Do your stories have a spiritual message? Or…perhaps we should ask ourselves what spiritual message do our stories tell? Because all storytelling delivers a spiritual message. The message may be spiritually rich or poor but it is there. And it seems like spirituality has been at the core of storytelling from the beginning. A recent article about newly discovered cave
Camouflage Game (Wild Goose Chase) The new forms of this game have the potential to twist truth in ways that kill ideas that matter far more than just killing the research project described in the quote below: “Hal was there only as a sophisticated untracker in groups. Untrackers get you going down the primrose path…you feel comfortable
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.
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
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
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
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
“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
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.
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
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
