Annette Simmons

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May 6, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – Part 2 of 8

towwn5

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 20, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part five

Apple

Story Is Still the Foundation of Culture and Context

If formulas and machine learning could solve all of our problems, we wouldn’t need stories. Like every religion, technology delivers dogma and formulas that promise more clarity than they can deliver. Religions recruit metaphor and storytelling to make sense of ambiguities that dogma can’t condense. Technological dogma—definitions, templates, and formulas based on accuracy and consistency can’t duplicate the way moral emotions encourage us to toggle back and forth between small circle goals and big circle needs. That’s why now, just as technology fails to deliver the panacea of solutions it once promised, we discover what is missing—the emotional solidarity needed to implement big circle solutions to global problems. A decrease in the number of stories that drive emotional urges to identify when, where, and why to sacrifice selfish goals in favor of a collective goals means fewer people value the sensory cues moral emotions deliver.

From a cultural point of view, any definition of story must reflect the role stories play in creating and sustaining shared assumptions about appropriate behaviors, fair play, and important values. These are the stories that guide continuous re-discoveries of the “Big T” Truths that transcend the limitations of rational understanding. Economic logic alone will not keep golden rules of spiritual generosity alive. To rise above our selfish instincts we cultivate stories that build faith that doing good is it’s own reward. These stories reinforce good behavior so a community can maintain the fragile but functional faith that goodwill, good actions, and good intentions are worth the minor sacrifices they require. Slack off on the stories that keep these promises/morals alive, and faith begins to die.

Stories that clarify and reinforce habits of imagining long term collective benefits whenever we make important decisions build a culture with strong emotional instincts for doing good. One of my mentors, Joseph Sobol, director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at University of South Wales, recently shared his current working definition of story as:

“The representation and evaluation of consequential actions by sentient agents in imagined worlds.”

For those of us who want to reinforce cultural contexts that support moral behaviors, Sobol’s definition helps us pay attention to story elements that are vital. Setting out to represent “sentient agents” discourages flat emotionless characters. Working to simulate “consequential actions” ensures a storyteller can include contradictory aspects of sequential events. For instance, Little Red Riding Hood is more than a children’s story. It illustrates the point at which a seeming virtue (bravery) can lead to trusting wolves who only pretend to be kind. Sobol’s definition also includes a vital reminder that every story’s end goal is only fully realized within the imagination of our listeners. For culture keepers, Sobol’s definition helps us remember that new media, like old media, either does or does not reinforce imagined futures that correlate individual sacrifices with cultural values and payoffs.

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

Filed Under: Big T Truths, Stories Help, Uncategorized Tagged With: Annette Simmons, business storytelling, Collective, communication, consequences, Definition of story, Golden Rule, Joseph Sobol, moral storytelling, narrative, storytelling, Storytelling Moral Survival System, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

April 16, 2020 by Annette Simmons 5 Comments

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part three

Is yellow the most important color?

Is yellow the most important color?

The Social Impact of Storytelling

Over the twenty years since The Story Factor was first published technology has accelerated communication, and with it the speed of storytelling, beyond our wildest imagination. Amid the revolutionary growth of all this digital media, video, database mining, and social media, Apple founder Steve Jobs commented that the “most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” Jobs did not originate this thought. Hopi Indians have long said, “He who tells the stories rules the world.” But it was Jobs and his colleagues in the tech world who ushered in advances that magnify the power and magic of storytelling. Magic this powerful brings with it responsibility, so it’s essential to remember that to whom much is given, much is expected.

The biggest lesson over the last twenty years for storytellers is the realization that using technology to control a narrative in favor of a single point of view can silence other important points of view. The ancient story about five blind men describing five different parts of an elephant takes on new significance if you imagine that one of the blind men might now have a Twitter feed of 50 million followers. Through no fault of his own, his story describing only the elephant’s trunk—the only part of the elephant he could feel—could convince millions of his followers that elephants are like fat snakes that hang from the sky so they will be completely unprepared for the actual thing. The point is, single stories with short-term goals often leave out important details, and technology has increased our ability to spread those short- sighted tales.

In a TED talk, Nigerian novelist and short-story writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned of the danger of a single story, even those stories with positive intent. As a little girl in Africa, Adichie read children’s books about white children living in Europe that both engaged her and left her feeling excluded. A book designed to teach European kids to read unintentionally sent her the message that the world wasn’t interested in brown kids. It is difficult to predict this kind of harm, but now that we can see the potential we can develop practices that lessen the risk. Part of the answer is to avoid the harm of a single story by providing a variety of perspectives.

It is part of the creative process for artistic storytellers to apply a variety of methodologies and to be suspicious of “yes/no” answers to questions that are too complicated for the “yes/no” binary. Imagine asking Van Gogh if yellow is the most important color. Any “clear” answer distracts the aspiring painter from learning that yellow’s importance (like all colors) changes depending on its proximity and relationship to other colors. A tiny speck of yellow on an otherwise dark canvas can be more meaningful than a canvas completely covered with the same yellow. Whatever clear answers you have adopted to guide your storytelling, it’s important to remember that there are lots of good answers and more than one good definition. Single definitions limit your stories to the constraints of that source’s point of view. Recruiting definitions of story from psychology, business, behavioral science, marketing, public speaking, anthropology, the liberal arts, and mythology are bound to improve the artistry of a storyteller, as well as mitigate the risk of blind spots.

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

Filed Under: Big T Truths, Finding Stories, Stories Help, Uncategorized Tagged With: Annette Simmons, business storytelling, narrative, storytelling, Storytelling Moral Survival System, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

December 17, 2019 by Annette Simmons 5 Comments

“The Lord’s just showing off today!”

Sometimes I hear a story that I just have to share.  This one came from my mother, Harriet. In this picture taken last week, you see Mom standing with the guys who just repaved her driveway. She saved for two years to repave that driveway and just had to have a picture to celebrate.  I particularly like the guys’ “Kick Some Asphalt!” sweat shirts.  For people who can’t find stories to tell, I recommend my mom’s example of turning ordinary life into story worthy events.

Mom loves her new driveway and they guys who made it happen!

Mom loves her new driveway and the guys who made it happen!

 

So here’s the story:  Last Sunday Mom went to church at First Presbyterian and then to lunch with a friend. Driving back she decided to visit my “Aunt” Jere a longtime friend who taught me piano lessons and who is now suffering from COPD. On the way to Aunt Jere’s house she passed a woman walking along the road lugging five bags of groceries. Mom told me she just had to turn around.  When she pulled up, rolled down her window and asked, “Do you need a ride home?” Without hesitation the woman blurted out “YES!” They both got tickled about her enthusiastic response and once she had placed her grocery bags in the back seat and climbed in the passenger seat, started chatting.  The woman looked at mom and said, “Looks like you went to church this morning and got the message!” With equal enthusiasm Mom replied, “I sure did!” It turns out this woman had just missed her bus and if mom hadn’t given her a ride would have had to walk well over a mile with five heavy bags in the Louisiana humidity. As they pulled in her driveway, she summarized her thoughts to my mom, “Yep, the Lord’s just showing off today!”

I think value-in-action stories are much easier to find when we remember to show off our values more often.  Happy Holidays and may you find yourself with plenty of opportunties to show off the rich mutual rewards of kindness.

 

 

Filed Under: Big T Truths, Stories Help Tagged With: Annette Simmons, inspiration, mom, story, storytelling, The Story Factor, Value-in-Action Story, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

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

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