Changing the story
In this episode, we explore how, to anchor the process of reinventing ourselves, we need to change our own deep-story
In the previous parts of this brief series - Reinventing ourselves and More on reinventing - we looked at the challenges of reinventing the way we relate with the world, and some first practical steps for doing so. For this episode, I’ll show a more step-by-step approach that I’ve often used with organisations that need to do the same kind of reinvention. This centres around the core theme of changing the story.
In essence it’s kind of turning the old ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ thing on its head: we start at the level of the forest, and then work our way back towards the detail-level of the individual trees and shrubs.
In this case, the metaphoric ‘forest’ is a storyworld, within which our own story will take place; and the equivalents of the forest’s trees and shrubs represent the elements of stories within that storyworld.
More on that storyworld-stuff in a moment. First, though, we need to take a look at our existing story - or rather, at what’s happened in the past that has made that life of ours into a story. My colleague Bard Papegaaij uses the metaphor of life as ‘a string of pearls’ - distinct beads of time where we do much the same thing for a while, then a brief gap where something changes, and we then move onto the next new phase of life, with all of these beads linked together on the same single thread that we would describe as ‘my life’. What’s interesting here is to look at what happens in those brief moments of change…
Usually, that gap would actually have been a moment of choice. Most often, perhaps, the choice we took at some point would have been to stay on the same path - in which case, the same bead continues on, and even the memory of that moment of choice may have been lost. Yet at other times, particularly those that we might recognise later as key moments in our life, we instead took the other choice, the other path. Or perhaps the change was not a choice as such, but forced upon us by some life-event. Either way, those points provide the gaps between the beads, the points of flexion in that ‘string of pearls’ that is our life.
In a very real sense, there’s a story there, each bead or pearl representing a set of linked scenes or story-arc. Yet looking back along that story, we’ll often note a common theme or storyline that still threads everything together across all of those changes.
In my own case, for example, probably the common theme, as far back as I can remember, has been an emphasis on how we learn skills. That theme has taken on many different forms, in many different places: sometimes it’s been about new skills that I need to learn, or showing others how to learn them; sometimes it’s been more about researching the mechanisms and methods that drive skills-learning and make it all happen.
And whilst it’s sort-of been a single thread throughout (because it’s always been me, my own ‘life-story’), that thread has itself been made up of multiple strands that interweave and cross each other. Different tasks, different disciplines, different people, different places; to some extent different values, perhaps, though most of those have always remained much the same. Although some of those strands may change along the way - breaking off or coming to an end at some change-point, perhaps, or replaced by another strand somewhere beneath one of those beads - it is still that one overall theme.
That’s my thread: what’s yours? What common theme or themes can you see in your own life?
If we can see that thread, it can be a useful guide when in the midst of reinventing ourselves.
So let’s come back to that notion of a storyworld - a place where stories happen. This is actually part of work that I do with organisations who want to rethink their strategy, but it applies just as much to individual people like us when we’re reframing the way we live and work.
What we’re after here is a vision, in the sense that the term is used in quality-systems: a brief summary of a stable anchor or reference-point for everything that happens within the storyworld - or the shared-enterprise, to use the more common business-term. We build this vision from just three questions:
what is the focus or concern for everyone in the storyworld?
what is everyone doing about that focus or concern?
why is this important for everyone in the storyworld?
To give a real example, consider the tagline for the well-known TED conferences: “ideas worth spreading”. (Note that it’s now much more just one conference run by one organisation: it’s a whole storyworld, a shared-enterprise, with many others doing their own TED talks, books, videos and more.) What is everyone concerned about in that storyworld? - ideas. What is everyone doing about this concern? - they’re spreading ideas. Why is this important to everyone? - because these are ideas that are worth spreading. In that sense, we can summarise an entire storyworld with just three questions, and sometimes in as little as just three words - as in this example, with ideas worth spreading.
From this, we can then derive values to guide decisions and actions everywhere in that storyworld. To use that TED example, it’s easy to see that if we want ideas that are worth spreading, then those ideas will probably need to be novel, original, useful, and easy to understand: each of those are values for that context. We can also use these values as effectiveness-criteria, because in effect they literally define what ‘effectiveness’ is within that storyworld.
From those values, we can then derive success-criteria, to test whether or not we’ve succeeded in terms of that overall vision for the storyworld. To again use that TED example, if we’ve been spreading ideas that are novel, original, useful and easy-to-understand, then we’ll have succeeded, in terms of the storyworld’s vision; but we probably won’t have succeeded if we’ve been spreading ideas where any or all of those attributes are missing, or if we haven’t spread any ideas at all.
Given all of that, it should be quite easy to decide whether a storyworld with this vision is one want to be involved in. If not, it’s easy enough to tweak those parameters of the vision - the focus or concern, what everyone would doing about it, and why it’s considered important - and try again, until we find a description for a storyworld that does make sense to us, that does match up with what we want and need.
(If you want more detail on all of this, there’s a video about it up on my YouTube channel: see Introduction to visioning.)
Once we’ve identified a storyworld that we would want to belong to, the next step would be to work out where we would want to position ourselves within that story. In other words, what kind of role we would want to play there; and also our value-proposition - literally, how we would propose to provide value to other players in that shared-enterprise, and to the storyworld as a whole.
One way to make a start on this, which I’ve mentioned in one of the previous episodes in this series, is to use a simple tool of mine called SCORE - Strengths, Challenges, Options, Responses, Effectiveness. It’s just a simple frame with four boxes, one in each corner, and also one more box in the middle. On the left-hand side are things that are in our choice: Strengths, or capabilities that we already have available to us, on the upper left; and Challenges, things that we don’t yet know how deal with, on the lower-left. On the right-hand side are the things that are more in the outside-world’s choice: Options, opportunities and so on, over on the upper-right; and Responses, rewards, returns and so on that we either have or are looking for from the real-world, down on the lower-right. In the middle there’s a box where we put our Effectiveness-criteria and success-criteria, that we gathered during the previous step about visioning. (The slightly fancier version of the SCORE frame shown below has an extra box inside that middle box, to hold the question that we want to focus on through the SCORE exercise.)
To use this, we’d first place into the Effectiveness box all of the effectiveness-criteria and success-criteria that we gathered in the previous visioning step. Then write a few starter elements in the other boxes: some capabilities that we already have, our Strengths; some issues we need to resolve, our Challenges; some opportunities or risks that we’ve seen, our Options for action; some Responses from the real-world that we’ve had, or that we need. It can actually be just a single item, in just one one of the boxes: all we need is something with which to start the ball rolling.
The key point here is that it’s not about making lists, in classic SWOT style: instead, it’s about how things connect, how one point leads to another, and another, and then another. We test each new point, in any of the boxes, against all of the other boxes - and then see what ideas, insights and information arise as we do so.
To use the TED example again, we have a value - an effectiveness-criterion - that says that the ideas that we’ll work with will need to be novel. How will we test that? So we’d link from that point in the Effectiveness box to, say, the Options box: how do other people test this? That suggests we need an answer to that question: we’d link from there to the Responses, and look for an answer. One answer we might get there would be that we could do a patent-search. But do we currently have a capability - a Strength - to do a patent-search? No, we don’t: so that’s a Challenge we’ll need to resolve. Yet once we do resolve that Challenge, that new capability will now be a Strength that we didn’t have before: so what new Options might that added Strength now open up? What Responses would we need, to test each new Option?
And so on, and so on: each new link creates new questions, which triggers new ideas, insights, information, weaving a new story as it goes along.
That’s how to use SCORE to help in changing the story.
(If you want more detail, there’s a full set of videos about this up on my YouTube channel: see Introduction to SCORE change-map, Using SCORE: Where to start?, Using SCORE: Start from Strengths, Using SCORE: Start from Challenges, Using SCORE: Start from Options, Using SCORE: Start from Responses and Using SCORE: Start from Effectiveness.)
All of the above should, I hope, sound simple and straightforward. And it actually is: whenever I’ve used it, with organisations and with individual people, it’s always worked well.
The catch, of course, is that simple ain’t the same as easy…
This process of reinventing ourselves, of changing the story, it’s often downright hard. Don’t be surprised about that: almost by definition, it’ll often challenge us to the very core. It’s hard to keep focus, hard to keep the discipline; always much easier to hide in procrastination, in other distractions, in fallbacks to old habits, old patterns. Tools like those above won’t do the work for us: it’s always up to us to make it all happen. Yet what the tools can do is help keep us on-track, to keep the focus, to remind us of what we’re aiming for at each stage of the change.
And change we must: there’s no doubt about that now, for all of us. Finding our place within a new story, that’s now changing faster and faster with every passing day.
(Many thanks to Bard Papegaaij, Helena Read and Duncan Hart for conversations shared with each of them while developing this episode.)
Great follow up article Tom, I have never used score, but it looks that it could pay dividends.