Story is already the currency of organization. We trade stories all day, every day, no matter where we work or live. That means they are the lifeblood of every organization, determining its health, well-being and future viability. If you want to story to become an agent of future potential, though, there are four roles you might want to take a closer look at.

ANTHROPOLOGIST: Discovery

Consider yourself an anthropologist and use story as a way to look at organizational culture. Ask yourself the question: “What’s here?” and do some fieldwork. What stories are being told? What’s their focus? Are they positive or negative? Who is telling them? Who doesn’t get to tell stories or who is marginalized? What’s the impact of the stories?

You can tell a lot about the health and connectivity of an organization by the stories being told. So what is alive in the system (s) you are part of? What kind of a StoryField are they? Since any person, place or...

Inviting story into the room with you is one of the best choices you can make for group success. It easily flows across the way a group naturally performs and can support the cohesion, coherence and results a group achieves. Here’s how…

Sam Kaner and his colleagues identified and named the parts of how a group works together in his seminal work “Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making”. In the Art of Hosting practice field, we call this the “Breath Pattern” and we use its parts – divergence, emergence and convergence – as a guide for designing great group process. 

Making friends with the Breath Pattern

Whether a group is meeting for one hour, multiple days, or longer this pattern naturally repeats itself, just like humans continue to breathe in and out. Knowing about it — and surfacing it to the group – can make the work easier. It’s not that this is a “bad” group because it is...

This post was written as a guest blog for Percolab.

I am writing this post sitting in the airport in Columbus, Ohio. It is currently 9:46 and my flight to Chicago and then on to Montreal should have departed at 8:27. It didn’t. Not because there are weather conditions here or mechanical errors or any other local disruption. I’m sitting here because of the domino effect.

Hurricane Dorian is busy pounding the Bahamas, and flight changes on the East Coast are causing mass disruptions in other parts of the country. For those who need more proof that we are all connected, be it by climate, systems or thought patterns, this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

I want to make the case that our narrative ecology is the same. In other posts I’ve taken the forest ecology — and how trees continually communicate with each other — as a metaphor of how human systems interact. Trees are connected by the mycelium sheath. Mushrooms connect the individual root systems...