We create and share stories as a way of understanding the world. Our ’sense of narrative’ guides us through life. Narratives are the basis of community. They inform our relationships. Characterize our business decisions. Color our music. They affect everything from our spiritual beliefs, to the schools we attend, to the products we patronize.
Storytelling is in our DNA. You can even say our DNA is, itself, a story as old as life on the planet, told in a language first translated in 1953 by scientist-storytellers Watson and Crick. Before 1953, scientists knew the story existed, they just didn’t understand the language in which it was told. Watson and Crick cracked the code and the story has been unfolding ever since.
Narratives are the most powerful way we have of organizing information. They impose structure and meaning on the chaos of communication that flows like a thousand roaring rivers into, through, and out of networks. They connect virtual experiences to the real world. They inspire action. Narratives make sense of it all, and of our relationship to it all.
As you may know, brand narratives designed for the networked world cannot be scripted, they must be improvised. Much of the work we do at GameChangers involves helping our customers become better improvisers of their narratives, and not focus as much on telling good stories as they do on living good stories. It is much easier and more cost effective to preach what you practice than it is to practice what you preach.
Here’s a huge distinction between scripted and improvised narratives:
Scripted narratives operate under the laws of Newtonian mechanics (also called classical mechanics). Call them Newtonian Narratives. Improvised narratives, by comparison, operate according to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Call them Quantum Narratives.
Here are some characteristics of a Newtonian Narrative: It is finite, with a beginning, middle and end. It unfolds in linear time. It follows a formula or script. It has a credited author. It is inhabited by a well-defined and finite number of players. It is rooted in physical geography. It is platform specific (even when it is multi-platform). It is solid, mechanical, repetitive and dependable. It is immutable. The book you read today will be the same book tomorrow. It is causative, that is everything in a Newtonian Narrative happens because of something else. Events are related to one another according to its formulas. (”If Peyton Manning endorses it, people will buy it.”)
Another important distinction: a Newtonian Narrative can only be conjecture before the fact and can only be true (or not) after the fact. That is, until events have actually transpired, there is no truth to these narratives. A book cannot be read until it has been written, , a news story cannot be reported until the ‘news’ has occurred, and all our scripts, game plans and predictions are, at best, a positive vision of what we’d like the future to hold. None of it is our reality. Newtonian Narratives predict the future and chronicle the past, but they are not ‘alive.’ Examples of Newtonian Narratives are: market research, feature films, sitcoms, print media, TV ad campaigns, style guides and the shopping list on your refrigerator door.
One more characteristic of the Newtonian Narrative: It places a premium on knowledge, by defining knowledge as a have/have-not concept. It rewards ‘knowing,’ and penalizes ‘not knowing.’ In the Newtonian Narrative, knowledge is something you earn, or pay to acquire, at which point you are said to ‘own it.’
None of this is to say that the Newtonian Narrative is necessarily bad, or undesirable. Just like Newtonian mechanics in physics, it has its place, and that place is vital, as Toyota is learning today to its dismay, with all its recalls on defective car parts. (Something in its process didn’t follow the script its engineers had authored.)
Networks call for a different approach to storytelling. A quantum approach. Understanding this difference and acting on it presents a huge opportunity for businesses and brands, and perhaps our best chance for economic growth that is both profitable and sustainable.
The Quantum Narrative redefines storytelling by ripping up and recomposing the stuff stories have been made of since the first cave dweller showed her companions how to build a fire (and got thrown out of the cave not long after by another cave dweller who claimed the secret of fire for himself).
Though it literally has existed forever, production of this kind of narrative is still in its infancy. You can see glimmers of it in transmedia, massive multiplayer games, distributed production models, theme parks, social media, alternate reality games, activist brands, smart badges, business in China, remixes and mashups, augmented reality, micro-loans and the video of your dance in the musical, Hair.
Here are some of the characteristics of a Quantum Narrative: It has no beginning, middle or end. It has unlimited numbers of beginnings, middles and ends. It is generative instead of repetitive. It is participatory instead of authored. There’s no traditional storyteller-audience relationship; in the Quantum Narrative, everyone is responsible for creating the story. It does not foster consumption as much as it invites customization. This is why participants in these brand narratives are not consumers; they are customers. Or players.
A Quantum Narrative is not bound by time, space or geography. As with human DNA, what happened 40,000 years ago is still present and active in the narrative today. This kind of narrative can transpire in the blink of an eye or unfold over many millennnia. Or both. It happens here at the same time it’s happening across the room or the planet. It resembles the playing of a game by an infinite number of players more than it does the telling of a story by one person to an audience in a room.
A Quantum Narrative is platform agnostic. You cannot tie this kind of story to a technology or convention, because is designed to liberate itself from such conventions and transcend the media that deliver it.
A Quantum Narrative is present tense, which means that it does not get bogged down by history or saddled with expectations. This is probably its most important characteristic, because it means that every single action in the narrative holds breakthrough potential. Breakthroughs are not predicted by the narrative, they are, rather, made possible by it. It is non-causative, that is, you cannot always know how or why things occur. Serendipity plays an important role.
Quantum Narratives do not focus on who has knowledge and who doesn’t. Instead, they begin with the premise that everyone (and everything!) has knowledge, and the fact that we don’t all know the same things is an advantage, not a drawback. Quantum Narratives are designed to be shared, not owned. They emphasize interpretation, context, and perspective over a so-called body of knowledge.
Quantum Narratives create the conditions for unexpected collaborations and syntheses of ideas. They connect what has been scattered, make whole what would otherwise remain divided, and continually evolve.
They focus more on theme than on plot. They assess performance in terms of consistency (thematic alignment) and inconsistency, not in terms of rightness (on message) and wrongness. There’s only one way to be right, but there are unlimited ways to be consistent with a theme. This, too, has huge implications. It means that Quantum Narratives, in addition to being more adaptive, possess way more potential than Newtonian Narratives do. It’s the difference between an atomic reaction and a stick of dynamite.
Tags: Brand Narrative, breakthrough, copyright, economic growth, improvised narrative, Innovation, interpretation, Knowledge, Narrative, Newtonian Narrative, opportunity, ownership, participatory culture, Quantum Narrative, script, story, Storytelling, YouTube
Many interesting insights and ideas… thanks for sharing.
I love the analogy – reminded me of my Zen studies regarding how the watcher and the watched arise mutually in a spontaneous, dependent way.
If you strip away roles in storytelling, you can begin to get out from under the onus of ‘I tell a story and you listen.’ Forget ‘Storytelling is something we do.’
Instead, consider, storytelling as something we are. It sounds strange to use a verb to describe what a noun is, but I would posit that our language heavily influences and shapes our view of the world (some would say it actually creates our world).
Playing with our language in counter-intuitive ways opens up many storytelling opportunities. And isn’t having fun a large part of storytelling?
It’s an interesting post, but I have a few points to quibble.
1) Humans exist linearly. The very definition of time is the observation and perception of measurable change from one state to another. This is why we respond to linear narratives — our lives are made up of beginnings, middles and ends, even if we sometimes require years or decades of distance from one of our own “story arcs” to see them as such. Also, stories are instruments of social education — we learn mores, morals, history and custom by being told story, not to mention that we use stories told to us to better understand our own experience. When we tell our own stories, the telling is shaped and influenced by the stories we have been told.
2) Equating quantum mechanics to improvised storytelling is somewhat mislead, possibly because of the common but over-simplified explanation that Newtonian physics = formulaic clockwork and quantum physics = chaos into perception driven reality. The fact is, Newtonian physics is the macro-scale result of pico-scale quantum physics… and what appears to be chaos actually behaves according to rules that operate at a very small, very fast scale. Quantum doesn’t equal improvised — if the rules of the multiverse were improvised, there would have to be an improviser… and now you’re out of science and into spirituality.
3) I think that by taking away all the essential elements of narrative, you’re left with something that is no longer a narrative… or, perhaps, like children at play who tell a story as they go along, it’s not a narrative until it’s been told. The end result is still narrative, though, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Looked at another way, even if people all over the world are telling their own stories from a “quantum narrative” foundation, the stories they end up telling each other are still “Newtonian.”
4) The comparison between an atomic reaction and a stick of dynamite speaks to this — because ultimately, both explosions occur because of a foundation of quantum effects. Newtonian physics is, again, the observable, macro result of unobservered, pico-scale quantum interactions.
Perhaps the real quantum narrative is simply the human experience, and storytelling (in whatever form, however you want to define it) is the “Newtonian” expression of that experience.
Matthew
My responses:
1) So says the Western mind. The Eastern mind would, I think, see it differently, maybe like this: the timelessness of a narrative is part of its charm.
2) I’m not saying there are ‘no rules’ to either improvisation or the Quantum Narrative. Improvisation does not mean ‘winging it,’ nor does it mean ‘no plan.’ Quite the contrary. There are rules. And they’re not improvised. The rules of the multiverse ALLOW FOR IMPROVISATION. That’s a big difference from the way you put it. There is plan, but it’s flexible to the point that it exists in a state of constant change. As for being ‘out of science’ and ‘into spirituality’, this statement itself expresses the duality that a Quantum Narrative resolves. Quantum mechanics is the overlapping of science and spirituality, says Fritjof Capra in his book, The Tao of Physics. That’s his story and I”m sticking to it ; )
3) I don’t propose ‘taking away’ the essential elements of narrative. Narrative is narrative, just likes physics is physics. It is all, ultimately, composed of the same stuff. What i DO mean to suggest with the concept of Quantum Narrative, is that the story experience, as Scott points out, is relative to its observer/participant. A story that’s Newtonian in nature will be pretty much the same experience for every observer. One that’s Quantum can still be shared by its audience, but can be also be a different experience for everyone in the audience. It’s still a story, with traditional story elements, and can be composed of the same ’stuff.’ It just might not be the same stuff for everyone.
4) My point is that the language of Newtonian physics explains the dynamite, and that the language of quantum mechanics had to be created before the atomic reaction could be perceived.
I really don’t think we diverge much on what a story is. It has a beginning, middle and end. It has heroes on quests, wise old men, shapeshifters, goddesses, monsters, and elixirs hidden in well-guarded caves. What I’m saying is that a networked environment demands new forms, and that these new forms cannot be defined in terms of the old forms.
Think about Rashomon. A story told by Kurosawa from four different perspectives. A movie based on two short stories written in the 1920s. The form of a motion picture could contain Kurosawa’s story, and so that’s the way Kurosawa designed it. It was limited by its linearity and running time. Limited by what a film could cost and still make money, etc. etc. These were the rules that defined the form, and within that structure, Kurosawa was liberated to create a kind of movie that had never been seen before.
Now let’s say that today, I want to remake Rashomon, only I don’t want to tell the story from the perspective of just four characters, that’s been done to death, I want to tell the story from the point of view of one million characters! We’d be sitting in theaters for a long time watching that movie. More likely it never would’ve gotten to the theater because of ‘problems with the length of the script.’ The problems of telling this story are not the same as the ones Kurosawa faced, so the solutions aren’t going to be the same, either.
This is the same challenge faced by brands operating in the networked world. New narrative problems call for new narrative solutions. I think quantum is a good way to characterize the new solutions, that’s all.
Thanks, Matt. Great points, and I appreciate the dialogue.
I’ll tell you what. After writing “The Stories That Connect Us” last year, this is an incredible piece. Thank you.
Fantastic post, Mike!
[...] media is an example of “quantum narrative.” So says Mike Bonifer, who in his piece, Quantum Narrative, suggests a dichotomy comparing “Newtonian Narrative” with Quantum Narrative. [...]
[...] Quantum Narrative Thoughts on Improvised vs. Newtonian Narratives. [...]