The purpose of narrative is to provide the illusion of overcoming uncertainty.

Managers have to be willing to revise narratives as necessary, as emergence occurs, as context changes, as situations change.  And note, narrative is not merely telling stories.  Narrative is providing enough ascribed coherence so that the people hearing the story, the rest of the audience that’s part of the group with you, has got some kind of a potential willingness to act.   The purpose of narrative is to provide the illusion of overcoming uncertainty. Uncertainty is a lack of potential willingness to act.  If one is willing to act, one is acting as if one is certain. Ambiguity is something else. You can have a willingness to act in an ambiguous situation.  You are not acting as if there was uncertainty because you were willing to act.  By definition, one is taking an action that’s as if one were certain. 

Narrative is about trying to situate the possibility space for the audience so that they can see what are referred to as affordances, the opportunities that are present in the adjacent possibles.   The only things that matter for the next action are the adjacent possibles.  To set up a vision, a mission, something that is out there to be aimed at and not have a way of relating that vision to what the next steps are, to what the adjacent possibles are, is a nice story, but it gives no guidance about what to do next.  The next steps are adjacent possibles, and they have to be situated in the possibility space. 

 

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.