36 by Justin O’Neill

Eighteen years ago today I turned eighteen.

Two whole lives spent coming of age.

Interestingly, it actually feels like something is different this time around. Is it possible that we divide our lives into 18 year periods? What happens at age 54?

My final installment on working with stories in my facilitation practice.

Stories to Remember who we are

The best teachers tell stories. They will sit you down and tell you a story about someone or something that was facing the very situation in which you find yourself. All the great religious leaders told stories. Many of their stories focused on the fact that the wisdom we need is available to us right now. That wisdom may be ancient, but there is nothing new under the sun.

I am a keen collector of teachings from Aborginal Elders. By teachings I don’t mean stories commonly thought of as “the myths of Indians.” Rather, I covet and value the wisdom that is shared by my Elders who aim to make it directly applicable to my present situation. Whether it is Herb Joe’s teaching about “poor weak human beings” or Sonny Diabo’s lessons about the life path, Elders show us that the stories that are ancient and deeply embedded in our cultures have applicability to the present day.

First Nations communities suffer from a couple of centuries of objectification. Our stories and teachings have been collected like museum pieces and stored on shelves and in books where they seem to atrophy and become more and more distant from daily life. It is not uncommon to hear people questioning the value of these old teachings and their relevance to contemporary situations. This has created a very disempowered situation. Without our own stories, we go to the stories of others, and those who have the most powerful story telling technologies (TV stations, media outlets, films) have also had a fairly consistent agenda of colonizing indigenous peoples. Mass media continues the colonization of indigenous peoples by giving us stories that are not our own, filling the vacuum left by the loss of our traditional technologies.

You might well be forgiven for thinking that the traditional modes of passing on stories have disappeared if you have never heard an Elder teaching. But once you discover that these teachings are very much alive, and what’s more, they are OURS, something shifts. You begin to look for more and more knowledge that is actually borne from life in this place, stories from our own families and territories. Stories about the land and the people and the situations that haven’t changed even if the cultures have. It becomes clear that the stories and teachings are still current, that they are relevant and more powerful than imported stories because they are from the land beneath your feet.

Indigenous peoples are indigenous through the connection to land. For centuries the land has been interpreted through stories. So to reconnect people to their lands, the stories must be told and the cultural understanding set in the enduring context of who we are, where we have come from and where we are right now. Traditionally, stories were not mere curiosities served up to pass the time and entertain. They were the fundamental clues to living a healthy life in a very particular place. And they remain current.

I once listened as Nuu-Chah-Nulth Elder Julia Lucas told stories of son of Raven and son of Mink and how they tried to have their way with the young women of the community. Terrible and painful fates befell both of them as a result of their sexual improprieties. They were funny stories, but they were offered as earnest teachings about sexual health for young people. And they are just as current in an age of AIDS and other STDs as they were in the old days, when the punishment for sexual misconduct could be pain and death from other means. For the youth who were listening to Julia, these stories really sank in. They were their stories, their teachings, stories about their ancestors and directly relevant to their lives.

Having these stories and the realization that the stories are yours is a tremendously empowering thing. It can be truly transformative to realize that all the cultural baggage you seem to have been saddled with is actually important, relevant and exclusively yours. If you have this knowledge available to you, then you don’t need to go outside for your stories. You can remain true about who you are, secure in your identity and gifted with your teachings. From this place of power you can go out into the world and hear the stories of others with open ears, seeing them for what they are rather than attaching to them to fill a gap in your life.

I think this lesson applies to any group with a shared culture. This is why Open Space Technology meetings work well in organizations. People create their own agendas around the stories of the organization and over the course of a day or two, folks realize that what they have in the room right now, in this moment, is far more precious than they ever thought. By telling stories, recapitulating history, interpreting each other’s inner lives and sharing lessons learned, people come to realize that their own experience has immeasurable value to the group.

This is not a prescription for group-think or navel-gazing. It is rather a call to understand how important the tacit knowledge inherent in any group is to that group’s destiny. Stories are the DNA of culture. They reflect where you have come from and they determine where you will go. You can augment your DNA with other genes, but the stories you have right now are the ones that have brought you to this point. They are responsible for every piece of success and every taste of failure. Learning from these stories, seeing the successes as things to replicate and taking medicine from the failures is what propels you forward without dependence on outsiders. It gives you strength to move in the outside world secure in who you are and what you are doing. It allows you to be focused on your purpose while you interact with a learn from your environment.

Stories mediate our inner and outer worlds. They are the glue that joins the two together and brings us fully into the present in a holistic and healthy way. Knowing our stories gives us tremendous power: we are clear about who we are, how we make meaning of the world around us and we know how that world has been interpreted through our real or metaphorical ancestors. We are able to benefit from our unique inheritance and work to create an even better one for our descendants.

Our job is to take all of this and be in the world in such a way that the stories that are told about us give hope and power to those who inherit our legacy. It is no small challenge, but it is within each of us. All we need to do is to remember what we are doing right now, so that when the time comes we can say “once it was like this…” We will all be Elders at some point and we will be called upon to share our life’s lessons with others. How will we benefit those people?

What will our story be?

Stories to move us through grief

Any time people have to accept loss, the grief cycle is triggered. To various degrees people experience shock and anger, denial, acceptance, letting go and reframing. This process is subtle for small things like having a trusted colleague moved to a different project but it can be full blown if people experience a trauma such as a death or a similar emotional upheaval.

Change brings loss, and because change is constant, so is the emotional response to what is being lost. In other words, as my colleague Birgitt Williams is fond of saying, “there is always grief in the room.” Working with grief is a key skill for facilitators and storytelling turns out to be an important way people move through loss and get to a reframing stage in their lives, with an ability to see possibility in the future.

Sudden change triggers a defensive mechanism. We get our backs up, express shock and experience anger at the way our world has been shaken. And then, as if to stem the tide, we engage in denial strategies to try to stave off the reality of the situation. To move through this and accept the fact of change, it helps to be able to remember and honour what has been lost. And so stories become a very important part of the grieving process. This is why we create space for stories at funerals. In Maori culture, friends and family gather in the whara nui (big house) with the body of the deceased to tell the unvarnished truth of the life which has ended. Relatives get to hear the full story, the good and bad (and sometimes the ugly) as people come to remember the dead.

This process helps the whole community to remember the person and to accept the death. It also serves as a catharsis to enable people to move on. Likewise, in organizational life, telling stories is a very important way to deal with large scale changes.

I was recently working with an organization that was experiencing a lot of staff dissension and management turnover. People seemed to be fighting over everything and there seemed to be no one cause for all the trouble. After talking with people for a while it became clear that the organization was facing a fundamental shift in its mandate and direction. This shift had come from the Board of Directors and had been refused by the Executive Director, a founder of the organization. He left angrily and the staff morale broke down after that. Over the course of a year, a once thriving and important regional organization became impotent and toxic.

This shift in direction was a very difficult thing to accept for the people who had worked for a long time in the organization. Many of them weren’t prepared to accept the change and it became clear that they were trying to hold on to the status quo as much as possible. Letting go was hard.

So, in preparation for a strategic planning retreat, we held a day of story telling, where the employees and the Board together could tell stories about the organization and the founder and the great work that had been accomplished. People honoured one another and the mood of the gathering was solemn but, like the aftermath of a storm, seemed to be clearing. The storytelling session gave the staff a chance to remember what had been and tangibly let it go, sometimes with humour, sometimes with tears. After several hours of storytelling, people became clearer, more able to envision an uncertain future. It made the subsequent work a little easier because people were more open to new things.

Story telling like this creates openness in a situation that feels like the walls are closing in. When people are under stress and in conflict it is usually a sign that the emotional space they share has become too small. Storytelling sessions, in the truly natural, round-the-campfire, natural mode can have the effect of both releasing emotional energy and building a new shared emotional space. And sometimes to move forward, that is the kind of ground you need to have sown.

Next, how remembering stories from the past help us to move forward secure in the knowledge of who we are.

A second way that I use stories is perhaps the most traditional way: to hear a deeper truth embodied in the story.

Stories as expressions of our truths

I facilitate a great many meeting where the subject matter is dry: public policy, goals and objectives, interests and agreements. In many ways, a lot of the work I am called on to do involves holding space for richer communication between people. And for me that means truer communication. So, for example, when I am listening to a community member trying to describe a policy issue to a government person, I�ll ask her to tell a story about what she means. Suddenly authenticity gets introduced into the equation. Telling a story from a personal perspective puts a face on a policy issue, reminds us what is important and helps to sew together a relationship between people who may have very different positions, responsibilities and power. Especially in working with community and government people, using stories is a tacit acknowledgment of the inherent power that each person brings to the process. We are all endowed with are stories and as Thomas King says, stories are all that we are.

Years ago I heard Utah Philips tell a story. He told of a time when he was a young man and he had an opportunity to visit a cowboy who knew dozens of songs from the great cattle drives of the 19th century. The cowboy lived in a small house in New Mexico and was dying. It was a tremendous opportunity to get these songs from the mouth of a man who had been on these cattle drives so Phillips arranged a visit.

When he arrived at the cowboy�s house he was met at the door by a nurse who said that although the cowboy was in poor health, he was looking forward to the visit. It would take a few minutes to get him ready so Phillips was invited to make himself at home in the living room.

Phillips began perusing the bookshelves and was immediately struck by the huge number of books from the ultra conservative John Birch Society. His initial reaction was to ask himself what he was doing there, about to have a conversation with a man who was bound to feed him political babble that Phillips would find deeply offensive.

And then he caught himself and he realized that he wasn�t there to talk politics with the cowboy, he was there to get songs. He realized that talking politics with the cowboy would only result in a conversation full of canned ideas recited from a book. Phillips was after the truth, and in concluding the story he said, �if you ask people about what they truly know. They will always tell you the truth.� And what they truly know is not contained in the books they read, it is contained in the stories about who they are and what they do and what is close to their heart.

That story has informed my approach to learning about what is important to people ever since. Whether I am working in a consultation process or helping a team find their way through a project, I�ll always go to the stories of the people in the room, and invite that level of truth to come forward.

It�s important to note that the stories don�t ever have to pass any objective test for truth either. These kinds of stories are not stories intended for the world of metrics. They can only be measured in terms of the impact they have in creating a shared cultural space. They give us glimpses of what people know, of what people value and therefore they contribute to the overall cohesion of a group, organization or a community.

Think of the stories you know, the myths that you share with others in a group. What do these myths tell you about the group? What is the �inside� information you are privy to, information which can only be gathered by an insider through knowing the stories of the group. What do those stories tell you about the Spirit of the place? Each group is unique because of the stories that create its shared space.

Stories to bring the world into being

And as much a stories can contribute to an abstract set of values, stories are used to make things concrete. Let me tell you what I mean�(see that?)

Years ago, I first twigged to the power of stories in a meeting with government and community people on Aboriginal family violence. The meeting was being held in Ottawa, which like most capital cities tends to exist on a plain far removed from everyday life. The conversation began in a very dry and technical manner, about the amount of money available for family violence prevention and the restrictions of the mandate to spend that money and so on. There was no connection to the real world until one community member started to tell a story about a recent case of family violence in her community. Suddenly the stories came poring forth, and it was all we could do as facilitators to record the underlying points that were being made. Much to the amazement of the government folks, by the end of a day of storytelling we had compiled a list of policy recommendations without a single person talking about mandates, program spending authorities or regulations. Each of these stories was a concrete reminder of what was true, and as facilitators we acted as translators, shifting the language from one ear to another, trying to represent and honour what was being said in a way that was understandable and useful to the government folks. And while all of this was going on, a heart connection was being made between everyone in the room an everyone became a little more real to each other through the listening and the telling.

In many indigenous cultures, the world is said to be created from a story. In this example, I am trying to show that it is possible to tap this teaching, and to share with one another the stories of our jouneys in order to create a community, a team or an organization based on the truth of lived experience. The role of the facilitator then becomes one of inviting forth stories, being a good listener and being a helpful translator where required. Most importantly the facilitator must hold space for the myths to do their work.

This particular example also points to another very important way I use stories in my facilitation practice: in the process of grief and healing. That is the subject of the next post.

How I use stories

As a facilitator, I work a lot with stories. Both in organizational and community settings, stories and storytelling are important to my practice.

We understand stories to be the fabric of our cultural and social worlds. Within organizations, storytelling is becoming more widely recognized as a critical mode for the transmission of knowledge. In this series of posts I want to discuss the ways in which my engagement with stories in Aboriginal communities and organizations has informed my practice as an organizational development consultant.

My story about my work.

I have a story that I tell about what I do. My work focuses on First Nations and Aboriginal communities and organizations primarily in Canada. I work as a facilitator serving the evolution of groups and communities. I sometimes describe what I do as “organizational and community development” but more recently I have come to see my work as “applied decolonization” primarily because I focus more and more with groups on finding their own solutions within themselves instead of relying on external, and often colonial structures, to provide answers. For me, “decolonization” means finding ways to constantly open up ourselves and our communities against all of those forces that would close us down.

To do this, it is important that we draw on the stories of individuals, groups, organizations, communities and cultures to be able to understand and express the inherent gifts that help us to move on.

Indigenous communities and people have a rich tradition of storytelling. Telling stories serves a variety of purposes from transmitting personal and cultural knowledge, to healing, to helping people understand what is true and real. In the contemporary world it seems as if story telling is a lost art, but in my work, where stories are invited forward, it doesn’t take long to recover the method as people realize that storytelling is about connecting with what we actually know.

This series of posts is about the ways in which I work with stories. I am interested in readers’ thoughts to these methods and suggestions for extending them deeper.

Talking about what’s real

Stories help us to understand what is real. They do this in two ways. First, by understanding the stories we have about ourselves and the world we can understand how we frame the world. Second being invited to tell our stories we automatically undertake both introspection and expression the twin acts of creating shared truth and meaning.

As individuals, we are constantly negotiating our place between what we personally feel is real and true and what is collectively held to be real and true. We examine our world through the stories we hold about it and this shapes our reaction to things.

When we perceive an event in the external world, we do so through our stories. For example if we see two people in conflict, our perception of the situation is determined by stories such as those about power, respect, peacemaking and independence. These stories are so powerful that they actually create different versions of reality and we quickly lose sight of what is real.

Consider a common example. We witness a shouting match between a manager and a subordinate in an organization. If we believe that those with power should use it responsibly, we might conclude that the manager is in the wrong and that the subordinate is right in defending herself.

If we believe that people should be loyal and respectful to authority, we might see the subordinate as the problem for engaging in inappropriate behaviour with her boss.

On the other hand, if we have a strong story about peace, for example that people should be peaceful at all times, then we might conclude that both are wrong, and that both bear some responsibility for finding a different way to resolve their conflict.

Furthermore, if we have stories about ourselves either as peacemakers (I help keep the peace) or as people who value independence (I need to let them resolve this situation), it will colour our relationship to the event.

So what is real? Having uninvestigated stories about what is real actually impedes our ability to see the situation for what it is. It closes down our ability to relate to both people in the conflict and sets us in conflict with those that hold different stories about the situation. If I am facilitating a situation like this, it makes sense to hear from people about what they perceive, but it also helps to go deeper and invite an exploration of the stories that each person holds because these are the things that will drive our relationship with the situation and each other. It is fine to have stories about the world for they help us to mediate our relationship with reality, but to hold them without knowing what they are pits us against others with deeply held stories and beliefs. We see our own reality as the only reality, without understanding how others see things. After a process of introspection, we can share our stories with each other in a way that both holds open space for innumerable interpretations of the world while at the same time recognizing that the actually reality of the situation is bigger than what we alone perceive.

Understanding the stories we hold about the world is a deeply introspective process. It can be facilitated with a number of practices that connect us as individuals with ourselves. I personally use meditation and other contemplative practices and, increasingly, what Byron Katie calls “The Work” which is a powerful way of compassionately investigating the underlying stories we carry with us, and around which we construct our identity.

These processes are useful for investigating the “shoulds” that plague us. When we use the word “should” we tell a story that argues with reality: if people “should” be peaceful and they clearly aren’t, we will create stress for ourselves until we can tell ourselves a more real story. A more real story might be one that acknowledges that people get into conflicts. It helps then to position myself to conflict: once I recognize the reality, I am no longer surprised or shocked by it and I can work to resolve it if that is what I choose to do. Understanding my story helps me to move beyond the powerless state of “you should stop fighting” and into a more active role of peacemaking.

Once we begin to understand our personal stories, we can then use storytelling to express the way we see the world, and that is the subject of the next post.