I first learned about Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Inform
ation Age to the Conceptual Age when I met with Steve Borsch a month ago here in Northfield. Steve wrote about the book back in March in his Connecting the Dots blog in a post titled Left Brain or Right Brain? Remixing the World and he features it among his favorite books in his left sidebar.
I was delighted to discover that among the “six essential aptitudes on which professional success and personal fulfillment now depend” that Pink details in his book is Story. He defines it as “context enriched by emotion” and examines “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.”
Pink includes this quote from Don Norman’s book Things That Make Us Smart.
“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. Logic generalizes, stories particularize. Logic allows one to form a detached, global judgment; storytelling allows one to take the personal point of view, to understand the particular impact the decision is apt to have on the people who will be affected by it.”
I’ve got a Tell Stories section in the How to Blog Effectively chapter of my Guide to Leadership Blogging and Pink’s treatment has inspired me to provide more depth and breadth to it.
