May 14, 2020 by Annette Simmons 1 Comment

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

Ray, Rosa, Ted and me sharing dinner and stories.

Ray, Rosa, Ted Hicks and me sharing dinner and stories.

We need a Magic School for Storytellers

Thirty years before J. K. Rowling created Harry Potter, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series imagined a magic school that taught apprentice sorcerers how to avoid abusing the power of magic. Le Guin points out early in the series that “even to light a candle is to cast a shadow.” Her point is well taken. While the vast majority of storytellers have good intentions (lighting candles), good intentions aren’t enough when practicing the powerful magic of storytelling because the potential pitfalls (shadows) are many. Master magicians (like master storytellers) need guidelines to avoid abusing their power. Here are a few guidelines borrowed from magic school:

Know your own heart and what feels meaningful to you.

Stories without heart don’t travel very far. Le Guin’s magic school refused entry to any student who could not give his true name. Certainly the magic of one who knows his own name and his own heart is more powerful than one who isn’t sure who he is or what he stands for. In Le Guin’s first Earthsea novel, a young wizard is showing off when he recklessly summons his own shadow, which then seeks to destroy him. By the end of the book the young wizard learns that he can never escape his shadow, so he merges with it to keep it safely in check. We don’t have to be perfect, but we do need to understand our weaknesses. It is impossible to art your heart into your storytelling if you don’t know your own heart.

Prove trustworthiness by demonstrating restraint.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Storytellers, like sorcerers, create illusions, transform normal people into heroes (or enemies), and mold perceptions in ways that imitate the magician’s sleight of hand. J. K. Rowling’s character Dumbledore puts it this way: “It is our choices that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.” His advice applies equally to storytelling. Rowling’s version of magic school is not only interested in teaching students how to do magic, it is dedicated to teaching budding wizards how to avoid (and how difficult it is to avoid) doing magic that causes harm. The success of the Harry Potter books proves just how engaging it is to collaborate for moral reasons. In a commercial environment where storytellers are only evaluated on how quickly they stack up wins, it takes courage to exercise restraint and leave some opportunities untapped. Yet without restraint there is no evidence of trustworthiness. Only a story of what you could do, but choose not to, can prove you are trustworthy.

Tell stories that validate both sides.

There are things that beginners can’t know. It took me twenty years to realize the danger of characterizing storytelling as a tool rather than a resource. Telling a story that connects two adversarial sides and helps them to start building bridges and finding meaning in collaboration is the highest art of the storyteller. Demonizing others in order to win at all costs, silence the weak, or smooth the abuses of the powerful is much easier, but it lacks wisdom, requires very little skill, and strips your practice of meaning. Build your talent by stretching yourself to find stories in which both sides win. Help adversaries see a bigger picture so they can discover solutions that are invisible when their lens is narrow.

The famous Appalachian storyteller Ray Hicks once told me that during a particularly difficult time in his youth he stood near a cliff and the voice of the devil “come upon” him. “It was a fast, urgin’ voice” trying to persuade him to escape his troubles. He stood in the mountains on an “outcrop o’ rock” contemplating a jump as the “devil’s voice” told him to just “get it done, go on and get it over.” Ray looked me in the eye and said, “But then I heerd the Lo-r-r-rd’s voice, and it was a calm peaceful voice—not like that fast urgin devil voice—it tole me, Ra-a-ay, you gonna be just f-i-i-ine. Ain’t nothing that bad. Things is gonna turn around.” Ray then told me my job was to go out and “up the numbers” listening to that calm voice.

So from Ray, to me, to you: “We need to be listenin’ more to that calm peaceful voice ’cause that’s the voice that’s gonna get us through.” That’s the voice that has the magic in it.

Excerpt from Chapter 12, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019) AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

May 13, 2020 by Annette Simmons 3 Comments

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 7 of 8

BIg T Truths make stories come alive.

Truth in Storytelling

When I wrote the first edition of The Story Factor twenty years ago, I began with the idea that people don’t want more information. They want faith in you and your positive intentions. I never suspected that two decades later we’d be discussing an explosion of stories that intentionally undermine this faith. Without the conventional power of weaponry to achieve their goals, certain groups have learned to harvest the twin powers of stories and technology. These weaponized stories persuade neighbors to attack each other as enemies. They undermine trust and often trick us to act against our own best interests. Now that technology amplifies the frequency and reach of malicious storytelling, the power of malicious storytelling to destroy social cohesion is more evident than ever. These results call on all storytellers to double-check that the stories we tell do not erode our ability to balance competing needs.

The good news is that stories only get better when a teller digs deep to reveal capital “T” Truths that that engage, describe, and explore real-life ethical issues. I knew a retired preacher, now dead, who complained to me that writing the history of his church only produced a flat, boring story. I innocently suggested, “Then you aren’t telling the whole truth because in my experience telling the whole truth makes every story more interesting.” He responded, “You mean I should tell about the S&M affair I had with a female preacher from the next town over?” Stunned, all I could say was, “Well, it already sounds more interesting.” It’s an extreme example, and no, his affair didn’t make it into the church’s history. But I share this story in the hope it will help you remember that withholding truths to control a narrative is a recipe for flat stories. Interesting stories take on ethical dilemmas, paradoxical truths, and lift our gaze from the transactional to the transcendent. Sanitized stories are boring.

Digital storytellers now seem to be rediscovering this fertile ground after initial attempts to mechanize, accelerate, and simplify storytelling produced lackluster results. One approach I admire provides a personal Bitmoji avatar to illustrate real-life paradox with image-based stories we can drop on top of real-life photos or video to add more meaning. For instance, the Bitmoji avatar that shakes off fear before walking across hot coals, then celebrates a very short while before his or her feet burst into flames. The “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma is a paradox we have all experienced. Drop this Bitmoji sequence onto a wedding or graduation photo on Snapchat and the reminder that joy and suffering are usually a package deal can make us feel more connected.

Chatbots, on the other hand, have trouble with paradox and universal dilemmas. From the get-go, I’m wary of the ethical implications of designing a bot with the precise goal of tricking humans to believe a machine is also human. Even more worrisome is the idea that this trick is often achieved by teaching humans to think so much like machines that we can’t tell the difference. Chatbots tend to simplify paradox into binary options that discourage any inquiry that might undermine the bots programmed goals. Natural language processing can obviously be automated. But how could we possibly develop a machine that won’t oversimplify moral paradoxes? It’s not surprising that initial attempts, like Microsoft’s experiment with the chatbot on Twitter named Tay (“thinking about you”), quickly learned to maximize the speed of response rates with racist, sexist, and Nazi-sympathizing posts.

From the beginning of time, humans have recorded organic wisdom with stories to guide real-life personal choices. Today it seems that a search for organic wisdom, or even a road less traveled, is blocked by increasing arrays of algorithmic chutes and ladders designed to lead us to travel only the roads that are profitable to the road builders. (As opposed to the original Snakes and Ladders game from the second century bc that illustrated karma by characterizing good deeds with ladders and evil deeds with back-sliding snakes.) This algorithmic distortion means you can search the internet for advice to treat any chronic disease, and the solutions you find are typically controlled by whichever group profits most from your misfortune.

It’s no accident that creative people increasingly protect a certain amount of time spent without screens, to experience nature, and cultivate transcendental perspectives using meditation and ritual. These people don’t hate technology. They simply see solid advantages to ensuring their brains can still sense transcendent truths as well as invent rational equations. Ursula Le Guin, whose stories mined real-life conundrums, once said:

“Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity…Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable interchangeable.”

Ancient Aramaic tales of genies (jinn) feature tricksters with supernatural powers who grant extravagant wishes purely to teach a character how to watch what he wishes for. Now that we have manufactured supernatural technologies that reach exponentially larger audiences and grant extravagant wishes at the press of a button, we are relearning the hard way to watch out what we wish for.

Certainly there are those who will argue that business is not responsible for keeping moral stories alive. But one thing I know deep in my bones from more than twenty years of teaching stories in the business environment is that facing a moral conflict and taking a stand builds trust much faster than sidestepping these issues. In order to stand out your stories need to show what you stand for.

It is emotion, not numbers, that keep us engaged, drive us to protect the weak, fund philanthropy, and fuel our search for justice, equity, and meaning. Just because it is impossible to quantify the long-term payoffs of moral actions doesn’t mean they aren’t worth the investment. And just because you want to make a profit doesn’t mean you need to engage in the dark arts to do so.

Tomorrow: Magic School for Storytellers

Excerpt from Chapter 12, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019) AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

May 12, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 6 of 8

The Moral Dilemmas of a Lion, a Scarecrow, and a Tin Man

Frank Baum’s original introduction to The Wizard of Oz, written in 1900, made it clear that he felt children no longer needed the stereotypical “old-time fairy tale” that “may now be classed as ‘historical’ in the children’s library.” Baum claimed the time had come for “newer ‘wonder tales’ in which…the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” Still traumatized by watching the movie version as a child, I wanted to shout, “Flying monkeys!!”

In spite of Baum’s promise to throw out the bad and keep the good, he needed those scary flying monkeys and evil witches in order to deliver the promised wonderment and joy. The moral dilemmas in this story survived the transition into the movie version intact, even if Hollywood changed Dorothy’s silver slippers into ruby slippers and reinvented the good witch from a “face…covered with wrinkles, her hair…nearly white…[who]…walked rather stiffly” into glamorous Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.

Note that this hundred-year-old story has been farmed for leadership lessons for decades, including a self-published book on leadership lessons according to Toto, Dorothy’s dog. That’s because the The Wizard of Oz is a multi-moral story that illustrates paradoxical truths such as learning to appreciate home by leaving home, that what you seek externally is already inside, that courage doesn’t exist without fear, and risking self to save others can restore ones sense of self.

We seem equipped with emotions specifically designed to override extreme self-interest in favor of love and connections. If there is an evolutionary reason that humans living isolated lives suffer loneliness, then stories celebrate a wide range of feel-good solutions. Most offer blueprints that show how reaching out with love, making connections, and acts of generosity can be much more rewarding than winning as much as we can, as often as we can. The best stories teach us how to balance dueling desires for paradoxical goals like love and power rather than risk the danger of choosing only one over the other (a paradox that spreadsheets don’t reflect).

We learn how to determine whether it is time to connect or disconnect, to be firm or flexible, to tend relationships or go it alone, to use or set aside emotions, to reference past, present, or future, to exert control or invite participation. It takes the virtual reality of plots and characters to successfully toggle back and forth between technically contradictory yet complementary approaches. We find meaning not in choosing one over the other, but in embracing the paradox that we thrive by giving and receiving, by following and leading, by creating rules with exceptions that tend to relationships, and by both revealing and hiding our vulnerabilities.

Excerpt from Chapter 12, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019) AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

May 11, 2020 by Annette Simmons 4 Comments

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 5 of 8

We need trust to survive and thrive.

Blueprints for Building Trust

Learning to drive was fun until I hit the mailbox. I burst into tears, blaming my dad, “You told me not to brake when turning corners!” It wasn’t my fault that he neglected to clarify I should brake before turning the corner so I could release the brakes while turning the corner. Through my face-palmed fingers I could see his wooly eyebrows lower as he stared at me from the passenger side of our 1972 V8 Dodge Charger. He had told me to turn right as we were driving through our neighborhood, and I did exactly that. I turned the steering wheel right without braking, fishtailed, hit a black mailbox, and pulled over to cry. I dreaded the upcoming apology and wondered how much money it would cost me to fix it. I buried my face in my hands and listened as my father got out of the car and his steps crunch, crunch, crunched in the gravel as he walked back to inspect the damage. After a long pause, he shouted, “Get out of the car and come look at this!” I obeyed reluctantly and was confused to see the black mailbox upright and undamaged but slightly swaying back and forth. On closer inspection the mailbox post was mounted on an industrial spring secured in concrete. Apparently I was not the first driver to cut that particular corner too fast and too close.

Telling stories is at least as powerful and dangerous as driving a car. Getting there fast is not always the best tactic. We hit mailboxes along the way. Making mistakes and learning from the mistakes of others is the very essence of all mastery, particularly storytelling. The idea that we might be reengineering evolution’s primary method for moderating greed makes it that much more important to catch bad habits before someone gets hurt. Not all of the mailboxes we hit can bounce back.

For centuries, parents have used stories to teach fledgling humans how to “drive” without hurting others. Stories offer blueprints for interpreting the world, maintaining relationships, and controlling impulses. Not just so the kids don’t burn the house down, but, according to evolutionary psychology, so kids learn the downside of acting like a raging narcissist without empathy, who can see no value in collaborative efforts and no reason to sacrifice for the collective good. Stories train little humans how to balance what to give and take by demonstrating the real-life consequences of immoral actions over time.

Aesop’s fables still circulate after more than 2,500 years because these stories are endlessly relevant and therefore endlessly meaningful and entertaining. Aesop employed animal characters like the wolf to teach moral lessons. Aesop gave us metaphorical scenes that warn us not to trust wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing; to respect a wolf’s warning to balance the prospects of a full belly against wearing the collar of a domesticated dog; and to remind ourselves of the danger of false alarms, with a story about a little boy who cried wolf once too often. When we retell these stories designed to entertain as well as model vital cultural habits, we preserve centuries of lessons derived from human survival experiences.

Evolutionary psychologists now suggest that storytelling might have developed as a result of natural selection. Humans who collaborate in groups consistently survive and thrive better than isolated humans unprotected by a group. Stories that bend human behavior toward collaboration with our neighbors protect us from the danger of letting Rome burn while we argue over who started the fire.

If our bodies only provided a chemical high for individual wins, we’d make far fewer sacrifices for the common good. We might hoard resources and fail to build the kind of infrastructure vital to human progress. On the other hand, if we only got our highs from bonding, we might not venture out to pursue new paths of progress. Only stories can preserve the paradox that we must seek both. In order for humans to survive and thrive, we need stories that don’t oversimplify the difficulties of building both good fences and good relationships.

Because any theory about evolution is impossible to prove outright, we are left to examine our own personal experiences for evidence that validates the idea that we need cultural stories to promote the kind of morals that will sustain collective survival. You already know how doing the right thing usually requires some sacrifice of time, money, or personal goals for the greater good. To keep us making these sacrifices we need vivid storytelling that sustains the promise that doing the right thing is a cost well worth the investment. It’s no accident that our ancestors learned to ritualize sacrifices as a path to renewal. Themes of reincarnation, resurrection, and phoenixes who emerge from the fires of destruction interpret pain and loss as a sacred path to transcendent illumination—not a reason to pick up all your toys and leave or numb the pain with a purchase. Stories that remind us of our shared dependence cultivate the emotional fortitude required to pay the high price of preserving collective survival. These are the stories that will enable us to address climate change.

Excerpt from Chapter 12, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019) AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

May 8, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – Part 4 of 8

“Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Brand Stories: Trust Based on Trustworthy Behaviors

Nike has employed corporate storytellers since the 1990s. Their decision to illustrate the “Just Do It” attitude with ads that support NFL star Colin Kaepernick’s decision to call attention to police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling during the National Anthem is an excellent example of supporting a moral story to correlate meaningful goals with commercial goals. While there was a temporary dip in Nike stock price, the stock price soared to new highs within a week. Sales showed an immediate increase in 2018 post Labor Day sales (31 percent) compared with the same time period in 2017 (17 percent). Those who might discredit Nike’s moral stories by pointing out that the company’s record is not pristine ignore the reality that no one, no institution, and no company is morally pristine.

We have to start where we are. That’s why we need stories that teach us how to face and forgive imperfections so second chances keep us moving toward virtues like justice. Gillette’s decision to call out toxic masculinity in a two-minute advertisement illustrating their tagline “The Best A Man Can Get” is yet another example of adding virtues to a product’s value proposition to increase trust and awareness. Public uproar not only increased awareness, it may have increased the trust that women who buy razors for men feel toward Gillette. Budweiser’s 2019 Super Bowl ad promoting wind energy just adds to the evidence that stories that illustrate moral backbone engage listeners.

Excerpt from Chapter 12, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019) AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

Annette Simmons

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 7 of 8

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 6 of 8

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 5 of 8

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – Part 4 of 8

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