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.
I think there are two kinds of truth, little “t” truth and Big “T” Truth. If anyone walks up to you wagging their finger and says, “You want the truth…I’ll tell you the truth!” … …they are about to share their opinion with you. Big T Truths are timeless and transcend the small snapshots of little
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
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
In 2004 I introduced my ideas about story-thinking to a bunch of design engineers who responded “no, no, that’s design-thinking.” So I fell in love with design thinking…genuises like Dan Lockton (101 patterns for behavior change), Jan Jursa and UX Storytellers (free ebook with personal UX stories) create designs that are stories. Perhaps story thinking and design thinking are not an exact match but the steps of find/share/refine from UX,
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
