Lessons - Narratives Are Not Stories | John Hagel - Founder of Center For The Edge

First one, narratives are not stories. What does that mean? So just conscious, somebody hearing that, they're not going to say, what do you mean narratives are not stories? How does it have any impact on whether I'm going to lose my job? Well, most people, again, be narratives and stories to be the same thing. They're synonymous. You know, you can use either word. I make a big distinction between women. For me, a story is self-contained. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end to it, the end, the story's over. And the story is about me, the storyteller, or it's about some other people, real or imagined, but it's not about you. You can use your imagination, figure out what you would have done in that story, but it's not about you. So that's a story, at least the way I talk about it. For me, a narrative is very different. First of all, it's open-ended. There is no resolution yet. There's some kind of big threat or opportunity out in the future. Not clear whether it's going to be achieved or not. And the resolution of the narrative hinges on you. It's a call to action to say your choices, your actions are going to help determine how this narrative resolves. So it's a call to action, and I think trying it back to fear, and I talk about narratives at many levels. So I think there's personal narratives. I think there are corporate narratives, geographic narratives, movement narratives, that starting with the individual, I believe most of us, first of all, we've never really stepped back to articulate what's the narrative that's driving our life. What's our view of the future is a primarily driven by threat, a primarily driven by opportunity. And if so, what threat or what opportunity? And then what's our call to action to others? Do we have a call to action to others? Because in my experience, many of us who are increasingly consumed by fear because we're focusing on threat in the future, we lose trust in other people. We can't afford to rely on other people. We have to do it all ourselves. So there is no call to action to others. We become increasingly isolated versus no, where I want people to come together and help me to address this really big, exciting opportunity that's out in the future. And so I think the process of just stepping back and articulating that narrative that we have today, what is it that's driving our actions and choices today, but then reflecting on it to say, is this really the narrative that's going to help me to get the most impact that's meaningful to me? It can be very powerful. I view it as a catalyst in the journey beyond fear because in my experience, people who go through this exercise, they come up with this aha moment that they actually are focusing on fear and threat in the future. And that's what's driving their fear. And they're end to it's driving their current day actions, right, because they've got the movie. Yeah, very interesting. So this is almost taking like, you know, it's always best practice to even have a personal one, three, five year plan, but many people don't even have that. This is taking it to another degree is to have your own personal narrative for your life. Yeah. Right. What's the big long-term threat or opportunity, and not just like six months or even a year, decades ahead, what's the big red or opportunity that's motivating you today? That's motivating your actions today. And so that's, yeah, amazing. That's very powerful. That's very, it's a very, very good, incredible idea for people to take on. Okay. The second piece. Well, actually, can I just mention a corporate narrative because I think again, I talked about personal narratives, but corporate narratives, increasingly, I think, are important. And here, the challenge I find is when I talk to executives about corporate narratives, they say, oh, we have a narrative, we began in a garage, we faced incredible obstacles, we overcame them and accomplished amazing things. That's our narrative. And my point is, no, that's about you. What's your call to action to your customers, to the prospects out there? That's the big, exciting opportunity for them, and what action do they need to take? And it's not by your product, it's some action that is meaningful to them that will help them get that opportunity. And just a quick example on that, because I think they're very few corporate narratives, but hugely powerful in the world, increasingly driven by fear, is what Apple computer did in back in the 90s. They had this narrative that was framed around as slogan of think different. But if you unpack the slogan that was, you know, for decades, we had digital technology at tip-aware names, gave us numbers, put us in cubicles, narrow for the first time there's a generation of technology where we can express our unique potential and individuality. But it's not going to happen automatically. You need to think different. Will you think different? It's the reason why for many people, I think Apple became the equivalent of a religion. They were talking about such a deep aspiration that customers had, and they weren't talking about Apple. They were talking about the customer and the opportunity for the customer and the actions they needed to take. So anyway, I'll just offer that as I think an additional opportunity here that is missed by most companies. What does passion mean in the context of fear and overcoming fear? Yeah, so first of all, again, I get everybody in my experience has a different definition of passion. Based on my research, I've ended up focusing on a very specific form of passion. I call it the passion of the explorer, and it has three components to it. One is people have this passion have a long-term commitment to having an increasing impact in a domain that excites them. So they're there for the future and having more and more impact there. Second item is when confronted with unexpected challenges, they get excited. This is an opportunity for them to learn how to have even more impact. So they're excited by it. And then the third element is when they're confronted with these unexpected challenges. Our first reaction is, who else can I connect with? Who can help me get to a better answer faster? So they're extremely well connected. And I think that that's the combination of those three elements. Now you turn mounting performance pressure into excitement. This is an opportunity to have more and more impact in the area that really excites me. So I think that I would say one of the challenges we face is that I'm going to generalize, but I think particularly in large organizations around the world, passion is deeply suspect. You don't want passionate people. This kind of passion, when I talk to executives about passion, oh yeah, we want to passionate workers who will work nights and weekends for one of the signed tasks. No, the passion that I'm talking about, those people ask a lot of questions. That's distracting. Why do we ask so many questions? They take too much risk. They deviate from the script that they've been assigned. No, we don't want passionate workers. We want workers who will do their assigned tasks reliably and efficiently. The reason why, again, I did a survey in the US workforce at most 14% of US workers have this kind of passion of the explorer about their work, 86% do not. So I think it's a huge opportunity and need for all of us to really find the passion that excites us and find a way to really focus on it and that in an environment and culture where we're discouraged from it. I mean, again, even in school, we were taught, you know, listen to the teacher, memorize what the teacher has to say. If you've got a passion, do it out on the playground or maybe at home after school, but when you're in school, just listen and do the assigned tasks. And that was to prepare us for the work environment that we were going into. So now.