stories & organizations

In China and Japan there is a legend or proverb that says an invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstances. (1)

The thread may stretch or tangle but never break. As a child grows, the thread shortens, drawing closer those people who are destined to be together, binding families and friends forever.

The term survives translation into both French (le fil rouge) and German (der rote Faden). In both cases it signifies a connecting thread that runs through plots, themes and places.

CC Luigi Anzivino

Which brings us to stories. And our first principle is that each storied experience goes deeper and reaches further when there is a visible red thread running through it.

In a piece of research or communication, the red thread carries records, experiences, texture and personal testimony from the earliest framing and gathering stages right through to the end product.

By enabling the contributors to a process or project to hear their own voices and stories in the bigger story, it reconnects the individual and the organization. Feeling themselves to be seen and heard, they are more inclined to use their influence in the bigger story more thoughtfully.

Issue at stake | The connection between individual and organization is ruptured. There is fragmentation and loss of meaning and purpose. People feel their voices are not heard, so they lose the will to contribute.

Speed and temporariness of association make this worse, disconnecting the past from the present and making the future feel unimaginable and irrelevant. Shortened timeframes in individual perspectives throw each individual back on their on resources and survival tactics and distance them from making the values, intentions and plans of the organisation their own.

How the principle helps | The red thread allows individuals to hear their own voices and stories reincorporated (2) in the bigger stories, providing a degree of coherence that is, in itself, meaning.

The main idea is that, whatever the trajectory of the work as it unfolds, the things that result will show traces of the tellers of the original stories. These traces provide a bond of connection and commitment between the individual and the bigger picture. Here are some examples from our work…

• A building might show the traces of a workshop where people shared experiences, hopes and fears about integrated health working.
• The memories that people hold of a building might become part of the fabric of that building when it is opened after renovation.
• Humanitarian aid workers can see themselves and their experiences echoed in an information and knowledge strategy for emergency response.
• Frontline workers in two merging government departments can see the shadows of themselves and the dark underbelly of the merger in fictional stories carried from the frontline to be listened to, uncomfortably, by the Board.

Instead of people staying connected to people by a red thread, people stay connected to stories, and stories to people. It is this tug and pull that allows people to continue to see themselves as part of, and influential in, the story, rather than feel that the story is happening around them.

It scales up and it scales down. A one-day workshop for a whole organisation planning the next year or two might be sequenced as:

• postcards (personal, arrival, past to present)
• jumpstart stories about pride at work (past to present)
• values and qualities derived from jumpstart stories retold (personal to collective)
• analogies that bring those values to life (variations on a theme)
• scenarios that explore the storied expression of this material in different settings (imagined near futures)
• a timeline of the recent past (arrival in the present, collective and individual)
• future stories with backcasting/the future backwards (imagined futures threaded back to the present.

Shifts in perspective, place, the direction in which time is running, real and imagined situations… All these things are threaded together so that shared individual and collective stories become a collective resource that allows the individuals to see themselves differently in terms of:

• How they have arrived together in the present.
• How that present looks and feels.
• How they can move together into the future.

Exactly the same thing might happen at scale in the narrative journey of a larger piece of work, for example in the case of the Asian Development Bank. There we collected legacy stories and used them to bring personal experiences of the past to bear on delivering the Bank’s future mission. The scale and complexity grows, the possibilities increase, but the principle of the red thread runs through it all.

In the words of Walter Benjamin (3)

‘Thus the traces of the storyteller cling to the story, the way the hand prints of a potter cling to the clay vessel.’

This is the second of a series of posts about how organizations and business networks can foster their story systems. The first in the series was The One-Winged Butterfly.

REFERENCES & NOTES

(1) We didn’t know this when we fell on the term red thread to describe the process of folding each part of the gathering and shaping process into the next. The idea I had originally might have been inspired by the use of red tacking thread in sewing or by imaginging a red thread through electrical cables.

(2) The original label for this principle was reincorporation, from Keith Johnstone Impro: improvisation and the theatre (1981, Methuen). In the chapter on narrative skills, Johnstone writes (p116):

‘The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still “balance” it and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them. Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn’t tell you why they applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure.’

(3) Walter Benjamin The Storyteller, reflections on the work of Nikolai Leskov (1936) published in Illuminations, one of the most influential short pieces for Sparknow about storytelling, written between the wars. You can download a pdf of the whole essay quite easily at http://www.slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_1331-Benjamin.pdf

Rob Walker and Josh Glenn have been selling random, valueless items on ebay, each with a backstory associated with it, to make a point about what urges us to buy.

The article about this in The Guardian the other day was subtitled ‘The true value of a gift is not how much it costs, but the story that we attach to it’ and tells us that

Conceptual consumption is what Mike Norton at the Harvard Business School and his colleagues call this; the notion that shoppers, especially well-heeled shoppers in the rich, fully sated developed world, are after ideas and stories rather than just physical items.

This popped back into my mind while I was reading the gorgeous ‘The Hare with the Amber Eyes’ by Edmund de Waal for research earlier this week. It’s research, storytellingwise, on several levels: how the teller sheds light on the effect of the story on them, telling a story through objects, coming at heritage sideways. You can tell that de Waal is, by trade, a potter, as there is something tactile and delicate about his prose and rendering of his detective work, through a netsuke collection ( a collection of small Japanese objects) that has come into his possession, tracing back his family history through the story of the collection as it passes from person to person, somehow surviving intact the fractured history of Jews in Europe in the 20th century.

Although in some ways quite the opposite of conceptual, I feel as though he is saying almost the same thing as he talks, early on, of his determination to give the story meaning rather than trivialise and anecdotalise, something so dangerously easy to slide into:

It could write itself, I think, this kind of story. A few stitched-togehter wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient-Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque. It would come out as nostalgic and thin.

All the way through the book, de Waal fights against the tendency to thinness that threatens us all as we take the easy route to gathering in the stories lying easily at our disposal and stringing them together into something that will pass muster. For this I find his book almost to be a campaign both for what deep stories are for, and how we must treasure the challenge of seeking the deeeper story, and for the way objects, archives, place become places for him that yield up clues as he spends time (much longer than he expected) getting the feel for the story under the skin.

He ends talking about the patina, both of things and of stories:

It is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how it works. Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so the essential is revealed,the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.

Both de Waal’s journey and the trivial ebay experiment in the article are small threads that gather into an inference that we mind a great deal just now about meaning right across our lives, not just in the small compartment that we allocate to private and personal. We want to touch things and be touched by them, physically and emotionally, and we want meaning to accrete over time in work settings too.

With this in mind, we’ve started working again with David Gunn of Incidental with whom we did such gorgeous work using found sound and slivers of interview to make a soundscape of a development bank during 2009. Building on this, hooking into the work the we’ve done with Clive Holtham over the years on slow knowledge and the rich role of a Situationist derive in creating a different kind of story witnessing that affects both the witness and how they then in turn engage with others.  This cannot be surface work and it cannot be about creating ‘thin’ anecdotalised trivia to bring back to work. It has to go below the surface and work towards new forms of meaning and encounter in a business context that yield new possibilities and promise.

Curry and peacekeeping in the Congo was one of the items on from our own correspondent on radio 4 this Saturday and I thought I’d share it as a good example of an impact story, following on from recent blogging here.

You can read it, or listen to it on the podcast. Text comes to just under 1000 words and I reckon that it was about 7 minutes or so? that I listened to driving back from Cambridge.

Evidently this is a kind of radio magazine article, or essay, so not intended in some ways as a hardhitting business impact story, but it chimed quite strongly with me, because of the work we do with development banks, and the detailed analysis we’ve done on impact stories in that context, and because of our current work with the WHO on knowledge and emergency preparedness and response.

I’d suggest that you read it or listen to it and make your own notes before going on to read the rest of this blog and then we could compare notes about whether it works for you. Maybe bear in mind some of the checklist we use, such as

• are there characters, time and place markers?
• does it transport you?
• does it surprise you?
• does it feel credible and authentic?
• what does it prompt you to think, want to do?
• how would you use this story in different settings?
• how are the facts and the story woven together here, and to what effect?
• how is the organisation (let’s call the UN peacekeepers the organisation here)

[Pause & reflect. I’ll guess you’ve been away for 10 - 15 minutes]

And from memory of hearing it, not rereading it, this is what I heard.

1 | I’ve tried reading the Congo rape stories as part of my current research and have found it almost impossible not to drift off when reading them, perhaps because the are just to hard to bear, but I listened to this whole story with the appalling acts that prompt the UN to e there in the background, and didn’t waver once. The facts of scale, 20,000 the sheer size of the UN effort, were well placed for me and I can remember them.

2 | What kept me listening was the sideways take, the Indian experience in the Congo, not the ‘UN peacekeepers’ experience, but the Indian experience. The counterpoint of  the vast previous experience of the main peacekeeping character, and the fact that this still didn’t prepare him for the Congolese challenge tells me more about the state of Congo that a direct description, so counterpoint brings out the enormity of the challenge, as does his despair as something like the inability to use the mangos well. Listening to Gary Trudeau on all his years of Doonsbury cartoons on the radio on the way up, he used a great phrase, ‘contextual scrim’, which I think is just what this is about.

3 | The sideways take again is reinforced through the descriptions of food, the personal associations of the author of this with a colonial reversal for the Indian peacekeepers.

4 | You can feel the author’s presence, his own reactions are present, he goes on a march, he is there as a listener, but he’s not absent, his own reactions, emotions as surprises as a witness also bring the whole story from an abstract distant horror to something much closer to, stickier, sweatier, hungrier, and altogether more real. It’s his take, and the presence of his witnessing, and through his eyes and ears, in turn, the witnessing by Indian soldiers of an African disaster, reels the story in to becoming real and relevant and somehow urgent. This kind of presence of an eye witness is one of the things I notice most commonly absent in organisational storytelling.

5 | How would I use it? I don’t know exactly: what work could it do for UN peacekeepers, for getting the Congolese to see themselves differently.  It’s not a story of great hope, but a story of surprisingly small hope, and perhaps in this it, and stories like it, could also do a job.  I also particularly liked that I didn’t have to listen to a lot of first hand account. To build on Philip’s ‘cuts’ blog before this, Paul Moss did the cutting, shaping, pruning and selecting here to find the power and immediacy in the story that would bring it to me and I liked him taking that responsibility to nudge me into urgent response on a grey Saturday morning on the A10.