I used to believe that stories made the world go around. The ending chapter of Strategy: A History laid out the facts: narrative architecting is the essence and the future of achieving big objectives in groups. A dozen other books have been screaming the opposite at me for years, but I didn’t yet know how to listen. Thinking Fast and Slow laid out how behaviors are manipulated by stories to become unconscious biases. Charles Duhigg clarified that habits are changed one at a time, and create cascading behavior change (as did the guy that wrote Atomic Habits). Everyone who has written in a compelling way about work and engagement discusses individual behaviors that managers, leaders, and individual contributors need to exhibit (though engagement as a thing to measure makes it seem a little story-hocus-pocusy, come on Gallup). Here is the actual way: context is the end and the beginning. The greater the detail, the greater the understanding not the more accurate the mental model nor more compelling the 2×2 diagram. Henry Mintzberg gets this and has written well about it – management is an act of detailed attentiveness followed by actions that match the specific situation. Peter Drucker was onto this as well, but he wrote in vague syllogisms that didn’t orient sufficiently to situational specifics. Amazon’s management system reflects the idea that behaviors, when turned into habits and given attention (with some creativity to improve the behaviors applied at intervals) create an unstoppable force.
Beyond corporate contexts (because who really wants to play “new feudalism” for too long in a row), life is best lived in context. Wittgenstein and Zhuangzi seem to have independently concluded that language is basically a long-term story engine – a mechanism for social pattern matching that doesn’t have to pay attention to get narrative results. “Unconscious culture” these two thinkers railed against, one in the form of a takedown of analytic philosophy (satisfying to see Bertrand Russell reject it and admit his rejection was deeply biased against the loss of his intellectual edifices) and the other in the form of logically consistent stories that effectively deny rationality as we know it (not to mention the human institutions that support directed rationality).
So what’s one to do? Stand in the stream and let it pass around you. Put your hands in the stream and notice the feel of the water, the sound of rocks bouncing along the bottom, the rush through your fingers of water heading downish. Notice the context. See the stories that are being woven and blanketing the shoreline. See through the stories to the riverbank. The stream is not a story as it passes through your fingers, it is water.
Roman Ryan 