Stephanie Pace Marshall
Stephanie Pace Marshall is an internationally recognized educational pioneer and inspiring speaker and writer on leadership, learning, and the design and creation of transformative learning environments. She is founding president and president emerita of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy; the founding president of the National Consortium of Secondary STEM Schools; and past president of the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, International. She is author of over 40 published journal articles; an author for Organizations of the Future (Drucker Foundation) and an editor and coauthor of Scientific Literacy for the 21st Century (2002). Her 2006 book, The Power to Transform: Leadership that Brings Learning and Schooling to Life, received the 2007 Educator’s Award from the Delta Kappa Gamma Society, International. She is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce in London and a trustee of the Society for Science and the Public in Washington, DC. She serves as chancellor of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois.
■ ■ ■
Stories become testaments, old or new, that choreograph the life of a community.
–Stephen Larsen
In 1997, I received an unusual invitation: “Come and spend a week with a group of medicine men and women ‘spirit doctors,’ healers, and elders of the Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal tribe, explore the nonlinearity of ancient ways of knowing, and co-create a new, more sustainable human story for the new millennium.”
Despite challenges, I accepted the invitation; the possibility of cocreating a sustainable human story with some of our oldest living ancestors was magnetic.
Months later I arrived in the Red Center of Australia, and for the first time in my life, I felt completely disoriented. I did not know how to be, belong, or think there. Everything I thought I knew, every way I had navigated and made sense of my world, was challenged. Most frightening was my loss of identity, my sense of who I was now, in this place.
I had said yes, with great clarity, and had traveled far to engage in a most elusive and irrational journey. I needed to understand why. Throughout my life, I had seen countless examples of narratives (even false ones) trumping data. I became curious and captivated by the asymmetrical power of story to change hearts, minds, and behavior.
Fortunately, before I became irretrievably lost, that quiet voice inside that often tells us what we don’t want to hear, spoke up: “You came here to learn and cocreate, and you no longer know how. So you must surrender, let go of what you think you know, listen, and pay attention.”
Here’s what I heard and learned. Aboriginal culture has its origin in dreamtime or world-making. Aborigines believe that before the world awakened, their ancestors emerged from sleep beneath the earth and began to sing their way across the land, seeking companionship, food, or shelter. Since the earth was still forming, their wandering and singing the names of things and places into the land actually shaped the landscape, creating mountains, watering holes, caves, plants, and animals. Eventually each ancestor reentered the earth, transforming themselves into a part of its topography forever. As they wandered and sung the land into existence, each left songlines, a “meandering trail of geographic sites” that crossed the country and were the result of specific encounters, captured as story.
Songlines are musical narratives and geographical maps, “a sort of musical score of a vast epic song-story that winds across the continent, telling of the ancestors’ adventures and how the landscape came into being.”1
Aborigine children are born into and inherit a stretch of a songline; the song’s verses are their birthright and the roots of their identity. It is this continuity of song and story that keeps both the land and their connection to it alive. Since songlines are maps embedded in the land, there is simply no word for lost in Pitjantjatjara. Walking and singing these song–stories in the appropriate cadence in which they were created tells the Pitjantjatjara where they can find shelter, food, and water; singing them in reverse tells them how to go home.
The night before we left, we were given a remarkable gift. Sitting around the campfire, we witnessed the tribal elder sing and dance a songline; then he paused and we thought he was finished, but he began to sing and dance again. Our guide was astonished: “The Elder has changed the songline,” she said, “and nothing will be the same.” Over time, it became clear that this new songline was the roots of a different, more sustainable human story; the presence of Western leaders and Aborigine elders had inspired and enabled its emergence. Together, we had cocreated a new story.
This experience profoundly changed me. I shifted how I understood the essential work of leaders and embraced a new framework for grounding our work: story, map, and landscape. I did not disavow my need to develop expertise and skills in the work traditionally ascribed to leaders; rather, I chose to stand in a different place by paying attention to both the overstories (actual events) and the understories (journey of our hearts and souls) within my organization.
Years ago, I heard a renowned photographer respond to the question, “What’s the secret to taking a good picture?”
“Technique is important,” he said, “but the art of taking a good picture is knowing where to point the camera.”
The same is true for leadership. As leaders, we must consciously point the camera in places previously unheard, unseen, or unrecognized. When we illuminate our personal and organizational narratives, we see, hear, and experience them differently – and can then choose to change them.
Songlines and their seamless integration of story, map, and landscape are relevant to our new work as leaders – as storytellers and mapmakers. We, too, are born into a songline – a constellation of stories and identity-shaping narratives of who and how we are; as we walk these patterned stories, usually unconsciously, we feed them and keep them alive. They become our maps, whether prison or portal, and we become the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We become the stories we live.
During this uncommon journey to the world of the Pitjantjatjara, a profound insight unfolded for me, and it frames how I now think about my work:
Changing the story changes everything. Leaders can create conditions by design to illuminate and unlock new stories of potential and possibility and to set them in motion so new maps can be walked.
The following story illustrates how paying attention to story, map, and landscape is a powerful driver for organizational change. Several years ago, one week before my institution was to open for another year, the admissions staff had mistakenly sent letters of invitation to 32 students on the wait list.
Distraught, the staff presented a plan to address the error. They would call each family, apologize profusely, but not admit the students. I listened, but said no. We had extended an invitation and our integrity was at stake. We would admit these students and welcome them.
The news of my decision spread like wildfire. We needed everything – dorm rooms, beds, mattresses, computers, residential counselors, faculty. The buzz, both positive and negative, drowned out every other conversation. We had one week to make it all happen.
Aware that I needed to know and understand our internal narratives and what the community was feeling, I asked a trusted colleague to write down every comment she heard and send them to me anonymously. Then one evening, I read all the comments, and detected two dominant patterns or narratives. One I called the firestorm (a story of impending division and fragmentation); the other I called the gift (a story of emerging pride and generosity).
I presented two visuals: one, a blazing fire, and the other a gift box with a big bow. Each image was surrounded by the community’s comments. I described these narrative patterns as two emerging stories over which we had complete control and asked my colleagues which one best defined who we wanted to be. We could choose the firestorm, grounded in a narrative of scarcity, and likely ensure we would have a dismal year; or we could choose the gift, grounded in a narrative of abundance.
As the year unfolded and the 32 students thrived, it was clear that the story we chose to live was the gift.
I later heard from many who wanted to embrace this story, but felt their responses were inadequate when confronted by the firestorm advocates, that the public naming of these two stories as choices gave them a place to stand and an authentic voice in cocreating our desired future. In response to negative comments, there was no argument; all they had to say was, “You’re living in ‘the firestorm,’ and that is not my story.”
This profound leadership experience yielded an epiphany: We are wired for storytelling. Facts largely activate the language areas of our brains, but stories activate and engage our brain holistically. We are relational beings, and stories enable us to identify with the experiences of others and connect them to our own. When we change our stories, we change our choices. And when we change our choices, we can change our minds.
Today, we behave as if we believe that more information, sophisticated data analytics, and additional and better strategies will predictably produce the outcomes we seek. But what transforms organizations into generative and creative environments are deeper relationships, and authentic conversations of meaning and purpose and life-affirming stories of identity: stories of who we are, what is possible, and how we want to be together in our work.
As leaders, we must know what to look for and how to see it, what to listen for and how to hear it, what to tell and how to tell it. We must also attend to the understory – the emotional and soulful dimensions of who we are.
“I never predict,” says Peter Drucker, “I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”2 Our work now is to point the camera on the often unseen and unspoken narratives in the collective consciousness of our organizations and shine a light on them so we can choose who we want to be. Sometimes the leader’s role is to remind us of who we really are.
Leaders and Leadership
Storytelling and Mapmaking