Story Box

The conflation of fact and interpretation creates blind spots and locked perspectives. Scientist call this Reality Basis.

Mistaking the Map for the Territory

The challenge is that any conception we have of the world is not it. Yet we frequently mistake the map for the Territory. When we conflate Interpretation/Perception and Fact with Reality, we call it a Story Box

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth” – Marcus Aurelius

Scientists call this Reality Bias – thinking we perceive reality when in fact it is always filtered by our mental models. We can think of getting beyond reality bias as recognizing there is no “Is”. More specifically, we can never directly know all of what Is. For one thing the universe is ever-changing so even if we studied everything by the time we finished ingesting it something would have changed. Related to that is the deeper problem that Methodology and Ontology are inseparable. In simpler language, what we perceive a thing to be cannot be known independently of the medium through which we perceive or come to know it. For example, the philosopher Ken Wilber points out if we were to look at a steel bar we would not know it was Hot unless we looked through infrared glasses or we went up and touched it. For each of the ways we have had in the past of “touching the world”, we have developed an Operating System or interlocking set of tools and worldviews. Our aim in this book is help leaders to construct a provisional “next level” operating system.

We forget that it is merely a story and take it to be Reality or what Is.

One example of a Story Box is believing that girls are bad at math. Believing you have innate qualities that make you good or bad at something is what psychologists call an “entity theory”. In one experiment, just hearing that boys or girls did worse on a challenge caused children of that gender’s performance to drop by 12.8% on the second round of the challenge*. We all have some version of a Story Box or entity theory regarding ourselves (you may be feeling confused about Story Boxes and entity theories being equivalent. I am not reducing the Story Box to an entity theory. Just remember all theories are Story Boxes)

This plays out at all scales from societal to our personal relationships.

If you follow the news, it is very likely you have concluded the world is going to “hell in a handbasket”. News coverage has indeed been growing steadily more negative over time. The truth may surprise you. Learn more about this and the concept of Zooming Out by clicking here.

Deep Listening as a Path Through

When we share the Story Box in workshops we ask participants to go home and practice Deep Listening - which is a way of gathering more data before adding interpretation. Specifically, we ask participants to practice listening to their loved ones at three levels – the information being conveyed, the emotion, and the spirit or intention of the communication. We invariably find people return with relationships transformed. A common refrain is something like this: “I thought my spouse was nagging me constantly. But as I practiced deep listening, I realized that what was being expressed was concern and the spirt behind it was love. I had put my spouse in a Story Box of nag. And I interpreted our interactions through that lens. When I shifted he did too.”

This has also lead to the term Story Coffin. When we lock the Story Box down so tightly no other interpretation becomes possible, we have created a “StoryCoffin” for that relationship as we are not allowing the other person or ourselves room to grow.

Reality is a Creative Phenomenon.

If you have seen one thing above it is that Reality is a creative phenomenon. This makes Reality Like a FunHouse mirror and proves there is at least some truth to the old saying – “we see the world not as it is but as we are”.

Barring cataclysm, the future is very likely brighter than you think. The average person in the developed world has experienced a 100-fold increase in income over the past few hundred years. A 65-fold increase is forecast to occur by the end of this century.

Zen and the Art of Story Boxes

In 2011 shortly about the time Google released Search Inside Yourself which was based on the experience of Google Billionaire Cheng Made Teng bringing a zen master to sit with Googlers, Dialog conducted a 3 day retreat with a zen master in Steven Dell’s mansion overlooking the Texas State Capitol. (This is the kind of environment Bob Gutermuth created in his quest for an authentically unfolding company). One of the things employees asked in advance is what is a zen Master? After some consideration: I answered “someone who shows you that any box you are in is a result of your own making”

That is our aim - to help you see how you can be aware of your cognition at the source of the Story Boxes themselves.

Let’s look at the process of building Story Boxes at different levels. At the level of inside as we experience (these two meet and one cant be reduced to the other).

Let’s look at the “Story Box Projector” from a network perspective. Let’s look at “you” as a Network.

As Sociologist Robert Galdini has said “I link therefore I am”. Our brains are neural networks that link things together. Marketers understand this well, as Galdini notes, marketers seek to link their products to things you find Salient and Desirable (distinction: bullshit vs. lying).

It makes sense that our brain links things because that is basically what networks do. Our brains are networks that have a particular structure that offers humans the unique ability to make stuff up.

This is because we store things in two different networks – the two halves of our brains (see making things work by Bar-Yam). These two halves are therefore able to retrieve inputs and match them together in novel ways. Other species can communicate. Monkeys let other monkeys know when a predator is near the river but they don’t make up stories about events at the river. This ability to create “counterfactuals” seems to be what allows us to scale our collaboration across networks.*

*We will return to this ability to make things up or create stories as it is this ability that explains why humans are the only Ultra-social species that doesn’t come with a hive or a nest, i.e, is not a single family. The key is our ability to create memetic links in the absence of genetic links. So you can think of this as opening up a layer of reality and world-building that is not available to any other species. The space of intersubjective reality. The space we create together. This is the space that Vince is a master of creating. And a space which we will want to pay great attention to given our central challenge as a society is to ensure that our social innovation keeps pace with physical.

You might be asking why we are talking about the human species when I am talking about you specifically. The answer is that you are part and product of a network. In one sense, what we could call your network address determines everything about you. The time and place you were born dictate your language and your perspective and even the thoughts you are capable of having. As we shall see in the next chapter on language “without the words we don’t have the thoughts” and our words are culturally derived. Just as there can be no forest without trees and there are no trees without forests. Just as when you read you are figuring out the words from Top down the meaning and context of the sentence and bottoms up from the letters themselves. The part defines the whole and the whole defines the parts. This basic unity and interdependence is a feature of.