Rewriting Leadership with Narrative Intelligence

How Leaders Can Thrive in Complex, Confusing and Contradictory Times

Greg Morgan

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781787567764
• eBook ISBN: 9781787567771
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Leadership is a slippery concept. Researchers disagree on its essence, describing it variously as behaviours, character traits or styles. Effective leaders understand that we make meaning of our experiences by creating stories we believe to be true, but which are largely based on fragmentary evidence filtered through our biases, beliefs and dispositions. 

Rewriting Leadership with Narrative Intelligence draws on a range of disciplines and scholarly traditions to build a compelling case for a new perspective on leadership, seeing it as a deeply embodied, intuitive skill of curating shared narratives, in influence relationships. 

Defining narrative intelligence as 'our ability to evaluate the efficacy of the stories we create to serve our needs, our capacity to rewrite them, and the practical skill to take effective action', this book methodically outlines how leaders cultivate their own narrative intelligence to:

• Become the person they seek to be by aligning narratives and core values with actions 
• Navigate through the challenging leadership space of populism and the erosion of traditional values
• Ethically curate the narrative others hold of them 
• Strengthen self-efficacy, take more effective actions, and avoid stories which inadvertently undermine goals 
• Communicate with trust and influence 
• Build energy and alignment within teams by generating shared narratives 
• Cultivate a culture of narrative intelligence 

This book will prepare leaders to reshape their own and others' stories to be more aligned with achieving goals and wellbeing. It will prove a useful resource to undergraduates and post-graduates in courses on leadership and management, as well as organizational development consultants and senior executives.

Part One

A Case for Narrative Intelligence

It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. (Patrick Rothfuss, 2007, p. 658)

An Invitation to View Life as a Flow of Interweaving Narratives

We don’t experience life … We experience the stories we tell to explain what happens to us. (Ken Baskin, 2008, p. 1)

A narrative intelligence paraphrase of complexity and storytelling researcher, Ken Baskin’s quote, would suggest that we experience life and we experience the stories we tell ourselves to explain it – and they are not the same.

Psychologist Russell Hurlburt describes a very private, unique world we all inhabit.

You live your life entirely immersed in your pristine experiences, a stream of your own creations, tailored by you just for you … unfettered by time, place, or reality … Your pristine experience is your own ultimate intimacy: You create it; you shape it; you live in it; you’re immersed in it every waking minute; no one else can access it. (2011, p. 411)

As each of us hurtles through space and time in the ever-unfolding present, we wonder things like: what is happening, why is it happening, how might we alter what is happening to enjoy more of it or endure less of it, how does what is happening connect with what just happened and what might happen next? Historian of meta-trends in human development, Yuval Noah Harari, says “Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives” (2014, p. 113). Illuminating meaning in our lives from that ‘brilliant ray of light’ is generated by the flow of stories we constantly create to make as much sense of what we can, of what is happening. And as we do this, each of us casts ourselves as the lead character (sometimes as hero, other times as victim, survivor, villain, or champion) in a series of interweaving narratives involving other people and events that feature in our lives.

There is a case for considering that thinking in narratives is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human. There is a case for considering that we interpret everything we experience, and that we do so in terms of previous experience, our values, our emotions, our fears and hopes – everything our lives have taught us.

The narratives we construct to explain what we experience often hinge on things that have no existence in the world independently of us: things such as love, patriotism, religion, duty, debt, gratitude, recreation, ego, humility, comfort, status, income, pain, generosity, and competition. And yet, from where we each sit in the director’s chair of our life, we curate and choreograph how the previous scene connects to the present scene and how that might lead into the next scene. We can never ‘re-take’ an upcoming scene, so if it should not turn out as anticipated we simply rewrite the narrative and keep going.

I am proposing that narrative intelligence begins with a meta-cognitive capacity to comprehend that we live out our lives in continuous, unfolding narratives of our own creation and which we believe are objectively true. Narratively intelligent people use this capacity to monitor the narratives they inhabit and rigorously evaluate them for how useful they are in the pursuit of personal goals, and life’s larger goals extending beyond the self. A narratively intelligent person understands that we are simply unable to experience data in the world without subconsciously rushing to create an explanation for it. I am proposing that we do this in our pervasive quest for finding meaning in our life. Where are my glasses? Should I pull out those weeds in the garden or poison them? I think our destination is around the next corner. Why did Mick frown when I said hello? I’m not sure if I should accept this job offer. Time that I love wasting is not wasted. How do I tell my boss I disagree – should I?

The stories we tell ourselves help us make meaning of our experience, dreams, and aspirations. Stories are convenient packages for storing and linking information, whether or not such linkages are accurate. Looking back on an experience, it is always possible to build a neat narrative of causes and effect.

A narratively intelligent person will reflect on the data a current narrative is based on, data that might be missing, alternative and more helpful narratives supported by the existing data, and further data that might be needed. Narratively intelligent leadership understands all of this and appreciates also the vast complexity of complementary and conflicting narratives that orbit and weave around each other in an organisation, accordingly either generating or draining energy. As will be described in Part 2, narratively intelligent leaders develop a deeply embodied skill of drawing people ethically into shared narratives that generate collegial energy for realising a shared vision. They understand the impact of their own behaviour on the unfolding narratives of colleagues, and rewrite their own narratives accordingly.

Narratively intelligent people fundamentally realise that any understanding we arrive at and any meaning we make is always tentative and incomplete. They understand, as humans, we have a predisposition for believing we understand things, when we often have very little grasp at all. They understand that they can reach deeper insight into what is happening by accessing their narrative intelligence.

What is a Story?

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. (O’Connor, 1961, p. 66)

Ever since first being captivated by the magical words, ‘Once upon a time …’ we have all been listening to, telling and participating in stories. When a friend asks, “How are you?” or a colleague at work on Monday morning asks, “How was your weekend?” we might see it as an invitation to answer the question by telling a story – even when all that was intended by the question was a greeting, a polite ‘hello.’

However, a story is more than an account of something that has happened. Narratologist scholar, David Herman (2007), elaborates, “stories are accounts of what happened to particular people – and of what it was like for them to experience what happened – in particular circumstances and with specific consequences” (p. 3). As English author, E. M. Forster observed, “The king died and then the queen died,” … is a chronicle. “The king died and the queen died of grief,” is a story (Dowling, 2011, p. 5). The novelist John Le Carre reputedly said, “The cat sat on the mat” is not a story but, “the cat sat on the dog’s mat” is (Martin, 2012). The Greek philosopher Aristotle observed that even though a story involves events linked by cause and effect, it needs a structure of a beginning, middle, and end, explaining that a beginning is an event causing other events; an end is a final causal or correlated event in a series; and a middle contains events caused by previous events and that cause subsequent events (Butcher, 1895, p. 29, VII. 3).

For Aristotle, the unfolding sequence of causal or correlated events is the key to a good story, followed by characters: “The plot, then, is the first principle and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: character holds the second place” (Butcher, 1895, p. 27, VI. 14). Aristotle observed that good stories are anchored in their plot – the way that unfolding events impact on each other. By ‘character’ he meant more than simply the characters who make up the cast: he says that, “Character is that which reveals moral purpose: it shows what kind of things, in cases of doubt, a man chooses or avoids” (Butcher, 1895, p. 27, VI. 17). This suggests that, for Aristotle, a good story involves people’s ‘moral purpose’ being tested by how much they ask of themselves and others in responding to challenging circumstances.

Aristotle’s understanding of an effective plot involves three key attributes which influence each other: Peripeteia – a reversal of fortune, Anagnorisis – a recognition or discovery, and Pathos – suffering (Butcher, 1895, p. 39, XI. 2–6). Peripeteia involves an unexpected reversal of circumstances, Anagnorisis involves a shift from ignorance to knowledge, and Pathos involves “a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily torments, wounds and the like” (Butcher, 1895, p. 39, XI. 6). A more contemporary rendering of ‘pathos’ is a quality that arouses an emotional response; hinted at from its original Greek meaning of both ‘suffering’ and ‘experience,’ with sympathy, empathy, and pathetic all being derived from it (Harper, 2018a).

Aristotle’s observation of ancient Greek drama continues to resonate with contemporary students of story. Existential philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1980) echoes Aristotle by describing plot as the, “intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story …. Plot makes events into a story” (p. 171). Pioneering cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruner (2002) who founded a field of narrative psychology (Mateus & Sengers, 2003, p. 6) describes how a masterful story constructed around Aristotle’s principles can alienate us, “from the tyranny of the compellingly familiar” (pp. 9–10). He describes that while a great story, “may begin on familiar ground, it aims to go beyond it into the realm of the possible, the might be, could have been, perhaps will be” (Bruner, 2002, p. 13), with peripeteia disrupting the compellingly familiar: “a story begins with a breach in the expected state of things – Aristotle’s peripeteia. Something goes awry, otherwise there’s nothing to tell about” (Bruner, 2002, p. 17). A great plot generates emotional tension in us between what we expect and what occurs. Bruner (2002) describes this as a dialectical tension between the canonical and the possible (p. 13). Once a plot seduces us with such uncertainty – banality, routine, and predictability are overwhelmed by an engaging, suspenseful dissonance over what will happen next.

Bruner (2002) explains that while a plot may have characters seeking to restore or capitalise on their reversal of circumstances, what often assumes greater significance is the anagnorisis they experience during their efforts – “the epistemic or moral insights into what is inherent in their quest for restoration” (p. 20). Bruner (2002) seems to be alluding to Aristotle’s sense of pathos when he suggests that a good story is an, “invitation to problem-finding not a lesson in problem-solving. It is deeply about plight, about the road rather than about the inn to which it leads” (p. 20).

For our purposes then, we might define a story as a series of events linked by correlation or cause and effect, into a coherent plot involving people’s character and life being shaped and challenged by unanticipated reversals of fortune, discovery, and emotional turmoil. Central to this seems a yearning and struggle for agency, our capacity to engage in actions that will shape events and create a sought-after sense of order, especially following disruption. As we go about our lives, day-by-day, we constantly create an understanding of what is happening by creating stories with rich plots and characters, involving cause and effect, and often featuring peripeteia. (I tried to use my credit card to pay for refuelling my car, but the eftpos machine rejected it, saying ‘insufficient funds,’ even though I knew my account should have had ample funds to pay for it….)

Ricoeur (1984) refers to our human predisposition to give narrative shape to our experiences. He describes our seeking and shaping of order among chaos as ‘emplotment’ in which we select events in an organised sequence, and emphasise some over others into a plot.

Reflective Questions

• What distinguishes a plot from a chain of events?
• What role does a character play in a story?
• What do you make of the suggestion that an engaging story involves problem-finding rather than problem-solving?
• What is a narrative without ‘peripeteia’?

Implications for Practice

• The stories we tell ourselves and others about our lives, are more than narrated events. They stimulate, confound, challenge, frustrate, surprise, and delight us, every bit as much as a gripping book or movie.

Stories and Narratives

Ha‘ina mai ka puana — Hawaiian for ‘Let the story be told!’ (Robert Wolff, 2001, p. 196)

Story is the juice through which consciousness and culture move. (Houston, 1997, p. 123)

Several researchers (Strawson in Rayfield, 1972; Seese & Haven, 2015; Sergeeva, 2016; Speight, 2015, p. 11; Takaya, 2013) draw no distinction between ‘story’ and ‘narrative,’ with Denning (2005, p. xxiv) and Gebber (2017, p. 4887) using them as synonyms.

In his reflections on what makes a story, Bruner offers a helpful distinction between a story and a narrative. Bruner (2002) outlines that every story has a narrator: the person who tells the story, with that person’s point of view influencing the narration, and therefore the story told (p. 17). Quite different versions of Little Red Riding Hood may well be heard with a change of narrator from the anonymous, sympathetic observer who traditionally narrates the story, to the wood-cutter, the wolf, Red Riding Hood or her grandmother. This distinction between a story and its narrating goes at least as far back as the Russian formalists, with Viktor Shklovsky (2017) differentiating between fabula – the sequential events of a story, and syuzhet – the plot or the way the story is told (p. 24). The fabula is always governed by the chronology of events progressing from the start to the end, whereas the syuzhet is constructed according to the intentions of the narrator (whether speaker, author, film director, etc). The syuzhet may omit some events, compress or extend time and present events out of chronological sequence.

French literary scholar Gérard Genette (1980) adds a further distinction: story, narrative, and narration. His sense of story and narrative is similar to Bruner’s: with ‘story’ being the linked, causal events, and actions; narrative being what is revealed to us by the narrator; and with narration being the way the story is told, including the sequencing of events, what is included and omitted or emphasised, and other literary devices that produce the narrative.

Narratology scholar Mieke Bal (2017) defines her discipline as, “the ensemble of theories of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacles, events – of cultural artefacts that tell a story” (p. 3). And while narratology can be traced back to Aristotle, classical, scholarly traditions in narrative studies have evolved over the last century along distinct paths, including:

• Russian formalism, emerging in the early twentieth century, focusing on the form of the narrative rather than on cultural or philosophical considerations. Key to formalism is a belief that there is a science to literary texts, that they are governed by elements embedded deeply within the text itself. Vladimir Propp’s (2009) analysis of 100 Russian folk tales revealed fundamental social and psychological challenges encountered during people’s lives. He identified seven spheres of action and 31 fixed elements of folk tales. A formalist approach to literature suggests that it is the skill of the author in juxtaposing critical elements of form ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part One A Case for Narrative Intelligence
• Part Two The Practical Wisdom of Leading with Narrative Intelligence
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index