not to resist this impulse but to embrace it.”3
Story, businesses are realizing, means big money. Economists Deirdre McCloskey and Arjo Klamer calculate that persuasion—advertising, counseling, consulting, and so on—accounts for 25 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. If, as some posit, Story is a component of half those persuasive efforts, then Story is worth about $1 trillion a year to the U.S. economy.4 So organizations are embracing the story ethic espoused by McKee and others—often in unlikely ways.
The clearest example is a nascent movement called “organizational storytelling,” which aims to make organizations aware of the stories that exist within their walls—and then to use those stories in pursuit of organizational goals. One of the founders of the movement is Steve Denning, an Australian who began his career as a lawyer in Sydney and later became a midlevel executive at the World Bank. “I was a left brain person,” he says. “Big organizations love that kind of person.”
Then one day, in a World Bank shake-up, he was booted from a job he loved and banished to the organizational equivalent of Siberia: a department known as “knowledge management,” corporate jargon for how a company organizes its vast reserves of information and experience. Denning became the department’s chief. And—grudgingly at first—he underwent a transformation. (Sounds like a hero’s journey, doesn’t it?) As he sought to understand what the World Bank knew—that is, what knowledge required management—Denning discovered that he learned more from trading stories in the cafeteria than he did from reading the bank’s official documents and reports. An organization’s knowledge, he realized, is contained in its stories. And that meant that if he was really going to be the top knowledge honcho at the bank, he had to go well beyond the L-Directed lawyer-executive approach he’d learned in the first twenty-five years of his career. So he made the World Bank a leader in knowledge management by making it a pioneer in using stories to contain and convey knowledge. “Storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking,” he says. “It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds. . . . Abstract analysis is easier to understand when seen through the lens of a well-chosen story.”5 Now Denning is spreading his message—and telling his story—to organizations worldwide.
Denning isn’t the only one taken with stories’ business possibilities. 3M gives its top executives storytelling lessons. NASA has begun using storytelling in its knowledge management initiatives. And Xerox—recognizing that its repair personnel learned to fix machines by trading stories rather than by reading manuals—has collected its stories into a database called Eureka that Fortune estimates is worth $100 million to the company. In addition, several ventures have emerged to help existing companies harvest their internal stories. One such firm is StoryQuest, based in suburban Chicago. It dispatches interviewers to a company, records the stories of that company’s employees, and then produces a CD that uses these personal narratives to yield broader insights about the company’s culture and mission. In the United Kingdom, Richard Olivier, the son of Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright and a former Shakespearean theater director, now advises large companies about how to integrate Story into their operations. Olivier calls his technique “mytho-drama.” His clients read and act Shakespeare’s plays to elicit lessons in leadership and corporate governance. “Logical and analytical abilities alone can no longer guarantee success,” Olivier says.6 Successful businesspeople must be able to combine the science of accounting and finance with the art of Story.
“Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.”
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL
It’s easy to make fun of a purchasing manager pretending to be Titus Andronicus. But the fact that slow-moving, change-resistant large organizations have begun wrestling with Story—a word that itself would have made someone an executive suite laughingstock a decade ago—is telling. And it speaks to that innate capacity that I mentioned earlier. As Alan Kay, a Hewlett-Packard executive and cofounder of Xerox PARC, puts it: “Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.”
STORY IS having another important impact on business. Like design, it is becoming a key way for individuals and entrepreneurs to distinguish their goods and services in a crowded marketplace. The best way to explain this phenomenon is to tell you a cou
ple of stories from my own consumer life.
The first example of story-as-differentiator arrived in the mail. My family’s neighborhood in northwest Washington, D.C., is in the midst of a slow generational turnover. The people who bought their houses decades ago and raised their kids in tidy brick colonials have started to retire. Meantime, young couples with children want to move into the neighborhood because it offers the conveniences of a suburb without actually having to live in one. Since prospective buyers far outnumber potential sellers, prices have been climbing. And so, to entice a few more of the older folks to get up and go, realtors frequently send postcards to every address in the neighborhood touting the latest sky-high price they’ve gotten for one of these modest homes. But in the mail one day came a realtor postcard that was different. I nearly threw it out at first. On one side it had the usual photo—a house a few blocks away that the realtor had just sold. But on the other side, instead of the sales price in 72-point type followed by a row of exclamation points, it had the following:
Florence Skretowicz and her husband bought this delightful home in 1955. They paid $20,000 in cash for it and loved the many special details like solid oak floors, large windows including many with leaded glass, oak millwork around the doors, . . . an Old English fireplace mantle, and a garden pond. At age 91, Florence moved to Brighton Gardens, a retirement community in Friendship Heights, and the Fernandez sisters, neighbors and old family friends, asked me to sell this jewel. I was honored. Florence let us clear out the house, paint it inside and out, refinish the floors, and wash the windows.