Narrative Strategy: A Systems Approach to Storytelling
A slightly esoteric rant on moving beyond stories as products
I’m not the first person to recognize that storytelling is imperative to systems change. But I will say, from all the discourse around using storytelling for change and realizing the outcomes we want, we sure as hell keep ignoring that stories don’t exist in a vacuum. We treat stories as individual products, storytelling as individual processes, failing to recognize that if we want things to change, we need to reorient around the ecosystems and relationships that make stories real.
Full disclosure, I’m knee deep on a food systems research project and it’s making me eager to move beyond the input-process-output approach to storytelling we’ve come to rely upon. Of course the way we tell stories is going to be reflective of our industrial culture! How else can we make sense of anything if we don’t easily categorize everything into beginnings, middles and ends? Or heroes and villains? Or any other linear cause and effect that helps us make sense of the world?
I think anyone working in narrative and storytelling needs a good reckoning with how we think of stories and systems. I believe that narrative is a system of stories. But we seem to ignore that changing one story in a system requires an understanding of the interconnection and relationships of that system. So if we want to change a system, we need to do more than tell a singular compelling story And we can’t just shout it at people and hope that it works. We need to engage in storytelling as a systems practice. That’s what I’ve been discovering with narrative strategy.
With my narrative strategy practice, I map current stories being told as a system. Most of my clients work in complex systems (such as healthcare, finance etc), with multiple stakeholders and demands, which requires a larger commitment to story-listening than simply storytelling. If I want to know how the system works, I’m going to listen to the stories being told by the stakeholders, rather than attempt to simplify their experience into a catchy slogan. And I need to be able to make space for all the multiplicities, perspectives, contexts, situations and every changing truths that make up our reality. It requires effort and awe. Something that we tend to avoid in today’s convenience-over-everything world.
We have to make space. And hold it. And understand that the stories of our communities, cultures, collectives are just as dynamic and living as the systems we live in. When I practice narrative strategy, I think of the narrative as a living organism. Inside that organism is the organelles—the stories—that make that narrative function. Each is unique, each playing a role that I probably can’t simplify into a single sentence. But I understand that I can’t predict and control all the possibilities of the stories being told, the stories being received, the stories being experienced. All I can do is hold the contradictions, desires, and obstacles tenderly, trying to expand beyond my conditioning that centers just one story.
If we want to use stories and narrative to change the way we do things, we need to stop seeing them as products. We need to see them as the ever-evolving relationships, the connective tissue of ecosystems and consciousness. The sinewy symbolism that impacts us in ways we can’t describe but are nevertheless true.
So what’s the take away from this post?
Try seeing what happens when you see stories and narratives as part of a larger system. A living system, like any other ecosystem. See if you can observe the relationships between stories, storytellers and story-listeners. What will we find when we stop treating story as a commodity, and embrace it as a life force?