Narratives

Narratives are received from the moment we are born through Conversation and other sources of information.

Clearly knowing the source of where narratives come from is extremely important.

There are lot of ideas which don’t serve the ‘end user’ of the narratives which serve other groups that don’t necessarily have the same incentives.

For instance silly ideas in business:

• Sales Funnel - Came from vendors selling sales workflow products

• Marketing Drip Campaign - from a marketing automation vendor

Every time we receive new ideas people have to evaluate whether or not the idea is compatible with their existing ideas.

Compatible narratives are more easily understood and accepted.

Some narratives/concepts require a base of many other narratives/concepts before you can ‘understand’ them.

Narratives are imaginary. Canada is not a real object that you can touch and talk to.

All our physics theories are approximations of reality which is more complicated.

See Sapiens.

Narratives can range from negative to positive.

Some people ‘positive narratives’ might be negative for other people.

It all depends on your own ‘deep’ narratives.

If strangers have shared narratives it makes It easier to communicate.

Part of making a company communicate well is to work on building shared narratives that facilitate communication around the business of the company.

See Decentralized Company Communication

This is why people can look at the same video or same conversation and hear completely different meaning.

Each person’s Narratives Alter the Meaning of one Conversation

These ideas which are core to a person.

Imagine every neuron is connected to these ideas in physical form.

Ripping out these core ideas is super hard work - in fact it can break a person.

Imagine you believed that you were helping people through your work and then came to realize that your work was destroying people. This would be a traumatic belief to let go of.

I can relate to this when my core beliefs around management changed and perception changed of what I felt I had done to past staff.

When two people have completely different narratives to describe the same behaviour or events.

See Fundamental Attribution Error