Invisible Threads Part 4: Unravelling

Or, Seeing the Wood and the Trees

“I can’t see the wood for the trees.”

Throughout my life, even though I knew what it meant, I’ve felt somewhat confused by this expression. Specifically, I noticed that the word “wood” can mean both the whole (“wood” as in “forest”, which is of course the intended meaning), and the parts of the whole (“wood” as in what trees are made of). Given that a large part of my life has been about struggling with when to step back and look at the forest (“see the big picture”, as they say), and when to sit down and closely examine the wood (in the fine-grained detail sense), it’s quite apt that I felt intrigued by this double interpretation. It also seems ironically appropriate that I got confused by taking the idiom apart and interpreting it literally, because that is almost exactly what the expression is telling us not to do.

Personally, I often feel called out for “not seeing the wood for the trees”, in the commonly accepted sense of the expression; but sometimes I think the rest of the world spends too much time doing the opposite and ignoring the trees completely. While focusing on the big picture is useful, this article is about the ways in which the macro can reduce and oversimplify the micro, and why this can have a real influence on how we think and behave towards others. And one device that helps us unpack and interrogate this is story.

Throughout this piece I refer to story and narrative, so before we start, perhaps it’s helpful to be clear about how I distinguish between the two. In essence, I see narrative as the story behind the story, or the broader framework that a story fits into. If a story tells us about characters and what happened to them, narrative explains why it happened. Narrative chooses the conclusion and, more importantly, which stories get told and which get disregarded or silenced. We’ll look at narratives at the macro level; stories at the micro level; and how, while the former serves essentially to compress reality, working with the latter can help us expand it. The bigger implication of all this is that examining the micro could be useful for change at a personal, interpersonal and cultural level.

Macro level: The power of simplification

As I’ve considered previously in this series, predictability is built into storytelling. What about simplification? 

In the organisational world, a major part of a leader’s job is to help people see the wood for the trees, because leadership involves giving people direction. Identifying trends is, in a sense, simplification; so are establishing a vision or setting a goal, because they require condensing data and making projections, rather than staying lost in a scatterplot of data points or possibilities. In a world of unknowns, stories can offer some form of clarity about where we’re headed, even if they don’t provide certainty about exactly when we’ll get there, or even the precise coordinates we will arrive at.

I’ve often reflected that so much of a leader’s power to influence others lies in their ability to simplify. Simplicity is compelling for all of us, but it may ultimately be make-believe – reality is really more complex. As followers and critical thinkers, we should allow ourselves to take narratives apart and question confidence in simplistic explanations. Nonetheless, at both an organisational and individual level, simplicity is practically helpful: choosing to temporarily ignore detail is what helps us to function effectively, make decisions, and move forward.

Narratives and stories shape what we think and how we relate (for better or worse).

Research shows that the stories we consume – even the fictitious ones – are not just a vacation from reality; they can actually shape what we think.  

Ever heard of the Will & Grace effect? For those who aren’t familiar with it, it gets its name from the late-90s/early-2000s sitcom, which focuses on the relationship between Will, a gay lawyer, and his best friend Grace, a Jewish woman who runs a design firm. Researchers at the time, studying how prejudice against marginalised groups might be reduced, had a theory known as the contact hypothesis – basically, if I am exposed to people who are different from me, particularly those from so-called minority groups, over time my (biased) views towards these groups will improve. They wondered whether this interpersonal exposure might also work if it were simulated – say, by watching an engaging TV show (they called this “parasocial contact”). They went on to set up a study essentially to test whether watching Will and Grace could make people less homophobic. Their conclusion was, in essence: Yes it can.

This article offers more detail on the study, as well as insights into how the effect works, which help us understand what particular characteristics of mediated storytelling are effective in positively shifting attitudes. A first important variable was quality: It’s crucial that audiences have a positive experience of these “parasocial” interactions, so they must find the show entertaining and the characters relatable. Will and Grace was an award-winning show with massive popular appeal – it arguably wouldn’t have worked otherwise.  

But another key variable was quantity or variety: it’s important that people experience several different examples of “minority” group members, both “typical” and “atypical” (another character in Will & Grace, Jay, is cast as a flamboyantly gay actor, while Will doesn’t fit this stereotype). This shows diversity within “other” groups and avoids inadvertently reinforcing stereotypes. I see this is a beautiful example of how seeing the metaphorical trees can change how people see the forest. Or, in a beautiful quote I’ve heard Brené Brown use, “It’s really hard to hate people close up”.

The main takeaway from the above is that resolving ignorance and challenging stereotypes can be done effectively via a great story. And if great stories can change attitudes, they can also shift behaviour. A great local example can be found in the South African show Soul City, and subsequently Heartlines, which is an NGO driving ongoing social change initiatives. The creator of both, Garth Japhet, who recently published the book Like Water is for Fish, explains that the vision behind these projects was essentially to use storytelling firstly for effective health communication, and more broadly for social change.

“If you want to reach people,” Japhet said in a recent webinar with the Daily Maverick, “you have to go where they are”. Soul City, which aired between the early 90s and into the 2000s, was created with the aim of promoting health behaviours, but more broadly it addressed social issues that were specifically relevant for poor and rural communities in South Africa. When it came to serious topics like preventing the spread of HIV/Aids, Japhet realised that having medical workers read out lists of statistics just didn’t work; stories, on the other hand, were more likely to have an impact because behaviour change requires an emotional engagement, not just an intellectual one.

Loosely based on a true story: Why unravelling narratives is necessary

If stories can change attitudes, they can also generate and perpetuate them. If we can use stories to unravel stereotypes, we should also be aware that we use stories to create shortcuts about others in the first place. What “shortcuts” am I talking about? At the heart of stereotypes, both negative and positive, are biases, prejudices or assumptions. These in turn consist of any taken-for-granted beliefs about groups of people, which serve to explain and to simplify the way they are, as well as the way things are and should always be. This brings us back to narrative.  

Chené Swart, author of the book Reauthoring the World: The Narrative Lens and Practices for Organisations, Communities and Individuals, writes:

“In this work, a narrative is seen as the end result of a meaning-making process where certain incidents are woven together in a story […] These narratives are all informed by meaning making of various events and incidents, the taken-for-granted beliefs and ideas of my culture and society that have influenced the conclusions I have drawn about my identity and what actions are therefore possible in my life.” 

Chené Swart, Reauthoring the World

If the function of a narrative is to explain simplistically what happens to us by explaining the way things are, it’s helpful also to notice that they tend to do so in an absolute, black-and-white, either-or way. What are some examples? A conspiracy narrative may be that bad things happen because of bad actors – there has to be somebody behind it all. Another narrative might be that foreigners will take advantage of us and can never be trusted. A more personal narrative may be that bad things always happen to me because I am a victim or even because I am not good enough. The impacts of these narratives on our behaviour can be wide-reaching, largely because they change what we pay attention to, which evidence we choose and which we disregard, and how we interpret it.  

An important point I want to add is that narratives and stories, while constructed, are based on reality, even if not on absolute truth. One might say, for example, that race is ultimately a construct (perhaps the ultimate and arguably the most divisive narrative of all time) because while skin pigment is real, racial categories are arbitrary and racial classification was engineered by the elite. This is not to say that people’s experiences of racism are not valid, or that we can fix everything by claiming to be colour blind. Race has been described (helpfully, I think), as one of those things that are “real but not true”. Or more bluntly, racism is real but race is not.

Micro – How stories show up at the smallest level

The problem with narratives, as Swart describes, is that they lead to what she calls identity conclusions. This brings us to recognising how stories are packaged into language right down to its most reduced form: words. A label – a single word or phrase – can conjure up all the narratives attached to it, which in turn leads us to tell stories about the person we have assigned that label, and why they behave the way they behave.

What are some words, labels or terms that encapsulate stories or narratives? Feminist. Good mother. Father figure. Immigrant. Uneducated. Even terms like “doctor” and “scientist” carry gender and even race stereotypes. Interestingly, stereotypes can affect not just the views of the person doing the labelling, but the behaviour of the person being labelled – even if the stereotype is merely implied.

Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart uses the example of an Asian woman going into a Maths exam. If somebody were to say to her in passing, “You have an interesting surname – where are you from?”, her attention may be drawn to her race; then, because the stereotype of Asians is that they excel at Maths, she is likely to outperform on her exam. Conversely, if someone were to say “I love the dress you’re wearing”, her attention might be drawn to her gender, and this may lead her to underperform on the exam because the stereotype of women is that they are not good at Maths. I like this example, because it reminds us that each of us is made up of a multitude of intersecting identities, but critically also that stereotypes, while we may think they exist “out there”, are also part of our socially inherited makeup and can be made more or less personally salient in context.

The simplistic stories we tell about people based on labels are, of course, often handed to us. In author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s powerful TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, she points out that to Western people who have never met a person from Nigeria, the “single story” they have about them, based on narratives presented by the media, is that they are poor (or scam artists). In turn, this reflects a bigger single story about the whole of Africa. That now-familiar observation of how people think “Africa is a country” is a perfect example of narratives compressing reality.

The associations that labels like these carry are clearly powerful, and problematic not just because they generalise but because they can dehumanise and polarise. That’s the reason why Trump’s calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” was not just offensive but seemingly dangerous. Our choice of words can include or exclude, because a definition inherently implies what it is not and therefore defines what doesn’t belong (think “maternity leave” versus “parental leave”, or “mother/father” versus “primary caregiver”). 

Looking to decompress

As we’ve seen above, all these devices, though subtle, can play a powerful role in shaping our lives. It therefore seems that we would do well to interrogate them. If narrative serves to reduce and compress reality, working with story offers the potential for questioning and for opening to other possibilities.

Stories work for us as we explain our way through life, trying to sustain a sense of control, purpose and identity consistency. Narratives work for us because they provide us with a sort of short-hand operating system to make sense of the world. But if we were to recognise that a certain narrative is no longer serving us – for example, having realised that the Victim narrative undermines our agency, or is inconsistent with our taking charge of our own lives – we could try to change it. We can do this by first identifying a new narrative, and then finding different stories that support it.