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Annette Simmons

Ten Games People Play to Control Truth (2)

The Intimidation Game (2nd of ten): The transcribed stories from the original research still describe how intimidation games scare people away from a game player’s protected “territory:” All of a sudden he flared into a defensive kind of maneuver. He lapsed into another language…It was uncharacteristic of this guy. He turned crimson.  He was saying, ‘I made the decision.

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Annette Simmons

Ten Games People Play to Control Truth (1)

People seem to be applying the same ten games from Territorial Games (1997) to control narratives and thus control our perceptions of what is/isn’t true.  For the next ten weeks I’ll post about each of these ten games one at a time. But first let me give a bit of background on the research. It all started

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Annette Simmons

Who Controls the Truth?

I think there are two kinds of truth, little “t” truth and Big “T” Truth.  If anyone walks up to you wagging their finger and says, “You want the truth…I’ll tell you the truth!” … …they are about to share their opinion with you.  Big T Truths are timeless and transcend the small snapshots of little

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Annette Simmons

Charlottesville Vigil in A Southern Town

Elizabeth Beauvais spoke the words written below last Sunday night at a local vigil to mourn the violence in Charlottesville. We still have a confederate monument directly in front of our court house. Let’s not ignore the stories perpetuated by these monuments. Monuments have motives. This one was erected during Jim Crow when loyalty to Confederacy was code for

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Annette Simmons

Budweiser Storytelling Genius Used for Good

I just watched the new Budweiser commercial for July 4 this year and I think it is genius.  They used story to do good as well as make money. Lately I’ve been disturbed by mechanistic applications of story, but this? This is big picture, risky, embedded with big T Truth and I hope it does

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nurse ratched
Annette Simmons

United Airlines: The Nurse Ratched Effect

  I stopped flying United Airlines a while back.  I remember the first time I felt harassed on a United flight. I asked for help lifting my backpack into the overhead. The flight attendant’s lip curled slightly as she said, “I am primarily here for your safety” with a tone that added the unspoken message, “so don’t treat me

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Popular Posts

Paradox: Root Cause of Polarization

According to Pew research, disdain between opposing political parties in America has doubled in the last 30 years, coincidentally the span of my own consulting business, Group Process Consulting. My efforts to document true stories about these escalating conflicts inadvertently produced a set of oral histories across the years: Territorial Games (1997), A Safe Place

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Contrasts, Not Conflicts

 “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”  Groucho Marx Troublemakers erode trust faster than we can build it back right now. Yet, many of these “troubles” are invented conflicts that distort predictably contrasting values. It helps to know what to look for. And once

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Storyteller’s Confession: My Secret Mission

I’ve been trying to infiltrate the halls of power for decades. My secret mission is to increase the diversity of thought by teaching those without a voice how to tell their stories and by teaching leaders how to find and retell stories that broaden everyone’s understanding.

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

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

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 7 of 8

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

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