Narratives – the power of a good story

?In these times of Christmas holidays, it is worthwhile to reflect on the story which started the whole Christmas thing. It’s a story of a refugee family in the middle east, forced to deliver their baby boy far away from hospitals and safety. Instead, they took shelter in a stable and put their newborn in a manger. For those witnessing the small, exposed family, it was probably hard to imagine that this was the start of the worlds larges religion that, would live on and prosper more than two thousand years later. No matter you call yourself a believer, think the historic events happened according to the story in the bible, or you think it is pure bogus, it proves the power of a narrative. In this post, I elaborate on the importance of storytelling, in business, in life and why it might be threatened by AI.

Strong narratives that have changed the world

There are several historic narratives that has changed the course of history. When John F. Kennedy uttered the famous words in Congress on May 25, 1961: “US should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”, it was the starting point of a nation unifying behind a common goal. But not only that. It also started an engineering effort never seen before, that spun off in numerous technology achievement serving the broad population, not only the space industry. And when Winston Churchill 4th of June 1940 declared “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.?We shall never surrender” it marked the start of an unbendable British resistance that eventually led to the fall of Hitler. Furthermore, Martin Luther King’s speech in Washington the 28th of August 1963 have given us the immortal words: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” which even today call for racial justice where there is a lack thereof. All these three quotes show that well formulated narratives, in synch with the time, can start big movements and really influence the outcome of the history. They are a sign of the strength of a good narrative.

The historic significance of Narratives

In his book Sapiens – A brief history of mankind, the author Yuval Noah Harari introduce the concept of fictions. A fiction is something the human collective has agreed to be true, might it be money, the law, culture or religion. He calls them fictions since they only exist because we agree they exists. Harari leads into proof that this is what made Homo Sapiens superior all other species, the Neanderthal included. Harari ascertain that a one-on-one duel between a Homo Sapiens and a Neanderthal unquestionable would lead to a disaster for the Homo Sapiens, since the Neanderthal was much stronger. A fight between 10 Homo Sapiens and 10 Neanderthal will lead to the same outcome. However, the change in outcome arise when the Homo Sapiens line up hundreds or thousands in the fight. This was something the Neanderthals were not able to do. What made Homo Sapiens capable of organizing large groups into coordinated actions that the Neanderthals could not? Harari say that it has to do with the fictions. Through culture and religion, the Homo Sapiens could organize in large group that had a coordinated direction and purpose. That is ultimately what lead them to be the rulers of the world. Another way to put it was that the Homo Sapiens were superior storytellers. Never underestimate the power of a good story.

Natural selection on storytelling

If the theory of Harari is true, that Homo Sapiens is the king of the world due to its ability to tell stories (fictions) and also to listen, absorb and act upon stories, it is not farfetched to believe that there, during the ten thousands of years have been a natural selection on storytelling. Here how it supposed to work. Some individuals had a natural disposition to tell better stories. These individuals could gather and align the actions of larger groups. The same was true for those who was inclined to listen, absorb and act on stories. They could function better in larger group and more easily behave in accordance with the belief of the common narrative. Therefore, in the fight with other communities, these storytelling-excelling group had a better likelihood to survive. By that, the storytelling gene was given a better chance to propagate throughout the generation. This is my home-made theory, and it is hard to give proof of its accuracy, but if not, the 10 children of the storyteller Elon Musk talks to my favor.

Leadership and Storytelling

When you work as a leader, your task is to influence people. In relation to your direct reports, you do that by nudging and morphing your behavior to be as functional as possible for the overall task. By carefully chose what you say, how you say things, your facial expression as well as your body langue, you influence, or in the best case inspire, your tribe to commonly achieve the goal. However, there is a limit to how many you can reach with your behavior. If the organization you lead is counted in hundreds or thousands of people, there is no way you can influence them all through direct interaction with you. You simply need another tool. You need a good narrative.

As a leader for a large group of people, you need a narrative that explains the overall purpose and direction for the organization. It is supposed to work as a guiding star for each and every individual in your tribe. Ultimately, the shared story is ingrained in every person. Hence, confronted with a new and uncertain situation, they can circle back to the narrative, take that as a compass bearing and understand how to act. Therefore, it must be “wide enough” to be applicable to general situations but “precise enough” to give guidance. It is a bit like the rules you give your kids. They should work as frames for their upbringing. Such rules should be very clear and consequences hard when they are crossed, but wide enough to give freedom to operate within to foster independent individuals. A good guiding narrative gives both freedom and guidance. The story must also be understandable and lovable, meaning it should speak to the feelings and ultimately align with what your people want. As a leader for a large organization, a big part of your task is to repeatedly communicate the narrative for it to slowly grow into a story that, not only you as a leader tell your people, but a tale the employees tell each other.

Extra important are a good narrative when you need to make a significant change in an organization. Change is hard. Change meets resistance. Therefore, the story for change is the motor that reminds the organization to push through, although it is uncomfortable, One last general thing about narratives for large organizations. It is good if contains an element that anchors back to the history of the company. In that way it signals that this is not something taken from thin air, but rather a natural development and the next step in the long and proud history of the company.

Leading change with storytelling

In my career, I have used storytelling to align my organization many times. When I got the trust to lead the Electrification Development at Scania, and our BEV offer was minimal as well as our sales, we carved out a story that both had the sight far in the future as well as the anchor in Scania’s long history. One natural starting point could have been to base it on the moral imperative to take responsibility for the climate change. That was of course true, but instead we explained how the total operating economy (TOE) would change over time with the prediction of battery and diesel prices. This will lead to a date in the future where the cost of driving diesel will exceed the cost of driving BEV (TOE parity), meaning those drivers who switch from Diesel to Battery Electric would earn more money. When TOE-parity appears, some driver will make small adjustments to their operation to be able to drive BEV, hence earning more money. Market economy will take care of the rest. The other building block in our BEV-narrative was that we were to attack it with a modular approach. That is how we have developed, sold and produced vehicles since the 50-ties. It is a bit harder, perhaps somewhat slower than to just build one or a few models and go to market. However, when you have the right building blocks (i.e. batteries, charging solutions and eMachines) in your modular toolbox, and they adhere to the standardized interfaces, then you can build every vehicle you historically have built as ICE-vehicles, but now as BEV. Our slogan was:

Eventually all transport will be battery electric for economical reasons. We meet this demand with a modular solution. The winner is not the first who launch, it is the first who scale.

You can read more in my previous post https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/transition-electrified-heavy-vehicles-magnus-mackaldener/?trackingId=EKlOYuhaTDajmoNOA2LXvA%3D%3D

The other example of storytelling for change was when we at Scania realized that our old, rather stifling project model was not suitable for the future we were foreseeing, and we needed to adapt. We came from a paradigm of projects. In essence, a project is to “buy a result” far in the future. You do it by defining scope, cost and time (in a project definition) and then the idea is to execute on that plan. When the future becomes more and more complex (i.e. hard or impossible to predict), the approach should not be a better and more detailed plan, but rather a different, more agile approach. We called the transformation Fit For Future and based it on the ideas from the Agile way of working. The general catch of the storytelling was that, when the future is unpredictable you need to adjust your course more often to follow a moving target. Each adjustment of a development project in a large organization involves some kind of decision and communication. To cope with that, either the decision makers must improve their decisions per time unit (DPM), OR you need to involve more people in the decision making (spread the burden of decision making). Fit for future advocated for the latter. Since the hierarchical top in an organization is always narrow, more involved in the decision making process means push decisions down in the organization. But, how can relatively uninformed employees deep down in the organization be given responsibility for important decisions, you might ask? The answer is that the decisions power is not given singular individuals but rather groups of say 100 employees, we call them value creation teams (VCT). These team of teams have a clear customer value they should fulfil and encapsulate maximum complexity within them (i.e. contain all relevant cross-functions). By that all relevant information for a critical decision exist in the VCT and the goal (customer value pull) is clear. Thereby, decision making can be decentralized. The short story goes:?

Since the world is more complex and unpredictable, we need more decisions per time unit. We create that by decentralizing decision making to VCT:s that encapsulate most possible complexity and have a clear customer value pull. We call it Fit For Future.

More thought on Agile can be found in my previous post https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/golden-rule-reorganization-magnus-mackaldener/?trackingId=EKlOYuhaTDajmoNOA2LXvA%3D%3D

Your personal story

In the HBR article “What’s your story” (HBR 2005), Hermina Ibarra (London Business School) and Kent Lineback advocate for a personal story to give direction and resilience in your life. They write: ”All of us tell stories about ourselves. Stories define us. To know someone well is to know her story….When we want someone to know us, we share stories of our childhood, our family , our school years, our first love, the development of our political views, and so on”. In that sense, they mean that stories define us. But they also introduce the concept of a Coherent Life Story. They say that:

Coherent narratives hang together in ways that feel natural and intuitive…..that our life are a series of unfolding’s, linked events that make sense. In other words, that the past is related to the present, and from that trajectory, we can glimpse our future.

Therefore, by defining your life story, you make yourself a guiding star in times of transition in your life. Standing in front of a junction in life, your life story give you hints which way to take. Like Ibarra and Lineback put it, your life story gives a “glimpse of your future”.

We see that stories are important for cultures and communities, for corporations as well as in peoples personal life. But what predictions can be said about the future importance of stories?

The loss of a common story

As we have learned, stories play, and have played an important role throughout the history of mankind. Taking the face value of Harari, religion (a fiction according to Harari) has during a large period constituted the glue that keep us together. For large groups, the religious belief is what defined their life. It created a shared promise about the future. For the religious, that promise said: if you follow the scripture and subordinate your life accordingly, eternal life awaits you in heaven. That Narrative was held true by the western majority until the second half of twenties century. Then, with increase of wealth and spread of market economy, the traditional religions were replaced by a new one; Consumism. The promise of market economy and consumism was: if you only buy this “stuff” you will become happy like the celebrities on the commercial. It was manifested by the hard-working family parents hoping to give their kids a better life than they themselves had. The ladder of success was first afford TV, then car, then summer house, than national vacation, then international vacation, then 10 streaming services then….. However, that promise was never delivered upon. As soon as you bought your car, there was one that was better and now you wanted that car instead of your own boring one. And when you just signed up for your third streaming service, your favorite show aired on the one you didn’t have. This is the foundation of post modernism, which partly is defined by the loss of a common narrative. More and more people experience a loss of a story to believe in. The Sociologist Hartmund Rosa summarize the state when he says that the world has become numb and people lack a sense of resonance with the surrounding world. The only Narrative our society seem to sign on to now is the belief of infinite growth in a finite world. And then AI enters.

AI and common stories

AI has a unique ability to threaten our common narratives. One example is the fiction we call democracy. Someone has described democracy as a continuous, publicly ongoing dialogue about ideas. Another way to put it is to say that democracy are ideas floating around in society collecting followers. This “ongoing dialogue” used to take place in public media like newspapers and press. We all read roughly the same papers and watched the same TV-program. In that sense, we shared the same narrative. With the emergence of social media, much of the public discourse moved to platforms like twitter. And we all know what the recommendation algorithms did to the amplification of one sided messages creating echo chambers. Now, with AI, there is impossible to know if the sender on a social platform is a real person, a random chatbot or in worse case a coordinated information attack from a bad actor or state. What used to be a calibrating factor for our shared story (broadcast media) is now replaced by artificial tailored messages mainly creating divergence.

Connecting the dots

Narratives have a certain attractiveness to mankind. It might even be in our genes. Used wisely, they are a powerful tool for positive change. If we do not watch out, we might be pushed around as society by diverging narratives. To fight this dystopia, my recommendation to you would be 1) to craft your ability to use narratives as a part of your leadership toolbox and 2) define your personal story to use as a compass in this changing times of AI.

May the “good story” be with you!

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