Annette Simmons

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April 30, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part 13 (suggestions)

Same gray, different frames. Objective thinking is not as objective as we might think.

Same gray, different frames. Objective thinking is not as objective as we might think.

Retain Paradox

The optical illusion above demonstrates how a black or white background will cause two identical gray squares to seem different. The gray square against a black background usually seems lighter.

Living a more meaningful life may simply be a matter of feeling connected to a bigger circle of moral concern and finding the sweet spot between self-interest and collective interests. Sacrifice is the flip side to the joy of belonging. James Baldwin quoted Shakespeare: “Out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety,” as a definition of art and poetry. Everything that matters to us matters more when we stand in the sweet spot of contrast. We better feel the pulse of our hearts when we win the struggle against our demons. Jack London, in Call of the Wild, asserts that “such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.” There can be no Call of the Wild without a deep understanding of the un-wild and taming effect of civilization. Stories that are too civilized need a bit of wild to feel real, and vice versa. Storytelling turns into dark magic when a story is distorted to portray a human paradox as if there was one viable solution rather than balancing two poles of a paradox we must manage. If all our heroes win, we never learn to value failure.

Retaining paradox keeps your content relatable, realistic and alive with contrast. We can use whatever template we like as long as our stories retain a tension between the trade offs of reason and emotion, safety and freedom, efficiency and resilience, logic and compassion and all of the other messy truths vital to a meaningful life. Stories that track the drama of finding these sweet spots are simply more interesting.

And now it seems like paradox might even be a natural law we didn’t fully understand until after we used highly sophisticated computers to hack efficiency. Neurological research by Israeli professor Rony Paz of the Weitzman Institute and Professor Itzak Fried suggest there may be a “zero sum game between efficiency and robustness.” 1 We gain one at the price of the other, and vice versa. In the brain, cognitive rational signals can become so efficient they marginalize the amygdala’s primitive signals and the imbalance causes dysfunction and a lack of resilience. The professors suggest the metaphor of a washing machine run by highly efficient software that lo-and-behold increases the likelihood of the washing machine breaking down. Paz compares the amygdala to the washing machine drum: “It’s not highly sophisticated, but it is less likely to fail – which is important to animals’ survival.”

Trying to outsmart the “efficiency vs. nature” paradox in finding and telling stories creates the same results. Efficiency is only one pole of this human paradox. And it’s opposite is not chaos, but nature’s efficient system for survival – moral emotions generated by an “unsophisticated” but robust amygdala. The amygdala system has been denigrated as our “monkey mind” for decades, but monkey minds know stuff. Our emotions may be “irrational,” but they are irrational for survival-based reasons that use emotions to guide the survival behaviors we call morals.

Emotions keep us alive and connected. I imagine a data analyst and Hopi chief would have vastly different ideas about what is “efficient,” one smart, the other wise. With storytelling, if we rely too much on efficient templates, lo-and-behold it increases the likelihood of stories that break down. If storytelling evolved as nature’s method for curating emotional lessons for survival (more on that in the next chapter) then forcing stories to adapt to technology’s version of “efficiency” may marginalize the emotions we need to facilitate workable survival habits.

Living a good life, doing a good job, being a good leader, and telling a good story blend art and science. Laws, dogma, and their digital-grandchildren, algorithms, will never permanently resolve the paradoxes of being human. It would be like forcing a person to choose one solution between a) Breathe in oxygen or b) Breathe out carbon dioxide. Retaining paradox invites listeners to trust their senses and mine the wisdom of their own experiences with stories that offer context rather than dictate.

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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

April 28, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part eleven (templates)

Design thinking is a form of story thinking.

Design thinking is a form of story thinking.

 

User Experience Stories: As <Persona> I want <What?> so that <Why?>

I remember teaching storytelling to Microsoft engineers in the early 2000s and explaining what I thought of as “story thinking” only to be told “no, that’s design thinking!” And it is, sort of. For me story thinking has always been agile enough to examine, test, and respond to intangible beliefs, values, emotions, as well as measurable feedback. Design thinking and Agile methods (project management processes that incorporate frequent reassessment and adaptation) simply formalize the sequence that best leads to functionally and perceptually rewarding goals. Developed to improve software design, User Experience (UX) templates and methods blend the work of a team of designers in ways that keep conclusions flexible and responsive as situations change. One way they keep things flexible is to pursue goals that feature users’ perceptual interpretations as “user stories.”

UX designers combine interviews (stories) and data to categorize consumers into personas, so they can fill in the blanks: “As <Persona> I want <What?> so that <Why?>” This template definitely keeps technology responsive to subjective human needs. The UX definition of a user story applies to the specific purpose of design, but the design-thinking process that goes with the idea of UX stories is exactly how I teach executives to find stories that connect and communicate a message. It introduces the discipline of testing whole stories in realistic circumstances rather than evaluating bits and pieces of a story against hypothetical scenarios. The Agile process encourages us to spend more upfront time in discovery (observing and listening to existing stories), and finding current patterns, before establishing guidelines (what is most important), so we can test and retest new stories until they click. The UX process puts first things first when it comes to storytelling.

The only danger with UX philosophy from my point of view, is the habit of characterizing all emotionally driven behaviors as “cognitive biases” (systematic errors). Putting all emotional reasoning into a basket labeled “systematic errors” makes it hard to reinforce moral biases that are only irrational in the short term but represent centuries of emotional reasoning for when, where, and how to override short term quid pro quo expectations in favor of long-term goals. Discrediting emotional reasoning creates emotion-less systems. To the overly rational, moral behaviors look like errors in judgment. We must be wary of people who suggest we “change the story,” when what they really mean is for us to change the morals that have put a dent in short term profits.

Emotion-based decision-making can be wrong, but that does not mean it is always wrong, or that emotions aren’t absolutely necessary for human decision – making. For instance, seeing a packed parking lot at a restaurant might make you decide to eat there, even though your emotions are biasing you to treat a correlation called social proof as if it were cause and effect. Packed parking lots do not cause good food. You were right for the wrong reasons. But jumping to the conclusion that cognitive biases like trusting social proof, basing choices on availability, or habits of loss avoidance are irrational and therefore wrong, ignores the fact that these habits have proven useful for centuries. When systems exploit rather than support cognitive biases, they potentially undermine critical reservoirs of social trust. For instance, social proof is a bias that encouraged cave men to drink water others had already tested. Categorizing “social proof” as a systematic error sidesteps moral concerns over manufacturing social proof by say, buying millions of Twitter followers. This betrayal undermines long-term trust in social proof to the point that collaboration becomes less and less likely.

Another bias called “loss avoidance” may also play a critical role to encourage “better safe than sorry” patterns that help us over-ride short term impulses in favor of living to fight another day. When storytellers exploit this bias by discouraging delayed gratification with threats of loss (“act now, offer ends soon!”) it erodes our emotional system for moderating unwise impulses. Stories that frame not voting as a way to avoid loss erode faith that voting—imperfect as it is—will allow us to avoid much bigger losses down the line.

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Annette Simmons, Big T Truth, business storytelling, Design thinking, narrative, storytelling, Storytelling Moral Survival System, The Story Factor, UX, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

April 27, 2020 by Annette Simmons 2 Comments

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part ten (templates)

What goes up must come down...but does that make it a story?

What goes up must come down…but does that make it a story?

Story as Problem/Solution

It’s tempting to define story as a simple problem/solution equation. But problem/solution doesn’t accommodate the reality that humans experience problems that are simultaneously external and internal, and frequently caused by ourselves as much as the actions of others. Limiting a story to a format of problem/solution risks forcing a narrative to misrepresent certain solutions as more effective than they actually are. For instance, stories in the 1990s that blamed inconsistent standards as a primary cause of inadequate education led to massive investments in standardization and common core curriculums. Yet increasing the consistency of standardized approaches has not proved to the be the cure these stories promised. In many circumstances standardization actually decreased teachers’ ability to adapt their methods to suit the natural inconsistencies of diverse situations.

Run an experiment on yourself to test the results of using problem/solution as a format. Pull up a real-life significant emotional experience and impose the problem/solution frame on it until you can see for yourself what gets lost in translation. I’ve got one. The problem: I wasn’t happy living in my hometown. The Solution: I moved. The missing elements of the story are that I still love many aspects of my hometown. My mother is living and I have great friends there. I told my mother that I moved for business reasons but that’s not entirely true, either. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also wanted to be in a more diverse culture that was in better economic shape than my hometown. Plus, I really like starting over because it’s a creative process. And of course, I might end up unhappy again in my new town if I’m simply in the habit of being unhappy. If I told the story as if moving solved my problems it would be a misleading oversimplification.

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

April 24, 2020 by Annette Simmons 3 Comments

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part nine (templates)

Stories that cherry-pick correlations and represent them as causation can be misleading.

Stories that cherry-pick correlations and represent them as causation can be misleading.

A Story Spine

The best storytelling templates arise from the arts. Improv artist Kenn Adams laid out what he called a “story spine” as a mechanism to help children and adults play with improvisational theatre. According to Kenn, the origin of his template arose from his desire to bring arts, creativity, and improv play to more people. The template is a guide for creating characters and a plot that produces a spontaneous play that is as satisfying to the players as the audience.

Pixar Studios uses a similar template to provide structure to illustrate core human conflicts with a story.

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___.
One day ___.
Because of that, ___.

Because of that, ___.
Until finally ___.
(And ever since that day______.)
A beginner storyteller given this template might find fill in the blanks with merely plausible events and characters instead of looking to personal experiences with real people, actual life events, and the sensations of time and space. No template can correct for a storyteller who doesn’t remember to “write what you know.” It’s worth noting that this template is only one part of Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling. Without the other twenty-one rules the template could be limited to creating merely feasible characters negotiating hypothetical situations. Apply the other twenty-one rules, such as “remember that what is most fun to write doesn’t necessarily translate into what is most interesting to an audience,” and the template becomes much more useful.

Story as Cause/Effect

The novelist E.M. Forster famously stated that “the king died then the queen died” was not a plot until adding the detail that the queen died “of grief”. Some have interpreted this to mean that stories set up clear cause/effect relationships. It’s not a bad way to hunt for a plot – love sets you free, pride leads to a fall, etc. – but this method risks oversimplifying relational truths, and correlations. Love usually kicks your butt before it sets you free and pride leads to wins as well as losses. Whenever a storyteller forces a story to suggest an easy cause/effect relationship he runs the risk of omitting complexities that render the story as recognizably realistic. Perhaps the king killed the queen’s lover before he died. Her grief gets a bit more complex and the reader is offered more freedom to come to his or her own conclusions.

There are risks to restricting a story to the format of cause and effect. We create unnecessary problems when we tell a story that suggests a clear single cause and direct effect, when the truth is far more complex. Cause/effect stories can discredit story-supported social norms, like the golden rule. For instance, if a story translates “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” into a cause/effect relationship, it unilaterally suggests treating people fairly automatically causes others to treat you fairly in return. Forcing a story to characterize any human dilemma as an effect of a single cause unwittingly encourages oversimplified solutions that don’t work in real life. Even when simple parables imply cause/effect sequences, the goal is to reinforce reliably accurate correlations—not statistically provable causes and effects. Within storytelling, then, be advised that impressions of cause/effect are usually metaphorical and correlational.

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: business storytelling, communication, correlations, interview techniques narrative, narrative, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

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Storytelling 101

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

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

May 14, 2020 8:43 am

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Posted in: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths
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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 7 of 8

May 13, 2020 7:37 am

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Posted in: Uncategorized
oz

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 6 of 8

May 12, 2020 6:48 am

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Posted in: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths
We need trust to survive and thrive.

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 5 of 8

May 11, 2020 8:38 am

  Blueprints for Building Trust Learning to drive was fun until I hit the mailbox. I burst into tears, blaming... Read more →

Posted in: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths
"Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything."

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – Part 4 of 8

May 8, 2020 8:13 am

  Brand Stories: Trust Based on Trustworthy Behaviors Nike has employed corporate storytellers since the 1990s. Their decision to illustrate... Read more →

Posted in: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths

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