Podcast: Narrative Leadership

I recently had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Dr Sally Fox for her Story Pros series of Podcasts. In a wide ranging hour-long conversation we covered many topics including: Narrative Leadership; the importance of post-heroic stories; and the relationship between truth and stories.

I’m grateful to Sally for the quality of her probing questions and for the opportunity to think out loud about the state of storytelling in the world today and why it is so essential to speak up and to speak out in the face of ill-informed and divisive political and social narratives.

Click on the image above to find my podcast (and many others) on Sally’s excellent website. It can be played directly from the page or downloaded free from iTunes.

Gone in the Morning

I’m delighted to announce that my new book Gone in the Morning: A Writer’s Journey of Bereavement has just been published. We are often reluctant to talk about death and how it affects us, yet we all face loss and bereavement at some time in out lives. The book is a memoir about the death of my wife Chris Seeley and how writing has supported me as I’ve mourned her passing.

‘A heartbreakingly moving and yet wonderfully hopeful chronicle of a unique and mysterious journey – from the shattering illness and death of the author’s wife Chris to a beautiful reborn wholeness.’
– Judith Hemming, Psychotherapist

‘Told with the raw pain and profound honesty of one who has been through the whirlwind and stepped out the other side. This will be a precious gift for others searching for comfort and solace whilst experiencing the anguish of losing a loved one.
– Jaki Harris, Grief and Loss Specialist

‘A beautifully crafted tale of one man’s grief – and a testament to the healing power of art. Essential reading for those on the lonely road of bereavement.’
– William Ayot, author of Re-enchanting the Forest: Meaningful Ritual in a Secular Age

Click here to find it on Amazon or here to order direct from the Jessica Kingsley Publishing.

We’re having a launch at Hawkwood College, Stroud, 7.30-915pm, 12 October.

Do let me know if you ‘d like to come.

Signs of the Times

Recently, Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth to be International Word of the Year, 2016. The fact is (irony intended) our relationship with the truth has always been problematic. Even stories told with a good will as an honest attempt to relate an experience are partial and limited in their point of view.

The problem gets worse however when the art of storytelling is deliberately subverted by individuals and institutions to mislead the unwary. In the economic sphere, we call it fraud and when eventually the bubble bursts as it usually does, perpetrators like investment advisor Bernie Madoff and Jeff Skilling of Enron are called to account.

For most of my lifetime, for a politician in the western world to be caught in a deliberate lie would be grounds for resignation or dismissal. But as both the EU Referendum and the US Presidential election showed, this is no longer the case. I have my own view about the probity of individual politicians, but that is not my point here. I am far more concerned by the direction in which democratic politics as a whole is moving.

Demagoguery and populism (pandering to the lowest common denominator) have always been the shadow side of democracy and only a healthy respect for the truth can keep them at bay. Unfortunately, respect for the truth in some quarters is not just unhealthy but apparently at death’s door. Coincident with, and perhaps consequent upon the explosion of social media, the distinction between truth and lies, honest reporting and fake news, information and misinformation, is increasingly disregarded in favour of viral memes and fictions masquerading as truth – pretences that create their own reality.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) presciently explored this phenomenon in his classic work Simulation and Simulacrum. He suggests that we can look at the increasing distance between images (or stories) and underlying reality as a hierarchy from representation to simulacrum, thus:

• Representation: the reflection of a profound reality;
• Trace: masks and denatures a profound reality;
• Void: masks the absence of a profound reality;
• Simulacrum: has no relation to any reality whatsoever.

If representation is an attempt in good faith to signify or reflect an underlying reality, then a simulacrum might best be described as a fiction that believes itself to be real. In between these extremes, “trace” and “void” represent attempts to erase aspects of an underlying reality from a discourse either by using neologisms and abstract language to obscure a subject or by treating it as though it doesn’t exist.

This is not some obscure epistemological argument. In a world in which truth no longer matters, nothing matters because we can’t trust the meaning of anything. Or as Baudrillard put it:

It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival, determinist mode, the “active,” critical mode, the analytic mode – the distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the end and the means.

For a more detailed consideration of these issues, see Chapter 15 of my book Telling the Story: The Heart and Soul of Successful Leadership. I also recommend Christian Salmon’s excellent Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind.

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The picture at the top of this post shows Jean Baudrillard posed in the costume of Morpheus in The Matrix, a well-known sci-fi movie that challenges our perceptions of an apparent reality that is entirely fictional.

Of course, it’s a fake.

French Connection

Yesterday evening, courtesy of my friend and colleague Dominique Turcq of BoostZone, I had the pleasure of running a short session for rising leaders in France’s leading construction company, as part of their global leadership programme. A graphic recorder was on hand to capture some of the key elements of our discussion.

Together, we explored the power of stories and storytelling to change the way we see the world, which felt very timely given recent events in UK and US where the vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have both shown the dramatic ability of cogent stories to bring about seismic upheavals in the political landscape.

Storytelling is not necessarily benign, as Christian Salmon argues in his excellent book Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind. Stories can be used quite cynically and very effectively to raise fears and to manipulate our emotions. But stories are the water in which we humans swim: we cannot escape their influence nor avoid telling them.

The hard task for those seeking a more progressive and inclusive world is to tell stories that can inspire us to take this more demanding and ultimately more generative route. Barack Obama managed in 2008 and 2012. The UK Remain Campaign and Hilary Clinton both notably failed to do so in 2016.

It has become a commonplace of leadership literature to talk about the need to win both hearts and minds. But our lives are governed – for good or ill – by the limits and possibilities of our imaginations. We ignore that reality at our peril.

Against Leadership

Fashions in leadership theory come and go: trait theory (either you’ve got it or you haven’t got it), participative leadership, leader-member exchange theory (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours), situational leadership, contingency theory, path-goal theory, servant leadership, transformational leadership, authentic leadership, charismatic leadership, functional leadership, relational leadership, systemic leadership, even (and I hold my hands up to this one) narrative leadership.

Faced with such a welter of models we can be forgiven for feeling a bit confused about what we actually mean by the term leadership. Nevertheless, we can identify a dominant discourse – a set of underlying tacit assumptions – running through most of the extensive literature produced by the academic and professional “leadership industry” in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Professor Amanda Sinclair of Melbourne Business School brilliantly exposes these tacit assumptions in her iconoclastic book – Leadership for the Disillusioned. See if you find yourself nodding or shaking your head as you read this summary of her critique:

We have been so surrounded by this view of leadership that it has become difficult to think of leadership outside this framework of meanings. In this view, leadership is:

• a weighty responsibility that is usually borne by men in high places;
• an individual performance (despite claims that followers are part of leadership);
• an activity developed and played out in interlocking elites of the military, business and politics, centered around the interests of large-scale global capital;
• generally concerned with expanding an organization’s growth, “reach” or material success through normative influence, and without mention of power;
• of such importance as to generate a leadership development industry, involving many people in teaching and training others to be leaders;
• of such importance that it is among the most researched of all subjects, demanding large-scale surveys and a proliferation of instruments to measure leadership or its potential;
• a task requiring disembodied, cerebral command and tending to assume physical manifestations of leading and following to be irrelevant; and
• assumed to be of inherent moral value, neglecting frailties, vulnerabilities or the darker side of the leader psyche.

How we think and talk about leadership matters because the language we use to conceptualize something frames our understanding of it and influences how we behave. Of course, individuals can and do make a difference but I also want to open up the idea of leadership beyond the dominant heroic ideal of a handful of supremely able and charismatic (usually male) leaders.

The heroic discourse, which Amanda Sinclair so eloquently describes, is long past its sell-by date. As Einstein is credited with saying – “no problem can be solved from within the level of consciousness that created it” – and there is now so much evidence that our current leadership paradigm is failing to tackle (or even address) the most significant issues of our time that we might just be on the verge of a qualitative shift – a revolution – in our thinking. If you think more of the same is going to do the trick, put your hand up. No? I thought not.

However, I’m not overly optimistic that this revolution will succeed, because the heroic ideal, which is still widely promoted by the business education and leadership development industries, has become what Michel Foucault called a “regime of truth”: a way of thinking and talking about something that is unconsciously held in place because it serves to maintain existing power structures. It is, for example, used to justify stratospheric rates of remuneration for some UK private sector CEOs that are 150-200 times (in the US, 300-400 times) the size of regular employee salaries.

Challenging dominant discourses whether in business, government, academia, or society at large is not for the faint-hearted. Unsurprisingly, most of us are reluctant to change our minds when the privileges accruing from our way of life rather depend on us holding a certain point of view. Nevertheless, in the spirit of inquiry, let me offer an alternative point of view that opens up different ways of construing the leader’s role and offers new possibilities for action.

So let’s begin by putting the term “leadership” in its place. Why does this need doing? Because reifying the concept turns the active phenomenon of leading (verb) into the static entity of leadership (abstract noun). Instead of leadership being something that people do, it becomes something that people either have or don’t have: an attribute; a quality; a trait. Instead of recognizing that we can all participate in the process of leading, we assume that leadership is a zero-sum game and divide the world into leaders and followers, then wonder why those who are labeled followers are disengaged or disaffected.

If we focus our attention on leading as an active process then we must ask ourselves what we actually do when we lead. This is a much more useful and interesting question than, for example, whether leaders are born or made. Chuck Palus and Wilfred Drath of the Centre for Creative Leadership suggest that one crucial activity is helping to make sense of things (the process of arranging our understanding of experience so that we can know what has happened and what is happening, and so that we can predict what will happen) in a complex environment.

This may seem obvious but its consequences are far-reaching because it obliges us to think of leading, less in terms of taking charge and making things happen, and more in terms of participating in a social process of meaning-making. Although some people may have nominal positions of leadership (supervisor, manager, director, CEO, etc.) they exercise their responsibilities by engaging in an ongoing process of sense-making with other people who in turn, by virtue of their participation in the process, are also engaged in the process of leading.

This way of thinking also implies a more inclusive notion of leadership (it’s hard to get away from the word) and a more dynamic sense of how systems and organizations actually work: leaders emerge from or step into a set of relationships between people already engaged in multiple processes of sense-making from which shared (and contested) understandings materialize and from which shared (and contested) commitments to goals and actions flow. Thus, as Drath and Palus say:

The process of making meaning in certain kinds of social settings [actually] constitutes leadership. In other words, we can regard leadership as meaning-making in a community of practice.

Thinking of leadership as a process of sense-making that permeates a group, promotes a more fluid and realistic view of human relations and a less lofty and exclusive idea of what it means to be a leader. Leadership becomes the lifeblood of a living system and not just the perquisite of those in high places. This does not deny that some people have more power and influence than others in the process of sense-making because of formal hierarchy, acknowledged experience, intelligence, political alliances, personal charisma, etc. But it does offer the possibility of engaging a wider range of people in taking responsibility for their contribution to sense-making and it does suggest that an important shift in attitude is required from those in nominal leadership roles.

Leading as sense-making (or meaning-making) is a powerful meta-concept that sidesteps the definitional quagmire that has plagued the whole field of leadership studies since its inception. It invites people occupying nominal positions of authority to think differently about their role than simply “taking charge and making things happen” and it opens up the possibility of participating in acts of leadership to anyone – inside or outside of organizations – who initiates or contributes to the process of sense-making.

These are challenging times. Whatever our local context, we are all beginning to experience the realities of significant climate change, massive environmental degradation and a global economic crisis. Our ability to respond adequately will require new ways of thinking about and enacting leadership capable of engaging whole populations in collective action, preferably without resorting either to utopian fantasy or despotic tyranny. If there was ever a time to rethink what we mean by leadership this is it.

 

Copyright  Geoff Mead, 2016
Adapted from Telling the Story: The Heart and Soul of Successful Leadership, Jossey Bass, 2014

Emmanuel Faber

Here’s a wonderful example of Narrative Leadership in action. Emmanuel Faber, CEO of Danone Group speaking at a recent graduation ceremomy at French Business School HEC . He shows us how to be personal, vulnerable, and challenging at the same time. He asks us to consider the responsibilities that come with privilege.

Watch it and ask yourself what your life and work are in service of?

Feeding the Beast

Feeding cake to a hippopotamus.

It’s rare to find an image that so perfectly represents both the delights and the dangers of the consultant’s life, particularly for those of us offering our own artful practice to organisations hungry for new experiences.

It takes a while for organisations to realise that they need what you’ve got: improv, storytelling, visual arts, dance, clowning, poetry, music, ritual, drama, etc. But when it becomes faddish they all want a bit of it, at which point everyone else and their uncle jumps on the bandwagon and claims to be able to provide it.

Actually, what organisations need is not so much the particular artful practice on offer as the creativity and humanity they can bring. At best, they break down conventional barriers and open up communicative spaces where the purposive-rational logic of the system world can be challenged by the social-communitarian values of the life world.

If that happens, then relationships can deepen, profound insights arise, and behaviours change. In fact, I believe that we must engage artfully with the world if we are to extend the scope of our concerns beyond immediate self-interest toward what my friend Richard Olivier calls “planetary purpose.”

But artful practices can be consumed merely as amuse-bouches at the corporate dining table, entertaining flourishes to alleviate the ennui of weary managers. And at worst, they can be used cynically to further reprehensible or morally dubious ends, or to “make-happy” rather than address the dysfunctional organisational dynamics of late capitalism.

For good or ill (and perhaps for both) the arts have become the latest “must have” ingredients of executive leadership events and business school programmes. For example, the notion of Narrative Leadership that I first developed more than a decade ago now has widespread currency.

Instead of knocking on doors trying to persuade reluctant HR managers that they need our skills as storytellers, I and my colleagues find ourselves much in demand. We have a responsibility not to let this bonanza blind us to the ends to which our clients use our work, and to make our artful practice accessible without corrupting it.

As an artful practitioner, the tricky thing these days isn’t to get the hippo to eat the cake, it’s to make sure the hippo doesn’t eat you too.

Hello Birmingham

Who hasn’t played rock star in their minds at least once in their life?

One step up from air guitar, playing rock star involves stepping onto the imaginary stage of a huge auditorium with rows of excited faces as far as you can see, taking the microphone from the stand and giving it your all to the accompaniment of screaming, head banging, and general idolatry.

Last week, I ran storytelling sessions and told stories “in the round” to hundreds of bankers from the stage of a large hall in the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham. Granted, they managed to contain their excitement sufficiently to refrain from dancing in the aisles and throwing their underwear, but nevertheless they were an enthusiastic bunch and my rock star fantasy got a bit of a boost.

The real point of writing this however, apart from being reminded of how much fun it is to work with large groups, is to say that storytelling can thrive in the most unexpected places. Most of my work involves taking story into environments that are desperately in need of an injection of life-world energy: company board rooms, universities and business schools, government departments, NGOs and charities, to name but a few.

And in all those places, when you get behind the facade of organisational life, people are people and, by and large, they love the chance to learn more about storytelling and to share stories.

It’s all a long way from the joys of performing in the Storytelling Hut at the School of Storytelling a decade ago. I still love telling stories but I’ve also come to appreciate the joy people experience when they come to understand that their own stories – and the stories they tell ­– matter. I’ve discovered that opening the door for others to enter the world of story gives me every bit as much satisfaction as the applause that follows a well-told tale.

Satisfaction. That gives me an idea.

“Hello Birmingham.”

Storytelling: The Art of Imagination

Storytelling is a universal human phenomenon because stories are how we give meaning and significance to experience. It is through stories that we create (and re-create) our sense of self; bring together (and divide) groups, communities and organizations; expand (and limit) our view of the world.

Leader as Storyteller
Telling a convincing story that acknowledges where an organization (a group of people, an idea, or movement) has come from, recognizes the realities of the present situation, and offers a worthwhile future is a fundamental and defining task of leadership. The long-term success of any leader depends on the stories they tell, the stories they live and how well those stories speak to the needs of their time.

What is a story?
The essence of storytelling is its tangibility: the storyteller seeks to convey an experience (something that actually happened or might have happened or might yet happen) in such a way that it seems real. Stories are dynamic, they necessarily involve particular characters doing something specific at a certain time and place. If nothing happens, the dynamism is lost – it’s just a description.

How do stories work?
A story told with enough detail and feeling for it to seem real provides an imagined experience which can stir the emotions and hopes of an audience. The story can be told in many ways: in writing, on video, by images. But the most powerful effect comes from telling it in person. This is why TED talks are always filmed in front of a live audience and never delivered direct to camera.

Information, argument, and story
Not all communication is telling a story; we analyze data, exchange information, proffer opinions, make arguments and plead our case, as well. Be selective, use stories when you want to activate the listener’s imagination and emotions by conveying a real or imagined human experience. Do not overload them with data, analysis, opinions, argument etc. or they will not work.

What makes a good story?
Engaging stories tell us how characters meet and overcome (or fail to overcome) the obstacles that thwart their desires. Straightforward victory narratives are dull and unconvincing; there is no light without shadow; we want to know about the struggle. Stories come alive with concrete descriptions, three-dimensional characters, dramatic moments, humour and passion.

Quality not quantity
Sincerity and passion matter most when telling a story but it is worth spending time and effort to develop your storytelling skills. The books and resources listed below offer a range of helpful tips and techniques. You don’t have to be a “natural” and nor do you need a huge repertoire. A few well-chosen stories, honed through practice and feedback are enough make a real difference to the impact of any leader.

Storytelling and change
The stories we tell are fateful: our ability to change ourselves, our organizations, and our world depends upon our capacity to re-imagine them. We need the lift of new stories to get change off the ground; nothing changes unless the stories change. A story of new beginnings can be a springboard for major change. Stories of change happening elsewhere can help people grasp what once seemed impossible. Stories of how things could be can bring future possibilities alive.

Public leadership
For those in public leadership roles, the most powerful leadership stories link three elements: the personal story (who I am and why I am called to lead); the group story (who we are and what is our ‘destiny’); the story of the particular challenge we face (what we need to do now). Identity, belonging, and purpose combine uniquely to claim the moral authority to lead.

Rethinking leadership
When we think of leading as an ongoing process of making-meaning with others (through stories and other means) it allows us to extend the concept of leadership beyond conventional ideas of power, position, authority, and role. Instead of leadership being the exclusive preserve of the few, it takes on a much more inclusive quality. In this view, leadership is exercised by everyone who contributes to making meaning in a community of practice.

Ethical considerations
Demanding allegiance to a single story is a common form of organizational (as well as religious and political) fundamentalism; stories told to conceal the truth about a product are legion; stories that minimize or ignore the consequences of actions provide alibis for damaging behaviour. Ethical storytelling need not be literally true (every story about the future is a fiction) but it must not be designed to oppress or mislead.

Storytelling specialists
Consultants offer support in many areas of organizational storytelling including: strategic storytelling; brand content; learning histories; collaborative storytelling; narrative coaching; employee and stakeholder engagement; story gathering; future stories, etc. Seek out those with expertise in organizational issues as well as a thorough grounding in story and storytelling.

© Narrative Leadership Associates

Adapted by Dr Geoff Mead from his recent book Telling the Story: The Heart and Soul of Successful Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2014)

Wild Margins

Chris Seeley

21 August 1966 – 3 December 2014

Our beloved partner, friend and colleague Chris died at 6.47pm Wednesday 3 December from the effects of a brain tumour. She was at home in Folly Cottage surrounded by her family, a few of her many friends, and with me by her side. She had been unconscious since Tuesday lunchtime and slipped away without distress or pain as if carried on a sea of love. Afterwards, we sat with her until dawn to accompany her passing. Next morning we found these words in her journal, written about 10 days before.

machete
hacking at
the
mooring
lines
tying me
to my
life, the
shore,
the jetty of
my life
as the
tide comes
in and
oh so
gradually
bits disappear
under the
starlight
and others
float off
to sea. Gone in
the morning.

 Light, love and blessings dearest Chris – to you and to us all.