Annette Simmons

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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

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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

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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

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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