“Do you want to be right, or kind?”

The ultimate paradox of caring for self AND others suggests we periodically forfeit a win in order to nurture and protect. Folklore documents the evolutionary benefits of jumpstarting collaboration by sharing credit, helping without demanding payback, nurturing, protecting, and other patterns of behavior that are increasingly characterized as weaknesses by competitive thinkers. And I’m not bashing competition. I’m just suggesting competitive overreach is currently undermining collaboration and that there are alternatives you may want to consider.

The good news is that folklore offers a vast library of lessons about collaboration: how to nurture, protect alliances, and share resources, as well as earning some wins. Biggest problem? Developing enough discipline to decide when and where not to win, when to connect instead of competing. If your head just exploded, you may have been indoctrinated to think only in competitive narratives. But in real life, too much winning isolates winners from those who feel exploited which leads to inequities, rage and polarization. In the early 90s when I studied with traditional folk tellers, I was exposed to the full compliment of collaborative stories as well as competitive stories. So let me dig back into that basket of wisdom stories and pull out a few that we could use right about now.

Repair After Betrayal: The Grateful Dead

There are plenty stories in our world’s treasure trove of folklore about the need to repair rifts, but I particularly like the collection of stories from Jewish and Eastern origins named “The Grateful Dead.” Did you know that in addition to being a band’s name, the grateful dead is a collection of folktales that encode the power of positive reciprocity and repairing a wrong without any promise of quid pro quo?

The Story of the Grateful Dead

A traveler happens to discover that a dead man cannot be properly buried because his creditors hold his body as collateral. So, he pays the dead man’s debts and pays for him to be properly buried. Later in his travels a stranger arrives to help the “hero” and together they find success in all their endeavors. The helping stranger turns out to be the spirit of the grateful dead come back to reward the hero’s generosity.

The story works because helping a dead person is not the normal way to chase a big payoff. In the same way, chasing the goals of speed and efficiency leaves little time for repair.

These folklore generated “to do” items aren’t just for “nice” people. Repairing relationships is vital to human evolution. Survival requires collaboration. When I taught work groups about the “ten territorial games” they intuitively understood an exclusive diet of “every man for himself” naturally kills collaboration. It’s not rocket science. And every group of humans trying to do great things will end up generating feelings of betrayal over time. Without rituals of repair their circle of concern shrinks. Continuing to be competitive when there is need for repair severs relationships and leaves at least one side (usually both) with an injury unhealed. Ghosting only works for so long. Eventually we need other people. It doesn’t matter who started it. I can just about guarantee they think you did. There is always an opportunity to reach out and repair. I think of it as giving “second chances.” I fully acknowledge it probably works less than 50% of the time. But when it works, the repaired relationship can be exponentially stronger than it was originally. Plus I enjoy collaboration more than competition. It’s not a weakness. It’s a preference.

Back in direct marketing days, corporations learned that a customer who had a complaint resolved was more loyal/profitable than a customer without a complaint.

Rituals of many religions facilitate habits of repair. The process of repair varies widely. You may be forgiving yourself, forgiving someone who harmed you, or reaching out to someone who felt harmed by you. Most healing rituals acknowledge the grievance, validate harm done, and make amends. I think of it as offering second chances. Sure, I get burned, but not 100% of the time.

Whenever we feel the urge to ignore, take revenge or pay someone back for a negative experience, that’s the time to remember than we simultaneously hold the power to repair that connection. Not all deserve our efforts, but some do. And those relationships we can repair will teach us things we need to know and maybe earn us the benefit of the doubt next time we have goals that seem to be mutually exclusive.

Sharing information, showing empathy, forgiving, making amends — these are all an investment in building reciprocity so good turns can breed more good turns.

As for strategy of repair, I suggest sharing an “I know what you are thinking” story as a first step. Tell the story from their side, validate how it must have felt for them. Then tell a vision story about the kind of collaboration you seek. Even if your attempts to repair only work a fraction of the time, you end up better off for the connections you rescued.

Remember Brene’ Browns lovely RSA video about empathy versus sympathy?

Brown tells a story about how empathy means visiting someone in the deep hole they are in, rather than shouting sympathy “oh that must hurt,” from a safe position on the surface.

She summarizes: “In order to connect with you, I have to connect with something inside myself that knows that feeling.”

She cites the skill as “shifting perspectives” but that term undersells how hard it actually is. I prefer the term perceptual agility.

While it’s easy to grasp that we need to shift perspectives, we woefully underestimate the mental and emotional agility this requires. Teaching storytelling for three decades required that I articulate the components of perceptual agility. Great storytellers are people who can imagine and step into different narratives at will.

Perceptual agility is akin to spatial awareness. When I was in high school, I was surprised when a military recruiter reached out to me because my aptitude for spatial awareness tested pretty high. I didn’t even know it was a thing. Maybe I was born that way, or maybe the fact that I studied mechanical drafting developed my skill. Certainly, the rigor of drawing a top, side and front view of objects in space helped. In hindsight, the most important learning may have been that those three views could look nothing alike but were still vital to developing a three dimensional prototype.

So, I looked up spatial awareness to find clues on how to teach perceptual agility. The children’s game, “Simon Says” enhances coordination, proprioception and visualization of 3D space. This reminded me of the traditional storytellers exercise I know as, “walking around the world of your story.” In preparation for performance, tellers retell their story from multiple points of view: a neighbor’s, the dog’s, other character’s perspective, even from the kitchen table’s viewpoint. The teller may eventually tell the story from a single point of view, but this exercise enriches the story with relational and sensory details that “make it feel real” and increase engagement. It’s similar to the rigor of drawing three views of an object. Regular practice improves agility. The payoff is that seeking multiple points of view reliably reveals new insights.

Spatial awareness also requires the skill of proprioception — using muscles, joints and tendons to know when and where your body is in space and time. The signs of a human body’s dysfunctional proprioception are a lack of coordination, bumping into objects, and using too much or too little force. For organizations looking to be better coordinated, less bumpy, and more efficient, developing organizational “proprioception” requires building the equivalent of better collective muscle memories that intentionally access multiple perspectives.

I thought everyone could do it…until I tried to teach it. I worked with plenty of people who genuinely wanted to be empathetic storytellers but their perceptual agility was inflexible. As a result I began looking for emotional barriers to this skill of stepping out of your own narrative, goals and concerns into another’s.

One big barrier is that a battle narrative reduces your ability to see the big picture. Run your own experiment. Take a second to look around. You can see walls, chairs, windows, or maybe a tropical island (lucky you!). Now imagine a man with a gun approaching. Your perceptual field dramatically narrows. In this way, fear diminishes perceptual agility. And while this is an extreme example, it plays out in every organization that prioritizes competitive narratives over collaborative narratives. Believing the world, or your job is a hostile win/lose environment degrades one’s ability to see opportunities for connection.

Finally, empathy-in-action often contradicts (temporarily) the narrative that consistency equals quality. Total Quality Improvement goals inadvertently devalued the kinds of inconsistencies required to achieve empathy and psychological safety. Our standard operating procedures specifically avoid inconsistencies. It means stepping away from being efficient to take the time to offer a warm blanket to a shivering patient. Empathy in action means we bend rules when they don’t serve the human in front of us. Yes, this kind of inconsistency attracts criticism. But it is the only way to manage a both/and paradox, of holding two (or more) truths at once.

To counter negative interpretations, I tell the old story about five blind men each describing the only part of the elephant they can touch (it’s a column, it’s a snake, it’s a wall, etc) arguing endlessly about how wrong the others are. I’ve learned to warn people that their subconscious may accuse them of flip flopping but the skill of perceptual agility is incredibly useful whenever narratives seem to conflict. What may seem to be mutually exclusive is actually connected when we gather all the little narratives into a bigger picture.

That’s what happened when one of my client’s attempted to reduce fall risks by ensuring everyone followed standard procedures. It failed miserably. It wasn’t until someone gathered stories from the people they wished to protect, that one woman calmly explained that someone helping her off the floor was the only time she was touched. That single story expanded their perceptual agility. Seeking other narratives develops the kind of perceptual agility that makes genuine empathy possible.

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Perceptual Agility: Practicing the Mental and Emotional Gymnastics of Empathy was originally published in The Structural Skills Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 1994, I sat on the grass in Tennessee, listening to Ray Hicks tell his ancestors’ versions of “jack tales” using phrases straight from Chaucerian times. It was hard to understand his thick accent, none of his stories were “updated” and yet I was on the grass because the tent overflowed with devotees. He was not an outlier to be rejected. This eccentric one-of-a-kind man was the star of the show. Because storytelling is about specifics, not simplified generalizations.

Mesmerized by the power storytelling had over me and those around me, I began to study with traditional tellers including Ray Hicks. Then, using the language of marketing and business, I tried to translate the benefits of storytelling to my clients. I had a profound faith in the forces of good. I deferred to my traditional storytelling mentors, because I feel that story is a form of magic, and as is the case with any kind of magic, arrogance is as dangerous as evil intent.

In the late nineties, several story loving business consultants decided to attend the National Storytelling Network conference. I listened to tellers’ whisper “They have no soul!” as those of us wearing business jackets explained, “But we’re here to help.”

I soon realized that many offers to help are merely a desire for control. It is the same justification colonizers use to help themselves to the resources of others. And business is looking for ways to help themselves to the resources of storytelling. Not with malicious intent. It’s just the nature of the business tribe to look for efficiency, scalability, and return on investment. But the investment ratios are completely reversed for a traditional storyteller. Spending years on a story instead of minutes offers insights, connections, and experimentations that are more meaningful than profit. For a traditional teller, the lessons of our most ancient stories reject exploitation, elevate the role of self- sacrifice and prompt us to give generously with zero guarantee of return. Our bag of stories documents a range of moral obligations played out over time to remind us that immediate gratification is not always in our best interest. From a business point of view, these moral patterns are not profitable.

From an evolutionary point of view, oral storytelling evolved to complement rule-based systems of governance with a morality of sympathy that augments the morality of correctness. Solomon’s story of resolving two women’s dispute over a baby by threatening to cut it in half (revealing the real mother) illustrates that the rule of law is blind in ways that story can see. Jesus parables explicitly address the cruelty of a law against working on the Sabbath if that work might save an animal’s life. Submitting story to objective criteria removes the logic of love that makes a subjective exception to objective brutality. I’ve argued this point with data scientists for the past ten years. From Bayesian statistics to LLMs there is no way to automate kindness without understanding that the very definition of kindness is to deviate and accommodate someone who doesn’t fit the mold.

Last year, I was surrounded a group of AI enthusiasts who were very frustrated that I wasn’t more engaged or curious to discuss how to “capture the power of storytelling.” I’m not afraid of tech. I just have a strong faith in preserving our freedom of imagination. I did my due diligence by experimenting with AI after a friend told me my disinterest “hurt her feelings.” With her coaching I worked on two different platforms to build a “storytelling advice” bot using my books and articles.

In the beginning it was fun, ego enhancing, and immersive but soon I realized there was no way AI could re-produce the results of delighted listening (learned from Doug Lipman), a prerequisite to playful spontaneity. I walked away after one bot, when asked to answer as me said, “well bless my buttons!” Having heard humans (white males, anyway) complain that my southern accent was some kind of secret advantage, I sensed the same influence of patriarchy in the oversimplification of what makes me, me. In summary, I reject the stacked sequences of small oversimplifications that dumb down complexities.

Just look at the distortions already at play when you use AI to look up Plato’s Ship of State. AI refers to it as the “ship of fools” quoting a modern oversimplification that distorts the original message. One search I ran spit out a plot summary that conflates two characters into one. The original story is far more instructive that the summary, describing a near-sighted, hard-of-hearing, charismatic captain being chosen to lead because he is popular. The lesson is that choosing to ignore the trained navigator was a death sentence. Same message as when Socrates suggested a sweet shop vendor might trick sick people into taking candy instead of the less pleasant medicine that might have healed them. If stories could be “controlled” how many stories do you think will still carry the moral messages that caution against arrogance, greed, and immediate gratification?

I read a report that AI is demystifying thinking, as if that would be a good thing! Nope, our desire to be right all the time is an addiction that ends up burying dangerous truths with oversimplified generalizations. In the 1990s I studied how business thinking and story thinking were fundamentally different. Objective thinking is fine for some things, but it is not suited to solve subjective (feeling based) problems. As others sought to make storytelling into an objective tool, to exploit it, to push certain narratives over others, or to silence what they might deem an “anti-story,” I courted competitive thinkers with the title “Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins,” thinking I might convince them that collaborative wins count too. Because a constant diet of stories about competitive wins undermines society’s ability to role model the skills of restraint, generosity, and diverse participation required to reach collaborative wins.

I’ve been labeled “difficult.” But big T Truths carry their own gravitas; and paradox is at the heart of most of what we consider big T Truths. Humans are both good and bad, rules work until they don’t, convenience is not always in our best interest, help is not always benign, control is not always best, and trauma can turn into wisdom. Paradoxes can never be solved. We need constantly evolving stories to keep ourselves mindful that we don’t know everything and there is always another side with a different story.

I confess, I’m not as interested in increasing the bottom line as I am in finding ways to sustain many bottom lines that will support as many people as possible.

That puts me at odds with the cherished assumption that business is all about doing more with less — specifically less people. Because I like people, I want to improve people’s lives and save the environment at least as much as I want to increase profit.

And I’m not a nut. I know we need to protect the success of the organization. But I trust that all the metrics, quantitative analysis, and algorithms that exist solely to show how to do more with less aren’t going away.

And they don’t need to, but we do need to embrace a new paradigm where people count as much as numbers. And we do that through sharing our stories.

Storytelling is a form of generosity vital to collaboration. When people are forced to be transactional it kills the magic of growing faith and trust by showing faith in others without demanding quid pro quo payback. The most inspiring stories narrate self-sacrifice, helping without pay back, showing good faith, and illustrating moral norms. We don’t build trust when the terms and conditions of connecting include multi-page inventories of all that might go wrong. Every set of terms and conditions I’ve read told me a rather dark story of distrust and selfishness.

Two years ago, I started coming clean about my concerns about the ethics of those who want to learn storytelling in order to control narratives rather than engage multiple narratives. Not surprisingly, most businesses who called me decided to hire someone else after I started talking about the ethics of storytelling. Learning the ins and outs of storytelling is like going to magic school. I think any teacher who doesn’t show students about the dangers of dark magic is being irresponsible.

One of the blessings of being up front about my “secret mission” is that some of the businesses who call are even more interested than before. I’ve got a new book coming out that articulates how competitive narratives tend to treat collaborative narratives like competition. Drinking from a Different Well: How Women’s Stories Change What Power Means in Action, taps into the genius of women’s narratives about power, the way men misunderstand female contexts, as well as a coherent way to blend male and female power in the workplace to redefine success in a way that protects people, profits, and the planet.

Gendered narratives represent preferences not competencies. Sexual dimorphism suggests that when evolution must protect a paradox (protecting us AND them) nature/nurture often splits the difference by ensuring both matter — but in different degrees.

Protecting “them” is a bit more important to women and protecting “us” is a bit more important to men. When women end up in positions that don’t offer enough power to protect “them,” we feel powerless and evade promotions that will only make it worse. The term moral distress explains a lot about why women leave positions of power. If we don’t have the power to do the right thing, it makes us feel powerless.

This is not just women, of course; anyone who prefers collaborative narratives over competitive narratives ends up being treated like the competition when it comes to control and power. It’s one of the things that I’m working on right now.

How do we blend both competitive and collaborative narratives? What needs to change in the way we make decisions? How do we deal with our own hypocrisy?

I include myself. Only by investigating the difference between what we say we want (safe planet, healthy people, etc.) and what we actually do to achieve it (I don’t compost for instance) can we figure out how to close the gap. Your thoughts?

My new book Drinking From A Different Well: How Women’s Stories Change What Power Means in Action is out October 2021. For a preview excerpt check out www.differentwell.com

Thank you for reading.

Follow The Structural Skills Project Now!

If you also believe that the so-called “soft skills” are the essential human strengths that set us apart in an AI-powered world, write for us!

To be added as a writer, send an email to structuralskillsproject@gmail.com with the subject line: Submission — [Your Medium Handle]

In the body, include:

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A Storyteller’s Confession: My Secret Mission was originally published in The Structural Skills Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.