Annette Simmons

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 3 of 8

Trust is the story of not doing what you could get away with, because you care about someone other than yourself.

Trust is the story of not doing what you could get away with, because you care about someone other than yourself.

 

Trustworthiness as Competitive Advantage

If morals need stories to thrive, it might also be true that stories need morals to thrive. Technically the stories you tell do not require moral intentions. Yet practical experience teaches us that few of the stories we cherish could possibly be classified as amoral. A story may not portray your preferred morals, but all stories, at least the interesting ones, embed moral lessons by correlating certain behaviors with consequences. It is hard to tell stories that reward faith in positive consequences like freedom, justice, and trust without exposing the truth that economic reasoning will never be equipped to achieve these kinds of subjective goals.

Few, if any, Hollywood blockbusters could demand our attention without portraying some kind of moral conflict between good and evil. Marvel’s 2018 movie Black Panther reinforces a similar moral lesson to the one Seuss teaches in The Cat in the Hat when the king decides to risk the danger of revealing his kingdom’s extravagant resources in order to clean up global messes. Disaster movies present one moral dilemma after another. Even the stories about characters who don’t know how to clean up their own messes (Thank you, Quentin Tarantino) deliver a moral lesson about the consequences of leaving messes for others.

Brian Boyd makes a strong case that storytelling is a survival mechanism in his book On the Origin of Stories, stating that humans have a “natural appetite” for information, “especially for pattern, and information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences.” Stories pass along behavioral information that is just as important to our survival as the information passed along in our DNA.

Stories that stress mutual success might be more important now than they ever have been. The suicide rate for Americans is up 30 percent since 2000. Globally, suicide rates are up 60 percent over the past fifty years. According to the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer, the United States shows a “shattering loss of trust” that is the “steepest most dramatic decline in trust ever measured since the barometer began in 2000.” Over two thirds of the markets measured by Edelman Trust Barometer indicate trust levels below 50 percent.

There has to be a reason that “biology turns loneliness into a disease,” according to UCLA professor Steve Cole, who studies the effects of loneliness at the molecular level. The physical costs of isolation for adults is said to be a 25 percent increase in mortality that translates to AARP’s estimate of $6.7 billion annually in extra Medicare expenditures. “Me first” stories aren’t inherently bad, but a tsunami of “me first” stories leads to an erosion of trust when “me first” stories begin to replace “all for one, one for all” stories.

Social media systems designed to siphon off social trust to achieve short-term economic goals surely diminish the trust left over to achieve noneconomic goals, like sustaining faith in our fellow humans. The decision to trust corporate platforms with the care and maintenance of our social connections have revealed the dangers of this misplaced trust. We don’t trust friends who tell our secrets, and yet we temporarily trusted commercial interests that not only told but sold our secrets. Trust in Facebook dropped from 79 percent to 27 percent after customers learned the social platform ignored reports that Cambridge Analytica did not observe consent requirements before harvesting and exploiting the personal data of millions so they could pursue questionable political agendas using coercive stories.

It is hard for us to call out this kind of duplicity when we are overwhelmed with stories that drive us to seek speed rather than slow down long enough to reflect. When a corporation only rewards fast, measurable returns, it unintentionally marginalizes employees’ moral concerns and trains employees to “value growth above trust.” Like billionaire CEO Marc Benioff of Salesforce says, “A company like ours can’t be successful in an unsuccessful economy or in an unsuccessful environment or where the school system doesn’t work.” Benioff blends service work into the company culture so real-life experiences of showing and earning trust ensure employees are better equipped to identify the times when growth means losing trust. It’s a difficult choice to make, but almost always better in the long run to preserve trust by avoiding the option of exploiting “opportunities” that sacrifice trust you will need later on.

 

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

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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

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – Part 1 of 8

The Morals of Our Stories

Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It is fun to have fun But you have to know how. —Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me NOW!
It is fun to have fun
But you have to know how.
—Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

 

Dr. Seuss’s story The Cat in the Hat embodies a lesson for any of us who loved this book as a child. In the book, two children alone at home are tempted into mischief by a cat wearing a top hat while their pet goldfish warns them of dire consequences. While the cat persuades the children to ignore the goldfish and join in his messy fun, afterward he orchestrates a massive cleanup just in time to avoid parental consequences. To me the story implied that I could have fun, break the rules, and do whatever I wanted as long as I cleaned everything up before my parents found out. Others favored the goldfish’s advice to follow rules and avoid making a mess in the first place. With the help of stories like this one, children learn how to balance fun and responsibility in ways that are vital to their success as adults and their success as storytellers.

Seuss’s plot offers a blueprint that traces both the fun and cost of making messes while simultaneously making it clear that leaving your messes for others to clean up doesn’t work over the long term. Learning to clean up the messes we make is a moral lesson that starts with children’s stories and passes from each generation to the next…if, and only if, we protect and repeat the behaviors recommended in stories to sustain society’s faith that our collective survival depends on certain prosocial habits.

If we reclaim the term “moral” from negative connotations of judgmental intent and hypocrisy, it is much easier to embrace the idea that moral lessons work to our advantage. The emotional qualities of our lives, products, services, and families directly reflect the quality of the moral lessons we reinforce by repeating certain stories. Now that most of our conversations about what is morally good or bad occur within the context of technology, it requires more of a concerted effort to remember that emotional reasoning already influenced the design of any system programmed by humans.

From a purely rational, profit-maximizing context, spending money on moral behaviors such as conserving resources, building products that last, or refusing to exploit human weaknesses seems like someone else’s problem rather than an investment in  proving you take our collective future seriously. Once labeled inefficient, unnecessary or avoidable, the prosocial emotions that previously encouraged us to override certain selfish interests weaken. When moral behaviors like self-restraint, empathy, and compassion stop feeling meaningful, we become less collaborative and more isolated. Without stories that train our imaginations to have faith that today’s sacrifice of time and energy will pay off, we are at risk of losing the irrational but highly functional faith that moral actions pay off, even though it is impossible to calculate how and for whom, exactly.

Moral behaviors that can’t be justified with ROI calculations will fade unless we keep telling the kinds of stories that bolster our faith that the intangible benefits of certain moral actions transcend short term financial returns. Without a concerted effort to sustain our faith in morally reasoned stories, we expose ourselves to the danger of the weaponized stories and fake news designed specifically to poison cultural reservoirs of meaning and trust. For instance, many stories of disruption suggest it is smart to increase profit by identifying and eliminating expenses that protect intangible collective benefits and pay only for actions that directly contribute to profit. The truth is that there is no business case for moral norms that can’t be undermined by a motivated data analyst. In a world that only recognizes calculable cost-benefit ratios, moral norms lose meaning and stop driving behavior. So we must sustain these meaningful stories if we want to live in a moral and just world.

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

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Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part 15 (suggestions)

Use your imagination to see multiple perspectives.

Use your imagination to see multiple perspectives.

Protect Imagination

Imagination is a daily practice. Our brains use two forms of memory. One is a procedural memory that supports rational, scientific, left-brain habits. The other is an episodic memory that tracks and records episodes (stories) of experiential learning often discredited as anecdotal evidence. Remembering entire episodes exercises our imaginations as we toggle between various points of view and tour the complexities of real life. Our imaginations require direct sensory input. Physical experiences stock up a reservoir of images, sounds, tastes, smells, and sensations. I’ve noticed a sharp decline in the ability of digital natives to come up with expressive metaphors, perhaps because screens can’t provide enough authentic sensory experiences to activate what seems to be a sensory-dependent skill.

Science is beginning to indicate that what we call insight is largely a sensory process. While we await more science, it’s interesting to consider all the metaphors we use to describe intuition or insight. We smell bullshit; something rings a bell or triggers our radar; a story delivers a flash of understanding, sends off vibes, or delivers a kick in the gut. Maybe what people used to call “extra-sensory” perception is more accurately described as sensory perception—reading our own body’s sense of a situation. All I know is that when I diligently seek out experiences that feed my imagination and revisit these experiences by imagining the sensory details, it is much easier to come up with insightful metaphors and stories.

Imagination enables us to invent new futures that are better than the present. Logic relies on past evidence-based successes, whereas imagination turns reality into clay we can mold into novel shapes and then test. Consider the person who sketched the design for the chair supporting your bottom right now. At some point this chair didn’t exist. That person imagined it, sketched it out, maybe even used a story to communicate the idea of it so strangers could construct it into a material reality. Without strong imaginations we struggle to invent new material realities.

Constant investment in your imagination stretches the mental muscles you need to explore beyond apparent limitations. Protect your storytelling from the enemies of imagination: certainty, proof, and metric constraints. Question certainties that narrow your definition of a problem. Ask real people to tell you true stories in person (share yours first). Don’t allow well-intentioned criticism to obliterate the best parts of your stories by shifting your focus to minor flaws before you have found the heart of your story. Rise above cynicism, quarantine fears, and risk vulnerability to stay connected to your imagination’s ability to find new trails of insight.

Software designers regularly use metaphors of architecture, building, and journeys to accelerate design ideas. These imaginative metaphors demonstrate how quickly metaphor can recruit the power of our imagination to see connections that logic fails to notice. Think about your imagination as taking on the metaphorical habits of different animals. For instance, my imagination is naturally like a fox because I chase whatever rabbit runs in front of me. Sometimes I need my imagination to hibernate like a bear or become as fickle as a cat, vacillating between exploring a problem from the inside/out as well as outside/in. Physical world metaphors trigger new points of view that may reveal new insights.

Metaphors shake things up. When you characterize a well-worn problem with a new metaphor you update your view with imaginative insights. Another of Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling suggests making a list and then discarding your first five ideas in order to see if the sixth one surprises you. Likewise you might list five good metaphors specifically to find a sixth metaphor that better improves understanding. I use all of these tricks to stimulate my imagination.

Finally, imagination is vital for people who maintain a wide circle of moral concern. If we can’t clearly visualize the people we care about: future generations, our boss, family and the vast array of humans we choose to treat like family they will cease to influence our perceptual field. Expanding who, where, and what we imagine makes our stories feel more meaningful to more people.

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

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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

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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