In our last episode of Politics for Nerds, we discussed the Ladder of Power. If you haven’t already, please read that episode.
So we know that the highest ladder of power is ‘mythological power’. Over the coming episodes we will take a look at how Narratives or Stories work in an organisation, but before that here’s a small teaser about something you might not have spent a lot of time thinking about — that stories are extremely powerful.
Stories are innate to humans and they are the primary mechanism of human relations. Here are some curated videos about the power of storytelling.
Do you feel that data should trump emotion? I got bad news for you — it never has and it never will…
And you got the feels from that story about the autistic college student right? That’s neural coupling. That’s the power of storytelling.
And here’s the Sapiens guy — Yuval Noah Harari — taking a more macro view of stories. If you’ve read Sapiens then no need to watch the video but if you haven’t you might get a new idea or two from his talk.
In fact, you can get to a whole tonne of videos about how deeply innate and powerful storytelling is to humans by just searching for it on YouTube.
As one speaker said, homo sapiens is homo fictus — the storytelling animal — constantly imposing the order of story onto the chaos of existence.
And of all the stories we tell, none have more power to harm or heal than the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, whether as individuals or as organisations.
This is a teaser you can say to the next few episodes of Politics for Nerds where we go into the power of storytelling to shape your organisation.
Stay tuned.