I was struck by a recent radio interview with Brian Greene. He’s a physicist who writes childrens’ books and his book Icarus on the Edge of Time was recently made into an opera. In the interview he said that he didn’t think any more that there was such a thing as science fiction, but that putting science into fiction was on the only way to make the facts accessible to non-scientists.
Following my last blog, I’d been thinking about writing something about the role of fiction in unearthing the facts, and this seems to me a telling point in that direction. It had me looking through the archives for some work we did with a large government department years back around a merger, and I found an old A3 sheet I developed as an experiment in telling the story of part of the work. We were doing what was called a ‘Deep Dive’ to find out what the blockers to merger were at the front line of the organization and ran a series of workshops which (from memory) ran:
* jumpstart story, personal story about a time when you were proud…
* half story about a challenge you face today
* swap the half stories and make happy endings
* gathering in the insights, what obstacles does the organization face today
* make a story, of any kind you like, using all the materials we made today
And boy, did they make stories. We had dwarves, and sabres, and knights in shining armour, Christmas was cancelled, three little pigs couldn’t live in the same house because premises stopped them, two spaceships were having trouble docking because their manuals were written in different languages, an old peoples’ home was being merged with a scrapyard and went bust because the confused old people wandered into the machinery, got crushed and the cost of funerals soared.
Now you see how I can remember all of that without referring to anything, about a piece of work that was in 2005.
It caused us a terrific problem, which I’ve written about in another paper Listen or thy tongue will make thee deaf. Actually, it’s not a great paper, and I’ve always meant to rewrite it, because the subject of it (where does the truth lie) is a very interesting one. But the point I wanted to make here was about the solution to the problem and how fiction helped with that.
Our challenge was to take these wicked, pithy and often hilarious insights into the merger and get the Board to listen in a 20 minute slot at the end of a four hour board meeting. How on earth could we get their listening? And it was a Herman Hesse fairytale I was reading at the time that gave us the clue. It’s called ‘The Dwarf’ and it’s a story of a beautiful lady, a potion, infidelity ‘all that is at the heart of every adventure and tale, old and new’ says the dwarf. He’s a master storyteller whose job is to entertain his mistress:
He had learned the art of storytelling in the Orient, where storytellers are highly regarded. Indeed, they are magicians and play with the souls of their listeners as a child plays with a ball.
His stories rarely began in foreign countries, for the minds of listeners cannot easily fly their on their own powers. Rather he always began with things people can see with their own eyes, whether it be a gold clasp or a silk garment. Then he led the imagination of his mistress imperceptibly wherever he wanted, talking first about the people who had previously owned the jewels or about the makers and sellers of the jewels. The story drifted naturally and slowly from the balcony of the palace and into the boat of the trader and drifted from the boat into the harbour and onto the ship and to the furthest spot of the world. It did not matter who his listeners were. they would all actually imagine themselves on this voyage, and while they sat quietly in Venice, their minds would wander about serenely or anxiously on distant seas and in fabulous regions. Such was the way Filippo told his stories.
And that’s what we did. We chose three stories (all recorded) that started with one of the jumpstarts, then one of the half-stories that felt a bit more like a Kafka-esque day in the organization, and finally a wildly naughty story that was quite spiteful about the head of the organization. We belt and braced it about having another person do a bit of a warm up about listening too, to make some room in their ears.
You’ll see from the A3 sheet some of the longer term impact of this and from the Listen article what some of the other issues round it were.
There’s much more I’d planned to say but this is more than long enough already, except to say that there was an interesting side story we discovered about positioning our role as facilitators of the sessions. We found that they arrived, a bit suspicious, expecting us to do things to them, in the normal way of training. We found we had to make it quite clear that we had no intention of doing anything to them. They could be as miserable as they liked, as critical as they liked, join in as much or as little as they liked. We didn’t expect them to leave the room transformed. We wouldn’t manage their mood. Our job, we said, was as custodians of their voices. Whatever they shared, or made, our job was to make sure that this was conveyed, the full essence of it, no dilution, back to the Board and the directors. The rest was up to them.
I think they were quite surprised.
There’s more to be said about safety next time perhaps.
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