More on Meaning: The Story...

The human mind has a special relationship with stories; they are our primary sense making mechanisms; they help us find meaning in events, past, present and speculative futures.  People read newspapers for just this reason - journalists take events and make stories out of them (often getting them wrong, or distorting facts to fit a good story structure) giving us the illusion that we understand what is going on.  The vast majority of readers are unaware that this is happening, and take the journalist's views of cause-and-effect as factual; this is how strong the story-making impulse is.

Other evidence of our relationship with stories include the popularity of the movies, in which the industry repeats near-identical stories time and time again; the ever-popular paperback novel; soap operas; theatre; TV dramas; opera; office gossip; ballads; the demand for "case studies" in marketing and text books; business plans and (without apology) project plans.  Every time you say or think "that makes sense", you have accepted a cause-effect relationship, or a component of a story.

The problem is that the story is a two-edged sword: It can be a very influential tool to persuade and motivate people to change their behaviour and actions, but it can also be used to exaggerate the importance of the incidental, the irrelevant, and the self-serving (this relates to Decision Quality, which is covered in a later section).

You can use stories to great effect for team motivation; spending time discussing alternative journeys and outcomes from the project is highly worthwhile.  Spending time discussing one particular storyline may be very useful:  The Monomyth.

The Monomyth is so prevalent in narrative across the world that it seems to be hard-wired into our brains, and it may well influence our personal and team behaviour in subtle and pernicious ways as an unconscious script.  It is also called the "Hero's Journey" and it comprises these phases:

1. A call to adventure, which the hero has to accept or decline
2. A road of trials, regarding which the hero succeeds or fails
3. Achieving the goal or "boon", which often results in important self-knowledge
4. A return to the ordinary world, again as to which the hero can succeed or fail
5. Applying the boon, in which what the hero has gained can be used to improve the world

For a project to run successfully, there are elements of the Monomyth script, whether they are consciously or unconsciously instigated, that we would rather minimise, but which would provide the excitement in a storyline - and possibly the meaning in a project. There are also elements which we would like to exaggerate.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Project, Leadership, Black, Book