Whose truths are these?

I keep seeing people arguing and speculating about the creation, history, authorship and ownership of the Cynefin framework, and I feel increasingly obliged to say something about it. To keep quiet seems an injustice to all parties. So I'll answer a few questions I keep seeing come up, once and for all, to the best of my recollection. Warning: these are my memories, this is my perspective. It cannot be the same as anyone else's, even if I try. (To those who have no idea what this means, hold on; a new post about e-book readers is simmering and should be done soon ;)

So, am I the co-creator of Cynefin or a contributor? That depends on what you mean by Cynefin. If you mean the form of Cynefin that existed before I started working with Dave Snowden at the IBM Insitute for Knowledge Management (IKM) in April of 2001, no, I am certainly not its co-creator. I believe Dave showed a version of these early Cynefins in his "history of Cynefin" paper. In the earliest versions of Cynefin it related mainly to learning, KM and communities. This is why in my post about Cynefin last summer I said I had helped Dave with "his" Cynefin model. To be honest, I had a very hard time writing that word "his." It took me months to do it, but I'm glad I did. It was right. Dave did have something he called the Cynefin model before I started working with him, and it would be churlish to pretend what he had before I came along didn't matter. It was not what it is now, but it was something, it was something good, and it was his something.

Now, if by Cynefin you mean the version of Cynefin in the 2002 "Complex Acts of Knowing" paper, I consider myself in between co-creator and contributor. Dave and I had been working on the model together for a year before he wrote the paper, and I can see signs of my influence there; but I can also see that much of it is Dave's own thinking. Our worlds were beginning to leak into each other, you could say, at that point. I first drew my seeing-eye pyramids in April or May of 2001, and that as well as many discussions and experiments had an impact on how the model evolved. But we each had our own separate thoughts too. (I had been working in the areas of narrative and complexity for some time, in graduate school and later at IBM Research, and was interested in where these worlds came together.) As I recall it, our first presentation of the framework in its known, knowable, complex, chaotic form, with the bubble domains, was at an IKM member workshop in June or July of 2001. Dave and I collaborated heavily before, during and after that workshop and several others in the fall of 2001, and much of what became the stable Cynefin arose during that collaboration. But I did not write any of the 2002 paper. At the time it never occurred to me to ask to be included as an author (as a contractor I was far too low in the social hierarchy at IBM to even consider it). There is a reference in the paper to a "Snowden and Kurtz" paper on social network stimulation, which I did write but which never got published.

Finally, if by Cynefin you mean the form of the framework that appears in the 2003 IBM Systems Journal paper, yes, I definitely consider myself its co-creator. What is in that paper is substantially the same as what we presented and used in 2001, but there were small refinements during those two years as we began to collaborate more and more strongly. The 2003 paper was actually cut down from double the size for publication and it involved a pretty equal contribution of ideas - and one of the best back-and-forth collaborations I've ever experienced - over months. I did write most of the text, but that's only because I had more time to write because I wasn't flying around giving keynote speeches, which I hate doing.

People have told me they wondered whether it means anything that I'm first author on that 2003 paper. It does to me. My recollection is that Dave offered me first authorship to make up for the fact that he was able to make many keynote speeches and present the framework in person to many audiences, who naturally assumed it was his own. I wasn't very comfortable with that imbalance, and said so, so we agreed that I would be first in print and he would be first in presentation. Over the years I have consoled myself for the many mentions of "Snowden's Cynefin framework" with the fact that I am the first author on the most often cited paper about it. It is silly of me to care about it, I know, but I do care, and I appreciate it when people get the author order right.

As I wrote about last summer, at some point I decided to take my toys and go home, and my old/new confluence framework stands alone. It's happy that way. The collaboration was fruitful for a while, but it ended, and Dave went on to collaborate with other people, as I did.

So, take your pick. If you want me to be either "just a contributor" or a full co-creator I hereby give you permission to believe either you like. You can of course follow this exercise through for every other person who has had an impact on the Cynefin framework, including maybe some I don't even know about. This is probably true for any framework that has ever been published. Several people have already helped me with "my" confluence framework, in discussion and feedback. Are they collaborators, contributors or co-creators? Sure, yes, whatever you like. The distinctions only make sense if you believe in owning ideas at all, which I don't.

To repeat myself for the tenth time, my view is that ideas are like whales that let us swim along if we behave ourselves. Part of behaving ourselves is not putting ropes on them. They might seem tame for a while but that's just an illusion. Wait a few hundred years and see if that rope is still there. Did Darwin discover natural selection all by himself? Was Bell the inventor of the telephone? What did Tesla do? Who built the first computer? Depends on who you ask, doesn't it? So why ask? I'm more interested in the whale.

Now, having handled the trivial issues, here is the only question I really care about. Who is the true first creator of the Cynefin framework? Again, it depends. If by Cynefin you mean the thing you draw that way with those names to it, it is Dave Snowden and nobody else. But if by Cynefin you mean the essential truths it conveys, it is not Dave or anybody born this side of Tutankhamun, but countless and nameless ancient people who saw what human life was all about and passed it on for thousands of years. And maybe it goes even deeper than that ...

I wasn't quite ready to write about this yet, but I've been reading an excellent book called The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. It is about the way our left and right brains process the world. It is Cynefin all over, or confluence all over, or the medicine wheel or anything you like. The left-brain right-brain stuff has settled down from its first outlandish claims to a more nuanced understanding, and McGilchrist summarises the research very well. To put it briefly: our two brain hemispheres have different responsibilities, approaches, personalities almost when it comes to dealing with reality. The right hemisphere (left hand) is vigilant and handles breadth. It watches for predators and conspecifics and large patterns in the environment. It watches things emerge, seeds desired patterns, disrupts undesired patterns, thinks out of the box, considers all angles - get it? The left hemisphere (right hand) is intent and handles focus. It picks out which grains of dirt are food. It categorises and sorts, finds best practices, repeats experiments, tests, proves. These two ways of looking at the world work together to help us survive and thrive, and they go back all the way to the birds and fish.

A few tantalizing quotes from the introduction (only because it's the only thing I can find online to copy and paste from - much more meat in later chapters):

One of the more durable generalisations about the hemispheres has been the finding that the left hemisphere tends to deal more with pieces of information in isolation, and the right hemisphere with the entity as a whole, the so-called Gestalt...

It seems that they [the two hemispheres] coexist together on a daily basis, but have fundamentally different sets of values, and therefore priorities, which means that over the long term they are likely to come into conflict. Although each is crucially important, and delivers valuable aspects of the human condition, and though each needs the other for different purposes, they seem destined to pull apart.

...the relationship between the hemispheres does not appear to be symmetrical, in that the left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on, one might almost say parasitic on, the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. Indeed it is filled with an alarming self-confidence.

"Alarming self-confidence" seems an apt way to describe the rigid structures of best practices and all of the business acronyms we love to hate.

So what I'm thinking now is, maybe this is what ties the grandmother medicine wheel and all her grandchildren together. Maybe our truths are not truths about what is out there but truths about what is in here. Maybe this is what we are, and what we are is what makes our world what it is. I have yet to finish reading this (long but wonderful) book, and will write about it when I have something to say about it, but I wonder if the grandmother medicine wheel may have her own grandparents who came long before her and started the whole thing going. Now that's ownership worth exploring.

Towards a more fully cooked blog

So I've been thinking a lot in the past few weeks about this blog. I started it a little over a year ago, and I have tried hard to keep to my original rule of posting about once a week, following what seemed like blogging etiquette at the time. In addition to providing hopefully helpful tips and ideas about narrative inquiry in practice, I intended to use the blog as a way to rewrite my book in pieces, for feedback and to get the ideas to where they wanted to be sooner. (The complexity stuff crept in by itself later.)

Charlie and me

Writing a book on a blog has been both great and terrible, but not in the way Oz is great and terrible. On the one hand, I think it has added some spice to the book, as the various situations I faced throughout the year provided food for thought. The terrible part was in trying to squeeze a book out in little pieces. It doesn't work very well, at least not for me. Those who have been reading all year will have noticed how I kept saying "next week I will write about X" and then the next week wrote about some totally unconnected subject. There was a reason for that! It turns out that writing book fodder takes a deeper level of concentration than writing about whatever pet peeve or slice-of-life observation I've been pondering during the week. You can pretty much map my level of distraction by whether I wrote book fodder or general observations. My conversations with myself about the blog have gone like this all year:

Me: So, we are supposed to write about this thing for the blog next.
Myself: We can't write about that! There is too much other stuff going on this week to write about that!
Me: Okay, suppose we put that off and write about this other thing.
Myself: No, that's too complicated. I can't get my mind into that this week.
Me: Well, we have to write something. What can we write about?
Myself: What about that thing we read in the paper yesterday?
Me: Nah, that's trivial. Who would want to read about that?
Myself: It's all we've got.
Me: All right then, let's write about that.
(Ten hours later)
Me:  I've been trying to write about the trivial thing, but it turns out it's not as trivial as we thought. We could easily write a book about it.
Myself: No time for that! We have to get something out! What else can we write about?
Me: Well, while reading about the trivial thing, I found this even more trivial thing. How about that?
Myself: Sounds great. Let's write. Hurry up!

A few times I found myself writing nested inside three levels of other writing I was not yet ready to write about. Some layers sloughed off and are still laying around waiting to be finished.

Charles Dickens wrote in serial form, like many other bread-and-butter novelists of his time. I noticed recently that my blog posts this year have been strikingly similar to Dickens' writing. (Not in quality! Just in other ways.) We both wrote mostly, sort of, about the larger thing we were supposed to be writing, but in certain chapters of certain Dickens books, you can clearly see that he was busy or distracted or tired of the longer project and branched off into the sort of pet peeve or slice-of-life observation you would put on a blog. I'll bet you don't find much of that sort of thing in novels that were not released in serial form. Dickens' branches take the form of caricatures/characters who entertain and then fade back as the main story returns. I wonder if you knew what Dickens was doing each week, would his branches match times of distraction by other events in life? Is comic relief writing relief? And did Dickens have sloughed-off layers of chapters lying around like I do? I would not be surprised. Writing something big in pieces is like serving soup every ten minutes while you are preparing it. Sometimes the soup is fully cooked, but sometimes it's just water with some warm vegetables floating in it.

I've been poking about, just a bit, reading about serial publication and novel writing, and this bit from an essay by Grahame Smith on VictorianWeb struck my eye:

What are some of the implications of Dickens' commitment to seriality? It can take us back to Connor's distinction between becoming and being, because it is surely possible to argue that over the nineteen monthly parts of its writing and its appearance before the public, a novel such as Bleak House was in a continuous process of becoming. In other words, its state of being as a literary text is of a quite different order to the static being of a Victorian three-decker novel, the writing of which was completed before it saw the light of day in the hands of a reader. Such a method of writing and publishing give Dickens' texts a sense of fluidity in a number of ways. One of the most obvious is their interactive relationship with the public, the possibilities of change and modification in the light of changing patterns of sales and of audience response....

I have learned a lot about what should be in the book (including things I hadn't realized were missing) by what people said or didn't say, and read or didn't read, on the blog. Certainly writing the book in the blog has helped it become, but it has not helped it be. The distraction of always finding "something for the blog" has hampered the book in coming to a conclusion. That's why I decided to stop blogging every week, to start with.

Gleaners and miners

When I started blogging I had no idea what sort of blogger I'd be. Now I know. I envy the gleaner-bloggers who report on their daily or weekly wanderings over the web of information (Kathy Hansen and Gregg Morris are favorites in the narrative world). I'm not a gleaner, because I don't wander. I spend something like one minute a day on the web, and that's not just because I have a kid; I never spent much more than that. I can't usually say "didya see this" because, unless it's in my yard or on my kitchen floor, I usually didn't see it before everybody else did. Instead of a gleaner, I'm a miner. I dig. I go deep down, muck around in the dark, and every once in a while come up with something. Mining and regular blogging don't go together. When you blog regularly you have to come up when you don't have anything but mud to carry up with you.

Mining reminds me of The Neverending Story. One of my favorite parts of that book is the part where Bastian makes wishes, but he doesn't really make them: they make him. They well up. Writing wells up too. Some of my blog posts this past year were written and published only after I had been thinking about them and making notes on them for weeks or months or even years, but others were pulled together in a day to meet my weekly blogging schedule. Some wanted to be written and some had to be written. It's easy to tell the two types apart, and it is only the fully cooked posts that have attracted the most commenting and reposting and linking.

So I've been thinking. A few weeks ago I said here that I was going to post every two weeks instead of every week. But that doesn't really seem an improvement. My new idea is to post only when something is fully cooked. I think it will work better for everyone involved. From this I can see why magazines or group blogs might be better than individual blogs, because they can achieve periodicity without each contributor needing to perform at the same level in each time period. In a way, with people now using blog readers rather than following individual blogs, people are creating their own magazines that can assemble lots of fully cooked elements as they come together naturally. That makes a lot more sense. When everything written on blogs wants to be written, blogs will be more useful to everyone.

About that quail

One more tidbit to round out the year of reflection. I've never mentioned this before, but I wonder if anybody ever wonders about the little story in the header of this page. What happened was, about a week before I started the blog, I was walking on the path to the pond, as the story says, and a quail (or maybe it was a grouse) told me the broken-wing display story. I recognized the story right away, but I was amazed to be invited in to what is normally a closed storytelling circle. I think I even said "Come on, are you serious?" But yes, the bird was carefully and precisely feigning a broken wing, at me, and clearly hoping I would follow it away from its nest. With a great surge of gratitude I played my part as the audience and followed it. Soon I was rewarded by watching it suddenly jump up and fly away at high speed once I had gotten about thirty feet from where its nest probably was. This event was both memorable and relevant to storytelling, because it was about what happens when someone tells a story. The audience is invited in to listen to the story and become part of the larger story that surrounds it. Such an invitation, especially when unexpected, is a precious gift.

Usually when I spend time in the woods I am outside of the stories, just a watcher in the world, but this was one of a handful of times when I have been privileged to participate in a natural storytelling event. So I chose that emblem of the gift of story listening as my centerpiece for the blog. It's one thing to listen to the stories of a world, even to watch them happen, but to be invited to enter into storytelling events is a rare privilege (one to tell stories about!). I think everyone who works with stories, whether in their own community or elsewhere, whether in woods, fields or cities, should remember how special a privilege such an invitation is and play their part respectfully and with gratitude.

[Note: The picture that used to be at the top of my blog is no longer there, so this post seems nonsensical. This post shows the image that used to be there.]

Story games

This post is about story games, in three ways.

First, it is an announcement to my readership that, due to the lamentable fact that I am apparently incapable of making any utterance less than five pages long, I will be switching to biweekly posts for the foreseeable future. I just can't keep up this level of writing - on this blog, anyway.

Second, I'm happy to say that due to the apparent lack of anybody wanting me to work for them (much) in January or February, I may actually be able to finish rewriting the book. I may blog even less during that time. So if I'm silent, you will know why.

Third, I thought I'd throw out a few tidbits on great games to play with your kids if you want to build and tell stories together, for fun and for narrative sensemaking. My son and I have had a wonderful time using games (online, for the Wii, on the computer) as part of our daily narrative sensemaking, so I thought I'd pass on some recommendations for other parents, and just anybody who likes to play with stories.

Open-ended physics games

Physics games are those where you manipulate objects in virtual space with realistic elements such as gravity, momentum, inertia, etc to reach goals. Some are very simple because the goals are obvious and the puzzles involve nothing but logic. Those bore me quickly because there is no way to tell a story in them. To tell a story you need uncertainty. You need to have something happen, and then not know what will happen next, and then find out what happens next. If what will happen next is always that you will solve the puzzle, or not, you can't do much with it story-wise. But some games offer scope for the imagination. In general, if there is either much latitude in how a problem is solved, or a level editor that exposes the game designers' engine to players, you can work out stories in the space.

Fantastic Contraption is a favorite. There you have things like wheels and planks, and you need to build things to get things from here to there under constraints. The fascinating thing about Fantastic Contraption is that site visitors submit their own solutions to the puzzles, and many of them are essentially stories. People have taken the basic engine and used it to create the most amazing events, some of them featuring emergent patterns that they found by exploring the limits of the system. The catapults in particular are worth watching over and over.

There are many more wonderful physics-engine games at physicsgames.net that can be used in this way (Demolition City, Sprocket Rocket and Red Remover are favorites).

Open-ended games with characters

Playing with a simulation-style program (not necessarily physics-based) that has a good level editor and characters is a little like being a director, in that you can explore and work out issues (like negotiating rules, resolving disputes, avoiding vicious cycles, etc) by manipulating the actions of characters. It is also useful to be the characters (who must have  funny voices, of course) while making them do things onscreen.

Professor Fizzwizzle is a silly platform game where you help this little crazy professor get back to his laboratory from which his robots have evicted him (he accidentally turned the control dial from "friendly" to "rage"). The challenges are fun (luckily solutions are nearby for the lazy player - never mind how I know that) but the great part is the level editor. We have set up endless stories in which the professor and the rage-bots (over which he still has a limited degree of control via various funny devices) face off in hilarious ways. Here the story is not so much built with simple balls and planks interacting as it is characters who have useful behaviors and characteristics that stand in for things we want to think about.

Some others in the open-ended-with-characters group are MySims Kingdom, MySims Racing, the WeSki series, and the games based on the Cars movie. In all of these it's fairly easy to place characters into situations and pretend to be them while controlling them. One favorite thing is to play hide-and-seek, where one of us searches for the other who is hiding somewhere. Or we set up story scenarios, like one character is lost and needs help finding their way home, or two characters have an argument, or one character is bullying another, or two characters want to convince a third of something, and so on. This is all great narrative sensemaking material.

You might say The Sims is the standard for character simulation. But when I played The Sims (this was before the child) I found myself frustrated by the restricted worldview. I created an endless parade of hermits who would carefully parcel out their meagre savings in order to bury themselves in reading, writing and walking in the woods. But they ignored the woods I built (those trees cost money, you know!), and all they would do is whine that they wanted television and parties and jobs delivering pizzas. I hear the Sims people have done some work on those limitations, but I'll believe it when I see it. I did have some luck when I found out the infinite-riches cheat (something to do with monkeys), and I did have some fun creating people from literary situations (the Boxcar Children was one I remember). But I never could get the people to enjoy nature and reading and solitude, which sort of took all the fun out of it for me. If you can't tell stories about yourself, what is the point of telling stories?

Role-playing games

Role-playing games are, obviously, games where you play a role. I find that these games vary immensely in how much you can play with the roles you inhabit. You can't build stories if you can't play with characters, for the same reason you can't build stories if you can't find uncertainty. If you always know what a character will do (because they are orcs or something) you can't build a story. You can only experience one somebody else made (which is fine for what it is, but that's not what I'm talking about here). What you can do with a role-playing game is, if the narrative material provided is rich enough, it can provide fruit for stories that spin off outside the game itself.

For example, I have played and loved several titles in the Harvest Moon series. It's a favorite unwinding thing to do after work. Everything's free or next to it, everyone's nice, your spouse and kids do anything you ask, you can befriend people simply by handing them things they like (and you can look up what they like online). And work consists of hoeing in the garden for an hour or two a day. It's the ultimate fantasy game for middle-aged workaholics. But this series is particularly rich in materials for narrative sensemaking as well. In one of the Harvest Moon stories, when I was playing as a woman, I found two suitors (you marry and have kids) who perfectly captured two sides of my husband: Craig the irritable grouch, and Toby the soft-hearted and humble fisherman. Similarly, I found two female characters that described two sides of me: the proud, sharp-tongued Selena and the shy, kind Candace. My son and I spent many hours working out the ramifications of these abstract characters trying to live together and do things like, say, put food on the table and keep a house clean. My son himself favored the tough-guy characters who seemed to have great power - but cleverly, the game didn't leave them that simple and gave them interesting flaws to explore. All of this has been great grist for the mill that is childhood (and parenthood).

Other role-playing games that spur storytelling like this are Ico (the emotions it evokes are amazingly real) and the must-see Samarost. The Dungeons and Dragons world is another great role-playing system in which people work out who they are going to be. I spent many hours defining and redefining myself using that narrative system during adolescence (when I most needed it). Once in a while I'll drag out my yellowed character sheets (or whatever they were called) from back then and look at them, and it's like reading the story of my coming of age. As I understand it there are many such worlds now, and everyone can find something that works for them.

create

We have recently started playing create (by EA for the Wii), and I find I have to give it its own category. It is an excellent story vehicle, not necessarily the best ever, but still pretty darn good. It took me a while to figure out how it works, and I'm still amazed that anybody thought to put things together in this way. To begin with, you can explore fourteen distinct worlds, each with its own mythological/symbolic setting: theme park, transportopia, family home, outer space, the great outdoors, ancient history, future city, pirates, I can't remember them all. In each world you have three elements. At the back of the 3D space is a standard-issue 2D paint program, although it has some extra-fun elements like "stickers" you can "flick" to set in motion (airborne vehicles, clouds, birds, etc).

In front of the 2D backdrop is a 3D composition space where you can arrange items appropriate to the setting (or inappropriate, as you like). Conveniently, some of these items make great story characters. There are even real and fanciful animated creatures, though they don't do much but stand around and do a few stereotyped moves. They also don't interact, sadly, which would have made the system more Sims-like. It's not that fun to put the robots with the ancient sea monsters if they just stand there and gawk at each other, or at nothing really. My favorite of the worlds so far is the ancient history world, where I have Mayan and Greek and Egyptian statues holding little conferences on various topics all over the place, while monsters and rabbits wander among them. It's easy to set up stories of jokes, disasters, discoveries, conflicts and so on. (Interestingly, my son has decorated all of his worlds to look new and perfectly functional, while my built worlds all feature rust, decay and the taking over of human structure by natural growth. Hmm.)

Right smack in the middle of each 3D composition space is a ribbon on which a 2D physics-based simulation takes place. It looks like it is embedded in the world around it, but it really isn't (leading to much initial confusion). In each world you have ten "challenges" with pre-made goals, and of course achieving the goals wins you points and 3D objects to use in the scene composition and simulation (how irritating this pervading belief that nobody will play anything if they don't win anything, ooooh, winning). But the cool thing here is that the challenges themselves are not logic puzzles but great story-generating engines. Even with all the other stuff, if these challenges had been the boring sort - only one way to get this ball to that hoop - I would have put the game down.

The reason this simulation works for narrative play and sensemaking is that like many of the better physics games, it is a complex-and-complicated system. Because you are using virtual gravity, wind, and fickle machines (some of which have hilariously unexpected properties, like monster truck tires that pop like balloons), things rarely go as planned. Successfully having completed a puzzle once gains you next to nothing when you try to do it again. One misplaced whiff of forced air and the whole contraption goes off in a different way and you miss all the goals. One type of challenge in particular, called the "Score-tacular," is less like solving a problem than like orchestrating mayhem. This is a story event generator. There was one memorable moment the other day when we had to gain 30,000 points and couldn't see how, and then by accident the simulation got into this cycle where a spiky thing almost popped a balloon, but didn't quite, and we watched the spiky thing go around in circles for about fifteen minutes as the points added up 500 points at a time. We began to wonder if the cycle would ever end and talked about stopping the simulation, when at 37,000 points the balloon suddenly burst, and we burst out laughing. What a story! After we stopped laughing we talked about other times when things happened like that, when it seemed like something would never happen and then it suddenly did. Like anger, and making friends, and wars, and stuff like that.

Outside of the challenges, you can use the open-ended simulation to build events into stories. One we did last night was, we took teleporters and put them in a circle so that whatever we dropped into one teleporter would go round and round forever. We then placed a magnet somewhere just to give the system a nudge, and watched as the lawn tractors chased themselves around the loop faster and faster and faster, until they started popping out and shooting like rockets across the sky. We also had a blast placing characters from the past (an Inca god who shot arrows out of his mouth in indignant fury and rode around on a seige tower) into positive and negative interactions with contemporary vehicles like tanks and blimps and farm tractors. This propelled a discussion about technology through the centuries and how our lives are different in some ways while the same in others. And about conflict and the various ways we leap to conclusions about each other. The tanks in particular have enabled much exploration of power used to aid and obstruct: sometimes a missile blast can be a helping hand. And so on and so on.

What makes create such a useful resource for narrative play? I think it is the combination of many settings (providing backstories, dilemmas, opportunities, genres), many characters (bears, robots, monster trucks, indignant statues), and many events (importantly, many of these happen by surprise). I always think of stories as looking like pencils, with setting as the eraser, characters as the shaft, events as things along the shaft (letters, icons, fingernail marks, teeth marks), and the point of the story as ... well, the point of the pencil. When a game substrate provides settings, characters, and events, you can build lots of stories with lots of points. And then you can draw things with them.

So that's my round-up of great story games (for the around-seven set and adults who like that sort of thing).

One thing I've noticed while writing this is that except for D&D, I only described computer games. I can hear somebody saying, "But what about good old board games?" The problem is, most board games aren't great story material. Too many of them are only about winning, or so much about winning that the story material is hard to make good use of. Monopoly is a pretty good story substrate - I spent years of my childhood exploring all the ways to cheat and steal in that game, and only found out years later that some of our "variations" weren't actually written in the instructions but local to our family. (Evidently there is no "rich game" where everybody gets loads of money! In that case why play?) In general the best games for narrative play are not games with rules you play by, but games with rules you play with. I've found a few games like that recently - Set is one, Blokus is another, and some of the ThinkFun games (Rush Hour is a pretty good story generator). Colorforms still exist, thank goodness. But it's mostly slim pickings. It seems like most board game designers are more interested in creating docile instruction followers than original thinkers. Or that's what they think parents will pay for anyway. If I see one more tangrams set with "helpful" patterns you must build, I'll scream. Quietly.

In the bath, as usual, I thought of another paragraph to add in here. It's the predictable response from the stick-and-rock people. You know, the people who say children can only grow when they have nothing but sticks and rocks to play with. We are mostly stick-and-rock people ourselves, in the summer, and the Wii sits abandoned for months. Certain LEGO lovers around here become offended by my admonitions to stop "shuffling bits of plastic around" and go out in the real world. And we do (and you do too). Just two weeks ago we built a pirate/anti-pirate ship (it kept switching sides) out of bits of old wood and string, with a tomato support for a mast, a garbage bag for a sail, a log for an anchor, and an old frisbee for a wheel. (This being a futuristic pirate/anti-pirate ship, it also needed many inexplicable dials and levers.) However, the ship soon stuck fast to the ground and had to be yanked up and frog marched to the garage for storage, lest it trip us up when it's invisible under the snow. This time of year it's always either cold and dark or cold and going to be dark soon, and the Wii begins to beam benevolence in contrast. (And our friend the snow is not yet here. When the snow comes we gain another medium of narrative substrate that, unlike the frozen mud and sand, can be molded into roads, buildings, people, cities.) But yes, I agree that when physical conditions permit, nothing can beat sticks, rocks, mud and snow as the best narrative substrates of all.

Are there any games - of any kind - that you find particularly useful as material for narrative play and sensemaking?

The healing cleaver

Yesterday I posted about the issue of context in story listening, and how I try to preserve context and worry that I fail. Today I listened to two doctors tell stories about how listening to their patients tell their stories helps them work together to find solutions to problems. (This was on a teleconference from the Plexus Institute on the topic of Narrative in medicine, about which a colleague told me and many thanks, colleague. I think the Plexus Institute puts up archived recordings of these calls if you want to listen to their stimulating accounts. Look for archived PlexusCalls.)

The two doctors on the call reminded me of something I had forgotten. They talked about how part of the therapeutic solution doctors and other health providers offer to patients is just the opportunity to tell their story to someone who cares and is listening. The story is the therapy, they said. They mentioned the gratitude they have found in patients for this act of listening, not for any solutions proposed but just for the chance to speak and be heard.

The sword in his mother's hand

I had forgotten that. I myself have been amazed to find so many people grateful to be heard in the story collections I have helped people put together. Generally the storytellers in the projects I help clients with have been asked (begged) to contribute to something, a goal or a cause, though sometimes they have been simply paid or required to contribute and given no other reason to speak. In most projects some number of people have inevitably expressed gratitude for what they have usually called the chance or the opportunity to speak. Some who don't say it directly have radiated their gratitude indirectly, through their stories. Sometimes you can just feel the relief people have at finally being asked the right question that gives them the permission to share their experiences and perspectives.

This made me think about my post yesterday. If the severing of context from a story is always negative, if asking people to recount their experiences to strangers and using those stories to represent people without their further participation is a dangerous enterprise open to abuses of power, how could anyone possibly feel gratitude about it? Should they not cry out in protest? Why do so many people seem to honestly enjoy the experience?

I wonder if in my soul searching I've been too one-sided in looking for solutions and blame. Maybe sometimes the loss of context in storytelling is exactly what is needed. It could be empowering as well as coercive, and maybe at the same time. Maybe sometimes a story that cannot be told within the boundaries of family, friends and community can be told beyond those boundaries, and that could lead to reflections and revelations impossible otherwise. Maybe sometimes the cleaver heals.

It reminds me of this great Sting song that goes:

He looked beneath his shirt today
There was a wound in his flesh so deep and wide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside
He turned around to face his mother
To show her the wound in his breast that burned like a brand
But the sword that cut him open
Was the sword in his mother's hand ...

Though the sword was his protection
The wound itself would give him power
The power to remake himself at the time of his darkest hour
She said the wound would give him courage and pain
The kind of pain that you can't hide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside

Maybe what I have not been considering, in my struggle to work ethically, is that effective story exchange should be both a tie that binds and a sword that cleaves. If that is true, cleaving context from story becomes not something uniformly to be avoided, but something to be used at the right place and time. When is that place and time? I don't know. It is something I'd like to think more about. If the creation of distance is an essential element in story collection, when is it essential and when is it obstructive? When does it help and when does it hurt?

The power to remake himself at the time of his darkest hour. Isn't that what stories do for us, give us the power to remake ourselves? Maybe it is in our darkest hour when we need the distance a loss of context can provide. Maybe that is why I've seen the people with the worst, saddest stories show the most gratitude. They have the most to reveal, the strongest boundaries, and the greatest reason not to reveal their stories without the freeing context of no-context. Why do people call suicide hotlines when they are surrounded by family and friends who would do anything, go anywhere, pay anything, to help them in their time of need? Maybe sometimes the cleaver heals.

Clothes or skins? 

I'm not saying my ritualized practices of relying on storyteller interpretations as maps of authenticity are not warranted. I still believe it is manipulative and self-deluding to interpret the stories of others without attempting to preserve some understanding of their meaning in situ. But maybe the key to helping people collect and work with their stories is not in preserving context above all else, but in helping them manage the interplay of cleaving distance and joining intimacy.

I've thought about this duality in stories for a long time: are they objects or living beings? I've seen lots of people excoriate those on the other side of that divide. Those who treat stories as objects say: Don't put too much stock into stories. Don't treat them as powerful forces and don't be deluded into thinking they represent reality. They are just shiny playthings, constructions created for purposes, artifacts, masks. When my son was very little, he would describe people based on the colors of their clothing, not realizing people didn't define people that way. We would read a book and he'd say, "I liked that red man" or "That blue man said mean things." It was only later that he realized I separated clothing from identity and stopped doing that. People who see stories as objects see them like clothing, things that can be put on and taken off. They caution us not to take them too seriously.

Those who treat stories as living beings say the opposite: revere stories for their centrality to the human experience. Respect them, don't ship them around as commodities, don't remove their sacred layers of context. People on this side get all hot and bothered about voices and rights, and write long blog posts about the dangers of cleaving story from context and the daring temptations of manipulative interpretation by outsiders. I've been on this side, obviously, but I wonder if I have gotten too storier-than-thou about it for my own good. Maybe because I have felt the sharpness of the cleaver in my hand so often I have not understood its dual uses as I should. There is that great quote from Oscar Wilde: "Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth." Maybe sometimes stories should be masks we can put on and take off. Asking people to come into a room of strangers, or onto a web site, is like asking them to shed their skins as if they were clothes and try on others. It allows them to step outside of their clothes that say "single mother" or "struggling farmer" or "helpful doctor" and speak freely, unadorned by the confining encrustations of context. It transports.

Casting themselves into the wind

My favorite metaphor for stories is that they are like seeds, so I like to use it as a handy tool to explore any and all dilemmas. Seeds can be seen as objects, things that can be picked up and cast about by those in control of them. Some even speak of seeds as tools, elements of human-controlled technology.

But seeds can also be seen as living organisms with abundant abilities to adapt and respond: sharp spines, chemical weapons, adaptive growth patterns, the power to endure through harsh conditions and emerge when favorable conditions return. I've always been on the side of the living-organism view, I think. It is where I am when I talk about the horror of cleaving context from story. But there is a liberating merit, at the right place and time, to treating stories as objects, to casting them on the ground as a farmer casts seeds. To loosening the bonds of context and sacrificing the sacred to the profane. To Carnival and the breaking of rules. To shaking stories loose from their moorings and prodding them to travel. To giving them the gift of courage and pain.

But it's not that simple. Some seeds don't wait for farmers to cast them, and maybe some stories don't either. Some seeds cast themselves, with their pinafores of fluff and their whirligig motors. Some seeds build their own loss of context into their travels, and maybe some stories do, or want to, as well. If that is true, some stories may wield their own tiny cleavers and cut themselves loose. For these stories, maybe I am not the agent of control at all. Maybe I just delude myself into believing I have power over them. If it's true that some stories cleave themselves, the ethical narrative intermediary should not expend their energy on preserving context in every situation, because sometimes they will work against what they want to support. Instead they should find out what is most wanted in each circumstance. Which stories want to travel? Which have grown wings? How can you tell? I'm not sure. There must be some way of discerning a winged story from the burrowing sort. There must be some way of finding out which stories have cut themselves loose and are struggling to fly. Maybe in a story wings look like gratitude.

One bridge too far

From the story-seed bridge I see another nearby analogy (will you follow me there?) to mutation in natural selection. Mutation is a sort of shaking of the bag of life to see what will fall out of it. Mutation destroys cherished boundaries and concocts new combinations, some wondrous and some grotesque. When we cleave stories and cast them about, we are inserting some entropic forces into the order of cognitive, psychological and social explanation in order to reach new assemblages of order. If so, is that not the perfect role for a trickster to play? Should not a narrative intermediary fill that role, at times? Is the cleaving of story from context the spice of story work? Does it keep the process just unbalanced enough to keep it alive, even as it introduces the pain of destruction and renewal?

Oh, dear. I've done it now. The metaphor police are here. They have a warrant for my arrest on charges of flagrant mixing: "beyond all reasonable tolerance." I can't very well argue. I know I've been caught red-handed. I have to go.

Severed stories and those who sever them

One of my favorite moments in my work is when I'm sitting with a body of stories and their accompanying interpretations. This is a position I have been in many times now and have come to love, over and above writing or programming or almost anything else I do. Sitting with the stories, abiding with them, listening to them, is a delight. Recently, as I reflected on this process and the emotions I experience as I go through it, I thought writing about it might be helpful to others who are also doing this sort of work.

Listening to the story of stories

I always start with the answers. I should explain, to those who don't know, that in projects I help my clients with, I always ask them (beg them, really) to ask people at least a few brief questions about each story they tell: how do you feel about it, when did it happen, and so on. When I receive the stories for a project, they never stand alone but are adorned, encrusted, surrounded with meaningful interpretations.

So when I receive this information, I begin by generating every possible measure and comparison among answers, visual and/or statistical. Then I pore over them. How many people said they felt happy yet confused about their stories? How many people over fifty told stories in which people needed respect? How many under twenty said that? How many people said their second-hand stories lacked control? If they said one thing, were they more likely to say another? Or the reverse? And so on. These thousands of comparisons form patterns which I sort through, sometimes by eye, sometimes by algorithm and sometimes in both ways. Some patterns line up as expected, some are surprising, some curious, some unsettling. The patterns begin to assemble themselves into heaps that grow and merge until I arrive at a smaller group of large trends at the highest level.

Importantly, none of these trends are based on the stories themselves. They are based on interpretations: answers people gave to questions about their stories and about themselves and their views.

I do actually read some stories as I assemble patterns; but I only read small subsets when a pattern is too curious to be understood without plunging into detail. I carefully avoid looking at any stories without a good framing reason, a question to be answered, in the early stages of the work. I never allow myself to wander into the story collection and start exploring.

Why keep myself away from the stories? Because I don't want to form any patterns in my own reading. What I want to do is find the patterns the storytellers set down for me to find. The patterns that form in the interpretations given by storytellers create a second-order story, one that encompasses and explains all the stories beneath it. It is the story of the stories, told by the people who told them. I can only find that story-of-stories by listening to what people said about their stories. The most delightful moment in every project is when the story-of-stories starts to tell itself (or, when the large trends in story interpretation begin to appear and stabilize). If slogging through all the pattern comparisons is like patiently tending a garden, watching the patterns join and merge into strong messages is like harvest day. It is like watching a dense fog lift over a quiet landscape, or rounding a corner and hearing a distant sound become a resounding choir. It is heartening. The people find their voices and speak.

After I have discovered the story-of-stories I communicate it to whoever asked me to help collect the stories. In more technical terms, I explain and illustrate each major trend in prose, in graphs, in statistics, and in stories. As I build this presentation, I finally allow myself to dive into the stories. At this point I read as many stories as I can in order to choose relevant stories with which to illustrate each trend. (Usually that means I read all of the stories, but when there are thousands I cannot get to them all, poor things.)

I always find myself pleasantly surprised at how perfectly the trends match the stories. I don't know why they wouldn't match up, but I'm always excited when they do. The problem is never to find examples that illustrate the trends; the problem is to choose among the many excellent examples that present themselves. People know their stories. I've come to rely on that fact.

Whose story of stories?

I mentioned this always-surprisingly great match between trends and stories to my husband the other day, as I put together a report on a project. He said, "Gee, if they match up so well, maybe you don't need to do all those statistics and look at all those graphs. Maybe you could just read the stories." Not knowing any better, bless him, he put his finger directly on the crux of the issue. My reaction was rapid, emotional and instinctual: I recoiled. What would happen if I read the stories alone? I know exactly what would happen. The result would be worse than useless; it would be a disaster. I might as well not even start such a project. The people would not find their voices and speak; I would try to speak in their voices, and I would fail. It would be like any number of bad movies where ghosts or aliens or monsters take over people, issuing grunts, guttural horrors, grotesque gestures. It would not be real speech but un-speech, something wrong, distorted, alien, horrible.

So I've been thinking about this issue, of why it matters that people interpret their own stories, lately as I work on rewriting the book (Working with Stories). At one point in WWS I say, "You don't have to ask people to answer any questions about the stories they have told." But you know, I don't like that anymore. I want to take it out.

I think I'm coming round to a belief that if you don't ask people to interpret their own stories in some way, you have to take the P out of PNI -- that is, you are just doing Narrative Inquiry, not Participatory Narrative Inquiry. You don't necessarily have to ask people to fill out survey forms about stories; that is just convenient in some circumstances. You can ask people to reflect in a workshop setting, because asking people to build larger stories out of their stories is asking them to interpret, reflect and participate. (In fact in-person, facilitated reflection is far better when you can support it.) But you do need to engage people in some sort of reflection about their stories if you want to hear their true voices. Stories alone are not enough. I have become increasingly convinced of that fact. It just can't have the positive impact I think story work can and should have, and in fact I think it holds danger.

Whose trails through whose lands?

Let's picture a story collection as a landscape marked with features: rocks here, bushes there, a brook, a solitary peak rising above a grassy plain. Anyone who reads the stories gets a sense of the lay of the land. If you have read through any books with hundreds of folk tales or short stories in them, you will remember what it feels like to begin to sense the rise and fall of the terrain. I love to stretch out with a book of folk tales from a region or history and explore it, all the while thinking of other lands I've visited in the past. Maybe you do too.

Now. Anyone who encounters such a land of stories lays down trails through the land. Some trails are broad and rutted, with nothing but the most stubborn grasses struggling to grow on the compacted earth. Some trails are slight and hard to discern, only visible to those familiar with them. Forming your own trails through a narrative landscape is one of the delights of exploring a story collection. As a lover of folk tales, I look forward to feeling the paths form as I read through a collection. But if you have done this, you also must know that my trails cannot be your trails. The experience of reading a collection of stories is a story in itself, and each such story is unique.

Even the same person reading the same book decades later will lay down new trails. When I used to read Hans Christian Andersen's collected fairy tales every year as a child, I ran first on my favorite trails. One of my favorite stories then was "The Story of a Mother." It was about a mother who loses her child and speaks with Death and -- I don't remember how it ends. As a child I loved that story. It was heroic and romantic, and I think it helped me understand how much my own mother loved me, even if that love was manifested in rules and chores and waking me up in an irritating way. As a mother today, I cannot bring myself to read that story. That trail has grown over and lies untrodden, abandoned, forbidden. Just now I looked the story up on the internet and tried to read it -- but I find I can't. I can't face what it says. I couldn't even keep the browser window open, not looking at it; the words leaked fear and pain across into this page where I am writing. Someday I may read that story again and forge a new trail to it, but not in this stage of my life. People know their stories.

Now picture me again, this time facing a collection of stories told by real people, often people in real distress (because story projects usually involve people unhappy about something). Or picture yourself in the same position. If I was to build my own trails through that land of stories, or if you were, of what use would those trails be to anyone other than myself, or yourself? How would my trails or your trails help the people who told the stories, the people who asked for the stories, or the people who might be helped by the stories? They would not help them; indeed they might hurt. My story, or your story, would fight with the story the stories are telling. It might even take over and enslave their story, without our knowing it. So I don't build my own trails. I let the storytellers show me where to find their trails. I do this by asking them to reflect on their own stories. The answers they give me are the trails I follow, and those trails are what I present to those who asked me to help collect the stories. I recommend this practice to everyone who works with stories. Don't build trails. Ask, help and watch.

My journey to story reflection

I didn't always feel this way. I didn't always ask people to interpret their own stories. I started thinking about asking questions about stories soon after I began my journey through organizational narrative. As I recall, I had been reading the literature on story classification and story databases, and I was unhappy with the way people described stories. Of course adding contextual information to stories was nothing new. People had been annotating stories with metadata in computer systems for decades already, and for centuries (though less systematically) before that. But recently the cognitive scientists had got hold of things and everything was about plans and goals and actions. I wanted more. I asked myself: What are all the questions you could possibly ask about a story? To answer that question I spent three months surveying the research and popular literature in fifteen fields related to stories and storytelling. I ended up with several hundred possible questions, which I clustered into the three giant categories (form, function, phenomenon) that informed much of my later work. Some of my favorite questions from that list can be found in Working with Stories.

Soon after I developed this list I began to use questions of form, function and phenomenon to annotate stories and find patterns in the answers. Some of this early work on story annotation was done with John Thomas in IBM Research and some with Dave Snowden, Sharon Darwent and others in IBM Global Services. A decade later, lots of people have used this question-asking process in dozens of successful projects, but many may not know that in the first few years we did not ask storytellers themselves the questions. We did not think people would do it, and we did not realize it had value. Who answered the questions in those first years? Our clients, that is, the people paying us to collect stories, were supposed to answer them; we always asked people to agree to do that part of the "work" (as we saw it then). But when it came down to it, one client after another balked, and Sharon and I ended up staying up half the bleary-eyed night answering questions about stories. After doing this several times we said to ourselves that it just wasn't going to work this way. I did try, sometimes, in the early days, to answer questions myself about the intent of storytellers, like, did the storyteller appear to find this memorable. But those were always educated guesses, maps drawn by hearsay.

Note that all through this we did not realize the potential benefit of asking people to interpret their own stories. We were dragged kicking and screaming into doing it right. I have tried to remember on which project people were first asked to interpret their own stories, but I just can't remember. I do have a strong sense that when we began to gather more and deeper reflections from the original storytellers, the trails we found became more clear and easy to follow. What we discovered was that people know their stories. There is no better foundation on which to work with stories than stories combined with what their storytellers say about them. This is abundantly obvious in retrospect, but I for one did not see it coming. (If anyone else did, fine, all honor and credit to you, but I don't remember anyone else seeing it coming either. As I recall it, we all saw it as a labor-saving device at first and only discovered its other effects later.) In any case I'm very glad we discovered it, because it has had huge positive effects, from what I've seen, on the field in general. Isn't it always the case that the thing overlooked becomes the thing that holds everything together?

Severed stories

When I consider the benefits that can be gained by exploring the trails people have laid down among their own stories, I begin to have almost a horror of people reading and presenting the stories of others without such contextual interpretation being somehow preserved. By extension of course this is a horror of my own early work, but following my embarrassment rule it is a good sign of progress.

In their natural setting stories are never told devoid of context. It is only when we set about collecting them in databases that the problem arises at all. People add meta-narrations to their stories all the time, about why they told them, who they want to hear them, what parts are the most important, how they feel about them. Asking people to reflect on their stories is a way to mimic these interactions and preserve at least some of the story's context. That's why it works.

I'd go so far as to say that a story with no context to it ... is not really a story at all. It is a sort of imprint of a story, an impression, like those pencil rubbings people make of old gravestones. If you make no attempt to include some sort of story context in what you collect and work with, you are not really doing story work at all, because you are not working with living stories. You are just picking up dead stories and shuffling them around.

It reminds me of that scene in The Golden Compass where Lyra discovers a severed child: a child without his daemon, something torn apart, abhorrent, grotesque.

The little boy was huddled against the wood drying-rack where hung row upon row of gutted fish, all as stiff as boards. He was clutching a piece of fish to him as Lyra was clutching Pantalaimon [her daemon], with both hands, hard, against her heart; but that was all he had, a piece of dried fish; because he had no daemon at all. The Gobblers had cut it away. That was intercision, and this was a severed child.

Her first impulse was to turn and run, or to be sick. A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out: something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of night-ghasts, not the waking world of sense. ...

She found herself sobbing, and Pantalaimon was whimpering too, and in both of them there was a passionate pity and sorrow for the half-boy.

Passionate pity and sorrow for the half-boy. This is exactly how I feel about stories taken out of context. They are naked, lost, half-stories that cry out to be clothed in meaningful context.

The kind of narrative analysis where experts build trails through the stories of other people simply by reading them and rearranging them seems to me nothing more than a thin fabric of delusion over the cold-blooded seizure of control. It is the treatment of stories as objects or commodities, things to be remapped and repurposed into new objects for consumption and use by those with the power to use them as they see fit.

Those who hold the cleaver must not use it 

I'm aware that this reaction is extreme. It seems extreme even to myself. I can't entirely explain it. It is not rational. Maybe it has come after sitting with so many tens of thousands of stories, feeling their vulnerability to exploitation, and wanting to protect them. I don't actually know anyone who rips stories away from their meanings in this way, so it's entirely possible -- no, probable -- that I have constructed a bogeyman to act out my own fears of what I might do with stories.

Just today I got an email about a project. The email said, we are entering the stories now and you can read some if you want to. My immediate reaction was to recoil. I even drew my hands back from the computer as though the keyboard were burning. It is interesting to reflect that the person who sent the email is used to facilitating storyteller reflections and interpretations in workshops, not to receiving disembodied stories through the ether as I do. I wonder if they are further removed from the daring temptation to use the sharp cleaver I could wield to separate context from narrative, daemon from child. Maybe it is the nearness and power of that cleaver that brings the spectre of using it so close to my mind and makes my reaction so intense (and my procedures so internally ritualized). I always say that working with stories has both great power and great danger. This is one of the dangers: of cleaving context from story and thereby subduing one story of stories with another.

Of course, there is another interpretation of my bogeyman story. It only occurred to me as I let this essay steep while I stepped into a hot bath. The bath, that womb-like, back-to-the-beginning font of wisdom, bubbled up the thought that maybe the reason I fear the cleaver so much is that I am already wielding it. I am an agent of story intercision myself. How foreign, how alien is it to gather people into a room or onto a web form and ask them to tell their stories to strangers? No matter how many and how deep the questions I ask, maybe I delude myself into believing I am preserving context. Maybe the thin fabric of delusion over a cold-blooded seizure of control is my own. Maybe my procedures are so ritualized not because they preserve context but because they preserve the remnants of what was once context. Maybe what I fear is what I already do.

Recently I was talking about the issue of being an intermediary in story projects with a colleague, and I noticed that I kept mentioning attributes of tricksters. People who work with stories must stand with one foot in two worlds, as insiders and outsiders at once. They must be ready to break the rules and upset the prevailing order so they can help people discover new rules and new order. They must lie to discover the truth, because only by making it clear that they cannot be trusted can they provoke people to think for themselves. And more than anything they must laugh at themselves and question their every statement and motive and plan. If that's true, I am probably exploring in the right direction. I'm starting to think a manual for working with stories (which is what I've been trying to write all this time) should be a manual for tricksters. It's worth thinking about, and it may be worth writing about. I've got my copy of Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World out and am planning to map it onto story work. Can't believe I never put that together before.

Readers, I wonder how much I am unique in having this feeling of power that must not be used, and in worrying I might be using it without knowing it. If you work with stories, have you had nightmares about severed stories? Have you seen anyone wield such a cleaver? Have you used one yourself? And have you developed any techniques that preserve story context in your own work? And do they work?