Are you Curious about Story Thinking?

The What

Neuroscience shows we are wired for STORY. Storytelling uses STORY as a Communication Strategy. Story Thinking uses STORY as an Operational Strategy. Telling a better story is an important skillset. But living a better story is the ultimate goal.​

The Why

Story Thinking was created to address the growing needs of knowledge workers, knowledge leaders, and learning organizations in the knowledge economy, where ideas are the raw materials. It is time to move beyond memorized learning and step-by-step business processes and begin to operate from the sense-making pattern of STORY. ​

The Why Now

As the organization becomes increasingly complex, merging the intelligence of people and machines, we will need to develop new models for leadership, change, and education. There are four ways to prepare for this future:

• Ignore the progress of technology and dismiss the idea that intelligence itself will disrupt the organization, where humans will work with AI.
• Embrace the pessimistic view of the many job types that will be displaced by robots and artificial intelligence, with the need for humans in the workforce continuing to decrease over time.
• Trust technology to overtake humanity to become our overlord, with humans embedding internal technologies and ceding ultimate authority to the technology.
• Trust humanity to realize that there is an opportunity to become more wholly human again, and that we have become the robots since the second industrial revolution. Now, let the robots do the memorization and repetitive work while we develop our full story thinking capabilities and retain authority over technology. This is the philosophy behind Story Thinking.

The How

Story Thinking is about the major organizational challenges related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), and ways for visionary leaders to begin addressing them now by rethinking traditional views of change, learning, and leadership. This is not another book about the gloom and doom associated with predicted job losses due to robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, this is a solutions-based book that provides a new way of thinking about the organization, called Story Thinking.

The Who

John Lewis, Ed.D. is a leadership speaker and coach, and is the founder and president of Explanation Age LLC, a management consulting company that focuses on thought leadership, organizational change, and knowledge management. He is a member of The International Institute for Knowledge and Innovation, and an independent certified leadership Coach, Teacher and Speaker with The John Maxwell Team.

John has delivered a Keynote presentation at the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Research Studies, a Masters Series presentation at the International Society for Performance Improvement conference, and a Thought Leader presentation at the Canadian Society for Training and Development conference. John holds a Doctoral degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Southern California, with a dissertation focus on mental models and decision making.

John is the author of “The Explanation Age” and “Story Thinking,” which provide tools for the coming age of knowledge and decision transparency, with implications for Business, Education, and Governments. New methods are presented to facilitate strategic management, thought leadership, learning strategies, collaborative decision making, and conflict resolution.

John has worked for several leading global organizations and his career highlights include launching GPS satellites and being recognized by Gartner with an industry Best Practice paper for a global knowledge management implementation.

The Wherefore

Story Structure: In comparing dozens of change, learning, and leadership models, an underlying sense-making pattern emerged. It is the pattern of story. ​The story thinking cycle is more than just a list of six phases, where one might ask if there are possibly seven phases instead of six. There are underlying mindsets and mental states working inside the story, which are producing the six phases. Understanding the underlying mindsets will provide deeper insights into the process of change, the mindset preferences that exist, and how to lead change more effectively.

Workability Beliefs: At the core of the story thinking cycle we find the fundamental beliefs related to our perception and definition of “working.” You may have heard that “it either works or it doesn’t work,” but there is a third workability belief called Could Work, the mental place of most projects.

Response Modes: Many languages end each sentence with either a question mark, a period, or an exclamation point. These are the specific ways that we respond mentally to our workability beliefs: Questioning, Reflective, and Reactive. We are either asking a question, and we communicate this using a question mark (?); or we are making a reflective statement, and we communicate this using a period (.); or we are making an emphatic reactive statement with conviction, and we communicate this using an exclamation point (!).

Story Thinking Mindsets