Power Of Stories

Weaving culture through stories

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Inanimate objects have a way of jumping to life when a story is woven around them. It is simple, isn’t it? Context determines the attention that we give to an object. When we get to know more about the context, the object jumps to life. There is much power in stories. In fact, paying attention to stories and culture will help us live rich lives.

Sample this.

The other day, my mom bought a saree and gave it an affectionate caress and whilst marveling its intricate pattern said, “that’s 41 years of experience that’s got this out”.  Intrigue got the better of me and I soon found this card with her.  This card came with the saree, she said. Whoever had thought about it, has a brilliant mind.

Truth be told, my appreciation of sarees is next to zero and the role often is limited to being the man in tow, when a saree is being bought. The card helps me view the saree as a product of human effort now. An object that I can relate to much better.

The power in stories.

That there is power in stories is a given. In the above instance, the saree, an inanimate object, came alive to me because of the added context. A human being with all life experiences is a carrier of stories. A power-packed repository, if you will. So power packed that tapping into them can completely alter the perception about the person. Often times, bringing alive our own biases and themes in our mind.

Lincoln, once famously said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better”.

Stories and conversation.

If stories are at the heart of it all, it is conversations that bring them alive. In whichever form or shape, it is conversations that are active carriers of stories. In the ‘everything-needs-to-be-measured-binary-digital-transactional-world’, conversations have been reduced to transactions. The richness that lies nestled within us evaporates like the hope expecting parents had for a stillborn child.

Edgar Schein, who I have written about earlier, through Humble Inquiry and Humble Consulting espouse practical ways of empathy and connection.  A connect that has curiosity, discovery, and conversation as basic tenets to build on.

As I interact and work with leaders across the board and around the world, there is one thing that emerges ever so clear to me. The ability to create the climate for conversations to thrive is a competence modern day leaders must work on. There is much work that needs to be done in this space. Therein lies the space for us, our stories and our conversations.

Is there anything that we can do in our daily lives to be able to foster this. A bunch of things stand out for me. Here are two. These need to be expanded on.

1. Take on less: Keeping empty spaces in the calendar is, in the modern times, seen as inefficient planning. For all those who run a “return on investment” calculation on conversations: Returns that come from deep conversations are non-linear, long lasting and disproportionate in the long term. To go deep is necessary to expand.

2. Deep conversations have a lot more to do with questions, deep listening, and curiosity than sharing. Not that sharing is not important. Just that it becomes a natural part of evolving conversation.

Here is a fantastic blogpost that I discovered. Titled “52 Questions to Bring You Closer Together“ it is a keeper. I love the methodology behind the questions as much as the questions themselves, for it has lead me to work on and add on to the list.

Here is another story

Come September, along with my friend Stephen Berkeley,  I am running a one day workshop titled “Building Bridges Breaking Walls, One Story at a time” in Osaka.  At the Asia Conference of the International Association of Facilitators, we hope to stir some conversation.  Just as we did last year in Seoul, South Korea.  The workshop last year got us some feedback that flattered us beyond our imagination. Sitting at the lobby of the hotel in Seoul, still chuffed by the kind words that participants had for us, we promised ourselves last year that we would think through and prompted us to think and offer a more holistic offering.  That’s exactly what we have put together for this time.

For starters, we have gotten a lot more committed to the idea of encouraging a greater coming together. We intend continuing this conversation well into the future.  Through portals, platforms and one conversation at a time. We are aware that the role of leaders in creating a space for genuine deep conversation is something that we seek to explore even more.

That this conversation must develop is something that we are convinced of.  In organisations, communities, civil society and every other place, people have to be able to sit down and talk to each other. And hear each other out. The times we live in has seen building walls of all kinds catching the fancy of the world. But if we were to fancy our chance of passing the planet on to generations that come, we have to invest in our each other. Through our stories!

We look forward to your support.  We will keep try and aggregate our thoughts under the #story2story hashtag. Please dive into the conversation. In the meanwhile, listen to someone’s story. You never know what it can do to you. Or to them.

Building a Story Ecosystem

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Post By Stephen Berkeley

In 2011 I had the fortune of spending three days with Peter Senge, the Author of “The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organisation” and “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization” identified in 1997 by the Harvard Business Review as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. The event was the Society of Organisation Learning‘s “Fundamentals of Leadership” workshop in Boston. It brought alive for me the importance of active listening in the building a story ecosystem.

Peter has a very Zen style, so when he spoke his words seemed to go deeper into the cerebral cortex than any speaker I have ever heard. One of his pearls that has shaped my work as an Organsiation Development Practitioner was “What we say and don’t say and what we do and don’t do creates culture”. From my experience of working at a leadership level in healthcare over the last thirty years in Australia, UK and India, I would rephrase this to, “what we say and don’t say, what we do and don’t do, creates stories, in our minds and the minds of others, and it is these stories that create culture”. And of course, as Peter Drucker famously said: “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

One of the hypotheses we are testing with the “Building Bridges and Breaking Walls, One Story at a time” workshops is that “When whole systems engage in deep listening to each other new realities emerge for the whole system that can be infectious. Systemic change will bring about lasting impact for the system and its constituents”. The exact opposite is also true, when we do not engage in deep listening to each other, new realities will still emerge and can be infectious for all the wrong reasons, because the untold stories live on in our behaviours.  The grapevine is stories that have not been listened to. So it can also be said that untold stories can have a “lasting impact on the system and its constituents”.

In healthcare, a reputation that has taken years to be built can be destroyed in a flash, whether it be an individual or an entire organisation, because lives are at stake. However, a system does not break down overnight. There generally is a steady stream of stories that would have been symptoms that the system is about to implode. But as leaders, we are often caught up in getting things done that we do not pay attention to the emerging stories within our organisations. Stories not tended to, have the capability of derailing everything from our overall vision to a new product launch, to a project or just everyday productivity. Not to mention destroying relationships. Stories like stones can be used to build a bridge or a wall. How we tend to stories determines whether we build a bridge or a wall.

I took the above picture at Haines Falls in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York shortly before my workshop with Peter Senge in Boston. I had just finished co-facilitating a 4 day Dialogue with 60 healthcare leaders from 7 countries who gathered to explore the intersection of spirituality with healthcare. It was a vibrant but intense experience as I was the graphic recorder, my first attempt. But I needed a bit of a release so I decided to go for a walk in the woods and discovered this epic bridge.

After four days of listening to stories and synthesising them into a graphic, this bridge represented our journey. We started the four-day dialogue with our own individual stories, but through a well crafted facilitative process involving Open Space Technology, World Cafe and Appreciative Inquiry we identified our commonality and the areas we could individually provide more leadership on. Each story was like a stone, we could have used them to build a bridge or a wall. We chose the bridge.

Trust plays a central role. To draw out the stories that are shaping your culture needs a facilitator skilled in creating a safe environment for conversations that count. Currently, there is a trend towards “storytelling”, but it is only part of the picture. There is, in fact, a Story Ecosystem. We need to pay equal attention to the component parts of this story ecosystem.  The art of story work requires you to be a story detective, a three-dimensional listener, a harvester, a curator, a synthesiser, a sense-maker and a facilitator. You need a systematic way of hearing all the perspectives and understanding the narratives.

Our workshops on “Building Bridges and Breaking Walls, One Story at a Time” and the online conversation we hope to create, will dive deep into the StoryWork Ecosystem. Do hope you can join us at #IAFAsia17 in Seoul on the 18th August. You can also follow our journey on our FB page

IAF Asia Conference 2017 Seoul Pre Conference Workshop Kavi & Stephen

Building Bridges & Breaking Walls. One Story at a time.

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August will be the curtain raiser month of sorts for me. I along with Stephen Berkeley will be working with interested and interesting participants at a one day Pre-Conference Workshop at the International Association of Facilitators‘ Asia Conference and exploring the power of stories in bridging the world.  The IAF Asia Conference 2017 is happening in Seoul in August 2017.   What better of a setting for a topic like  “Building Bridges and Breaking Walls. One Story at a time”! I think it fit to build context the IAF Asia Conference 2017 Seoul Pre Conference Workshop titled: “Building Bridges and Breaking Walls, One Story at a time” through a series of posts here.  This then becomes a space for conversation and dialogue on the power of stories.

IAF Asia Conference 2017 Seoul Pre Conference Workshop

IAF Asia Conference 2017 Seoul Pre Conference Workshop “Building Bridges and Breaking Walls, One Story at a time”

Stephen and I have been bouncing ideas off each other for a while now on a variety of topics. From Systems Thinking to organisational structures. The power of local communities.  Change processes in organisations. Process facilitation. And a variety of other topics. Even as the conversation evolved, we realised that we were very different individuals with a different take on most topics that we discussed. United only by a strong idea of staying engaged with pursuits that are meaningful.

Even as we discovered more of our worlds we saw how similar they were, despite having completely different contexts. Set in different times, time zones. As much as we had our differences, we were united in our openness to share and exchange stories from our respective worlds. Over time this became to be the fulcrum of our friendship. It was but obvious that the willingness to listen to and share each other’s stories bridged gaps.

One day as we sat on a rock after a small hike, a little idea came upon us.  We perhaps could work with larger groups to explore the power of telling and listening to each other’s stories too. Perhaps, we thought, that would bridge larger gaps in the world that surfaced in our conversations many times over. We ran a few experiments, ran the idea past friends and colleagues.  The idea seemed to have currency. It kept growing. We wondered why and came up with our own set of hypotheses.  The set is only growing.  Here are the five that I connect to the most.

a. There are too many wedges in the world we live in. Cultural. Political. Generational. Economic. The trouble is that those wedges are seeming to appear like irrevocable divides. Walls of steel, so to speak!

b. The world has newer tools and additional power to communicate in the modern times. Sadly these tools find increasing use in amplification of these divides.

c. Listening to each other’s stories helps understand points of views and helps explore our world views.  Examining these with an open mind brings greater awareness and possible shifts. Stories are integral to these shifts.

d. Shaping and shifting of the narratives and stories, both inside our minds and in the world around us will determine the shape of the world our kids will inherit

e. When whole systems engage in deep listening to each other new realities emerge for the whole system that can be infectious. Systemic change will bring about lasting impact for the system and its constituents.

For now :

Armed with the first-hand experience of leading change initiatives in large organisations and communities, we seek to further the conversation to see what more is possible. Would it be a new set of skills and abilities? Perhaps a deeper understanding of the process of change? Maybe a clearer way to harness what emerges from a story? We don’t know for sure what else the questions are. And thus begins this journey.

While it is a personal journey to take the ‘story of the story’ to newer areas, new bridges will perhaps get built. In the telling and retelling of the stories, new ways and connections have greater chances of emerging. All of us who jump into participate are going to be better off depending on how much we are willing to give and take.  Seoul in August ’17 will be the first pit stop. And we intend continuing the conversation, armed with whatever comes from the previous pit stops. This space will curate the journey and will continue to evolve.

This is work in progress. And this is far from complete. Wonder if we will all ever be. So, do jump into the conversation. Spread the word. Let’s see what stories emerge.