Good stories are like good ideas. It doesn't always make sense until a missing piece of the puzzle comes into view. And for that, all of us usually depend on others to have everything fall neatly into place.
The story of this blog began a few days ago, when my friend and long-time inspiration when it comes to all things “story”, Michael Margolis, connected me to a post on LinkedIn by Joe Lazer. The post speaks of the work of Kurt Vonnegut and his understanding of the universal shapes of stories.
It's absolutely worth taking a look at the video the Lazer posts, in which Vonnegut, in his own funny, articulate, and beautiful simple manner, describes his theory with just a blackboard and a piece of chalk.
To give one example. Below is a graph, in which the virtual axis runs from Good Fortune (G) to Ill Fortune (I), while the horizontal axis shows the evolution of the story from Beginning (B) to End (E). One of our most beloved story formats, Vonnegut suggests, might be called “Man in a Hole'. Although, as he points out, it doesn't have to involve either a man or a hole. But it is a tale in which someone has something bad happen to them, only for them to resolve it and end up slightly better off than when they started.
To support his intuition, Vonnegut suggests that we would do well to feed all of the world's stories into a machine to analyse their shape; and, as Joe Lazer points out, 60 years later, a team of data scientists did just that, only to report that Vonnegut was right all along: that there are a set of universal story arcs that keep on repeating throughout space and time.
As a lover of narrative theory, this is all so fascinating, to think that, in spite of the infinite number of stories that have played out across space and time, patterns begin to emerge that unite us all. And if this is true of stories, we can perhaps assume the same is true of experiences, including the experience of school.
Many of you will know of our recent work with the Felt Experience Indicator®, a framework and tool that we designed to visualise the experience of school for students, parents, and employees. It enables us to look at dimensions of this experience, such as happiness, connection, belonging… and track, for example, the “wavelength” of happiness over time. These visualisations enable us to see very precisely where the experience is peaking and where there are dips.
Looking at Vonnegut's work, it all feels very familiar. But, as these ideas collided in my mind this week, I started asking myself: are some of the patterns that we are beginning to see in schools more universal than others? And, as we collect more data, will we be able to identify some universal arcs in the experience of school?
Any data scientist will tell us, it is far too early to tell, but here are two trends that already start to stand out as potentially universal themes.
The first, we might describe as End of the Honeymoon. Whether we are looking at students, parents, employees, event attendees, or even heads of school, we often see that experience dips after a moment in time before rising again. In the example below, we can also see that the experiences of men and women, boys and girls, may differ even if the overall shape is the same.
The second trend could be called Life at the Business End. We've started to notice that the experience of parents in schools shifts downwards as their children enter the final years of school, as per the example below. And perhaps that “peak” at the end is the relief that we, as parents, might just have completed our first major test in the broader story of parenthood.
We haven't yet got to the level of clarity that Vonnegut achieved, after a lifetime of study and reflection. But we certainly have the machine and can't wait to see whether patterns start to come clearly into view as our data set grows.
For now, though, click on the link to Vonnegut's video and enjoy his genius mind at work.
Cover photo by Robyn Budlender on Unsplash.
Comments