cognitive scientist

And that is the essence of the aptitude of Story—context enriched by emotion.

Story exists where high concept and high touch intersect. Story is high concept

because it sharpens our understanding of one thing by showing it in the context of

something else. For instance, the John Henry parable helps us understand in a tightly

compressed way what happened in the early stages of the Industrial Age. The Garry

Kasparov tale then relates that story in a new context—thus conveying a complex idea

in a more memorable and meaningful way than if, say, I had tortured you with a

PowerPoint presentation on the automation of work. Story is high touch because

stories almost always pack an emotional punch. John Henry perishes. Garry Kasparov
is humbled. To paraphrase E. M. Forster’s famous observation, a fact is “The queen

died and the king died.” A story is “The queen died and the king died of a broken

heart.”

In his book Things That Make Us Smart, Don Norman crisply summarizes Story’s

high-concept and high-touch essence:

Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision

methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific

context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the

emotions. . . . Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact

package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion.2

The ability to encapsulate, contextualize, and emotionalize has become vastly more

important in the Conceptual Age. When so much routine knowledge work can be

reduced to rules and farmed out to fast computers and smart L-Directed thinkers

abroad, the more elusive abilities embodied by Story become more valuable.

Likewise, as more people lead lives of abundance, we’ll have a greater opportunity to

pursue lives of meaning. And stories—the ones we tell about ourselves, the ones we

tell to ourselves—are often the vehicles we use in that pursuit. In the rest of this

chapter, I’ll examine how the high-concept and high-touch capacity to weave events

into an emotionally compelling narrative has become an essential aptitude in business,

medicine, and personal life.

But first I need to tell you a story.

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a far-off land, lived a hero who was prosperous, happy, and

respected by all. One day, three visitors arrived. They began pointing out the hero’s
many flaws and told him he was unfit to remain. The hero resisted, but to no avail. He

was ousted from his land and sent off to a new world. There, adrift and alone, he

floundered. But with the help of a few he met during his exile, he transformed himself

and vowed to make his way back. And eventually he did return, where he was

welcomed to a place he scarcely recognized, but that he still understood was home.

Does that story sound familiar? It should. It’s a variation on what Joseph Campbell

called “the hero’s journey.” In his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,

Campbell argued that all myths—across time and across cultures—contain the same

basic ingredients and follow the same general recipe. There are never any new stories,

he said—just the same stories retold. And the one overarching story, the blueprint for

tales since humankind’s earliest days, is the “hero’s journey.” The hero’s journey has
three main parts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The hero hears a call, refuses it at

first, and then crosses the threshold into a new world. During Initiation, he faces stiff

challenges and stares into the abyss. But along the way—usually with the help of

mentors who give the hero a divine gift—he transforms and becomes at one with his

new self. Then he returns, becoming the master of two worlds, committed to

improving each. This structure underlies Homer’s Odyssey, the story of Buddha, the

legend of King Arthur, the story of Sacagawea, Huckleberry Finn, Star Wars, The

Matrix, and, Campbell would have argued, just about every other epic tale.

But there’s something else about the hero’s journey that you might not have noticed—

and that I wasn’t conscious of myself until very recently. The hero’s journey is the

underlying story of this book. It begins with the knowledge worker, the master of L-

Directed aptitudes. She faces a transformative crisis (wrought by Abundance, Asia,

and Automation) and must answer the call (of a new way to work and live.) She

resists the call at first (protesting outsourcing, denying that things need to change). But

eventually she crosses the threshold (into the Conceptual Age). She faces challenges

and difficulties (mastering R-Directed aptitudes). But she perseveres, acquires those

capabilities, and returns as someone who can inhabit both worlds (she has a whole

new mind).

“The story—from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the
human mind for the

purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there
have been no societies that did

not tell stories.”

—URSULA K. LE GUIN

Now, I’m not suggesting that A Whole New Mind has some mythic stature. Hardly.

Indeed, my point is just the opposite. It’s to show that stories in general, and the story
structure of the hero’s journey in particular, lurk everywhere. Our tendency to see and

explain the world in common narratives is so deeply ingrained that we often don’t

notice it—even when we’ve written the words ourselves. In the Conceptual Age,

however, we must awaken to the power of narrative.

The Story Business

Robert McKee is one of the most influential figures in Hollywood, but you’ll never

see his face on the screen or his name on the closing credits. For the past fifteen years,

in three-day seminars in the United States and Europe, McKee has taught aspiring

screenwriters how to craft a compelling story. Some forty thousand people have

plunked down $600 for his Story Seminar. And his students have gone on to win

twenty-six Academy Awards. Anybody who hopes to write a screenplay begins by

reading his book—Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of

Screenwriting. But in recent years, McKee has attracted a following among people

whose only connection to the movie business comes when they buy a ticket and a tub

of popcorn at the local multiplex: the executives, entrepreneurs, and workers of

traditional business.

Why do they seek McKee’s counsel?

I’ll let the irascible master answer in his own words: “Although businesspeople are

often suspicious of stories . . . the fact is that statistics are used to tell lies and damned

lies, while accounting reports are often BS in a ball gown. . . . If a businessperson

understands that his or her own mind naturally wants to frame experience in a story,

the key to moving the audience is not to resist this impulse but to embrace it.”3

Story, businesses are realizing, means big money. Economists Deirdre McCloskey and

Arjo Klamer calculate that persuasion—advertising, counseling, consulting, and so on

—accounts for 25 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. If, as some posit, Story is a

component of half those persuasive efforts, then Story is worth about $1 trillion a year

to the U.S. economy.4 So organizations are embracing the story ethic espoused by

McKee and others—often in unlikely ways.

The clearest example is a nascent movement called “organizational storytelling,” which

aims to make organizations aware of the sto