Why we need stories from the edge
I came across the idea of the power law when I read Duncan Watt’s Six Degrees. It’s the one that best describes city population distributions, the size of hubs in networks, the popularity of blog sites, word frequencies and the Pareto principle, to name just a few. In power law systems there’s one standout (the biggest city, the most frequently used word, the most popular blog) then the rest trail off into a very long trail. Imagine one of those fun drop slides where you hang from a bar, let go and enjoy a terrific slide to the end. The shape of a drop slide is the same as a power law if you graph these distributions. Quite a different shape to the normal, bell-curve distribution we were all told at university best represented the world we live in. Power laws tell us to notice the extremes. Bell curves tell us to remove the outliers and look at the majority.
Do you know the difference between character and characterisation when you are crafting a story? In Story, Robert McKee tells us that characterisation is what you can see, the observable qualities: a person’s age, gender, occupation, how they dress. Whereas character is revealed by their action when there are tough choices to be made. In the final season of the West Wing, Bruno (the Republican campaign advisor) finds Senator Santos’ (the Democratic presidential candidate) briefcase and Bruno brings it to his boss, Senator Vinnick who’s running against Santos. Vinnick is presented with a dilemma: leak the contents of briefcase and gain an advantage in the campaign or return the briefcase to Santos. His actions in tough situations when there is much at stake reveal his character. Vinnick returns the briefcase.
Stories are told at the edge and from the edge. We recount remarkable events which in turn communicate those events that reveal our colleague’s character. This is why stories are at the heart of organisational culture but they don’t magically appear without a trigger. They come from remarkable things that are happening.
Sometimes people say to me, “does that story really represent the majority of what people think?” My first response is to say we are less interested in a single story than the patterns many stories reveal. But the question does reveal bell-curve thinking where the outliers don’t matter, they’re an aberration to be ignored. But think of every major breakthrough in how things are done. Each one came from the edges. The trap we make for ourselves comes from the wonderful minds we have and their ability to make sense and explain things after the event. “Of course Google had to happen, 911 was a foreseeable tragedy waiting to happen, the ability to show videos on the net would result in a multi-billion dollar purchase”—bollocks! In hindsight it all makes sense to us and we believe we can predict what is coming next by analysing past events. Those days are well behind us now. From now on we need to design for serendipity, furiously take action, make mistakes, but most importantly create situations where ideas can bubble up and and be tried out.
Stories are a double edge sword. On the one hand they deliver the messages from the edge. On the other hand they are the carriers of sensemaking, explanation and encapsulate the causes that brought us here today. Stories help us simplify what happened. We need to be both wary of and embrace stories. Get used to paradoxes. Charles Handy said it was the age of unreason and I think he is right.
While I haven’t finished the book yet I’m finding The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb an inspiration that’s generating so many thoughts. Last week I had the good fortune to have a hour long chat with Tom Peters at the AIM Convention. It turns out we both share many intellectual interests such as Karl Weick’s work on sensemaking, a love of storytelling and a desire to challenge the status quo. In that conversation Tom said I was crazy if I didn’t read The Black Swan. I’m glad I took his advice.
Technorati Tags: black swan, karl weick, nassim nicholas taleb, tom peters
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:
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Great post, Shawn. If there are many stories from the edge how do we figure out which ones are significant or portentous? I guess this is a variant of the weak signal detection problem?
That’s it Patrick. We can’t figure it out. We need to try stuff out and see what happens. Even the concept of weak signals suggests it can be discerned beforehand.
Do you think the edge may sometimes be more in view that we think, or if there is a self-similar edge all the way down, are we on the edge too? “The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery”. JP Rangaswami has some super posts on the perils of risk-management trends, cultures that squash out the counter stories, what might also be viewed as silent evidence, worth checking out. 2007 has been a good year for books 🙂
Listening to all stories from the edge (and trying stuff out on each) is a lot of work, and there’s a risk surely that getting obsessed with the periphery takes too much attention away from the core (which is the bread and butter). So I think the “weak signal” idea is an important one… and looking for patterns in the “edge” stories? Andrew Grove’s classic “Only the Paranoid Survive” talks about finding and listening to the Cassandras in the organisation, middle managers who are close to the suppliers or the customers… which suggests that who the stories come from also matters.
I agree Patrick. There is no way you want to respond to all the stories you hear from the edge. Patterns are important. Mind you we are suckers for patterns. Some psychologists did an experiment (reported in The Black Swan) where they presented the subjects with a number pattern like 2-4-6 and asked the subject to provide another number pattern to the experimenter that might reveal the underlying rule that creates the pattern. So the subjects might say 3-5-7 (add 2) or 4-6-8 (even numbers). The experimenter would say yes or no if their suggested pattern revealed the rule – a bit like playing Mastermind. Well the rule was “ascending numbers” and hardly anyone suggested a descending set of numbers so the experimenter could say ‘no.’ We see patterns easily and assume we can uncover the underlying rules easily as well. But we can be easily fooled.
Healthy scepticism is needed. We need to be mindful of our confirmation biases and actually look for instances that disprove our theories. It’s too easy (and tells us nothing new) to find confirmatory evidence (which is a contradiction).
So it’s not easy and weak signals probably falls into this trap of amplifying things we confirm.
Patrick – Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about his “bar-bell” approach to market risk when he was a trader. 85% of his investments went into really safe stuff (treasury bonds). The remaining 15% were related to potential positive black swans (such as Black Monday – where apparently he made a lot of money).
There is a risk of obsession with the periphery – but for many organisations there is greater risk in ignoring it. Possibly the investment of management time (core vs periphery) should be similar to NNT’s investments of money (without following the actual ratios)?
I think your point about looking at “who” is telling the story is important. And the responses the stories generate. If they make people uncomfortable or they get rejected in an off-hand manner then that could imply they need looking at more closely. As Shawn notes, confirmation biases can be an issue.