Cone of Plausibility

What is the cone of plausibility?

The cone of plausibility is a visual framework used in strategic foresight to illustrate the relationship between the present moment and the range of future outcomes that may unfold over time. As uncertainty increases, the future does not resolve into a single outcome but instead expands into multiple possible paths.

The framework helps leaders distinguish between probable, plausible, possible, and preferable futures. It is particularly useful for organizations that need to make long-range decisions under conditions of uncertainty, complexity, and incomplete information.

As the diagram suggests, the further into the future one looks, the wider the range of outcomes that must be considered—and the less reliable narrow predictions become.

Origins of the framework

The cone of plausibility was first articulated publicly by Charles Taylor in 1988 in Alternative World Scenarios for Strategic Planning (U.S. Army War College), as a way of illustrating the range of geopolitical futures facing decision-makers.

Since then, the concept has been adapted and refined by futurists including Trevor Hancock, Clement Bezold, and Joseph Voros. While Prescient did not invent the concept, we developed the visual depiction used here to clarify how different categories of futures relate to one another in practice.

Insights for strategic planning

Several planning insights emerge when the cone of plausibility is used explicitly rather than implicitly:

The probable future is only one future.
The probable future reflects what is most widely expected to happen if current trends continue without major disruption. While useful, it represents consensus—not certainty.

Over-reliance on the probable future increases vulnerability.
Organizations that plan exclusively around the probable future are often surprised when unexpected developments occur. Making assumptions visible creates space to explore outcomes that may not be likely, but are nonetheless plausible and consequential.

Preferable futures highlight agency.
The concept of preferable futures reminds leaders that the future is not entirely predetermined. Strategic choices, investments, and governance decisions can influence which futures become more likely over time. Notably, preferable futures often sit at the outer edge of plausibility, where competitive and institutional advantages can emerge.

Possible futures set the outer boundary.
Possible futures describe what could happen within the physical and systemic constraints of the world, even if such outcomes are highly unlikely. The plausible future lies between this outer boundary and the narrower band of what is currently considered probable.

Case Example: Using the Cone of Plausibility in Strategic Planning

In 2018, Boeing projected a strong outlook for commercial aviation and positioned artificial intelligence and autonomy as drivers of improved safety and efficiency. The company’s planning assumptions reflected a continuation of historical safety trends and anticipated a growing role for autonomous systems in response to pilot shortages.

From the standpoint of the probable future at the time, these assumptions were reasonable. However, other plausible—if unlikely—scenarios received less attention. What conditions might lead to a fatal accident? What if such an event occurred more than once? How might regulatory, reputational, and operational consequences cascade?

Had greater consideration been given to these plausible futures, some of the downstream impacts that followed may have been mitigated. The example illustrates how planning that remains narrowly anchored to the probable future can obscure emerging risks with significant strategic consequences.

Why this matters

Strategic planning that focuses only on what seems most likely can limit an organization’s ability to anticipate risk, adapt to disruption, and recognize emerging opportunities. The cone of plausibility provides a disciplined way to broaden strategic conversations without collapsing into speculation.

Used well, it helps leadership teams test assumptions, surface blind spots, and make more resilient decisions in environments where uncertainty is not an exception, but a defining condition.

Apply the Framework

I use the cone of plausibility with leadership teams to surface assumptions, test strategic risk, and expand the range of futures under consideration.

Your Organization Is Already Telling a Story. Make It Strategic.

Most organizations tell a story about who they are—but few intentionally craft narratives showing how they'll survive uncertainty and thrive in a changing future. Yet that's exactly what today's complex, fast-moving world demands.

What is a strategic narrative?

An uncertain future, complexity, and an accelerating rate of change are the defining characteristics of our era. Yet most organizations approach their narrative assuming that the future is stable and knowable. Few intentionally create narratives demonstrating how they will survive periods of uncertainty and adapt and thrive in a different future.

To emerge intact, healthy, and strong, organizations today need a shared vision of who they are and an understanding of who they can become in the face of change. This is what a strategic narrative provides.

A strategic narrative is an intentionally composed, compelling and inspiring story that explains the enduring values shared by members of an organization, their origins as a collective, and what they want to achieve in the future—and how. But more than that: strong strategic narratives are the sinews that connect an organization's past with its vision of the desired future. A solid strategic narrative serves as an element of resilience. It radiates enduring meaning to its participants and model of transformative change, demonstrating new behaviors and interactions that will help the organization thrive.

What is strategic about a strategic narrative? What does it have to do with planning or strategy?

Great question. 

All organizations have a story about where they come from, who they are and how they imagine the future. Part of that story is purposefully crafted (CEO speeches, the “our story” page on a corporate website). But much of it emerges organically—in the way people casually talk about the organization or create workarounds that end up embedded in the system. An organizational narrative’s conscious and unconscious elements are reinforced through people’s stories about their institutions and actions.

An organizational narrative becomes strategic when leaders get honest about the gap between their official story and the actual story people tell about the organization—in hallway conversations, exit interviews, Slack channels. A good strategic narrative closes that gap and offers new models for behavior using the actual story as its founding basis. Creating the conditions for new behavior and a new story opens pathways to future resilience.

What is so narrative about strategic narrative? Is it a story?

The short answer is yes. Although strategic narratives might not sound exactly like a novel or children’s book, strategic narratives are stories.  

All humans understand our social reality through stories. We use spreadsheets to understand budgets, taxonomies to classify system elements, and stories to understand and influence each other. 

As individuals, we tell stories about our experiences to make sense of what is happening around us, creating a constant dynamic thread that links past to present and future.  

Organizational psychologists have empirically confirmed that the way we narrate our reality to ourselves plays an instrumental role in our behavior. Our stories become tools that guide our decision-making; people always seek to take steps that make sense based on what they did or what happened last. This behavior also shapes external reality. The adoption of gen AI in the workplace today is an outcome of individuals’ beliefs—their story—about its role in productivity and their own role in the mission at hand.

 The link between narrative and external conditions offers critical insight for organizational leaders. Stories are ideal for introducing potential environmental changes and modeling new behaviors required to succeed in changing circumstances. 

How can we create one single narrative that is also representative and inclusive?

This question is urgently essential. The answer starts with being honest about the decisive role of power in determining whose version of a narrative gets told. All groups have uneven power relations. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In families, parents rightfully have more power than their young children. In corporations, greater power ideally means more responsibility and accountability.  

The uneven distribution of power suffuses institutional narratives. Some narratives are elevated to official status. In contrast, others are suppressed or unspoken. Recognizing this power imbalance is an essential element in the health of an organization and its successful management. Opening the organization to all of the stories that shape it is a critical strategic move, especially in a transparent, networked era in which many stakeholders drive organizational success.

Ultimately, this diversity is a form of strength, as companies that seek greater inclusivity recognize. To generate this strength, powerful strategic narratives must be elastic and inclusive enough to withstand the inevitable negotiations over their meaning by stakeholders. 

This means creating narrative-building processes that actively surface suppressed voices and genuinely negotiate meaning with stakeholders—not just broadcasting a top-down story.

What is the outcome of a strategic narrative project? Are there tangible deliverables?

There are tangible and intangible deliverables. At the least, a project should produce an actual narrative: a story told in a style that is culturally aligned with the organization about its enduring values, how it began, its future vision and what it is doing today to achieve this vision.

If there is no compelling vision of the future in play, then strategic foresight work to create a viable aspirational vision is also recommended.

Strategic narratives are also frameworks for strategic communication. I instruct participants on using the narrative in a ‘recipe’ to communicate new initiatives consistently and compellingly for different audiences.

The intangible deliverables are as important. Executives or other participants in creating a strategic narrative develop a shared understanding of the company’s path and gain confidence in relating change to insiders and outsiders

How can we work together to create or revise our corporate strategic narrative? A case study:

Here is one case study from my own experience. A public resources company planned a significant transformation in its business model, beginning with the addition of a second core business. It was essential to convey the theme of continuity to shareholders and the public rather than radical change.

First, we uncovered the existing organizational narrative. I audited public statements, their website and other documents to clarify their intentionally communicated narrative about the company’s future. I conducted executive interviews to uncover their unconsciously held ideas about the future. In these interviews, I could observe the language patterns used to talk about the company. I held a series of interviews with company executives. They evoked past examples where they felt the company had succeeded and displayed its best values. 

Based on that work, I supplied them with a set of seven enduring values they could refer to as touchstones to showcase the continuity and evolutionary aspects of their change. We also provided them a new strategic narrative that began in the past, pointed toward their intended future and rested on their actions today to evolve toward that future state. It helped persuade those leading change that they had an exciting, enduring quest to relate, rather than an abrupt change in their business model that might frighten investors.

 Ready to clarify your organization’s narrative? Our working process

Here’s what the process looks like if we work together to create or revise your strategic narrative:

1. Uncover the narrative you're already telling We audit your official story—websites, leadership communications, public statements—and conduct stakeholder interviews to surface the unconscious narratives embedded in how people actually talk about your organization. This reveals the gap between the story you intend to tell and the story people are living.

2. Build a shared assessment of where you are From that work, we develop a picture of your present moment that stakeholders across the organization can recognize. This becomes your foundation.

3. Envision a future worth moving toward We explore emerging trends, assess your current long-term strategy against new conditions, and articulate an aspirational goal—something your organization can actually achieve.

4. Find the seeds of that future in your past Through stakeholder conversations, we locate moments when your organization already demonstrated the values and behaviors your future requires. They're already there.

5. Define what progress actually looks like We develop criteria and metrics so your organization knows which activities and actions move you toward your goal.

6. Create the communications strategy We develop collateral and a plan that demonstrates continuity and evolution—internally and externally. Your narrative becomes the frame through which people understand what's changing and why it matters.

When You Adopt Horizon Scanning, the Quality Of Your Strategy Improves

A Basic Guide to Horizon Scanning for Organizations

Most organizations plan for a future that looks like the past. Horizon scanning is how you spot what's actually coming, the changes emerging at the edges of your awareness that could reshape your world.

Formally defined, horizon scanning is the effort to “continuously and objectively explore, monitor and assess current developments and their potential for the future” (Rowe, Wright, and Derbyshire, 2017). But the idea is older and simpler than that.

Imagine you are the captain of a trade vessel in an earlier era. Your livelihood depends on your ability to set sail. You need to know whether stormy weather, strange creatures, or ships from enemy lands may be lurking. Your tools are simple: your eyes and your best judgment. But if you only stand and look in one direction, you might miss an enemy ship coming from the other. Your best bet is to scan—to look widely in every direction to grasp all of the dangers and threats emerging from the water.

That is the essential metaphor of horizon scanning.

Scanning the horizon widely can help you anticipate coming threats

Why Horizon Scanning Matters Now

Horizon scanning emerged in the 1960s ascompanies faced growing complexity—international expansion, advancing technologies, new management challenges. The technique is even more vital today. An uncertain future, accelerating change, and complex interconnected systems mean that organizations can no longer assume the external environment will remain stable or predictable.

Horizon scanning does three critical things:

1. It asks you to pay conscious attention to change and reminds you that the external environment is dynamic and can produce surprises.

2. It insists that you focus on issues beyond the inevitably narrow scope of your mission, reducing the chances that developments will catch you off guard.

3. It anchors your decisions and strategies in a genuine future focus by asking the what-ifs that matter.

The Concept of Weak Signals In Horizon Scanning

The goal of horizon scanning is to anticipate relevant issues and opportunities before they have fully developed. These potential issues are often called “weak signals.”

 Igor Ansoff, a mathematician and military theorist and, later, a strategy professor, introduced “weak signals” into strategic thinking.

He urged managers to seek early evidence of a changing environment—those signals that are not yet fully evolved or “strong” enough to be heard clearly. His process was straightforward: identify and collect signals of change, evaluate their relevance, and incorporate them into the firm's strategic planning.

A weak signal is considered to be an event or a phenomenon that has occurred but is not typical or mainstream. It has not reached the stage of being an “issue” or a problem or even a recognizable trend. People use news media, social media, and specialized sources for information to unearth weak signals. Horizon scanning usually involves recording these signals in a database and then evaluating them to understand what they mean.

This evaluation, rather than the collection of information in itself, is the heart of the horizon scanning activity. How do you know if what you have found is meaningful? What if it is something you have never heard of but which is known to others? Can one weak signal by itself matter? 

The fact is that you can’t answer all of those questions at the time of collection. Accepting—even embracing—this ambiguity is essential in horizon scanning work. Swiss anthropologist Pierre Rossel described weak signals as "perceptions of possible changes that are essentially candidates (or hypotheses) with a socially relevant and resonant knowledge building process." In other words, a signal is evidence that seems meaningful to you in the context of your organization. You think it should play a part in building a picture or story of a potential future environment.

Additionally, the very act of seeking to identify what is currently on the distant horizon is a fruitful exercise. By conducting it, you are putting yourself in the advantageous position of potentially seeing, preparing, and acting on changes in the environment in a proactive way. 

An Example: How Weak Signals Predicted Major Change

In a 2020 article on horizon scanning in the journal Foresight, Yuichi Washida and Akhihisa Yahata explored how how horizon scanning informs future-focused scenarios predictive value. They offered an instructive example of weak signals in action.

In 2014, one of the authors identified four unrelated weak signals related to disease spread:

• The danger of infected mosquitos

• A syphilis epidemic

• An item about prostitution and drug use in the European Union 

• The spread of tuberculosis in run-down areas in Japan

Separately, he collected four items on the topic of China.

• Chinese military activity close to Vietnam

• Economic competition between Japan, the US, and China

• Japanese corporations withdrawing from China

• Chinese was being used increasingly in educational contexts

Looking at each cluster together, he drew two conclusions. The first set suggested the potential for a dangerous epidemic. The second suggested that China would soon test its capacity to be a global leader. These were "non-linear" changes—they could not be extrapolated from past trends. The only way to find them was through disciplined and imaginative analysis of weak signals in relationship to each other.

In their 2020 article, the authors pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic and China's role in it as expressions of these signals. By seeing them in 2014, they had time to prepare.

How to Set up a Horizon Scanning System

Horizon scanning is best as a systematic activity. Through repetition and continuous looking, you can begin to get a sense of change over time. With that said, if this is a new practice in your organization, you may want to dip into the activity with a specific project or question. 

Experienced futurists have identified key decisions to be made?

• How broadly or narrowly you want to define your scope. A national security organization already monitors the geopolitical environment. But what might they discover by looking at consumer behavior in local markets? These could signal early signs of resource constraints that eventually matter to them. A global clothing retailer already follows market trends and supply chains. But what about scanning global geopolitics for emerging trade disputes that could disrupt their operations?

• Your time horizon. Are you looking for what emerges in 3 years or 30? This shapes what signals matter.

• How you will analyze what you find. Will it be a database? Regular team discussions? What role will genAI automation play in your analysis?

• How analysis feeds into strategy. Scanning only matters if it actually changes how you plan and decide.

Once you've answered these questions, you can choose what to collect, and crucially, recognize that looking outside your area of expertise is vital.

Four Essential Practices

Rossel suggests four more important practices around the collection and analysis of signals.

(1) Don't consider signals in isolation. One sign or event is unlikely to be the sole cause of complex change. Analyze signals in connection with others and in the context of a hypothesis about the future environment. Clusters of weak signals tell you things individual signals cannot.

(2) Probe your own bias. You are always a biased observer. Does a signal you've chosen reflect or confirm your worldview? How does your point of view color what you've identified? This self-awareness is essential to avoiding confirmation bias at scale.

(3) Make it collaborative. Horizon scanning should never be a solo activity. Other stakeholders will see signals you miss and interpret them differently. The more diverse the group performing horizon scanning, the better your chance of spotting what matters.

(4) Follow the signal forward. When your group decides to include a particular signal in your expectations of the future environment, keep watching it. Appraise it in light of what happens later. This rigor sharpens your understanding of how change actually occurs and when it's relevant to you.

The Culture Problem: Why Information Abundance Changes the Scanning Environment

Directions and explanations of horizon scanning often focus heavily on the collection of information and weak signals. This makes sense historically—horizon scanning evolved in an information-poor environment. People had to go to public libraries and government offices to gather data. A conference or meeting with an expert offered rare insight into an otherwise closed world.

Today is radically different. We are drowning not only in information but in intelligently curated collections of emerging innovations, ideas, and practices from countless channels. This abundance makes the entire concept of a "weak" signal less important. It places far more pressure on the people collecting and evaluating information to do so openly and thoughtfully.

Fostering an organizational culture that can take in information that counters its dominant view of the future—and remain open to creative analysis—is now critical. Without a strong, open culture around information, it doesn't matter how much you collect. Your organization simply won't be able to make good use of it.

The Neuroscience behind Strategic Narrative

When our stories are dysfunctional, we are dysfunctional

Several generations of increasingly advanced science now tell us that the insights of novelists and filmmakers have an empirical basis in our brain chemistry.  This should be a clarion call for every leader, because when our stories are dysfunctional, we are dysfunctional, both as individuals and in organizations.

The machine view of humans has become obsolete

The understanding that humans actively structure our reality in the form of stories goes against the Enlightenment era premise that people are rational machines who process reality as a kind of math problem.  Rational wo/man is someone who digests empirical facts and then analyzes them on the basis of an external principle.

Science now tells us that there is no such creature. Our brains aren’t transparent receptacles for objective facts, but complex filters  relentlessly interpreting information and transforming it  into a coherent story.   It  is the story we end up telling ourselves that drives our behavior.  We all have different processing filters, which is why the same facts mean different things to different people. Moreover, our minds are less attuned to the distinction between facts and fictions than they are to figuring out which accounts of an event are more or less persuasive.  In other words, we value coherence over facticity.

From Frog Brains to Humans: Interpreting our Surroundings

Scientific research has been building the case for half a century that we are all storytellers.  In the 1950s, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jerry Lettvin, laid some of the groundwork with an influential article, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.” In his study of how frogs see, Lettvin showed that frogs’ neurons are optimized to see small objects in motion and not to see anything that is still. In other words, frogs interpret the objects around them in line with their priorities, which revolve largely around catching flies, a tasty dinner from a frog’s point of view.

Many years later, cognitive scientists began to frame this recognition in human terms. Like the lowly frog,  our brains also mediate information, organizing it in a way that makes sense to us.  Our tendencies are narrative:

• We each select information that matters particularly to us from all of the noise around us

• We put it into a temporal order in which one event follows another for a reason

• When we don’t have enough external information to create a story, our mind helpfully steps in and supplies it, so that we experience reality as a coherent narrative

What cognitive psychologists learned from folk tales

The first social scientists who understood this phenomenon did so through their studies of folk tales. Folk tales are interesting because they are highly formulaic and also universal.

You do not need to know the specific details of a folk tale to know what is likely to happen in it.  If the boy loses the girl, we know the boy will get the girl later.  If the hero is thwarted in a task, we know that he will make another attempt and try harder.   Cognitive psychologists in the last half of the 20th century were interested in this rather amazing knowledge that we all seem to have.  How do we all seem to know what will happen next? Psychologists and anthropologists explained that cognitively, we hold in our minds two ways of viewing a story. One is as a series of  “parts” and the other is as a “whole” that goes from beginning to end.  We always already know the “whole” archetypal story, and because of that knowledge, we can fill in the blanks in parts where details aren’t supplied. As it turns out, we process reality in much the same way as we do folk tales.

Reality, like stories, is scripted

Jean Mandler, who is today Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, explained in the 1980s that we process our everyday lives just as we do folk tales.  She explored daily ‘scripts,’ which for psychologists, are what drive routine activities, like driving to work or making breakfast. These activities are “scripted” so we perform them automatically without having to re-invent our routines every day.

Mandler observed through empirical studies in her laboratory that people make sense of daily routines in that same “whole  - part” structure that we bring to folk tales.  We automatically pour a cup of coffee because we know it is a part of the larger script of making breakfast. As with stories, we link our activities in a temporal and meaningful order.  When performing the script, 'going to work,' we would not try to pay for the bus before walking to the bus stop. If we did not have this resident narrative formula available to us, we would have to invent our habits anew every day by deriving what to do, and in what order in order to complete activities like eating breakfast and going to work.  So our implicit narrative understanding is a useful heuristic, like a program running silently in the background of our daily life, that helps us function more effectively.

You can already see how powerfully these insights explain a wide range of human responses to events.  It is as if we are all protagonists in an ongoing mystery novel, trying to gather as much information as we can to put together the right story. In situations where there is a chronic shortage of information, people develop conspiracy mindsets.  This happens in authoritarian states and in dysfunctional businesses where information flows are cut off. 

In diverse populations, there are likely to be many different ways that people experience the same facts on the ground.  This is true in multicultural societies, liberal democracies, and many workplaces.  This diversity of narrative can make the group fragile, unless there is a strong value placed on the validity of diversity itself.

In times of stress or crisis, whether a corporate crisis, rapid societal change or a surprise event, the script to which people have grown accustomed is itself exploded, and people tend to experience dissonance, an inability to put the story together.

Cognitive Neuroscientists Reveal our Storytelling Brains

Cognitive neuroscience is still at an early stage in some ways, but emerging studies reveal that our brains are hard wired for storytelling.  Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneer in this field, has studied people with ‘split brains,’ in which the right and left hemispheres can no longer communicate with each other, so normal sense-making is impaired. Taking advantage of the fact that information can only be fed to one side of the brain at a a time, Gazzaniga discerned that if the left brain is deprived of all of the information required to understand a situation, it will invent an explanation.

In his studies, people who have not seen an object placed in their hand, such as a coffee cup, will make up a reason even if they do not know. “Oh yes, I have not had coffee today and was going to get a cup.” Jonathan Gottschall, who writes about this work in his book The Storytelling Animal suggests that this ability to generate explanations evolved in humans  so that we could “experience our lives as coherent, orderly and meaningful,” even if that means we must project meaning into situations when they threaten to appear random or incoherent.

For most of us, most of the time, our storytelling brain is a kind of black box that keeps the mechanics of what we are doing out of view.  We don’t really notice how we are putting together stories: picking up different information, solving the ongoing mystery of what is happening by privileging some events, dismissing others and putting it all in an order that makes sense.

We generally only notice stories when they are brought to our attention as fictions: when we read novels or watch movies.

In our everyday lives, as English professor Kay Young and medical doctor Jeffrey Saver have written,  our storymaking is so well integrated into our lives that it is invisible. We don’t notice that our conversations are a process of developing a story with someone else, or the activity of selecting and ordering particular memories to make sense of our lives.

Alternatively, as cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner has persuasively argued, we notice the mechanics of storytelling when  archetypes or formulas are disrupted, forcing us to question not just the content, but the rules that govern our narratives. Disruption can come in the form of personal events such as  unexpected illnesses or unexpected windfalls. It also arrives in our lives via public events. When we  watch the daily news, take part in our local communities, or go to work,  occurrences either adhere to the script to which we have become accustomed, or upset our “whole” story of what we implicitly believe should be happening. As a result we may lose our confidence that we are putting the "parts" together correctly.

All of that activity takes place in the 'black box' of our narrative-making brain, which Young and Saver describe as a distributed neural network that includes three different areas, each with its own function. Memories are organized in the amygdaloid-hippocampal system; language is constructed in the left peri-sylvain region; and events (whether real or imaginary) are placed in narrative structures in the frontal cortices (Young and Saver, 75). When the brain is well functioning, we are able to systematize our experience in narrative form, which in turn gives us a sense of self.

When we lose our narrative ability, this can have profound effects on our sense of self.  This has been demonstrated in people suffering injuries in the narrating parts of the brain.  Young and Saver describe several different expressions of dysnarrativia,the inability to narrate. Some amnesiacs get stuck in a particular period, unable to tell about events over time anymore. Others fabricate false memories without recognizing that they are false.  Some people who sustain injuries to certain parts of the frontal lobe lose the ability to assemble their experiences in a story.  Such people can become sluggish or even motionless for long periods.  “Individuals who have lost the ability to construct narrative…. have lost themselves,” say Young and Saver.

Ultimately, though, we don’t just live in our own solipsistic stories, but in the social world of work, family and community. There, we engage each other in a kind of narrative marketplace, becoming characters in the stories of others and inviting them into or rejecting them from our own.

How the body changes in response to engagement with stories

Paul Zak, the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, has explored people's physical responses to the stories of others by measuring oxytocin levels of people watching films or listening to stories in a lab. In experiments, he showed that deep engagement in a story leads us to release oxytocin, a chemical  that increases positive, helpful impulses. Zak suggests that this response relates to our emotional involvement:

If you pay attention to the story and become emotionally engaged with the story’s characters, then it is as if you have been transported into the story’s world. This is why your palms sweat when James Bond dodges bullets. And why you stifle a sniffle when Bambi's mother dies.

Such engagement does not only happen with fictions but with the ‘true stories’ of our lives when we become deeply engaged: At work, in our personal lives, in the 'characters' we encounter in news stories, in our communities and nations.

How to Make Practical Use of this Information

Understanding that people organize their experiences through narrative has powerful implications for leaders and organizations who are seeking to manage or generate change.  There are many insights that understanding our narrative brains make possible; here are just a few.

• Lack of communication within an organization produces narrative ambiguity. People will create reasons for what is happening when they do not have enough information or cannot make sense of what is happening.

• Leadership storytelling is important but it is only one part of creating a meaningful environment. Everyone generates his or her own story based on how they experience external events. Leadership stories are one event; others lie in the environment, in formal and informal processes that structure the organization, and in policies for example. So good leadership lies in using all of the tools that shape the environment to enable good stories to flourish.

• An environment in that supports good stories likely includes:

  • High levels of transparency and good communication channels

  • Validation of a diverse interpretations of what is happening, within a range considered reasonable and productive

  • Being surrounded by others who have a positive story to tell and can interact in validating ways

• In times of turbulence and uncertainty,  people are likely suffer forms of dysnarrativia because it is difficult to place parts of the story in a coherent 'whole.'  We question the “whole” as our assumptions are disrupted.  In the face of planned or unexpected change, leaders should recognize the possibility that people's underlying understanding of the organizational narrative may be upset, and seek to mitigate negative effects.

Sources mentioned in this blog post:

• Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,”  Critical Inquiry 18, 1991.

• Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Houghton Mifflin, 2012

• Kay Young and Jeffrey Saver, "The Neurology of Narrative," SubStance 30, 2001

• Jerome Lettvin,“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” 1958

• Paul Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make us React, The Neuroscience of Narrative,” Cerebrum, February 2015