Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
T.S. Eliot1
I have borrowed the title of this chapter from Paul Ricoeur's book of the same name.2 In a sweeping 750-page analysis, he proposes an underlying circular relationship between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience. The relationship between time and narrative is a fascinating and rewarding subject for philosophical study, but for our purposes the essential point is that telling stories is how we make sense of our experience in relation to the passage of time – past, present, and future.
This deceptively simple idea leads directly to the proposition that underpins this book: 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 task of narrative leadership.
Remembering that a story is an imagined (or re-imagined) experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listener's imagination to experience it as real, it is relatively easy to see how stories can be used to make sense of things that have happened in the past. By selecting particular events and placing them in a certain sequence, we imply motives and causal relationships. Indeed, we commonly tell stories in the past tense to give them plausibility: so and so happened, then this happened, then that happened. I will demonstrate with a random paragraph from Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things.3 Here it is, as written, in the past tense:
And now, transposed into the present tense:
The first version – in the past tense – gives more credibility and authority to the narrator: she is telling us what has happened. Conversely, reading the second version – in the present tense – one gets the sense that the narrator is merely asserting what might be happening. What else can the narrator do in the midst of an experience; how can she really know what is happening, let alone understand why things are happening, when they have not yet been played out?
It seems that using stories to make sense of the present is not the same as using them to make sense of the past. How can we tell what the story is when we are in the middle of it? And what about stories of events that have not yet occurred: how can we use them to make sense of the future; what weight can we give them?
The narrator cannot know that this is what will happen; she is speculating, presenting what she thinks will (or might) happen based on her knowledge of the parties involved and imagining their behavior under supposed circumstances. But this is only one of many possible futures. Events could easily take a different turn and, as readers, we may find it difficult to decide how likely it is that the narrator's prediction will come about. Of course, it is even more difficult to gauge the likelihood of possible futures when dealing with real-life events rather than those depicted in a novel. In real life too, some futures will suit us better than others and we have an interest in shaping the future as well as trying to predict it.
As Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”4 Using stories to make sense of the past is hard enough (place 100 historians end to end and you still won't reach a conclusion) but at least we are used to the process. Using stories to help make sense of the present and of the future presents new challenges and calls for different approaches.
The rest of this chapter will explore the use of story to make sense of all three domains: past (the told story); present (the unfolding story); and future (the imagined story). We will consider some of the issues in each domain and look at some practical tools and techniques. First, though, here are some questions to help you relate what follows to your own circumstances:
- 1. The Big Picture: Take as much time as you need to answer these questions. Some people find discussing them with a partner helpful. Answer them from the perspective of the organization, group, or movement in which you exercise leadership rather than from your own individual point of view.
- What images and metaphors speak vividly about your past?
- What do you want to honor from the past?
- What was unique or distinctive about your origins?
- What is essential from your past for continuity?
- What about your past do you want to distance yourself from?
- What images and metaphors speak vividly about your present?
- What do you want to name about the present?
- What is unique or distinctive about you now?
- What are your core strengths and values?
- What is changing or needs to change?
- What images and metaphors speak vividly about your future?
- What makes the future of your organization etc. worthwhile?
- What is unique or distinctive about your future?
- What represents a small step, a step change, a big stretch?
- What key challenges are you are facing?
Your answers to these questions (and to the others that occurred to you as you were thinking about them and/or discussing them) begin to sketch out the domains of past–present–future within which you exercise leadership. What did you notice about the different gestures of looking back at the past, looking around at the present, and looking ahead to the future? Because our temperaments vary, we are likely to find ourselves drawn more to some domains than others. Which domain did you find most challenging to address? Which did you find easiest? What does this say about the way you lead? To what extent are you rooted in the past; open to the present; and focused on the future?
Learning from the Past: The Told Story
When we experience events that either our conscious or subconscious mind judges to be significant we store them as memories. To remember them we shape them into stories that we tell to other people (and sometimes to ourselves). Roger Schank goes so far as to equate story creation with memory:
It is by retelling such stories and reconsidering their meanings in changing circumstances that we are able to learn from the past, strengthening the influence of stories we deem to have positive effects and loosening our grip on those that no longer serve us. Most schools of coaching, counseling, and psychotherapy are based on this premise and we can apply the same principle to learning from our collective experience in organizations, groups, and movements.
If, as leaders, we want to encourage learning from the past we can tell a story ourselves or we can initiate a collaborative process to enable the produc...
