Spring and new life for Rakontu

Every year I forget about spring, and it's such a wonderful surprise to find it all happening again. I can't get enough of sitting on the ground beside the withdrawing snow and just looking at the dirt. It's still there, and there are still things growing in it. What are seasons but a story that gives us hope?

I am happy to report that Rakontu has emerged from its long snooze and is scampering about again. Meaning, we have new documents on the architecture and visual design of Rakontu 2.0 for you to look at. Please send feedback and suggestions.

For those who have no idea what that means, here is the elevator speech on Rakontu:

Rakontu is about small groups sharing stories for a reason. Rakontu communities are private spaces where people share personal experiences about something they all care about and in the process build something they can all use. Usually people in a Rakontu community will have something they want to do together, some common goal, and they will be interested in collecting and working with their stories as a means of getting there.

You could call Rakontu groupware for story sharing. I think that gets the point across better than anything related to social media, because social media has taken on a sort of Seinfeld-like nothing-about-nothing tone I'd rather avoid. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

So I thought what I'd do here is use this space to go back to a previous blog post about Rakontu, Steal these ideas, and use it to explain (and test by explaining) changes and improvements in the new version. (If you haven't read that and want to understand this, you might want to go back and read it first.)

The most exciting thing about Rakontu 2.0, to me, is that I am not building it. My husband and I have been building software together for nearly twenty years. Our skills and interests dovetail so perfectly that we work much better together than alone. Where each of us fears to tread the other rushes in confident of success. So this time around, his will be the legs you see sticking out from under the chassis when you visit, and I'll be priming the body panels.

This time we are building a rich thick gooey client in a Java desktop application that communicates via mediated something-or-other (here we see the efficiency inherent in the system). This gives us the ability to move far beyond the straitjacket of web forms and "view next 25 items" links. I am very excited about this movement to the rich client, as the new visual design surely shows. (And yet I also eagerly await the inevitable embarassment when the real thing makes these designs look ridiculous.)

One thing that has not changed and will not change is that Rakontu is free and open source. It will remain so. We have made and will continue to make a substantial investment in developing Rakontu. Our business model is to sell our (hopefully very useful) services, as a subject matter expert in the area of story work and as a technical expert in support of the software, to organizations who want to use Rakontu. I always say that people who make open source software are like those old-time doctors who took payments in money or chickens. If you have a budget, we will be overjoyed to help you make Rakontu work for you. If you don't have a budget, here it is (will be), and if you have any spare chickens, that is, good word of mouth, feedback, bug reports, icons, connections ... then by all means drop in and say hello.

So, on to those improvements.

1. Support sharing over performing

From Steal these ideas:

One of the biggest challenges in supporting online story sharing today is countering the performance problem. The web has developed into a grand marketplace for self-expression and self-promotion, and people shape their behavior on it accordingly. There is nothing wrong with self-expression, and surely all storytelling contains an element of performance. But I'm interested in supporting the kind of storytelling that leads to conflict resolution, perspective-taking, mutual learning, strong communities, and effective decision making. I call this story sharing to distinguish it from storytelling in which performance is a larger force.

Rakontu 2.0 will have some features that I hope will increase the ratio of sharing to performing in story exchange: embedded utility ranking, preservation of context, social translucence, and synchronous story sharing.

Embedded utility ranking means that it will be impossible to rate a story for quality or give it a "thumbs up" or any other measure of popularity. Why? Imagine a group of programmers building software together and voting each other's code up and down based on how cool the indenting is or how clever the variable names are. Or imagine a group of engineers building a bridge together and voting their designs up and down based on the fonts and colors they used to draw them. It would be useless information that would get in the way of building something useful together. In the same way, when people want to work with their stories to achieve a shared goal, a unidimensional rating of stories based on their resemblance to Hollywood blockbusters or Shakespearean tragedies is a distraction from the task at hand. So the "nudge" system I built in Rakontu 1.0, which was a grand and lovely mistake, will move underground in 2.0 and become a question about contexts in which each story could best be useful to the group. It will still be possible to rank and sort stories, but questions of utility will be just that: questions, whose answers have meaningful uses. Not ratings, not badges and not popularity contests.

Preservation of context means that Rakontu 2.0 will keep the context of story exchange in sight as new stories are elicited, told and linked into the story museum. One thing I realized the last time through was that "out of sight out of mind" applies strongly when it comes to story context. We don't close our eyes when we tell a story, and software that helps us tell stories shouldn't close our eyes either. So when a person is telling a story they should never lose sight (literally) of the context in which they are telling it: who they are telling it to, why they are telling it, what they are responding to, and so on. You should see some indications of this when you look at the new visual design, but I will be keeping it in mind as we build the working version.

Social translucence is a wonderful term coined by Wendy Kellogg and Tom Erickson at IBM Research. I think sometimes people have misunderstood this term and built systems with social transparency instead of translucence. The reason healthy social relationships are translucent and not transparent is that people constantly negotiate boundaries and partially share information. That's the necessary opacity in the translucency that makes things work. As many people are painfully aware of at this point, nobody wants to know everything about everybody all the time.

One thing I've thought a lot about is the impossibility of channeling social translucence into a unidimensional measure or score of activity and behavior such as karma and buzz systems. My husband pointed me to what Clay Shirky said about trying to engineer social negotiation (sorry - don't have a particular link to give you; just look at his stuff, it's all good). What Shirky said was that people already know how to be aware of each other. We've been doing it for a long time. If you try to give people a "better" way to do that you will just get in their way. It's like giving a dog an electronic sniffer that can identify ten smells. I like what he said and it rings true based on what I've seen in other social software and in my own attempts with Rakontu 1.0. So I'm getting rid of all attempts to summarize or package social awareness and just letting people see what other people are doing. In other words I'm now concentrating on creating a portrait of activity rather than a measure of it.

Synchronous story sharing means that Rakontu 2.0 will have a much stronger emphasis on people sharing stories in real-time conversation. People will still be able to enter a story into the system in the same way people make posts to online forums, but it will be easy and natural - I hope - to complement asynchronous posting with chat-type conversations in which stories naturally flow, are noticed, and are tucked in to the story museum as they appear. Of course I'm waving my hands around furiously as I type this (metaphorically) because this part will depend very heavily on strong testing, in which I invite everyone who is reading this to participate and contribute.

2. Build a café in a library or a library in a café

From Steal these ideas:

Possibly the most important things I learned by designing, building and using Rakontu are that online story sharing is both a verb (storytelling) and a noun (stories); and that neither matters more than the other; and that they must intermingle for story sharing to work. I picture these as a café where people meet and recall their experiences, and a library where people browse through experiences previously recalled.

This part I am super excited about. In fact two of the menus in Rakontu 2.0 are going to be "café" and "library." I have essentially divided the user experience into two main spaces: those where you ask what is going on here and those where you ask what is in here. Here is a quick look at the café timeline (non-working mockup which will appear nonsensical later).

As before the timeline shows time on the horizontal axis, but the disastrous popularity axis has been replaced with categories of activity, to supply the "what" that is going on here. Of course power users can manipulate the categories to explore nuances of activity such as word usage, answers to questions, fiction and fact, and so on. This design also removes the need to remember what a lot of little icons mean which is a hindrance.

I came up with this design, by the way, after taking a stroll through the periodic table of visualizations at visual-literacy.org. I took each of the hundred or so visualizations shown there and tried it out with stories and people and comments and so on in the slots provided. This "swim lane" diagram won the competition for best fit for purpose.

Everyone in a café should see the same café so they can use the same language when they talk. But the best way to look at a library depends on who is looking at it and why. So the basic view for the library in Rakontu 2.0 is a simple one based on the old Smalltalk browser, which I still miss every day. It was just a great way to drill down and up and sideways through a mass of related information very quickly. Using the Smalltalk browser always reminded me of riding the elevator in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory: it doesn't just go up. This is Rakontu's version of the browser:

Here we see the user looking through polls (sets of questions) about stories and finding stories people said they would remember for a long time. Under each story the drill-down continues to explore the comments and things hanging below it like catkins on a twig.

I also said in Steal these ideas that, "as soon as we got up over a few dozen stories I found myself wanting to see many other views of the data: link maps, bar charts, tables, sorted lists, and so on." We are creating a plug-in interface for visualizations of Rakontu data so that other people can write fancy bubble charts and whatever kinds of insightful navigation and pattern detection devices they would like to add. That's kind of a no-brainer.

You may be wondering why I keep talking about a distinction between café and library, since in Steal these ideas I said, "I'll be so bold as to say that any story sharing system in which the telling and the keeping are not intermingled will not succeed." The great thing about software is that if you design it well you can create tools that provide distinctions between and passages between at the same time. How? By encapsulating each activity within the other. I've seen many well-meaning pieces of software that enforce modality where it is not necessary simply because their developers failed to imagine passages through the walls of their conceptual constructions. The normal laws of space and time do not apply in software. Say you are in your kitchen, and you remember you forgot to clean out the fish tank. You have to go into the living room, right? But not in software. You can just extend your magical arms and reach anywhere in the house.

I love contextual menus. You know, those right-click-on-everything-in-sight menus? They provide secret passageways through many otherwise impenetrable software fortresses. One I have grown to love is in PowerPoint. You can click on any number of objects on the screen, then right-click and choose "Save as Picture." PowerPoint will write a PNG file with exactly those objects, even if they were five out of a hundred on the page. That is a passageway. So even though we are building café and library areas, they will be so criss-crossed with passages that it will be more like a café-library and a library-café. Which passages are best kept open and which are best left to heal closed is a matter of testing, testing and then some testing.

Who does what

There was another element in the café/library section in the Steal these ideas post. It was about roles people could take on to help make the community work: curator of the story museum, guide to help people engage in story exchange, and liaison to bridge gaps to off-line members. I still love the roles, but in hindsight, because I wanted them to be volunteer and easy to take on without approval, I put too much work onto the managers as a result.

In the new design I've changed that in two ways. First, managers can choose whether each role is open (anyone can take it on at any time), agreed (anyone can take it on, but they have to agree to some terms and must commit to a time frame), or moderated (a manager must approve members taking on the role). In this way the software can better accommodate a range of groups with varying degrees of trust built up before the software is in use. This is similar to how people run real storehouses of memorable items. If the museum is grandma's attic, all the family members can come in and poke around. But if the museum handles a city's treasures, measures must be taken to safeguard the collection.

Second, I've designed some new roles that delegate some of the tasks previously given to managers.

1. A facilitator takes responsibility for planning group workshops for story gathering and sensemaking, and they maintain any fictional characters for anonymous attribution. Facilitators are like guides in focusing on the people-parts of the community, but they have wider and deeper responsibilities in that context.
2. A researcher explores the collected stories to look for patterns that can be used in sensemaking workshops. They also manage the polls of questions about stories, observing which questions are most useful and which are misunderstood or ignored. Researchers are like curators in focusing on the data-parts of the community, but they have wider and deeper responsibilities in that context.
3. A technician handles all computer-related issues. Like guides they answer questions, but they help people set up, maintain and understand the software itself.

With these delegations the manager is only required to provide governance for the group, that is, setting policies and resolving disputes.

Now you may have noticed that the facilitator, researcher and technician roles require expertise that may be beyond the capacity of many people who might be using Rakontu. This reflects two realities. First, I want to expand Rakontu to cover a wide range of storytelling and sensemaking activities so it can fully support people who are working with stories for a reason. And that is going to involve some learning by somebody. People may grow into the knowledge, but somebody has to learn to carry out those roles.

Second, we can't continue to develop Rakontu forever without any funding, so I need to design some way I can help people use it for a fee. I can't do that from the outside, so I need to build myself into the system, and it only makes sense to build in other people like myself who can help people work with stories. Much of my work in the past several years has concentrated on helping everyone learn how to do what I do, but it is always reasonable to charge for useful work. If you happen to be a person who facilitates story work and would like to be involved in using and improving Rakontu, by all means let me know. I would love (in time) to be able to point to a network of facilitators, researchers and technicians available to help people with story projects using Rakontu. You know that story about heaven and hell, right? About the long spoons? We can feed each other and eat well or feed ourselves and starve.

3. Embody knowledge about narrative

Looking back at the Steal these ideas post, I said about embodying knowledge, "Probably the best successes of Rakontu so far have been in this area." I still feel that way. I feel pretty confident that Rakontu will help people share stories and use them to do useful things even if they know absolutely nothing about stories.

And while I'm at it, let me repeat what I said back then in this part, which is that nobody needs Rakontu or anything like it to share stories or work with them. Why am I building software then? Because people use computers. If there were no computers, after I recovered from my three day celebration I would set about helping people work with stories without computers. But here they are, and here we are. So let's get to work.

4. Build for commitment

Yep. No change there. I still think the web needs this, more and more in fact, and I'm still committed to it. I know that much story sharing happens in casual settings, and I do not claim that by designing for people with a shared goal I am building the only reasonable or even best story sharing support. It is just what I care most about, that's all.

5. Decomplexify

This is where I will need your help. I can never be anything but a hopeless nerd, a detail lover. You will always find me mucking about in the viscera of any system I use or build. I will need the help of many friends to rise up and have a look around to see how things look different from up there. All criticisms will be gratefully acknowledged, even if with a snarl. (Joking...)

6. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

This part of the post was about how you should not build what I built, but build other things I didn't think of. I am still thinking of this as well. We plan to include a few different interfaces for both plug-in and exchange connections between Rakontu and other software, and we would love to exchange ideas with anyone interested in pursuing ideas similar to these.

So: that's the plan. I'll say it again: We have new documents on the architecture and visual design of Rakontu 2.0 for you to look at. Please send feedback and suggestions. By next spring ...

Saving stories or saving storytelling?

The other day I read an article in this week's Christian Science Monitor called "Saving the stories." I can't stop thinking about it. The article is about people in Qatar collecting stories from old people and packaging them for young people to experience. As I keep rereading it I keep coming back to a few particular sections of the article. It starts:

Growing up, Kholoud Saleh never heard the story of the donkey and the grain. Or the one about the magic fish that helped a lonely stepdaughter escape her evil stepmother. "The older people, they were told [these stories]," she says. "But us, no."

And this part:

In Qatar, stories have primarily been shared orally. This was partly by necessity – the government didn't offer comprehensive public education until the middle of the 20th century. ...

Folklore was a way for extended families to share their heritage and values. It "allowed grandfathers and grandmothers to play a big role in children's verbal education at home," explains Elnour Hamad, an art education professor at Qatar University.

But in the past 10 years, Qatar has rapidly transformed into a bustling cosmopolitan society. Now, young people spend more time at school and in malls than they do with their families.

The article describes how young people set out to capture some of the old stories the old folks tell, spurred on by a researcher who "armed them with tape recorders and sent them out to find elders." One the student collectors recalled that he

... ventured into coffee shops and mosques in the hopes of finding people to talk to. He was turned away again and again. "It was so difficult at the first," he says. "I would come to ask, and they would say no, no, no."

Then

Eventually, he convinced one woman to share a story about a donkey that steals grain from an old woman on a farm. The donkey denies that he is responsible, but the old woman designs a clever test to figure out that he's the thief. ... Since that initial breakthrough, other stories have followed.

Some people involved in this project are converting the captured stories into "graphic short stories" with "accompanying illustrations." Says a student helper:

Today, kids are more concerned about Disney stories and TV shows ... We want to take them back to their tradition.

And a participant:

My daughters and my sons should really be able to read these stories.

Half of me reads this and says, yes, bring stories to the people. Good things happening. In fact at first I thought nothing but: we must put that link on our blog, it's good news.

But the other half of me keeps crossing its arms and saying: Wait a minute. I understand that people are trying to work with the rock-solid fact that people are unreachable except through polished, packaged, television-style stories today. But is that a rock-solid fact? Do we have to accept it? Can we change it? Could it be that saving stories and saving storytelling are at odds? If we concentrate on saving only one, might we unwittingly aid in the destruction of the other?

When I read this article I wanted to know some things. Why did people stop telling stories? What do the old people say about why they stopped telling stories? Why do they say "no, no, no" when you ask? What is the story of the loss of storytelling? What stopped working? Is anyone asking these questions? Or are we only asking about the stories themselves? Stories without storytelling are like facts without faces; they lose their humanity. It seems a hollow achievement to capture only the stories while storytelling itself is left to die. If young people "spend more time at school and in malls," can nothing be done about that? Is there no innovation or creativity we can apply to the situation? Are we treating the disease or only its symptoms?

I could imagine an article that involved all the same people, but in addition described a series of monthly meetings held in every city street or village where the old people were asked to tell the old stories and the young people listened. It's not hard to hold such meetings; just advertise a free meal and people will show up. You could even hold them in schools and malls, if that is where the young people are.

Consider the Laughter Clubs of India. In these people get together regularly to do something together that harks back to old times and helps them all. They don't preserve laughter: they preserve laughing. Maybe research projects with aims to reinvigorate traditional culture could sponsor and promote story clubs. And maybe some few young people might be attracted to the idea and might be given a small stipend to undertake a storytelling apprencticeship where they spend time with one or several old storytellers and learn to tell the stories themselves. What would that be like?

I've seen several other instances of people creating spaces where people come together to do something of mutual benefit. Have you heard of the Hole-in-the-Wall stations in India? These are shared workstations set up where people get together. From the web site linked above:

For experts, like Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, Hole-in-the-Wall is a ‘Shared Blackboard’ which children in underprivileged communities can collectively own and access, to express themselves, to learn, to explore together, and at some stage to even brainstorm and come up with exciting ideas.

For villagers, it is more like a village Well, where children assemble to draw knowledge and, in the process, engage in meaningful conversation and immersive learning activities that broaden their horizons.

And finally for children, it is an extension of their playground where they can play together, teach each other new things, and more importantly, just be themselves.

Could you imagine storytelling/listening centers like this? Why not?

If people created some sort of support for storytelling like this, some tape recording would go on here and there, and some stories would  be saved. But that would be a safe-guard in the event of loss, a complementary action, not the entire effort. What if there was a balance between reviving the practice of story exchange and reviving the old stories?

In the environmental movement there are groups like the Nature Conservancy who preserve land, and there are groups like the World Wildlife Fund who preserve the idea that nature matters. Which is more important? They both matter. What if there was a similar balance in efforts to preserve the narrative life of humanity? (Is there? Then why do I keep reading articles like this one?)

(Of course I am writing based on an ignorant reading of one newspaper article. Perhaps the people leading this effort are creating such a balance.)

What do you think? Is it better to save stories or storytelling? What is the best way to support both? Are they at odds? If they are at odds, what are some solutions? If they are not at odds, how do you see them?

Form, function and phenomenon

I have sorta-kinda written about story as form, function and phenomenon so many times now that I wonder if people wonder why I keep glancing at it and never hitting it head on. The answer to that question is (of course) a story.

The quiet question

The Knowledge Socialization group at IBM Research, of which I was a part and of which John C. Thomas was the head, was formed to address issues of organizational narrative in ways that would help IBM and its clients and customers (external and internal). I happened to be hired on just as the group was forming in early 1999 and was in it for two years. I built the group's web site, which I had no possible idea would still exist twelve years later (just shows you what a metropolis IBM is). As to how long the group lasted, I believe it was five years or so? Anyway so in the first few months we spent a lot of time talking about what sorts of projects would be most useful and doing mini-projects to explore possibilities. I was also reading everything I could get my hands on about narrative so that I could become more useful.

XML was just beginning to take off at the time, and John suggested building an XML specification to describe stories for use in organizational story bases. I'm a natural organizer and am never happier than when I have hundreds of similar-but-not-quite-identical things to put into little piles. So I set to work.

How to begin deciding what metadata people might want to collect about stories? Said I then,

The idea of classifying and deconstructing stories is not new. Aristotle proposed three fundamental elements of which all stories are composed. In 1916 Georges Polti proposed that all stories could be classified into thirty-six dramatic situations (including such categories as "The Slaying Of A Kinsman Unrecognized" and "An Enemy Loved"). 

People generate and exchange metadata about stories every day, in discourse, memory and anticipation. In fact, people telling stories often include explicit metadata ("metanarration") about the story or the storytelling situation to prove that the story is worth listening to—"I’ll never do that again" or "That was an incredible experience." [That last had a pointer to the seminal 1967 paper by Labov and Waletzsky, now available online.]

I came up with this question: What are all the questions anyone could possibly ask about a story? From that I landed on: What are all the questions anyone has ever asked, or recommended asking, about stories? The idea was to arrive at a global list, a narrative Key to All Mythologies if you will, from which one could draw set of questions for particular contexts of use. (The Key to all Mythologies was the lifelong endeavor of James Casaubon in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, an endeavor that ended badly when he died without having found a suitable successor to take over his work.)

This was my original list of fields to consider, in rough order of the degree of attention paid:  

narratology, folklore study (comparative and contextual), professional fiction writing, professional storytelling, case-based reasoning, narrative organizational study, narrative inquiry and analysis, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, knowledge management, knowledge representation, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, literary theory, journalism. 

Today this list shows me my background as an ethologist and the technology-and-information culture at IBM. I can see some important things I left out: community theatre, conversational analysis, sociology, cultural anthropology, marketing, advertising, PR, policy analysis, foreign policy, complexity, just to start with.

However, I still remember this part with fondness:

I deliberately juxtaposed fields of academic literature and fields of professional literature to encompass both reflective and practical perspectives.

No academic blinders here, which is significant given I had been spat out of academia not long before this. Actually, as I recall at the time I was still barely able to read an academic journal without dissolving in anger. But I digress.

The forest of detail

Having decided on this list of fields, I found out (by asking and by following webs of citation) what were considered the seminal books and papers in each field. And then:

I looked for instances of metadata—questions, categories, segmentations, classifications, analyses. There were many of these, and many of them overlapped in scope and meaning, both within and between fields.

Everything that didn't start out as a question I reframed as a question. I found that

Looking for story metadata is like breathing: it’s everywhere. Story touches so many fields that finding new pockets of academic and popular literature with something to say about story has become nearly a monthly occurrence. The problem is not to find story metadata; the problem is to make sense of the huge mass of it and reduce it to something tractable.

This was all done by hand on sheets of yellow notepaper (yes, this is a story from long ago, children). After I felt I had reached a feeling of satiation in every field I had intended to cover—this took nearly three months—I stopped writing things down and started cutting things apart. I snipped the sheets of paper up into smaller pieces, usually with one question apiece but sometimes with a few very closely related. Then I played with the slips of paper. More formally:

I began to assemble a composite sketch of possible metadata through a sort of implicit consensus. I allowed the structure to emerge slowly, continually checking and adjusting to take account of new perspectives. At a few points I reiterated the design by taking apart the whole structure and putting it back together again.

Taking apart the structure meant literally scattering the bits of paper and starting to heap them up again. Why? Clustering gets better the second and third times, as you gain a stronger sense of the shape of the body of things. There is satiety in assembly as well as in collection. The more you care about the result, the more important it is to destroy what you have built.

The number of questions topped out around 400, and they formed slowly into three large groupings at the top level of a hierarchy several levels deep: form, function and phenomenon. (Actually, phenomenon was ineptly named "trace" at the start; the alliterative improvement only occurred to me years later. Let's just sweep that under the carpet shall we?)

The beast of industry

By now you are asking: What are all those blocks of quoted text? They are taken from a 24-page paper I wrote about the project in 2000. Where is the paper? That's another part of the story. You see, I petitioned the IBM powers-that-be through official channels to publish the paper externally. I was told I could not and have sat on the paper, and the 400 questions, ever since. Of course it's probably because I put the 400 questions in the paper that IBM declined to publish it.

When I tell myself this story I alternate between telling it in three ways. In one version I trembled in submission before the gods of industry, was spurned, and crawled away nursing my wounds. Oh the inhumanity, the poor meek creature who never did any harm to anyone crushed by the heel of cold profit. In the second version I strode forth and tilted at the windmills of industry, knowing full well that the heartless machine would never let go of anything worth possibly anything ever, and fiercely immolating the project in protest. In the third version I stupidly threw away a pretty good paper to seek an unrealistic utopia. I knew people at IBM who ignored the official channels and published papers without permission and never got in trouble for it. I might have got away with it if I hadn't asked permission, or if I had stopped at the line clearly marked "do not push IBM beyond this line." But I wanted to ask, and I didn't want to stop at the line. I was meek. I was cheeky. I was naïve.

In any case, I keep pondering as time goes by if I should publish these things and risk arousing the beast, or approach it and bow and scrape. But I don't seem to do either of those things, even though I have been on the verge several times. The paper itself would win no awards and reads no better than a school term paper to my eyes at this point. But I do often peevishly wish people could make use of the 400 questions, because they do provoke thought, or at least they seem to when I get them out and look at them every year during the International Days of Self-Pity.

I have published the list in part. I took the brazen step of sneaking my favorite twenty questions out of each of the three large groups into my book three years ago. (Nobody noticed.) Besides, I've come to realize my grand list was never the Key to All Mythologies anyway. It was just a glorified literature review. They aren't my 400 questions, they are just 400 questions other people asked and I mashed together. Anybody else could go out and read the same books and papers and arrive at the same list, or a better one. I don't even consider the list all that complete at this point. I'd be embarrassed to put it out as anything authoritative now, at least not without another three months to smarten it up.

My dream then was to put the questions up on a web site and invite everybody in the world to bring the list to the next stage with me: to annotate, sort, organize, append, expand it. That's what I would have done if I had got permission to publicize the paper. If anybody at IBM can hear me and wants to help me do that, I'm game. But I no longer think it is the loss to humanity I once did. It took me around three months full time to compile the list, and I'll bet it would take anybody else no longer; and if you divided that task up among ten people it would only take ... hold on ... about 50 hours each. So, not a big project really. And the thing I found most useful from it is too big and too alive to be owned by anyone, so the point becomes moot.

Something old/new/borrowed/blue

Do you care deeply about this story of the idiot standing before the hulking dragon of industry? Not likely. Here is something you can use.

Consider this fable from Aesop:

An ant went to the bank of a river to quench its thirst, and being carried away by the rush of the stream, was on the point of drowning. A dove sitting on a tree overhanging the water plucked a leaf and let it fall into the stream close to her. The ant climbed onto it and floated in safety to the bank. Shortly afterwards a birdcatcher came and stood under the tree, and laid his lime-twigs [trap] for the dove, which sat in the branches. The ant, perceiving his design, stung him in the foot. In pain the birdcatcher threw down the twigs, and the noise made the dove take wing.

That's just the sort of story Aesop would tell, isn't it? The old rascal. It never comes right out and says anything, but we know what it means. That sort of understanding is what people do best. So, we apply the instrument:

The form of a story is its internal structure. In the realm of form, a story "works" because it fits our expectations of what stories are like and uses that fit to deliver a message. Within those expectations of what stories are like, many nuances can be used to produce particular effects. The largest distinctions within story form are those of environment, character, plot, and narrative.

Story form in the ant fable (sorry, these are mussy screenshots; when I tried to recreate the hierarchical lists I nearly broke blogger; click to see them bigger):

The function of a story is its use in our thinking and remembering. Function depends largely on relationships: between characters in the story; between characters and their plans, goals and actions; between the story and other stories; between characters and events in the story and people and events in our lives. In the realm of function, a story “works” when we find it in the right place at the right time, when we learn something useful from it, or when it reminds us of something we need to know. The largest distinctions within story function are those of meaning, understanding, and connection.

Story function in the ant fable:

The phenomenon of a story is the story of its existence as it moves through time and society. A story’s phenomenon depends largely on context: when and where the story was first told, what effect it had, when and where it was heard and retold in different forms, how it changed over time. In the realm of story phenomenon, a story “works” when it survives through time and impacts the lives of people. The largest distinctions within story phenomenon are those of the story’s origin and development, its current variation and use, and details on individual storytelling events. For each storytelling event, story phenomenon details the interpretation of the story by the storyteller, the events surrounding the storytelling event, and the viewpoints of all participants on what took place.

Story phenomenon in the ant fable:

There. That's about five percent of the original paper, and it's still far more than I've ever published about these three dimensions before. But hopefully it can give you a bit better and more useful idea of what I mean by form, function and phenomenon. The simple example serves to illustrate the utility of considering different perspectives on stories, I hope. You could try looking at a story in each of these ways yourself and see if new insights emerge.

The way I see these three dimensions coming together is in a metaphor about cells. A story is sort of like a cell in our bodies. Internally a cell has all sorts of complex-complicated structure (including possibly other organisms-that-were such as mitochondria living their lives inside of ours). This is like story form. The cell membrane is not simply the border of the cell; it is almost like a brain in its detailed control of transport and communication. This like story function. If we zoom out our microscopes and look at the larger tissues of the organism, we see cells embedded in the contexts of their tiny destinies, some never moving and some traveling vast distances. We see them come together, form things, move apart, die. This is story phenomenon. What is life? It is all of this. What is story? It is all of this.

The river of life 

I count FFP (shall we call it) as one of the top five useful things I have learned about stories so far. It has informed all of my work, sometimes without my knowing it. It has become a trusted friend. If my thinking on narrative is incomplete it is because FFP is incomplete. Is FFP incomplete? Sure, maybe. I can imagine that. I can also imagine it being derivative or redundant of some obscure treatise I never happened to read. If you can see something I have missed in it, please tell me. If it's the same thing you've read in so-and-so's book, I want to know who so-and-so is. If you want to work on improving it with me, let me know. I want it to grow.

I remember reading Stuart Kaufmann's book Investigations and laughing at this line:

It may be that I have stumbled upon the proper definition of life itself.

What, stumbled upon it right next to all the other thousands of people stumbling upon it with you?

Here's another one, in Stephen Wolfram's doorstop (sorry, seminal work) A New Kind of Science:

Just over twenty years ago I made what at first seemed like a small discovery: a computer experiment of mine showed something I did not expect. But the more I investigated, the more I realized what I had seen was the beginning of a crack in the very foundations of existing science, and a first clue towards a whole new kind of science.

Ooooh, your own science. It is a sad fact that success often brings its own failure with it. The safest thing is to never succeed, or to never succeed entirely, or to never believe that what has succeeded is you yourself. Because it never is, really, is it? Have you read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius? You should. It's rational emotive therapy thousands of years ahead of its time. I pull it out every year or two and go over it again. From Book three:

Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died. The Chaldaei foretold the deaths of many, and then fate caught them too. [...lots more dead people, lice, mud, etc...] What means all this? Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get out.

I love that part: get out. Get out and leave the boat for others. If you have built a beautiful boat and have come to love it, but you have built that boat to fit so perfectly your own form and that of no one else, when you get out of the river of life the boat will get out of the river of life with you. What could be sadder than that? The reason Casaubon's attempt to build the Key to All Mythologies is a tragedy is not that he didn't finish it; it's because he couldn't let go of it. In Book four Marcus Aurelius says:

For all things soon pass away and become a mere tale, and complete oblivion soon buries them.

But a mere tale is a lot. It is everything. It is the river of life. Only by getting out of it can we stay in it.

Represent stories as stories represent themselves

Having set my insight-child free in the river of life, one essential element I will defend with defiant zeal is its aspectiveness. Read this quote from the book Neuroethics (found on one of my favorite blogs, Heroes not Zombies, and actually it did not originate in the book cited, but is a quote citing another quote from the biblical scholar James Dunn):

While Greek thought tended to regard the human being as made up of distinct parts, Hebraic thought saw the human being more as a whole person existing on different dimensions. As we might say, it was more characteristically Greek to conceive of the human person "partitively," whereas it was more characteristically Hebrew to conceive of the human person "aspectively." That is to say, we speak of a school having a gym (the gym is part of the school); but we say I am a Scot (my Scottishness is an aspect of my whole being.)

Form-function-phenomenon is an aspective distinction, not a partitive one. The dimensions do not divide and exclude but interpenetrate and augment. They cannot and should not argue. They should only present and represent. This is wonderful because it's exactly what stories do, and it's why they have such a central place in human life. Stories are among our most aspective elements of thought and conversation. They deserve an aspective framework of understanding, don't you think?

Stories of definition

A few weeks ago I realized a mistake I had been making and corrected it. You may be interested to hear about both the mistake and the correction.

If you have followed Kathy Hansen's wonderful series of interviews with people who work in the story area, you will have noticed the wildly varying answers to her question about what makes a story a story. I used to read some of these and get ... well, not upset, but perhaps self-righteous, or behaving like what my mother would call (in her gifted way of putting just the right words in the right place) "a little snot." As I read more and more of these definitions, I noticed that I would get predictably upset when people defined stories in either of two ways. The first group would say a story was characters acting in time and space in an arc of plot events and blah blah blah Hollywood blah blah. The other group would say a story was people in communities sharing their lives and rending their hearts and blah blah blah therapy blah blah.

My superior definition of story has always been this, as I wrote in my book:

The very simplest definition of a story is: a recounting of events where you wonder what is going to happen, and then you find out. In order for you to wonder what is going to happen there has to be a tension between two or more possibilities (it's why there needs to be a comma in that first sentence). Aristotle called it potentiality, development and result -- meaning, something could happen, something does happen, and what happens means something. There can be other recountings of events that are not stories -- for example, lists of things that happened on different dates, or places you stopped on your way to the coast -- but if there is no uncertainty there is no story. Uncertainty is the reason stories draw us in and engage us, because they tap into problem-solving instincts that have evolved over millions of years.

So there you go. That was the one right way to look at stories, and all other ways were wrong. Aristotle and I knew what we were talking about, and all the duffers out there didn't.

Then one day about a month ago I was asked for the millionth time during an interview: "What is a story?" As I prepared to give my practiced and perfectly correct response I suddenly realized I was completely wrong. Or rather, wrongly complete. And all of those interviews (thanks Kathy) fell perfectly into a story I had never understood until that moment.

Let me explain. My biggest gift in my own story work, other than the "we are all swimming in stories already" moment, was discovering that there are three fundamental dimensions or aspects of story, as follows (and excuse me for repeating this again and again):

Story form is the internal structure of a story: things like setting, characters, plot and point. A good story uses effective narrative form to deliver a message well. 

Story function is its utility to our thinking and learning: things like meaning, understanding and connection. A good story helps us learn what we need to learn, find out what we need to know, or remember what we need to remember. 

Story phenomenon is the story of the story: things that describe context, like where and when and why a story was told, who heard it, how it can and will be retold, and so on. A good story lives on because it sustains the health of the community.

The reason good people disagree on what a story is, contrary to my precious self-regard, isn't that some are right and some are wrong. It is that we are looking at different parts of the elephant.

Everyone gravitates to one or two of these dimensions of story more strongly than the others, and that gravitation colors the way they think about stories and what they think makes a story a story. I was trained in ethology, so I think about cognition (and mimicry and trickery and riots and things like that) a lot, so I gravitate to a definition based on story function. I have paid some attention to the other dimensions, and particularly like story phenomenon, but I still gravitate to what I know best. Other people come at story from other backgrounds and personalities, so they experience different things, so story takes on different shapes to them.

What I am saying is that your definition of story is a story about you and your life. This means that no definition of story can be truly complete without considering all of these dimensions in the same way that no story of humanity can be complete without including the story of every single human being.

Pluralistic nonsense? A story is everything, thus nothing? I have to accept an outpouring of emotion as a story even if nothing happens in it? The touchy-feely folks have to accept a surprising chain of events as a story even if nobody feels anything as a result? Not exactly. We don't need a melting pot of story definition, just some respect for multiple perspectives and maybe some interfaith dialogue. If you live and breathe cognitive science, read Theatre of the Oppressed. If you dream in community therapy, pick up a book on screenwriting. If you design perfect characters, read up on expert systems or indigenous knowledge. Traveling broadens the mind.

What does this mean in practice? Should everybody use every story definition in their work all the time? Not exactly. Different definitions of story have different practical utility in different contexts. That's a good thing. While we should all practice moving outside the story dimension we know best, it is not always the best course of action to include every story definition in the specific contexts in which we are working at any one time.

Reaching an audience? Sending a message? If your stories do not have strong arcs of story events and characters in conflict, they will not prove memorable or motivating. If you want to know what a story is and isn't in that context, read McKee and Bal.

Creating an narrative knowledge management system? Learning from your mistakes? If your stories do not present dilemmas, discoveries, surprises and solutions, they will not increase your understanding. If you want to know what a story is and isn't in that context, read Schank and Klein.

Bringing together a community? Writing to your grandchildren? If your stories do not resonate and connect in context, they will not achieve a lasting positive impact. If you want to know what a story is and isn't in that context, read Boal and Bauman.

And all combinations thereof and so forth and so on. The particular combination of goals in any story project will determine the particular combination of story definitions it can most fruitfully use to the best effect. The more we develop our agility at handling various combinations, the stronger our ability to create effective story projects. I have been as much at fault as anyone else in assuming that my strongest way of defining story was the only way and limiting my ability to build great story projects as a result; but I now see my way to a better place.

So, I'm thinking the next time somebody asks me, "What is a story?" I'm going to say, "What do you want to do?"

Context as trap and tool

So I'm looking at an old copy of National Geographic a few weeks ago and I see an advertisement that makes me ponder. And ponder. And write.

Two guys holding things

The advertisement strongly featured two photographs. Here is the first.

Being a visual person, my eyes immediately went to the photographs, and right away my stereotype crew sprung into action. You know the crew I'm talking about, it's those little people inside you who read one sentence of an article, jump to the author's name/affiliation/party/picture, and say "Oh, it's written by a ____, that's why it says that" or "Can't expect anything good/bad/right/wrong out of somebody like that" or any other of a variety of knee-jerk reactions to surface appearances. My crew works as well as yours does (or better!) and here is what the crew came up with.

1. What a puny vacuum cleaner. Underpowered. There is no way it will be able to pick up all that stuff on the floor. 
2. Ewww, look at that old couch, what a horrid color. Are those scuff marks on the wall? What is that in the room beyond? More banged-up furniture? Creepy place.
3. Look at this guy's pants. They look old and dirty. His shoes look old and weirdly out of date. I wonder if he found them somewhere. Cheap thin Wal-mart shirt. 
4. What is a guy doing vacuuming anyway? Where is his wife? Maybe he lives alone. Maybe nobody likes him. He looks unhappy.
5. He looks more than unhappy. He looks distressed, in pain. He looks like he is about to cry. Why is he so distraught? Because he is lonely? Because he is --
6. Wait -- is that sweat on his pants? Could he be working? At a dingy motel or something? Oh. This is very bad. A man using a vacuum for money is about the lowest you can get in this society.

This is not what I thought, mind you, it's what the stereotype crew came up with, and I don't listen to them. (But I can still hear them.) 

Further down the page there was this photograph.

The crew said:

1. Oooh, rich man.
2. Golf clubs, open space, nobody in his way. Probably a private course. 
3. New white pants, spiffy. Look at that sheen, must be nice fabric. Nice black shoes, very professional. Probably had them cleaned professionally. The way that thin shirt lies on him, it must be silk. 
4. Look at that fancy specialised golf glove, must be important. 
5. Look at that look of intense concentration on his face. He looks like the kind of guy who knows what he wants and always gets it.
6. A man like that is on top of the world. That's about the highest you can get in this society. 

A second later, the considered-opinion consortium (they are most decidedly not a crew) commenced their oration on the subject. First they pointed out that doing cleaning work is perfectly reasonable and respectable. They reminded us that we had put ourselves through college partly through working evenings as a janitor at a day care center. It was in fact one of our best jobs ever. We loved buffing the shiny floors, monitoring our tiny queendom of cleaning supplies, and serenading the acoustically perfect bathrooms. Most importantly, doing the physical work of cleaning gave us a welcome respite from thinking in classroom and library all day. Cleaning freed our minds to do the sober work of reflection and mental development. We have often, said the consortium, reflected back on those cleaning days and wondered if we chose wrongly in pursuing an occupation that kept our minds busy instead of calling on our hands to do their part. We implore you, they argued, to recall the man we met who owned a janitorial service and was free to take university courses and explore as he found topics appealing because his needs were supplied by his capable hands.

Similarly, the consortium's reaction to the second man was that, yes, he looks important, but he might be stressed out because of the many people who depending on his decision making power, or the way the department is being run in his absence, or his upcoming announcement of a new and ambitious program. Do not take appearances too strongly, and so on and so forth. Sadly these speeches were given to an empty auditorium because the knee-jerk crew never sticks around long enough to hear the consortium speak, having run off to their next panicked reaction. But I was listening. When both groups had spoken, I reflected and decided that I'd still rather be the golf guy. He just looks happier, I thought. Those looks on their faces are like night and day. You can't miss that.

It was only at this moment, after all the preceding took place, that I realized the man in both pictures was identical. His shirt and shoes were the same, but most importantly, he had the exact same expression on his face. (Look closely, he does.) The people who made this advertisement pasted the same picture onto two backgrounds. Only the context is different. (You could say that the second visible arm in the second picture represents a change in the man, but really that second arm is contextual as well, since it only exists to provide a place to display the fancy golfing glove.) Inside the unchanging parts of the man, nothing is different, but it looks different. What looked to me like sweat and dirt in one picture looked like sheen and quality in the other. And the identical facial expression came across as near breakdown in one picture and top-guy focus in the other.

Seize the day?

The advertisement is from a lottery offered by Dubai Duty Free called Double Millionaire. In this lottery tickets sell for about $550 US, only 5000 are sold, and the prize is two million US dollars. The large text on the advertisement reads, "Live a New Life."

Let me ask you something. How many people do you know who are willing or able to spend US$550 on a 1 in 5000 chance? I know ... let me think ... zero. In fact I think I can say that I have never even met a person who would think of doing this for more than about ten seconds. So probably very few of the people who bought a ticket for this lottery could possibly be seen in that first photograph. They would have to be living in the second photograph before they would buy the ticket. That's strange, isn't it?

Here are some statements by winners of this lottery (and other similar ones by the same group) from press releases:

I’m thrilled to win such a beautiful car! This is my fourth ticket for a BMW and I still cannot believe that I finally won it!

I am still proudly driving my winning car and thankful for Dubai Duty Free for such an amazing prize but winning two million dollars is just truly a great surprise! [This person won twice in the course of 18 years.]

My family and I always buy tickets in Dubai Duty Free’s promotions when we travel. I never lose hope to win a prize and thankful to Dubai Duty Free for making this happen.

It was my first ever visit to Dubai when I purchased my lucky ticket. I was excited to shop in Dubai Duty Free on the way back and to my great delight won my dream car!

It took a long time before I finally got the prize and I’m happy that the prize was worth the wait!

I am so excited to have finally won in one of Dubai Duty Free’s promotions. It’s been seven years since I purchased my first ever ticket and I never lost hope to become a winner. I would like to thank Dubai Duty Free for making my day a very memorable one!

I have noticed a few things about these comments.

1. Five of these six people have not bought one ticket but have bought at least two and often several. So these are not people who, once in their life, followed a dream and spent a large amount of money on a chance at riches. These are people who spend that amount of money regularly. That places them further away from the vacuum guy than before.
2. Half of the people mention "finally" winning or hoping to win, which seems to imply that they had some expectation of winning. Granted, the number of tickets sold was small, 5000 for the Double Millionaire lottery. But still, the odds of winning are small enough that people should not think of this as something you can win "finally" by trying several times. It almost seems as though the winners felt they were entitled to win the lottery after buying several tickets.
3. A partial list of the stated occupations of the winners above: owner of an auto supply business, owner of a trading company, student at a private school, "Promotion Manager" at an international corporation. One stands out because he "runs a gas refilling station" and so is closer to the first photograph. (I notice that man's occupation is more widely reported in newspapers - more noteworthy?)

Please note that I do not mean to disparage any of these people, not the winners and not the lottery providers. I am simply pondering the curious fact that the creators of this lottery chose photographs that represented the material wealth of its audience as far lower than it actually is. Why did they do that? What is it, exactly, that they are trying to show with this contrast? What story were they telling?

My guess is that the story is not about wealth at all. It is about control. The man in the top picture looks miserable because he has to vacuum the floor. The man in the bottom picture looks intent because he doesn't have to swing the golf club. The first man is a loser, a victim, a put-upon pawn. The second is a winner, his own man, on top, in charge. Everyone identifies with the loser because everyone loses, no matter how rich or poor they happen to be. Nobody is as much in control as they would like to be.

Context as trap

Curious about how the advertisement creators composited the pictures, I tried to pull the two guys out of their contexts so I could compare them. On doing this I found out another interesting feature of the advertisement. I used Photoshop's "magic wand tool" to try and select both men based on color alone. Here is the man with the vacuum.

And here is the golf man.

The vacuum man disappears when you remove his environment, but the golf man doesn't. Whether this was done deliberately or by accident, it is part of the story being told. The vacuum man is one with his environment, trapped in it, you might say. The ugly couch matches his ugly shirt, and the smudges on the walls rub off on his sweaty pants. The black line in the doorway runs right through his head! He cannot escape his context but is a victim of it. If he walks out of this picture he will take it with him.

The golf man, by contrast, stands out from his environment and can escape it. He can walk away from the picture (even the golf club) and carry himself intact. Isn't that what we all want, the ability to walk out of the picture we find ourselves in -- the parts we don't like, the smudges and drudges -- and insert ourselves into another picture? Isn't that a potent fantasy, to change your world without changing yourself?

It was turning out to be very difficult to pull both men entirely out of their context given the color issues, so I just pulled the heads out by hand. Here are the two guys face to face.

Can you tell which is which? I can only tell because I know I made a divot in the vacuum guy's head trying to pull him out of the door frame. He's the guy on the right. If I try I can make either of these guys look intent or miserable. Can you? I'll bet you can. His expression is like one of those is-this-a-vase-or-a-lady illusions. It was only the picture they were in (trapped in or strolling through) that made us think otherwise.

I was typing things into Google like "how rich do people think they are" and so on, and I found an essay called Six Ways of Thinking Rich by T. Harv Eker. A relevant excerpt:

Rich people believe "I create my life." Poor people believe "Life happens to me." If you want to create wealth, it is imperative that you believe that you are at the steering wheel of your life; that you create every moment of your life, especially your financial life. If you don't believe this, then you must believe you have little control over your life and that financial success has nothing to do with you. That is not a very rich attitude.

Instead of taking responsibility for what's going on in their lives, poor people choose to play the role of victim. Of course, any "victim's" predominant thought process is "poor me." And presto, through the law of intention that's literally what they get; "poor," as in money, me.

Mr. Eker proposes a bit of "homework" that entails taking responsibility for one's situation -- by not complaining -- for one week. He says, "You can be a victim OR you can be rich, but you can't be both. It's time to take back your power and acknowledge the fact that you create every moment of your life."

So why didn't the lottery owners just show a harried executive, maybe an owner of an auto supply business or a Promotion Manager at an international corporation, at his desk doing things he doesn't want to do? Why push it all the way to unskilled, unwanted, dirty labor? I'm guessing what they wanted to get at was the superlative emotion of powerlessness. They are not selling wealth but the ability to seize control of one's own destiny. They ask people: Do you want to be this poor victim or this powerful man? The implication is that buying the lottery ticket is itself an action that amounts to seizing control. The lottery group wants the lottery customer to see himself as empowered not because he has enough money to play golf when he wants to (which he might have already) but because he is acting out the context of the second photograph, the context of having seized control of his life.

What strikes me as ironic about this is that buying a lottery ticket with one's money is the opposite of seizing control. It is throwing control to the winds. Would it not be better to use $550 to, I don't know, buy books or classes or expert help to develop your skills in some area? Or to reduce your risk in some area so that you would be less vulnerable to whatever hazards are inherent to your context? I can name you ten thousand things I could do with $550, and not one of them involves random chance. It seems to me that if this advertisement has succeeded in convincing people to buy a lottery ticket (which it may or may not have done) it has succeeded in getting them to act precisely opposite to their self-interest. That's powerful, isn't it? That's the power of context.

The meaning of dirt

A story sprung to mind when I saw these two pictures, this one about context in the reactions of other people. It happened one day several years ago when my husband and I were moving to our current house. We had accidentally lived for four years in an affluent suburb of New York city and were just leaving. (I say accidentally because we found a house to rent that took dogs and was within walking distance to the train -- a great feat -- without realizing we had chosen the one cheap block in an otherwise affluenza-infected town. On our first day in the house, my husband met a man walking by on the street, introduced himself and enthusiastically pumped the man's hand in his excitement. "Do you know what I like about this town?" said the man. "People leave each other alone." It was pretty much that way the whole time we lived there.)

So here we were leaving the affluent town four years later, and here I was walking down the street to the drug store as we packed our last load of stuff into a rented truck. We had hired movers, but we had to do a lot of the packing and moving and cleaning ourselves. As a result, on that day I was absolutely filthy. My jeans and t-shirt and hands and face and hair were covered with dust and grime. As I walked down the sidewalk the body language of people passing me practically shouted. It said, filthy, must be the help, not of our class, keep away. People looked away or down at the ground and practically fell into the street trying to keep their distance.

Three hours later we were at the new house. We needed something and I went to the nearby town to get it. (This time it was seven miles away instead of a thousand feet. Ah, country life.) So here I was again, walking down a similar street towards a similar drug store and wearing the same t-shirt, jeans and dirt. Again people passed by and again I watched their body language. What a change. Here the body language said, filthy, must have work! good for her. Nobody moved away. Some people even nodded as they looked directly at me and smiled. The same signs that meant "danger, avoid" in one context meant "safety, accept" in another context. If this hadn't happened on the same day just a few hours apart I would have never noticed the strong contrast.

Recalling this made me think: What if the vacuum man strode onto the golf course? How would people react? How would the man react? Would he censor his own actions? Would he seize the day? Should he? How would he know if he did?

Context as a tool

The skillful or accidental manipulation of context can encourage people to take actions that are opposed to their self-interest and damaging to others. Why? Because the impact of context usually surpasses our awareness of it. This is not a controversial statement; volumes have been written about it by sociologists and psychologists, and the entire industry of advertising relies on it. What I am most interested in, in my context of helping people work with stories to make sense of things, is that for the same reason context can be used as a trap to manipulate it can be used as a tool to empower.

The skillful manipulation of context is often a critical factor in effective narrative sensemaking. Many of the exercises people use in sensemaking involve deliberately moving objects -- stories, facts, opinions, feelings, characters, beliefs -- into and out of different contexts. This is where the power of context is put to use in a most positive way. When we are unaware of context being used on rather than by us, we may be in some danger. But when we control where the man goes and what rubs off on him, we can use that power to inform our decisions and empower ourselves.

What does it mean to skillfully manipulate context in the course of narrative sensemaking? Well, stories are the vacuum and golf guys, of course. They are the things we see as having expressions of pain or concentration on their faces. As facilitators we can manipulate contexts using three types of method.

1. We can manipulate the interpretation of stories, such as answers to questions about them: Is this a positive story? Did it turn out well? Who is it about? Why was it told? Who should hear it? And so on.
2. We can manipulate the exchange of stories. We do this when we collect stories from multiple groups and consider them together, or when we ask people from different groups to trade stories.
3. We can manipulate the construction of larger stories built out of and around stories, in the form of constructed artifacts like landscapes and timelines.

What varies from one context to another? Most often it is groups of people as defined by their relationships, characteristics and/or roles. But sometimes we vary context by time, both in its overall relation to past present and future, and in specific references to time periods (in the first year of the project, after the accident, after the restructuring, etc). Sometimes geography or some other measure of space is varied. Or we vary the topics of stories: dangers and opportunities, stories about them and about us, and so on. Things are getting complex here, so I will just collapse this dimension to a simple "our stories" and "your stories" distinction, where the distinction could be any of group, time and space, or any combination thereof.

Now, I can think of four configurations in which we can place stories and contexts: juxtaposing, splitting, merging and crossing. The amount of trust required, and the potency of the output, increases as you move down the list.

Juxtaposed context

Juxtaposing two narrative contexts is the least difficult and weakest form of manipulating context. Here stories are not moved out of their original contexts. Instead the two contexts are placed side by side at their nearly-but-not-quite-joined edges.

If we are using interpretation, juxtaposed context means the patterns of our interpretations of our stories are compared with the patterns of your interpretations of your stories. I often do this in projects for clients. For example, I might look at the relationship between reported feeling about a story (happy, sad, relieved, etc) and perceptions of responsible behavior (reprehensible to admirable). If I can look at the same pattern in patients and in doctors, I can hold up those patterns next to each other and compare them. The formation of patterns, however, is contained within each context.

If we are using exchange, juxtaposed context means our stories are held up next to your stories and we look at them side by side. This is like books that offer translations or adaptations of important texts with the original (sometimes facsimile) and translated versions on facing pages. You could do this, for example, by preparing a booklet that shows sets of, say, three stories per topic from each of two groups, each set printed on facing pages (where the page border is the literal edge of the context). Such a document could be used to jump-start sensemaking in groups working separately or together.

If we are using construction, juxtaposed context means we build something with our stories and you build something with yours, and we compare what we have built. This is a common workshop technique: the bosses build their timelines or archetypes - with their stories alone - and the underlings build their own, and then the constructed artifacts are compared. No stories leave their original contexts, but the artifacts come to the edges of their worlds and peer across the gap. Such constructions remind me of the famous Christmas truces that took place during the two world wars. Soldiers from both sides used honored rituals as constructed protections to peer across into a different context ... for a little while.

I ranked this configuration of contexts as the easiest to do and the least powerful. Why? Because nothing has to leave its original context, so there are no rough edges to sand and no rough feelings to calm. These are safe methods best used when the facilitator is inexperienced and/or the groups are unwilling to try new things or explore new ground. 

Split context

Splitting a narrative context means taking stories from one context and moving them simultaneously into two or more new contexts and considering them separately there. In all methods of this type stories must be collected up front with the intent of providing diversity of opinion and thought, sometimes from neutral or balanced sources such as historical records or news accounts, and sometimes based on prior story projects. The stories are then distributed into two or more contexts of use and the resulting patterns are compared.

If we are using interpretation, split context means we interpret a set of stories and you interpret the same set of stories, but neither of us told them. Again patterns of interpretation provide insights into how the groups are similar and different in their views. This can help to uncover opportunities for finding common ground in areas of conflict.

If we are using exchange, split context  means we read and you read the same stories together, and then we might talk about what we read. As with interpretation the source context is chosen to stimulate discussion by creating opportunities to explore varying views of the same material. This sort of thing goes on every time people discuss a literary masterpiece or a juicy bit of celebrity gossip; but conscious use of the technique can give more power to the sensemaking.

If we are using construction, split context means we create a construction and you create another, but we start with the same stories. Thus the archetypes or timelines or landscapes constructed differ in meaningful ways, which people might then come together to explore.

The requirement to build a source context from neutral or balanced materials up front limits the use of split-context methods, because rarely are people willing or able to put in the time to do that. You cannot simply collect material at random and use it; you have to study whether it provides adequate balance and diversity to feed the processes of interpretation, exchange or construction by people with different stories to tell. This takes time and patient attention. I have built a few stimulative story sets for such uses, and I can say that it does take some serious time to create a story set that is at once balanced, diverse and focused.

But having said that, I think these methods have untapped power because such a story set can challenge people to think about things they might habitually avoid considering. It is especially useful when you are trying to help people get past deeply entrenched assumptions about well-known subjects. For example, I once collected a set of stories about asymmetrical conflict throughout history. These were used in at least two instances to jump-start sensemaking in groups of analysts tasked with exploring new ways to address contemporary asymmetrical conflicts. A critical element in the success of these attempts was finding source material that would overturn assumptions by providing surprising connections. It is easy, if you look back in history, to find instances where today's superpowers were yesterday's perceived terrorists, criminals, drug-runners, and insurgents. The same goes for roles. You can put together stories of dastardly monks and sainted thieves (and even, if you look hard, sainted politicians!) with which to disrupt hardened assumptions and free up discourse and the sharing of multiple views.

People are sometimes unwilling to work with split-context material, considering it foreign, boring or irrelevant. I remember trying to use that asymmetric-conflict story set in a project about corporate conflict and finding people unwilling to make the metaphorical leap to stories about Napoleon and the Opium Wars. Doesn't apply, they said. If you can't give people something they consider relevant they can't split the context with any useful result. The need for bespoke solutions is another barrier to split-context story work.

Merged context

Merging two narrative contexts means taking two sets of stories from two different contexts and placing them both into a third, separate context together. Usually the original contexts are temporarily obscured so as to enable consideration of the third context by itself.

If we are using interpretation, merged context means our answers and your answers (about our separate stories) are considered together. We do this when we ask different groups of people, or the same people at different times, the same questions about their stories. We can then consider one set of patterns created by all the stories without distinction. I typically do a combination of juxtaposed and merged context in considering answers to questions, considering what all the respondents said next to what the teachers and students said separately. Often both of these comparisons are needed to make sense of what is happening.

If we are using exchange, merged context means we read our stories and your stories together as one body. This is the sort of intervention you might do when you want to help two groups of people find common ground. You might ask them all the same story-eliciting questions, like: When you think about values you want to pass on to the next generation, what experience stands out that you would want everyone to hear about? When stories in response to such a question are mixed together into a new context devoid of identifying information about race or class or gender, people can learn some surprising things about people they thought were very different from themselves. Here the technique of late revelation, where you have people read stories and only later reveal the identities of the speakers, can be effective in overturning stereotypes about other groups. You identified with a story, and when you find out that person happens to be a such-and-such you revise your idea of what such-and-such means.

If we are using construction, merged context means together we build something that has our stories and your stories in it. This is what we do when we ask people to consider two or more sets of stories when they build a timeline or landscape or set of archetypes or composite story together. 

Merged context is less often used than juxtaposed or split context simply because it relies more on mutual trust. Merged context is the first one in the list where stories come into close contact with alien stories. I've seen people hesitate to allow their stories to be mixed with those of others, and I've seen people refuse to consider the stories together. They sometimes insist, for example, on having identifying details returned to stories. They might say, "I can't read these stories without knowing who told them." Or they will try to circumvent the process by trying to suss out the identities of storytellers by their grammar or dialect or subject matter. People are so very good at finding out things about other people, especially about their social standing, that it can take some work to bring stories together. Even if people are not in a workshop setting they may balk when they find out that "those people" are also telling stories in the project. In a merged-context project you need to be clear about your goals and ask people to help you meet them. You also need to make sure your goals are goals both groups can put their energy into; otherwise you risk having an unequally merged project, where one group uses both sets of stories while the other uses every means they can find to exclude stories of the other group.

Crossed context

Crossing narrative contexts means transferring stories from one context to another, with a corresponding move of a second set of stories in the opposite direction.

This is the most powerful and most dangerous configuration in story work. I think the main reason it is so dangerous is that crossed contexts surface stereotypes the most strongly. When you show somebody a story and you tell them the story was told by a person in a different group - this is not merging, remember, it is crossing, so you have to let them see the original context - you do not get their considered opinion. You get to hear their knee-jerk chorus, the same stereotype crew I heard reacting to the pictures of the vacuum and golf men above. This can be hugely useful and hugely misleading. Stereotypes are amazingly useful up until the moment you forget they are stereotypes. Since this is a danger to which we are all prone, handling crossed context means watching yourself as carefully as you watch the project.

If we are using interpretation, crossed context means we interpret your stories and you interpret ours. I have only seen this done once, as far as I can remember. It was amazing. People in the two groups attributed completely different motivations to the behaviors they saw in each other's stories. As I recall it, one group ascribed an action to irresponsibility and proposed punishment, while the other ascribed it to inexperience and proposed help. These are stereotypes laid bare. Be careful if you think that simply answering some questions about stories will not impact people, if the groups are far apart. People may forget filling in a survey form, but telling and hearing stories has a stronger impact, and that impact must be considered at the start. Such an impact can be positive, but if badly managed it can deepen a divide. For example, say two groups of people are asked to interpret each other's stories, but the questions are subtly biased so that one group comes off looking better than the other. Or maybe the questions are written so that only one group can understand them, so the interpretations of one group are distorted. The results are unreliable and the people are unhappy. Pilot testing of eliciting and interpreting questions can go a long way towards helping people provide reactions without inflaming emotions.

If we are using exchange, crossed context means we hear your stories and you hear ours. This can be a transforming technique, but it can also inflame conflicts and needs to be handled carefully. One method is to maintain perfect anonymization and privacy of individual storytellers to prevent the singling out of people who "blow the whistle" (especially when their group is the one out of power). Or group processes that rely on transparency and social pressure can provide the necessary support. I am reminded here of the work of Fambul Tok, a group doing story work in conflict-ridden areas. (I am a big fan of this group and recommend their new book and documentary film.) Fambul Tok has brought together the perpetrators and victims of war crimes in Sierra Leone, some of whom live harrowingly near each other, to share their stories with their communities. Here story exchange takes place under ritualized circumstances in the presence of the whole community, and the goal is to create new "stories of forgiveness and reconciliation." What Fambul Tok has taken on is not an easy task. Strong and consistent attention is paid throughout to maintaining safety for all involved and to fostering permanent positive change. This is crossed context working under difficult conditions and creating a powerful result.

If we are using construction, crossed context means we build with your stories and you build with ours. I have seen this done, but only when the groups were not in obvious or strong conflict with each other, like between employees of merging companies or groups of professionals with different roles who regularly work together, like teachers and administrators, analysts and decision makers, historians and teachers, researchers and engineers, and so on. One use is to ask two groups of people to derive some kind of construction from their own stories and the stories of the other group in parallel. This can help groups come to new insights about better ways to work together toward mutually acceptable goals.

People are multidimensional beings, but our contextual labels sometimes make us appear unidimensional to each other. Any two people divided in one way can usually find at least one other thing that unites them, even if remotely. You can nurture such commonalities to help people work with cross-context stories. I remember doing a little research exercise once where I compared stories told by white supremacists and civil rights workers looking for some common thread. I found it. They all wanted a better world for their children. Yes, one group hoped to get it by helping everyone get along, and the other group hoped to get it by killing the other group. But they both wanted it. I've read that the reason Jimmy Carter is such a great negotiator is that he always finds one thing he can legitimately say he shares with those he meets. It might take him hours of listening to find it, but he always finds it. As I recall it he told the story of negotiating with Haitian warlords some years past, and said that he latched on to the fact that they said they loved their children very much. So did he, and they built on that. He strung that slender thread across the chasm. You can help people do that when you help them tell stories across the chasm. You can gear your questions so that they bring out commonalities you suspect people might have (or better, that you know they have based on prior separate story work).

Another mechanism that can help bridge cross-context stories is theatre and metaphorical shift. Taking raw stories and transforming them using timeless structures such as folk tales can help people build bridges through abstract forms. Here is an example and one of my favorite folk tales of all time. This is from the book Folktales from India (edited by A.K. Ramanuaan):

Once a lamb was drinking water in a mountain stream. A tiger came to drink the water a few yards above him, saw the lamb, and said, "Why are you muddying my stream?"  

The lamb said, "How can I muddy your water? I'm down here and you are up there."  

"But you did it yesterday," said the tiger.  

"I wasn't even here yesterday!"  

"Then it must have been your mother."  

"My mother has been dead for a while. They took her away."  

"Then it must have been your father." 

"My father? I don't even know who he is," said the desperate lamb, getting ready to run.  

"I don't care. It must be your grandfather or great-grandfather who has been muddying my stream. So I'm going to eat you," said the tiger. And he pounced on the lamb, tore him to pieces, and made a meal of him.

I love the layers of meaning in that story. I could imagine setting up a project where two conflicting groups of people are not asked to tell stories directly but to choose folk tales for people in another group to read. This would embed the mechanism of crossed context in a metaphorical shell of constructed protection by which groups can communicate across the chasm of difference. This is the basis of some forms of community theatre, which has cross contextual elements.

Vacuums and golf clubs galore

After all this exercise considering all the ways we can skillfully manipulate context to improve sensemaking, when I look back at the vacuum and golf guys I find them cavorting around both contexts, showing each other how to play golf with a vacuum and chase dust bunnies with a golf club. I see them striding together out of both pictures and into the city streets, onto the moon, deep under the sea, and high on a camel's back. They seem happier than they did before, neither trapped and both full of great ideas. That's where we should all be, isn't it?

A final note: I seem to have gravitated towards talking about groups of people as contexts, and about contexts in conflict. I suppose this is probably because understanding how people differ in their views depending on group membership tends to be a part of many narrative projects. And many narrative projects do involve some degree of conflict, even if it is mild, between viewpoints. If you want to build a shelf you use a t-square and a saw, and if you want to help people achieve goals with and in spite of diverse experience you use stories. But you can consider all of the twelve situations I've mentioned here (four configurations, three method sets) where the contextual differences are between stories told at different times, in different places, in response to different questions, about different topics, in different media, to different audiences, in different settings, in person and on paper, and on and on. Many skillful manipulations of context might suit your goals.