The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  Linking the indoctrination process to a higher purpose; education in itself is a noble pursuit

  Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-Step Process

  Public confessions: identification of old story, confrontation of truth

  Peer support, personal coaching, peer pressure

  Public expression of new story

  Spiritual anchoring: enlist support and help of Supreme Being

  Make each recovering alcoholic the guardian of his fellow brothers’ thoughts

  Repetition of meetings: weekly/monthly meetings for life

  Military Training

  Immediate control of public and private voices: quick punishment for showing any dissent, negativity, cynicism, anger, or fear (new story)

  Repetition (new story)

  Peer support and peer rejection

  Idea Training (new story formation)

  Linking entire indoctrination process to higher purpose: protecting family and country

  Religious Training

  Idea Training—using the Bible, Koran, Scriptures, etc., as basic content of new story; churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues are primary indoctrination centers

  Public and private confessions (old story)

  Repetition—reading, discussing, singing, chanting (new story)

  Make each person the guardian of his brothers’ thoughts

  Peer support and peer pressure

  Indoctrination starts immediately following birth, the younger the better—for example, in Muslim madrassas, Catholic catechism classes, parochial schools

  Linked to a cause beyond oneself: Supreme Being

  Then there’s corporate training, whose doctrine, while somewhat more varied perhaps than those above, still hews to a powerful orthodoxy.

  Corporate Training

  Idea Training—corporate vision, mission, values, ethics, product superiority, rules of engagement (new story)

  Leadership training—lectures, small group discussions, reports; advancement requires successful indoctrination in company’s party line thinking and politics (new story)

  Peer support (mentoring) and peer pressure

  Chief learning officers are indoctrination specialists who help to disseminate key learning elements

  Corporate retreats (special indoctrination events) promote renewal and repetition (skits, plays, games, ropes courses, adventure events)

  Daily diaries—many firms employ corporate coaches who recommend the practice of keeping a daily diary; coaches periodically review written entries for evidence of learning and provide constructive feedback

  Now I’m not suggesting that because the institutions above use many of the methodologies used by cults, they are the moral equivalent of cults. I am suggesting that being aware of these similarities allows us to understand how our stories and ourselves often morph, typically in undetectable increments, into things we don’t want or like.

  Take the business world. The leaders I meet every week hardly lose sleep in fear that they will turn into ideological monsters à la Mao or Reverend Jim Jones. But the ones who are committed to improving themselves and their corporate environments become (more) aware of their potentially fanatical behavior. Yes, fanatical: After all, the roots of fanaticism are found in mere intolerance, intolerance for any thinking or belief contrary to one’s own. For example: “I know I’m right and I’m not going to allow any contrary discussions about it.” Ever hear any leader express that thought, explicitly or implicitly? Have you expressed it? Felt it? And when it’s expressed, what message is the employee/listener getting? Probably this: “Adopt our thinking without question or get out of the organization.”

  If, in your professional life, you express to others, or even just to yourself, one or more of the following, you should probably consider it a sign of a growing problem:

  Increasing intolerance for beliefs and values that don’t absolutely align with yours

  Increasing rigidity and inflexibility in thinking and action

  Increasing use of fear and threat of retribution if what you say is not acted on or taken seriously

  Increasing inability to see value in opposing points of view

  The examples above can just as easily be applied, of course, to life outside the boardroom and the workplace. Fanatical thought and coercive behavior are alive and well not merely in formal settings like the classroom, the office, the chapel, but in subtler, seemingly less structured environments, too. For instance, what is the true difference—when comparing net results—between a coercive Communist government using brainwashing techniques, on one hand, and an insidious, infiltrating corporate culture using mass-market advertising to sell valueless real estate, on the other? If the former deceives us into doing things we otherwise wouldn’t, things that are bad for us, then the latter at least…wait, doesn’t it do exactly the same thing? It’s no great insight to suggest that, but for the hypnotic power of TV commercials and other sorts of advertising, we would not buy many (perhaps most) of the products we buy, we would not buy kids’ sugared cereals, we might be less tolerant of physical violence, more intolerant of abuse of any kind, etc. But could the biggest difference between these two cultures of indoctrination simply be the content of the messages injected into the inductee? Perhaps I overstate things, for dramatic effect; after all, technically one can walk away from the TV (though few young children, once exposed to the Sirens’ call of its content and form, have been known to pick up the remote and turn off the TV of their own power—and few grown-ups have walked away, either), while such an option clearly did not exist for the Chinese man, woman, or child who felt the government’s program and message just weren’t his or her cup of tea.

  Then again, perhaps I don’t overstate it. Many cults notoriously attempt to strong-arm their constituencies by controlling all forms of communication that could provide them with a competing message; on the other side, those of us who smugly consider ourselves independent-minded are, if not deprived of information, then imprisoned by it: More than half the executives we work with freely acknowledge that their means of communication and information—BlackBerry, cell phone, e-mail, Internet, TV—control them, not the other way around. I’m not sure that the differences between and among mind control techniques are quite as great as we’d like to believe. One man’s indoctrination is another man’s socialization; one woman’s mind control is another woman’s persuasion.

  One thing is for sure, though: Whether it’s called persuasion or mind control or socialization or indoctrination, getting people to formulate or change their core beliefs and values—to change the story of their life—is achievable only when it’s supported by an enormously powerful premise. That’s where seduction comes in.

  PROMISES, PREMISES

  Jim Jones ordered the mass suicide of more than nine hundred people in Jonestown. The promise to the “victims”? Redemption. The “Moonies,” led by Korean-born Reverend Sun Myung Moon, recruited thousands away from their families and into their Unification Church by promising spiritual purification and enlightenment. David Koresh created his own religious sect, eighty of whom ultimately died by suicide and self-inflicted conflagration, at the Branch Davidian Commune in Waco, Texas; he, too, had promised spiritual redemption. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini sent children on suicide missions against Iraqi fortifications with the promise of their gaining direct entry into heaven. Marshal Applewhite promised the same reward—direct entry into heaven—to his people, the Heaven’s Gate cult, thirty-nine of whom participated in a mass suicide (preceded, for the men, by castration) when the Hale-Bopp comet arrived, apparently their signal that it was time.

  The indoctrination process invariably begins with a story of seduction, one of great promise.

  Follow me and my beliefs and you will experience the peace, meaning, and hope you’ve always longed for.

  These beliefs and practices will take you into goodness, purification, healing, enlightenment, and rebirth.

  This path will provide entry into ev
erlasting happiness and joy.

  To draw outsiders in, the seducing individual or organization must flash a damn good promise; one might also call this the seducer’s premise, or purpose—at least as far as the seduced are concerned. (The seducer’s ultimate purpose—e.g., power, prestige, money, fame, a captive audience—may well be quite different from what is being offered to the constituents.) The promise bears some typical characteristics:

  It’s always presented under the guise of good.

  The “door” through which the indoctrination process typically passes is the spiritual door.

  The deeper you go into the belief, the less able you are to question its validity and truth.

  Once again, the business world provides a rich vein of examples. The vulnerability to seduction and unrealistic promise helped to fuel both the spectacular rise and crash-landing death of corporate giants like Enron and WorldCom. Early on, they made explicit promises, as virtually all public companies do and must, to act responsibly and ethically with the money invested in them. I don’t believe the people running these companies started out with the intent to defraud employees and shareholders, or to empty the 401(k)s and pensions of retirees, as they would eventually do. I believe they were generally decent people who got seduced by the promise of great wealth and glory—gradually, then suddenly—into doing evil deeds. Despite those very public failures, every day another corporate leader is seduced into changing his or her story about what’s right and wrong—from withholding critical data to deceptive accounting procedures to falsifying shareholder quarterly earning reports. Every day, by some storytelling process, an employee is seduced into altering a fundamental ethical position and, in doing so, places himself or herself in moral peril. Every day, organizations and their people seek out and take shortcuts, seduced by the belief that there won’t be a price to pay, that somehow they’ll be the lucky ones to get away with it. Every day, huge, profitable companies find creative ways to lay off employees who’ve been with them for nineteen and a half years so they won’t have to pay the pension that kicks in at twenty, telling themselves a story that it’s unavoidable (it’s not), that the departed worker is getting a severance package that’s generous (it isn’t), that the company ought not be faulted for betraying a promise the company made almost two decades ago (of course they should).

  Some warning signals that may suggest you have a heightened vulnerability to seduction:

  Increasing preoccupation with securing fame, power, or financial wealth

  Lack of clarity about your values, purpose, and spirituality in life

  Tendency to look outside yourself for answers to life’s most profound questions

  Very limited capacity for self-awareness and self-reflection

  Poorly defined sense of self

  Considerable inner turmoil, unhappiness, and discontent

  From the hundreds of workshops I’ve conducted and the thousands of people I’ve worked with, I realize it’s no small thing to ask you to step outside yourself and examine what does and doesn’t work about your life as you’re living it, as your story has been unfolding all these years. A fish, after all, spends its entire existence never realizing it’s in water. But we’re more self-aware than fish, and so it’s imperative that we dive in. “It is so easy to become our surroundings, our environment,” wrote Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton in her book, Seductive Poison. “Without clarity, we are our own deceivers.” When Steve B., the man at the start of this chapter who seemed to have it all, recognized, at age fifty-three, the fundamental flaw in his story—that his private voice was not his own but his father’s, that for decades he hadn’t really lived his own life, that he had experienced so little joy in a life that should have been overflowing with it—he broke down. He bawled like a baby. For a good while, he was a mess. He had lost one of the most vital elements in his life: his identity. For so many others I’ve had the privilege to work with, an equally seismic breakthrough occurred when they realized, for the first time, how completely “off” their story had gotten, how the journey was not of their own making, though they had followed its flawed road map. On the second morning of the workshop, I ask the group whether, in doing their homework (writing their old story) the previous night, they had unearthed the authentic “voice” they were writing in and, if so, was it theirs? In almost every class, several people raise their hands to say that yes, they found the voice—and that it belonged to their mother or father. (Every now and then the infiltrating voice belongs to a teacher or a priest or another family member, but the vast majority of time it’s a parental voice.) “Our brains are valuable forgers, weaving a tapestry of memory and perception whose detail is so compelling that its inauthenticity is rarely detected,” writes psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his frank and insightful book, Stumbling on Happiness. “In a sense, each of us is a counterfeiter who prints phony dollar bills and then happily accepts them for payment, unaware that he is both the perpetrator and victim of a well-orchestrated fraud.”

  You may think everything coming out of your mouth is of your own formulation but it’s probably not. Better to be wary of even your own ideas and words until you can examine their roots. We’d be well served to heed the endearing skepticism of media critic Marshall McLuhan, who once said, “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”

  HOW YOUR VALUES AND BELIEFS AFFECT YOUR STORYTELLING

  Before you can write your new, better story, you must know who you are. Absent that knowledge, the author has no authority.

  Nothing speaks to who we are and how we perceive the world more than our core beliefs and values. Inescapably, it is these beliefs and values that serve as the lens, or filter, through which we interpret our sensory experience. Many of our most dominant stories, not to mention our most dogmatic and inflexible ones—people can’t be trusted; God exists; God does not exist; affirmative action is just another form of bigotry; affirmative action is not only justified for aggrieved minorities but benefits society as a whole; euthanasia can be an act of grace; euthanasia is playing God; etc.—can be traced to deeply embedded values and beliefs. To understand just how profoundly beliefs and values influence the way we create stories, let’s look at one of the most loaded subjects for human intercourse: politics. And while our sleeves are rolled up, let’s examine the divergent views about one of the most inflammatory issues bedeviling Americans as I write this in early 2007: the war in Iraq.

  The invasion and the ongoing perilous situation over there have sharply divided the country in the stories we tell. Stories about President Bush range from those that heroize him to those that villainize him, while stories about the war itself range from those portraying it as grimly unavoidable and necessary and better now than later, to those portraying it as calamitously irresponsible, even evil. Let’s hear the respective takes of Robert C. and Diane R., two representative Americans, on the subject. First, Robert:

  George Bush is the worst thing that could happen to America. His arrogance, stubbornness, and poor judgment have done incalculable harm to this country and the people of Iraq. I hate the man and all that he stands for. When I see him on television, my skin crawls. In the grand scheme, he’s more dangerous than the terrorists themselves. I personally believe that he knowingly lied to the American people—but even if he didn’t, he’s guilty of other lethal sins: willful ignorance; abominable lack of preparation for Iraq after the capture of Saddam; and an inability to assess how the situation is really going, by some objective, nonpartisan, nonpolitical measure of reality, and to make the necessary adjustments so that the minimum number of lives are put at risk. He leads an administration that has really learned only one lesson from Vietnam: This time they’re going to shut down as much daily TV and media coverage of the death and brutal destruction going on over there, to keep the issue abstract for most Americans so the war machine can proceed unimpeded. I’m absolutely certain he will go down as the worst president in this country’s history.

  Now, Diane’s s
tory.

  I deeply admire George Bush. Because of his courage, conviction, and determination, my family and this country have not been attacked since 9/11 and have hope for a terror-free future. His willingness to attack terrorists relentlessly, wherever they are found, and to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world, is changing the course of history in a profoundly positive way, despite the difficulties that we at home and especially our soldiers and the Iraqi people are facing right now. Really, now: Did people expect such a sea change would proceed without a hitch? Has it ever? This is an enemy that is not looking to compromise, and we kid ourselves to believe that diplomacy alone is the answer, when it so very rarely is. If we cut and run now, what will we have done? Weaken us in the eyes of our allies and our enemies and, more important, put off the time when we will have to confront an adversary that is not going away simply because we want them to, and which will only be stronger, and more nuclear-ready, the next time around. In spite of Bush’s declining popularity, I believe he is a man of great character and integrity, willing to make difficult decisions, which makes him precisely the right person for managing the grave crisis we now face as a nation. When the history books are written twenty to fifty years from now, George Bush will no doubt be regarded as one of this country’s finest presidents.

  Can they really be talking about the same man? How could such completely opposing stories be formed from the same set of facts? What could account for such divergent views of the president and his actions? It’s clear that Robert and Diane each adamantly believe that the story he or she is telling represents the real truth—the objective reality—about Bush’s actions, decisions, and very essence.