Narratives are getting to be a hot topic, so you’d think I’d be pleased that I’ve just published a book where they play a central role. A few people have even congratulated me on my timing. They think it is deliberate. Sadly, I am not so smart. In fact, if I’d seen this coming, I’d probably have picked something else to work on.

You see, I don’t like working on popular, trendy things. I get anxious and irritable when I discover that others are working on the same ideas that I am. Call it intellectual agoraphobia, being an unsociable jerk, or just plain lack of competitive drive. So I haven’t exactly been happy about narratives suddenly becoming a hot topic. It feels like I just went on a lovely solitary hike through some beautiful wilderness, and arrived at a great camping spot, only to discover that a whole noisy, partying crowd had also gotten there by a different route.

Yeah, these are mean, turf-grubbing, selfish, uncharitable thoughts. It’s not like I own Narrative National Park.

Fortunately for my sanity, the big crowds seem to be headed along trails that don’t interest me. In business and politics, much of the attention is on marketing and motivational narratives. In the broader cultural sphere, there’s a lot of interest in identity narratives. There is also an anti-narrative movement focused on the problems of narrative approaches. If any of these topics interests you, here are some good starting points:

1. Marketing narratives: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
   
2. Motivational narratives: Squirrel Inc. by Stephen Denning
   
3. Identity narratives: The Redemptive Self by Dan McAdams
4. Anti-narrative movement: The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Tyler Cowen’s blog

My own interest is pretty narrowly focused on decision-narratives. The raw stream-of-consciousness story you tell yourself as you actually live through an experience and make your live, real-time decisions.

The book is primarily about the fundamentals of the idea, but in this post, I want to explore an application of those fundamentals to the problem of crafting strategy narratives (the post is stand-alone; you don’t need to have read the book). In particular, I am going to examine the limitations of existing varieties of strategy narratives, and argue that we need a new variety, thick strategy narratives.

[Read more…]

HT: Hosh Hsiao, Apple of my eye? US fancies a huge metaphor repository.

In the end the program should produce a methodology, tools and techniques together with a prototype system that will identify metaphors that provide insight into cultural beliefs. It should also help build structured framework that organizes the metaphors associated with the various dimensions of an analytic problem and build a metaphor repository where all metaphors and related information are captured for future reference and access, IARPA stated.

“For decision makers to be effective in a world of mass communication and global interaction, they must understand the shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures of interest. Recognizing cultural norms is a significant challenge, however, because they tend to be hidden.  We tend to notice them only when they are in conflict with the norms of other cultures. Such differences may cause discomfort or frustration and may lead to flawed interpretations about the intent or motivation of others. The Metaphor Program will exploit the use of metaphors by different cultures to gain insight into their cultural norms,” IARPA says.

The Metaphor Program is divided into two phases, totaling 60 months, and is intended to begin in November 2011.

HT Justin Pickard, Timepass and Boredom in Modern India.

This seems very similar to Robert Levine’s The Geography of Time in spirit, but more of a drill-down into a particular regional kind of time.

Boredom is experienced in relation to modern clock time.  Time drags because it seems to pass much more slowly than the clock or calendar says it should.  The ‘traditional’ time of pre-modern India is different, however, and Nita Kumar, who worked among artisans in Banaras in the 1980s, has captured it as well as anyone.  Banaras people, she says, are notorious for their unpunctuality and never care about waiting.  But that is not because ‘time has no importance for these people.  It is rather that time is too important; it cannot be sacrificed for this or that purpose arbitrarily; it has to be lived to the full, every bit of it …  There is no hurry, no sense of time slipping or flying by, or rushing by like a stream: there is no such thing as “time”.  It is not an external that controls you.  It is inside you in that it is a way of feeling.  The way you feel, what you are moved to do, is what time it is.’^[11] At first glance, the Banaras artisans’ outings and recreations look like old-fashioned forms of timepass.  But they are not; not only is timepass about time dragging, rather than flying by, but more crucially it is about time as pointless, external and controlling – which is exactly the opposite of the traditional sense described by Kumar.

The article is about the idea of “timepass” in India, what Americans might call “killing time.” The author traces the term to around 1990, but I vaguely recall hearing it well before that. In Bombay at least, in the specific context of peanuts sold as an idle-munching snack (the street vendors call out, “timepass” so it is a synonym for roasted peanuts), I think it goes much further back.