High-performance teams

Science and narrative

As indicated in The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, there is a close relation between narrative and science. A very interesting article by Roald Hoffman developing this idea has appeared in the current issue of the American Scientist. The connection between experiment and story has often been remarked: an account of an experiment is fairly obviously a story. But Hoffman goes further and points that even the most complex theory is in essence, what else but a story...

Storied Theory

By Roald Hoffmann

Published in American Scientist: July-August 2005

Volume: 93 Number: 4 Page: 308

DOI: 10.1511/2005.4.308

Science and stories are not only compatible, they're inseparable, as shown by Einstein's classic 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.

Science seems to be afraid of storytelling, perhaps because it associates narrative with long, untestable yarns. Stories are perceived as "just" literature. Worse, stories are not reducible to mathematics, so they are unlikely to impress our peers.

This fear is misplaced for two reasons. First, in paradigmatic science, hypotheses have to be crafted. What are alternative hypotheses but competing narratives? Invent them as fancifully as you can. Sure, they ought to avoid explicit violations of reality (such as light acting like a particle when everyone knows it's a wave?), but censor those stories lightly. There is time for experiment--by you or others--to discover which story holds up better.

The second reason not to fear a story is that human beings do science. A person must decide what molecule is made, what instrument built to measure what property. Yes, there are facts to begin with, facts to build on. But facts are mute. They generate neither the desire to understand, nor appeals for the patronage that science requires, nor the judgment to do A instead of B, nor the will to overcome a seemingly insuperable failure. Actions, small or large, are taken at a certain time by human beings--who are living out a story.

Better Theory Through Stories

One might think that experiments are more sympathetic than theories to storytelling, because an experiment has a natural chronology and an overcoming of obstacles (see my article, "Narrative," in the July-August 2000 American Scientist). However, I think that narrative is indivisibly fused with the theoretical enterprise, for several reasons.

One, scientific theories are inherently explanatory. In mathematics it's fine to trace the consequences of changing assumptions just for the fun of it. In physics or chemistry, by contrast, one often constructs a theoretical framework to explain a strange experimental finding. In the act of explaining something, we shape a story. So C exists because A leads to B leads to C--and not D.

Two, theory is inventive. This statement is certainly true for chemistry, which today is more about synthesis than analysis and more about creation than discovery. As Anne Poduska, a graduate student in my group, pointed out to me, "theory has a greater opportunity to be fanciful, because you can make up molecules that don't (yet) exist."

Three, theory often provides a single account of how the world works--which is what a story is. In general, theoretical papers do not lay out several hypotheses. They take one and, using a set of mathematical mappings and proof techniques, trace out the consequences.

Theories are world-making.

Finally, comparing theory with experiment provides a natural ending.

There is a beginning to any theory--some facts, some hypotheses. After setting the stage, developing the readers' interest, engaging them in the fundamental conflict, there is the moment of (often experimental) truth: Will it work? And if that test of truth is not at hand, perhaps the future holds it.

The theorist who restates a problem without touching on an experimental result of some consequence, or who throws out too many unverifiable predictions, will lose credibility and, like a long-winded raconteur, the attention of his or her audience. Coming back to real ground after soaring on mathematical wings gives theory a narrative flow.

Let me analyze a theoretical paper to show how this storytelling imperative works. Not just any paper, but a classic appropriate to the centennial of Albert Einstein's great 1905 papers....

To view the rest of the article analyzing Einstein's paper, with illustrations:

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/44518

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For more on The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

Narrative: The Secret to High-Speed Learning

What’s the secret to high-speed learning? Most discussions of learning are very cerebral i.e. all about brain, but the reality is that high-speed learning is all about a combination of brain and heart. We learn quickly when we are passionate about learning, slowly when we're not. If this is true, and I believe it is, for both formal and informal learning, then a primary focus in sparking high-speed learning has to be on engaging the heart. This is one reason why The Leader's Guide to Storytelling points out that abstract, cerebral approaches to learning are very ineffective, and why narrative is important for high-speed learning: it can engage the heart.

Another reason why the heart is important is that there are two types of learning - one that takes place within the existing set of assumptions and one that involves a change of a basic set of assumptions. The latter is the more important kind of learning and it's the harder one to accomplish because the passion to learn is generally absent.

There was an interesting article on this recently in Fast Company about health care. It pointed out that the basic problem of the health care system is not better high-tech medicine but rather the inability to get behavioral change. A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral. That is, they're sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control: i.e. too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise. Using conventional approaches to learning, 90% of patients don't change their lifestyle and are back in surgery, intensive care, or the morgue pretty soon. The amount of money at stake is large: about 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. Unless you can change the passion to learn to live more sensibly, people aren't willing to change their basic assumptions.

The same thing happens when you're trying to get an IBM, or Xerox, or Kodak, or the World Bank, to undertake a basic change in corporate strategy - unless you can generate the passion to learn and undertake basic change, it doesn't happen. And moreover, in these cases, it's a matter of getting large numbers of people to change their basic assumptions all at once, which is much more difficult, because the status quo constitutes mutual reinforcement for everyone not to change. In such settings, those proposing change tend to get classified as heretics, outsiders, or worse, in order to protect the status quo from change.

By contrast, changes within a given set of assumptions happen quite easily once the learner is motivated. e.g. since 4 pm yesterday, I have been struggling to figure out how get my Dell Inspirion 6000 computer to talk to Canon Optura 20 camcorder. It’s true that there's an overwhelming amount of information out there about such problems, and it hasn't been easy, but once I'm strongly motivated to solve the problem, the Web enables me to find the needle in the haystack, something that was not before possible. Getting to the solution moreover doesn't involve any change of my basic assumptions. It doesn't involve a change in my lifestyle.

Similarly, within a corporate setting, innovation and learning within the given assumptions of the firm happen relatively easily. Big companies with deep pockets win the battles of innovation at the margin without much difficulty. It's when you get to basic, disruptive change, that the big firms have a major problem, as Clayton Christensen has eloquently pointed out in his books.

One reason why discussions of learning get fixated on the brain, and largely miss the heart, is by framing the current overall issue of learning as one of the dealing with the infoglut. The reality is that the infoglut is (almost) irrelevant to the problems of learning: the Web has made it infinitely easier to find stuff, once we are set out with passion and persistence to learn something.

True, people feel overwhelmed. But why? There are several reasons, not all related to learning.

• One is work pressure, as companies try to do more with less, and people are squeezed in between. A charitable interpretation of this phenomenon would be that companies are trying to figure out how far they can squeeze their people before they self-destruct. This is not very intelligent management behavior.
• Another is that companies try to solve their own cost problems by making clients do the work - automated call centers instead of helpful human beings. Again a very short-sighted approach. Smart companies make things easier for customers, not more difficult.
• Another is that the pace of change of new technology means that constant learning is now de rigueur and some people haven't made that change in assumptions. This is a genuine learning problem.
• Another is that we're still learning the etiquette of the new technology e.g. sending a message to 300 people instead of the 3 who really need it.
• Finally, there is the fact that in the US, people live to work, rather than work to live. They seem to like working for its own sake. By contrast, in France, people work less and are (statistically) more productive. They like to enjoy life as well as work. It's a life style choice. (see Paul Krugman in the NYT on July 29. I leave it to you to say which country has things in better balance.

The bottom line from The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: high-speed learning runs on passion as well smarts. Engaging people’s hearts is a sine qua non for high-speed learning, and how else to do that except through narrative?

Find out more at http://www.stevedenning.com