Annette Simmons

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May 6, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – Part 2 of 8

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Meaning Makers

Any storyteller can train herself to ensure her stories support meaningful feelings. The first step is to acknowledge the numbers won’t always reflect the emotional payoffs of deferred self-interest. The second step is to decide to do it anyway. This kind of storyteller actively practices meaningful personal strategies that balance the needs of her circle of moral concern as well as her own needs. This is the sweet spot where we find meaning. Supporting others is an inside job that offers intangible rewards we collectively refer to as a meaningful life. This isn’t a new idea and it isn’t new to call ourselves out when we sense that meaninglessness might be reaching dangerous levels. Sixteenth-century poet John Donne started his famous poem with the phrase “no man is an island” and ended with the admonition “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

It has always been the storyteller’s job to make the world feel more meaningful and help people feel more connected. Humans have intuitively understood the danger of isolation, and many cultural stories teach us specific ways to avoid being left alone. Most of these cultural lessons are variations on the theme: “Don’t be a jerk.” Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are uses only 338 words to illustrate the need to balance personal freedom with love of family. Nobody needs an evidence-based definition of a jerk supported by cost-benefit analyses. For a long time, the stories we shared ensured that most people knew a jerk when they saw one—particularly if he or she was staring back from the mirror. Now, not so much, which means more jerks, more loneliness, and more isolation.

Medical science proves our intuitive fear of isolation is well founded. Our bodies treat isolation like a mortal threat, fueling inflammation for autoimmune diseases just as our supercharged technology-mediated culture creates even higher levels of isolation. It is possible that placing all our faith in technical solutions temporarily stole our faith in social norms that have for centuries taught us—not all, but enough of us—to protect ourselves from isolation by practicing tolerance, forgiveness, and empathy. Well-intentioned efforts to evangelize the power of technical reasoning may have inadvertently starved our cultural faith that protecting family time and other rituals that preserve meaningful connections are more important that the profits we gain by forfeiting connections.

Faith in the inherent value of moral motivations is either sustained with personal experiences and stories that keep that faith alive, or it isn’t. There must be a good reason that we crave stories that show how suffering is meaningful. The cherished Charlotte’s Web is, after all, about a spider who places her friend Wilbur’s life above her own. Nietzsche’s observation that “he who has a why can endure any how” sustained Viktor Frankel as he recounted his suffering in concentration camps in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. Humans crave stories that show how love, trust, honesty, and justice prevail in spite of selfishness or greed. We crave these stories like we crave water—and they may be just as important for our survival. The stories we tell become the maps we use to chart our lives. If we perpetuate stories that unintentionally send the message that money can buy love, people act accordingly. Lucky for us, it doesn’t take long to realize substituting money for love is a pretty lonely story.

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

Filed Under: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths Tagged With: Annette Simmons, business storytelling, leadership, Moral Blueprint, narrative, storytelling, Storytelling Moral Survival System, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

May 1, 2020 by Annette Simmons 3 Comments

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part 14 (suggestions)

We lose a lot when we use Boolean logic to understand Big T Truths.

We lose a lot when we use Boolean logic to understand Big T Truths.

Question Metrics

Technology has evolved from practical magic to mind-blowing magic during my lifetime. While I am deeply grateful that my brain developed without the influence of personal computers, my entire working life progressed through the stages of rapid technological advancement in real time. In the early 1980s, I combed through five- inch thick stacks of printouts with tables that cross-referenced metrics from primitive databases we called “mailing lists” that we rented to test selling strategies and assumptions. We tested the responsiveness of certain clustered demographics (personas) with a/b testing limited to mailed offers using deeply flawed tracking tools. If anyone can appreciate how machines learn by analyzing unstructured data, I can.

However, improvements in tracking and measurement improve accuracy that may not qualify as wisdom. Intelligence is a resource for being right. Wisdom is a resource for doing right. Systems designed to be right respond with kindness only if the expense of providing a kindness can be justified with measurable returns. Kindness, wisdom, and ethical decisions cost time and money that yield impossible to measure long-term collective returns. That means moral actions will never be fully justified with corporate metrics. Instead these metrics disrupt and re-categorize the expense of moral decisions – and morals can be very expensive—as unjustifiable expenses rather than worthy investments. The bottom line is that the high cost of protecting humanity from adverse events like pandemics and climate change will never “add up” as profitable on any single spreadsheet. Our survival depends on re-integrating moral reasoning into economic decisions.

I recommend storytellers keep two sets of books, one for easy-to-measure criteria and one to represent meaningful goals that cannot be measured. That way, we can pursue short-term metrics without forgetting that stories also produce long-range outcomes that are impossible to measure in meaningful terms. When we subject ourselves to systems that only fund measurable goals, transcendent moral goals like justice, equality, and human rights are left unfunded and people begin to feel isolated and unengaged.

Excerpt from Chapter 11, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019)  AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

Filed Under: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths

April 29, 2020 by Annette Simmons 4 Comments

Storytelling Moral Survival System: part 12 (suggestions)

Make sure your stories always make your own heart sing.

Make sure your stories always make your own heart sing.

Art Your Heart into Storytelling

I worry that people who promise to science the shit out of storytelling haven’t been doing it long enough to understand how linear reasoning can ruin the flow of the creative process. Wise mystics used stories precisely to capture life’s mysteries intact, so anyone who promises to de-mystify storytelling needs to either explain how to re-mystify these paint-by-number stories or stop oversimplifying the process. If you agree, I believe the answer is to always put your heart into every story you find, develop, and tell. Not someone else’s hypothetical heart, but yours, the one that beats inside your chest when you feel inspired and suffers when you see others suffer. Now that storytelling ideas and advice are increasingly translated to suit the goals of technology and digital media, protecting a few primary concepts from being sliced and diced will help storytellers stay in touch with centuries of storytelling wisdom that is impossible to accommodate in linear binary formats. Novelist Haruki Murakami explains it this way: “In many cases, it’s because works that critics see as analytically excellent fail to win the natural empathy of readers.”

Excerpt from Chapter 11, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019)  AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

Filed Under: Annette's Blog Tagged With: Annette Simmons, business storytelling, communication, influence, inspiration, narrative, storytelling, Storytelling Moral Survival System, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

May 28, 2019 by Annette Simmons 2 Comments

Ten Games #10: Powerful Alliances

Powerful Alliances

It's not what you know but who you know!

It’s not what you know but who you know!

“Powerful alliances” is a territorial game humans have played from the beginning of time. But when people start treating friends and natural allies like bargaining chips to win a territorial game in ways that silence others – they cross a line.  It is human nature to cultivate connections with people who seek the same goals we seek to use their power, a voice, or connections to step in when they can help.  Back when I did the original research, technology had yet to invent platforms and industries to dedicated to automating powerful alliances. The gig economy has forced many people to treat friends like assets.  It makes me sad.  But it’s not new.  The minute work life is characterized as a battle then accumulating allies, spies, confederates, pawns, re-tweeters, likes, links, and moles reduces friendships to bargaining chips.

The chickens are coming home to roost.  Blindly recruiting other people to play games on your “tribe’s” behalf as a way to silence, disable, or crush perceived opposition is effective but there are consequences. Once friendships are stripped of intimacy, loyalty, kinship, moral solidarity, and empathetic feedback and replaced with economic reasoning and score-keeping we lose the social glue that holds us together.

The game called Powerful Alliances is the best example of how a territorial game can be used for good or evil (although game players always believe they are on the side of good).  A big picture view of politics today shows tight groups of liberals and conservatives deploying every powerful alliance they can to “win” battles that can never be decisive.  The fatal flaw in pursuing wins instead of balancing continuums is that choosing one “side” or the other prevents the healthy toggle back and forth between contrasting but vital moral paradoxes that work best in tandem.  Territorial game players dont seem to understand there are no “wins” involving paradoxes of human life (safety/freedom, individual/group, relationships/rules, etc) that could possible be decisive without dire consequences.  Worse, it divides the resulting “tribes” to the point alliances are no longer moderated by social norms of discretion, dialogue, compromise and deep trust.

People who “mobilize” their friends into contacts for economic advantage don’t intend to contribute to the global loss of social trust we now experience, but they do. Like everyone else, I hope to attract powerful alliances too.  But only with people who genuinely think my work makes a contribution to the collective wellbeing of us all.  Likewise, I will continue to share and promote your work when it speaks to my soul and helps us lead the business and political environment back to collaboration, mutual respect, and reciprocal generosity.  It’s all I care about. If I can help, let me know.

But please let’s stop reducing human relationships to “contacts” – it’s killing unconditional generosity and cultivating cynicism we cannot afford.

Filed Under: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths, Stories Help Tagged With: Annette Simmons, Big T Truth, communication, Territorial Games, true stories

February 8, 2019 by Annette Simmons 3 Comments

Ten Games 8. Discrediting Game

Discrediting Game

“He would sometimes use humor to put him down. He’d make comments like ‘Well let’s stay strategic here,’ and that implies that his comment was something less than strategic. We’d laugh, but you know, they were direct put downs.”

“They would ridicule the sincerity of the fans of the new consultants. They would make them sound gullible. Saying, ‘Well that sounds pretty damn bizarre to me. What relevance does it have? You guys are turning into groupies for God’s sake.’”

Those who play the Discrediting Game undermine the reputation and credibility of their “enemies” with actions that can be as subtle as a raised eyebrow all the way to blanket character assassination.  This game has been around forever but it used to be kept under control by social norms.  Digital media has reframed what was a “nuclear option” into a daily habit. Previously, the non-verbal feedback of face-to-face interactions meant the majority of us were far less willing to demonize people we knew we desperately needed to create mutual wins.  It felt stupid.  Our emotions warned us that it was dangerous. Now we have evidence that demonizing others (just to win) felt stupid for very practical reasons.

“People were just harassing them completely. They would say, “Why do we have to listen to this? They used names like Krauts, Frogs, etc. for whomever. They were swearing…The effect was that they didn’t listen to what the person was saying. They distracted people that were listening …They effectively cut off anyone’s ability to receive whatever data was coming from the Europeans. They pulled in anyone within earshot from listening to whatever was happening. They brought in people who typically might have listened but who now share those viewpoints.”

If there is one abuse of storytelling that concerns me most it is the desire to control a narrative by discrediting other points of view.  Once an accusation sticks there may be a relative bump in trust for the accuser compared to the now demonized party, but the lost trust isn’t replaced. It is transformed into distrust and yet one more point of view is marginalized or even silenced. The robust influence of multiple points of view dissipates and our reservoirs of trust simply begin to run out.  The daily habit of demonizing rather than forging connections has created escalating accusations and fear stories, distracting everyone’s eyes from working together on shared solutions to shared dangers like climate change, systemic poverty, and war.

When businesses and politicians play only to win, they siphon energy from our ability to play together.  Pretending that life is a game to win has channeled far too many resources that used to build trust to game behaviors that tear trust apart. To frame politics as a battle is to recruit strategies from the “art of war” – surprise attack, sabotage, diversion, to “kill with a borrowed knife” and a whole host of strategies that might be appropriate for war but have the effect of breaking every norm we need for peaceful existence to the point that everything feels like a war.  Just because some people are bored with peace, doesn’t give them the right to turn business and politics into a war where character assasination is a winning strategy.

Filed Under: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths Tagged With: Annette Simmons, Big T Truth, business storytelling, Story Factor podcast, storytelling, Territorial Games

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