Last night I listened to four people speak on how they were taking risks in being creative in their work.  Each used story in order to do this.  The audience were fully tuned and engaged throughout the evening.

My guess is we all learnt a lot, also inspired and encouraged.  I certainly made loads of notes, ending up adding some “colour” to a couple of meetings I’ve been planning.

The four didn’t share everything about how they risked – the details were often sketchy as they offered less than historical, step-by-step accounts of their work, leaving plenty of things out and rearranging their material so it worked better as story.  At the same time, I took what they shared to be a real and true account.

Story is fascinating, and I never ceased to be amazed at how it works – because it clearly does.

Our lives are immersed in stories.

There’re stories happening to us right under our noses ‘because we lack the ability to recognise them and the language to talk about them.*  The stories others appear to allow us the opportunity of looking our lives in different ways to how we normally do.  Martin Seligman writes about how some adversity (A) does not lead directly to some consequence (C).  In between A and C there are our beliefs (B) about the adversity: as it were, the stories we tell ourselves but possibly don’t recognise.**

Questions help us to dig down into these beliefs, these stories, whilst not asking questions leaves something as it is: the most dangerous and most risky place to be.

Here are two questions I’ve adapted from Keith Yamashita for you to identify elements of your story with:^

What is your purpose on this earth?
What have you historically been when at your best?

(*From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.  I’m using Senge’s words about invisible issues here as they work well when it comes to the stories which are invisible to us.)
(**From Martin Seligman’s Flourish.)
(^Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)

The ancients devised their myths to explain the world and universe, and their place within these.

The most important myths are not only enacted by battling gods and demigods but those entered into by real people.

Perhaps the greatest myths tell of the struggle between chaos and order.

Our heroes are not those who tell us everything is pointless and anarchic; neither those who we must focus on order and efficiency.

Our heroes are those who are prepared to step into the chaos and struggle for order.

“[W]e’re coming off a twenty five-five year posteighties period of efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.  I think the unintended consequence of that entire efficiency era is that people diminished their questions to very small-minded ones.”*

The best and highest Self we can be, is not the product of being overwhelmed by chaos, nor having everything in our lives working sweetly, but the Self emerging from the struggle to overcome the chaotic, forging perseverance – because we know the world will change again and will will have to step into the fray once more.

“Why isn’t this working anymore?” is not the cry of the clueless but the deep question from someone prepared to admit Voldemort is back and work out how to defeat the Dark Lord.

(Keith Yamashita, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.  Consider what efficiency has covered up, the “suicide machine” of “make more, faster” which means we live in the chaos of consuming the resources of 1.5 Earths.)

How come we’re here, doing the things we’re doing, wrestling with all these things happening to us?

To use Twyla Tharp’s term for finding ideas for her choreographic work, we’re scratching around through our stories to make sense of it all.  When we do, we begin to spot some possibilities for what our futures can be.

Adding a little new language can do this, making the invisible visible, or highlighting something important: a word or a phrase articulates everything we’ve been trying to figure out – and we play with it – paths open before us:

‘When you learn new responses, or any new language, you create new pathways of brain cells.’*

‘I sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation.  It’s your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences.’**

Things don’t have to line up perfectly or be complete before you try out new ideas and thoughts.  Neither do you.  You don’t have to feel like it, either.

Tell yourself your story, even if it’s so far a hypothesis, and see what happens.  Talk positive to yourself and you’ll find you’re different and things are different.

Interesting, isn’t it?

‘Pleasure is way of feeling.  But joy is a way of seeing.’^

(*From Michael Heppell’s How To Be Brilliant.)
(**From Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.)
(^From Mark Rowlands’ Running With the Pack.)

‘Should mission statements be mission questions?’*

Statements sound like we have everything figured out.  Maybe it’s just my love for questions, but good questions suggest futures with more possibilities.

Mission statements can be a way of saying: This is what we’ve been doing so far and we think this will work in the future.  Like stories, they tell us how we got here.

What if, instead of seeing our past stories – personally or collectively – as explaining why we’re as we are, we ask questions like: Why did I make this decision?  Why did we react in this way?

Where we are now is only one of many places we could have ended up.  The future is full of many possibilities.  Statements take us to one place.  Questions open up many possibilities:

Which of my skills do I want to hone the most?
Why am I more interested in these?
Who will help me to do this?
Who do I want to help or where do I want to make a difference?
Who could I work and collaborate with?
What new things might we need to begin?
What are my/our resources?
What do I need to let go of?

Just a few of the mission questions which begin to branch out.

(*From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.  I have to admit, I haven’t read this section yet; I really like the question.)

‘There is no substitute for finding true purpose.’*

There’s no time like the present for living our purpose.  We certainly can’t do this in the past.  And the future is about imagining how to live our purpose now.

Purpose is something we’re awakened to.  This awakening takes place when our inner and outer lives align, when our dreams are given shape and form.  It includes our thinking but is more than thinking: ‘Awareness takes over from thinking.  Instead of being in charge of your live, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.’*

When this happens, my past begins to look different.  It isn’t so much messy and full of flaws and errors as making it possible to come fully to this moment of understanding, of alignment.

I realise I’m more than the total sum of my parts.  And I realise, through all those I am connected to, we are more too.

This is about what we want to be and be about now; not more of what we’ve been.  We’re more than we have been.  Imagine the significance of this for peoples who’ve been at odds with each other for centuries, when we allow our hopes for now to reinterpret our pasts, becoming the ways we have come to a better now.

This is where I want to be and where I’m scared to be.

(*From Eckart Tolle’s A New Earth.)

We all have at least one.

a. A view or vista.
b. A mental view or outlook

Mine has been changing.

From where I’m seated, I focus on the small heater in my study.  I move.  Just a little, and see it in quite a different way.  If I keep moving, I know I can obtain 360 degree view.  Even though I am no longer focused on the original view, I carry all the information.  I may still conclude the original perspective was the best after all – it has the switches on this side.

Sometimes a different perspective changes everything for the better.  If I come to where someone else is sitting and gain their view of something, my world can change.  (It doesn’t have to be a person: I can look at something from the point of view of a future society or the planet or a species.)

Perspective is made up of several perspectives.  Someone may look at their life through the lenses of spirituality, relationships, work, finance, and health.  Michael Heppell suggests more, breaking these down further: relationships, contribution, vision, career, personal development, health, close family, and money.

Yesterday, I considered the importance of deep breathing; today, I add perspective.

Try focusing on something in your home or outside (outside is best), noticing all the details you can as you breathe deeply.  Then, move to a different viewpoint and refocus.  Note how your focus looks quite different from here.

You can do this with your own life, or some situation you are facing.  You can invite another person to tell you what this looks like from their perspective.

Of course, you can’t do this unless you’re prepared to move.

Deeply.

We’re breathing all the time but don’t usually notice our inhaling and exhaling.  Yet nothing would happen if it were not for our breathing.

Often, we breath shallowly, caught up in the busyness of life.  When we take a moment to breathe deeply, we interrupt this.  To take a few breaths deeply slows things down immediately, noticing how breathing moves through our whole body.

When we breathe deeply at the beginning of the day, we can access how everything begins again.  Then, what do we breathe out?  What do we breathe in?

We can have a place to escape and breathe deeply awhile, close to where we are busiest.  We don’t have to carry any special equipment with us.

For these few moments we stop, reflect, and even change direction.  We give ourselves a fighting chance to walk away from WYSIATI and SOSO (What You See Is All There Is and same old same old).  We begin to notice all the things and the people  we’d missed, and how we can throw some creativity into the mix.

When our breathing deepens, our awareness expands.  We see what else we can do.  We see what we can do with others.

Our breathing deepens again.

“It’s pure elation when you find this elegant way to solve a problem.”*

Fifteen year old Jack Andraka had just produced a litmus paper test for pancreatic cancer.

This solution sounds a lot less complex than his powerfully disruptive question:

“What if I exposed a single-wall carbon nanotube with an antibody to a protein overexposed in pancreatic cancer?”*

Elegant is another word for the simplicity found on the far side of complexity.

Framing the right question is a skill in itself.  Andraka’s question was powerful and disruptive.  It’s what’s needed to shake ourselves awake from how things are.  Ever had those kind of dreams?

You may be the only person who must ask the question you are asking; everyone else doesn’t see the need for a question.

Asking the question is followed by a great deal of failure.  If we could find the solution or answer easily, it would already exist.  The important thing is to fail in different ways, not in the same way.

‘Failing gracefully is part of the deal.’**

In the process, we come to know more clearly who we are becoming and what we have to hand, providing us with the perseverance to keep going until we break through into the elegant answer.  We also become generators of even more powerful questions.

(*Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**From Seth Godin’s Graceful.)

I can’t quite picture what you’re telling me.  What does it look like?  Why don’t we stop talking about it and do it?

When we draw it, make it, or enact it, we make something visible, and more real to others – so less likely someone will get it wrong: “I thought that’s what you wanted me to do!”

What we find ourselves doing is prototyping: trying something out to see if it actually works, or maybe how we can make it work.

Another benefit of making something visible is we find out what we can really do and how much we really have.

We sometimes make things visible to ourselves first.

I’m part of an organisation which can still be talking about things decades later – not giving itself the chance of knowing whether something will work or not.

“If you want everyone to have the same mental model of a problem, the fastest way to do it is with a picture.”*

Try doodling it: here’s a visual alphabet which makes it possible for everyone to illustrate what they’re talking about:

(*Visualisation expert David Siebert, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.  I don’t know there were visualisation experts!)
(**From Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution.)

The passengers on the top reck of the number 26 bus didn’t know what to make of the group of pirates wielding cutlasses and “arr-ing” on the way to their seats.

We’d begun on Portobello beach with a game of Battleship (or should that be Man O’War) on the sand, and we were now heading into Edinburgh to find a few pubs (taverns) to tell our stories of daring-do, handing out our treasure (chocolate) to those who would take it.

A story with lots of fun.

Jonathan Gottschall closes his book pondering the future of story, especially because it’ becoming increasingly possible to live within novels as they’re being written.  In MMORPGs (Mor-pegs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games) players are the protagonists fighting against evil, escaping mundanity.  So will the story, which has been helpful to us as a species, become a liability, creating “a mental diabetes epidemic” as we prefer virtuality to realtime?*

I’m more hopeful.  Especially for stories which allow us to ask the most important questions.  In these stories, we can do some “thinking wrong” – the technique of ‘mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together.’**  When the expected things don’t work, why not combine things in stories which don’t go together and see what happens.

What if I don’t take offence at what someone says to me or does to me?  What if I don’t hold this person responsible for something their company or ancestor did?  What if someone could walk off the street into a shop in which they could purchase a different story to live.

The difference between the pirates in Edinburgh and a mmorpg is the pirates were trying out an idea to see how people can have fun and make a difference in the world.

‘Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it.’^

(*Brian Boyd, quoted in Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^From Susan Cain’s Quiet.)