Human Drama is Timeless
This is part of a series of patterns which form a part of Emergent Design — the human tendencies that need to be incorporated into any emergent process.
It struck me the first time I read some of the classics — the Chinese sage Chuang Tzu, and the Greek philosopher, Plato. I couldn’t help but wonder; why are their observations on our behavior still relevant? Haven’t we, as a species, evolved to the point where musings on human nature from 2,300 years ago should no longer apply? While our physical technologies — from transport to computing — have advanced beyond the imagination of our ancestors, our social technologies — how we interact with each other and hold ourselves in a group — are stuck firmly in the distant past.
In March of 2016, I found myself in the third day of a strategic offsite for The Value Web. We were at a critical juncture. There we were, 25 of us trying to apply our own facilitation methodology to ourselves, with questionable success. Much that needed to be said was left unsaid. I found myself increasingly frustrated, even angry.
It gave me pause.
I design dialogue for a living. I understand the emotional arc that many go through at stressful moments, because I guide organizations through them all the time. But here I was: annoyed, frustrated, feeling like I wasn’t being heard, feeling like we weren’t getting to the real issue. I was getting emotional.
The designer in me wondered; how much of this emotion is necessary?
I know that the key to any decision is the creation of intent; the actual desire to act on a decision, rather than passive acquiescence. What I was faced with in that moment, was that creating intent is as much an emotional journey as it is a rational one. This entanglement of the rational and emotional is what differentiates it from mere thought, and what gives it such power.
While the substance of our thought — be it corporate strategy or particle physics — may have changed substantially since Chuang Tzu’s time, the emotional journey we go through individually or collectively to build the intention to act on that thought has not; human drama, it turns out, is timeless.
In his book “The Seven Basic Plots,” Christopher Booker points out that the structure of our stories remains constant across time and geography. Between Gilgamesh, written 5000 years ago, and any contemporary James Bond film you might watch today, you find a narrative pattern he calls “Overcoming the Monster.” Through story after story, through the millennia, we relive a very limited number of narratives that continue to resonate with us.
This desire for narrative, our tendency to create characters and our difficulty in seeing our own story lines objectively are obscured, in the working world, by cheap concepts like professionalism, which treat the human condition as an externality to the adult work of getting things done.
But the designer needs to know better. What I saw in myself during our offsite was not simply that my emotions were a factor, but that they were following a narrative structure planted deep in our collective psyche. Was I living the “Hero’s Quest?” And if so, who was the hero?
In any difficult decision, or in a significant transition, I now apply the following principles when I am designing for humans:
1.) Humans have an emotional reaction to events or changes that are significant to them,
2.) We make sense of our emotional reactions through stories,
3.) Our stories follow a predictable pattern throughout human history,
4.) We then live our story as much as we live the reality of our situation, with one influencing and reinforcing the other.
The challenge for the designer, then, is to be aware of the narrative that might unfold, and to create the opportunity for a new one to be written. We don’t ignore the emotional journey; we anticipate it, understand its structure, and create a pathway for a new narrative to unfold.
When designing a process for group decisions or co-creation, we must consider the elements of this emotional journey. What is the narrative that exists? Is this comedy, tragedy, hero’s journey or something else? Who are the characters? Do all of our players share the same sense of who the characters are? Are they living the same story?
Groups caught in a poor, shared narrative may be dragged down by a sense of defeat. Others, with competing narratives, may seem unable to agree on the problem, despite a seemingly simple set of facts. The creation of characterizations can colour people’s interpretations of each other’s behaviour.
By making narrative an explicit component of your design, you can create a productive conduit for people’s emotions; by creating a shared experience of that narrative, you create the opportunity for shared intent to emerge.
