 In this episode we'll be talking about why is everybody talking about storytelling these days. We'll also address how stories can help you understand the world around us and help to co-create new services. And finally we'll talk about activism and activists and why you need to become one. Here's the guest for this episode, let the show begin. Hello, I'm Mary Alice Arthur and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to do more work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. My guest in this episode is Mary Alice Arthur. Mary Alice helps people and organizations find stories that make them flourish and helps these stories to come alive. If you've been following the show for some time, you know that I think stories and storytelling are key cornerstone in service design. And Mary Alice has a great way of explaining the power of stories and also how we can actually practically use stories on a day-to-day basis to do good. So this is an essential episode for any service designer. If this is your first time here on this channel, don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon because I post new videos on this channel at least once a week. So that's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Mary Alice. Welcome to the show, Mary Alice. Thanks. Good to be here. It's really nice to have a non-service designer on the Service Design Show because it's always so enriching to hear stories. And we're going to talk about stories from other fields so I'm really happy that you're here. For the people who don't know who you are because probably this is a new audience listening to you today. Could you give a brief introduction? Who are you? I call myself a story activist and that really has two parts. So I'm somebody who's really interested in how story works and story of course is you could call it the human operating system. So it's a really good thing to know something about. And the word activist for me means what stories do I choose to pay attention to? Because when I activate stories they come to life and we are living in stories. So it's really an interesting thing to know how to activate stories. Which ones do we want to live in and which ones don't we want to live in? So that's one side of my work. I work with stories and how they're working. And the other bit is about hosting. So how do we actually work together well to bring our stories to life? And that is what kind of processes do we use? How do we go to conversation that really matters? How do we stay together when it gets hard? And how do we learn? How do we verse stories together? I've said in a previous episode that I believe that storytelling is really an important part of the work we do as a service design community because it's all about communication and explaining and getting people to work together. So I'm sure that we'll learn a lot today. You gave me three really interesting topics. Are you ready to start and do some interview jazz? Yeah. This is new for me though. Yeah, let's give it a shot. Okay, so the first topic for today is called The New Black. Why are we talking about storytelling as the new black? What does that mean? So this is a phrase that comes out of the fashion industry, right? Black is the traditional color people wear in urban settings. And if you've ever watched a fashion event, so guys don't worry if you haven't, but if you've ever watched a fashion event, there's lots of color, there's lots of movement, there's lots of clothes, and then the designer comes out and they're always wearing black. It's very interesting, they're very plain. So every so often the fashion industry says Navy is the new black or Maroon is the new black. In fact in the U.S. there's a TV show called Orange is the New Black, a story of a woman who went to prison, right? But I call story the new black because we are calling everybody a storyteller, which is actually factually true. If you are a human being you are a storyteller. But we call our music people storytellers. We call our authors storytellers, that's more kind of a legitimate one. Sometimes we call our politicians storytellers. So we're kind of labeling everything stories, so stories like out there floating around, but not everybody knows how to work with it or what it really means. And why, the first question is, is there a big difference in the attention for stories and storytelling for let's say in the last five or ten years from your experience and where is that coming from? That's the second question. If we look at the history, this is an interesting thing. There is a book out there called Megatrends that was written in 1983 by John Nesbitt and Patricia Aberdeen and they were their future trend people. And they had written about these things that were coming up. The only one I remember out of that book was called High Tech, High Touch. So it was interesting that in the 70s was the rise of personal computers. When Steve Jobs and his mates and others started working on, everybody should be able to have a computer. And at the same time, the storytelling revival started to happen in the U.S. and the U.K. So suddenly people thought it was kind of interesting to get together and listen to traditional tales and tell personal stories and things like that. So these two things don't appear to be related, but they, in my book and from this particular future trend, I think they are, and if you look at social media, social media these days is a massive platform for personal storytelling. So it was about 2003. You've had Annette Simmons on your show. I met her around that time because the first people talking about organizational storytelling started meeting about that time. Around 2003, so like 15 years ago, yeah. That's also when IBM started, it had the Kenevan Center, Dave Snowden's work out of that started in IBM and their interest in story started then. That's when he was also working. So a lot of people started talking about it then, but I used to talk about it as a fresh green field and there were people outstanding in it. I mean, there were people standing way over there. And when I started talking about storytelling in 2003, 2004, people looked at me like I was crazy and they would say, oh, that's interesting. And then I could see them turn the other way. And then it finally started coming into the literature probably when Steve Denning started writing about it. He had been working for the World Bank and because of that organization and the seriousness of that organization, suddenly the mainstream media, Harvard Business Review started thinking about it. When something goes into Harvard Business Review, it's kind of getting mainstream. We've had the same one with design thinking and service design happen. Yeah. And our practice fields would probably say, is it a good thing or not that people are all talking about this? Exactly, yeah. That's also, there was the conversation also with Annette, sort of like, what is the downside that storytelling is getting the attention it is getting. One thing that triggers me, I mean, like you said, if you think about the new black and think about the fashion industry, it's, you know, it's fashion. But I wouldn't, I don't know, would you compare storytelling to fashion? Will it, will it move into a new season and will storytelling be over? Probably not, right? But this is the challenge, I think, which is why I'm very interested in it, is because what happens when we begin to use things that are intrinsically part of our humanity as tools? And in the working world, we call that flavor of the month. You know, oh, I like this ice cream this month and next month I'm on to something else. And we know about that in organizational settings. People get, they were into agile and then they get into lean and then they get into, so whatever the next thing is, gets the focus and then they kind of go, well, that didn't work, let's use the next thing. But because stories are the way that humanity works in the world and takes its agency, the ability to do something, then I think it's really important to say this is more than a tool. And what does that mean? So do we, what do we have to do to make it one blow over? Because like you said, it's part of humanity. So should we treat it in a different way? Should we have a different conversation around it? I think so. I think people need to say, how do I become the most conscious about how story works? When I decided to take on the title, Story Activist, I had one friend who had very early on in the 1960s been working with the farm workers movement and she said, don't use this word activist, people respond negatively to it and I thought to myself, there are so many words I can think of that need reclaiming. And activism is one of them and leadership is one of them and power is one of them. All of these things, consumer, we call people consumers but what would happen if we believed ourselves to be citizens? The languaging is actually really important. How we define things. And so we're in that period when things need to be reframing, renaming, reclaiming. These are all rhyme interestingly. I didn't mean to do that but we need to do some of that activity to say, what does it really mean instead of this fly by. So we have a political leader who talks about fake news and alternative facts which is very interesting because it actually puts the focus on what does real mean and what are we using our stories for. So when will we wake up to how we're using our stories really? And that's part of the work I've been doing. Can we create some consciousness around story? And more consciousness. So how would you describe the way we're using stories these days? I think about it as three waves. They're kind of like waves rolling in but the biggest one right now is influence. So we are in the wave of influence and people, especially organizational leaders want to learn how to tell stories because they want influence. They want to say, listen to my idea or you should trust me on this or buy my product or our product means this so we're going to tell some stories about it. So by far I think what's making this incredible rise of storytelling is the wave of influence. People believing I want influence. The question of course is what are you using your influence for? For good or for evil. Because a bulldozer is simply a tool it can knock down something precious or it can make the way for something to be built. It all depends on how you decide to use it. So a story is the same. I would say there are no innocent stories. Every story is asking for something. As an agenda. And maybe the agenda is just telling me, I want to tell you or I feel hurt and I want somebody to know how I feel or this happened and I can finally express it. All of those stories are asking for something. Will you be sharing the other two waves in the next topics? Okay, so this is a good time to sort of move forward. Let's move on into the second topic and I think this will give you the opportunity to talk about the other waves that is called story rolls. So before I get into those I do want to talk about the other two topics before I get into the story rolls. Okay, so the important thing to know is this word here. Story field. So we think about ourselves and about things as having a story but in fact we are the intersection of all the stories that we hold about ourselves all the stories others hold about us all the stories of our roles like you're a somebody who works in service design you're a father, you're a colleague you're a friend, you might be a sibling maybe you have others, you're a son all of those things are different stories and so you're actually not one story, you're a field and it's an interesting thing to know that every person plays a thing as a field. So every organizational structure, every product is the intersection of all these different stories and that makes it interesting and of course the question is which stories are on top and what's playing itself out. So the first wave of story I think is about influence the second one is about collective sense and meaning making. We can work with stories because they have the gold in them because we tend to file all of our experiences and what we know in our heads by asking for the stories. So context equals content and a good way to get stories from people is to ask a good question. That's what we're trying to do here. Yeah, and that is in fact one of the most powerful tools I think for leadership is the ability to ask questions and I call it question literacy. We think of literacy as the ability to read but there's also question literacy the ability to ask good questions and not many people have that these days so that's interesting. So that's the second wave. Tons of people know about story for influence fewer people know about story for collective sense and meaning making the third one I think is healing and holding that is holding W-H-O-L-I-N-G bringing the pieces back together. How can story help us come together around things that we've maybe been fragmented around. And I often think when I'm working with groups whether people realize this or not there is some healing needed before you can get into action. So whether that's I'm sorry I didn't tell you or I'm sorry you didn't know that or I need to apologize for this or I see you now or any of those kind of things there's either very covert meaning people are aware of it or overt people are aware of it or it's covert something needs to happen in order for people to step in fully. So very few people know about that one but that leads us into the roles. So how can you yeah there we go. The story roles. So this here's my question in return what if story could really help you in a variety of ways that you're working what are some roles you could take on right. So the first one for me when I think about field work that is how do I find out the story field I'm working in then I need to take on the role of expedition leader. And the nice thing about this word expedition is that an expedition leader realizes they need a variety of talents on their team in order to find out what's really going on. So that also means we need a variety of stories in order to find out what's really going on. So how can we use story to help us explore the territory we're working in so that's one role. Secondly stories can help you develop stuff. I want to take my work further I want to find out how service design can extend through other products and places I'm working so this is a strategic approach so this is a strategist role it's a strategic thing to use stories to help develop what you're doing. So what stories are we going to tell about something or what can so we first of all are going to learn about the field that we're in and now we're going to go okay well strategically which story should we be telling in order to take our work further. So which stories do we put on top is that yeah. Yeah which do we lift up which stories do we help to emerge. Yes. And we can help them by keeping using them then there's this role of harvesting so I use this word harvest we know about what harvesting is if we know about farming so every farmer plants for a harvest you have a plan so if you want to be a good harvester this is about finding out what stories we're carrying and it's a really interesting thing to harvest the story of our project team around service design. What have we learned working on our work that may take us forward or show us where innovations are waiting or help us to understand who was there that we didn't see at the time so harvesting is a really interesting way to use stories. And how does harvesting relate to the first one like exploring which which stories are around how do these two relate. So here I want to search out what's the field I'm operating in where are these intersecting stories what are people saying about something and usually the stories they're telling are telling me what they believe about it so what do people believe. Now I might go I really want to go after I have a specific harvesting tactic I want to take I want to go after who needs to work with whom to make this thing really work well so I'm going to ask that as my question are there stories that will help me to find out about that. This is like a research perspective. And then finally this one is about co-creating if I want to take on the role of a visionary then my I can create a story a future story to say where are we going to go in the future because we the stories like the roadway it takes us in a certain direction so together with what I'm working on or who I'm working with or whoever my co-creators are we can become visionary and decide where we're going by creating stories that could take us there and this last thing immediately reminds me of politics like in which story of which story do you want to be part of like do you agree like is that politicians are always doing that and you'll notice the wave we've been in this wave right at the moment and we'll be going a bit more right and most of our politicians are saying we're going to make us great again that's not only here but that's in other places too returning to the good days returning to the old days what that story is telling us is I want to take us back to a place of comfort where we felt we knew what we were doing and who we were the interesting thing for me is could they decide to do this instead and say who do we decide to be that's actually a much more interesting jumping off place from my perspective if we knew where we were so we can if we knew where we were at this moment then who do we decide to be how have we learned to work together and then who do we decide to be as a result could be really interesting I don't notice politics moving in that direction it tends to be more populist but for those of us who are voting we could say what stories are people telling and if I dig into those deeply why are they telling those and do I therefore really want to go in that direction with that person or what story do I choose if I wake up get beyond the emotion stories trigger emotion which is why they're really powerful which of these four roles is a role that you find most interesting or most valuable most yeah valuable I can tell you when I think it's the do I have a preference I like doing all of those things I can imagine in general I like doing this a lot because this is the unsung role what do we really already know from what we've experienced if we would go after where have we learned to work well together or if I'm thinking about a product or a service when has it happened that people are interacting with this at the very the very level we hope for and what helped that to be true so if we really dig into what we are what's already hiding in plain sight that's something there's something really really cool about that I'm thinking about the harvesting perspective as just sort of tuning in to the the stories you want to hear or see because like you said it's a story field and sort of you hear all the stories at the same time but harvesting is like tuning in to those specific stories you're interested in it's like tuning a radio station you only want to listen to the violins and not the rest of it it's something like that not the rest of the orchestra yeah and from your experience which role is the most challenging or hard sometimes it can be this one the visionary role the co-creating because often people come to work on something with certain ideas I want it to be like this or here's where the potential is and we can even be using the same language and mean quite different things and it may take us a long time to realize it yeah yeah yeah so you have to sort of establish first a common language before you can even start to think about it and I've worked with some senior teams realized later they were using the same word for different stuff and that's why they could never understand each other oh you mean that oh and now I get it yeah and I think language is so important and that's one of the big struggles in service design that everybody the running joke is if you ask 10 service designers for a definition of the field you'll get 11 definitions and that's that's really a language issue right we don't have a our language is not common enough I'd say yeah you want to add something yeah that's that that can make it really interesting to ask them to tell a story instead of a given definition yeah and that's probably and that's usually what happens exchanging what I call war stories or that's tell me what you did and how it went down yeah are you ready to move on to the third topic and I think it closely relates to what you started with yeah okay I am you said you called yourself an activist so here we go activist and the question for you again to come up with an interesting question starter yeah how far can we take story and how far can we work with it and that's why I think this whole concept of story activism or being a story activist is really interesting because essentially all of us are story activists and I got this phrase from a New Zealand actor called Cliff Curtis and he was recorded as saying something like when story is really working it makes you want to do something it makes you want to run to jump to be active which is of course the essence of story and so everybody who works with story for me as an activist something like that I poked my ears up like this I poked my ears up to say oh I'm a story activist that's what I want to do so the question is what stories are we paying attention to and how so within any story field there's some stories that we need to stop telling when we keep telling those stories it's not helpful so I noticed that in the NGO field a lot of nonprofits especially working with people who are marginalized use very deficit language and they have to tell victim stories a lot in order to get funding but what does that force the people who hold those stories it forces them to stay victims essentially because they have to keep telling the story to get the money so some stories need to stop being told some stories we need to keep telling because they're really good and some we need to start telling and it's interesting in this field to ask yourself what stories need to be told what stories do we need to keep telling and what stories do we need to start telling and that's like writing a new chapter for your book like what what will the next next chapter look like what do you want to be in the next chapter and you ask a question how far can we take stories or what do you mean with how far how far in in terms of so do you think about story as a tool think about story as a methodology we've talked about it as something that can inform some roles that work inside of inside of the work is it a way of life so I often when people say to me what is story really I have a number of pictures I hold up so I hold up a picture of a road leaning into the future so the story can take us into the future it's a frame so often people can't you know they have they whatever their picture is like you know whatever this is it's like having a box of puzzle pieces that have been put together I've got my tidy picture but then suddenly another piece comes in where does that go it's outside the frame so it can be a restriction or it focuses the way we look at things sometimes I show people a picture of a bowl of yogurt because story is a live culture and and it's continually being fed so what are you feeding it negative things it's becomes negative if you feed it positive things it becomes positive but it's alive and I always say to people if yogurt isn't alive don't eat it it's not any good for you and sometimes I show people a picture of my suitcase because sometimes our stories are baggage they keep dragging behind us and we somehow are carrying this weight so it story is all of those things and it's really you know how far am I willing to dig in to see how it can be helpful to me and where I decide to take it and who I can become because of it yeah so this is super inspiring for me because I think thinking about stories in these different application I'll call them applications enables you sort of to think how in which places in which situations will I use stories and in which way I sometimes tell about that we use stories to sort of communicate results we use stories to do research we use stories to get people engaged and it's like it's all those things it's not just it's not just a way of communicating like right and that's also what you're saying there are you can do more with it and that's how far you interested to go what's I don't know if you thought about it but what is the next frontier of stories, storytelling stories what's going to happen in the in the next near future well you know those three waves I talked about and I I don't have a big piece of research about them but I have a little piece of research because I talked about those at a conference in 2017 and I wrote a blog post about influence and on LinkedIn and 4,000 people more than 4,000 people read my blog and I was like I'm a blogger now I felt really great well linked to the blog somewhere down here yeah and then I wrote the second part about collective sense and meaning-making and I was a I got a little bit sad you know kind of like what's happened to my big audience and then I wrote about healing and holding and 200 people read that and at first I was really depressed and then I went no I'm right it was kind of proof that I'm right because in fact it's like that influence collective sense and meaning healing and holding and so I think we're in that part we're in that time in the planet right now where many of us realize we've run out the end of our old story we don't actually know who we are anymore together as a humanity we don't we've kind of what is our purpose why are we here we seem to be impacting the planet greatly and we don't seem to have the will to do something together about it why not but we don't know what the next story is and so many of us are feeling uncomfortable, sad or even incredibly depressed in our organizational structures many of us are wondering if family life is all that is or feeling incredibly stressed that we have so much to do around even keeping the basic stuff together so we are at one could say a crisis of story and maybe the interesting thing is what do we choose to do with our story together because the truth is there can't just be one story there needs to be some frame within which all of these ways of looking at the world can fit and work and live together and what is that I don't know exactly but that's what's coming what's the story that connects us now and tomorrow this doesn't seem to be the kind of thing politicians are focusing on at all but it's the most important question if people are interested in this topic and want to learn more about it what would be some good resources that you could recommend the project I'm doing right now is called story the future and if you look at storythefuture.com you'll find some of the ways we're trying to raise consciousness around what story does and how it works and there's a growing group on Facebook story the future online summit is the Facebook group there are some people out there doing some interesting writing on that including Charles Eisenstein who wrote the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible David Corten who's written stuff about what's the next story of course Otto Sharmer's work is really kind of touching on the edge of that there are many people who are kind of coming at it from different angles which is why I started working on story the future because I said where's that place where all of us doing this stuff could meet because there is not really a cohesive practice field around it so many many people now more than ever when I look at my history since 2003 have very few people now to almost everybody talking about story it's quite a different field so the biggest question is how can we work together and let's hope this community will also connect with the story thinkers community because I think we can collaborate and learn so much from each other so we're heading towards the end and I always have one final question and that is is there a question that you have for us for the viewers the listeners of the service design show is there anything you'd like us to chew up on yeah I think of service design I think in that kind of the most broadest possible way and one thing that you know the built environment I think is a really really interesting place to look and I'm thinking that specifically I came back to the U.S. after living overseas for 35 years some large part of that New Zealand sometime in Europe and the way that all of the services and how they're presented act on our psyche is really really interesting and the United States has a very particular service culture attitude which I find phenomenally interesting but also particularly stressful because it's kind of a wound up it has to be operating all the time so I begin to ask myself is 24-7 actually healthy for us is everything on demand actually a healthy human thing and how do we help people become very wise in their consuming choices maybe yeah maybe what is the price we're paying for enabling services in that sense right yeah there's always a price maybe what's the trade off that's better that's a more positive way to formulate it I want to thank you for sharing what you're doing sharing what sharing about stories sharing your stories I think you're inspired me at least to learn and to dig more into this topic and I'm sure a lot of listeners and viewers too so thank you Mary Els thank you very much for the invitation really fun my pleasure how do you deal with the tradeoff of designing services for instance that have a high availability how do you manage those tradeoffs leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation there if you're interested in stories and storytelling and want to tell the story about service design check out the free course that I've got for you that helps you to explain service design in plain English and if you'd like to see more videos don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified with new videos around thanks so much for watching and look forward to seeing you in the next video