Category: Blog

“Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand,” wrote the Scottish essayist Thomas Caryle in 1820 of the First Industrial Revolution. “Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.”

He was addressing a fear which seems eerily familiar today, as we embark upon the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an epoch delineated by Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. This is the era where the lines between the physical and digital are becoming blurred: automation, artificial intelligence, and mobile supercomputing of a power unimaginable to a previous generation, let alone the world of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

It is the age of the ‘superjob’.

Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report identifies the ‘superjob’ as the apex evolutionary offspring of the ‘hybrid job’. Hybrid jobs marry technical skills with ‘soft’ skills; superjobs “combine parts of different traditional jobs into integrated roles that leverage the significant productivity and efficiency gains that can arise when people work with smart machines, data, and algorithms.”

The advent of the superjob creates a significant challenge for the leaders of today. Organisations need to be actively ‘recoding’ their activity, i.e. “integrating machines and humans in the flow of work and creating meaningful roles for people.” Without this crucial shift in perspective, businesses risk falling behind in the race to re-skill existing staff with the tools they will need for the future, and opportunities to recruit  new employees already comfortable with this changing work dynamic – the ‘architects’ of the revolution – will be lost. By proactively replacing traditional job descriptions with inspiring new ‘job canvases’, in which the benefits of automation and augmentation to an individual’s productivity become central to the organisation’s story, a company can recode risk into reward.

This will take collaborative organisational imagination, and a shared vision of how man and machine in tandem can bring about exciting new outcomes – less Carlyle’s ‘mechanical’ men than humans using machines with their whole heart. Technologically-enhanced super jobs can be heroes of this revolution, not the villain.

In 2016, the creators of DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence company acquired by Google, challenged 9^thdan professional South Korean Go player Lee Sedol to a five-game match against its AlphaGo program. ‘Go’ is the notoriously difficult 2,500 year-old board game played with black and white pieces on a grid of 19 x 19 lines. It takes years to master, with a quantity of potential moves that famously outnumbers the entirety of atoms in the universe.

Sedol, a boyish hero of the game ranked the second greatest player of all time, accepted the challenge with the nonchalant swagger of a champion at the peak of his powers. He positioned himself as the torchbearer of human intelligence entering the valley of this dark shadow of automation, the redresser of a balance lost by Gary Kasparov in his defeat to the IBM chess computer Deep Blue a decade earlier. 

The story would be different in this sequel; now it would be the humans striking back. Sedol emphatically predicted that AlphaGo would not win a single game.

In the second game, and already ahead in the series, the program played a maverick winning move so exquisitely odd, so alien, Sedol was frozen in its otherworldy headlights. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he said.

“So beautiful.”

AlphaGo won the series 4-1.

Sedol was crestfallen at the defeat, and apologised for letting mankind down, but at the end of the series he said that he was overwhelmed with gratitude to AlphaGo for allowing him to see the game he loved from a fresh and exciting new perspective. The program was not the obstacle, or the enemy – it was a catalyst for novel ideas and possibilities.

Sedol reworked the story of his interaction with technology from one of hubris and defeat into a narrative of hope and possibility. Fear of the unknown had become the joy of potential; man and machine had created a strange and exhilarating shared adventure. This is the impact of the storytelling perspective – the “efforts, attachments, opinions” of your workforce protagonists can be transformed into a dynamic shared vision of a prosperous future.

Skid Row is many different things, depending on who you speak to.

At the level of moniker, it is a space defined both by placelessness and haunting, visceral proximity: a catchall catchphrase for the streets of deprivation and misfortune that squat, omnipresent, behind more comfortable, more affluent lives. To others, it’s an icon of the failed American Dream. To most, as the downtown LA for the down-and-out, Skid Row occupies a far more literal, yet equally impermanent, geography. For nearly 100 years, since 1920’s itinerant workers first flooded its streets, it has been the largest, most enduring homeless community in America; never officially designated, never planned, never provided for – yet searingly, undeniably, stubbornly manifest across the single square mile it occupies. In this exposed, juxtaposed world – around which skyscrapers and glossy apartments are emerging at speed, fuelled by the building boom that’s cannibalising remaining affordable housing – thousands of people have settled; many more since the credit crisis, which has seen a 23% spike in the county’s homelessness. The luckier ones have tents, makeshift shelters and trolleys. Many simply sleep in open air, enduring the relentless desert sun throughout the day.

To local officials, it’s a public health hazard and huge economic drain. Filthy needles litter the floor; gangs pitch tents and shift drugs; arson attacks on tents arise often from embittered neighbourhood feuds, damaging surrounding warehouses. The stench in the air is a reminder of the silent killers in the streets. With barely any accessible sanitation– around nine filthy cisterns to over 1,800 people – open-air defecation and urination regularly lead to deadly outbreaks of hepatitis, E. coli, meningitis, tuberculosis and much else besides.

The people of Skid Row are vulnerable, largely unemployed, often addicts, often suffering from poor mental health, sometimes ex-convicts. Yet to residents, Skid Row is also a community, with a strong sense of social injustice and agency – as evidenced by the thousands who last year voted to form their own council and unofficially elected their own mayor, known locally as General Jeff. Their problems, like the problems of all homeless people, are complex, interconnected and entrenched. There is no simple solve, and no clear political agenda to drive change through. And this pattern of soaring need, political obfuscation and frustrated efforts is replicated across western nations – at enormous economic, social and individual cost. So what is to be done?

Alex McDowell is not a politician, social worker or an urban planning expert. He has no expertise or experience with homelessness or poverty. He is more commonly known as the celebrated designer producer of films from Minority Report to Fight Club. Yet his work may be the answer to this mass social blight. By designing and realising complete, data-driven, alternative futures for the visionary projects he has shaped (Minority Report alone spawned multiple real-world patents), McDowell has forged the practice of world building: a blend of design and storytelling through which we are able to ‘prototype the future and provoke change’. Now, under the remit of narrative designer, McDowell heads up both the USC World Building Institute and Experimental design studio – a team governed by the belief that ‘[we] have the power to build the futures we want to inhabit. Not by following the trends set by our current constraints, but by leading each step forward through imagination and ingenuity’. At the heart of this discipline is the power of collaboration ‘to action the collective vision of our shared future.’

This may sound like lofty stuff, and it could be easy to dismiss in the face of such a grimy, glaring, immediate need. But for millennia, fiction has been the site of our most radical social revisioning. And today, technology-driven worlds mean we don’t have to stay on the page and in the individual mind to see a different world. At the Future of Storytelling, the softly-spoken McDowell urged us to see the deep power and pragmatism of this next-generation approach. The world’s problems, he said, are design flaws, not inevitability. They are a failure of collective vision. By listening carefully and learning from the wisdom of lived experience and diverse expertise – ‘coming to the table ignorant’ –  we can take our current trajectory and imagine a new, better path forward. We can design a complete world by breaking down its structures – broken, in McDowell’s framework (‘The Mandala’), into context, scales, domains and ecologies. And when we can collectively tell a new story about what could be possible – when we can experience it as a vividly, coherently designed world – we can extrapolate backwards to solve the problems of the present.

For storytellers everywhere, for anyone involved in change of any kind, the potency of this practice cannot be underestimated. We can shape the future, instead of being shaped by it. We can build the world we want, not the world that will be. But we have to believe in the future we imagine before we can take action. We have to share the vision. And this is where storytelling becomes empowerment in its rawest form. To tell the future story – to build belief – to make it happen – has always been the art of leaders everywhere. At The Storytellers, this is what we help our clients to enact across their organisations. But in our VUCA world, where so little can be promised or known absolutely, this is no easy task. World-building is future storying born in volatility and speed. It draws on the wisdom of crowds to build the spaces we don’t know and can’t individually imagine. It allows for rapid prototyping and iterative testing. It uses virtual spaces to tests outcomes, not just imagination. It draws on the power of fiction to reform reality in ways that entirely redefine human agency.

Through this practice, the Experimental team has helped a Bedouin tribe of Saudi Arabia envision a sustainable future community; native Alaskan tribes engage the next generation in the story of their future and develop new food practices; biologists collaborate at quantum scales by allowing them to enter the world of a cell.  Now, McDowell and his team are working with the Skid Row community to help them build their own better future as a self-sufficient, empowered community. Watch this space.

On paper, the story exchange doesn’t look like much. Sit with a stranger. Tell your story. Listen to theirs. Take on their story as your own and tell it back to a group. Such simplicity, in this age of bio-hacks and cognitive reprogramming and empathy increasingly understood as a neurological response triggered in specific conditions, and increasingly not at all.

But with this simple technique, Narrative 4 – a not-for-profit founded by author Colum McCann – have led an empathy revolution through the world’s schools and conflicted communities; giving young people bridges to each other and repairing the wounds of religious division, gang violence, gun crime, racial and sexual violence. Their model is fearless hope through radical empathy. They ask you to ‘dwell in someone else’s body, dwell in someone else’s country, dwell in someone else’s skin and mind for a while’.

They do this because as an organisation, they believe that if we can see our own story as valuable, and we know that the story of the other person across the wall is valuable, then we can begin to put right the vast majority of ugly things in the world. At The Storytellers, we powerfully agree, and have long admired the work they do.

Because of this, I was thrilled to have the chance to take part in a (dramatically accelerated) story exchange at the Future of Storytelling festival. With only an hour, we were paired off and given seven minutes each to share a story about ourselves; an experience that is, in and of itself, worthy of reflection (where to begin? How to choose? What do your choices say about you?). But the important thing to note here is the immediate gravity of the experience. The knowledge that you will take responsibility for a stranger’s story weighs heavily. You listen harder than you’ve ever listened. You try to piece together the things your partner says and does not say, and understand the silences between them. You build a bond in seconds because you know you have entered into a pact, however momentary, to protect the story of them. And as you re-enter the room, and begin to hear the stories being shared, you feel this bond in the wider group. Everyone listens respectfully, quietly. And this is part of the Narrative 4’s expertise. They create the conditions for people to share in unguarded, unusual and unselfconscious ways by laying the ground rules of respect, privacy and equality. Everyone’s story matters, however small or banal; however heroic or cruel, remote, or emotional.

We all carry around an inner story: who you are, why you are, what you’ve done – all contained in the single story you’ve just told your partner, however inarticulately. This inner story is an expression, not of fact, but of belief: a castle we construct from the fragments of experience, interaction, and outcomes we accumulate as we move through life. We experience this narrative, consciously and sub-consciously, as the fact of who we are. And this narrative, in big and small ways, determines much of our lives: how we conduct ourselves in the world, what we have the courage to pursue, how we treat the people we love.

When we’re young, this story evolves as elastically as our neural pathways. We learn from our interactions and reshape our sense of self accordingly. By the time we’re 25, this story is synaptically engrained; it becomes our short-hand to the world around us, making it harder and harder for us to change as we get older. To listen to another person tell your story is to see the same ray of light refracting through different prisms. You realise, in the most literal way – and perhaps for the first time in many, many years – that the story of you may not be quite what you thought it was.

For some people in the room, the experience illuminated a new sense of cause and effect; a new linearity; a different emphasis that betrayed an undisclosed truth. A new clarity on an unsolved riddle of lost love; a new accountability for actions taken or not taken. Those who had their story retold said it felt like a very powerful form of therapy: like walking around themselves in the therapist’s chair.

But above all else, the story exchange is about empathy in action. And in the care of the retelling; in the kindness of the details; in the fluidity of the story arc, taken so deeply to heart; in the visible connection between partners, who flinch and smile and steady themselves in synchronicity, there is something undeniable and wordless and true. Every story matters. Every story is different. Every story is the same.

Maybe you can change the world in an hour.