We Are the Stories We Tell

I’ve always kept my CV up to date. As things happen in my professional life, I tend to meticulously document everything so that I understand my career in relationship to my goals and to other people I admire. 

After encountering an especially good teacher, or a particularly insightful piece of research when I was in graduate school, I might have said, "Okay, well, that's the sort of professor I would like to be one day.” Or when looking at the resumes of my heroes like Bill Coughran I might have reflected, "I'm so far away from this person’s achievements. I should strive to do more." 

In either case, I would have used my CV as motivation and a chart of my progress. I was documenting my story with a mind to where I hope it might be going. When I joined LinkedIn, my wife said, you know, this is the most ironic thing. You're working for a company that's all about professionals telling their career stories to the world. Your career and your fixation on careers have converged.

I’ve always felt that all of the participants in our collective human drama should be mindful of how important it is to become storytellers. My former boss at LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, taught me many things about leadership. One of the most important was that narrative matters when you are trying to inspire a large group of folks to accomplish a common objective. If you spend enough time with him, at some point you will hear him say, “we are the stories that we tell.” If you’ve ever tried to lead a group of folks larger than 120-150 people, you have visceral knowledge that something is different about these bigger groups.

In groups up to this size, a manager might be able to know each member of the team, what they are doing, the boundaries of their capabilities and trustworthiness, their personality quirks, etc. Moreover, every member of the team can have this knowledge about every other member of the team. This trust radius allows leaders to set goals and objectives, understand accountability, and to develop reasonable expectations about how work will proceed. It also allows individuals who are accountable for a task whose completion depends on others to have reasonable expectations about how others will collaborate with them.

Larger groups are a different thing altogether. In these groups, having a shared story is not just nice. It is absolutely essential so that everyone understands what the collective whole is about, and what it is trying to accomplish.

Our shared stories are the maps to both present and future, and the bedrock of how we are able to function from teams to communities to sprawling societies. Our shared stories are such a fundamental part of being homo sapiens, that it can be easy for us to forget their supreme importance, and to allow the momentum of our day-to-day activities to carry us forward even after the old story has ended and the new one is left unwritten. And at this particular point in history, we may very well have entered a period where we’ve literally lost the narrative, with a wide range of nascent, often mutually hostile narratives emerging to fill the void.

According to Oxford professor and author, Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens, it could very well be the case that homo sapiens is the dominant species on the planet because sometime during the cognitive revolution that happened 70,000 to 30,000 years ago, we developed language and the capacity to tell stories. Without the ability to tell stories, groups have some ability to regulate themselves through interpersonal contact and “gossip” or networks of chatter about what’s going on in the group. For primates who are limited to these mechanisms for group regulation, groups break down when larger than 50 or so individuals. For humans, research indicates that 120-150 individuals is our effective limit. Storytelling allowed groups of our ancestors to share a vision for the future and to organize themselves around that vision in a way that other human species were not able to replicate. This ability to work toward a common objective with large numbers of other individuals, most of whom our ancestors did not or could not know, may be part of what allowed homo sapiens to succeed in ways that other species of humans could not and helped to lay the foundation for modern societies.

Modern corporations themselves are works of fiction brought to life because their employees, investors, business partners, marketplace participants, and others all share a belief that they are real. This pattern of shared belief in the reality of corporations has been around for long enough, is so ubiquitous, and is governed by so many precedents and covenants, that talking about corporations as stories seems a bit silly and philosophical. Nonetheless, corporations would not exist were it not for a fairly complex set of stories that large numbers of people choose to believe are true.

Less philosophically, developing a story about a future that you would like to see realized, is at the heart of leading a large team. Telling an inspiring story allows every member of the team to make the story their own. A good story helps the entire team invest in a set of actions that in aggregate allow the story to be realized over long periods of time, involving the efforts of large numbers of individuals. The absence of a clear narrative about what you’re trying to accomplish and why in a large group of individuals is a recipe for disaster.

What was true for prehistoric homo sapiens and is true for corporations and modern organizations of all flavors, is equally true for larger groups of human beings. Industries are based on stories about how a common set of efforts can produce benefits for companies, their customers, and the societies in which they operate. Stable economic and political systems are based on stories that we’ve told and refined over time about how we can fairly trade with one another, how we collectively solve the problems of community, and how we react to and resolve conflicts.

For industries to work, and for economic and political systems to remain stable, a preponderance of people must believe in and accept the stories of their existence. This requires that individuals understand how the stories of these large structures intersect and impact their own story, and that they believe and accept them. Moreover if these large structures are to thrive, individuals must feel inspired by their stories.

One of the challenges that every one of us face at this moment in time is that the story of technology’s trajectory and how it intersects with our expectations of our individual futures is in flux in ways that it hasn’t been in the West since the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. For some, the story that is emerging is utopian, and they can’t get to the future fast enough. For others, the story is dystopian, and they have a hard time imagining how anyone would want to live in the world that we are creating for ourselves. For most, the story doesn’t exist at all, which means that they are missing an extremely important opportunity to help write the story that will inevitably shape their future lives. Despite being born an intransigent skeptic, on the subject of our future I have always been a hopeless optimist. Humans are capable of amazing things, I believe that our story is one of striving for better that over time ennobles us all.

We, and what we become, are the stories that we tell.