August 15, 2017 by Annette Simmons 1 Comment

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 white supremacy. It still is.

She agreed to let me share a copy of her words:

“I went to the University of Virginia in the mid-1990s as a Jefferson Scholar, a scholarship that brought with it expectations of not just academic excellence, but citizenship and a real contribution to the inclusiveness, equality among student life. I soon learned that this was a campus-wide religion at UVA – this religion to Jefferson and his democratized ideals of self-determination, honor and equality. I took the history of civil rights under Julian Bond and poetry with our first black female poet laureate Rita Dove. I say this to tell you what a horror and shock it was to see hundreds of torch-bearing neo Nazis walking the central lawn of this campus, my campus, on Friday night. Don’t get me wrong – Charlottesville, then and now, struggles with a racist and misogynist past with lingering aftershocks in the present– a state school that didn’t allow women in until 1970, a university built with slave labor under the design of a founding father whose repeated rape of his slave mistress has become perversely romanticized. Charlottesville is far from perfect. But Charlottesville did not bring this on itself.

I believe that Charlottesville was expressly targeted as a strategic battle site by douchebag Richard Spencer and his NeoNazi, racist colleagues BOTH because it is now a progressive city built by the leading architect of America AND because it could actually be anywhere. For outside hate groups to invade and unilaterally terrorize a city that voted over 80% blue in the last election, a college town, and UNESCO world heritage site – (a city also, by the way, surrounded by a sea of red) – is a pointed, clear message that reads: We can take Berkeley with torches and hate just as easily as we can take Shreveport.

This matters to us not just because we feel for people in Charlottesville but because the violence could happen here — and the oppression and marginalization of already vulnerable people is in fact happening daily at the policy level.

My friend Kristin Adolfson was in the crowd hit by the car Saturday that barreled into her and dozens of other peaceful protesters that were holding signs that said, “Solidarity. Unity.” Kristen had written Love Not Hate on her shoulders and carried snacks and water in her backpack. She was marching by a low-income housing complex that white supremacists had been tormenting with racial epithets and chants of “Heil, Trump”. Miraculously, Kristin was unharmed, but a woman near her, Heather Heyer, died. Kristin told the New Yorker in an interview Sunday: “This was a terrorist act. Something that happens in so many places around the world, and it happened here in our little town. And I still can’t process the hate—that someone could actively take people’s lives, that’s what their goal was.”

She wrote to us on Facebook:

“What I can’t forget: The joy we had as we were marching down Water Street. Clapping and chanting and the solidarity and the community.

Then: such a strong feeling of ***NO!!!!!*** when I realized what was happening, realizing there was a car at full speed plowing through us. If my NO could have stopped time. It felt like it should have, it was that big.
How I knew what was happening and I couldn’t stop it. The sound of the car hitting human flesh and bone, ripping into us like dominoes, a quick staccato. Bodies thrown into the air. The anger that someone would do this. So angry, so angry. NO.
NO to the car and to the driver and to why it happened.
The fear for how bad it was, how many dead? How many dead.
A woman supported by three friends screaming heart wrenching. Her scream contained all our screams.
The tear streaked face of the young man wearing gray and a black medical mask around his neck, telling me someone is dead.
His face. Grief, incomprehension, pain, tears and pain, collapsing not able to stand.
His face.”

Over the past several years, since Sandy Hook, I’ve wondered – how long until I know someone who’s killed by gun violence and unchecked hate and intolerance? Or since Lafayette – when will I need to map out the exit the next time I take my kids to see a movie? How long until it comes for me or someone central to my life? I didn’t have the opportunity and the misfortune to test my courage as Kristin did (and I know that for many the awfulness of racially motivated violence has long been in their streets.) Charlottesville is as close as it’s come for me. I won’t let my fingers write “so far” – but that of course is my fear, your fear, all our fears, right?

Here’s what I know:

This is not “alt-right” or far-right, this is non directional, non partisan. Non American. The actual right should be loudest group saying this.
This is not about First Amendment rights. Not when assembling and speaking also means toting torches and assault rifles and other actual tools of terror. Friends who teach constitutional law at UVA have been telling me and others earnestly that when both the first amendment and the second amendment are abused together – violence, terrorism, homicide are not far behind.
Ignoring the fact that there is a short, direct and causal line from the President’s rhetoric and permissiveness for hate to the recent shocking surge of violence and hate crimes in American towns is dangerous. Strong leaders on both sides of the aisle, CEOs and other influencers are now seeing this writing on the wall and finally being vocal. Meanwhile – David Duke, our embarrassing fellow Louisianian, himself declared that the alt-right unity fiasco “fulfills the promises of Donald Trump.”
Doing nothing regarding Shreveport’s own Confederate statues and totems of racism in the hopes that Charlottesville’s violence won’t come here is ostriching and wrongheaded and in fact, the surest way to greater oppression and racial violence and domestic terrorism.
Equivocating with so-called compromises on false equivalencies – as if monuments enshrining civil rights and slavery bear equal moral weight and significance as worthy symbols in front of a courthouse is another fast track to Charlottesville – or worse.
I love Charlottesville so much I named my daughter after it — and I also gave her the middle name Strong. I actually believe Charlottesville is going to be okay, largely because there is a strong and motivated population and institutions that immediately began calling the evil out by name, AirBNB owners who canceled Alt-right reservations, locals who moved their cars to make it harder for hate groups to park and have to walk miles and miles in their sad little fake military costumes, teachers and students who stood in front of their university buildings as they sought to reclaim it for tolerance and were viciously assaulted, and now residents crowd-funding for all kinds of social justice groups to strengthen their community.
I love Shreveport too. Can we organize like that together?
When and if the Nazis come to our town, or reveal themselves in our town, terrorize and threaten people, maybe even brutally mow down some young brave person, how will we respond to their chant “you can not replace us.” I think we start in the same way we have gathered here at this vigil: by standing up to say, “we are not replacing you – because you were never entitled to anything you are demanding in the first place.”

I need to say how much of an imposter I feel as a well-meaning, slightly crunchy aging liberal white woman talking about bigotry and racism. I am acutely aware of the fact that what I am speaking of is no news at all to my neighbors of color in Shreveport. In fact, I told Tamica there were people far better positioned than me to speak today. But then, I remembered what I read this Sunday morning in the New York Times:

“Now is the time for every decent white American to prove he or she loves this country by actively speaking out against the scourge this bigot-ocracy represents. If such heinous behavior is met by white silence, it will only cement the perception that as long as most white folk are not immediately at risk, then all is relatively well. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, and nothing could more clearly declare the moral bankruptcy of our country.”

Read more from Elizabeth Beauvais here. She’s a great writer!

April 21, 2017 by Annette Simmons 3 Comments

United Airlines: The Nurse Ratched Effect

Can safety becomesa pipeline to express resentment?

Can safety create a pipeline for resentment?

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 like a servant.” At the time, I assumed her anger was due to a snowballing series of unpleasant events and my assumptive request felt arrogant to her. It was not immaterial that she was black and I am white. I am active in racial reconciliation work in the Deep South so if race was part of it that makes sense to me.

But I see another pattern fueling tension between United employees and customers that recently led to man-handling a customer. And I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Like all reality, there are predictable polarities in business – particularly service businesses. One big paradox is:

If the customer is always right… are employees still our most important asset?

I’m guessing United and other airlines adopted the “primarily here for your safety” perspective as a strategy to increase the dignity employees retain if/when customers are unkind. A guardian gets more dignity than a servant so this metaphor shifted the pendulum of empathetic perspective toward employees. And that’s wonderful. We should be taking better care of employees. This has been a long term strategy for United and it explains the CEOs initial solidarity with employees.

Yet the unintended consequence of increasing empathy for employees by characterizing them as guardians first, hosts second, simply shifts the burden to manage physical safety and psychological safety. Attempts to mechanize empathy seem to shift the burden by de-humanizing yet another context where personal attention matters. We are drowning beneath a tsunami of decisions chasing numbers at the expense of personal relationships and it is turning out exactly as you might imagine.

Systems designed to ensure physical safety frequently create a lack of psychological safety. Think Nurse Ratched. Or TSA (much better now). Systems and routines designed to minimize the situational nature of empathy only prevent the situational nature of empathy. Even hospitals enter a dangerous phase when numbers become more important that people. And it’s not restricted to a focus on safety. Last week, I felt harassed by endless phone calls from my car dealer strong arming me into completing a customer satisfaction survey. These poor people seem more incentivized to score satisfaction than deliver it. Competition for good numbers can turn good people into little nazis. We need two forms of measurement: numbers are great but qualitative measures matter too.

Numbers games teach winners to shift expenses and burdens onto losers – in United’s case – customers. Emphasizing physical safety (measurable) over psychological safety (qualitative) builds autocratic systems that enforce preventative routines based on worst case scenario, root cause analysis, and the ethic of “better safe than sorry.” We can do better. The human need for empathy (and the consequences of empathy denied) will never be designed out of real life. So why not embrace the paradox, pursue safety and good numbers while remembering that the best way to get empathy is to give it.

P. S. Check out my updated audiobook version of The Story Factor on Audible!

February 3, 2017 by Annette Simmons 7 Comments

Women’s March 2017: My Personal Experience

It is 5:00 a.m. Thursday January 19, 2017. I have no plan except to drive my car 1,193 miles to “show up” in D.C. for the Women’s March. I gas the car; pick up Valerie, and swing by “Southern Maid” for a king cake. Images from “Thelma and Louise” excite and frighten me. We will stay at my stepsister’s near Greenbelt metro station. Louisiana people don’t visit family without a king cake this close to Mardi Gras.

We drive ten hours on Thursday and eight hours on Friday under spacious skies, rainy skies, not so many fruited plains, and gobs of purple mountain majesties. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia. In Tennessee we stop to stretch our legs and buy supplies: whiteboards (dumb), markers, oh-so-nonviolent pink glitter for counter-protestors (prescient), pink heart stickers, pink wrapped chocolates and hot pink bandanas since neither Val nor I knit. We arrive Friday night and my stepsister and her husband make fish tacos for six. Dessert is king cake and Rachel who arrived with Deb from Massachusetts the day before gets the baby. All six of us agree to leave the house at 7:30 a.m. the next morning.

We leave the house at 8:15 a.m. Kind, congenial, and considerate is more important than punctual. The six of us turn into twelve, then twenty four…then too many to count as we migrate to the train station. We smile. We “woo-hoo” at all the great signs. We board the train in numbers that expand exponentially at each train station. We photograph ourselves and each other. I ask my stepsister, “Can I borrow your hat for a selfie?” Across the aisle I hear, “Do you need a hat?” I let out a girly squeal, “Seriously?” I may have even fanned my face with my hands.

Three girl scouts and two moms hold open a bag of hand-knitted pink pussy hats. “Pick one.” Val and I chose. Hers is pink knitted plaid (how is that even possible?) Mine is hot pink. Inside are notes: “Dear wearer of this hat…” hand signed by the knitter. Paula from Albany, New York knitted mine. Hugs. Thank yous. We show the notes around then put them in a safe place. More photos. The doors open. Our numbers expand again. This time the doors can’t close. Despite sitting tight with minimum of personal space we already fill this train beyond capacity. Instinctively we access the secret wisdom normally used for zipping up skinny jeans. We inhale and suck ourselves in so the doors can close. My flesh tingles. I realize I feel physically and psychologically safer now than I’ve felt in months. I “fit in” with this group that is much larger than I realized. Sweet relief. We are not alone. My hope expands in proportion to our numbers.

Police and Metro workers wait in position to hand signal us up from the metro toward the daylight. We flow like mighty rivers surging from twelve different metro stations onto the streets of D.C. until we overflow the banks of our own expectations. As we converge, I see swirls of women, men, children, girl scouts, scientists, federal employees, activists, grandmothers, teachers, cooks, hijabs, signs, geeks, beauties, hippies, a kaleidoscope of humanity moving with one mind and one intention: to show up. We steadfastly ignore our flaws, judgments, egos, agendas, hurts and divisions in order to fully experience what I can only describe as a shared faith that compassion is more important than control. We show up so can look ourselves in the eyes, see who we are, how many we are, and how dedicated we are to wrestling our nation’s arc back toward justice.

It is past one o’clock. Marchers occupy every square foot in every direction as far as I can see. Occasionally a small group passes nearby forging a path in one direction or another. We squeeze elbows in to make way. Discomfort, jostling, and the frustration of immobility escalate but we are steadfastly kind. Kindness is more important than position, proximity, or prominence.

Cell phones don’t work. Instead, we have conversations. Where are you from? How long did it take y’all to get here? Rachel is surrounded by a cluster of young women listening stories about Soujourner Truth. Two Arab women try to help me find a signal. I crave an aerial view to affirm our strength in numbers. Younger marchers climb walls, poles, a stack of pallets from the day before so they can see. I watch a young woman climb a tree to get an elevated view. She loses her footing, regains purchase and finds a stable spot. Her success prompts spontaneous applause and cheers. She didn’t know anyone was watching. I didn’t either. We cheer her beauty, ambition, and perseverance.

My imagination recalls a November trip to see Monarch butterflies hibernating in the mountains of Mexico. I feel like one of those butterflies tightly pressed against millions of others – nature’s safety plan for survival. In the dead of winter it takes togetherness to survive. When it is time for migration, there are individual actions but the lifespan of each butterfly then shortens. The butterflies that return back to Mexico are often seven generations removed from the ones that left in the spring. I see a grandmother with a sign, “Why Am I STILL Marching for Equal Rights?”

A voice shouts, “What. Does. Democracy look like?” “THIS is What. Democracy looks like!” I cannot see the jumbotron. I do not see a stage. I do not hear any speeches (we will watch them later on youtube, Ashley Judd twice) By two p.m. our “battalion” – I don’t know what else to call us – begins to march toward a street that runs parallel to the official parade route. I will return home without ever laying eyes on the official parade route. We are overflow marchers, not extraneous, but evidence of an endless supply. Those who value money and power more than compassion and collaboration should know there are lots more from where we came from.

Police are kind and polite. Two of them snap photos of us from horseback. A man stands in the street playing his violin for us. We walk in the street observed by more marchers now standing on walls and sitting on higher ground taking time to rest and soak it in. Even by 4:00 p.m. signs are still held high by arms that must channel super-duper mother bear strength. I’m tired. I hurt. I beg five minutes rest. Then I keep going.

From outside there will be disdain. Pundits will try to discredit our intent or twist aggressive narratives out of women who merely stand firm against the attack on human rights and human dignity. Selective coverage will misdirect attention. We will be criticized as inarticulate, unfocused, and hypocritical. It will be difficult. We will need more of that super-duper mother bear strength.

The train is an even tighter squeeze on the way back. We are too tired to orchestrate a skinny jeans inhale. Instead we hold on to each other, share seats, sit in laps and accommodate our bulk like Saturday morning sweatpants and a fuzzy blanket. We comfort our mutual exhaustion and look like the Far Side cartoon of a boneless chicken ranch. Dead tired. Until …over the intercom the train conductor asks, “Can I get a woo-o-o?” We give a full-on “woo-o-o” that brings smiles as we listen one last time to our collective voice.

Taking my boots off feels like an orgasm. I am so hungry pizza tastes like nirvana. My exhaustion delivers peaceful delicious sleep.

Sunday we start driving at 11:00 a.m. to a different Tennessee Holiday Inn Express. Monday morning I do an interview with a Shreveport, La. radio station. (paraphrasing). He asks:

“Did you buy any extra ummm, of those, ummm pink hats? I want one!”

“I didn’t see any hats for sale. I got my hat from a Girl Scout on the train. It wasn’t really a merchandizer’s event. All of the hats I saw were handmade, free.”

“So the pink..ummmm, what shall I call it puggy hats…pully hats…p— ”

“You mean pink pussy hats?”

“Wel-l-l-ll, we have to abide by FCC regulations…”

(pause)

“I don’t see a need to rename the hat…but let’s move on. I’ll let you borrow my hat so you can take a selfie if you want.”

“Great! Next question: Do you think Madonna went too far?”

“I think Madonna felt safe enough to vent. I’ve heard schoolteachers say terrible things in a teacher’s lounge that they’d never say in a classroom. I know this event wasn’t private but it felt private to me… It felt like one huge therapy session between a million women collectively on our last nerve. It was an opportunity to speak freely. She did. She was talking to us…not to observers.”

“You don’t sound angry. There were some angry signs out there. Did you see a lot of anger?”

“Umm, not an inappropriate amount. Anger is how we protect ourselves. So it makes sense if signs created by women who feel threatened, who want to protect their rights might look angry. But I think that is what anger is for.”

His questions alerted me that what I experienced is not the story most people will hear. Many layers of meaning will be attributed to the Women’s March on Washington. But deep meaning (any deep meaning) inevitably invokes paradox and is too visceral, emotional, and experiential to share without personal experience or artistic interpretation.

I think you had to have been there, or at least want to imagine what it was like to be there in order to truly understand what it meant to take part in the biggest demonstration in US history. It meant the world to me. I hope you find a meaningful point of view that fills your heart with faith that kindness, empathy, and collaboration are more important and more powerful than the disdain, greed, and competitive reasoning currently dividing us.

September 16, 2016 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

The Story Factor Audiobook: Connecting the Dots 2001-2016

The Story Factor is now updated and available on audible as an audiobook. Fifteen years of perspective and a genius editor (Stephen Brewer) helped me cut it from 13 hours to 5 hours flat. Producers Jay and Michelle from Beyond Measure Media took me into a real studio and monitored sound quality and my energy levels to meet their high standards. I hope you like it.

In the Steve Jobs tradition, I thought I’d “connect the dots” between the obsessive research (you have no idea), designed interventions, and no charge experiments I’d run on any group of volunteers that would let me and the journey that lead to the original The Story Factor back in 2001. I was still in grad school when I attended my first National Storytelling Festival in 1994, but it was a long time I realized how important storytelling is or learned enough to describe storytelling as a type of “intervention.”

In fact, The Story Factor was the third book in a series of three intense periods of research and experimentation, design and testing that began with my search to increase authentic collaboration. In 1994 my mentor Dr. Jim Farr (founding contributor to Center for Creative Leadership) taught me how to deliver learning experiences using transformational self awareness techniques that improved leadership skills by blending soul-deep examination of intent and beliefs in a way that clarified their definition of success and for some, redirected the traectory of their life. So… the “team building” tools at that time just seemed terribly superficial in comparison to my experiences running these workshops. I was certain I could find a leverage point for self-awareness that would shift the negative emotions wasting time and resources with phrases like “not my job,” or avoided questions with “who wants to know?” I set out to identify what patterns work against team building: “When, where, how do we reject collaboration and why?”

For instance, in meetings, subtle messages like a stiff tone of voice, raised eyebrows, or strategically insincere agreements erode trust and decrease our desire to collaborate, share information, support, or even to save the game player from drowning down the line. So the first book, Territorial Games named ten micro-behaviors or repeated patterns from hundreds of executive’s true stories I had recorded and transcribed. Most answered first with metaphors like turf war, back stabber, silo or the thank-god-its-a-metaphor “pissing contest.” I’d point out the metaphor was not literally true and then ask “so what actually happened?” These true stories revealed a subterranean language of inclusion and exclusion understood across all cultures. My theory was that evolution designed us with insincts a/k/a emotions that compel us to acquire and protect territory: no longer hunting grounds and watering holes but the intangible territory that helps us survive and thrive: information, relationships, and status. Therefore a rational, cognitive desire to collaborate was insufficient without vital emotions like trust and faith.

So AMACOM published Territorial Games and give it away as the 1998 membership gift for joining American Management Association. Clients hired me to help plan mergers, de-escalate infighting, and unlock impasse. The games worked best with funny stories that neutralized defensiveness and increased self awareness. I provided an alternative story for the “who started it?” question to decrease assumptions of malicious or negligence, which is that these emotional behaviors are hardwired by evolution for survival. “If you play these games, it’s okay, its not your fault…but guess what…those people who you think deserve payback? It’s not their fault either.” This new story increased self-compassion and a reason to monitor behaviors that sent unconscious signals to back off. For those who are doing it on purpose – the list of games denied them plausible excuses.

Still, there were long term turf wars that would never go away until all the old stories were exposed to each other in a way that created a bigger story than the us/them causing problems. Back in grad school (1994) I had written my masters thesis on “dialogue,” drawing from organizational learning, systems theory, social psychology, In 1996 I got ahold of David Bohm’s “On Dialogue” and continued my enduring study of anything from Ed Schein on group process. Armed with this understanding, and the crafty little tricks I learned from my mentor, I wrote A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear and Distrust. It was an ambitious design for training a group (60 max, although it worked for 90 at least once) to a.) self-regulate by generating personal and group strategies for pre-empting what I’ve come to call “going to the bad place” and b.) shifting expectations to accomodate the feelings of uncertainty and sheer frustration of stretching your brain wide enough to see that everyone has a piece of the same elephant. In that book is a shapter on Storytelling as one of the “seven basic facilitator skills.” This is the first time I used simple drawings for common group patterns instead of words. It was a very successful form of visual storytelling even if I was not yet aware of it.

Everytime I facilitated dialogue I took notes to capture as close to a verbatim transcript as I could. It turned out the “faulty assumptions” groups decided to abandon were basically stories. And every insight a group dsicovered by examining their bigger story required could not spread from that group to the organization without it’s own stories and metaphors. I realized l was an awkward fish swimming in an ocean of stories. I wrote the The Story Factor to map the currents.

Fifteen years later, I took time to revisit, update and edit the maps in The Story Factor, producing this audiobook as a result. Let me know what you think!

July 26, 2016 by Annette Simmons 3 Comments

Dark Magic: Tony Schwartz’s Abuse of the Story Arts

Most of this post comes from the July 25, 2016 issue The New Yorker by Jane Mayer you can read in full here.

Storyteller and writer Tony Schwartz feels “deep remorse” for ghostwriting the 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal an “autobiography” of Donald Trump that arguably crafted the beguiling character now running for president. Character development is central to good storytelling. Tony Swartz is good at it.

I feel for Tony. Because I think every talented storyteller makes concessions to power and money at one time or another. Half the time, we don’t know the cost of the concession until it is too late. So this post is a result of two days of me wondering how we can tell which concessions might lead to deep remorse and how to avoid them.

Because a story must be specific to feel real we constantly risk what Chimamanda Adichie calls the danger of a single story. Painting a pretty picture can hide injustice, greed, and other sins. Likewise a fearful future can hide hope, positive intentions, and unexplored solutions. Paul Costello writes “a story is never innocent.” (I highly recommend his Ethical Principles of Narrative Work)

How did it happen? How can we make sure it doesn’t happen to us?

The current story is that Trump’s book wasn’t Tony’s idea. It wasn’t even Trump’s idea. It allegedly originated when S.I. Newhouse (dead now) owner of Advance Publications (privately owned media company) called Trump with a book offer via Random House (sold) because an article about Trump bumped sales. S.I. Newhouse used the numbers to conclude that a book about Trump would make a good investment.

Tony says he coincidentally contacted Trump to do a Playboy interview and during their conversation learned of the book deal, suggested the title “The Art of the Deal.” He agreed – for half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance plus half of the royalties, far more than normal –to ghostwrite it. Today, Tony says he will donate these royalties to charity but from what I can tell, he means “from now on.” He didn’t state what he’d do with the millions of dollars of royalties he’s already earned in the last thirty years.

Tony is still in the storytelling business. Today he runs the Energy Project, a consulting firm that promises to improve employees’ productivity by helping them boost their “physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual” morale. The quote “I’ve spent significant portions of my life trying to doing penance for having written that book,” is less a mea culpa than an excellent backstory for his current consulting gig. I’m willing to bet Tony Swartz will make more money than ever. But I’m bitchy that way.

It is none of my business. I’m simply looking for useful clues on the mechanics that lead to “deep remorse” to help storytellers make a living without choosing to “sell out.” (Tony Swartz words, not mine.)

In the New Yorker podcast Tony recalls it was 1985. He had a mortgage he couldn’t afford and a second child on the way. He knew writing the book, “might undermine my credibility as a journalist.” In the end, he admits, “I did it for the money.”

There were still opportunities to walk away. His first meeting, after less than 30 minutes of asking for substantive content, Trump asked, “Do really have to talk about this stuff?” Tony replied that “it’s a lot of space to fill and I can’t just make it up.” Tony: “It’s not that he was private – he was just bored and distracted. He wanted to move on …It was like pulling teeth.”

Tony’s personal journal in Oct 21, 1986, halfway through writing the book gives the first clue:

“…while I’m fascinated by Trump and while it’s been an interesting experience the last thing you could call it is nourishing or enriching, its in fact, precisely the opposite. It is draining, its deadening, its one-dimension-alizing.

It pulls me away from all that is best in life: complexity and subtlety and caring and nurturing. All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular, because it’s all a black hole.”

later …

“the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character—even weirdly sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”

When he tried to check out the facts of the stories from people involved…

“I would walk through what I understood, they would smile or shrug or roll their eyes” and some would share their description of what happened/ There were times when he pointed me to facts that just weren’t true. Tony invented the phrase “truthful hyperbole” rather than call it what it was. Lying. In the end,

“I was hired to put the best possible face forward. That’s what I was hired to do. And that’s what I did.”

You and I like to think we have good character. Most storytellers do. But research proves that context, not character, is a better predictor for this kind of slippery slope behavior.

Contexts that put a storyteller at risk:

Too much personal debt that makes you feel trapped.
Client want’s YOU to do the story-finding process without his/her personal involvement.
Work that is draining, deadening, or one-dimension-alizing.
Rich, powerful organizations without field tested processes for identifying and correcting unethical behavior.
Justifications like “truthful hyperbole” or “Maybe it didn’t happen but it could have happened.”
One source stories. External stories that don’t match internal stories.
Abdicating ethical responsibility to the client.
Working for a sociopath. But you rarely know ahead of time.

Sociopaths are charming and charismatic. I’ve been sucked in by two in my career (that I know of). In both cases, I didn’t know until the middle of the work. One was a class action lawyer who asked me to teach his thirty support lawyers about storytelling. In the middle of sharing stories, he took over – putting people on the spot, embarrassing them, criticizing in spite of my design of “no critique.” It was awful. I called him out in private, then did the best I could to save the people and end early. Later I learned that he rigs the annual softball game every year so all the good players are always on his team. Ask around, maybe you will be lucky and find a telling detail like that before you take the client.

The other time I worked for a sociopath she seemed smart, enthusiastic and eager to create a safe place for dangerous truth (a rather intense approach to dialogue). By lunch, I knew. I begged her ‘this is a room full of people just dying to make you proud, but they aren’t sure how.” Blank stare. She told me, “I decided to fire those four last Friday.” The four people who’d had the courage to speak. I regret helping her identify new victims.

Throughout history storytellers have been the conscience of our species. Today evolutionary psychologists posit emotions are the collective error managment system vital to human survival. Emotion is the only reason humans suffer for each other, forgive, share, love, and communicate, Remove emotion from your decisions and we lose these things. If it feels bad, it probably is.

Tony Schwartz former editor called him “Dr. Frankenstein.”

Tony Schwartz current clients include Facebook, Google, and other powerful rich organizations. I just hope he has a system in place to avoid doing something else he might regret in another thirty years. 2046 isn’t that far away.

Annette Simmons

Charlottesville Vigil in A Southern Town

United Airlines: The Nurse Ratched Effect

Women’s March 2017: My Personal Experience

Dark Magic: Tony Schwartz’s Abuse of the Story Arts

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