GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore
As human beings we cling to two misconceptions of life. The first is that life is fragile. That is not quite right. Living things are certainly fragile — we are all subject to injury and will eventually die. Even whole species can go extinct. But life itself is anything but fragile. It originated some 3.5 billion years ago and has subsequently taken over the entire planet — land, water, sky, even deep within the earth — and shows no signs of loosening its grip. Life per se, in other words, may be the most powerful force we can experience.
Our second misconception is that, when it comes to our own lives, we are the ones in charge. There is some truth in this, but there is also truth in the notion that life is in charge of us. That is, life per se has an agenda that is independent of us, an agenda in which we are inexorably embedded, one that is grounded in the two universal functions that have enabled it to withstand the test of time — metabolism and reproduction.
We know a lot about these two functions from our study of the microbiology of the cell. Both entail a mindboggling number of chemical reactions chained together by a myriad of cascading pathways that are in turn governed by a byzantine array of positive and negative feedback loops. What is truly astounding is that, working in tandem, they have, from their very inception, been both dynamic — ever-changing—and persistent — continuity-maintaining. Life per se, in other words, is characterized by sustained dynamic equilibrium.
To be sure, life has evolved enormously since its cellular inception. After about 2 billion years of single-celled organisms only, cells began to collaborate with one another, leading to the emergence of additional layers of complexity. Over the 1.5 billion years since, they have generated all the variety of living things we see today, as well as a huge variety of species that have passed out of existence. But amidst all that change, over that entire immensity of time, at the level of the cell itself, this absurdly complex concatenation of cascading processes has never ever stopped. Based on this history, I think we must conclude that living things are compelled to live, and that includes us.
Yes, we can end our lives through suicidal interventions, but we cannot will our hearts to stop beating or our lungs to stop breathing. We can’t stop sleeping, and we can’t stop waking up. In short, we are embedded in something that is much larger and more powerful than our conscious selves, and we need to appreciate how this shapes our lived experience.
It turns out there is a whole tradition in philosophy called phenomenology that takes this premise as its starting point. It is organized around the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but not in a way I am happy with. Like most philosophers, Husserl and Heidegger anchor their work in analytics and then search for narratives to illustrate their concepts. This runs counter to the fundamental premise of The Infinite Staircase, namely that the stairstep of Narrative precedes the stairstep of Analytics, both in evolutionary time and in order of priority when establishing meaning. That is, you need to get your narratives in focus first and then apply analytics to them, not the other way around.
The reason this is so important is that lived experience expresses itself in narratives, not analytics. Analytics abstract from narratives underlying principles which can be used to refine our strategy for living. This is an incredibly important function, one that underlies virtually all the amelioration of the human condition that we have accomplished over the past several centuries. But analytics cannot substitute for narratives. They cannot capture the immediacy of experience nor engage our sensibility with anything like the power of narratives. We are story-telling creatures, first and foremost. That’s how and where we develop our understanding of cause and effect.
Now, if we take the notion that we are compelled to live and we add it to the notion that narrative is our primary mode for processing lived experience, we can reasonably surmise that we are compelled to tell stories. What might that mean?
Well, for those of us in business, this is not a big surprise. We spend the bulk of our time engaged in storytelling and listening. What are you working on? How is it going? What’s the plan? How did the call go? Did you find that bug? What did Harry want? You get the idea. Stories are our lived experience, even more so if we are working remotely.
More formal occasions call for more formal storytelling, be that a proposal, a report, an analysis, an earnings call, or an annual plan. The point is, in all those situations, we are compelled to tell a story. Now, to be sure, our story may well be challenged–that is the function of analytics—but it is not OK not to tell one. The reason is that all our future actions will ultimately be grounded in a story that we agree to accept. Even the most routine bureaucratic approval cycles involve storytelling at some point in the process. We cannot act without a storyline to guide us. Thus, we are compelled to tell stories.
This is even more the case in the realm of politics. Today we are awash in political storytelling, much of which is being labeled misinformation. But the term is misleading. It implies that the teller has got their facts wrong. But that is not what is happening. Instead, they are telling a story that they believe will generate the political response they are seeking, be that to get themselves elected, or to prevent someone else from being elected, or to get legislation passed, or to block legislation from being passed. Our job as responsible citizens is to apply our analytics to their narratives to detect the ones we endorse and those we repudiate.
In both business and politics, pressure-testing the narratives we are presented with requires both judgment and experience. We normally do not have access to an irrefutable body of facts. Instead, we have to assess the character of the storyteller based on how they come across to us, how self-serving their story might be, how plausible it is, and the like, and we often draw on the opinions of professional commentators whom we have found to be trustworthy. There is no guarantee we are going to get things right, but the more due diligence we do, the more likely we will get close.
But what about all the lies? What about all the blatant liars that are just getting away with it? Why aren’t they being held to account? Why do their supporters believe them? The answer, in my view, is because they want to. People are not stupid. They know when other people are lying. The reason they accede to such lies and bully each other into accepting them is because the story being told validates their lived experience. You or I might repudiate the narrative, but we cannot repudiate their lived experience. That is theirs, not ours.
What we can do is share lived experiences with each other with the goal of finding common values. This requires a level of civility that we see openly mocked and that mockery is perhaps the most dangerous current in our present circumstances. It is not the narratives that are the problem. It is the sneering. We can work our way out of the toughest situations if we respect each other’s perspectives. We cannot do so when we demean or demonize our opponents. Stories and storytelling are the currency of our being. We cannot let it be debased.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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