More Stories

“I got up and then I found a berry. And then I ate it. And then I went hunting with Andre. And then Andre was killed by a Mammoth. And then I was sad. And then I found another berry. And then I ate it. And then I felt better.”
— Noamh Eanderthal, ~40,000 BC.

Neanderthals — one of our evolutionary siblings — had many things going for them. They were physically stronger than us. They also had bigger brains than we did.

But they were terrible, terrible story tellers.

Homo sapiens (that’s us), on the other hand, are slightly less physically intimidating. And yes, we have a brain that’s a bit more on the compact — or portable as I’d like to think of it — end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, of all species in (known) existence, we do possess the most developed ability to tell a good story.

About 45,000 years ago — homo sapiens marched out of Africa towards Europe. There we met our brethren buff and brainy neanderthals.

A few thousand years later, neanderthals are nowhere to be found. And homo sapiens (homos sapien?) dominate the earth.

I’m telling you:

Stories.

Now I know what you’re all screaming in your compact, portable heads.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc!

The classic “after it, therefore because of it” logical fallacy. While we shouldn’t conflate correlation with causation, it supports the story that I’m trying to tell, so who cares about the actual truth. Hold that thought, we’ll get back to it.

How does one scale cooperation beyond a small group?

If we’re all sitting together around a camp fire, we’re all good. Our parents are friends. We’ve known each other since birth, we trust each other, we know what to expect.

But what if we need to work with that other group, one camp site over? We’ve seen them around, but don’t know much about them. How do we know we can trust them? How do we know that if we help them, they won’t stab us in the back?

What would help is if we would find something in common. Some sort of indication that they believe what we believe; that they want what we want. To throw in a terrible management term: to know that we’re somehow aligned.

But how?

Stories.

It’s stories that make the world go round. Ironically, it’s also stories that make the world go flat, but I’ll get back to that in a bit.

One of the obvious success stories (hah) of the scalability of the story is money.

I hope this won’t mess with your head too much, but money isn’t real. It’s not a thing rooted in physical reality. It’s a story we tell each other and that (most of us) are buying into. While once upon a time we traded a few chickens for a cow with a neighbor, today we tell ourselves that a number stored somewhere in a COBOL-implemented database (or on a Rust or C-implemented block chain) has value, and that it’s something we can trust and should care about. It’s this story that allows us to trade with people we have never met. Billions of people collaborate based on the money story.

When you can make collaboration happen at that scale, no neanderthal is going to be able to stop you. For better or for worse.

Stories.

Sadly — and we see some of this reality this week’s world events — there’s no correlation between what makes for a compelling story and... you know... the truth.

It would be great if stories would only really work if they accurately reflected reality. Sadly that’s not the case at all. In fact, it’s usually the completely fictional ones that make for a better, more attractive story.

A word of warning. We’re about tread into potentially controversial topics.

Let’s talk about the world being flat. I’m sorry. But I have to go there.

Which of the following stories do you think is more interesting, more compelling?

Version 1: There’s a conspiracy that has been going on for decades, likely longer. It’s a conspiracy between NASA, and many other government agencies around (I should really use a different preposition, which shows that even our language was infiltrated) the world. These groups have been colluding to hide a truth that is actually obvious to the critical eye. Anybody who’s ever looked at the horizon will intuitively know this truth, but every possible effort is being made to hide it, including amending the books that our children read in school. Including the technology that we use every day like Google Maps. All the people in high places, all the people in power are in on it. All of us have been gaslit for a long, long time. That reality is that the world is actually flat, not round, or “spherical” as the elites would attempt to correct you.

Version 2: Yah, we’ve been through this but let me repeat. Once upon a time, when we didn’t know any better, we thought that the world was flat, because why not — it looks that way at first sight. Then the Greeks invented math, did some measurements and calculations and deduced that it’s actually a sphere. While at that time we still assumed we were the center of the universe, even that didn’t turn out to be the case. Copernicus concluded that it’s not the spherical sun spinning around the spherical earth, but the other way around. End of story. By the way, if you were ever involved in anything mildly political, you’d know how near impossible it to even agree on something as trivial as the proper side of the road to drive on. The idea that a powerful elite across the globe would agree to conspire on anything and to keep it quiet is a romantic idea, but completely inconceivable.

I think you’ll agree that the second version, while being less batshit crazy, is rather boring.

Sadly, reality is often boring at first sight. This is why fiction is such a big genre. It’s way easier to create something compelling that’s made up.

When we’re tired at the end of the day, we kick back, flip on the TV and stream Shrinking, or The Diplomat (if you’re not, you’re doing it wrong — The Diplomat season 2 finale is insane). We don’t pull up a Tableau dashboard, or a A0-sized print-out of a spreadsheet. At least I don’t. Except on data nights (but perhaps I misheard what my wife asked for).

Could that dashboard or spreadsheet not be turned into a similarly compelling story, though?

I just realized that I set the bar quite high mentioning Shrinking and The Diplomat, so let me quietly dial that comparison down to an episode of The OC or Grey’s Anatomy instead and argue: yes, this can be done. It requires effort though. But why would something being hard be a reason not to try. Ultimately it’s the powerful stories that set the course of history. Case in point: neanderthals, where are they?

There’s a story locked in that dashboard that just screams to be let out.

There’s intrigue in that spreadsheet cell.

Once upon a time, in a dashing place, there was a board...