“Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even of finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.”

~ Harriet G Lerner

At the Singapore Facilitators Conference in Nov 2010, together with a fellow facilitator/friend, Wendy Wong; I co-facilitated a workshop presentation that blended our common interests in Story and Visual Language.  Being a meaning-making device for a meaning-making species, Story is deeply embedded in our very existence and psyche.  From Homerian epics to Scandinavian sagas to 140-word Twitter ‘tweets’ to Japanese haikus, Story has been and is the archetypal container for philosophies, perspectives and world-views.  Out of the many incidents that happen to us, we only choose some and string them together as a story that makes sense for us.

2 key aspects of Story form the basis of our offering.  Story, when told, reaffirms the truth of the story-teller’s experience to himself, regardless of whether listeners believe in it.  In that sense, Story becomes the story-teller; a chosen story can become something that dominates the story-teller’s thinking and identity.

The second aspect is that Story can be re-authored, that is, to be re-modified with new layers of meaning.  The re-authoring process gives individuals the possibility of revisiting circumstances that were omitted previously from the stories and bringing in new detail (eg an overlooked decision point) that could potentially transform the very stories which have become a part of the story-teller.

Based on these 2 principles, we wanted to give our fellow facilitators an opportunity to make new sense and meaning from what was in their minds, a negative facilitation experience.  We wanted them to re-process a negative facilitation experience, that it was NOT something inherently wrong about the tools they were using nor that they had made mistakes in their design and tool selection, and of course, not because they were intrinsically ‘bad’ facilitators.

Wendy’s experience with Visual Language gave us an opportunity to invite participants to tell their stories in graphical form; using 3 possible ways:

1.  a simplified Quest,

2. Metaphor and

3. Framework (I can’t locate a framework online that is directly relevant to a facilitator’s growth but the Quality of Success Loop comes to mind as an example of a framework).

A facilitator's visual story about her lack of success in converging her boss' ideas with her own, as represented by the 2 different paths to buried treasure. Taking 2 separate paths lead frustration, with the buried treasure representing the shared, desired outcomes they both actually want.

 

Workshop participants were then asked to reflect on their Negative Story and to identify elements which when changed, would have allowed them to arrive at the originally intended outcomes.  Their Preferred Alternate Stories had to contain at least one such element.

The same facilitator highlighting the pathway to a shared path to 'buried treasure' - to have more conversations with her boss; building in a key reflection from her Negative Story.

Each participant was able to share in plenary that they were able to discover Positive Harvests even from Negative experiences; experiences that they may have previously dismissed as mistakes or mis-steps.  Negative Stories were no longer wholly Negative, but held the seeds of new thinking and possibilities.

 

Noel E K Tan

I’m often asked what I mean when I describe strengths-based approaches like Appreciative Inquiry as “a way of being”, not just a way of “doing”.   I make a distinction between the positive change facilitator’s competence in the use of strengths-based tools (Doing) and his own mastery and embodiment of the their underlying philosophies.  The key question then is how does the practitioner ‘be’ and ‘become’ and “therein lies the rub” and focus of this blog entry…

A student of mine who is now in the Singapore Education Service, prompted a chain of thoughts with her sharing of a Erica Jong’s quote:  “Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that ‘talent’ to the dark place where it leads.”

It in turn sparked a memory of Marianne Williamson’s words, made famous by Nelson Mandela:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?…”

The “dark place” spoken of by Jong, to me, is that the taking on of strengths-based focus to life challenges us, because we fear confronting our strengths and talents. Perhaps, it could be because of the raised expectations that others will have of us, once we have “proclaimed” our greatness? Or that we fear more criticism coming our way, as people around us are confounded by our re-discovered aspects of who we are.  As individuals, we need to go into that place and give our talents strengths their rightful place in our identity. Indeed, rare is that courage that will go to that “dark place” and courage is certainly needed for transformation.

On the road to congruence and authenticity, I propose that we have no choice but tip the balance in favour of strengths and possibilities, and it must first start with us.  There is no transformation of others, individuals or organisations, unless it begins with us, as Williamson exhorts us in her closing lines:

“And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.”*

Best,
Noel E K Tan

* – http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/122.html

This is a concise exposition of Positivity research by one of the foremost contributors to Positive Psychology, Prof Barbara Frederickson.

Noel E K Tan

Our lives are collections of stories.  Within these collections, there are those of ourselves, which we choose to tell people over others.  Events in our lives are often understood in relation to each other and the respective contexts in which they are found.  Stories are neither true nor false, all stories carry elements of both.  How and why we privilege these stories, gives insight into elements of our identities that we want to emphasise.  In that process, for better or worse, these dominant narratives become so engrained that perhaps, it becomes true that the story ‘becomes’ the story-teller with each re-telling.  I had the opportunity to learn more at my friend’s, David Lees, workshop at the 2009 World Appreciative Inquiry Conference in Kathmandu.

Narrative Practices can be deployed with reference to dominant stories.  In the spirit of Appreciative Inquiry to seek out potentials and possibilities, Narrative Practices are vital for individuals to identify stories of strengths and capacities in their lives, which may have been made subordinate to dominant narratives of despair, weakness and hopelessness.  With Appreciative Inquiry-type questions deployed to interrogate story-tellers on their dominant narratives, it is apparent that there are neither lives that are utterly dismal, without even a glimmer of hope.

At least 2 elements of Narrative Practices make them useful in supporting individuals to create alternate plot-lines for themselves.  The first was in the fact that Narrative Practices allow for the externalising of the negative.  Such that it is possible for individuals to be described not as helpless people but rather as people who find themselves in circumstances of helplessness.  The shift in discourse is both obvious and immediate – that these individuals are no longer problematic.  The shift also provides an opportunity for a clear reframing of the situation, allowing for the individual to take action.

The second valuable element is the fact that there are always unique insights from every story.  What is meant here is that simply, every story contains validating elements for the individual’s chosen narrative; there are neither good stories nor bad ones – only those that are told.  Given the contextualised and personal nature of narratives, the potential for exceptions against the ‘rule’ as it were, liberates the individual from the recriminations of self and from others.  It is here at the convergence of these 2 elements where Narrative Practices provokes Possibility Thinking.  Against the backdrop of discovered Strengths, individual narratives can be re-authored to bring Possibilities to life.

The romanticised image of Nepal is one always associated with Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain and the Himalayas.  While it is not false, the other elements of Nepal’s story are also of extremities.  Nepal has 8 of the world’s 10 highest peaks, has 1 national language, but over a 100 other languages and dialects.  About 50% of the population live under the poverty line, and drinking water is not easily accessible.  Finally, I just read in yesterday’s edition of The Himalayan Times that the weekly electrical outage period will be raised from 12 hours a week to 16 hours a week, due to the coming of winter when there is less water to power hydro-electrical projects.  Even as I write this, my hotel’s back-up generators have kicked in for the 2nd time in the 3 days I have been in the room.

In the same paper, I read of the continuing turmoil emerging from the last year’s elections amidst the rapid political changes over the last decade as the country moved from a monarchy to a federal republic.  All this against the backdrop of a decade-plus long Maoist insurrection.  Hence, it amazes me not by a little, that the Nepalese NGOs, civil servants and retired civil servants whom I had the opportunity to meet over the last 2 days display a great capacity for hope that the country’s search for stability and sustainable development will be found.  Nepal’s own search led to an Appreciative Inquiry experiment began in 2005 with an inquiry into Peace and Development, subtitling the summit as an initiative for Societal Transformation.

Judging from the deep friendships between the Nepalese organisers of the present conference with David Cooperider and those who were there in 2005, I sense too that while there is much work to be done still by my Nepalese friends and colleagues, there is a reservoir of hope.  A vast reservoir created by the nation-wide cascading process to search for the innate strengths that are in fact, common to widely disparate groups.

Heading to Nepal is a journey that I never quite expected to go on this soon in my life.  Let me explain –  I once toyed with the idea of trekking in the Himalayan foothills with the family, but the 2 young ones are, well, still quite young.  So I find myself on the brink of packing and at the threshold of another very interesting journey.

The 5-plus hours trip by air will herald an eye-opening experience for sure in terms of learning about Nepali history and culture.  I’m certain, too, that the Nepali story, though similar to other community narratives of strengths (the Gurkhas so impressed the invading British that they were incorporated into the British Army in the 19th Century) – will still be one that will be unique, a survival story framed with the Himalayas as an ever-present backdrop.

The journey will be significant for me as a conference delegate/online workshop presenter and student of Appreciative Inquiry.  The amount of learning from fellow practitioners coming from every corner of the globe, representing every spectrum of application from sustainable development to organisational change to community development to education, will be immense.  All of that stemming from the simple premise of reframing our situation by looking for Positives, Possibilities and Strengths, rather than negatives, problems and deficits.  I guess in the light of what has preceded the Conference over the last 18 months in the global economy, the apparent lack of progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, Appreciative Inquiry as a systems-level intervention can provide an alternative lens to how humankind must run our affairs.

So as I travel from familiar Singapore, I’m suspending judgement and welcoming the learning and the new friendships that will emerge.  I’ll be updating this blog regularly during the week I’m there, so do drop in when you can.

Noel E K Tan

In exactly 7 days, I shall be at the 2009 World Appreciative Inquiry Conference as a delegate/online workshop presenter. (More information forthcoming)  The conference will be held in Kathmandu, Nepal.  Here’s the online invitation on Youtube to know what it’s all about!