Last night while watching TV I saw a commercial for Air Wick’s Freshmatic® air freshener. Cute, but still, the same old product, just in new packaging. A good example of linear thinking; a way of thinking, I suggest, no longer cuts the mustard.
Let’s face it, although we have deluded ourselves into thinking it does, the old linear way of doing things no longer works, perhaps never has. We are in desperate need of a new model, a new way of thinking, a new way of getting things accomplished.
The global economy has collapsed, our educational system is in disarray, and social ills continue to mount—each the result of linear thinking. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act doesn’t create new models of teaching, but is the same old linear results based way of doing education. Teach the kids pre-described facts, test them, and you had better have better scores than last year.
The old linear, left-brained thinking that we have grown so comfortable with must give away to a new model of right-brained thinking—Creative and conceptual. Some call this new model for thinking, the “New Creative Economy,” or the Conceptual Economy.” Whatever you call it, the “new economy” is at its core, a storytelling economy.
Make no mistake here; this is not storytelling as we are use to it. This is not storytelling in the same linear fashion we use today, 1 + 1 = 2. The Air Wick ad had a cute storyline – skunks visiting rabbits – but it lead linearly to the punch line at the end: “Buy Air Wick Freshmatic.® ”
The new storytelling model is web-weaving, histological storytelling. In truth, there is nothing new about it; it is a return to a form of storytelling lost to the Enlightenment and its subsequent 1 + 1=2 objective logic. Over the years we have come to believe that the only way to think logically is the linear way. If Quantum Theory has taught anything, it is that there are logic constructs other than linear.
Perceptually, quantum theory evokes a new non-linear way of viewing and understanding the world. Embedded within the theory is the concept called, “superposition of states,” the simultaneous coexistence of several different possibilities. Each possibility, under the right circumstances has a probability of being observed.
Perhaps we should call this model of storytelling “Quantum Storytelling,” for in each story there is an overwhelming array of potential and possibility. You can stare at a photograph, for instance, over and over again, each time finding a new meaning, a new story. From this example it ought to be obvious that stories can be found in everything, not only in what we traditionally call a “story.”
Stories are all around us, in words and sounds, in what we see and in what we feel; everything is a story, everything tells a story. Stories are contextual; they make sense of who we are and how we fit into the larger picture. Storytelling puts our backstory and future potential into the context of the present. Through our stories we see the world, and our experience in it—episodic events, not an ordered logic of presuppositions. We process and discover our identity through the story
Storytelling puts our individual story – who we are, where we have come from, and where we think we are headed – into the context of our larger world, be it our block, city, or the world as a whole. Storytelling plants the story firmly into our full contextual environment; how we relate to each other and to nature.
For a story to make an impact, it must be delivered in such a way as to create within the observer an emotional impact, for in doing so, the observer becomes part of the story. We call this the grammar of storytelling. Unfortunately for us, the old linear way of thinking has struggled to change this grammar into linearly logical, objective outcome based conclusions, when in reality the grammar of storytelling is evolutionary and subjective, quantum if you will.
© Urban Paradoxes / Frank A. Mills, 2008