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.
I grew up on a farm. My father spent a lot of time away from our farm selling and installing systems for other farmers that gave them more opportunity at what was, quite literally, the grass roots level.
Sports is a recurring subject for GameChangers. How can it not be, with our work so tightly bound to the playing of games? All you have to do is thread back through this blog to see how many times sports and their players produce a ‘learnable moment’ that can be applied to business. Most sports provide a useful model for how structure (e.g. the rules, roles, environment and objectives that constitute the game) liberate performance, creativity and innovation.
Jeffrey Wells came to my attention around five years ago when I was talking with a Hollywood studio publicist about bloggers who were having an impact on entertainment journalism. The publicist cited a number of names including Wells’, about whom he added, “He scares me a little bit.”
Prepare to struggle. The path to any breakthrough is unpaved. Gamechanging does not guarantee an easy road to fame and fortune. It is, rather, a methodical series of steps taken in order to learn, adapt, and discover new avenues for productivity. Hollywood Elsewhere struggled early. At one point Wells had to solicit donations from his readers to keep the site alive. It now seems on healthier footing financially, but Wells has a penchant for drama, so you never know what kind of bind he’s getting himself into just so we can all enjoy watching him work his way out of it.
In the Business section of its September 22 edition, the New York Times featured