Storytelling That Drives Change
- David Purdy
- Jul 15, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 16, 2024
Sunnyside in Tarrytown NY. The home of one of our greatest storytellers - Washington Irving
At the NYU Stern School of business our students having been learning that EQ = IQ for more than a decade. And that experience provides a foundation for the School's Change! program, which we introduced in the fall of 2019. That approach helps Stern students not only change in their own lives but to become change agents for others. How? By telling stories that combine thoughts and feelings so compellingly that they can bring ideas to life, changing what others do and, at times, changing who we are.
At first blush, the relationship between emotions and change might not be obvious. Indeed, when I went to business school more than 30 years ago, emotions weren't on the agenda at all. But since that time, psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists and business professionals have learned a tremendous amount about the critical role that emotions play in business and in life, both for the better; but sometimes for the worse. And we have worked hard to help our students use those insights well to become both passionate and agile in their business lives and beyond.
The Science of Change
In Thinking: Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, shows that we're prone to make quick but error-ridden reactions to the world. He speaks of Systems 1 and 2, the former as described above but the latter offering a more reflective approach. Our students learn to heighten their self — and other — awareness, noting not just what they think, but how they feel, really listening to what their gut tells them. What Kahneman calls System 2 then kicks in to reflect on what’s going on, suggesting that we trust but verify those gut instincts. Such a level of self awareness also helps us see how our habitual responses can prevent us from adapting to a changing world. When they’ve seen how their reflexive thoughts and feelings can create ineffective self narratives, they’re in a better place to recreate more effective ones.
The "human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor," The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt (also a professor at Stern).
Narrative Science
As a species we rarely act as purely logical participants in an efficient marketplace of being. We are predictably irrational. We both think and feel our ways through our lives, writing our stories of what it all means, step by step. But while those stories can help make us be more effective, sometimes they can hold us back.
We need to dig a little deeper to better understand the role of emotions in storytelling and how storytelling informs our behaviors. Over the last 20 years scientists have discovered that we don’t just think in our lives; we’re always feeling our way through. Like it or not, we’re never purely rational. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, among others, reports that people with damage to the emotional centers of the brain lost the ability to think rationally. Yuval Harari, an historian/philosopher from the University of Jerusalem notes that emotions are “…evolutionary rationality made flesh.”+ But what role to emotions play and how they help us inform the stories we use to make sense of the world?
In effect, they weave together what happens in the story with what feels important in the narrative to tell us what it all means. Hence, stories draw on all our humanity — thoughts and feelings and actions — to sort through an otherwise overwhelming torrent of information to find what’s important. So like it or not, it’s critical to understand our feelings. Otherwise we’re likely be blindsided by our emotion-based implicit biases.++
More Self Awareness + More humanity = Better Leaders
At Stern, our core task is to help our students bring all of their humanity to their work -- passionate commitment to a project, their teammates and clients, and their best thinking as well. If they do that they'll be better able to see what needs to change in themselves and how their behaviors are most likely to harmonize with others.
+ Given today’s headlines, managing implicit bias is more critical than ever. In 2019 my colleague at Stern, Dr. Dolly Chugh (also a sociologist) published her book Becoming the Person You Mean to Be -- Overcoming implicit bias. She notes that our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are driven in ways that we may not be aware of ... and how to ensure that we stay on the right track.
