The Direction of Intention

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Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” Niels Bohr

The steps in organizational growth are the same steps necessary to take in personal growth. We wrap different language around the steps but the steps are the universal. Like Hollywood blockbusters we weave different details through them, the characters have different faces and names, but the story follows a well-known plot. This has been true for centuries! We like to tell the same story over and over again and there is a very good reason for that: our lives are mirrored in the adventure. We know what to do in our personal story because we identify with the heroine/hero in the story. Their journey of transformation is a guide to our journey of transformation. Their follies and foibles give coherence to our messy passage. Their death and rebirth is a map for our death and rebirth. Their story is a call for us to step more fully into our adventure.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past century it is that change is the only constant. And, the subsidiary lesson: the pace of change is escalating. Whether we realize it our not we are always in a process of change. The Dream Society, a book published over a decade ago by the market futurist Copenhagen Institute, suggested that this dramatic escalation of the pace of change has thrust us out of the age of information and into the age of story. Information and data can locate us in a moment, describe a point in time, but the point is of limited use because we are living so close to the event horizon. The point that the data describes is obsolete before we can translate it into meaningful action. The best we can do is to use the data to story ourselves into an unknown future. In this sense, it brings us around to something our ancestors understood with certainty: true stability is found in the story that we tell, not in the things we possess.

Of course, therein exists my favorite paradox: Our stories are both road maps for change and anchors of stability. We know who we are by the stories we tell. We know who we want to become through the stories we tell. We know what we want to create through the stories we entertain.

Filed under: Story, Truly Powerful People |