How Will Your School Community Share Your Story?

The pandemic experience is an opportunity to create a story to tell future generations.

King Lear and Cordelia (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 7) Francesco Bartolozzi , CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

A look at storytelling and leadership, here is a summary.

Key Points

• Story bias helps us organise, filter and remember information.
• Storytelling is critical to successful leadership — this is especially true during disruptive change.
• Teleological explanation helps us to understand what we are trying to become.
• The pandemic experience gives us an opportunity to create a story to tell future generations.
• Read more articles on leadership.

Narrative Bias

We rely on the story bias. It helps us process our experiences into manageable chunks. This cognitive bias is our tendency to assimilate experiences and information into a coherent narrative or story pattern.

We filter the masses of data we encounter. This pattern recognition lets us jettison the information that does not fit into our story view.

There is a downside. Although experiences are more memorable, we might force information into a preset mould and disregard new insights we need to pay attention…