Each person constructs a story of his life in which he’s the lead character. That sounds like something you’d say about a narcissist, but it’s true about everybody. Here’s the thing: it’s not always a hero story. It might be a conspiracy story, a sad love story, an adventure, or a tale of woe. It might be a collection of stories that weave in and out.
At a high level, think of how your high school English teacher characterized stories. Man vs. man. Man vs. nature. Man vs. himself. Etc.
Each of our personal stories is also embedded in a larger story based on our culture and other things, but for my purposes here I want to focus on the story surrounding each profession.
All of these stories have a narrative, a worldview, and a cast of characters. There are good guys and bad guys. There are conflicts and drama. There are themes, values, and a mythos.
If you want to understand someone (including yourself), you have to go beyond simple things (what he does, where he lives, what he likes, his achievements) and try to understand the story he’s living in — both personally, and at a higher level. Knowing that story will add color and perspective. For example, knowing some facts about someone is good, but it’s better to know why those facts are important.
Think about the room you’re in right now. There are ten billion facts about that room, but only a few of them are important to you. The facts you find important (that it’s clean and orderly, or spartan, lavish, dark, comfortable, full of books … whatever) say something about you.
I used to lead some workshops on getting marketing and IT to cooperate. I emphasized the need to understand the other side’s perspective.
That’s a good start, but adding the concept of story makes it easier to remember, easier to relate to, and easier to see how some new detail or twist will be understood.
Let’s take Beth, the systems administrator. Her perspective is that she has to maintain certain rules and procedures to keep things operating the way they should. That’s helpful. But now think of the story she lives in.
Beth sees her world as constantly on the brink of chaos. Spammers and phishers and hackers are trying to exploit both the network and individual devices. There are also internal threats. Foolish employees think they can skirt the rules and set up their own technologies to take shortcuts, not knowing that they’re creating dangerous vulnerabilities. Disgruntled employees would love to take the company down. In the midst of this, Beth is responsible to management for the stability of the system. Everybody thinks she’s rigid and inflexible. She doesn’t want to be rigid and inflexible, but she knows that if she drops her guard there’s going to be a data breach.
Now consider Jason. He’s responsible for revenue growth in a tough market. His perspective is that he has to be nimble, quick, creative, and responsive to the needs of advertisers and the market. His story is that he’s an impatient innovator with new ideas, but “old thinking” keeps getting in the way. He feels like Christopher Columbus arguing with a bunch of flat earthers — and yes, he’s smart enough to know that’s a total myth, but it’s a useful illustration of the way he feels. He needs to move forward. He doesn’t have time for the old guard to catch up. He has to beat his competition to the finish line.
Beth’s perspective can tell you why she has a rule against adding un-vetted devices to the network, but her story explains why she completely flipped out when Jason uploaded data to the server from his personal laptop.
When marketing and IT clash, it’s often because they see the same situation through vastly different stories. Marketing may view IT as overly rigid, while IT sees marketing as reckless. Understanding the story of each group can help teams bridge gaps and build trust.
Understanding a person’s story also gives you empathy. It helps you understand what dragons they’re fighting. It puts their moods and outbursts into perspective. It’s so much more powerful than knowing somebody’s Myers-Briggs type.
To work with people across different functional areas, understand the general story of that group — the worldview, the mythos — and also try to understand what role each person feels they play within that story.
Give it a try. Next time you talk to a fellow employee, pay attention to little clues that hint at the story they’re living in.
