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Annette Simmons

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

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

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Annette Simmons

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 6 of 8

The Moral Dilemmas of a Lion, a Scarecrow, and a Tin Man Frank Baum’s original introduction to The Wizard of Oz, written in 1900, made it clear that he felt children no longer needed the stereotypical “old-time fairy tale” that “may now be classed as ‘historical’ in the children’s library.” Baum claimed the time had

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Annette Simmons

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 3 of 8

  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

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Annette Simmons

COVID-19: The Stages Before Acceptance

I had taken an early morning flight from Sydney to Melbourne and while I don’t really like orange juice I was bored. So I peeled back the silver foil and drank from the plastic cup on my tray. Later that day a radio announcer caught my attention with a public health announcement that “all travelers on flight

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Annette Simmons

Ten Games People Play to Control Truth (5)

  Information Manipulation Game Tweak the numbers and you tweak the decision.  Edit video and you edit context. Control the narrative and you control what information seems relevant. Truth is the first casualty whenever we assume that everyone manipulates information so we have to as well….since “that’s how the game is played.” “Their response [when tweaking

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Annette Simmons

Budweiser Storytelling Genius Used for Good

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

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Popular Posts

Paradox: Root Cause of Polarization

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

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Contrasts, Not Conflicts

 “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

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Storyteller’s Confession: My Secret Mission

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.

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

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

Read More »

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 7 of 8

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

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