Narrative
Narrative is very respectful of the importance of cues. It understands that the meaning of a narrative is triggered in the mind of the receiver and that there’s a dialogue between the story that’s being told and how it’s being received, and that this dialogue is critically important. Stories as opposed to narrative tend to leave out their audience. They make use of code. The storyteller presumes that the meaning is obvious from the story that’s being told. Managers have recently spent a lot of time, especially in the U.S. and Europe and Australia, learning about storytelling. It’s the wrong thing. They should not be telling stories. They should be trying to find meaningful narratives for the people that they’re trying to interact with. That task places far more emphasis on looking at what meaning is being triggered in their audience’s heads, rather than looking for a great story to tell. In the political world, stories are spin. They’re the stuff that politicians come up with to cover things up. The difference is the politicians recognize that we all believe these to be stories and don’t pay a whole lot of attention to them. Managers haven’t learned that mistake. We will close this web introduction with a final lesson: Predefined ascribed labels are NOT the only means of finding coherence.
