The Narrative Project: A Postscript

April
5
2011

It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

John Keats

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are — objective pictures. He mumbled he wasn’t quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, “There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is.” Picasso looked at it and said, “She is rather small, isn’t she? And flat?”

Gregory Bateson

Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind.

Stephen Hawking

The world we spend our lives trying to make sense of is messy − which accounts for the relief we experience when we come across a paradigm (or, for that matter, an ideology) that promises to bring order to it. The problem with both is that they can – and regularly do –impose an arbitrary order upon the untidiness of everyday life that leaves far too much of reality unaccounted for. Force fit what Patricia Shaw has called the “living present” into conceptual frameworks and all kinds of important stuff squirts out around the edges.

Don’t get me wrong: management and organizational models can be useful − but only for as long as they’reseen as contingent and provisional rather than prescriptive. We treat the world the way we construe it and there are times when I find it useful to do my construing with lenses I borrow from Henry Mintzberg or Peter Senge or Ralph Stacey or any number of other very clever people. But I’d better remember to take them off before I drive to the store for milk or take on a Thelonious Monk tune at the keyboard.

Fanatics, once wonderfully described by Winston Churchill as people who can't change their minds and won't change the subject, look at the world through only one set of lenses and never get their eyes tested to see if their prescription might need changing. The problem with paradigms is that they can seduce us into thinking that they correspond to some kind of reality out there. While it may, for example, be useful to talk about egos, superegos andids, just don’t expect them to show up on MRIs. I once had to minister to an utterly devastated colleague who returned from a management development program where he had learned – thanks to a devilish psychometric instrument − that he was a wimp. Abandon hope all ye who enter this quadrant of the management styles matrix. I was able to help restore some of his diminished self-esteem by telling of times when I had seen him behave as a highly aggressive, bullying jerk. He was grateful. I do what I can.

Lest you think that paradigm entrapment is something that only happens in the social sciences, read Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble with Physics.” Lee is a physicist working at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo (thank you, Mike Lazaridis) who takes on the string theory paradigm that has held intellectual (and political) sway over the domain of physics for the past several decades. Its advocates see it as having the potential to become the much sought after TOE (Theory of Everything). What Smolin discovered when he published his book is that you don’t mess with the orthodoxies of revolutionary movements. He gets seriously unfriendly mail. Paradigmatic fanatics abound!

The great merit of narrative is that it keeps our experience of the complex, ambiguous and uncertain stuff of everyday life in play. The stuff, in other words, that paradigms can’t accommodate; that they ignore or pretend doesn’t exist. At some point we come to terms with the fact that there’s no perfection this side of the grave but we still have to get on with things. This is where we are well served by a sense of irony that comes to our aid by providing a shift of footing, a certain detachment, a change in perspective, a distance that allows us to be amused by our earnestness. And irony is more at home with narrative than it is with paradigms. Show me a fanatic with a sense of irony and I may change my mind.

I’ll end with a story that captures matters nicely.

I’ll not be able to get this exactly right because I can’t put my hand on the source. But I do remember the punch line and that’s all that’s really important. The setting is a conference on social and family relationships and an expert panel is sharing its wisdom about what makes marriages work. An audience member asks a panellist who has been in the counselling business for a lot of years what he thinks makes for a good marriage. In a lovely moment of candour he allows that he really has no idea. “All I can tell you is that in some relationships the rocks in his head match the holes in hers.”