Technology is anything made by a human to solve a problem.
Narrative is made by a human to solve a problem.
Q.E.D. Narrative is technology.
What problem does narrative solve? It actually solves two problems. 1) It answers Why? Narrative connects dots. It explains beginning, middle, and end. 2) Narrative touches our emotions; it soothes us. It moves us to act. Story, another word for narrative, evokes creativity to solve human problems.
Funny thing, if you ask most people to picture a technologist, an inventor, they are likely to conjure a man’s face or name. But…
A woman invented narrative.
To be more precise, the earliest inventor of narrative for whom we have a name is a woman: Enheduanna. She lived in Ur 4,300 years ago. The preface to Angus Fletcher‘s new book, Wonderworks, tells us who she was and what Enheduanna created. She was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad. She boasted, “I, Enheduanna, created this booklet — a thing which no one else had ever created.“ She crafted poems to mold emotions. She invented stories to engineer new worlds.
That’s what all narrative does.
That’s why narrative is the basis for strategy and for all new ventures. A strategy is a story with a beginning, middle, and end. New ventures are stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
I’ve been on a quest for almost 40 years to figure out the source of strategy, innovation, and new ventures. In business schools, we focus on economics, microeconomics, finance, to explain and justify strategies.
But we’ve known for a long time that’s not where strategy comes from. Herb Simon and his circle of scholars knew this decades ago. And, so they turned their minds to psychology; to judging and decision making to understand strategy. My colleagues at the University of Chicago, Al Madansky and Jim Schrager have been pursuing this line for years and developed a behavioral economic approach to judging strategy. And that is certainly a rich vein to mine.
Strategy originates in the human mind. But it does not begin with a decision.
Strategy begins with a story. My research suggests that narrative is the source of strategy.
So strategy must turn to story science to discover new strategies.
We need to start at the beginning, with Enheduanna, the woman who invented the most powerful human technology: narrative.
Narrative is made by a human to solve a problem.
Q.E.D. Narrative is technology.
What problem does narrative solve? It actually solves two problems. 1) It answers Why? Narrative connects dots. It explains beginning, middle, and end. 2) Narrative touches our emotions; it soothes us. It moves us to act. Story, another word for narrative, evokes creativity to solve human problems.
Funny thing, if you ask most people to picture a technologist, an inventor, they are likely to conjure a man’s face or name. But…
A woman invented narrative.
To be more precise, the earliest inventor of narrative for whom we have a name is a woman: Enheduanna. She lived in Ur 4,300 years ago. The preface to Angus Fletcher‘s new book, Wonderworks, tells us who she was and what Enheduanna created. She was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad. She boasted, “I, Enheduanna, created this booklet — a thing which no one else had ever created.“ She crafted poems to mold emotions. She invented stories to engineer new worlds.
That’s what all narrative does.
That’s why narrative is the basis for strategy and for all new ventures. A strategy is a story with a beginning, middle, and end. New ventures are stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
I’ve been on a quest for almost 40 years to figure out the source of strategy, innovation, and new ventures. In business schools, we focus on economics, microeconomics, finance, to explain and justify strategies.
But we’ve known for a long time that’s not where strategy comes from. Herb Simon and his circle of scholars knew this decades ago. And, so they turned their minds to psychology; to judging and decision making to understand strategy. My colleagues at the University of Chicago, Al Madansky and Jim Schrager have been pursuing this line for years and developed a behavioral economic approach to judging strategy. And that is certainly a rich vein to mine.
Strategy originates in the human mind. But it does not begin with a decision.
Strategy begins with a story. My research suggests that narrative is the source of strategy.
So strategy must turn to story science to discover new strategies.
We need to start at the beginning, with Enheduanna, the woman who invented the most powerful human technology: narrative.