The Challenges of Storytelling
It's July 27 and I'm thinking about the fact that it was three years ago today that TWI's founder Fred Whitman died. A lot has happened since then. We've gone from a small operating foundation that flew under the radar for many years to a grantmaking foundation that is funding important work, building strong relationships, and achieving higher visibility for our mission.
In terms of our mission, I am convinced more than ever of the value of our explicit focus on the processes of thinking, communication, and decision-making. And I'm also aware of the continuing challenge of articulating this work in ways that are concrete and compelling. The gap between reading or hearing about things such as dialogue or group reflection and participating in them is wide indeed. And this challenge especially hits home for process proponents trying to capture the attention of prospective funders. Process-oriented work can come off sounding too touchy-feely, too abstract, too general, too something - not to mention the problem of measuring "impact."
Anyway, I've been thinking about the challenge of communication not only because Fred's been on my mind (he was never satisfied with how the Institute was described) but because I've been reading Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The title says it all in terms of what they explore in the book and I'm finding much of it useful and thought-provoking. It's not all new of course, but they do present their material in a sticky fashion!
One point that strikes home is what they refer to "The Curse of Knowledge" and our tendency to "forget what it's like not to know what we know" in terms of our communications with others. I think I fall under this spell more often than I'd like to think when talking to new people about the Institute and some of the things we're involved in.
They also talk about the importance of stories, and that too has overlapped with my reflections about Fred. I find when I talk with people about the Institute, they "get it" in a much more real way when I relate the Institute's mission and interests to Fred life's story and struggles. Of course, the importance of using stories to convey ideas is not new, but the challenge of finding the right stories and telling them in a compelling way remains ever present. Successfully meeting that challenge is especially key for emergent fields like dialogue and deliberation or deliberative democracy.
So, on the anniversary of Fred's death, looking at where we've come the last three years and where we're going, I find myself thinking a lot not only about his story and my part in it, but also about the importance of story telling to our mission, and to the more prominent role media might play in terms of our goal of raising the public conversation about the importance of critical and collaborative thinking.