Working with stories part 1

How I use stories

As a facilitator, I work a lot with stories. Both in organizational and community settings, stories and storytelling are important to my practice.

We understand stories to be the fabric of our cultural and social worlds. Within organizations, storytelling is becoming more widely recognized as a critical mode for the transmission of knowledge. In this series of posts I want to discuss the ways in which my engagement with stories in Aboriginal communities and organizations has informed my practice as an organizational development consultant.

My story about my work.

I have a story that I tell about what I do. My work focuses on First Nations and Aboriginal communities and organizations primarily in Canada. I work as a facilitator serving the evolution of groups and communities. I sometimes describe what I do as “organizational and community development” but more recently I have come to see my work as “applied decolonization” primarily because I focus more and more with groups on finding their own solutions within themselves instead of relying on external, and often colonial structures, to provide answers. For me, “decolonization” means finding ways to constantly open up ourselves and our communities against all of those forces that would close us down.

To do this, it is important that we draw on the stories of individuals, groups, organizations, communities and cultures to be able to understand and express the inherent gifts that help us to move on.

Indigenous communities and people have a rich tradition of storytelling. Telling stories serves a variety of purposes from transmitting personal and cultural knowledge, to healing, to helping people understand what is true and real. In the contemporary world it seems as if story telling is a lost art, but in my work, where stories are invited forward, it doesn’t take long to recover the method as people realize that storytelling is about connecting with what we actually know.

This series of posts is about the ways in which I work with stories. I am interested in readers’ thoughts to these methods and suggestions for extending them deeper.

Talking about what’s real

Stories help us to understand what is real. They do this in two ways. First, by understanding the stories we have about ourselves and the world we can understand how we frame the world. Second being invited to tell our stories we automatically undertake both introspection and expression the twin acts of creating shared truth and meaning.

As individuals, we are constantly negotiating our place between what we personally feel is real and true and what is collectively held to be real and true. We examine our world through the stories we hold about it and this shapes our reaction to things.

When we perceive an event in the external world, we do so through our stories. For example if we see two people in conflict, our perception of the situation is determined by stories such as those about power, respect, peacemaking and independence. These stories are so powerful that they actually create different versions of reality and we quickly lose sight of what is real.

Consider a common example. We witness a shouting match between a manager and a subordinate in an organization. If we believe that those with power should use it responsibly, we might conclude that the manager is in the wrong and that the subordinate is right in defending herself.

If we believe that people should be loyal and respectful to authority, we might see the subordinate as the problem for engaging in inappropriate behaviour with her boss.

On the other hand, if we have a strong story about peace, for example that people should be peaceful at all times, then we might conclude that both are wrong, and that both bear some responsibility for finding a different way to resolve their conflict.

Furthermore, if we have stories about ourselves either as peacemakers (I help keep the peace) or as people who value independence (I need to let them resolve this situation), it will colour our relationship to the event.

So what is real? Having uninvestigated stories about what is real actually impedes our ability to see the situation for what it is. It closes down our ability to relate to both people in the conflict and sets us in conflict with those that hold different stories about the situation. If I am facilitating a situation like this, it makes sense to hear from people about what they perceive, but it also helps to go deeper and invite an exploration of the stories that each person holds because these are the things that will drive our relationship with the situation and each other. It is fine to have stories about the world for they help us to mediate our relationship with reality, but to hold them without knowing what they are pits us against others with deeply held stories and beliefs. We see our own reality as the only reality, without understanding how others see things. After a process of introspection, we can share our stories with each other in a way that both holds open space for innumerable interpretations of the world while at the same time recognizing that the actually reality of the situation is bigger than what we alone perceive.

Understanding the stories we hold about the world is a deeply introspective process. It can be facilitated with a number of practices that connect us as individuals with ourselves. I personally use meditation and other contemplative practices and, increasingly, what Byron Katie calls “The Work” which is a powerful way of compassionately investigating the underlying stories we carry with us, and around which we construct our identity.

These processes are useful for investigating the “shoulds” that plague us. When we use the word “should” we tell a story that argues with reality: if people “should” be peaceful and they clearly aren’t, we will create stress for ourselves until we can tell ourselves a more real story. A more real story might be one that acknowledges that people get into conflicts. It helps then to position myself to conflict: once I recognize the reality, I am no longer surprised or shocked by it and I can work to resolve it if that is what I choose to do. Understanding my story helps me to move beyond the powerless state of “you should stop fighting” and into a more active role of peacemaking.

Once we begin to understand our personal stories, we can then use storytelling to express the way we see the world, and that is the subject of the next post.