American cats kill 4 billion birds a year, yet an ornithologist, in his scientific research to preserve a species, kills one tropical bird that’s less than a thousandth of its population and people want blood.  The singular narrative is a great thing when the mob goes after the killer of Cecil the Lion, but not so great when they turn their focus on a well meaning scientist.

KILLING IN THE NAME OF …

GET HIM!

Yesterday the NY Times had a rather sad story about the level of internet vigilante-ism seen these days thanks to social media.  It was about ornithologist Christopher Filardi who did what field biologists have done for centuries — he “collected” a specimen.

But by the time he had come down from the mountains, the AMNH had innocently tweeted out a photo of the “sacrificed” bird (always loved how that word was used in scientific methods), mentioning he had killed it in the name of science.  That was all it took to unleash the fury of the internet.  He ended up the target of something similar to the Michigan dentist who killed Cecil the Lion (not in the name of science).

NARRATIVE LOVES THE ONE 

There’s a whole discussion to be had about whether nature should be killed in the name of science any more, but what interests me is the power and drama of the clean, singular narrative.  It’s fascinating because science loves big numbers and large data sets.

And yet, as Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his brilliantly concise 2009 article in “Outside” magazine (that I have used for years in workshops) storytelling is at its strongest when there’s just a single character — especially when it comes to the villain.

The Filardi article pointed out the millions of birds killed by millions of faceless villains (domestic cats) and nearly a billion birds crash into buildings each year.  But all those numbers are meaningless up against the drama of the one seemingly oblivious scientist slaughtering nature with apparently no concerns for the creatures themselves.

It might be hard to process, but had the bird been killed by a team of five biologists the rage wouldn’t have been as powerful as it was for just the one poor nature loving scientist.  And this ends up being one of the toughest challenges for science-minded people when it comes to communication — the idea that more is not more when it comes to drama — it’s less.

Want to hear from a few graduates of Story Circles Narrative Training?  On Monday we held an hour conference call with folks from three government agencies — all graduates of Story Circles.  They range from a scientist (Mike Strauss, formerly of USDA) to a communicator with a science background (Michael Bart of National Park Service) to a communicator with no science background (Heidi Koontz of USGS).  It’s an insightful discussion.  And gratifying.

WARNING:  There’s a bunch of beeps at the start from people joining the call, but they stop after a few minutes.

STORY CIRCLES:  IT’S FOR COMMUNICATORS OF ALL SORTS

On Monday the USFWS folks in Portland hosted this conference call in preparation for the Demo Day we’ll be doing with them this fall.  I moderated the discussion involving three veterans of Story Circles as a large group listened in.  Each of them spoke for 10 minutes, providing specifics on how Story Circles has worked at their agencies.

Of particular note is Heidi Koontz of USGS in Ft Collins, Colorado.  She’s a communicator, not a scientist, and head of communication for the Central States Region.   She tells of how, as a long time veteran communicator, she wondered if the training might be superfluous — that she already knows it all from her years of experience.  She says it proved hugely valuable.

I’ve had Heidi speak at several of our Demo Days because of this.  She tells of how the other four members of her circle were scientists, causing her to groan at first.  But by the end, the four scientists had become such a valuable resource for her that she now uses them constantly for editorial input as they now have a language in common — the language of the ABT Framework.

It’s a great discussion.

My heart is with Bernie Sanders, but my head says he (and the Democratic party) are doomed.  When asked on Friday evening on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher about “the message” of the Democratic party he didn’t have a good answer.  Until they figure out how narrative works, they are doomed.

BERNIE SANDERS AND BILL MAHER BID FAREWELL TO THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S HOPES.

TRUMP KNOWS NARRATIVE (STILL)

Trump knows narrative.  That was the title of my draft editorial that the publicist for my “Houston, We Have A Narrative” book submitted to a large number of newspapers in the fall of 2015 as everyone was busy laughing at Donald Trump.  It was turned down everywhere — they already knew Trump didn’t stand a chance at the presidency.  I was left telling about the Trump/Narrative theme the morning after the election on “The Business of Story” podcast.

Two weeks ago on “Meet the Press” (May 27), Chuck Todd said, “… as President Trump showed once again how skilled he is at shaping a false narrative to his advantage.”  He’s talking about “shaping narrative.”  That’s what Trump knows how to do.  And the Democrats don’t.

What can be said about this?  The Democrats are utterly, utterly inept at mass messaging, which means narrative.  Here’s yet another article, just last week, with the same old headline of the Democrats, “need to have a message.”  Over and over and over again it’s being said to them.

My Democratic strategist friend Dave Gold had an excellent article in Politico last year laying it out clear as day — that Democrats are too much in love with polls and data, and too clueless about story/narrative.

It’s now at crisis stage.

HILLARY VERSUS BERNIE: QUIEN ES LESS MESSAGE SAVVY?

Hillary’s campaign, sadly, showed that they were both inept at messaging and uninterested in working on it.  The former was displayed by the candidate herself on May 22, 2016 with this exchange on Meet the Press:

CHUCK TODD:  Bernie Sanders has been talking about a political revolution. A future you can believe in. Obviously, Donald Trump with the Make America Great again, is one of these slogans that has taken off, for better or for worse. If you could sum up, what is the big idea of your candidacy?

SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:  Look, we are stronger together. We are stronger together, in facing our internal challenges and our external ones. We are stronger together if we work to improve the economy. And that’s going to mean trying to get the Republicans to do what will actually help produce more jobs, like we saw in the 1990s. We are stronger together when we have a bipartisan, even nonpartisan foreign policy that protects our country. And that provides a kind of steady, strong, smart leadership that the rest of the world expects from us.

I ended up seeing for myself how disinterested in messaging the Clinton campaign folks were when James Carville pulled all his strings (which were plenty) to try and get them to at least try working with my ABT Narrative Template, which I told about last year here.  

That was sad, but Bernie is no better.

CAN YOU PUT IT ON A HAT?

Look at this exchange last Friday evening.  Bill Maher asked Bernie VERBATIM for “something that would fit on a hat.”  Why couldn’t he answer him with a 4 word slogan?  Donald Trump would have.

BILL MAHER:  … BUT an agenda is not a message.  They are different.  Trump is better at messaging.  His voters don’t care about an agenda except build a wall, lock her up.  What’s the Democrats message?  If you had to boil it down to something that would fit on a hat, which is about all that people can take in at this point — what’s the Democrat’s message?

BERNIE SANDERS:   The Democrat’s message is that we need a government that represents working families not billionaires.  (APPLAUSE)   An agenda that says health care is a right not a privilege.  An agenda that speaks to the young people that says that we should make colleges and universities tuition free and lower debt.

Where was the slogan that fits on a hat?  This is not silliness. Every facet of this country is now suffering the consequences of Donald Trump’s narrative skills.   How bad does it have to get until the Democrats admit they have a fundamental problem with narrative in today’s information-glutted world?

Look at this quote from last week:  Don Baer, White House Communications Director for President Bill Clinton, used to say that Democrats were really good at “coming up with 100 reasons to do something…but never just one.”

There’s your problem.  It’s called “the singular narrative.”  Trump eats it for breakfast as Democrats continue to argue back, “Well, it’s not that simple.”  Yes, it has to be, or there’s no hope for you.

HERE’S HOW SIMPLE IT IS

Last week Dr. Tullio Rossi of Australia posted this wonderful cartoon version of my ABT Narrative Template which so far has gotten several hundred retweets on Twitter.

It’s all so sad when looked at in terms of the presidential election.  Plain as day — Hillary was the left column in this graphic, Trump was the right column.  I showed it quantitatively over and over again using the ABT Framework.  I tried to show during the campaign how Hillary’s speeches were overflowing with the word “AND.”

The rest is Trumpian history.  Yes, it continues to be that simple.  This is a battle that the over-educated are simply not equipped to handle.  I started warning of this problem in 2009 with the first edition of, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style.”  It’s incredibly frustrating to watch them continue to spin so aimlessly.  And with no signs of change ahead.

The Democrats are doomed.

Last week my good friend Park Howell, host of the popular podcast, “The Business of Story” presented an excellent webinar titled, “Your So-called Storytelling is Killing Your Brand.”  I have talked for years about the stampede of well intentioned zealots for “the power of storytelling” who appear to have minimal ability to actually tell a story, yet dazzle audiences by presenting the complexity of story analysis drawn from books about story structure.  I like to think of it as trying to teach football to little league players using the playbook of the New England Patriots.  You can do it, all the parents will brag about how their kid is using such a sophisticated playbook, but is it really going to work if the kids don’t even know how to throw a decent pass or kick the ball properly?  This really needs to stop.  Please, start with the ABT before you dive into all the exciting complex stuff.  It’s what we do in Story Circles Narrative Training.  Start with the simple.  You need to build INTUITION first. 

THIS FEEDS STORYPHOBIA.  The top diagram shows something called “story spirals.”  Why?  There’s already enough scientists who are suspicious and dismissive of story dynamics in science without confusing them with excessive complexity.  The ABT is the simple pathway to gaining an initial understanding of the narrative underpinnings of science and drama.  Start with the simple.  Please.

TAKE MY ABT … PLEASE

I’m sorry to have to single out one person, but a specific example is needed to make this point.  I’m sure that Anna Clemens has the best of intentions in writing this essay about telling a story in your scientific paper.  But the problem is you really do confuse and lose a lot of people by diving so quickly into the complexity of “plot spirals” (how have I spent 30 years in and around Hollywood and not once heard this term?).

Narrative is very, very, very challenging.  This is what I learned long ago in film school where I studied with one of the great legends of script structural analysis, Frank Daniel.

We know this well in our Story Circles Narrative Training program.  As a result, we hold off to the end of each hour session for the discussion and implementation of the full story templates of the Story Cycle (as developed by Park Howell, derived from the work of Joseph Campbell, Jonah Sach’s book, “Winning the Story Wars” and other sources) and the Logline Maker (as developed by Dorie Barton and presented in our book“Connection,” and derived from Blake Snyder’s book, “Save the Cat”).

Last week Park Howell presented a great webinar in which he told of how in his workshops he uses the ABT as the simple, intuitive, entry point for eventually crafting a more complex narrative using those templates.  Everyone interested in the use of story structure for their communication should listen to his webinar.

All of these people wanting to popularize the use of story dynamics in science communication need to realize it’s best to start with the simple before progressing to the complex.  It’s that simple.  It really is.  We’ve been watching it for 4 years now in the development of Story Circles.  And you can see the strength of it in this approach in the new video we’ve produced with the National Park Service folks in Colorado

THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE IN COLORADO STORY CIRCLES.  Last week we posted this short video with three of the participants of the 6 concurrent Story Circles recently concluded by the National Park Service staff in Colorado.

PS, ENOUGH WITH THE PAUL ZAK AND OXYTOCIN REFERENCES

Paul Zak (cited in the Clemens article) and his oxytocin storytelling has been discredited by Ed Yong in The Atlantic and ridiculed by John Oliver on his HBO show.  Is there really no consequence for having that happen?

Story Circles works.  That’s the simple conclusion at this point, 4 years after sketching out the concept at the end of, “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”  We’ve now involved well over 1,000 scientists and communicators. In a few days we’re going to post a short video that shows how successful, popular and valuable the 6 concurrent circles with National Park Service in Colorado were.  For now, have a look at our weekly update that Liz Foote puts together every Monday — it gives a little glimpse into the current level of activity.  We’ve run 27 Demo Days (DD) and 38 Story Circles (SC).  It speaks for itself.

RES IPSA LOQUITUR.  Story Circles speaks for itself

I dreamed of it at the end of, “Houston, We Have A Narrative.” Now they’ve done it.  Last year the good folks at the National Park Service in Fort Collins, Colorado (and Lakewood!) launched 6 Story Circles involving 32 scientists and communicators.  All 6 went the distance, with the last one completing their 10th session this week. Along the way they established a new tradition — the ABT Cake (or pie!) to celebrate the 10th session along with the completion certificates (important in a government agency). Of course, the training is not finished.  It never is.  Story Circles just orients you with the tools and mindset to start seeing narrative structure better and thinking more deeply about it. This is now a nucleus of 32 people who can speak the ABT Framework among themselves as they shape the narrative structure of all their projects and communication.  It’s a major accomplishment, with huge thanks to Larry Perez, the Communications Coordinator who masterminded the entire effort from start to finish.

THREE CAKES AND A PIE.  These are 4 of the 6 circles, celebrating their 10th and final session with ABT cakes and an ABT pie.

THIS IS MY DREAM

Here is it, in living color.  I started the last chapter of, “Houston, We Have A Narrative” in 2015 talking about the idea of what I termed, “Narrative Culture.”  It’s the concept of a group of co-workers being versed in the ABT Framework and the narrative tools we introduce in Story Circles.  If they all speak this common language of narrative structure, and have practiced the idea of working on someones narrative as a group, using the narrative tools, that they can begin to not only work together, but also set standards where they can spot AAA and DHY problems and work to reduce them. 

Here’s what I said about it:

Having a narrative culture within an organization or university department or research institution could mean you have reached a critical threshold of people who have undergone narrative training, have developed the basics of narrative intuition, and now the norms have shifted. They know the narrative templates. They speak with a shared narrative vocabulary.

 And there is now a certain level of expectation of narrative clarity and cohesion.  It’s not a lot to learn, there’s just a need to learn it well. 

Here’s what Story Circles Narrative Training provides, and why it’s so valuable:

1 THE TOOLS – introduces the participants to the ABT, the Dobzhansky Template, the Story Cycle and the Log Line Maker

2 NARRATIVE INTUITION –  it puts them on the pathway towards the ultimate goal of narrative intuition

3 SOCIAL ENTRAINMENT –  it gets everyone in the habit of developing narrative structure as a group, which is essential

SO WHAT’S NEXT?

With many of the participants there’s a feeling of “That was great — what’s next?”   We’ve gotten that with other circles.  The Fort Collins USGS circle that took part in our AAAS video told about how they wanted to keep meeting after the ten sessions were done.

For now, it’s up to the circles to just meet on their own and view themselves as a resource.  For one previous circle there were four scientists and a communicator.  The communicator now speaks the ABT Framework language with the four scientists and is able to use them as a resource for analysis of press releases and papers.

We’ll eventually develop some sort of Story Circles 2.0.  We were talking about it at USDA three years ago from the start.  For now, the main goal is to just get large numbers of people through the training and let them continue to work and talk among themselves. We’re approaching 50 circles, and if you add up all the scientists and communicators who have taken part in the nearly 30 Demo Days, the total number of people involved is well over 1,000.  

Slowly, slowly, changing the way people look at communications training.  Getting them to realize, “Narrative is Everything.”

HERE’S THE VISION …

Plain and simple, as laid out in this figure on page 220 of “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”

On Saturday night comedian Michelle Wolf blew the doors off the White House Correspondents Dinner, besting even Stephen Colbert’s famous 2006 performance. Her Narrative Index (But/And ratio) was a sky high 47 — the highest I’ve ever measured.  I’ve been saying this for a while — it’s what you get with comedians — very dense, concise ABT structure.  Bill Maher’s monologues average 33. Imagine what would have happened if Michelle Wolf had been head speech writer for Hillary Clinton.  I’m serious.

NARRATIVE THAT BITES RATHER THAN BORES.

TWISTS AND TURNS

Hopefully by now you’ve at least heard about the stunningly hilarious “speech” comedian Michelle Wolf delivered on Saturday night at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Here’s the ABT Framework analysis. Look at her stats:

       BUT                                                                  21

       AND                                                                  45

       NARRATIVE INDEX                                         47

       AND INDEX                                                      1.8

The Narrative Index is just the ratio of BUTs to ANDs.  I’ve been studying it for three years now.  I’ve calculated it for at least 2,000 speeches.  None has ever scored this high. 

In general, dull speakers (GW Bush) score under 10.  Average speakers are in the teens (Hillary Clinton low teens, Bill Clinton high teens).  Good speakers are in the 20’s (Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr.).  Comedians are in the 30’s.  Richard Nixon reached the 40’s with his first inaugural address.

But Michelle Wolf … in addition to lighting the White House Correspondents Dinner on fire (even more than Stephen Colbert’s gutsy performance during the Bush years), she managed to ring the bell like no one ever before.  

These things go hand in hand.  For comedy to work, it has to be tight.  Her comedy was incredibly tight.  The Narrative Index reveals this quantitatively.

POLITICIAN, GET THEE A COMEDIAN 

I’m so serious about this it’s painful.  How dense can politicians be?  Get yourself a comedian for your writing staff.  NOT to write jokes.  Get a comedian because they have what I termed in “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” the essential quality of “narrative intuition” if they’re any good. 

Comedians get this stuff.  They bore easily.  That’s what you want in order to reach the masses —  someone who is not enthralled by your economic eight point plan.  

Form matters.  If jokes are long, boring or confusing they will destroy the performance.  Comedians understand form at an intuitive level.  Most politicians don’t, but they should.

Just to see how she uses the word “but” to turn so many of her lines, here’s the first five occurrences of it in her speech: 

I never really thought I’d be a comedian, but I did take an aptitude test in 7th grade,

People are saying America is more divided than ever, but I think no matter what you support politically, we can all agree this is a great time for craft stores.

I know there’s a lot of people that want me to talk about Russia and Putin and collusion, but I’m not going to do that because there’s also a lot of liberal media here and I’ve never really wanted to know what any of you look like when you orgasm.

Trump isn’t here, if you haven’t noticed, he’s not here. And I know, I know, I would drag him here myself, but it turns out the president of the United States is the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab.

Now, I know people really want me to go after Trump tonight, but I think we should give the president credit when he deserves it.

Working with Doug Parsons, host of America Adapts: the Climate Change Podcast, we produced a 3 part series on the issue of climate adaptation for the state of California.  It’s sponsored by UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability, and features a half dozen of their faculty.  The mood of the piece is light, but the actual contents are pretty dark as 20 experts weigh in with a fairly grim prognosis.  The predictions paint a picture of a state that will increasingly look like Baja for vegetation due to wildfire, has an approaching, “freight train of pain” for the issue of drought, and ultimately will confront “the greatest crisis humanity will ever face,” with sea level rise.  We were hoping for a happier ending.  Oh, well.

AN OUTSTANDING CAST!   

TWO CAREER FIRES IN ONE YEAR

Last month Doug Parsons and I produced, “California Adapts” a 3 part special for his podcast, “America Adapts: The Climate Change Podcast,” that takes a close look at the state of California.  Given that most of America now accepts that climate is changing (check out the report released this week from the Yale climate folks arguing this), it’s time to focus more on the question of, “So how are you gonna handle it?”

The podcast opens with Jeff Mount of U.C. Davis doing a powerful job of telling about the great flood of 1861/62 that so devastated Sacramento the capital had to be temporarily moved to San Francisco.  From there, Mary Nichols (long time head of California’s Air Resources Board) and actor/environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr. tell the story of how Los Angeles solved the smog problem of the 1970’s.

These two stories set the stage for the journey Doug takes around the state in the second episode.  We divided the issue of climate adaptation into five main topics — fire, flood, drought, temperature and sea level rise.   For each one he goes out into the field with an expert, then we interview others in search of a clear idea of how prepared the state is for climate change.

In the final episode we go back to a few of the experts to ask them for their bottom line opinion on what the future will look like.  The answers range from somewhat unsettling to very unsettling.  

I have to say, it certainly opened my eyes to how serious the problems are.  One of the most disconcerting bits is when Fire Captain Tony McHale of the Ojai Fire Station talks about the term “career fire” which means a once in a lifetime-sized fire.  He says, “We’ve had two career fires in the past year — what does that say?”

The big problem is infrastructure.  The future is going to need new approaches, and while it’s clear that there are lots of plans and ideas on how to deal with it, what’s not so clear is where the resources are going to come from and when the major actions are going to begin.

PREDICTION:  A well written comic speech should have an exceptionally high Narrative Index (BUT/AND ratio) — meaning above 20, ideally in the 30’s as Bill Maher’s weekly monologues almost always have.  OBSERVATION:  President Trump’s Gridiron comic speech on March 4, 2018 scored a stunningly high 44.  There is a science to narrative structure.  

TRUMP DELIVERS A WELL CRAFTED COMIC SPEECH. Regardless of content, whoever wrote it for him did an expert job with the narrative structure, and the speech was well received.

GREETINGS FROM SXSW INTERACTIVE

I’m in Austin where tomorrow Jayde Lovell and I will present our panel titled, “Selling Science (Before the World Melts Down).”  Here’s a little tip for the science world on how to sell yourself — get to know these two narrative metrics I’ve been working with for the past 2.5 years.

NARRATIVE INDEX =  BUT / AND

AND INDEX =  AND / TOTAL WORDS (% of words that are “and”)

TRUMP KNOWS NARRATIVE

On March 4 President Trump delivered a comic speech to the Gridiron Club.  The Narrative Index was 44 which is extremely high (38 BUTs, 87 ANDs).  I’ve only found one other speech ever that was above 40 which was Richard Nixon’s first inaugural (a barn burner from the guy who was determined to get himself into the Oval Office at all costs).

Good comedy has a high Narrative Index.  It has to.  Comedians cannot afford to bore or confuse.  They need to hit story points that are clear, and emerge at a consistent pace. 

These metrics are clear and predictable, and yet all I get from journalists is, “yeah, we know.”  Really?  Where?  Show me one article you’ve written on this.  

To the contrary, just look at the upheaval last year at the World Bank when Chief Economist Paul Romer tried to implement the “Bankspeak” study by Moretti and Pestre of the Stanford Literary Lab revealing the problem with the And Index for World Bank reports.  The end result was a kibosh on the whole concept.

Minds are closed to these metrics, but they will open soon enough.  Our SXSW panel tomorrow will be the next effort.

Two spontaneous sets of events, both arising from the ground up.  The message of gun control from the Florida kids is clear — our leadership has failed us.  What was less clear last year was that the March For Science had the same message — the organizers just didn’t take it as far.  But it’s the same situation — kids under attack, science under attack — in both cases politicians and leaders unwilling or unable to act.  My heart is firmly with both groups.  

 What happens when leadership fails.

 PRESSURE FROM BELOW

In early April Island Press will publish the the 2nd edition of my first book, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style.”  I’ve written 50 pages of new content for it, including a new Introduction.  The core message of the new material is, “Make Science Human.”  Below is a section I wrote about the March for Science last year.

Now, watching the news about the heart wrenching, long overdue spontaneous gun control movement emerging in Florida I see great similarities.  Their movement is far more dire and urgent, but both are at the core about one thing — failed leadership.

I’ve been observing the attacks on science since my 2006 documentary, “Flock of Dodos:  The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus.”  I’ve been stunned at the inaction of the higher ranks of the science community in defending their own profession.  The March for Science was explicitly about the attacks on science, with the key slogan of “Science Not Silence.”

But what wasn’t articulated was the source of the problems — leadership that does nothing.  In the case of Florida, the outrage is quantum levels greater. They are not pulling any punches as they point the finger of blame at congress, as they rightfully should. 

Science should keep an eye on how they are managing to take their movement to the next level.

Here’s what I’ve written about the March for Science in the upcoming 2nd edition.

And . . . the Problem Came to Life with the March for Science

Spontaneity. Not a common trait for the science world. I talk about it in detail in the first chapter of this book—how scientists lack it and how improv acting fosters it. Spontaneity is the antidote for the excessively cerebral.

Scientists are great if you let them control every single thing that is going to happen. You can see this in how experiments are run. They usually include these things called “controls.” Does that term give you a little feel for how scientists feel about spontaneity? As soon as something unplanned crops up, watch out. 

Such is the wonderful and inspiring story of the March for Science. Nobody at the top of the science world was involved with its inception.

In military terms, it was like low-level soldiers planning a mass rally by taking their plans to the top general, putting a gun to his head, and saying, “You’re in favor of this, right?” That’s essentially what happened with the March for Science when it came to the major science organizations—they were approached after the march was already planned. Many of them felt too rushed, too pressured, and declined to officially support it.

The idea for the march began with a discussion on the Internet site Reddit in January—just three months before the march itself took place. A few people were innocently talking about the Women’s March, a month earlier, which had involved over 4 million participants. Someone mentioned the idea of doing the same thing for science. A small group agreed. They were just average folks—no heads of organizations. They organized a Facebook group, and to their surprise the membership began growing rapidly.

I spoke with Valorie Aquino, one of the three codirectors of the march. She said they had a conference call in which they mused over the 1,000 members the Facebook group now had. They ended their call with a clear plan of how to grow the group to about 3,000 within a month.

The next morning they awoke to the stunning news that the group had grown overnight to 10,000. Within a week it had passed 100,000. By the time I spoke with her, it was approaching a million. Clearly, they had struck a chord. But where did all the energy come from?

Figure I-1. The 2017 March for Science started spontaneously in the gut. It was a narrative mess, but . . . it made me feel something because it was human. Photo in the public domain; accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

My friend Aaron Huertas joined the communications team for the project. Initially we both felt the march needed a clear message, which means “a narrative”—a clear problem-solution dynamic. Now I see I was kind of wrong.

Ed Yong in the Atlantic pointed out the confusion by listing twenty-one messages that were being mentioned by organizers of the march. A number of articles were written arguing against the march itself. Many complained that the whole effort was politicizing science.

In the end, the organizers really weren’t certain whether the event was meant to be a happy, fun science day for the family (like a science festival) or a more adult-oriented science version of the Women’s March a few months earlier, which was filled with contempt for the newly elected president.

Putting the Mess into Messaging

The messaging ended up being a mess, but so what—turns out sometimes you don’t need a message . . . yet. I remember arguing this in September 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged. The protestors’ narrative wasn’t very clear during the first week they began generating mass attention. Lots of news pundits—including my longtime hero Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball—criticized the movement, saying, “They don’t know what they want.”

But mass movements are almost never created by intellectuals with clearly thought-out plans. No, they generally arise from the masses, who are driven by the gut. Down the line, things move to the head—which is exactly what we eventually saw several years later as Senator Bernie Sanders began articulating a plan of action pursuing basically the same goals as the disorganized youngsters who occupied Wall Street.

So, despite the rain that spring Saturday morning in Washington, DC, tens of thousands of happy, fun, enthusiastic people turned up and the event was a stunning success. People carried all kinds of wildly creative and inspiring signs. Speeches were given before the march. They weren’t the sort of landmark speeches that have historically accompanied major protest events in Washington, DC. The speakers didn’t really seem to know what to say because . . . there was no clear message. But again, so what?

At the end of the march, in front of the Capitol building, there was . . . nothing. Just a woman with a bullhorn telling everyone in the rain to visit the website and keep the effort going. And that still didn’t matter. The event was all about the hour-and-a-half-long march itself and the sheer mass of humanity that was present, acting not like scientists but more like humans.

The crowd size was estimated at around 100,000. You could criticize it to pieces for not having a clear message if you wanted to impress your friends. Or you could just soak it all in and even feel some emotion about it. I went with the latter.

At just about the start time, I exited the Ronald Reagan Building, taking a break from a conservation event, and joined my old marine biologist buddy Bob Steneck of the University of Maine. We strolled down into the masses and marched from the start, near the Washington Monument. Within a few minutes we ran into Dr. Daniel Pauly, another old buddy and the famous fisheries biologist who coined the popular term “shifting baselines,” which I talk about in the first chapter. About halfway up Constitution Avenue, Bob and I stepped out of the crowd to walk up the stairs at the IRS building and watch the river of humans flow past. It was downright breathtaking.

What hit me most was the age range of marchers. There were lots of families with kids. Some we talked to had no connection to the world of science— they were just there for the spirit of it.

Others carried amazing signs—like two little kids holding a sign saying, “This family has five scientists!” Another family pushed a young woman in a wheelchair with a sign saying “Thanking Science for Research on Multiple Sclerosis.” That’s the stuff that made me look down at the ground and choke back tears. It really hit you—there was a huge, supremely human element to the event.

But the obvious question was, why was the turnout for the March for Science, despite the pouring rain, so incredibly large and inspired?

The Narrative Index (BUT/AND x 100) is not super-precise but certain patterns do emerge— like Nixon’s fierceness and George W. Bush’s stunning blandness.  When Trump writes his own material, his values are high (over 20), when others write it for him, they’re low (around 10).   I’m predicting he’s around 10 to 15, and with an And Index that is closer to the score of journalists than research reports.

STATE OF THE NARRATIVE.  The error bars represent the range of values for the State of the Union speeches of the past 8 presidents.  George W. Bush was the ultimate “And, And, And” president.  His AND INDEX (% of words that are “and”) averaged 4.7, which is right up there with World Bank reports (= Zzzz …).

LET’S SEE HOW AGGRESSIVE TRUMP IS

Nobody wants to give in to the simplicity of these two little metrics yet.  Last year World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer was booted from a committee for trying to use the AND INDEX.   But with time the “experts” will come to realize they’re real.  

It’s two simple numbers:

THE NARRATIVE INDEX =  BUT/AND x 100

THE AND INDEX =  AND/TOTAL WORDS (expressed as a percentage)

 I’ve gotten tired of trying to interest journalists in them — they apparently think there can’t be this sort of meaningful simplicity in the world.  The Narrative Index usually has a fair amount of noise around it, but there are some patterns that are undeniable.  Nixon’s first inaugural speech scored a blazing 46.  That’s the highest I’ve ever seen for any speech. After waiting a lifetime to be president, he was roaring with pent up frustration.

Eisenhower’s State of the Union speeches went from bland in his early years (6, 6, 5, 5, 7) to feistier in his last three years (19, 11, 12) as he foretold the impending perils of the military industrial complex.  But the biggest shocker is George W. Bush who never scored above 5 in his State of the Union addresses.  He was a nice fellow who just didn’t want to push anybody (which is what’s happening when you use the word “but” a lot).

WHERE WILL TRUMP SCORE?

You can bet I’ll be calculating both indices for him as soon as the transcript is posted.  I do it every week for Bill Maher’s ending monologue  on his HBO show.  Almost without fail, as I’ve noted in previous posts, he is always above 30.  That’s because he’s angry and he’s arguing fiercely, and he has a crack team of comedy writers who know how to disgorge narrative content without wasting words or falling into the land of “And, And, And.”

I’m guessing Trump will be around 15 for the Narrative Index and 3.5 for the And Index. Tune in the next morning, I’ll tweet what it is.

Yes, I know that no one likes to hear it, but these are hard, cold facts.  Michael Crichton said in 1999, “The information society will be dominated by those who are most skilled at manipulating the media.”  He foretold Trump, plain and simple.  Just look at yesterday’s immigration meeting.

 WHO’S A MEDIA MANIPULATOR?  

“SLOPPY STEVE” IS NOT FUNNY

Mass communication is about age old “archplot” dynamics, more than anything else.  As Robert McKee outlined in his landmark 1997 book, “Story,” the first and most important element of archplot is “The Single Protagonist,” which just means the singular narrative.  The importance of this was hammered home in the 2012 best seller “The One Thing.”  Plain, simple, uni-dimensional, no nuance, no subtlety.

Every time you hear one of Trump’s silly nicknames — like Sloppy Steve Bannon over the past week — you shouldn’t be chuckling.  The names may seem like fun, but you should be thinking of Crichton’s 1999 line that, “The information society will be dominated by those who are most skilled at manipulating the media.”  

The names are simple, logical (at least based on his opinions) and most important, they are mass media-friendly, and as a result, they stick.  Which is now bad news for Bannon.  But at the same time nobody has forgotten Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary or Pocahantas.  

And in the meanwhile, what’s the nickname Trump’s opponents have stuck on him?  Nada.

THE NARRATIVE LANDSCAPE

Think about it in terms of our media-driven society.  Media is narrative.  You can’t score media exposure without strong narrative content (meaning large amounts of agreement, contradiction and consequence).  It’s like an evolutionary “adaptive landscape” in which the element of fitness being selected for is narrative strength.  

This is why I think at the moment that Oprah is the only reasonable source of hope for a Democratic presidential candidate, and why the loss of Al Franken (a media-savvy veteran) was so devastating.  We now live in the media society that Niel Postman was predicting with his 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”  It will continue to select for those who know how to manipulate the media, and that, more than likely, means established media veterans. 

The world changes. 

You want to see and hear narrative in its purest form?  I’ve been saying for a couple of years now, “narrative is leadership.”  Oprah just gave a textbook demonstration of this last night at the Golden Globes.  Here’s my analysis.  This is what leadership sounds like.

THE ABT AT WORK.  Oprah’s speech was a case study of how to deliver narrative structure.

THE 3 FORCES OF NARRATIVE

Narrative consists of 3 forces:  Agreement, Contradiction, Consequence.  The art of leadership is using them in the right measures, in the right places, and for the right durations.  The ability to do this comes from having narrative intuition.  Have a look at Oprah’s instant classic speech from last night at the Golden Globes.

Look at how she opens with A STORY that is full of SPECIFICS.  It’s a solid ABT (the And, But, Therefore narrative template) as she sets up her minor problem of not being able to find the words to articulate her experience.  You know who hit on this same problem of not being capable of conveying the enormity of an experience?  Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address when he said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,”

They both hit on the point that “these events are much greater than anything I can convey.”

The entire speech is solid “problem-solution” dynamics.  No wallowing in accomplishments, no excessive congratulations, no silliness.

And look how it finishes — with the dream for “that new day” — completely reminiscent of Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have A Dream” speech in which he outlined the journey we are on, proclaiming progress, but saying we’re not yet there — finishing by describing the dream for the future.

This was a landmark speech, Oprah has deep narrative intuition, and the leadership skills — at least in communication dynamics — that our system selects for.

OPRAH’S GOLDEN GLOBES SPEECH, COLOR CODED

To break it down I color code the three elements throughout the speech using BLUE (agreement), RED (contradiction) and GREEN (consequence).

Thank you, Reese. In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history:” The winner is Sidney Poitier.” Up to the stage came the most elegant man I ever remembered. His tie was white, his skin was black—and he was being celebrated. I’d never seen a black man being celebrated like that. I tried many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone tired from cleaning other people’s houses. But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation is in Sidney‘s performance in Lilies of the Field: “Amen, amen, amen, amen.” 

In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B. DeMille award right here at the Golden Globes and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award. It is an honor—it is an honor and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them and also with the incredible men and women who have inspired me, who challenged me, who sustained me and made my journey to this stage possible. Dennis Swanson who took a chance on me for A.M. Chicago. Saw me on the show and said to Steven Spielberg, she’s Sophia in ‘The Color Purple.’ Gayle who’s been a friend and Stedman who’s been my rock. 

I want to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. We know the press is under siege these days. We also know it’s the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice. To—to tyrants and victims, and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this: what I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I’m especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories. Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell, and this year we became the story. 

But it’s not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It’s one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics, or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they’re in academia, engineering, medicine, and science. They’re part of the world of tech and politics and business. They’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military. 

And there’s someone else, Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know, too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.

Their time is up. And I just hope—I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks’ heart almost 11 years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and it’s here with every woman who chooses to say, “Me too.” And every man—every man who chooses to listen. 

In my career, what I’ve always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave. To say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere, and how we overcome. I’ve interviewed and portrayed people who’ve withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say ‘Me too’ again.”

Happy New Year everyone! Lots of big things ahead for Story Circles with 3 Demo Days, the second edition of my first book, and our SXSW Interactive panel in March. It all starts next week at Texas A&M.

OBSERVERS WELCOME: Next week we’re running back to back Demo Days with Texas A&M faculty and USDA scientists. We always welcome a certain number of observers. If you’re interested, contact us.

STORY CIRCLES CONTINUES TO GO WIDE

We’ve now run over 20 Demo Days and over 30 Story Circles with about half of them happening with USDA/ARS. For next week, we originally had one Demo Day scheduled but had such a large response we’ve added a second one. The total number of participants will be around 70. If you’d like to come observe just get in touch by emailing us: RandyOlsonProductions@gmail.com

This will be followed by Demo Days at the Western Sections Meeting of the Wildlife Society in February, our panel at South By Southwest Interactive in Austin in early March, then a Demo Day at University of Idaho in early April.

Also on the schedule will be the release in late March of the second edition of “Don’t Be Such A Scientist.” I’ll be starting a series of 10 blogposts here next week presenting much of the new content for the the book.

Stay tuned, it’s gonna be a big and exciting year!

SECOND EDITION, featuring 50 pages of new content including the new chapter, “Don’t Be Such A Poor Listener,” coming in late March.

There was a big kerfuffle last week over a Washington Post editorial by a young scientist who seemed to be arguing that extinction is no big deal. The essay inflamed the conservation biology community, producing nearly 4,000 comments in just a couple days. But before attacking the author, everyone should ask who is in charge of editing editorials at WaPo that they would publish such an overly long rambling mess? Using the basic narrative analysis technique I’ve developed, let’s take a look at how it was so poorly communicated that the author felt the need to post on his personal website an equally lengthy explanation of what he meant to say, which really only muddled it further. Whenever you have to issue a second, “What I meant to say,” statement, it means you didn’t communicate well.

“WHAT I REALLY MEANT IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I SAID, I THINK”

WHO’S IN CHARGE OF EDITING EDITORIALS AT THE WASHINGTON POST?

Okay, first question — since when does someone get nearly 2,000 words (1,844 to be precise) in the Washington Post to talk about extinction? Even the hottest of hot button social issues usually get only about 1,000 words or less. The New York Times, in their OpEd guidelines says, “Articles typically run from 400 to 1,200 words.”

This is the kind of stuff that makes people hate the mainstream media. It’s generally assumed that you need to have a really, really important point to justify an editorial, and that it needs to be stated clearly and CONCISELY. But then they go and print a train wreck like this?

Suffice it to say there was a firestorm of outrage over this “shootin’ from the hip” editorial. And then the author felt so misunderstood he posted his own “clarification” on his website. This is what you get with poor narrative structure.

LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF THIS MESS

Below you can see I’ve applied my Narrative Analysis technique to look at the overall structure of the essay. This helps you see what a logical mess it is.

Narrative Analysis involves identifying each sentence or section according to the three fundamental forces of narrative: Agreement (BLUE), Contradiction (RED), Consequence (GREEN). Great speeches and arguments do a good job of grouping these elements together and sticking to a single, clear over-arching problem to be addressed. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s is about “we were made a promise” (agreement), a century later it hasn’t been fulfilled (contradiction), so we’re gathered here today to continue the effort (consequence). You see this pattern repeated twice at the start of his speech, then in longer form for the rest of the speech.

The Gettysburg Address from Abraham Lincoln has even simpler 3 part structure. That speech is only three paragraphs, each being the respective elements. This clarity of narrative structure is the hallmark of cogent argumentation, straight out of Jerry Graff’s 2 million copy-selling textbook for the humanities, “They Say, I Say.”

8 NARRATIVE THREADS

So let me restate this guy’s argument in more conversational style. If he were at a cocktail party, here’s roughly what he would be saying in one paragraph.

“Okay, the problem with extinction is we can’t even be sure a species is extinct. No, wait, what I mean is that extinctions, when they happen, are trivial. And this leads to people wanting to preserve species out of blind knee jerk impulse. But saving species is trivial, because extinction is not a moral issue, it’s about how we don’t want to see anything change, but that’s pointless because things have been much worse in the past. And so the real problem is, how will we live between extinctions?”

Here’s how I derived this paragraph — by compiling all the “statements of contradiction” in his rambling discourse — meaning all the parts in red. This stuff is a little bit subjective — you might identify a few bits differently — but the general pattern is undeniable. Here’s what I got for the “statements of contradiction”:

1 EXTINCTION – Inaccuracy of extinction statements
2 EXTINCTION – Extinctions are trivia
3 EXTINCTION – Preservation is knee-jerk impulse
4 EXTINCTION – Saving species is biologically trivial
5 EXTINCTION – Extinction is not a moral issue
6 CLIMATE – We want to prevent change
7 CLIMATE – Climate has been much worse
8 EXTINCTION – But how will we live

In our Story Circles Narrative Training program we would call this classic DHY format, which stands for “Despite, However, Yet.” That means you’ve got multiple narrative threads at work in a manner so confusing that we’re on a wild goose chase going after one point after another.

BLAME THE EDITOR

So the author was young and inexperienced, as evidenced by his second effort to clarify what he said. But the more important question to ask is who in the world approved this editorial mess?

The author was so confused he ended up saying this on his website, “In the brief space of 1,900 words, I failed to make my views sufficiently clear and coherent,”

My good man, 1,900 words is not “brief” when it comes to editorials. I published an LA Times OpEd in 2002 on shifting baselines syndrome that was reprinted in three textbooks that was just over 1,000 words and probably could have stood to have been a little less. You, sir, were given an encyclopedia’s-worth of space to make your argument.

PRESCRIPTION: GET THEE TO A NARRATIVE TRAINING PROGRAM

I want to thank my good friend Gary Bucciarelli of UCLA for bringing this whole brouhaha to my attention. It’s an excellent example of why narrative structure is so important. Had this fellow run through our Story Circles Narrative Training program he would have known to start with the Dobzhansky and ABT templates in crafting his over-arching argument. He would have shaped it around the singular problem-solution narrative spine, and he would have brought it full circle at the end, instead of ending with … a question?

All of that would have obviated the need for his secondary “What I meant to say” essay. Here’s the overall breakdown. You can see just at a glance what a mess it was. Which again leads back to the editor, assuming there even was one.

THE NARRATIVE BREAKDOWN OF THE EDITORIAL

The text is color coded according to the three forces of narrative: Agreement (BLUE), Contradiction (RED), Consequence (GREEN).

Near midnight, during an expedition to southwestern Ecuador in December 2013, I spotted a small green frog asleep on a leaf, near a stream by the side of the road. It was Atelopus balios , the Rio Pescado stubfoot toad. Although a lone male had been spotted in 2011, no populations had been found since 1995, and it was thought to be extinct. But here it was, raised from the dead like Lazarus. My colleagues and I found several more that night, males and females, and shipped them to an amphibian ark in Quito, where they are now breeding safely in captivity.But they will go extinct one day, and the world will be none the poorer for it. Eventually, they will be replaced by a dozen or a hundred new species that evolve later.

Mass extinctions periodically wipe out up to 95 percent of all species in one fell swoop; these come every 50 million to 100 million years, and scientists agree that we are now in the middle of the sixth such extinction, this one caused primarily by humans and our effects on animal habitats. It is an “immense and hidden” tragedy to see creatures pushed out of existence by humans, lamented the Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson, who coined the term “biodiversity” in 1985. A joint paper by several prominent researchers published by the National Academy of Sciences called it a “biological annihilation.” Pope Francis imbues the biodiversity crisis with a moral imperative (“Each creature has its own purpose,” he said in 2015), and biologists often cite an ecological one (we must avert “a dramatic decay of biodiversity and the subsequent loss of ecosystem services,” several wrote in a paper for Science Advances). “What is Conservation Biology?,” a foundational text for the field, written by Michael Soulé of the University of California at Santa Cruz, says, “Diversity of organisms is good . . . the untimely extinction of populations and species is bad . . . [and] biotic diversity has intrinsic value.” In her book “The Sixth Extinction ,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert captures the panic all this has induced: “Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes that we’re willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos and handjobs on crows.”

But the impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency.Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit. There is no such thing as an “endangered species,” except for all species. The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings. Yes, we have altered the environment and, in doing so, hurt other species. This seems artificial because we, unlike other life forms, use sentience and agriculture and industry.But we are a part of the biosphere just like every other creature, and our actions are just as volitional, their consequences just as natural. Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.

Climate scientists worry about how we’ve altered our planet, and they have good reasons for apprehension: Will we be able to feed ourselves? Will our water supplies dry up? Will our homes wash away? But unlike those concerns, extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it.And unless we somehow destroy every living cell on Earth, the sixth extinction will be followed by a recovery, and later a seventh extinction, and so on.Yet we are obsessed with reviving the status quo ante.The Paris Accords aim to hold the temperature to under two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels,even though the temperature has been at least eight degrees Celsius warmer within the past 65 million years. Twenty-one thousand years ago, Boston was under an ice sheet a kilometer thick. We are near all-time lows for temperature and sea level ;whatever effort we make to maintain the current climate will eventually be overrun by the inexorable forces of space and geology. Our concern, in other words, should not be protecting the animal kingdom, which will be just fine. Within a few million years of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the post-apocalyptic void had been filled by an explosion of diversity — modern mammals, birds and amphibians of all shapes and sizes.

This is how evolution proceeds: through extinction. The inevitability of death is the only constant in life, and 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived, as many as 50 billion, have already gone extinct. In 50 million years, Europe will collide with Africa and form a new supercontinent, destroying species (think of birds, fish and anything vulnerable to invasive life forms from another landmass) by irrevocably altering their habitats. Extinctions of individual species, entire lineages and even complete ecosystems are common occurrences in the history of life. The world is no better or worse for the absence of saber-toothed tigers and dodo birds and our Neanderthal cousins, who died off as Homo sapiens evolved. (According to some studies, it’s not even clear that biodiversity is suffering. The authors of another recent National Academy of Sciences paper point out that species richness has shown no net decline among plants over 100 years across 16,000 sites examined around the world.)Conserving biodiversity should not be an end in itself;diversity can even be hazardous to human health. Infectious diseases are most prevalent and virulent in the most diverse tropical areas. Nobody donates to campaigns to save HIV, Ebola, malaria, dengue and yellow fever, but these are key components of microbial biodiversity, as unique as pandas, elephants and orangutans, all of which are ostensibly endangered thanks to human interference.
Humans should feel less shame about molding their environment to suit their survival needs. When beavers make a dam, they cause the local extinction of numerous riverine species that cannot survive in the new lake. But that new lake supports a set of species that is just as diverse. Studies have shown that when humans introduce invasive plant species, native diversity sometimes suffers, but productivity — the cycling of nutrients through the ecosystem — frequently increases. Invasives can bring other benefits, too: Plants such as the Phragmites reed have been shown to perform better at reducing coastal erosion and storing carbon than native vegetation in some areas, like the Chesapeake.

And if biodiversity is the goal of extinction fearmongers, how do they regard South Florida, where about 140 new reptile species accidentally introduced by the wildlife trade are now breeding successfully? No extinctions of native species have been recorded, and, at least anecdotally, most natives are still thriving. The ones that are endangered, such as gopher tortoises and indigo snakes , are threatened mostly by habitat destruction. Even if all the native reptiles in the Everglades, about 50, went extinct, the region would still be gaining 90 new species — a biodiversity bounty. If they can adapt and flourish there, then evolution is promoting their success. If they outcompete the natives, extinction is doing its job.There is no return to a pre-human Eden; the goals of species conservation have to be aligned with the acceptance that large numbers of animals will go extinct.

Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species. We don’t depend on polar bears for our survival, and even if their eradication has a domino effect that eventually affects us, we will find a way to adapt. The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.
Developed human societies can exist and function in harmony with diverse natural communities, even if those communities are less diverse than they were before humanity. For instance, there is almost no original forest in the eastern United States. Nearly every square inch was clear-cut for timber by the turn of the 20th century. The verdant wilderness we see now in the Catskills, Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains has all grown back in the past 100 years or so, with very few extinctions or permanent losses of biodiversity (14 total east of the Mississippi River, counting species recorded in history that are now apparently extinct), even as the population of our country has quadrupled. Japan is one of the most densely populated and densely forested nations in the world. A model like that can serve a large portion of the planet, while letting humanity grow and shape its own future.

If climate change and extinction present problems, the problems stem from the drastic effects they will have on us. A billion climate refugees, widespread famines, collapsed global industries, and the pain and suffering of our kin demand attention to ecology and imbue conservation with a moral imperative. A global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius will supposedly raise seas by 0.2 to 0.4 meters, with no effect on vast segments of the continents and most terrestrial biodiversity. But this is enough to flood most coastal cities, and that matters. We should do this to create a stable, equitable future for the coming billions of people, not for the vanishing northern river shark. Conservation is needed for ourselves and only ourselves. All those future people deserve a happy, safe life on an ecologically robust planet, regardless of the state of the natural world compared with its pre-human condition. We cannot thrive without crops or pollinators, or along coastlines as sea levels rise and as storms and flooding intensify.

Yet that robust planet will still erase huge swaths of animal and plant life. Even if we live as sustainably as we can, many creatures will die off, and alien species will disrupt formerly “pristine” native ecosystems. The sixth extinction is ongoing and inevitable — and Earth’s long-term recovery is guaranteed by history (though the process will be slow). Invasion and extinction are the regenerative and rejuvenating mechanisms of evolution, the engines of biodiversity.If this means fewer dazzling species, fewer unspoiled forests, less untamed wilderness, so be it. They will return in time. The Tree of Life will continue branching, even if we prune it back.The question is: How will we live in the meantime?

MY CONTENT-BASED CRITIQUE

One last comment here, which is my critique of the article based just on the content of what he said. The biggest thing he fails to address is one key word: time. That’s the wrench in the works of all this stuff. The current wave of extinctions is happening at an unprecedentedly rapid rate. That’s the real problem. If species slowly go extinct over the course of millions of years or even hundreds of thousands of years or even thousands of years, ecosystems can presumably re-shuffle themselves. But this extinction is happening over hundreds of years.

I found a rebuttal blogpost that had a comment to this very point. It said, “Post-extinction recovery of biodiversity takes millions, if not 10’s of millions of years.” That’s the problem.

“Of course it isn’t,” most faculty would say to the statement above, but do they know how and why it’s not the same? What we’re learning through Story Circles Narrative Training is telling us volumes.

Story Circles: Why so popular with research scientists but not graduate students?

YOU GOTTA HAVE “A WANT OR A NEED”

We’ve now had three years of development for our Story Circles Narrative Training program which has involved well over 1,000 scientists and communicators. We started with four prototype circles in 2015: undergrad, grad, postdoc, research scientists (conducted with USDA, NIH, Univ of Chicago and Hendrix University). The differences were evident from the very first meeting of each group.

The participants in three of the prototype circles (undergrad, grad, postdoc) were curious and willing to do as asked, but overall, fairly hesitant. The members of the last group — 5 research scientists at USDA/ARS — within minutes after hearing about the ABT Framework began talking about all the different applications they could think for it. They jumped in with an enthusiasm reflected by Cathleen Hapeman of USDA/ARS who tells about that first Story Circle at USDA in the new video we will be releasing with AAAS. The rest is history as USDA is now approaching 15 Story Circles and a dozen Demo Days.

Back then we thought that was just kind of interesting. Now we realize it’s fundamental to all communication training — the difference that previous experience makes.

Story Circles is very challenging. One of the participants in a Story Circle at Genentech said, “It’s powerful training, but the hour sessions are like eating your Brussels Sprouts.”

We’ve come to realize you need to be solidly motivated for the training to work. What this means is that the participants must have either a WANT (I’ve heard about this program and I want to do it) or a NEED (we know we need help with narrative).

In fact, the one major modification we made after the prototypes was to split the training into two stages — first, the one day Demo Day where everyone learns what they will be signing up for, then the actual Story Circles training of 10 one hour sessions. The Demo Day is the weeding out that makes sure the participants in the Story Circles are sufficiently motivated since they are signing up on their own, not being required to do it (we’ve learned you can’t force this stuff on people).

The result of this two stage process is that, of nearly 30 Story Circles to date, no one has quit before completing all ten sessions (with the one exception of a graduate student who felt he learned everything on the first day when he heard the three words of and, but, therefore — literally — and eventually quit).

HOW IS A GRADUATE STUDENT DIFFERENT FROM A RESEARCH SCIENTIST?

Has the science world thought deeply about this simple question? We can tell you one huge difference — experience. It turns out experience makes a huge difference in both focus and motivation when it comes to communication.

Think about it in terms of the fundamental couplet of “arouse and fulfill,” that I cited in the first chapter of, “Don’t Be Such a Scientist.” (2nd edition coming out in March from Island Press!) What you get with graduate students is a shortage of arousal when it comes to communications training.

Most are told they need it. They do the best they can in trying to follow what is being said, but they have limited experience in the real world. This means for something like Story Circles they are mostly plowing forward based on little more than blind trust — sort of like, “I don’t see how this relates to what I want to do someday, but if you say I should do it, I’ll do it.”

In contrast, the research scientists — as we’ve seen from that first prototype group — have plenty of experience in the real world. They have taken part in, or at least watched, major projects fail to have much impact because their results were so poorly communicated. By the time we start working with them they are aware of what it means for a project to have “lacked a clear narrative.” That’s what experience brings.

“STORY CIRCLES IS A WASTE OF MY TIME”

Yep. We’ve heard it from grad students. Many have said, “We got it — three words: and, but, therefore — all set.” At one university 50 grad students took part in the Demo Day. Of them, 26 signed up to do Story Circles, but a week later when the organizer tried to assemble the first circle, it turned out there were only 4 who really felt it was worth their time. The others said they mostly signed up just to lend their vote of support, but didn’t really see the need.

The same happened two weeks later at another university with 38 grad students in the Demo Day. At another university there were 19 grad students signed up for the Demo Day. I gave my talk on the ABT the day before. When it came time for the 3-hour “hands on” part of the Demo Day, not one of the grad students showed up (though 3 faculty did). The organizer said she spoke with some of the students after my talk — they felt like they “got it” on the ABT thing and didn’t need anything further.

I DON’T BLAME THEM: A SOLUTION WITH NO PROBLEM

I don’t blame grad students for not wanting to do Story Circles. Back when I was doing my PhD in biology I wouldn’t have had much interest in this stuff.

The more I have honed in on the problem/solution dynamic that lies at the core of narrative, the more I’ve come to realize how often smart people provide solutions to people who don’t know they have a problem. Imagine being told, “We’ve got a solution for you!” but thinking, “I didn’t know I had a problem.” Guess what happens when people do this. Here’s an example from the real world of conservation biology.

Three years ago the conservation groups in the state of North Dakota engaged in a huge and expensive exercise that proved to be exactly this. They created a state ballot initiative to “fix” the state’s conservation problems. It failed horrendously (20% supporting votes versus 80% opposing votes). I was brought in by a group to assess their communications work on it.

After a week of driving around the state conducting interviews I came to a simple conclusion — most people in North Dakota don’t think there’s any problem with their nature and wildlife resources. In fact, they feel blessed with an abundance. They looked at the ballot initiative and just said, “Why?”

So there you go. It’s hard to get people to work on a problem they don’t personally feel they have. That’s what we’ve run into with Story Circles with graduate students, repeatedly. Research scientists tend to know they need help with narrative based on their experiences, but graduate students just don’t feel the need for help … yet.

We’re continuing to work on it and study it. It’s not that graduate students are lazy or have bad attitudes, it’s just that they are swamped — getting better at narrative is not a perceived priority.

WHY ARE THESE OBSERVATIONS IN STORY CIRCLES IMPORTANT?

Because what we are doing is systematic. This is not a different bunch of lectures and exercises with various one day workshops. To the contrary, Story Circles is almost cookie cutter in it’s rigidity and consistency. All groups that do the 10 one hour sessions go through the same structured one hour time course with each session. We’ve changed almost nothing about the training for three years now.

The result is sort of like a controlled experiment. Everything is held constant between groups except the composition of the participants. If we had some sort of accurate metric (and we don’t — that’s a whole other discussion — narrative doesn’t lend itself to any simple, immediate measurements — if you think it does, you don’t understand it) we could probably quantify this difference between these two big groups.

For now, we can simply see it in the different way Story Circles works (and doesn’t work) with them.

BOTTOM LINE: GRAD STUDENTS SAY, “IT’S A WASTE,” RESEARCH SCIENTISTS SAY, “THANK YOU, WE NEED THIS”

Yes, this is of course an exaggeration. I’m getting a reputation as being an overly simplistic reductionist (thank you very much!).

There are lots of grad students who do get it and work as hard in the sessions as research scientists. The students themselves are not the problem. The problem is simply TIME and EXPERIENCE. Telling students, “You’ll thank us for this some day!” and hope that will motivate them to do the hard work is not enough.

Make no mistake, communication is challenging. You get back what you put in. There are no magic bullets, and even the almighty ABT Narrative Template is only as powerful as you what you get back from it by putting it to use repeatedly. This is the whole philosophy that underpins Story Circles.

But the bottom line is that you gotta go to the gym and lift weights, even if its boring, repetitive and stinks like Brussels Sprouts sometimes.

Why is this so consistent, universal, and unchanged? A Republican strategist points out, once again, that Democrats don’t know how to fit their argument onto a bumper sticker. Or t-shirt, as I had fun with a decade ago in this clip that never made it into “Flock of Dodos.”

Of course we’ve got a t-shirt!

“HANG ON” IS NOT AN OPTION IN THE REAL WORLD

One of the best rules of our Story Circles Narrative Training program is that the timing video that runs throughout the hour session is sacred. When you hear the audio cue go off, you have to stop what you’re saying to the group, mid-sentence.

This drives many scientists CRAZY. Being perfectionists, they want to finish their thought. But they can’t. The group turns on them with smiles, saying, “That’s it, gotta move on.” It’s a great exercise to help people deal with the need to not be a perfectionist when it comes to communication — you gotta do your best then keep moving. “Hang on,” is not an option in the real world.

BUMPER STICKER ME THIS

This need to say EVERYTHING is the bane of Democrats. They can’t help themselves. They have so many great idea. It was the downfall of Hillary Clinton. She ran a campaign with no clear single message, but heaps and heaps of things to say. Trump just had one simple minded thing — #MAGA.

Sadly, here’s a Fox News article pointing out the same thing. It says, “The problem with the argument that Democrats are making,” said Republican strategist Evan Siegfried in a devastatingly perceptive segment on Outnumbered Overtime last month, “is that the argument takes longer than a bumper-sticker slogan to make.”

It’s endless. And ultimately cured by three letters: ABT.

It’s the wrong way to go about it. Yes, they are stimulatory, but do they stick?

Can you “master” the power of storytelling in one day? No. How about one year? No.

LIE TO ME

If you were booking communications training, which would you go with — the exciting one day workshop that presents a shopping list of topics to be covered, promising to hit on pretty much everything, plus lots of “tips and tools,” offering “a packed day” that will send everyone home hyper-energized. Or would you opt for the long term training program that warns it will be like going to the gym for fitness and that one graduate referred to as, “like eating Brussel sprouts.”

My gut says I’d prefer the exciting one day event. It sounds more stimulating, and really convenient to get “the whole communications thing” done and out of the way in just a single day.

But my head knows better. The one day offering is noisy nonsense. Yes, it’s stimulatory, but so is being forced to watch, “A Clockwork Orange,” five times in a row with your eyelids held open. Improving your ability to communicate does not, and cannot, happen that quickly.

Why? Because it requires the development of intuition. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s landmark book, “Blink!” and you’ll get some appreciation for what is required to develop intuition. It all comes down to one word: time.

A DAY OF DHY

When you work with the ABT Framework you learn about the DHY form for content. It stands for Despite, However, Yet. What it represents is too many narrative threads all at once — which is stimulatory, but confusing.

There is an optimal form for narrative. It is expressed in shorthand with the ABT Template of And, But, Therefore. All else equal, this is the form for narrative structure that is the optimum.

Running people through a packed day, one topic after another, is basically taking the DHY approach to learning. Yes, it’s stimulatory, but think of it as a bunch of white heat that goes quickly from cold to hot then back to cold again.

“A FULL 7 HOUR DAY”

I hate to get too specific on this, so I’ll avoid examples from the science world. Keeping it broad, just search “One Day Storytelling Workshop” and you’ll find pages and pages of them from around the world. Here’s one in Oregon that I’m sure is a lot of fun, but what is your goal?

Do you want to have a fun, exciting day, or do you really want to improve your ability to communicate (for which narrative is the central element). Imagine going to the gym for a 7 hour workout. Do you think after 2 hours you’re accomplishing anything meaningful? And is it even possible you’re doing more damage than good after 2 hours?

It’s the same thing. It really is. More is not more when it comes to improving your grasp of narrative.

SCIENTISTS KNOW BETTER

What prompted me to finally write this blunt essay is that I was recently forwarded a Twitter discussion among scientists who were frustrated with the communications training they had received. Here was one of the comments:

COMMENT: “I think there is the perception that you can be good at it after a 1 hour-long workshop.”

That’s what I’m talking about. Everyone in the discussion seemed to be realizing this, and they felt like they had been lied to. This stuff is difficult. You definitely can get much better at it, but it doesn’t happen in one hour, one day, or even a one week boot camp.

YOU CAN’T RUSH THE RIVER

Here’s a great tidbit to this point. We’ve been working with folks at Genentech for the past year. We ran a Story Circle there with 5 scientists, meaning they met for the standard 10 one hour sessions that the training involves. Ideally the sessions happen one per week, meaning 2.5 months. But in their case, their schedules are so intense with so much travel, it took them 8 months to finish the training.

Which is fine. So long as they stay committed, it doesn’t hurt to have the delays, though it’s still a little better to stay close to the weekly schedule if possible.

So I asked them when it was over what would they think, given the intensity of schedules there, if we were to run a Story Circle that met three times a week, allowing it to be finished in less than a month. They immediately recoiled with a solid, “No.” It didn’t begin to makes sense to them to do that. They insisted that taking at least a week between sessions was essential to allow the training to slowly work its way down from the head to the gut.

And they are absolutely right.

There is no substitute for time. Sorry. Plain and simple. Don’t whine to me about your busy schedule. Do you want to improve or not? We’ve been hard at it for 3 years now developing Story Circles. If there’s one solid conclusion we can offer up, this is definitely it.

There is no substitute for time.

And guess what is at the heart of narrative. Time.

I have a therapist friend who is fond of the expression, “You can’t rush the river.” Therapy is narrative. It’s all the same stuff. Narrative is everything. This is what grieving is about. You can’t rush it. You can try. But if you want to genuinely heal, you can’t rush it.

Sorry. Welcome to life. At least for now, until A.I. takes over. For now, we’re still stuck with these 4,000 year old principles. But the good news is, if you invest the time, you’ll see the changes.

“WE’RE DONE WITH THE ONE DAY WORKSHOPS”

The good news for us with Story Circles Narrative Training is that nobody is arguing with us. We speak to so many groups now who say, “We’re done with the one day workshops — they don’t work.”

Story Circles takes time, and it’s even hard to quantify the outcomes (heaven forbid). But there is one clear metric which is that groups are coming back for more — especially with USDA, NPS and USFWS.

We’ve run over 30 Story Circles now. We have about a dozen Demo Days being planned for next year, including at Western Society of Naturalists in February, University of Idaho in April, and several government agencies in the spring.

We’ve yet to do any advertising or have any media coverage. We don’t need to. There’s lots of scientists who get it. They’ve tried the one day thing. It didn’t work. They’re ready to eat the Brussels sprouts.

There’s a reason why university graduates are not very good with communication. It’s the same thing you see with film school graduates (whom Hollywood has traditionally laughed at). Universities develop intellect. It takes a different approach to develop intuition. It’s what Story Circles is designed for.

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE IN COLORADO: Celebrating completion of the first of six Story Circles that ran all summer. Complete with an ABT cake!

INCULCATE THIS

Once upon a time the educational world understood and accepted the need for repetition. It’s called inculcation — “the instilling of knowledge or values in someone, usually by repetition.” Inculcation is also the pathway to intuition.

I experienced plenty of inculcation in elementary school where we learned the alphabet and arithmetic through endless, sing-song repetitions. I didn’t get much repetition through high school, and by college I could tell it was looked down on as some sort of old fashioned technique for stupid people.

But then I entered into a two year Meisner acting class in 1994 in Santa Monica (and keep in mind that acting and communication are the same thing). Meisner is the technique that is revered by the greatest of actors from Grace Kelly and Gregory Peck to Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton. The Wikipedia entry for the Meisner Technique says:

The focus of the Meisner approach is for the actor to “get out of their head”, such that the actor is behaving instinctively to the surrounding environment. To this end, some exercises for the Meisner technique are rooted in repetition so that the words are deemed insignificant compared to the underlying emotion.

There you have it. The word “repetition” and the idea of having people “get out of their head.” If you take a look at all that I’ve written and preached for the past 20 years for communication in general, those are the two most important underlying principles.

My first book, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist” (second edition coming in March) was built around the Four Organs theory that we learned in the Meisner class. It was all about “coming down out of the head.” The class was also built around endless repetition.

UNIVERSITIES ENTERTAIN MORE THAN EDUCATE

As I said, somewhere along the way the smarty pantses in the ivory tower decided that repetition is for slow learners. I think it’s something along the lines of, “Only dummies need things repeated.”

That attitude is fine if all you want to achieve is intellect. That’s what universities do. They are great at producing intellectuals. But there’s a problem when university graduates go out into the real world, which is that they lack intuition. Especially when it comes to communication.

We saw it at USC film school. In our orientation the older graduate students (well, actually, I was older than just about all of the students from the start) explained to the new students that when you finish film school, Hollywood is going to hire you for one main reason, which was not your ability to do the visceral/intuitive part of filmmaking as a director or even cinematographer. No, what Hollywood looks to film schools for is writing — the more cerebral element.

They mostly laugh at the directing and visual skills of film school grads. Why? Because new graduates lack experience, which means they lack the visceral elements. If you want to see a perfect comic picture of this watch, “The Big Picture,” which came out in 1989 but is pretty much timeless. One of the opening scenes is of three film school students and their lousy, clunky student award-winning films. We had to sit through hundreds of such films in film school. It’s what happens with communication when people lack experience.

STORY CIRCLES: NO LECTURES, NO NOTES, NO READINGS, JUST EXPERIENCE

I think there are a lot of people in the science world who want to be told they are wonderful communicators. Improv classes are certainly great for building comfort and self-esteem. But at some point you might as well accept that getting good at communication requires experience. And as everyone always likes to say in every profession in the world, “There’s no substitute for experience.”

So this is what our Story Circles Narrative Training program is built around — not feeding knowledge, just gaining experience. The whole realization of how it differs from university courses became clear to me last spring when a professor told me about his course on “narrative for scientists” he was teaching at his university. He felt it was similar to what I do. I asked if the ABT was part of it, he enthusiastically said, “Yes! It’s an entire third of a lecture!” Which meant what he’s doing is not at all similar to what we do.

With Story Circles the ABT is just about all there is. There’s no lectures, no notes, no readings. It’s not a university course. It’s training, similar to going to the gym and lifting weights. It’s “conditioning.”

The result of this is we’ve had some graduate students show no interest — saying, “I got it on the ABT — And, But, Therefore — all set, why should I spend an hour a week for ten weeks when that’s all there is?” But the response is completely different with government agencies and the scientists I work with at Genentech. They know that the practical side of anything takes repetition and experience. So they get it.

BUILDING “NARRATIVE INTUITON”

And now we’re getting to see how well they get it. A couple weeks ago I posted this set of comments from a recent grad. Last week we had the first of a half dozen Story Circles finish that have been running all summer in Colorado with the National Park Service.

We know from past graduates that the training takes time. That’s the whole deal with both narrative and intuition — they take time. But for those who go the distance, we’re seeing the development of what I’ve termed “narrative intuition.” The consequences of this end up being the term that NSF wore out long ago — that the training is, “transformative.”

The climate crowd dreams of motivating the masses, but their voice is so robotic, so informational, so rational, so non-human that the masses feel little. You want to hear a voice that cuts through the noise into the hearts of real people? Listen to Eminem’s rap about Trump last night at the BET Awards. It’s not easy to listen to, but what do you expect — it’s not easy communicating effectively like a real human.

WORDS THAT CUT LIKE A KNIFE.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNCIATION AIN’T PRETTY

It’s really painful listening to climate activists trying to rap (here’s one and another that will only motivate you to do one thing — avoid climate rapping), yet if enough of them tried with complete conviction they would probably eventually find their way to something that would be motivational for the masses. It just might take a lot of awkwardness to get there. But how serious is the climate issue? If it’s that serious, it would be worth it.

Rapper Eminem delivered this uncomfortable, searing rap session last night at the BET Awards that was instantly praised for its power. Similar to what Lin Manuel Miranda did for the seemingly dry historical material behind “Hamilton,” Eminem blazes life into today’s political issues with this performance.

This is what the theme of “Make Science Human” is about. If you want the masses to activate around the issue of climate, someone has to take the message down to a gut level like this. It’s how things work in a noisy society. You can’t stay up in your orderly, safe, logical tower and expect to motivate anyone.

Because Story Circles Narrative Training is a long term process we’ve been hesitant to attempt “assessment metrics.” The training is 10 one hour sessions, usually weekly, but it can take up to a year to see the full results. That’s how narrative is — it takes time. For now, the training is better described qualitatively. To that point here are the detailed comments of a recent graduate telling about the value of the training.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS. A flashback to one of the first Story Circles Demo Days from early 2015.

THE VALUE OF STORY CIRCLES

Here’s the comments of a recent graduate of the 10 one hour sessions of Story Circles who works with a government agency.

OVERALL VALUE – Story Circles really helped clarify the ABT. However, the log-line maker/hero’s journey is emphasized more during the story circles than during the introductory Demo Day session. Thus, one gains insight on how to write a narrative longer than a couple of paragraphs during story circles. One also begins to recognize this structure during movies and how it is a successful formula for a good movie…..

TIME COMMITMENT – The amount of time is not demanding and is worth it. Even if you wait until the last minute to do the homework (or don’t do it all for the days you aren’t on the hook for some writing), the time spent listening to the rest of the group’s comments and engaging in the discussion, will have an impact on your thinking and writing.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE – The opportunity to intensely practice recognizing, analyzing, and creating narrative structures was something I would otherwise not have undertaken. The story circles deepened my understanding of the ABT and improved my writing. It’s like learning a musical instrument or a new sport: practice, practice, practice.

IMMEDIATE VALUE – The challenge to my thinking that came from the story circles helped me reframe a major message about my program – I used the ABT structure in a presentation within days of this realization and have changed all my presentations and write-ups to incorporate this same ABT structure. This new message structure greatly strengthens how I communicate the unique value of our programs.

THE SUPPORTING MATERIALS – The reference cards and the handbook provided for the story circles are immensely useful aids. One can look at the reference cards during discussions to help with the ABT analysis and stay on track. I still refer to these aids when I am writing – whether it is on the job or at home. However, one needs to sit in a story circle and go through these aids to fully grasp how useful they can be – and how useful a narrative structure is to effective communication.

Story Circles is unique. We make no apologies for the time involved (and actually it’s really not that much, just an hour a week) as well as how challenging the sessions can sometimes be. You get back what you put into communication training. It’s about developing “narrative intuition,” and that takes work.

But the flip side is what you get from Story Circles, which you can see in the comments above. To put it simply, it’s a fascinating form of training that can crack your mind open to viewing the world in a whole different way.

If you have specific questions feel free to email me at: rolson@usc.edu

Bill Maher ends every episode of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue that begins with the last of his New Rules. Month after month, year after year, the monologues are powerfully written essays. Wanna know why? Just look at the Narrative Index. I measured it for 53 of them — the average is 33. Last week’s was a 43. That’s strong narrative content. If only they had written Hillary Clinton’s speeches. Seriously.

BILL MAHER’S WRITERS HAVE TEETH. His monologues have consistently strong narrative structure as reflected by the Narrative index. His values come from 52 monologues. McKibben is from four speeches, Trump is 11 debate performances, Lincoln is his 7 debates with Douglas in 1858, Hillary Clinton is 9 debate performances, Douglas is his 7 debates with Lincoln, climate skeptic Marc Morano is from 9 television appearances, and the left-most value is the average of 4 equipment maintenance manuals found on the internet.

MAHER KNOWS NARRATIVE

Wanna know why Donald Trump hates Bill Maher? It’s not just because Bill suggested he was descended from an orangutan. It’s also because Bill communicates with strong narrative content, as revealed by the Narrative Index.

It’s a metric so simple that it’s beneath the dignity of serious text analysis jockeys, but it’s also very profound in what it reveals. It’s just the ratio of all the BUTs to ANDs in a given text. I derived it from the ABT which arose from the Rule of Replacing I learned from the South Park creators.

These are the two fundamental words of narrative. AND is the most common word of agreement, BUT is the most common word of contradiction. They represent two of the three fundamental forces of narrative (agreement, contradiction, consequence).

I’ve been measuring the Narrative Index for hundreds of texts over the past two years. The patterns are astounding. In the graph above you see a range of values. At one end are equipment maintenance manuals. Not surprisingly, they hardly ever present narrative content. Telephone books would score even lower.

At the other end are Bill Maher’s monologues. For a while HBO provided the transcripts on their websites. I analyzed 52 of them. Also, just to show you in detail how the pattern works, below is the transcript of last Friday night’s monologue with all the BUTs and ANDs colored.

There were 10 BUTs, 23 ANDs, which means a Narrative Index of 43. That’s powerful.

POLITICIANS NEED COMEDY WRITERS (BUT NOT FOR JOKES)

You have to be careful analyzing small sample sizes. I usually recommend at least 1,000 words. This one is only 566 so you wouldn’t want to infer too much. But when you average it across 52 of his other monologues you can rest assured the pattern is real.

The fact is he’s got a great team of writers, and what they produce is always punchy. It has to be. It’s for television — the medium that produced our current President — a man who has a dangerously deep grasp of narrative.

This is what I’ve been saying for years — that politicians need comic writers as their speech writers. Not for their ability to write humor. They need them because they, perhaps better than anyone, understand narrative structure. They have to, or else they’ll bomb.

EPISODE 438: TRANSCRIPT OF END MONOLOGUE

AND finally … if you want to understand why america is so divided, don’t talk about Republicans AND Democrats, or red states AND blue states, read the story about The City Mouse AND the Country Mouse, currently being sold under the new title, What Happened? BUT the original is about two mice who learn that you’re either one or the other, city or country. AND the same really could be said for America. When you fly over it, you don’t see red states AND blue states. You see vast stretches of land where there’s nothing. AND then every once in a while, a city.

Here’s Missouri, BUT every state looks the same — a sea of red with a few blue dots. Now I could joke about Alabama all I want — AND believe me, I want — it’s Trump country. BUT not Birmingham, cause that’s a city — it voted for Hillary. Something happens to you when you live in a city — you get mugged.

BUT you also have a multi-cultural experience. Cities are places with diversity AND theaters AND museums, AND other gay stuff. I have nothing against rural life, BUT I’ve seen farms on TV AND they look dusty. Republicans are freaking out lately because it seems Trump is pivoting from these two, to these two. Colluding with Russia — fine. BUT Democrats?

BUT really it’s not that complicated. Chuck Schumer AND Nancy Pelosi? They’re city mice. AND that’s who a consummate New Yorker like Donald Trump relates to. Why is he always poop-Tweeting at 3 a.m.? Because he’s from the city that never sleeps. He’s such a New York guy, he had is last wife delivered. Trump’s disillusion with McConnell AND Ryan is not really political — it’s just that for the first seventy years of his life he would never be caught dead hanging around with traveling bible salesman like Paul Ryan or a corny countrified goober like Mitch McConnell.

For Christ sakes, the man is from Kentucky. Jeff Sessions is from Alabama. When he talks all Trump hears is a tiny little Ernest movie. AND Mike Pence? It must be torture for Trump to be in the White House every day with that home spun Christian tightly wound human hard on. He literally won’t dine with an unchaperoned woman. Meanwhile Trump has spent his entire life posing with a shit-eating grin that says look at all the pussy I’m getting.

AND this is the existential crisis of our President. He’s an asshole, BUT he’s not a hick. He represents one group, BUT belongs to another. I hate to break it to you real Americans, BUT what Trump likes about Chuck AND Nancy is they’re not you.

He’s not one of you — trust me — when Trump watches “The Beverly Hillbillies,” he’s rooting for Mr. Drysdale. AND when he tells a crowd — as he often does, “I love you,” what he means is that in middle America, he found something that he had long ago run out of in New York — suckers.

Trump voters were played for rubes by the ultimate fast talking city slicker who saw vulnerable people nervous about jobs AND the melting pot getting too melty, AND he told them he’d built a great wall AND get their jobs back at the mine, AND they said where do I sign.

Folks, you didn’t make America great again, you enrolled in Trump University.

Remember that beating we took next year? No. Remember that beating we took last year? Yes. Case closed. We talked about this on Terrence McNally’s podcast.

A HOME GAME WITH TERRENCE MCNALLY.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TWO NARRATIVE GUYS GET TOGETHER

I did this very fun podcast with radio host, writer and actor Terrence E. McNally this week. We ran through a range of topics mostly centered around the importance of narrative structure in politics (especially in relation to Trump) and climate activism. It was so nice to have a host who could explain a lot of the basic aspects of narrative structure better than I can.

One of the most interesting parts is our discussion of “The future is intellectual, the past is experiential/emotive — you need to use the past to work towards the future.” Which is why scary movies of climate predictions tend to not have much impact.

Hey, I was just talking with Jayde AND we were wrapping things up, BUT then she said “So, call me maybe,” THEREFORE we now have our first entry into the ABT Hall of Fame. #seriously #drinkthekoolaidnow

I KNEW THERE WAS SOMETHING BRILLIANT ABOUT THIS SONG. Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2012 mega-hit “Call Me Maybe” is the simplest ABT ever.

WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU NEED?

I’ve been saying it for 5 years now. The ABT is universal. Won’t someone please argue with me about this? Won’t somebody say, “No, you’re wrong, here’s an alternative, competing model for a universal narrative template.”

Maybe the ABT really is THE fundamental narrative tool that underpins pretty much everything. In his Masterclass, veteran screenwriter David Mamet says, “Everything is drama.” Which is true, except that I would broaden that to say “everything (interesting) is narrative, and thus ABT.”

Regardless, what more of a scholarly endorsement of the ABT is needed than Professor Carly Rae Jepsen using it?

“Reductionist and insulting,” “hyper-reductionist,” and “simpleton” are a few of the more common slurs you get when you advocate simplicity. But the mud slinging is worth it when you look into the eyes of 40 USDA scientists working with the ABT Narrative Template and see a moment of revelation as I did last Thursday in San Francisco at one of our Story Circles Narrative Training Demo Days. Kinda makes you wanna tell the narrative purists to get stuffed.

PROFESSOR OF “FULL” STORYTELLING

Last Tuesday my “buddy” Dan Fagin, long time professor of journalism at N.Y.U. who hosted me in 2014, tweeted some interesting comments my way — above are a few of them. The tone is condescending, the “hyper-reductionism” label is insulting.

Dan wrote a truly great book, “Tom’s River” that earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. I was one of many who applauded heartily. But I also agree with the Amazon reviewer who conveyed the essence of the book in saying, ” I appreciate how thorough it is but just beware that it’s meant for science-minded people who want the FULL story…plus the full story of the side stories.”

Yes. Dan’s an expert on telling the full story, and the world definitely needs such skills. But we had a Presidential candidate last year who tried endlessly to tell her full story, resulting in telling no story, and ultimately had her opponent tell her story with two words, “Crooked Hillary,” that she will take to her grave.

So don’t tell me about the need for subtlety and nuance in today’s world. Our nation is now getting ravaged by the consequences of thinking the masses have the time to hear full stories. They don’t.

Despite the record heat last week, Jayde Lovell and I ran our 8th Demo Day with scientists and communications folks from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Services (USDA/ARS) in their offices in Berkeley, California. The Demo Days just keep getting better as we perfect the Story Circles model. Lots o’ great developments ahead for the fall.

WHAT’S THE STORY, MORNING GLORY? USDA/ARS scientists and communicators craft their ABTs in a late summer swelter.

NOTHING BETTER THAN A DEMO DAY

Lots of skeptical expressions at 10:00 a.m. By 4:00 p.m., lots of deeply engaged minds, beginning to grasp how challenging this narrative thing is. What more could you ask for.

We ran our eighth Demo Day with the USDA/ARS folks last Thursday in Berkeley, California. It was organized by the USDA godfather of narrative studies, Mike Strauss (Director of the USDA/ARS Office of Scientific Quality of Review), along with his narrative understudy, Cathleen Hapeman. Jayde, Mike, Cathleen and I had dinner the night before where we realized how far we’ve developed the Story Circles model in less than three years.

At USDA/ARS they are launching their 12th Story Circle this month. That will make 60 graduates of the training consisting of the 10 one hour workout sessions. We’re approaching a tipping point with them where most everyone in the agency has heard about the training and seen the impact.

IT’S ALL ABOUT BREAKFAST

As Mike made clear in his morning presentation, the knowledge of narrative structure isn’t just for writing. He went through a list of the different applications of the training, from speaking to project plan development. And he presented his great use of narrative structure last year where he and a fellow administrator gave a major USDA national presentation that scored a bullseye by having a simple narrative core.

The presentation was a general talk about the importance of ARS work. They opened by saying, “All we’re here to talk to about is breakfast.” They then used breakfast as the central narrative to run through a series of ARS-funded studies on oranges, pork, wheat and other breakfast staples. Brilliant talk, brilliant use of narrative. Mike has been the heart and soul of Story Circles at USDA/ARS. And I’d almost say we’ll miss him, except that Cathleen is just as good and coming along to take his place when he retires at the end of the year. Which will make him available as a free agent for the Story Circles Traveling Road Show!

Bill Maher apologized on Friday for his racial slur in a show that was not quite as effective as it could have been.  One of the problems was he led with the CEREBRAL (Professor Michael Eric Dyson) and ended with the VISCERAL (rapper Ice Cube).   It would have worked better in the opposite order.

Ice Cube asked whether the show is comedy or news. That’s called wanting the singular narrative.

FIRST YOU WANT TO AROUSE, THEN YOU NEED TO FULFILL

Exhibit A on the condescending tone deafness of the left.  Chuck Todd of Meet the Press on Sunday tried to challenge John Kerry on his use of insulting language.  Kerry gave a basically deaf reply. 

DON’T BE SUCH A POOR LISTENER: John Kerry gives a completely disconnected answer to the question of insulting your opponents.

John Oliver last night suggested Trump might have inadvertently given the climate movement something they’ve needed from the start.  I’m in total agreement.  It’s easy to see if you look at it in ABT terms.  Trump is the B of the ABT that “the climate narrative” has needed all along.   This is why Al Gore’s boring “And, And, And” (AAA) movie was so sadly misguided.  Narrative is everything.

DON’T FEEL THE NEED TO THANK HIM, but as John Oliver suggests, he has done a favor for the climate movement with the strength and singularity of his contradiction of the entire topic.

EVERY NARRATIVE NEEDS A BUT

John Oliver, on his often-brilliant HBO show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” ended last night’s episode with the following:

JOHN OLIVER:  This week the climate movement may have gotten a symbol to rally around because apparently it was never quite enough to motivate ourselves out of love for this large gassy orb (EARTH photo), but maybe, just maybe we can now motivate ourselves to do something out of our loathing of THIS one (TRUMP photo).

He is absolutely right.

LET’S LOOK AT IT FROM THE ABT PERSPECTIVE

Here’s what John Oliver is saying.  For twenty years all sorts of well meaning people have been boring the holy hell out of the masses with their AAA (“And, And, And”) documentaries and other do-gooder media efforts.  Throughout my first book, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist,” I used Al Gore’s snoozefest, “An Inconvenient Truth,” as an example of poor communication.  Six years later in “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” I went into even more detail about this using the ABT.

Why was all that media so boring?  Because it lacked narrative strength.  How did it lack narrative strength?  It lacked contradiction.  How could it have had contradiction?  By going after the climate skeptics, big time.

Did Al Gore deal with the climate skeptics?  Only in a weak and misguided way.  He dismissed them right off the bat.  In so doing he wasted his entire opportunity to create narrative strength.

Gore dealt with climate skeptics with a single number.  He presented the number of studies examined by Naomi Oreskes in her Science paper and posed the question of how many of them disagreed with the consensus on climate change.  The answer was zero, meaning that in the real science world nobody buys into climate skepticism.  And that was it.  From there on he basically implied that climate skepticism was a trivial topic and never visited it again in the movie.

Big mistake.   That was his potentially powerful source of contradiction.  Factually they might have been a trivial force, but narratively they presented a huge opportunity.  That was wasted.

Even if they were only straw men, they could have been the source of contradiction to drive a good narrative structure and engage the brains of the audience.  The audience could have been on the edge of their seats, asking about the THEREFORE.  As in “Therefore what are we gonna do about them, before we end up with one of them as President?”

But he didn’t take advantage of that because he and the filmmakers were so weak on narrative intuition.

IGNORE THE SKEPTICS AND THEY WILL GO AWAY (NOT)

So is anyone in the climate movement FINALLY ready to accept that “ignore them and they will go away” is not a viable strategy for climate skeptics?  It never was, any more than to ignore the Swift Boat Veterans ever was for John Kerry.  I swear, the instincts of the left are just so bad when it comes to politics.

Trump is now the grand manifestation of the skeptic perspective and that is a potentially good thing, as John Oliver implied.  Yes, there will be some setbacks, but he is the singular source of contradiction that is now bringing the entire ABT of climate into focus.  The climate crowd at least finally knows who and where the enemy is and how to combat them.

Just look at some of the things happening.  The fact that almost all of the major corporations are in support of the Paris Accord is now a huge story.  There have been small articles over the past decade pointing out how both the military and major corporations have accepted climate change as a serious threat, but it’s only now that it’s suddenly a big story, thanks to Trump.  John Oliver pointed out that Walmart, Bank of America and Phillip Morris all support the Paris Accord.  The entire issue is now coming into very clear and simple focus, thanks to Trump.

It could have happened a decade ago, but the people in charge are just too devoid of narrative intuition.  And so now the world has assembled the narrative elements for them.

The question is whether anyone in the movement will actually listen and learn anything.  Or will they just revert to their AAA ways of the past decade.

Honest to goodness, it’s in the news this morning, and it’s all about the ABT.  World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer has been trying to get World Bank folks to reduce their use of the word “and.”  He’s demanded final reports not have “and” be more than 2.6% of total words.  YES!  He gets it!  This is narrative warfare!

“AND” FURTHERMORE …

FROM:  Financial Times, May 26, 2017

THE CHARGE:  EXCESSIVE EXPOSITION

This is a case for the ABT!  World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer has “stripped of management duties” after sending too many memos trying to combat the plague of “Bankspeak” that exists at the World Bank.  He is my new official hero!

There’s a bunch of articles this week, but this one is perhaps most direct, in Bloomberg News.

Somebody needs to get him a Narrative Spectrum refrigerator magnet.  Paul Romer is a warrior in The War on Boredom!

 

MOVIN’ ON UP

It’s been two years since we ran the first prototypes of Story Circles with NIH and USDA. Back then we were wondering “how will we manage to scale this up?”  The answer will come to life next week in Fort Collins, Colorado.

In January of this year we ran Demo Days in Ft Collins and Lakewood, Colorado. They involved a total of 57 participants. It took a couple of months to do the organizing, but by late March it was clear that enough people were eager and their schedules open to organize 6 Story Circles.

I’ll be going to Ft Collins next Tuesday and Wednesday to help with the launching of each circle. It’s great that we waited two years for this step forward. A year ago I would have been a little nervous about the logistics, but now that we’ve completed 16 Story Circles we’ve got the whole routine down and know how to launch them with no glitches.

TRUE SELF-GUIDED LEARNING

Story Circles is not like a college course. Not at all. Aside from the initial orientation, there are no lectures, no note taking, no readings. It’s just week after week, analyzing material we give you, then analyzing the material of the group members. A few people have called it boring. If you find it boring, you’re not doing it right. A lot of people have called it hard and even draining. If you find it hard and even draining … you’re probably doing it right.

The process really works when you hit the point that you’re spotting the ABT in the real world and finding yourself thinking A LOT about the narrative structure of things around you. Like movies, or newspaper articles, or radio segments, or a presentation you’re attending. That is when Story Circles is starting to work. Not so much during the ten one hour segments, but rather outside of them and in the weeks and months after you finish the last segment.

At this point we’ve had lots of people report back that the training is very, very valuable. And a few who simply didn’t get it. It’s definitely not the happy fun social hours that Jayde Lovell and I originally thought it might be. It’s hard work. But also very effective. Which is why we’re excited about these 6 new circles that will begin next week.

He uses two simple devices to make sure his new hour long Netflix comedy special has structure, moves along, and pays off brilliantly at the end. Narrative matters.

COMIC GENIUS AT WORK.

ADVANCING THE NARRATIVE …

If you’re a fan of Dave Chappelle, as I have been from way back, you’ll love his new stand up comedy special on Netflix that was his first show in LA in over a decade. The material is of course both crude and hilarious, but what’s worth noting are two narrative devices he uses.

The first one needs a tiny bit of a SPOILER ALERT so read no further if you want a completely blank slate in watching it. But it’s actually not much of a spoiler. It’s just that he says at the start he’s going to tell you the stories of the four different times he met O.J. Simpson in person.

When he gets to the end and walks off stage, he’s only told you three of them. I think you can guess what happens.

If you’re a fan of narrative structure, just think of the 5 rules of “archplot” I listed in “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” citing Robert McKee’s 8 rules in his landmark 1997 book, “Story.”  One of them is the need for the “closed ending” where all threads are tied up at the end of the story. Telling only 3 of 4 promised stories leaves the audience member feeling unfulfilled and not ready to go home.

Leaving you with one story untold might actually leave some of the more artistic and intellectually inclined stimulated to go home wondering what that last one was. But most of the masses would just be pissed, wanting to shout out, “Hey, where’s our fourth story?”

Dave Chappelle’s humor is oriented to the masses, not the sophisticates. You can guess what he does.

But the key thing for narrative structure is that with each of the four stories he tells, you can feel him “advancing the narrative.”  This makes the show more than just an “And, And, And” presentation of a bunch of funny bits as you’d get from a lesser comedian. Advancing the narrative is essential to narrative structure.

AND PAYING IT OFF

The other thing is more sophisticated and I don’t want to give it away, but suffice it to say he delivers a prime example of “plant and payoff.” This is a standard part of high quality storytelling.

You’ve seen it in a million movies. Some prop or idea or line is “planted” early in the movie, then “paid off” later when it returns. If you want to read a rundown on this technique, here’s a whole essay from my film school classmate Sean Hood (who by the way is in my upcoming video on Story Circles with AAAS).

So Dave Chappelle sets up something in great detail during the course of the hour long show, then surprises you at the end by bringing it back for his grand synthesis which is hilarious and perfect. He’s working at a level well above the majority of comedians today.

“Will the Science March Wither Away like the Women’s March?” is the headline right now on the website for Science Magazine. Which is a good question with a sad likely answer. Unlike the March for Science, the Women’s March, and probably the upcoming People’s March for Climate (which all have huge turnouts but no new message), the Earth Optimism Summit delivered a clear new message which was, “Time to focus on success.”  The event was a solid success and a case study in how to “advance the narrative” for environmentalism. Kudos to Dr. Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian Institution, the visionary behind the entire Earth Optimism narrative. Whether Earth Optimism actually will change things remains to be seen, but for now, it achieved the essential goal which is “advancing the narrative.”

DONALD TRUMP MAKES GUEST APPEARANCE AT EARTH OPTIMISM. Okay, that’s not really him, but you may recall in 2013 when Bill Maher bet him a million dollars to prove he wasn’t the son of an orangutan. One of the opening presentations of Earth Optimism was guys with an animatronic orangutan (but sadly no Trump jokes).

ADVANCING THE NARRATIVE: IT’S ABOUT HAVING A NEW ARGUMENT TO MAKE

That’s what narrative is about, at its core — having an argument that you keep refreshing over time. The three day Earth Optimism Summit last weekend in Washington DC wasn’t the typical hot air gathering of eggheads. This is because of one main reason: It had a clear new message. The message was, in simple terms, “Enough with the bad news, let’s focus on where we’re succeeding in protecting nature.”

Contrast this with the March for Science which had no clear message except the same old “science is good.” And compare to what you get at most conservation meetings — no clear message other than the obvious one of “we need to save nature” (duh). Earth Optimism had a narrative that calls for a SPECIFIC new action (to focus on success).

I gave a talk at Earth Optimism (EO) on Friday morning titled, “Narrative is Leadership.” My session was titled, “Inspiring Positive Action.” All four of the talks were indeed inspiring. But they also had something in common with every talk, discussion, pointed comment and biting piece of humor at the entire event. They were all about the argument/message that we need to shift the tone from pessimism to optimism, with the suggested mechanism being “focus on success stories.”

THE DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE

In “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” I defined the word “narrative” as “The series of events that occur in the search for a solution to a problem.” If you apply this to EO you see they are on a clear narrative pathway. The PROBLEM is flagging energy for conservation as people are growing tired and demoralized from the bad news. The SOLUTION is a re-energized populace.

Whether the Earth Optimism Summit’s idea of focusing on solutions is even the right way to achieve this solution remains to be seen. But for now, what is important is that EO is “ADVANCING THE NARRATIVE” (an essential element) meaning it is a step along the way in the search to find the solution to the problem. Getting together to complain about the same old defeats in conservation is the definition of NOT advancing the narrative, which eventually bores and demoralizes everyone.

SO WILL THIS WEEKEND’S PEOPLE’S CLIMATE MARCH ADVANCE THE CLIMATE NARRATIVE?

I doubt it. I’m not hearing anything to suggest they are advancing their narrative. All it looks to be is the same old whining about the climate changing and the right is to blame. That was going on a decade ago in the wake of Al Gore’s movie.

It’s actually similar to what the entire Democratic party is doing right now about Trump — not launching new ideas in an effort to advance their narrative (as Trump did with his “Make America Great Again” theme) — just wallowing in the same stuff.

No, the Democrats at the moment are stuck. They are endlessly fact checking, calling their opponents liars, screaming about how unfair it all is, but not advancing their narrative (for example, the Affordable Care Act — why aren’t they proposing their own means of fixing it?). I guarantee you they will never succeed until they get back onto the narrative journey, creating events that will serve as new stepping stones in the search for the solutions to the problems.

As I said on Friday as loudly as possible, NARRATIVE IS LEADERSHIP.

It’s unfortunate, but somebody has to say these things. The March for Science was stunning in the size of the turnout, yet equally stunning in the lack of a message. No one wants to say this, but I will. The message is, “There’s no leadership in science.”  The march wasn’t the doing of the science “leadership” — it was organized by “the troops.” I discussed this on NPR on Friday. An absence of leadership wasn’t a problem in the 1950’s, but it is today.

WHAT DO WE WANT? SOMETHING! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? SOMETIME!

ONE FROM THE GUT

On Saturday I took part in the March for Science in Washington DC. The turnout, despite heavy rain, was stunning and inspiring. It hit me at the gut level — both humor and emotion. Clearly there is a ton of good will at the grassroots level of the science world. But there’s a problem. The leadership is lacking.

I’ve been hitting this note for years and even mentioned it in my 2015 book, “Houston, We Have A Narrative.” It bothered me in the 1980’s when I was a scientist. The profession is run by faceless committees. Which was fine in the pro-science 1950’s and 1960’s, but we’re now in a different era. It’s a problem.

I was on NPR on Friday talking about, “the message” of the March for Science. There was no message. Actually, as Ed Yong identified, there were at least 21 “messages.” But in a world of too much information, that ends up resulting in their being no overall message.

EVERYBODY GO HOME!

The absence of a message on Saturday was abundantly clear. It started in January when the march first arose, not from the ranks of leadership, but from the grassroots level on Reddit. I was on the periphery of the communications team since near the start. They never managed to decide on whether the event was a politicized anti-Trump rally or a happy fun science festival day for the family. It ended up being sort of both, and also neither.

The absence of a message was most apparent on the website where they never did post any sort of slug line or slogan within the artwork. The closest they had was, “Science, Not Silence” (I dare you to say that ten times fast).

The clearest demonstration of a lack of a message was two things:

1 THE END OF THE MARCH –  the march ended in front of the Capitol building. A friend who was at the front told me they got there, everyone was ready for speeches and instructions on what to do, but instead there was just a woman on a loudspeaker saying, “Thanks for coming, all done.” Basically, go home.  No one was told what to do (i.e. “Write your congressman, organize your colleagues”)

2 NO MEDIA TRACTION –  coverage of the march was ephemeral and kind of trivial. The main focus was all the funny signs and science puns. But there was no clear message. Having a message, means having a narrative, which is what the media world feeds on because “media is narrative” as I said in my Friday talk at the Earth Optimism Summit.

THE MESSAGE:  WHERE’S OUR LEADERSHIP?

Q:  What is the official policy of the science world on debating anti-science people?

A:  There is none.

Right now the American Psychological Association is doing a good job telling psychologists to remember The Goldwater Rule (to not publicly evaluate the mental health of politicians in office). That is leadership.

But for the science world, trying to stop CNN from including climate skeptics in their climate “debates” seems to fall on peripheral entertainers like Bill Nye. In 2010 I blogged the recommendation that no one other than comedians debate climate skeptics, but that was just me, not the appointed “leadership” of the science world.

NARRATIVE IS LEADERSHIP

This was the title of my talk on Friday. It’s my message for 2017. It’s what I spoke about to James Carville’s class at Tulane University in January. It’s what I’m preaching now through our Story Circles Narrative Training (which will launch 6 circles next month with National Park Service in Colorado!).

I spoke with a friend yesterday who is a geologist. She told me that only 10 of the 52 member organizations of the American Geosciences Institute (the big umbrella group for geology) supported the march. The others were “put off” by the political tone of the organizers.

Which just confirms the predicament. There is no clear leadership for the profession of science. And that’s a problem, given the anti-science tone of the current administration.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but the one thing I know well is that everything has to start by identifying the problem. Everyone seems to think “the problem” is Trump. But I feel there’s a deeper problem, which is the absence of effective leadership with which to defend the profession. It’s not the end of the world, but is definitely something that needs to be addressed.

The March for Science page should have had a clear slug line on it. It should have asked, “Oh, Leaders, Where Art Thou?”

Anyone surprised? Yes, she’s gorgeous, but when she speaks she ain’t saying much. At least not in narrative terms. The Narrative Index of her speech yesterday at the State Department was 0. One IF, 35 ANDs, no BUTs.

LET ME TELL YOU A STORY — OH, NEVER MIND.

NOT YOUR BEST BEDTIME STORYTELLER

The First Lady gave a speech at the State Department yesterday as part of presenting the International Medal of Courage Award to 13 women. I’m sure it was well received, and it’s not to say that the simple Narrative Index of BUTs to ANDs (times 100) is the definitive word on content, but really … zero?

That’s what she scored. She never said the word BUT though she said AND 35 times. It was pretty much of a perfect And, And, And, (AAA) presentation.

The deeper question is who wrote it? Which of course was the same question raised for her RNC speech last summer, part of which was plagiarized from Michelle Obama. That speech at least had 5 BUTs for an NI score of 7 (though none of the BUTs were in the plagiarized part).

The bottom line is that she speaks the same as she looks. Beautiful but kind of shallow when it comes to content.

If Michael Crichton were alive today he would look at the news of President Trump and just say one thing, “Yep, figures.” His 1999 AAAS keynote address was titled, “Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities.” Among many things, he was offering up advice on how to deal with fake news. He tried. No one listened.

Michael Crichton gave a speech filled with practical advice for the science world. This is a line from his speech. Which fell on deaf ears.

WHAT ARE SPEECHES FOR, WHEN NO ONE LISTENS ANY MORE?

That’s a paraphrasing of “Words,” the old 1980’s song from Missing Persons. And is what Michael Crichton must have felt in response to his 1999 keynote address to the AAAS meeting titled, “Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities.”

The title referred to “ritual abuse” meaning the anger of the science world in feeling misunderstood, “hot air” the fact that most media is just that (so what), and “missed opportunities” — that it really isn’t that hard to use of the media, you just need to do it.

Michael Crichton was a giant of a man, not just physically (at 6’10”) but intellectually. He was a smart guy who left a burgeoning career in medicine to become a bestselling science fiction writer, reaching a peak with his landmark novel, “Jurassic Park.”

Over the years he kept in touch with the science world and by the late 1990’s had plenty of smart things to say given that no one in science had his understanding of mass media. He offered up his wisdom in 1999 as the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of AAAS.  He ended his talk by listing 4 problems and their possible solutions.

He started the last bit of the talk saying, “If I were magically put in charge of improving the status and image of science, I’d start by using the media, instead of feeling victimized by them.”

Look at the quote above in the photo. He knew what was coming. He could have predicted that one day the Presidency would be won by a master media manipulator. He tried to instruct the science world on how the system works. But scientists don’t listen.

CRICHTON’S PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

Here’s his specific itemization of major media/image problems faced by science and how to deal with them. Just about none of this was heeded.

THE EARTH OPTIMISM ABT: Earth Day is the largest secular holiday in the world, AND since 1970 has presented the bad news of how we are destroying the planet, BUT bad news takes a toll, THEREFORE this year the Smithsonian Institution is presenting The Earth Optimism Summit which shifts the focus of Earth Day to stories of success.

TIME TO ADVANCE THE NARRATIVE

ALL WE ARE SAYING, IS GIVE OPTIMISM A CHANCE

“We’re destroying nature.”  “We’re killing the planet.”  “Everything is dying.”  “We’re all horrible people.”

That’s been “the narrative” for the environmental movement for over 45 years — since the first Earth Day in 1970.  It was needed in the early days to motivate and light the fires needed to defend the planet.  But there’s an air of pessimism that inevitably arises from so much grim news. That pessimism eventually saps the life out of even the hardest workers.

Two scientists who figured out this problem more than a decade ago are coral reef ecologists Drs. Nancy Knowlton and Jeremy Jackson.  I watched their awakening over the course of several years when they were professors of marine biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

By 2010 they were both starting to work to change the tone of ocean conservation from constant kvetching to focusing more on “where things are working.”  They launched a series of symposia around the title, “Beyond the Obituaries for the Oceans.”  Their feeling was, “We’ve read enough obituaries for parts of the ocean, let’s shift our attention to the pockets of success in saving the oceans.”

Nancy launched the hashtag for #OceanOptimism which rapidly gained popularity.   A couple years ago she then began spreading the theme to #EarthOptimism.  From there she took the idea to the top of the Smithsonian Institution, where she is now a senior scientist.  They got behind it in a big way, and voila …

THE EARTH OPTIMISM SUMMIT APRIL 21-23 IN WASHINGTON DC — YOU CAN ATTEND!

The plans are now set for a gathering of over 200 conservationists ranging from scientists to economist to lawyers to communications folks to tell stories of conservation success from around the world.  I’ll be one of the speakers.  And here’s the good news — it’s open to the public for a modest registration fee.

Actually, here’s the very best news — the event has a clear narrative.  Unlike too many gatherings these days where people don’t really know what they’re trying to say (they’re just angry) this event knows EXACTLY what it has to say.

What the organizers and all the participants have for a message is laid out clearly with ABT structure in the subtitle above.  In fact, you can even boil it down to a single word, reflecting a clarity of purpose that’s essential for people to dedicate their lives to a mission and remain inspired over time.

That word is OPTIMISM.

A friend who attended the Oscars complained to me, “There were so many amazing stories for the night, I can’t believe the only thing the media talked about was the Best Picture mistake.” Actually that was the ONLY real story, and that’s why it dominated everything. The starting point for understanding storytelling is to understand what is, and is not, a story.

A STORY NOBODY ASKED FOR

LET ME TELL YOU A STORY …

Rick Nelson, our wonderful Story Circles aficionado with US Fish and Wildlife Service likes to tell about his buddy in graduate school who, “always said he was gonna tell you a story … and then he never did.”  Let’s consider this basic dynamic for Sunday’s Oscar’s debacle.

An actress friend of mine called me yesterday to tell me about what she saw at the Oscars, which she attended with her husband. The first thing she said to me was, “It was such an amazing evening — there were so many great awards given out, great speeches, and great performances — I can’t believe the only thing the media is talking about is the big mistake at the end of it all.”

Well, I can believe it.

Everyone is indeed still talking about “the big mistake.”  It’s Wednesday and I just listened to Jim Parsons (who was in “Hidden Figure”) on a radio show. The host asked him if everyone was talking about the big mistake at the post-Oscars parties. He said, “Yes, of course, non-stop, you couldn’t quit referencing it.”

In fact it was a real story because there was a genuine real PROBLEM/SOLUTION dynamic to it. Nothing else in the evening — none of the awards, award speeches, performances, jokes — none of those things presented a real problem that needed to be solved, and especially not at that level of importance.  The result was there were no other significant stories to tell.

In “Houston, We Have A Narrative” I defined the word “narrative” as “the series of events that occur in the search for a solution to a problem” and explained how that is the dynamic at the center of a story.  Now, think of the Oscars evening in those terms and you begin to see why 100% of the major media coverage focused on “the mistake.”

THE BORING FACTS

Yes, there were lots of great awards given out and honors paid, but those are, by comparison, pretty much just facts — of interest to some, but not to the masses.  The one thing that interests everyone is THE STORY of what happened at the end.  A problem arose — wrong winner announced —  a solution was found — gave it to the right winner.  The story that interests everyone was THE SERIES OF EVENTS THAT OCCURRED IN THE SEARCH FOR THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM.

That was the only real story.  The media knew, the people involved knew it, and the general public knows it.  The rest, as Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet, is just the facts, m’am.

Australians inspire me to make trouble.  If you’re going to South By Southwest Education Conference in a couple weeks, come hear me plus three crazy Australians on March 9.   We are presenting a panel on, “Science Refugees.”  Also, Jayde Lovell is giving her own talk at SXSW Interactive on “narrative selection.”

THREE AUSTRALIANS PLUS A WANNABE. Jayde Lovell, Bec Susan Gill, Rod Lamberts and I will talk about life as “science refugees.”

The lovely and talented Jayde Lovell will introduce the concept of “narrative selection” with this talk at SXSW Interactive.

JAYDED

My Story Circles Narrative Training co-conspirator Jayde Lovell is the ring leader responsible for getting us to South By Southwest in a couple of weeks.  For over two years I’ve been working with her and going from fan to loyal follower.  She is now the head of her own science PR agency named ReAgency, runs Sci Q, her own science channel on The Young Turks Network, her own space at the Youtube Studios, is the head of social media for the Tyler Award for Environmental Science, is Chief Storyteller for The Science March, won the National Academy of Engineering’s Next MacGyver contest, and is the funniest person I’ve met in decades.

Suffice it to say, we’re gonna have fun in Austin.  Come join us if you’re there.

If you’re giving a talk or teaching a class and want an amusing analogy for the Narrative Spectrum here’s a little thing we did with an Ikea desk.  Feel free to put it into your presentation.

THERE’S A RIGHT WAY AND A WRONG WAY. Which do you prefer?

THE IDEAL FORM

In “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” I presented The Narrative Spectrum.  It’s the central tool for our Story Circles Narrative Training program.

Think of the Narrative Spectrum as being like assembling an Ikea desk.  If you just stare at the parts and never even start the journey, that’s the AAA (And, And, And) form.  It’s non-narrative — you never even started the narrative process.

If you throw the instructions away, over-think how it all goes together, then just do it yourself, turning your nose up at 4,000 years of narrative selection, you end up with something like the DHY form (Despite, However, Yet) — a confused mess.

But … if you heed the age old powers of narrative (i.e. you read the instructions/learn about the ABT), take the time to do things right, then you end up with the ABT form (And, But, Therefore) and everything works properly.

Yes, it takes time to do it right, but do you really want to bore or confuse people?

THE NARRATIVE SPECTRUM. Respect it’s authora-tie.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine just announced they are releasing a report titled, “Communicating Science Effectively.” A quick search of the report for key words reveals a number of biases in the thinking behind it. I’m sorry, but this is a sad case of the blind leading the blind. Truly it is.

SCORE NONE FOR SIMPLICITY.

LET THE NUMBERS DO THE TALKING

The numbers say it all.  How can you talk about communicating anything effectively and never mention the word SIMPLICITY?  Any mathematician, for starters, will tell you the key to solving problems effectively is to find the simple solution. There’s the age old adage that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” And yet here is a report from the National Academies that doesn’t have even a hint of that thinking?

How can you talk about communication and not mention the word INTUITION? Communication isn’t something that robots know how to do. It’s done by humans. They draw on intuition when they communicate. Even if they are scientists. Even if they are scientists speaking at the most intense of scientific meetings. I know this, I was a scientist once.

There is nothing in this report about the need to find singular, unifying themes, or consider science as a journey. There’s not even a nod to the IMRAD template that lies at the heart of the effective communication for research scientists.

How does something like this happen?

And yet … what you do see in the numbers is the word FRAMING mentioned 67 times. What is framing? There’s not even clear agreement on what the term means, much less agreement that it leads to effective communication. It was debated hotly in 2007. It may be the cutting edge of debate among theoreticians, but then if that’s so, the report should have had been called “Communicating Science Theoretically.”

This report is so vastly mislabeled. I don’t want to ridicule it, I just want readers to know that as the science community complains about not being heard, this is where large amounts of effort are going.

It’s tragic.

Having trouble sleeping?  Here’s three hours of my droning voice, going on and on about the ABT, that’s a guaranteed cure for insomnia.

Trump, Coral Reefs, and the ABT.

It’s been a busy past few months for me on the podcast circuit (with a couple more in the works). Here’s three I’ve done since the election.

THE BUSINESS OF STORY:  TRUMP HAS NARRATIVE INTUITION

My buddy Park Howell is a professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University.  He and I connected nearly four years ago when he read my second book, “Connection,” and instantly grasped the power and importance of the ABT Narrative Template.  He listened to me try to warn about the power of Donald Trump as a communicator, but when my warnings proved correct he had me appear on his podcast the morning after the election.

AMERICA ADAPTS:  CORAL REEFS COMMUNICATION IS BAD NEWS

Doug Parsons was part of our Connection Storymaker Workshop in 2011 when he was working for the National Park Service on their climate team.  He eventually branched off on his own and started this excellent climate podcast, American Adapts.  We had a few discussions last fall about climate issues, but when I started ranting at length about the poor job that’s been done in communicating about the worldwide decline of coral reefs he demanded I put my mouth where my mouth was by being a guest.

NEW BOOKS NETWORK:  HOW THE GREENHOUSE MANAGER PUT ME IN MY PLACE

Bob Wilson of Syracuse University hosted me in 2010 for a two day campus visit to show my movie, “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy,” and speak to their sciences programs. I gave what I thought was a respectable talk, but a member of their audience didn’t think so. What transpired in the Q&A was the greatest public humiliation of my speaking career. It’s a great story that helped inspire much more effort and conscientiousness on my part and contributed to my third book.  He gave me the chance to tell the story in detail and lots more about what we’re doing with Story Circles and the ABT these days.

A TRUE VISIONARY. This is the man who got Bill Clinton elected. At 72 he’s more alive and electric than ever. The Democratic party needs to recapture voices of leadership (and narrative) like his.

PROFESSOR RAGIN’ CAJUN

Every college student in America should be jealous of the lucky 50 students enrolled in James Carville’s political science class at Tulane University.  On Monday nights they meet at the home of Mr. Carville and his legendary Republican wife, Mary Matalin, to have him present a guest speaker. It’s the way that college ought to be — a chance to hang out with awesome and innovative professors like that.

I got to know James last year, as I talked about on Park Howell’s Business of Story podcast which I recorded the morning after the election. From my work with narrative structure I came to realize that Donald Trump had an unfair advantage in the political world. He has deep “narrative intuition” — the term I coined in “Houston, We Have A Narrative.” In the podcast I told about my journey of frustration during the months leading up to the election.

I set to work starting in the summer of 2015 trying to publish an editorial titled, “Trump Knows Narrative,”(a broader version of this in-depth essay) showing how the ABT Template can be used to quantitatively show how much of an upper hand Trump has with communication. I drew on every contact I have at the NY Times (which was a lot), as well as contacts with 538 Blog, Slate, The Guardian, The Upshot Blog — on and on, pounding on the door of every possible journalist and news pundit, BUT … in the end I hit a complete brick wall.

Finally, a year ago I searched simply HILLARY CLINTON BORING. The first result that came up was an article with the headline, “James Carville Admits Hillary Clinton is Boring.”

I set to work and by April was on the phone explaining the ABT to James Carville himself.

He got it, immediately.  For the man who coined the term, “It’s the economy, stupid,” it didn’t take any explanation for him to see the power and importance of the simple ABT Template.  He tried to get the folks at Hillary Clinton’s campaign to listen to me.  BUT … they didn’t.  Just as they didn’t listen to a whole stack of people with good ideas.

The rest was sad history.

THE RIGHT WAY TO TEACH COLLEGE STUDENTS. Incredible night. Fifty incredibly bright minds. Far more questions than we had time for. There is hope for this country!

THEREFORE … LET’S HAVE FUN WITH CARVILLE AND THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

So Mr Carville invited me to give the second lecture of the semester to his class at Tulane. You can see the setting from the photo above — James and I seated on the landing with me showing slides to the right. Every few minutes he would interrupt with some hilarious story or gem of wisdom. The man is a gold mine of political wisdom, as well as communications savvy.

In fact, he opened the evening with a brilliant introduction that he said to me, “Once you hear this you’re gonna want to use it for every talk you give.” Which is true.

He asked the students if anyone knew who Edward Everett was. No response. I should have known — the name even rang a bell — but I was still lost. He explained.

Everett was the famous politician who spoke before Lincoln at Gettysburg in November, 1865. As Carville pointed out, Everett’s speech was two hours long, Lincoln’s was two minutes. “Which politician do you remember today?” Carville asked the students.

In fact, this is the famous quote from Everett after their speeches, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

And just to get didactic for a moment here, he was absolutely right. Lincoln had a super-clear theme of “unfinished business” which underpinned the 270-some words of his powerful speech. Lincoln had deeeeeep narrative intuition.

And the Everett anecdote is doubly fitting given that Lincoln’s speech, as first noted by Park Howell, is itself nothing more than a three paragraph ABT (basically “We have a great AND mighty nation, BUT now we’re in a civil war, THEREFORE it is up to us, the living, to make sure these men did not die in vain.”).  Mr Carville included that in his introductory comments as well. As I said, he gets it on the ABT.

DINNER WITH A LIVING LEGEND

After the two hour class we went to dinner at a quiet, local upscale restaurant. Every head turned as we were seated, and before the evening was done there was a line of people coming to the table to beg Mr. Carville to do something about this horrible new President, to have their photo taken with him, or to tell him stories about their parents having worked with him.

He laughed and joked his way through every autograph and photo, truly a man of the people. It was a fantasy night starting with his house which you can see looks like it’s straight out of “Interview with a Vampire.”  What a great, great professor, political strategist, and all around excellent fucking guy. Who has the foulest mouth you’ll ever hear. And the students, being from New Orleans, absolutely love him for it.

You can read about Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock bemoaning the sad state of college life these days in America, BUT … I can assure you students are still alive and kicking ass at Tulane. THEREFORE, that one night in New Orleans made the entire journey of rejection with my Trump editorial worth it in the end.

Yay.

SHORT, NOT SWEET, AND STRUCTURED.

INCOMING

Okay, Trump sucks and is a horrible person and all that stuff. There, that’s my disclaimer so that hopefully no one calls me a Trump lover. I’m not. But I do demand the right to analyze the narrative elements of his communication and call them “good” without having that mean I support his policies. I don’t.

The political pundits, who are deaf and blind to the entire concept of narrative structure, thought Trump’s inauguration speech was short, dark and weird.

First off, it wasn’t unusually short. It was 1,475 words. The first inaugural speeches of the previous three presidents were 1,592 (Bush), 1,607 (Clinton) and 2,422 (Obama). Yes, it was the shortest of the group, but only 7% shorter than Bush, 8% shorter than Clinton. That’s not a big deal.

It just felt short. That’s what properly constructed narrative structure results in — a feeling of “wow, that was quick.” I’ve made films that people thought were much shorter than their length and, sadly, I’ve made films that people doubted the length could possibly be as short as it was (which is a painful comment to hear).

It was powerfully structured in terms of narrative. As I have been saying for two years now, Trump has deep narrative intuition. This is just the start. He is going to give mean, angry, powerfully focused speeches for a long time to come. It’s what he thrives on. He will never, ever be content with a lack of tension. Never. It’s what narrative demands.

Here are, in my opinion, the 5 most important narrative features of Trump’s inauguration speech:

1) OVERARCHING ABT – THE “WE SHALL EMERGE FROM THE DARKNESS” THEME

Obama gave a solid first inauguration speech for which you could say the key word of “hardship” was at it’s core. It was justified then given the collapsing economy he inherited. Trump is getting a booming economy, yet he delivered the same sort of message. His ABT was basically, “We are in a dark time BUT I am now President, THEREFORE we are going to return to good times AGAIN.” Make a note of that last word.

Why would he do this? Is it because he’s a liar? Is it because he wants to scare people? Is it just “fear mongering”? No. He lives and breathes narrative. At the center of narrative — at the center of the ABT Template — is the word “but” which is a deeply negative word that arouses the brain with tension. Trump thrives on this word.

He will always be working to generate narrative tension. That is the main driver of all his actions. Even if there were ever peace, he would find a source of tension. The man will never, ever be comfortable for one moment if there is no tension. Everyone should accept this core property of his psyche. It explains more of his behavior than anything else. It’s why, rather than be a good sport with the SNL parodies of him, he instead takes issue with it. Being a good sport destroys narrative tension. That’s just not him.

2) NARRATIVE INDEX (18) – THE HAND OF BANNON

I had predicted last week that by looking at the Narrative Index of the speech (the BUT/AND ratio) you would be able to infer whether Trump’s schlub speechwriter Stephen Miller (author of his speeches last summer that mostly scored around 10) wrote it, versus Trump (who averaged 29 last spring when he was writing his own speeches that got him the candidacy).

In the end it was probably neither. The inside sources say it was his agent of darkness — his “strategist” — Steve Bannon. Which makes sense. It ended up being a compromise between the styles of Trump and Miller, and thus had the intermediate score of 18.

But more importantly, it had strong narrative form. Clear set up, short, structured journey, concise synthesis.

Also, there’s the side note of the Batman stuff that’s been pointed out. Bannon is a mediocre filmmaker. You can bet he probably shaped the Batman stuff.

3) OPENING ABT – YES, THERE WAS ONE

In classic ABT form he opened with words of agreement. He spoke the platitudes of how power is transferred every four years and thanked the Obamas. But then … he inserted a singular statement of contradiction with this passage:

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning because today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people.

There’s actually two words of contradiction — however and but. A double dose, fitting of what was to come. He identified the problem (the elites have had all the power), then launched right into the statement of consequence:

That all changes starting right here and right now because this moment is your moment, it belongs to you.

4) THE JOURNEY: ARISTOTLE WOULD HAVE BEEN IMPRESSED

From there, Trump/Bannon embarked on a series of narrative cycles — all ABT structured — all matching Aristotle’s cycles of paridos, episode and stasimon which you can see in Figure 5 of “Houston, We Have a Narrative.” Over and over until climaxing in this passage shortly before the end:

Finally, we must think big and dream even bigger. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining, but never doing anything about it.
(APPLAUSE)
The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.

5) THE GRAND SYNTHESIS, “AGAIN”

What is most stunning is the grand synthesis of everything — his last 100 words. SIX of those last 100 words were the word “again.” That is very, very significant. When you study the monomyth of Joseph Campbell you come to realize that once the journey has begun — once you have entered the “special world” — your only overall goal is just to get back to the “ordinary world” … AGAIN.

That word is deeply powerful in narrative terms. And guess where it’s shown up for the past two years — as the last word of his slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

That is how deep Donald Trump’s narrative intuition is.

So to all Americans in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, from ocean to ocean, hear these words: You will never be ignored again. Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way. Together, we will make America strong again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America. Thank you. God bless America.

BOTTOM LINE: THE SPEECH WAS NOT FOR ELITES OR EGGHEADS

Sorry. It’s the truth. If you are smart enough to pick the speech apart analytically then it simply wasn’t meant for you. Trump has deep narrative intuition. He knows how to use it to connect with the masses. No one — not one person — in the Democratic party has this attribute. It’s not just about being a populist hate monger. He embodies the “narrative imperative” of the American masses, and they will be listening to him for a long time to come.

What sort of narrative strength will Trump’s inauguration speech have?  Will he breathe narrative bluster like Richard Nixon?  Or deliver a rambling drivel-a-thon like Eisenhower’s second inaugural.  One indication will be his first paragraph.  Will there be a clear narrative/ABT structure (I would predict yes if Trump over-rules his speechwriter) or will it be rambling and unfocused (his designated speechwriter is not good).

NIXON’S SPLENDIDLY PORTENTOUS WORDS: He opened his inaugural speech with this ABT: “Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. BUT some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries. (THEREFORE) This can be such a moment.” He should have continued with, “Everybody better duck and cover cause HERE COMES TRICKY DICK!”

INAUGURAL

Wherever you find great speeches you’ll find the ABT at work.  Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech opens with the ABT structure for the first paragraph — so plain and simple I use it in all my talks.  The Gettysburg Address was nothing more than three paragraphs — one for each of the ABT elements.

Mario Cuomo’s legendary “A Tale of Two Cities” DNC speech of 1984 opened with an ABT as he basically said that Reagan says we’re a shining city on a hill AND in some places that’s true, BUT he hasn’t been to the worst parts of our cities, THEREFORE he needs to realize we are a nation of two cities.

Barbara Jordan’s legendary 1976 DNC speech opened with an ABT — 144 years ago Democrats first met to choose a candidate AND this week’s meeting is a continuation of that process, BUT tonight is different because I, Barbara Jordan am a key note speaker, THEREFORE the American Dream continues to advance.

It is the hallmark of great communication — clarity and simplicity of message.  Trump showed early in his campaign a strong aptitude for this, BUT … once he won the nomination he began allowing others to write his speeches, and their clarity declined.

Now he has appointed Stephen Miller as the main writer for his inauguration speech.  The guy wrote a misguided rambling mess last summer for Trump’s RNC speech that was shockingly long.

What he ought to open with is a clear ABT that presents his narrative theme of making America great again.  If he does, the speech will probably have been rewritten by Trump and will have focus and clarity.  If the first paragraph (or two) doesn’t have solid ABT structure, I predict it was written by Stephen Miller (and others who are rumored to be getting their hands into it — danger, danger) and will be flabby and rambling.

Tune in to see.

Last month PLOS published a paper titled, “Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science” which was a nice study, BUT… How do you write a paper about “narrativity” in scientific papers and not discuss the IMRAD narrative template that scientists began using a century ago? How can you use the word “influences” in the title if you did nothing more than correlations? Why would you over-complicate things by using “narrativity” instead of just narrative structure? The paper stands as a monument to the lack of “narrative intuition” in the science world.  Other professions (business, law, politics, advertising) already know that narrative structure underpins all communication. EVERYONE knows that narrative is central to all communication. Except, apparently some scientists, who lack intuition and thus need data. The bottom line is the same old thing, don’t be such a scientist — the world needs your efforts actually using narrative dynamics, not questioning their value.

A MONUMENT TO THE LACK OF NARRATIVE INTUITION IN THE SCIENCE WORLD.

IT’S CALLED INTUITION

Bob Dylan once said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”  If you have the least bit of common sense/intuition you can walk outside and figure it out for yourself.

The idea that science communication benefits from narrative structure was established a century ago by a generation of scientists with much deeper understanding for communication than today’s scientists.  They created the IMRAD Template which today underpins the communication of pretty much all scientific papers.  If you don’t know what IMRAD stands for, Google it.  If you’re a scientist, you should know.

“DATA” —  IT FIGURES

My development of the ABT Template has resulted in a great deal of interest, not just in the science world where I’ve launched it, but far outside of science.  In addition to 5 government agencies, I’m now working with a wide range of corporate clients (Roche, Billabong, Deloitte, Genentech, among others) who, instead of saying “Gosh, we don’t know — where’s the data to show this narrative stuff is actually needed?” have simply brought me in to get to work helping them apply the knowledge emerging from the ABT.  (I’m also working with a number of political folks shaping their messaging)

It’s very exciting. Everywhere I go, people are applying the ABT to strengthen their narrative content (just this week the National Park Service used the ABT throughout a 50 page climate report)

BUT THEN … I turn back to the science world and what do I see?  A paper presenting “data” to “prove” that “narrativity” matters.  Which is true.  It does matter.  Of course it matters.  It’s why scientific papers morphed from their original non-narrative form in the 1600’s to the structurally regimented narrative form of today using the IMRAD elements.

NOT WRONG, JUST SAD

There’s nothing wrong about their paper (except using “influences” in the title — isn’t that the same as causation when all they present are correlations?  I don’t see any controlled experiments).  If you really are stuck back in the 1600’s, needing evidenced-based arguments to convince you narrative matters, then I guess it’s the paper for you.

But seriously, the point was made a century ago.  The major thing everyone should learn from this paper is that no other professions feel the need to question the importance of narrative.  This is the handicap that science suffers from — a vast lack of intuition when it comes to communication.

It needs to change.  It has to change, given the coming anti-science onslaught, starting with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. this week (sheesh!).

As I said last week, 2017 is going to be The Year of the ABT.  This is a perfect start.  Just in time for our Story Circles Demo Days in two weeks in Colorado, the National Park Service has released a 50 page report on their Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy featuring the ABT approach throughout.  If it’s good enough for them, it really is good enough for you.

IT’S SIMPLE AS ABT. The climate is changing AND it’s having an impact on cultural resources, BUT we’ll never know how much change is happening if it isn’t documented over time, THEREFORE the National Park Service just released a statement of their strategy on this.

HOW TO ABT. On page 30 of the report is this nice, simple presentation of the ABT and how it works.

THEREFORE …

What’s best about this new report from the National Park Service on “cultural resources and climate change” are the sections on the ABT Template (And, But, Therefore) — on page 17 and 30/31 where they explain the ABT, tell how to use it for case studies, then present case studies throughout the document where they have clearly used it.

It’s not like the case studies all use the three words — it’s just that you can feel they have solid narrative structure.  Each one sets up the context, presents a single narrative thread, then addresses the significance and meaning of what’s going on.

It’s not that complicated.  Effective communication is simple.  Just like the ABT.

I can’t wait to run our two Demo Days with the NPS folks in Ft Collins and Denver.  This is the first group we’re working with who have already adopted the ABT approach.   We’ll be starting at the most advanced level yet.

We’ll be starting at the most advanced level yet.   Therefore … (stay tuned!).

The pundits keep laughing about President-elect Trump’s use of Twitter for diplomatic statements.  They shouldn’t be laughing.  It’s dangerous.  The problem with Twitter:  It’s a NON-NARRATIVE medium.  I showed this in my 2015 book.  I compared the average number of characters needed for a narrative statement (an And, But, Therefore or ABT statement) versus what Twitter allows.  The difference is huge.  This means there is little chance to put comments into context.  Stephen Colbert found this out the hard way in 2014.  For Trump there will come a disaster soon based around his tweeting, and it will be the result of the medium being non-narrative.  Maybe that will wipe the smiles off the faces of the pundits.

The dashed line is for the 140 character limit of Twitter.   When asked to write the narrative statement of their project using the ABT template (And, But, Therefore) the statements of workshop participants averaged more than twice the length of a tweet.  Bottom Line:  Twitter does not give you enough characters to make a clear narrative statement

It’s official — 2017 is the Year of the ABT. Why not, the ABT is the DNA of story, as my good buddy Park Howell of “The Business of Story” podcast likes to say.  It’s the central tool for our Story Circles Narrative Training which continues to spread.  This year Story Circles kicks off with two big Demo Days for the National Park Service in Colorado later this month.  Also, we’re up to our elbows editing the 20 minute video about Story Circles we’re doing as a co-production with AAAS. And in the meanwhile, the corporate and political worlds are starting to “get it” on the ABT and Story Circles.  2017 will truly be the Year of the ABT.

TIME TO LAUNCH STORY CIRCLES WITH THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE. Two days with 40 participants each in Fort Collins and Lakewood (Denver). A great way to start the new year!

As we prepare to enter a strange new world next year I want to end this year with the figure from “Houston, We Have A Narrative” that underlies pretty much everything we are now dealing with. Our information glutted world has turned “The Creek of Story” into “The Raging Whitewater Torrent of Story.”  The polls show clearly who is the casualty — the tiny fish of truth.  But by “story” I’m not referring to lying.  I’m referring to story structure.  It doesn’t mean you need to lie, only that you need to understand the narrative selective regime in which we now live.  “Just the facts” no longer works, as sadly shown by the losing Presidential candidate who tried to pursue that approach.  From here on, it’s all about story.

FROM HERE ON, STORY WINS. END OF STORY.

THE POST-TRUTH WORLD

There’s mountains of stuff now spewing out about the “post-factual world,” fake news and  “post-truth politics.”   Wikipedia even has a page for the latter.

I have only one simple thing to add to the mix.  It’s the visual (above) that was in my book last year, “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”  I suppose I might modify that figure to have two fishes — one labeled NARRATIVE (ABT, And-But-Therefore) that is succeeding in beating the river.  The other labeled NON-NARRATIVE (AAA, And-And-And) that is being swept downstream.

Hillary Clinton ran a “stunningly boring campaign” as the UK Telegraph and many other media outlets put it.  Her VP selection, Tim Kaine, was uber-boring.

You CAN NOT DO THAT in the United States and expect to win.  It’s an intensely narrative culture we have created.  My Story Circle co-creator Jayde Lovell and I are assembling the data and argument for the process of “narrative selection” — the fact that we live in a narrative selective regime — those who fail to comply get selected against.

NARRATIVE IS NOW OUR NARRATIVE

These are my watch words for the new year — the Narrative Imperative.  Donald Trump has deep narrative intuition, as I talked about on Park Howell’s podcast “The Business of Story” the morning after the election.

If you want to make sense of the world we are headed into, you better have a solid grounding in these narrative principles.  I presented the Dobzhansky Template in the book.   Here it is, filled out for the new year:

“Nothing in America Makes Sense Today Except in the Light of Narrative Dynamics.”

This underlies the fundamental dynamic between the right and the left.  The left has the statistics showing how rare terrorists attacks are in America, but the right has the handful of stories of terrorist attacks that are absolutely terrifying.  Story wins.

That’s the bottom line for 2017:   Story wins.

Happy Holidays!

I know we’re supposed to applaud climate scientists who speak out in defense of climate science, and I do.  But just getting media attention isn’t the challenge — it needs to have long term impact.  Which is where narrative dynamics come in.  I offer up this ABT analysis of climate scientist Mike Mann’s editorial yesterday in the Washington Post to help demonstrate the importance and power of narrative structure.  Yes, presenting lots of conflict draws attention for the short term, but for the long run, if you don’t have good narrative structure (i.e. all 3 of the ABT elements), you’re producing nothing more than “a sundry lists of facts.”  Which is what he did — all B, no A or T.

THE ABT ANALYSIS OF MIKE MANN’S CLIMATE EDITORIAL in yesterday’s Washington Post.

AN 8 WORD THEREFORE?

Climate scientist Mike Mann and I have been buddies since he was on the post-screening panel for my climate mockumentary “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy” at Penn State in 2009.  One of my first interviews for my blog The Benshi was with him in 2010.  He’s done a mountain of important work for the climate community, and borne the brunt of relentless personal attacks from climate skeptics — much of which he itemized in his Washington Post editorial yesterday.

But here’s the problem.  The narrative structure of his editorial is weak.  Yes, there’s a ton of conflict in it — a laundry list of attacks he’s endured.  But that’s all it is — in essence an AAA exercise (the dreaded And, And, And template).  Which is interesting, and maybe even a little bit curious, but in the words of Dobzhansky (as quoted in my last book), in the end he presents little more than “a sundry list of facts, some of which are interesting and curious, but ultimately meaningless.”

This is the hard part of narrative.  There’s more to delivering content that will “stick” (and btw, “Made to Stick” was nothing more than the fact that things stick when they have good narrative structure) than just making a list.

This is what participants in Story Circles Narrative Training begin to realize.  The ABT is the magic bullet of communication which seems at first to be incredibly simple, but if you commit to actual in-depth training you begin to realize it has infinite complexity.  And you begin to realize why it has been the central structuring principle of communication since pretty much the beginning of communication, thousands of years ago.

As my buddy Park Howell (host of “The Business of Story” podcast) loves to point out — the ABT goes all the way back to cave people muttering, “Unh Hunh” (A), “Uh Oh” (B) and “Ah Ha!” (T).  It is that primal.

“IT’S THE T, STUPID”

Okay, calm down, that’s not an insult, just a reference to the line from my hero James Carville (a master of simple communication) who coined the expression, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  This is the message to the climate crowd — it’s time to focus on the “THEREFORE” of your messaging.

There’s 21 paragraphs in Mann’s editorial.  20 of them are statements of the problem — on and on. If you’re part of the choir you can’t get enough of these details.  But if you’re only marginally interested (i.e. the masses), after a while you hit the point of wanting to “advance the narrative” which manifests itself with a feeling of “okay, I got it, you’ve been attacked a lot — what are you recommending we do about it?”  This is the power of the word THEREFORE.  It’s what begins to emerge when people work with the ABT — they begin to ask, “So then what’s the THEREFORE of your essay?”

In the case if Mann’s editorial, it was only 8 words at the end — “I would urge these scientists to have courage.”

It could have and should have been much more.  One of the key realizations we’ve had in Story Circles is that “the quicker you can get through the A and the B, the more we’re willing to let you have all day with the T.”  It’s the T that everyone really wants.

But also, without some attention to the A, there is little overall context, importance and depth to the message being delivered.  Yes, it’s nice to hook the reader with a first moment of conflict, but once that’s achieved it’s time to go to work on the basic narrative process starting with exposition. His editorial never did that.

THERE COMES A TIME FOR PREPARING …

If you find yourself getting furious at me for having the audacity to critique someone on the climate team then you’re probably as much of the problem as the climate skeptics.  It’s the same with the Democratic party which has delivered a colossal failure to this nation.  It’s a time for rational, analytical (not arm waving) analysis of what happened, why, and then delivery of the THEREFORE (how to do better).

Mann’s editorial should have given a couple of quick words of A (climate skeptics undermine the serious work that needs to be done, time is running out), a quick statement of the B (3 of his worst experiences plus all the signs that it’s now about to get really bad).  That should have been about 4 paragraphs.

The rest should have been the THEREFORE.  As in, “Therefore it’s time to begin preparing for the assault on climate science we know will come.”  It’s time to assemble defense strategies.  It’s time to look back to 2009 and realize how unprepared the climate community was for the email attacks of Climategate.  It’s time to shift the focus of science organizations from PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING (I served on the AAAS committee charged with this) to PUBLIC PERCEPTION of science.

This last one is big, and is very difficult for scientists to accept.  There is about to be a hell storm of attacks on the credibility of the entire science community.  David H. Freedman’s excellent 2010 book, “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing US” pretty much foretold that eventually the problem of “fake news” (which is no different from “false positives”) would emerge.  The door is now wide open for major communications chaos for science.

I saw it four years ago in my local California community where there was a painfully divisive local environmental issue. The anti-science forces wrote editorials in our local newspapers saying, verbatim, that today “scientists are no different from lawyers — you can buy one to argue whichever side of an issue you want.”  That, of course, is not true, but you better get ready for this at the national level.  It’s coming.

Last week I had dinner with the head of the largest science organization in the world.  I detected no major preparations in progress for the coming onslaught.

The bottom line, it’s time for a lot of THEREFORE’ing about the climate skeptic/anti-science community.  But I don’t see it happening.  At all.

All I’m seeing coming is a whole lot of the same old Climategate “Well, that just isn’t fair” reactions.

Get ready for “Lalaland” to win the hearts of movie fans over the next few months.  I attended a Screen Actors Guild screening yesterday where the lead actor Ryan Gosling spoke afterwards.  He was amazing, both in the movie and as well as tremendously likable in the Q&A.  But most important, the movie was an ABT tour de force, wrapping itself up in a neat story package at the end, prompting the audience to give it a well deserved standing ovation.  Musicals that work are difficult.  Musicals that work AND tell a good story are incredibly rare and difficult.  The film is already scoring advance raves and deserves every bit of the hype.

HE SINGS, HE DANCES, HE PLAYS PIANO — AND HE’S HUMBLE. Ryan Gosling shows incredible talent in the movie, saying he spent three solid months, night and day, learning the piano and dance moves.

MUSICALS WILL NEVER DIE

Once upon a time, long, long ago, I wrote and directed a 20 minute musical comedy film at USC film school that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, chosen as one of six student films out of nearly one thousand submitted.  You can actually view it here, but you need to keep in mind it was made 21 years ago as a student film and shot on 16 mm film, back in the days when that still happened.  It starred Carol Hatchett, one of the Harlettes, Bette Midler’s backup singers, who gave a tremendous performance that made it all work.

One thing I learned in the process of making that film is that it’s incredibly difficult to make a film that both has song and dance numbers, yet still tells a good story.  It’s easy to let the musical numbers, because they are so difficult, take priority and end up with a movie with a clunky story.

Knowing that gives me an even deeper appreciation for the new movie “Lalaland” starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone which manages both great musical numbers and a tight, simple story that builds to a wonderful conclusion.  It’s great.

GET READY FOR THE OSCARS

A friend invited me last night to a Screen Actors Guild advance showing of “Lalaland.”  For starters it was a pushover audience packed with actors who knew all too well the world the film is set in (actors and musicians in Hollywood).  Every bit of humor about auditions was greeted with roars of laughter and squeals of “oh my god, yes!” as the crowd related to the pains of rejection.

There were a few cliched moments and a couple of scenes that could have been trimmed a tiny bit, but otherwise the two actors overflowed with on-screen charisma and managed to reach the heights of performance of the classic 1950’s musicals.  Of course, it wasn’t quite “Singin’ In the Rain,” but nothing ever again will be.   Some things are just plain sacred and untouchable.  But that’s a sort of “shifting baselines” issue that’s not worth letting get in the way of this really fun movie.

ABT AT WORK

For me (predictably) the most significant element was feeling the tight story dynamics.  It’s a very simple story.  Almost too simple at times — i.e. you know that when the two lead actors fall in love there’s bound to be some rough times ahead.  But it all works, and by the end you can feel the ABT elements coming together, leaving the audience with the sort of feelings of satisfaction that are needed to connect deeply with a movie.

Truly great movies have a simple core that lets you leave the theater feeling everything made sense and was resolved, but also allow you to later find great complexity by thinking back on what the story meant.  This one was great that way.

I loved it — so much I wish I could go into enormous detail about why, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.  Suffice it to say the early critics are raving wildly — USA Today posted this article saying the NY critics have already called it the best film of the year.  If it is, I’ll be comfortable with that.

This is not an indictment of any one individual, just the entire community.  It’s characteristic of the science community in general — the inability to communicate broadly.  Coral reefs around the world are approaching their third act, but the messaging about their welfare continues to be muddled.  Yes, there are lots of dire warnings, but there HAS NOT BEEN THE ONE SINGULAR MESSAGE CONVEYING THE LEVEL OF URGENCY.  Singularity is everything for narrative and narrative is everything for mass communication.  The atomic bomb community knew how to do this starting in the 1940’s.  The military knew how to do it with hunting terrorists.  But scientists have been too deeply ensconced in their soup of facts to speak effectively to the public.

THIS IS EFFECTIVE MASS MESSAGING. The Doomsday Clock countdown to nuclear nightmare.

DON’T BE SUCH A CORAL REEF SCIENTIST

I spent a year of my life living on an island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  After spending upwards of 8 hours a day underwater conducting research almost every day, I knew the reefs around that island like the back of my hand.

Now those reefs are a wasteland from the mass coral bleaching event of this year.

The coral reefs of the Caribbean are worse.  I got to know the reefs of Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Panama 40 years ago.  Today they are shot.  In my lifetime coral reefs around the world have been obliterated.  And yet, while this has happened, the science/conservation community has been unable to produce much more than a “things are bad in some places” message to the world.

WHAT PART OF “SINGULARITY OF NARRATIVE” DON’T SCIENTISTS GET?

Actually, pretty much all of it.  Scientists are so determined to convey “all the facts” in all their joyous complexity that they have failed to convey much of anything when it comes to the plight of coral reefs.

I began bellyaching about this 15 years ago when I started my Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project with coral reef biologists Jeremy Jackson and Steven Miller.  I kept asking them, “What’s the ONE NUMBER we can tell the world about the state of coral reefs?  Are they 90% of what they were?  50%?  25%?”  And asking them why the coral reef community in general didn’t grasp the importance of having a single, simple indicator for the general public.

The world needed ONE NUMBER.  Not the standard, “Well, it depends on whether we’re talking about live coral cover or total biomass or standing crop or …”

To this day there is still no widely accepted one number for the overall state of coral reefs.  Yet at the same time there are still countless television documentaries and tourism agencies painting pictures of coral reefs as happy and healthy as they’ve ever been.  And why not — dead reefs don’t attract viewers or tourists.  We talked about this 15 years ago.  Nothing has changed.

THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK AND IRAQI PLAYING CARDS

Go ahead and ridicule the simplicity of things like the Doomsday Clock for nuclear armageddon and the pack of playing cards that were used in 2003 to communicate about the most wanted Iraqis.  If you’re a sophisticate you probably think those things are moronic.  But they work for the masses.

Mass communication requires a commitment to finding simplicity.  If you doubt this just look at our new President.  And if you’re mad about that guy being the new President, don’t blame him — blame the Democrats who let you down by their endless inability to simplify anything.

I’m sick of listening to the whiners.  I voted for Hillary.  But I also watched her campaign fail to find any simplicity in their mass messaging.  You can hear my sad story about it that I told the morning after the election on Park Howell’s “Business of Story” podcast.

The Clinton campaign was just like the coral reef community that has been either unwilling or unable to simplify their message of decline for 30 years, and now sits in confusion as coral reefs approach their own midnight.

Rotten, rotten, rotten mass communication, completely oblivious of narrative dynamics.

Next week we will launch our 15th Story Circle (at University of Maryland) making 75 scientists and communications staff participating in individual Story Circles, with 510 taking part in Demo Days. Some circles have finished but have gotten into narrative analysis so deep they haven’t wanted to quit. It’s effective, however there is one casualty: students and postdocs. Sorry.

THIS WEEK’S UPDATE: This is our weekly update showing circles that are meeting and what’s ahead.

FOUR HOTSPOTS

Story Circles is right on track to where we had hoped to be by the end of the year. Last year we developed the training through four prototypes with NIH, USDA and Hendrix University. Now we’re spreading the training.

In particular, we’ve developed four major hot spots — USDA, USFWS, USGS and Genentech. These are the places that have hosted multiple Demo Days and Story Circles with plans for broadening ahead. National Park Service is set to join the group in January with two Demo Days.

Best of all is watching circles finish their 10 one hour sessions and ask to keep going because they are so deeply connected with the process. Story Circles teaches a whole new narrative language that takes a while to fully grasp, but once you do becomes very powerful.

Right now we’re in the thick of a 20 minute video about Story Circles we’re producing with AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) that will be released early next year.

THE ONE CASUALTY SO FAR: STUDENTS

Sorry. We had hoped, along with many others, that Story Circles would be an effective training program not just for professionals, but for students as well. At this point we’re having to conclude it isn’t.

There just doesn’t seem to be the “need or want” when it comes to students. Professionals tend to have a lot of experience with projects that have suffered from poor communication, creating a feeling of need for the training. Or they’ve been hearing for years “you need to do a better job of telling your story.”

But when it comes to students, they seem to be more concerned with “is this gonna be on the exam?” or “are we gonna get credit for this?” or they’re too busy and over-committed. There just isn’t the depth of connection, and without that burning desire that is needed to light up the narrative part of your brain, the training just doesn’t amount to much.  I’m afraid it doesn’t work to shout, “You need to know this for your future!”  Apparently that doesn’t activate the narrative part of the brain..

They also have a tendency to say, “yep, three words: and, but, therefore — we got it, all done, thanks.” Several students have verbatim said that — “we got the three words, we’re all set.” If only it were that simple!

Here’s a great example of the ABT in action as well as the ABT/AAA overall structure.  It’s Bob Dylan’s 1966 song, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”?  It’s built of repeating ABT verses with an over-arching AAA structure.  Give that man a Nobel Prize (if he wants it).

To be stuck inside of Oslo with the Nobel blues again.

OH, MAMA

As he decides whether or not to make a showing at his Nobel Prize ceremony (some of the hosts are already so pissed at him!) let’s take a look at the ABT dynamic at work in one of his greatest songs.

The song consists of 9 versus, all with the same basic ABT structure of agreement, contradiction, resolution.  The words themselves are not that clearly ABT in structure, but the basic inflection/chord sequence clearly follows the ABT pattern.

Each verse begins with a bunch of statements that all have the And, And, And feel.  Some of them, like the first verse, even start with “But” but they’re still just statements of exposition.

Then the chord goes minor with “Oh, Mama …” and you can feel the contradiction of the flow.  In fact, you could drop in the word BUT to make it, “But, oh, Mama …” and it would work just fine.

The last line would be a little clunky if you added THEREFORE, making it, “Therefore to be stuck inside of Mobile …”  But … you can hear the tone of consequence in the music — i.e. you can feel the tension being released.  In fact, you could make it, “So I guess I’m stuck inside of Mobile …” and that would work fine.

Same thing, over and over, nine times.

The first three versus of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” showing the repeating And, But, Therefore (ABT) structure.

ABT/AAA

Overall, the songs shows the standard recipe for what we might call “engaging boredom.”  So many TV shows, movies, plays, personal stories, events … pretty much everything … commonly show this pattern.  Each verse is really engaging and pulls you in, but overall, the song doesn’t build to anything.  It kind of just “is.”

Which is cool, and is a perfect showcase for strong character work.  But, that said, the character side of the material had better be strong or it’s going to lose us.  Lots of nature documentaries are like this — made up of really cool, engaging little vignettes which hold your interest, but in the end leave you without much for a deeper experience.

That’s where the over-arching ABT comes into play.  It’s what great stories are made of.  It’s not obligatory, but it makes the difference between “a sundry list of facts” (as Dobzhansky so eloquently put it) and deep connection.

And that, is what narrative is all about.  To be stuck inside of AAA structure with the ABT blues again.

Not sure what kind of drugs I was hopped up on a couple nights ago (maybe still recovering from the election) when a poor innocent woman named Erin Rodgers from Toronto politely asked me to answer at least three of her ten questions.  Turned out they were all good questions so I answered them all, sounding like a lunatic, but so what, the new President has instilled this in me.  We can no longer afford to bore or confuse.

RIBIT.

Ten good questions, ten blunt, repetitive answers, all of which arise from “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”

“Mars Attacks” was a movie that was exactly 20 years ahead of it’s time.  The entire movie is ABT structured — “The Martians land AND they seem to have come in peace, BUT then they start slaughtering everyone THEREFORE basically beware of the Greeks and their damn wooden horse gifts.”  The ABT is the fundamental template of narrative and consists of three forces — agreement, contradiction, consequence.  Last week Trump was pure agreement in meeting with Obama.  Do you kinda think there might be some contradiction coming soon?  Better start getting ready because I don’t think the consequence that will follow is gonna be pretty.

TIME FOR A LITTLE BIPARTISAN EFFORT!

LET THE ABT BE YOUR GUIDE IN THESE DELICATE TIMES

Hate to be a skeptic, but all I could see last week was Trump’s deep, deep narrative intuition at work as he sat there with his new buddy President Obama.  That day will come to be known as the AND phase of Trump’s post-election process.  I would expect nothing other than that from the man given his deep narrative intuition.

But I also know what’s coming — the BUT phase (contradiction).  Which will then be followed by the THEREFORE (consequence).  It’s coming.  You can see it play out in a movie from 20 years ago, “Mars Attacks,” which was all I kept thinking about last week as the post-election olive branches came out.

Trump has narrative intuition.  I did this podcast the morning after the election with my buddy Park Howell for his Business of Story series.  To put it in terms of the Dobzhansky Template (see my last book for details), it’s like this:  Nothing in our near future is going to make sense except in the light of Donald Trump’s deep narrative intuition.

My advice:  Keep your eye on the narrative.

MY PODCAST THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION WITH PARK HOWELL, APPLYING NARRATIVE ANALYSIS TO WHAT HAPPENED.

Of all the exercises we did in film school, this one was the best.

JAKE GITTES KNEW THE POWER OF SIMPLICITY.

OVER-THINKING “CHINATOWN”

As much fun as I had in film school at USC, I was a little disappointed at times with some of the faculty who put little effort into their teaching.  Many of them pretty much said to go shoot a film and they would critique it — not much more than that.

But we did do one very simple and memorable exercise in our first semester production class. They broke us into groups of four, gave us one page of the screenplay for the movie “Chinatown,” and told us to come up with a shot list for everything on the page.

My group broke it down into 17 shots.  It was the scene where Jack Nicholson is watching through binoculars as a young boy on a donkey rides slowly through the empty creek bed.  We had a crane shot, a few dolly shots, close-ups of the boy and dolly, close-ups of Jack as he talks to him.

Everyone put their shot lists up on the board.  The other groups were in the same range — between about 15 and 20 shots.  And then they showed us the scene.  We were all stunned.

It was 3 simple shots.

That’s all.  No fancy camera moves, no cutting back and forth, just simple storytelling, first and foremost.

SIMPLICITY IS THE ULTIMATE SOPHISTICATION

This exercise came to mind this week because a young filmmaker showed me a one minute video he had just shot.  It was packed with text and twists and turns and quick cuts and … it was a tangled up mess.  This happens a lot.

People get excited about filmmaking and think it’s all about impressing your audience with the complexities of what you can pull off.  A truly great filmmaker has the experience and intuition to solve the challenge of telling the story in the fewest and simplest number of steps.   Just like an elegant mathematical proof.

The way you get to this point of being able to see the simplicity in the story is through lots and lots and lots of experience.  No real short cuts.  You just have to get to work gathering experience and seeking the ultimate goal which is narrative intuition.

THE ABT OF THIS LITTLE TALE

And just to show you the eternal ubiquity of the ABT, here’s the story I just told you.  “We made our shot lists AND we thought we nailed it, BUT then they showed us we were making it 5 times more complicated than needed, THEREFORE we were humbled.”

Get to know the ABT, it’s your ticket to narrative intuition.

An important distinction.  The “singular” narrative is part of narrative structure.  The “single” narrative refers to limited exposure.

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY.   Which is not the same as the importance of “a singular narrative.”  Let’s get clear on this.

SINGULAR VS SINGLE (NOT THE SAME)

Last month I was caught out by a grad student at our Demo Day at Yale Forestry School.  I was talking about the power and importance of “the singular narrative.”  He said, “But haven’t you seen that TED Talk about the dangers of the single narrative?”  I had not seen the presentation he was talking about (though should have).  I was left with little more of an answer than the standard Rick Perry, “duh, nope … whoops?”

I found the TED Talk. It’s very good. But it’s not about “the singular narrative.” It’s about “the single story.” The distinction is important.

THE SINGULAR NARRATIVE

This is a fundamental piece of “classical design” or archplot as I have presented in my books, citing Robert McKee’s landmark 1997 work, “Story.” It refers to the shape of the ideal form of narrative structure for the masses. He lists 8 characteristics, one of which is “the single protagonist.” This extends to the basic idea of presenting just a single central narrative. Not two.

Nicholas Kristof does a wonderful job of presenting this dynamic in the real world with his classic short, simple essay in Outside Magazine in November, 2009 titled, “Nicholas Kristof’s Advice for Saving the World.”  He cites the work of psychology professor Paul Slovic who shows how “storytelling needs to focus on one individual, not a group.” Not two individuals. Just one. That is the power of the singular narrative.

I read a very intellectual blogger last year saying, “I’d like to think people can keep two thoughts in their mind at once.” You’re welcome to wish for that, but it just doesn’t work that well for the masses. They prefer the singular narrative.

But there’s also a dark side which is the public’s insatiable desire for singular narratives. Last week there was a prime example of this reported in the NY Times as they told of how the story of the infamous “Patient Zero,” (who supposedly spread the AIDS epidemic throughout the United States in the 1980’s) actually wasn’t that clear, simple or singular of a story. There were earlier patients, but mentioning them dilutes the strength of the story, leaving you with the usual choice of story or truth.

THE SINGLE NARRATIVE

In her wonderful TED Talk, Nigerian speaker Chimamanda Adichie tells of growing up in a culture where the only stories they were told were of affluent white explorers from Europe. In hearing only this “single story” she naturally grew to believe that was all there was to storytelling — it always had to be about these people. She eventually realized it was possible to tell stories about her own people.  Her talk is about the dangers of being raised this way.

It’s a great talk and very culturally important, but it’s not at all about narrative structure. Very important to see the distinction. And very important to understand that you don’t have to tell only singular narratives, but failing to do so comes at the expense of size of audience. This is a fundamental narrative principle, as old as Gilgamesh (and Enkidu!) himself.

The Narrative Index reveals two modes for Donald Trump’s communications.  We know from last spring he scores high when he is speaking off the cuff with his solo unscripted voice.  But when he is scripted and less impulsive he scores much lower.   Last week he gave an unfunny, unappealing, flat and unclever speech at the Al Smith dinner.  If his Narrative Index for it was low, it would suggest it was written by his staff.  If high, it was probably written by him.  The actual score was 38, suggesting the madman created the whole mess by himself.

TRUMP HAS TWO MODES as reflected by the Narrative Index (But/And ratio). On his own, he has high narrative content. When others get involved, it drops. But look at the mess that was his Al Smith Dinner speech last week. It suggests he did all himself.

WATCH ME NOW

The patterns that emerge from the Narrative Index data are not necessarily causative — just correlative.  But they do continue to show a lot of consistency.

First off, we know that debate performances in general, being unscripted, tend to score higher than speeches.  This has been consistently true all year.  You can see it once again for the three Presidential debates.  Both Trump and Clinton score above 20 for all of their debate performances. They also showed no overlap in their scores (Trump: 28, 30, 30; Clinton: 20, 21, 21).

Trump continues to flounder with his speeches.  Once upon a time he shot from the hip and always scored above 20.  But ever since his victory in the primaries and his decision to go with a teleprompter for his speeches (seeking the advice of “veteran strategists”), his scores have been as low or lower than Hillary.

The implication is that other people put their hands into his prepared speeches, as he tries to speak diplomatically, causing the Narrative Index to plummet. The debates have allowed him to return to old form, producing higher scores.

If this really is a valid pattern, then we can use it to ask the question of who the hell wrote his unfunny, off-putting, crap speech last week at the Al Smith dinner?

Look at his score — a 38.  Kinda suggests little old Donald wrote it all by himself, thinking he would unleash his brilliance and charisma on the crowd who eventually booed him.  The speech sounded like nobody else had a hand in it.

Just imagine the guy as President.  Yikes.

This is important.  Very important.  In one of our Story Circles Narrative Training sessions recently a scientist was presenting his ABT about herbivory in rain forests starting off with basically, “The climate is changing and in rain forests we are seeing …”  This is one of the fundamental communications mistakes being made by the science and environmental community — the assumption that climate change is “the new normal” — that everybody knows about it now.  No, they don’t.  My advice: think through what the “ordinary world” means, realize most of the public is still grasping what climate change means, then start your narrative in the pre-climate change world.  Climate change is the central “problem” now.  To assume everyone has already advanced to that stage runs the risk of losing a lot of people, as well as coming off as aloof.

WHAT MAKES A HERO? This is from Matthew Winkler’s excellent TED ED video of 2012 that everyone should watch a few million times. Yes, it may feel like it’s “too Hollywood” if you’re a scientist, but make no mistake, your entire life is about problem/solution which involves the journey from the “ordinary world” (you have no problem) to the “special world” (you are seeking a solution) then back to the ordinary world when you’ve solved the problem. A crucial aspect of this for communication is to be sure you’re starting in the right ordinary world.

TIPS ARE FOR TURKEYS

As a rule, I’m hesitant to get involved in offering up “tips for communication” because it reinforces this sad notion many people have of thinking they can get great at communication without ever investing the time to engage in an actual training regime such as Story Circles.  The bane of what we do with Story Circles are the short attention span folks who say, “Great, three words — and, but, therefore — I’m all set, thanks, all done.”

It’s not that simple.  I don’t care if you pride yourself on being “a quick study.”  You’re missing the point — it’s about building narrative intuition, which takes time.

But for the sake of discussion and because this is a fairly profound element, I’m going to share this one bit that we’ve encountered in Story Circles.

WHAT IS THE ORDINARY WORLD?

This is a question that my buddy Mike Strauss, head of the Office of Scientific Quality Review for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has locked onto a lot in our training.  He has now overseen 5 Story Circles at USDA, including the prototype that produced the effusive testimony of participants a year later that I told of in July.

He has taken to stopping a lot of people as they are working on their narratives and asking them to think through and clearly define the “ordinary world” of their project.  If you’re not familiar with this term you can get a good first introduction with Matthew Winkler’s excellent TED ED film.  This is the whole dynamic you get with Story Circles — other people poking and prodding your narrative, helping you develop it as clearly and strongly as possible, ideally before you even start writing much of anything.

Everyone should stop and ask themselves this question for any project — what is the ordinary world — the conditions before the problem is identified.  Describing the ordinary world is where you lay out elements of agreement — things that everyone in your audience knows.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION TAKES TIME

And this is where a lot of climate communication is making a mistake.  I moderated a panel on climate change for the Malibu Public Library Speaker Series last month.  We had 3 climate experts and 200 audience members, almost none of whom had any background in climate science.  Most didn’t have the first clue of what climate change really means.

But even for the people who are climate experts.  It doesn’t hurt to open with a tiny bit of historical review — that once upon a time our climate wasn’t changing this rapidly.  We can all agree on that, and agreement is where you want to begin.

This is a tough dynamic because so many people want to begin by impressing you with how much they know.  It often takes a true expert to feel comfortable enough starting slowly, but it’s essential for communication to work well.

And in the meanwhile, Story Circles is so amazing — we learn something new with every circle we launch — like the one we started this week at Tufts University with five faculty members.  It is our 12th circle so far. Lots more to come.

It’s called “the singular narrative.”  It’s what the masses demand.  It’s a narrative principle that goes back at least 4,000 years — to the story of Gilgamesh — as Hollywood screenwriters know.  This morning we finally see behind the scenes of an epic tragedy.  Just as I began saying in January on this blog, Hillary Clinton has lacked a clear singular narrative/theme/slogan/message from the start.  This spring I communicated all this for three months with a Hillary campaign staffer who tried to pitch my thoughts to the campaign but hit a brick wall.  The tragedy is that from the start Hillary had a clear singular narrative and one word theme of EQUALITY.  It was there in the opening 250 words of her candidacy announcement on June 13, 2015 as she talked about “No ceilings” and said it VERBATIM with “what it takes to build a strong and prosperous America: “Equality of opportunity…”  But she eventually stumbled upon the shallow slogan of “Stronger Together” which says nothing about equality.  She could have used this singular equality narrative in the spring to join forces with Bernie Sanders who had the same theme at the core of his campaign.  They could have united under a single historically powerful word.  But the hacked emails now show the truth of what happened — utter narrative chaos.  She ended up with only one direction to go — attack Trump’s stronger singular narrative.

THE ONE THING (THAT THE CAMPAIGN HAS LACKED): These days I open my talks with a 30 second clip from the 1990’s movie, “City Slickers” that has come to be called “The Curly Moment.” Jack Palance as the cowboy-wise Curly tells Billy Crystal he needs only one thing in life. Billy Crystal asks what that one thing is. Curly replies “You gotta figure that out for yourself.” As the hacked emails of Hillary’s Campaign Director John Podesta now show, her campaign never did figure that out.

DIRECTIONLESS:  HILLARY

In August of last year I heard NY Times columnist and three times Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman talk on “Meet the Press” about how Hillary Clinton’s campaign lacks a message.  I sent him an email agreeing with everything he said, he wrote back a nice, albeit sad, reply of basically “yep.”  By the fall, as my book, “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” was coming out from University of Chicago Press and I was living and breathing narrative principles as I became inescapably aware that her campaign was suffering from complete narrative chaos.

Last month The Guardian ran an editorial with the title of, “Hillary Needs A Slogan.”  I forwarded it to Friedman, he wrote back, “Yep, thanks for reminding me.”  It’s been a very sad thing to watch.

DIRECTIONAL:  TRUMP

At the same time, Donald Trump showed deep narrative intuition from the very start by launching his campaign with a single, narratively powerful slogan, “Make America Great Again,” from which he has not veered one inch since that day.  Less than a quarter of the way into his announcement speech he first mentioned it in reference to the existing system “… they will never make America great again.”  Since then he has repeatedly circled back to that singular, narratively structured message endlessly, including two nights ago in the latest debate.

In my book I present the ABT Narrative Template, which I have termed “the DNA of story.”  It is the template of “and, but, therefore.”  Trump knows this template at a deeply intuitive level.  His slogan has been, “America is a great AND mighty nation, BUT we’ve slipped in the world, THEREFORE we need to make American great again.”  This has been the DNA of his campaign from which, despite all his incompetence and ineptitude with gaffes and anger, he has not veered at all. It is probably the central element that keeps his disastrous campaign still alive and enabled him to score respectable marks in this last debate.

“A STRUGGLE TO DEFINE WHAT SHE STOOD FOR” (NY TIMES)

That was how two NY Times writers put it this morning in their article about the hacked emails of Hillary’s campaign director John Podesta.  These words are no surprise to me.  In March I managed to contact James Carville with my thoughts about the absence of a clear narrative to her campaign.  In an effort to be of assistance, I pointed to the narrative tools I present in my recent book.  I do this stuff for a living these days.  I’m not a crackpot — I currently work with five government agencies including NASA, National Park Service and USDA, and a variety of other science and environmental organizations as I have for over a decade.

He very kindly referred me to Hillary’s campaign, a staffer contacted me in April, we spent three months with me offering up my specific analytical suggestions, and he valiantly trying to generate some interest.  Ultimately, as the hacked emails reflect, the cacophony of voices in her campaign made it hopeless for any outside voice — even if the person has authored three books on narrative.

“VEEP” WARS (HBO)

The hopelessness of my plight was spotted early on by one of my Hollywood buddies who pointed me to the episode of HBO’s “Veep” where the campaign speech writers have a big cork board covered with different Post-it notes representing the contributions of each of the competing speech writers.  He warned that in a situation like that the chances of an outside voice being heard were zero.  The hacked emails now confirm those comic scenes are a direct representation of what really has gone on.

The NY Times writers were alluding to exactly this when they said, “the exchanges among her aides are sometimes less “House of Cards” than “Veep,” HBO’s scabrous comedy dissecting the vanity and phoniness of Washington.”

THE MISSED “NO CEILINGS” THEME (HER STAFF)

The text of what the NY Times has written is painful to read for any Hillary supporter such as myself.  They talk about how the hacked emails show, “ …the campaign’s extreme caution and difficulty in identifying a core rationale for her candidacy, and the noisy world of advisers, friends and family members trying to exert influence.”

If not EQUALITY, she at least had the potential theme of “NO CEILINGS!”  She mentioned this at the start of her announcement speech, then a year later gave her primaries victory speech in a building in Brooklyn for which in her second sentence she noted, “we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one. ”

She could have had the crowd shouting “NO CEILINGS!  NO CEILINGS!  NO CEILINGS!” all night long.  And as one political veteran friend of mine has noted, that would at least be “aspirational” in the same way as “… GREAT AGAIN!” is.  But instead they ended up with the narratively empty “Stronger Together.”

DEAFNESS OF TONE  (HER STAFF)

How could her campaign committee have been so totally tone deaf to the need for the singular narrative?  “No Ceilings” could have been the war cry for millions of people across the land.

Here’s a final sad quote from the NY Times writers that sums it all up, “  The private discussions among her advisers about policy — on trade, on the Black Lives Matter movement, on Wall Street regulation — often revolved around the political advantages and pitfalls of different positions, while there was little or no discussion about what Mrs. Clinton actually believed.”

ONE LAST THING:  IT’S NOT TOO LATE

There’s a month left.  She’s gaining momentum.  Just start shouting it out — EQUALITY!  NO CEILINGS! Something, anything that has clear, singular narrative dynamics (Stronger Together doesn’t).

It’s there in the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — that’s the slogan, with of course the one minor gender updating needed now.  Shout it out and bring this train into the station.

Good debate moderators usually score all the way up to the 50’s for their Narrative Index (BUT/AND ratio). Their job is to “advance the narrative” which results in them squaring off the candidates by using the word “but” frequently — as in “Your opponent says this, BUT you say …” Lester Holt’s reviews were so-so for his job as moderator of the first debate. His Narrative Index was a meager 17. Kind of figures.

Nice guy, but …

GOOD MODERATORS INTERROGATE: For the Democrat debates last spring, every group of moderators scored 25 or higher, putting Lester Holt at a level below them.

MODERATORS NEED TO “ADVANCE THE NARRATIVE”

One of the interesting things that emerges with the Narrative Index is the role of good moderators. It’s their job to “advance the narrative” — to not just sit there letting the candidates go on and on, but to push them into positions of conflict. They do much of this using the word “but.”

A good moderator repeatedly points out “you said this BUT your opponent says this — THEREFORE?” The result is good moderators end up with a high Narrative Index score (BUTs to ANDs).

You could see this in the third Democrat debate last spring with major veterans Martha Raddatz and John Muir. Together they scored a 56. Here are some representative questions from them, all structured around the word of contradiction, “but.”

RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, the Department of Health and Human Services says more than 17 million Americans who are not insured now have health coverage because of Obamacare. BUT for Americans who already had health insurance the cost has gone up 27 percent in the last five years while deductibles are up 67 percent, health care costs are rising faster than many Americans can manage. What’s broken in Obamacare that needs to be fixed right now?

MUIR: You have said it’s your goal not to raise taxes on families making under $200,000 a year a goal. BUT can you say that’s a promise as you stand here tonight?

RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, first ladies, as you well know, have used their position to work on important causes like literacy and drug abuse. BUT they also supervise the menus, the flowers, the holiday ornaments and White House decor. I know you think you know where I’m going here.

MUIR: As I pointed out the CEO pay, 200 percent of their time — for that family of just 2 percent. You’ve all said, “you would raise the minimum wage.” BUT Senator Sanders what else – speak to that household tonight. 20 years, just a 2 percent raise, how as president would you get them a raise right away?

Lester Holt, as moderator of the first Presidential Debate last week received mixed reviews (that was actually the headline in People Magazine). Aside from allowing Trump to run wild, he just didn’t do much advancing of the narrative. And so, not surprisingly, his Narrative Index was a mere 17.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the two candidates — Trump scored a 25, Hillary a 20. Both of those values were about average. Which is how most people felt about their performances. Neither of them delivered a blazing, inspired vision for the nation. They both just jabbed and defended in a fairly directionless way.

They actually started off in the normal fashion with Hillary launching a barrage of “and, and, and” statements as Trump presented the singular narrative of how China and other countries are having their way with us. But the divide quickly vanished as Trump lost his composure and Hillary got feisty.

From his convention speech to last night’s debate, Donald Trump has tried his best to generate fear around crime in America.  I still love Republican strategist/skeptic Mike Murphy’s comment after Trump’s Republican convention speech — “Who knew we’re living in Gotham City?”  The statistics don’t support what Trump is saying.  But the problem is he’s selling a “positive pattern” narrative (meaning a clear pattern, not a positive vibe).  The truth, in this case, as is so often the case, is a null narrative of “there is no net increase.”  This is a classic example of how null narratives are a tough sell.

A SHIFTING BASELINES PROBLEM. If you started tracking the murder rate in 2010 you might accept Trump’s hysteria about crime being out of control. If you set your baseline at 1992 you see it’s dropped in half. But that’s not as good of a story.

FIGHTING TRUMP WITH A NULL NARRATIVE

In “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” I told about the difficulty of propagating null narratives, meaning situations in which there is no clear pattern.  This is part of the challenge of establishing innocence in the legal system.  People always want a culprit, which is a positive pattern (definitely need to come up with a better term for this than “positive” because everyone is so fixated on the popular definition of that word these days as being happy and uplifting, grrr …).Fighting for innocence is another example of trying to convey a null pattern (we don’t know who did it, but not this person).

Our brains are programmed to seek the positive pattern.  Trump, having deep narrative intuition, has a good feel for this.  He knows how to exploit these programming flaws of the average brain.

And that’s what he was doing (again) last night in the debate as he talked about the murder rate. But as the data above from 538 Blog show, the murder rate today is half what it was two decades ago.  It’s just that lots of people don’t know this and it’s hard to get them to hear it because … it’s a null pattern.

Everybody wants a good story.  Declining murder rates isn’t one.

This is how I will be viewing the first Presidential Debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  There are plenty of things to listen for in the debate, but as far as narrative dynamics, these five may be the most important.

THE NARRATIVE INDEX.  I posted this video (edited by John Rael) on Thursday.

1) STORYTELLING

Ronald Reagan was of course a (supposedly) master storyteller.  I always thought his stories were hokey, but billions didn’t.  Neither of these candidates are good at it.  Hillary is too cold and fact-oriented, Trump is too impatient.  It would be good to open with a specific story of some sort set in a specific moment in time involving a single individual as the main character, but neither have ever shown much ability for this.

2) NARRATIVE (Problem/Solution)

This is Trump’s “strength.”  He is a dealmaker with a short attention span.  He likes to get down to business quickly, and it shows in his Narrative Index (But/And ratio in the video above which Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing did a nice post about).  Listen for this. But also see if he doesn’t manage to get through lots of narrative loops (And, But, Therefore) by cheating the system through over-simplifying (“we like the Mexicans AND we want them to be part of our country, BUT there are too many illegals, THEREFORE let’s build a wall”).  See if Hillary is able to answer questions by quickly getting to the problem being addressed, or if she goes off with little focus.

3) OVER-ARCHING NARRATIVE

They both have supposed themes.  Trump is Make America Great Again.  Hillary is Stronger Together (though it’s not clear who this is directed at).  See if they open with their theme, then close with it (coming full circle like the Monomyth).

4) QUICK OPENING

Hillary has a tendency to open with four paragraphs of thank you’s that destroy her momentum. Trump opens quick.  Watch for this. One would hope she would open with a focused fierceness and a tone of “this is no time for pleasantries.”  It would also be really nice if she were to open with an ABT structure along the lines of the opening of Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

5) HISTORY

The description of the ordinary world ideally involves drawing on history.   In the Gettysburg Address, before mentioning the civil war, Lincoln described the history of the nation: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, AND dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  He started his second paragraph by talking about the present problem, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war”.

Hillary could do so much by drawing on the history of equality in this country, but who knows if she will.

Hollywood instructors are discovering Hegel’s Triad (which underpins the ABT).  It started with Frank Daniel in the 1980’s, moved to the “South Park” guys, and now can be seen in what current screenwriting superstar Aaron Sorkin is teaching.  Sorky’s template is bascially the DHY, geared more towards for advanced writers and advanced audiences who are completely up to speed with the stories he’s telling.

AARON SORKIN TEACHES SCREENWRITING.  “You don’t have an idea until you can use the words ‘but, except, and then’.”   It’s what you’d expect from a sophisticated master — the DHY.

“BUT, EXCEPT, AND THEN” = B1B2B3

It’s time to talk narrative templates, which all track back to Hegel.  He was the boring philosopher of the 1700’s (seriously, he tends to be the guy philosophy students most dread having to read). He’s the guy who identified “the Hegelian triad” of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”

A century ago, students were raised on it.  Then it became uncool.  But I predict a day soon where everyone circles back to realizing that in a world of too much information, the triad is an essential tool.

In “Houston, We Have A Narrative” I identified the narrative ideal as being the ABT structure of And, But, Therefore.  I then laid out The Narrative Spectrum where we end up with AAA when there’s no narrative at work, and DHY when we’re wanting complex/potentially confusing, hyper-narrative content.  The latter is what Aaron Sorkin is preaching in his workshops, which is what you’d expect for the narratively challenging medium of television.

SORKIN LIKES IT NARRATIVELY THICK

Aaron Sorkin is a Hollywood icon.  He won an Oscar for the screenplay of “The Social Network” and was the creative force behind “The West Wing,” “Newsroom” and lots of other great shows.  Now he is teaching screenwriting.

Above is the trailer for his course.  In the middle of the trailer he brings up a triad of “but, except, then.”  Which is great.  But … it’s a step beyond the iconic ABT structure.  As I have argued in my essay on The Narrative Index, television demands A LOT of narrative content.  It won’t tolerate AAA, and is often comfortable with DHY when it’s part of an on-going show.  This is what Sorkin is teaching.

THE “BET”

So let’s talk about his BET template (But, Except, Then).  The first thing he’s doing is skipping the A of the ABT and just starting with the B (But).  You can do this.  You’re basically “cutting to the chase.”  It’s great for short attention span folks and TV audiences who want the start to start right away.  But you do it at the risk of losing much of the audience, which isn’t a risk at all if they have already watched three seasons of your show.

You also lose the chance to set up your story – planting at the start the overall context an understanding of why this is an important story.  If it’s just another episode of a TV show that we already have been following for lots of episodes, then it’s probably a good thing to not waste a bunch of valuable screen time.  But if you’re trying to write a world-changing essay, you probably don’t want to lose the exposition at the start.

Then he moves to the E (Except).  This is the same as Step 4 (“The stakes get raised”) of the Logline Maker that Dorie Barton developed in our book “Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking.” We established an initial source of tension or conflict with the B, then we add complexity to it with the E.

This means something like, “The father is found lying dead in his back yard and it looks like he shot himself EXCEPT the angle of entry of the bullet appears to have come from next door.”  So basically “the plot thickens.” And then Sorkin wants to thicken it more.

The third element Sorkin wants is a T in the form of “Then” instead of “Therefore” as we find in the ABT.  This means that instead of moving towards “consequence” he’s just wanting more conflict.  So we find the dead body, we realize the shot came from next door, THEN … we find out the next door neighbor just left town. Now we have a complex story to chase after.

All of which means he’s basically wanting a big chunk of DHY. Which is great for engaged, sophisticated audiences.

Sorkin is a brilliant writer AND I would expect nothing less than a bunch of DHY from him, BUT you’re going to lose people if you’re wanting to tell clear, simple narratives to audiences that haven’t been following your show for three seasons, THEREFORE you should stick to the ABT for now, and use it to understand more clearly what Aaron Sorkin is doing at a more advanced level with his BET template.

“Is the ‘And, But, Therefore’ Template the DNA of Story?”  That’s the title of the Reddit AMA session I’ll be doing next Thursday from 10 to 1 PDT.  It’s a chance to answer questions about the ABT, Story Circles and the upcoming fall schedule of Story Circles Demo Days at Yale, Genentech, Tufts, UCLA, AAAS, Smithsonian, and USDA.  The page for it will open a couple hours before the start time, allowing you to post your questions.  We did one last fall, it’s a lot of fun, so please join us! The link will be posted here on September 7th (the day before the AMA). 

ASK ME ANYTHING (AMA). My friend Park Howell at Arizona State said last year (and I quoted him in “Houston, We Have A Narrative”) that the ABT is “the DNA of story.” The more we work with the ABT in Story Circles, the more I am certain he is correct. I don’t think you can boil story dynamics down to anything more concise than “and, but, therefore.” It’s incredibly powerful and gives rise to everything you need to know about story structure — which I think meets the definition of being “the DNA of story.” This is what I’ll be exploring in the AMA.

WHAT’S A REDDIT AMA?

If you’re not familiar with it, a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) is a chance to basically ask me (in this case, Randy Olson, scientist-turned-filmmaker) anything.  We did one last fall following the release of my book and and the webinar I did with the Union of Concerned Scientists.  Now we’re getting ready for a very busy fall schedule for Story Circles, so it seems like a good time to share the details of what’s ahead and what we’ve learned so far.

Hope you can join us Thursday morning!

By “Big Buts” I’m referring to paragraphs that start with the word “But.”  It turns out the New York Times is very fond of them.  We followed the front pages of 5 newspapers for 21 days this month.  The New York Times averaged nearly 2 “But Paragraphs” per day (or “BP’s”).  In contrast, the Wall Street Journal and two small local newspapers had virtually zero BP’s.  Why is this?

FASCINATING, RIGHT? Here’s our data for the number of BP’s per day for 5 newspapers over the course of 21 days. On an average day, the front page of the New York Times has at least two paragraphs that start with the word “But.” BUT … look at the Wall Street Journal and tiny Huntington News …

HERE’S THE DATA, TAWK AMONGST YERSELVES

The data are cut and dried.  Pick up the New York Times on any given day (as we did for 21 days) and you will see upwards of 4 stories that have a paragraph which starts with the word “But.”  It’s usually the third or fourth paragraph of the story.

Why is this?

HERE’S THE ABT EXPLANATION

It’s as simple as ABT — our “And, But, Therefore” template — or more specifically just the AB elements.  The front page of the New York Times, being so widely read, reaching for the broadest audience, having earned the most Pulitzer Prizes, and having the strongest narrative voice in the world of newspapers, also is the strongest “selective regime” for narrative structure.

I’m guessing the editors who shape the front page are not about to let a story amble and wander non-narratively with the “and, and, and” boring structure I identified in “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”  To the contrary, they shape every story, making sure there is exposition/context at the start (the “and” material) then a clear start to the narrative dynamic with the word “but.”

Moreover, when you look at their guidelines, they state explicitly that it’s fine to start sentences with the word “but.”  Here’s a post from their “After Deadline” blog where they address the idea of starting sentences with “But” (their ultimate source is the NY Times Manual of Style):

THIS AIN’T TRIVIA, FOLKS

Journalists seem to shrug and chuckle at everything I mention about the ABT.  Most act like they already know all this — they learned it in grade school.  But they didn’t.

The ABT is the DNA of story.  It comes from Hollywood.  It is both new (never before formalized) and old (the same thing as the age old elements of narrative form, going back to the Greeks, it’s just a new, more concise statement of them).  It’s at the core of our Story Circles Narrative Training that is now going wide.

The ABT opens up a whole new world of text analysis, as we’re deep into now.  There will be lots more coming along these lines in the next few months.  All new.  Which means, no, you didn’t already know this.

THANKS

Big thanks to Daria Epakchi for data gathering and Steph Yin for the NY Times editing insights.

Daniel Slotnik, whoever you are, you should be ashamed of the rotten New York Times obituary you wrote about my old buddy Thom Steinbeck.  Your first sentence includes the word “bitterly,” your only quotes from other people are from his father’s biographer disparaging him, and there was not one word about what a funny, fun-loving, boisterous, jovial storyteller Thom was.  Not one.  All you did was rake as much muck as you could find on him, then do your best to give him a final drowning in the shadow of his larger-than-life father.  I assume you were assigned to write the obituary and never met the man.  You should be ashamed of yourself.  F. you, Slotkin.  (btw, that’s for Thom — he would appreciate my saying that for him)

Me and a barrel-chested man.

STRANGERS SHOULDN’T WRITE OBITUARIES

What made Daniel Slotnik feel the need to stomp on the grave of John Steinbeck’s son, Thom Steinbeck who departed the world last Thursday?

His obituary is nothing but muck, raked back and forth.  There’s no quote from his wonderful widow, Gail.  There’s no quotes from his good friends.  Yes, he was engaged in plenty of legal battles.  So what.  He was a fun and generous person who supported veterans and workers groups vigorously.

And by the way, Slotnik, you overlooked the definitive statement on Thom to make your rotten case against him in death — the slender supplemental volume by Jackson Benson, Steinbeck’s biographer.  It was titled, “Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost.”  When I first moved to L.A. and went in search of Thom I began by checking out Benson’s biography which I had heard was massive.  I saw the Jackson Benson name on the spine of the thin book and wondered as I checked it out with a stack of other works on Steinbeck how “THE” biographical work on Steinbeck could be so small.

When I got home I realized it wasn’t the biography.  No, the biography is indeed 1,184 pages.  The “Ghost” book was a separate essay he wrote after completing the biography.  At the start of the smaller book he explained that he wrote it as almost a public service to all future biographers of famous people.  What he wanted them to know was about the horrendous battles, conflagrations and befuddlements he had to endure in dealing with the descendants of John Steinbeck, most prominent of whom was his son, Thom.

So there, Slotnik — you might as well have at least hit the bullseye by citing that work.  No, there was nothing wrong with any of the facts cited in your NY Times obituary.  It’s just that there was more to the man — a human side — that I now want to share because I was so fond of him.  Here we go.

LOOKING FOR STEINBECK’S SON

I met Thom in 1994 when I first moved to Hollywood.  I had to meet him.  I had grown up as a marine biologist transfixed on his father’s book “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.”  It was my density to meet him (and yes, I said density, an oblique reference to “Back to the Future” to show I will be infusing this piece with humor, something the NY Times obituary lacked, severely).

I was in a writer’s group where a woman was listing the other clients of her agent with Gersch Agency and mentioned his name.  I had her give her agent a letter to Thom from me.  A month later a “producer” (I found out later actually just one of Thom’s drinking buddies) called me up suspiciously.  I made clear I was a poverty stricken marine biologist just starting film school.  I managed to prove I was sufficiently innocent/incompetent and was thus granted security clearance.

A week later I met Thom at one of the swankiest bars in Beverly Hills.  I walked in.  Everyone looked too young and hip for me.  But then I spotted an older guy at the bar wearing a sort of captain’s hat, looking 1000% out of place.  I said to myself, “Please don’t let that be John Steinbeck’s only living son.”  It was, and he was already three sheets to the wind.

To make matters worse, one of the hottest young actress wannabes in my acting class was our waitress.  She kept bringing the drinks, but glaring at me like, “Dude, you’re with THIS old guy?”

We sat there for FIVE hours that first night, trading stories, laughing our asses off.  I drove home obliterated.  He told me stories of love and hate for his father.  He told me about how his brother and he always wanted to rent a tractor and chains and in the middle of the night tear down the statue of their father in the middle of town in Salinas, California.  He told me how much his father would hate EVERYTHING to do with the tourists endlessly honoring and worshipping him — which by the way was already palpable in his wonderful final personal book, “Travels with Charley.”

Thom told me about serving in Vietnam as a combat photographer — he told me he was the only one who shot film footage of the iconic photo of a Vietnamese man being executed (a photo of which won a Pulitzer Prize).  He told me about his beloved brother who died in surgery in 1991 — the person he felt closest to in his life.

A couple years later I was part of his bachelor’s party in LA where we went to Thai food, a strip joint, then a massage place.  A week later I took my buddy Jay Vavra with me up to Pacific Grove to his wedding to his wonderful wife, Gail Knight.  Just last year, as Jay was dying from leukemia, I went up and saw Thom and Gail in Santa Barbara and managed to find a couple of shots of Jay in their wedding photos which I contributed to his memorial service.

Thom and I worked on making a documentary of sorts out of “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” for a couple of years.  We had a number of fairly sloshed creative lunches, then at one point — and I’m sorry, but I just have to share this with some of you who can appreciate the outlandish humor of it (the rest of you can get stuffed) — we typed up a synopsis one day and as a joke he added on the cover page the subtitle of, “A Ribald Tale of Barrel-chested Men and Large Breasted Women on the High Seas.”

A month later he called me up and said, “Olson, I messed up.  It’s all over — I made a boo-boo — I accidentally sent that draft to Elaine” (his father’s third wife who shared with him control of the Steinbeck estate)  “She read the subtitle and wasn’t amused — she said no way will she grant rights to us to make a film.”  Which ended that project, but at least we laughed really, really hard about it.  For years.

In 2003 I brought him to our Shifting Baselines Roundtable Evening in Santa Monica.  At the intermission he told all the scientists they were full of shit — that the ocean was already done, all they were doing was agonizing over the remaining bits, then stormed out angry.  Which of course the next day was followed by a phone call with me where we laughed our asses off, again.

Thom was awesome.  He was of a different generation.  If you didn’t know him you could easily write the sort of pile of crap that Daniel Slotnik has written in the New York Times.

Actually, you know what, the whole journalism world owes the Steinbeck family an apology for the infamous question asked of John Steinbeck at the press conference for his Nobel Prize in 1962.  A journalist asked if he thought he deserved it.  That fundamentally soulless, disrespectful tone matches the NY Times obituary for his son.

Thom was just like his old man.  Not perfect, but deeply caring.  He did a lot of work with military veterans and farm labor groups and lots of other meaningful causes.  He was connected with the land and with working class folks, just as his father sort of tried to be and wanted to be and thought he was, but actually never really was, as Thom confirmed to me.  But at least his sentiments were in that direction.

They both knew bullshit when they saw it.  The New York Times obituary for Thom is pure bullshit.  You want to see the proper, decent, dignified way to write an obituary, Slotnik?  It’s right here, in the Monterey Herald, including a quote from Thom’s old buddy Arlo Guthrie.  Thank you, Monterey Herald.

“EPIC 2014” predicted the merging of Google and Amazon to create Googlezon; the beating heart of a massively superficial world. That hasn’t happened yet — the merger — but the superficial part is pretty close.

Gonna be a busy and fun fall with lots of Demo Days that will give rise to lots of Story Circles. Yesterday we launched the first Story Circle for USGS folks (both scientists and communications staff) who took part in the Colorado Demo Day in March.  We’re just getting started. 

THE FALL TOUR FOR STORY CIRCLES.

A DOZEN DEMO DAYS

The two Demo Days we did three weeks ago with USDA, NASA and University of Maryland produced 39 of 80 participants signing up to eventually enter into Story Circles that involve the 10 one-hour sessions. It takes a while to get each one off the ground.  From our March Demo Day, we have launched 4 Story Circles (two for USDA, one each for USFWS and USGS) involving 20 of the 35 participants in that Demo Day.

This fall’s events should involve at least 500 scientists and communications staff.  No telling how many Story Circles will arise from the Demo Days but I’m sure it will be lots (4 are already set for Tufts alone).  It’s a slow process, but we are on our way towards establishing small pockets of “narrative culture” meaning groups of workers where everyone in the group is fluent in the narrative language of Story Circles.  That is the point where we can start to put an end to painful AAA and DHY miscommunication efforts.

A wonderful time lies ahead!

At our two Demo Days last week we heard from two of last year’s participants in the USDA prototype Story Circle. When their circle ended a year ago, one of them was moderately positive about the experience (though not wildly enthusiastic), the other wasn’t really certain it was worth the time.  But a year later, their tone was completely different. They talked in detail about how it has changed how they write, read and think. Yes, it is that profound. The same pattern of needing time to let the training soak in has emerged with the AAAS Invention Ambassadors I work with. The bottom line: NARRATIVE TRAINING TAKES TIME (furthermore, one day workshops on storytelling are somewhere between useless and counter-productive).

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES.  Two participants in the USDA/ARS Story Circle prototype last year, Cathleen Hapeman (left) and Gail Wisler talk in detail about how Story Circles has changed how they write, read and even think.

THE PATH TO NARRATIVE INTUITION IS STEEP AND CHALLENGING

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I can assure you that obtaining the gift of “narrative intuition” ain’t gonna happen for you in a day, either. These things take time.

That wasn’t what one government program officer (at an unnamed agency) wanted to hear last year when I met with him.  He said they liked the sound of Story Circles, BUT … (he actually used the ABT template to say this), their people are too busy, THEREFORE could we shorten it to 5 instead of 10 one hour sessions.

I didn’t say no. Instead, I had Mike Strauss, head of the USDA Office of Scientific Quality Review and coordinator of the USDA prototype of Story Circles write a lengthy explanation of how it was only in sessions 6 to 8 that we started to see the emergence of elements of “narrative intuition” in the participants.

NARRATIVE TAKES TIME

Last week I listened to the further confirmation of this from two of the members of that Story Circle who spoke at lunch time with both of our recent Demo Days at USDA.  No one was more blown away than I as they talked enthusiastically about the value of the Story Circles training.

But here’s the most dramatic aspect of what they said — they were nowhere near certain of the value of the training a year earlier when it finished.  In fact, last August I interviewed Gail Wisler on camera and was really wanting her to say Story Circles was awesome, but she couldn’t and wouldn’t.

Seriously.  I was cueing her, almost verbatim — “So would you say the training has been helpful?”  To my dismay she was filled with hesitancy — saying basically it’s probably useful to some people, but she wasn’t sure yet.

Which is why I was stunned, a year later, to hear them both talk so confidently. Cathleen had used the ABT to give structure to a huge and very complex “project plan” (their central organizing document at USDA) with multiple investigators and various aspects of studying sources of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. She said repeatedly that without the training of Story Circles the project would have been a tangled mess. But instead, it scored the highest rating she has ever received.

Gail was equally certain and enthusiastic.

IT TAKES A YEAR, EVEN FOR INVENTION AMBASSADORS

None of this should be much of a surprise since I talked about it in “Houston, We Have A Narrative.” But I really never totally believe anything I preach, so it’s still pretty remarkable to me when I hear it from others. Which was also the case with the AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassadors this year.

For three years I have been brought in to work with the team of scientist/inventors they choose to give a series of talks during the year. It’s always a bit of a shock for them to be subjected to me — especially the ones who have given TED Talks with over a million views. They naturally think there’s no need to mess with their presentation skills.

In fact, last year more than one complained about having to use up their time with my lecture and notes to them.  And yet this year I was told, before I started with this group, that the same people who complained last year after my three days of working with them, as the year went on and they gave their talks, actually began to incorporate things I had recommended using the narrative tools.  By the end of the year they were apparently telling about the value of the tools and the training in their talks.

It just takes time.

And that’s what Story Circles is all about.

A SHOCKING LACK OF PUSHBACK

So there’s the biggest shocker of all — almost everybody seems to realize this stuff takes time.  Just yesterday I had a conference call with another organization interested in Story Circles.  One of their communications folks said she has been bothered by the one day workshops they have run.  She said she always feels there’s no “follow through.”  As a result, she totally understood the need for the 10 one hour sessions aspect of Story Circles.

All of which gives me great hope.  After 25 years of studying the communications challenge and finally coming up with this whole approach of Story Circles I had feared I would hit the same brick wall that has refused to support my journey. But it’s turning out to be the opposite.  Everybody gets it.  They are ready for the 10 one hour sessions. Even the big boss man at that agency who wanted to cut it to 5. That agency is now participating and ready to run their first Story Circles.

Yay.

It’s nearly two weeks since I bought a new iPhone 6S, but they still can’t activate it because of the tangle of Apple ID’s and passwords they had me create.  I think they’ve lost track of what Steve Jobs preached.  Complex is the default nature of most systems.  As Jobs always said, simplicity is hard work — which is especially true in communication.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, STEVE JOBS? OUR NATION TURNS ITS OVERLY COMPLICATED EYES TO YOU.

iPhone INCOMPETENCE

I really can’t believe how stupid my experience has been over the past two weeks with the iPhone 6S. I bought a new one.  They tried to set it up at the Apple Store, but after spending 1.5 hours trying to upload the contents of my iPhone 5 to the iCloud to back it up, the upload failed because of their poor wireless service (wouldn’t you think the store would have good wireless service?).

I succeeded from home, but then began encountering a tangle of several Apple IDs they let me put into the system (or actually I think created for me — I’ve never created a me.com or iCloud.com email address) somewhere over the past few years.

At one point the guy on the phone started asking me a series of those annoying privacy questions.  They were questions I have NEVER, EVER answered in my life — including “Where did your parents meet?” They met on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The guy wouldn’t tell me the answer but said the answer he had was a one-word city. How could that be?

He asked several other questions I have never, ever heard, yet said they had answers for them.

What a mess. They ended up having to file some paperwork that will take another 3 to 5 days to clear.  All just to activate the phone, which the guy couldn’t do for me because … “It’s just not that simple,” he said, verbatim.

The whole process left me feeling like their security backup systems have gotten so complicated their employees can’t really completely understand them. Which felt like it’s been a long time since Steve Jobs and his obsession with simplicity has left the building.

STORY CIRCLES IS SIMPLE

I guess I’m thinking a lot about simplicity these days because it’s at the core of our Story Circles Narrative Training. The entire program is built around the one simple narrative template of the ABT. It’s working great, and is a thing of beauty to watch how powerful it all is because of one main attribute — simplicity.

But it hasn’t come easy. The ABT is the result of a 25 year journey. Simplicity takes time. We all know this, though I think some of this thinking has been lost at Apple.

The violent crime rate is low, the economy is strong, ISIS is in decline, and Obama has pulled off miracles, but the Democrats are utterly incompetent at communicating any of this.  Trump is running as “The Law and Order President” when there’s nothing close to a crime wave.  It’s really sad.

LOOK AT THE NUMBERS. From the Urban Crime Reporting Program. The per capita murder rate in 1960 was 0.00005. In 2014 it was 0.00004, meaning it is lower today than even 1960. But you would never know this from listening to Trump. The Democrats appear determined to not get in the way of his distortions.

GOTHAM CITY?

The best quote I heard last night in the commentary on Trump’s nomination speech was political consultant Mike Murphy who said in reference to Trump’s fear-mongering speech, “Who knew we were living in Gotham City with marauding gangs.”

Seriously.  Look at the numbers for violent crime.  Everyone knows the murder rate is nearly half today of what it was in the early 1990’s, and it’s even lower than in the idyllic early 1960’s.

Trump is billing himself as “The Law and Order President.”  It’s so completely wrong.  But what is far more wrong is the utter and complete ineptitude of the Democrats to refute this.

It’s straight out of McKee’s Triangle.  Trump is telling a big “archplot” fear-based story that is just not true.  The Democrats are stuck with the real world “miniplot” story of “There is no crime wave.”  It is a tough challenge, but not impossible.

The solution is to tell a powerful archplot story of Trump’s reasons for lying, but do it in an interesting, compelling way that’s something more than just whining about him being a liar.

TRUMP KNOWS NARRATIVE

It’s so sad watching all this.  He is a master of narrative as well as performance.  The convention had a clear, singular, recurring theme of “Make America Great Again,” for which the word “Great” was easily switched out with “Safe” and “First” and anything else inspiring.

What do the Democrats have planned for their theme?  If the past year is any guide, they will change their slogan mid-convention.

The liberal pundits did their best to label the Republican convention as a disorganized mess.  But no, it wasn’t.  It had energy, spontaneity and everyone spoke constantly of aspirations.

I dread hearing the assessments of the DNC next week.  It will be smooth, professional, flawless and … it’s gonna be boring.  I guarantee you the most common critique will be “too scripted.” That’s been a problem with previous conventions.  This one seems inevitable for that label.

It’s a mess.  How can this moron be running as the Law and Order President when there isn’t any sort of a crime wave?  And how can the Democrats be so inept as to let him get away with it?

Filmmaker Michael Moore already predicted Trump will win.  To quote Han Solo, “I got a bad feeling about this.”

From sadness to joy in less than two minutes.

SOME THINGS AREN’T MEANT TO BE RETURNED.

CHANNELING A SPIRIT

I want to share a great moment I had on Saturday at the wonderful memorial event held at University of Washington for the late, great grandaddy of marine ecology, Robert T. Paine.

As I’ve made clear in both the dedication of my first book and in a blogpost, Bob meant a lot to me.  It was 40 years ago this summer that I first met him and he became my undergraduate advisor.  We stayed buddies over the years, trading lots of emails in recent years.  As Peter Kareiva conveyed so nicely last week on Andy Revkin’s NY Times blog, Bob embodied the very best of everything in ocean science.

At the memorial Bob’s daughters brought lots of his possessions — from books to t-shirts to marine ecology equipment — for everyone to take home whatever they fancied.  I’ve never seen that done before, but it was very cool — a chance for people to keep with them some of his enduring spirit — especially his books in which he had written his name.

I was milling around catching up with folks when a friend walked up with a copy of my recent book. It was the copy I had sent Bob last fall and written my heartfelt words of thanks on the opening title page.  She gave it to me, innocently assuming I’d want it back.  I stood there holding the book, starting to fight back an unanticipated wave of emotion, thinking, “No.  I don’t want this back.  Ever.  I gave it to him.  Why would I want it back?  It almost feels like rejection.”

It was disorienting.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  I wanted to throw it in the trash.  Something — anything — get it away — this was spiritually wrong.

But then … I swear, within less than a minute I looked across the room and said to the group, “Oh my goodness, is that Chuck Birkeland?”

He was my invertebrate natural history professor that same summer I met Bob Paine and one of the many incredibly cool, fun and smart marine ecology faculty I got to know in the U.W. Zoology Department.  The last time I had seen him was 35 years ago in Palau.  In fact, below is a photo of us headed out for a dive on that trip, plus he and I both worked on the crown-of-thorns starfish problem.

He had come from Hawaii for the event.  I walked over to him, he immediately smiled, said he had enjoyed my recent work on science communication, BUT THEN … he said, “Of course, I haven’t had a chance to get your most recent book.”

Bingo.  Amazing.  THAT was what was meant to happen with the copy of my book inscribed to Bob Paine.  And it did, as you can see in the photo I insisted we take (above).

I left the event with the biggest smile on my face in a long, long time.  Incredible how some things like that work out.

Bob, your copy of my book has ended up on just the right book shelf.

HEADED OUT FOR A DIVE in Palau, 1981. Lanna Chang on the left, Chuck Birkeland in blue shirt on the right, seated next to me.

This woman has deep narrative intuition and a pretty funny story to tell.  It’s not a perfect story, but she does a great and hilarious job with what she has.  Let’s listen to it then break it down for structure.

I DON’T DO WELL WITH “EXTRA”.  Jessica LaShawn needs her own show.

DELIVERING THE LITTLE PURPLE MAN IN SECRECY

I love this story so much.  One of my best friends and favorite people in the world is the singer/actor/dancer Carol Hatchett who was one of The Harlettes (Bette Midler’s backup singers) for many years and a frequent backup singer for Prince.  I got to know her twenty years ago when she starred in my USC musical comedy film, “You Ruined My Career,” which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 1996.  I’ve heard lots of stories from her about Prince over the years just like this one.  She and everyone she worked with loved him, just as this woman does, but he did have his particular ways.

So it’s a hilarious story, not just because it’s really funny, and not just because she’s really funny, but most importantly, because this woman is a great storyteller with deep “narrative intuition” — the key element we work to establish with Story Circles Narrative Training.

To analytically show you how good she is, I break down her story into individual elements and explain their dynamics.  I’m using a mixture of templates here — ABT, the Logline Maker, and The Story Cycle.

STORY ANALYSIS USING THE ABT AND OTHER TEMPLATES

This little exercise is a chance to see how excellent storytelling is equal parts science and art.  The science part is the template structure that we can spot.  The art half is her ability to know which specific details to include.

One of the key things to note is how little superfluous information is delivered, yet at the same time everything in her story is clear.  This is the sort of optimization process a person with great narrative intuition is able to achieve.  Great storytelling is about knowing which key details to keep in, and which can be cut out.  The set of criteria for the selection of material is too great and complex to do it analytically — you just have to have the intuition for it.

Central to everything is the ABT dynamic at multiple levels.  Sometimes she used the actual And, But, Therefore words.  Other times you can feel their presence and I’ve added them in parentheses.  Keep in mind that “so” is the word that is usually used in speaking instead of the clunky “therefore.”

Also, keep in mind how crucial and essential the “end of the first act” is to effective storytelling. There is no more important element to narrative structure.  If you delay it too long, you bore everyone.  If it happens too early, people get lost.  Knowing where the first act should end may be the single most important element in making a story work.  She pulls it off flawlessly.

LINE BY LINE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

OPENING ABT –  She automatically catches your attention with her first sentence.  The reason for this is that it is narratively structured with the ABT.

She begins by saying, “Hey, y’all, I’m so sad, I just heard about Prince and I love Prince, lord knows I do … (BUT) uh, not as much most of y’all, I haven’t even seen “Purple Rain” all the way through, so (THEREFORE) I just wanted to get on here real quick and tell y’all a story about the time Prince fired me …”

JUSTIFICATION –  As she continues, she explains why she’s telling this story, “ … because some of y’all need to laugh and you need to hear something great to know what kind of man Prince was.”

ESTABLISHING SETTING – The next sentence begins the story by establishing the setting through place and time, “I was blessed to actually work with Prince when I was out in L.A.”  This is similar to the “Once upon a time” cue that signals we’re headed into story mode.

EXPOSITION –  She’s laying down the details with next bit, “I was working the Grammy Awards — I worked the Grammy Awards like three or four years.”  This starts to give us the context in which the story occurs.

FORESHADOWING (with an ABT) –  “And I got assigned to Prince — (AND) now, how they even assigned me to Prince, I don’t know, BUT y’all know Prince is a little difficult, and (THEREFORE) he was a little difficult.”  By warning us he’s a little difficult we can already begin to feel a little bit of anticipation of things to come — we start thinking, “uh oh, she’s working with a prima donna”.

DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTER (an ABT) –   She describes the main character, “I got to work with him AND he’s so tiny and cute — I’m about five seven, like two hundred pounds, so I’m not like a super-little lady, BUT Prince is like right here to me and (THEREFORE) he was so cute.”

END OF THE FIRST ACT –  “So nobody knew that Prince was performing at the Grammy Awards and so it was my job to keep it a secret about Prince, so I go in there and see Prince and he cool as heck, and he’s laid back, and he’s like I gotta find a way to get to the stage, and I was like, oh, I don’t really know how to get you to the stage, we could like walk through here and get to the stage, and (BUT) he’s like “No one is supposed to know I’m here!”  And I’m like … okay — y’all know I don’t do well with “extra” — I don’t do well with extra.”

WHY THIS IS THE END OF THE FIRST ACT –  You can feel she was in her “Ordinary World,” just doing her normal job, escorting the celebrity to the stage.  But her Ordinary World gets overturned and she enters the “Special World” (in a big way) when Prince tells her something she’s never heard before — that the celebrity needs to keep his presence a secret, even back stage.

ACCENTUATION OF THE END OF THE FIRST ACT –  To add a little drama to this important point of structure she says, “So that’s when I knew that this was a set up and this was a chance for me to really get closer to God.”

COMIC PREDICAMENT –   We now have a classic comic predicament established.  We have two characters who have conflicting goals.  One just wants to do her (hopefully routine) job as simply as possible, the other wants do extraordinary things (to maintain secrecy about his presence). That’s a recipe for an entire comedy movie — like the 1981 version of “Arthur” with Dudley Moore (not the remake which flopped) where his butler is basically Jessica and he is Prince — same situation.

THE SECOND ACT BEGINS –  She now starts her journey of addressing the problem she has posed (trying to get Prince to the stage in secrecy).  She says, “Again, Prince is difficult — most of y’all know that — so I figure out a way to navigate Prince and try to sneak him through, BUT he sees this little roller car, and he’s like “Hey, get me on this roller cart.”  Okay, you know those little rollable hanger-like closets, but on wheels — its like a closet on wheels.  He gets his little tiny butt on this little roller cart, and he hides behind a sheet on the roller cart, and he wants me to push him.”

THE STAKES GET RAISED –  She has set up her journey which seems reasonably simple, but now she’s going to make it more dramatic as she says, “Now I cannot see where I’m going on this little roller cart in front of it, and we are trying to navigate through traffic and we are on set for the Grammy Awards.  And I don’t really know where I’m going.  It’s just little old me pushing this big old heavy metal roller cart with Prince on it.

FURTHER RAISING THE STAKES –  Here she makes it clear how difficult the job is.  “You cannot drop Prince.  You cannot hit Prince.  And you can’t say “Hey, help me,” because Prince is on here.  It’s up to me to keep it a secret because Prince is on this little ugly cart.  So Prince has got an attitude because I’m bumping into stuff.  Then I get an attitude because you get an attitude with me.  You can’t come for me — I don’t care if you are Prince — I love you Prince — I already done got cussed out by Stevie Wonder cause I kept saying I’m sorry — and you come over and you got an attitude with me because I can’t push you on this little roller cart, sir.

FIRST CULMINATION –  The story has been built way up to the point now where something has to give.  And it does as everything unravels and plunges her into her “darkest hour.”

DARKEST HOUR –  This is where our hero, Jessica, plunges into disaster.  She says, “So Prince gets mad and he tells me that I’m FIRED!  He told me to get the hell out, and away.  And I was like, you little old man — you — I swear … And let me tell you what he did — he flung his hat — you know how Prince flung his hat — and he got on the little roller cart and he stuck his little six and a half shoe out, and he starts scooting, through the sheet on the little roller cart, and he just left me there, looking stupid and dumb, and I couldn’t get back in the dressing room.

PLANT AND PAYOFF –  She gets a final accentuation here by doing what is called “plant and payoff.”  This refers to when something in a story is “planted” early on as it is mentioned and may be lightly funny but doesn’t seem that necessary to the story, yet it will have impact later if it is “paid off.”  A while back she had planted her past experience with Stevie Wonder.  Now she pays it off by saying, “And I was hungry and I ain’t have nowhere to go, and they were like okay we gotta re-assign you to somebody else, and then Stevie Wonder was like, “She probably sorry.”

END OF STORY AT TWO THIRDS POINT –  That ends up being the last bit of narrative and the end of her story.  We’re only about about two thirds of the way through the video, but the storytelling now pretty much ends.  Her next line is, “So, that’s what happened to me and that’s what happened when I worked with Prince.”  “So” is the same word of consequence as “therefore” which means she’s at the “T” in her over-arching ABT and this is all we’re going to get for storytelling.

From here she conveys the general idea that he did make it to the stage, but her comments are no longer tightly feeding the narrative (problem/solution dynamic) as she hits on summary notes about “I learned a lesson” and her friends texting her and “So that’s what happened to Prince,” and some silliness about how he was “the founder of kick push.”

In fact, you can feel how she has exited from the narrative world.  The narrative part of her brain is no longer active.  She’s now just tossing out statements of summary and random thoughts.  It feels totally different.

It’s too bad — we were ready for the story to get crazier at this point, but she sticks to the truth, which wasn’t quite as wild as earlier.

WHY THIS VIDEO DIDN’T GO VIRAL:  NO THIRD ACT

Nobody knows exactly why some utterly stupid videos go viral and others don’t.  Length is a fairly important variable but not absolute.  Most viral videos are about two minutes or less, yet the KONY 2012 viral video has over 100 million views and is nearly a half hour long.

Demographics are essential with viral videos because of the teen demographic — they are the driving force behind almost all viral videos — if you’re not playing to the teens, you’re probably not going viral.  That’s what drove the KONY 2012 video and made brainless entertainers like Pewdie Pie into Youtube mega-stars.

There’s nothing teen-appealing with this video, and at over 5 minutes it’s relatively long, but also it has a major structural problem in that it doesn’t have a third act.  If you view Matthew Winkler’s amazing animated video about The Hero’s Journey you see that Jessica’s story ends with Stage 6 — The Darkest Hour.  She got fired, was banished, and that was it — story over.

GIVING JESSICA’S STORY A REWRITE

What the story needed in narrative terms was for her to quickly regroup after he fires her, decide to get even with Prince for being humiliated by him, concoct some scheme to humiliate him, have it succeed in a wild and hilarious way, then in the final scene have him offer his apology to her so we can see he’s changed and become a better person.  So what’s missing is actually the whole second half of the second act in addition to a third act.

The key point is the story abandoned us in the middle of the journey, which meant that no matter how tremendous her story skills might be — and lord knows she is brilliant and hilarious — unless she made stuff up, she just didn’t have the material she needed to bring the story home.

To put it in simple terms, imagine a sports highlight reel scene of a player shooting the winning basket where we see him pull off a wild move stealing the ball from his opponent, spinning to his left, jumping up, shooting the ball, following the ball in mid-air, then cutting to a commercial.  That’s kind of what she does with the abrupt ending.

And this, once again, is why scientists have good reason to fear storytelling dynamics.  There is often an irrepressible desire to fill in all that missing stuff in order to have a story that will go viral.  When a scientist gathers all the data to tell half the story, there can be a temptation to over-reach for the last parts to make the story arc complete.  It’s only human.  Which is what makes it dangerous.

But at the same time, when it comes to scientists and storytelling, the most important thing is not to blindly shun the whole of “story,” but rather to confront your fears and gain an understanding of what causes the problems.

THE POWER OF STORYTELLING RESTS IN THE SPECIFICS

One final tidbit.  She does a great job of demonstrating this absolutely fundamental rule of how the power of storytelling rests in the specifics.  I repeat this endlessly in Story Circles.  It’s the little details that are so powerful — namely her referring to his “little tiny butt” and his “little six and a half shoe.”  So classic.  She’s awesome.

It wasn’t the greatest story ever told, but it was a perfect front end of what could have been one for the ages.  And now you see why Hollywood is such a fickle place.  They want perfect stories, and they get them — either through the shaping of fact or the manufacturing of fiction.

Filmmaker Josh Fox is the embodiment of misguided environmental good intentions.  His recent environmental “documentary” on HBO titled, “How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change” was labeled “conceptually scattered” by Variety, “scattershot” by the NY Times, and Village Voice called it an exercise in, “exasperating self-importance.”  It is people like Josh Fox who give the entire field of “environmental filmmaking” an unwatchably bad reputation.  He needs to quit.

Environmental filmmaking is hard enough without this guy further ruining the brand.

DEAR “UNEVEN” ENVIRONMENTAL FILMMAKER …

Please stop.  I recorded Josh Fox’s recent HBO film (the lengthy title is above) and tried to watch it, but I honestly couldn’t make it through the opening self-loving credits of him dancing alone in his home.  So I’ll just let Village Voice, Variety, and the NY Times provide the details with their reviews.

I disliked his first movie, “Gasland” enough.  It featured his stooooopid “breathy voiceovers” (as the Village Voice review calls them) that automatically speak of distortion, dishonesty and exaggeration with every breathy word.  This is not “documentary” filmmaking by any stretch of the word.  It is biased, self-certain editorializing at a level beyond even Michael Moore.  It’s the sort of polemics that chase away people who are on the fence about the severity of environmental concerns.

“Gasland” at least had enough storytelling to garner good reviews.  But here’s the problem — both the Motion Picture Academy (it was nominated for an Oscar) and the majority of film critics are lefty do-gooders who are more than willing to give these sort of boring “documentaries” a positive review simply because the films carry their values and politics.  The reviews are generally characterized by a “YOU NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE” attitude.

The truth is, nobody needs to see any movie, ever, unless it is truly interesting, coherent and engaging.  Not “scattershot.”  It really doesn’t work to have “some good sequences” buried in a boring mess.  The entire film needs to be watchable.  The planet really does need tightly scripted, well told narratively structured filmic essays on these issues of the sort that even environmental opponents can concede are well made.

And what is it with these “critics” that they don’t grasp the fact that a film needs to both have the right message AND be watchable to actually advance their beloved causes?

There is no excuse for what Josh Fox does other than self-indulgence, laziness, distraction, and self-delusion.  The goal of good filmmaking is “to tell a good story.”  This is even more important when the credibility of an extremely important issue like environmentalism is at stake.

Supporters of environmentalism need to realize that Josh Fox is hurting, not helping.  If you care about the planet, you should ask him to stop.  What he’s doing is worse than Exxon.  I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but it really is true.

As some great scholar once said (I think), “To err is human, to bore is unforgivable.”

 

STORY CIRCLES NARRATIVE TRAINING.  As Mike Strauss, Director of the Office of Scientific Quality Review at USDA says, “Story Circles doesn’t teach writing, it teaches thinking.”

My favorite scientist of all time is gone.  I dedicated my first book to him.  He taught me the importance of “asking good questions” as a scientist.  And he told me a lotta funny stories.

YOU GOTTA SMILE. Bob Paine was the best. He made everything to do with the oceans fun and interesting. I dedicated my first book, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist,” to him. He and the title were a perfect match.

A GIANT OF THE OCEAN WORLD HAS LEFT US

Let me start with a story.  I think the greatest joy I ever brought to the heart of Bob Paine was in the summer of 1978 when I was working as his field assistant on Tatoosh Island, had to take a dump out in the field, and told him I didn’t have any toilet paper so I used a few pages from Wilson and Bossert’s “Primer on Population Biology.”

Oh my goodness did he love that.  I was headed to Harvard that fall to start my PhD in the same department as the co-authors (in fact would end up being teaching fellow for both in my first year) and he just couldn’t get over it — daring me to tell them about how I had defiled their landmark book.

I spent a lot of evenings that summer sitting around the campfire next to the lighthouse on Tatoosh listening to Bob tell stories about his travels, science, fishing and bird watching, and seeking his advice as I drove him crazy with questions.  That was really all I knew to do in his presence.  His intellect was so great and I was such an utter peon that all I could ever think to do was ask him yet another question, though he was also a good listener (a key trait of a good storyteller), equally interested in talking about General Douglas MacArthur (my grandfather was his Chief-of-Staff for part of World War II), my upbringing in Kansas, and what it was like to live in a fraternity (he was a Harvard undergrad and never knew the experience).

Bob Paine was the greatest.  I kept in touch with him constantly over the years — sending him letters from distant ports of call in my field work, then reconnecting with him a decade ago when we had a massive screening of “Flock of Dodos” in the huge 1,000 seat auditorium on the University of Washington campus.  He helped organize that event and my mother (the star of the movie who is now 92) sat next to him during the screening which was just plain wonderful.  I told her yesterday that he passed away.  She remembers vividly chatting with him that evening.

Just last fall I traded emails with Bob and he wrote this great bit that I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my sharing with everyone.  He played a huge part in my life — quite possibly the most important part as I ended up doing my PhD with one of his students, Ken Sebens at Harvard.

This bit made me very happy that I had developed something he was finding useful.  And look at how, in his early 80’s, he was still deep in thought on how ocean ecosystems work.  I will miss his voice for the rest of eternity.

I’ve found that your ABT approach to be very useful in organizing my thoughts on a new writing project about which I know very little. There’s lots written about networks [about which I’m naive], food webs are a network, Pisaster is a node in some of them, and there are now 6-7 experiments tweaking Pisaster, and Pisaster plays the network game differently. ABT will help me organize my thoughts and possibly avoid being tarred and feathered. But possibly this is just more procrastinating. 

Trust me on this, I used to be a scientist.  I spent years studying Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  What is happening this year is shocking.  Based on what we witnessed in Jamaica in the 1980’s, it’s going to have lasting effects.

THE “GREAT BERRY REEF” IS ROTTING

Years ago I gave a slide show to a group of second graders in Los Angeles where I showed my favorite photos from my years of studying marine biology on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  A week later the teacher sent me the drawings the kids did after my talk.  One little girl very earnestly thanked me for telling them about “The Great Berry Reef.”

Now the northern third of the Great Berry Reef, where I spent a year living on Lizard Island, is just plain rotting to death.  There’s no better way to express it.  Look at the photos in this Guardian article focusing on the work of some of my old friends.

The next time you run into a climate denier, ask them to account for this.  It’s been fun laughing at their stupidity until now, but this changes things.  At least for me it does.  It’s very bad.

AS WENT JAMAICA, SO WILL PROBABLY GO AUSTRALIA

What was well documented for the demise of coral reefs in Jamaica is probably relevant to what is now happening to the Great Barrier Reef.

I spent the summer of 1980 at Discovery Bay Marine Lab on the north shore of Jamaica.  In August the island was devastated by Hurricane Allen, the largest hurricane of the century up until then. Along with my life long close friends, marine biologists Jeremy Jackson, Nancy Knowlton, and Mark Patterson, we hid out in the Blue Mountains and listened to trees crash down all night as Hurricane Allen passed over our heads.  At sunrise we looked down and in the distance saw 25 foot waves crashing on the reef — a bit of a contrast to normal conditions as none of us could remember anything bigger than about waist high waves hitting the reef.

The next day we went diving and saw complete devastation.  In a single day all the beautiful coral formations that had gone by such nicknames as “The Haystacks” and “The Emerald City” had vanished.  Left behind, down to about 50 foot depth, was little more than scoured bottom — no corals, almost no fish.

The reefs became overgrown by algae.  I returned 12 years later with my graduate students when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire.  The place was still an unsightly mess as very little coral had returned and everything was overgrown by seaweed.  To this day, 36 years later, it still bares no resemblance of the underwater splendor that it used to be.  Coral reefs take a long time to recover.

AT LEAST SOME OF THIS PARTICULAR FUTURE CAN BE PREDICTED

In 2007, as I was shooting my mockumentary, “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy,” science fiction author Michael Crichton told me, “No one can predict the future.”  He had become a huge climate skeptic and this was one of his favorite things to say.  And it’s true.  But …

We can now predict some very bad things for the northern third of the Great Barrier Reef.  It’s going to look bad for a long time to come.  The Guardian article, like everything else I’ve been reading, is horrifying.  I remember the reefs around Lizard Island so vividly.  Today’s photos, from that same area, bare no resemblance to anything I ever saw.  They really are kind of beyond the imagination.

Take it from me, it’s really, really bad.

“They don’t have a plan” is not a valid criticism.  If you think it is, you’re an over-thinker, and I’d like you to meet two people whose success you’re probably baffled by.

YOU DON’T NEED A DETAILED PLAN TO SUCCEED. Do you understand that? If you don’t, you may be over-educated, and destined for frustration this fall.

Okay, my relaxed morning was ruined today by a phone call with my Story Circles co-producer Jayde Lovell in which she got me angry, starting with remembering my Jack Black Ocean Symphony PSA, then remembering the Occupy Wall Street movement, then connecting the dots to the present Presidential campaign.

NO PLACE FOR HUMOR?

It starts with the overly-analytical, largely humorless people who manage to bore everyone so painfully that after a while nobody wants to listen to them moan about the demise of nature.  In 2003 I tried to explain to them how this works — that mass communication needs to begin with a voice that people want to listen to.

In that spirit I wrote and directed “The Ocean Symphony,” a Public Service Announcement (PSA) starring Jack Black and 20 comic actors creating a bad symphony for the oceans. It was the pre-Youtube days so we hired a distributor who sent the PSA out to 1,000 TV stations. They then used Nielsen tracking to record the airing of it for the next 18 months. It was aired by over 350 stations for free (as a public service).

We got lucky (something that does actually happen to people when they try things).  The same week they sent out the PSA was also the week that Jack Black’s movie “School for Rock” debuted at #1 at the box office so there was lots of awareness of him.  The distributor sent us big fat monthly reports which multiplied the airings by the individual costs of air time in each market had we paid for it.  By the end of the 18 months the reports showed that the PSA scored over $10 million in free air time.  It also played on the giant SONY video screen in Times Square, once an hour for two months.

Guess what all that success resulted in for my next ideas for humorous PSAs. Bupkis.

Nothing but a bunch of overly-analytical conservation people who launch stillborn campaigns yet think every piece of media attention MUST have a detailed action plan attached to it to have any value. Such people are the masterminds of endless failed campaigns. This was much of the message of my first book, Don’t Be Such a Scientist; Talking Substances in an Age of Style.

Yes, it is important to have at least some plan, but the idea of picking apart a good front end product because the back end is not yet completely nailed down is a recipe for cautious, uninspired failure.

As I explained in that book, the principle is AROUSE and FULFILL. If you don’t arouse, there will be no fulfillment. And more importantly, yes, it is possible to arouse without a detailed plan to fulfill. It happens all the time. But it will never happen if you are one of the brainiacs who prides themselves on critiquing projects before they can get off the ground because you think there’s not a good enough action plan.

OCCUPY SUCCESS STREET

So, along these same lines I found myself in September, 2011 in Portland, Oregon as the keynote speaker at a meeting on business sustainability where a group went out to dinner. Everyone was talking about the Occupy Wall Street movement that had erupted and was only three days old. The entire group of smartypantses at the table were condescending about the whole effort, saying the Occupy people were wasting everyone’s time because “They have no plan.”

I listened for a bit, and then I ruined the whole evening by taking on the entire table, trying to explain to them and all of their over-educated sensibilities that lots of mass movements erupt with little more than passion which can eventually be harnessed and turned into action. They thought I was stupid. I thought they were stupid. And even the next week I heard my media hero Chris Matthews echo the same sentiment on his MSNBC show “Hardball.”  He said the same thing — that he didn’t get it with the Occupy Wall Street movement — they have no plan — how are they going to stop rich people from getting rich — they are clueless.

And by the way, imagine if the action plan in September, 2011 had included, “We plan in 2016 to have Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders run for President espousing our basic principles.”  How much ridicule do you think that would have drawn.

This has become a trademark of the overly analytical, overly planning, overly controlling, overly educated types who may very well get their asses handed to them this fall by Donald Trump as they laugh at his lack of specifics in his political agenda so far. You can find their type running wild all over the Huffington Post and tons of political blogs that have been 100% wrong on Trump for almost a year now. They are smug, self-assured, and absolutely certain that if you don’t know EXACTLY what your plan is, there is zero chance you will ever succeed.

These are the people who kill innovation, destroy good ideas, and feel entitled because they are so heavily educated. And they are now totally flummoxed by the success of two candidates who essentially do not “have a plan” other than “we’ll get it done.”

BERNIE AND TRUMP ARE BLIND ENTHUSIASM COME TO LIFE

Guess what the Occupy Wall Street movement produced … Bernie Sanders.  Plus a single word narrative — “Occupy” — one word that speaks their entire philosophy. His political agenda is not much more specific than “eat the rich.” It’s easy to pick what he has to say apart with “how’s he going to pay for it all?” Same for Trump and his stupid wall, and stupid muslim ban, and stupid nuclear plans, and stupid stupidity. But guess who has all the energy and momentum.

Everyone is trying to blame the popularity of these two candidates on the anger and frustration voters feel towards “the establishment.” At the core of much of that rage is the frustration of listening to the know-it-alls who think they can see what doesn’t work. And in fact that has been the overall pattern for the past year — the know-it-alls saying over and over again there’s no way Trump and Bernie can succeed — the numbers are against them.

Well, Trump has now officially kicked their asses and Bernie is still in the fight. This election is about more than just anger. It’s a referendum on the know-it-all negators who spend their lives squelching people’s plans because they aren’t “thought out” enough. People are tired of being told their ideas can’t work. A lot of people are ready to either make America great again or eat the rich. They don’t quite know how, but they really don’t care. Their enthusiasm is blind, and sometimes that’s all that’s needed.

Wow, how much would it suck to be “The Love Doctor” Paul Zak this week after John Oliver made him the laughing stock on his popular HBO show on Sunday night.  Zak has ridden to fame with his book about oxytocin being “the moral molecule” and his TED Talk where he claims that hugs unleash the joys of oxytocin.  Oliver and highly acclaimed science writer Ed Yong end up being a sort of tag team of humiliation — Oliver with the big, broad, simple message that Zak is a clown, then Yong last fall in The Atlantic with a powerful, detailed disassembly of Zak’s oxytocin story.   Ouch.  I think the Love Doctor gonna need some hugs.

THE HUG-LY TRUTH.  If you haven’t seen this brilliant synthesis from John Oliver this past Sunday night, it’s worth watching the whole 20 minutes.  Or, if you want to skip right to the razzing of Zak, go to 10 minutes in where he begins the public shaming of “The Love Doctor.”

“I RECOMMEND EIGHT HUGS A DAY AND — OH, CRAP, HERE COMES JOHN OLIVER!”

Busted.  This past Sunday evening John Oliver delivered a wonderful and simple essay on the problem of “false positives” (saying you see a pattern when in fact it’s either not there or you don’t have enough data to say it is) that increasingly plagues the world of science — especially biomedical science.

The false positive problem was given a blast of major attention in 2005 by Jon Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University Medical School who boldly stated that, “Most biomedical papers published are false.”  The medical community recoiled at this, tested it themselves, found out he was right, then it was translated brilliantly for the public by one of my all-time favorite journalists David H. Freedman in The Atlantic in a 2011 foundation-shaking article titled, “Lies, Damn Lies and Medical Science.”

If you are interested in this topic in general, you really have to read Freedman’s article. It made my jaw drop when I first read it on the way to speak at an epidemiology conference in 2011 where I asked the experts if what he said was true and they reluctantly nodded yes.

So John Oliver’s segment is really just the even-more-popular version of Freedman’s article.  Oliver digs in deep with one specific example which is the excitement in recent years over “the moral molecule” oxytocin and the most enthusiastic promoter of this story, The Love Doctor, Paul Zak. What’s great is that before you question whether Oliver has his facts right, all you have to do is look to award-winning science writer Ed Yong who gave the detailed take down of Zak last fall in The Atlantic.  Together they make it kinda painful to think about being The Love Doctor this week.

And of course I like this because the overall message of my book last fall, “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” was that scientists are humans and have this Achilles Heel of (similar to all humans) desperately wanting to tell big, fun, exciting, and CERTAIN stories.  Paul Zak clearly fell victim to this.  Here’s the basic story points of his downward journey into the clutches of John Oliver.

THE RESEARCH – In 2011 Zak was the third of five authors on a paper in Nature titled, “Oxytocin increases trust in humans.”  I guess this is where he thought, “Wowser, I’m in Nature, what we’re saying must be right, I’m taking it all the way to the stars!”

THE TED TALK –  Also 2011 (maybe a little soon on the heels of the research publication?) Zak found himself on the TED stage telling people about the joys of oxytocin — how hugs release it and cause good things in your body — even though a cloud of doubt was beginning to enshroud the molecule’s reputation.

THE BOOK – In 2012 Zak published, “The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity” and hit the road with more TEDx talks and appearances on everything from The Dr. Phil Show to Good Morning America.

THE SCOURGE -That same year science journalist Ed Yong began training his skeptical eye on Zak and his oxytocin party.  His article in Slate that summer said it all with the subtitle, “Why the hype about oxytocin is dumb and dangerous.”  He quoted an analysis of the work Zak’s oxytocin campaign was based upon which said, “some conclusions are too enthusiastic.”

OXYTOCIN, CORTISOL AND STORYTELLING –  By 2014 he was entering into my area of interest, weaving big yarns about the role of oxytocin and cortisol in “The Power of Storytelling.”

MY IRRITATION –  I began getting irritated last year at what I was hearing about Zak giving talks on the role of oxytocin and storytelling.  I found it irritating because I had found my own interesting angle on neurophysiology and brain science in 2012 when I first spoke with Uri Hasson of Princeton University about his work establishing the field of “Neurocinematics.”  I cite his work in both of my last two books.  Unlike the boldness of Zak and his “Neuroeconomics” label, Hasson seemed very cautious about his neurocinematics term and constantly warned me that the science was very, very limited, in part because Functional MRI is such a crude tool.  Every time I tried to get him to commit to a simple, bold statement he seem to answer with words of caution and warning that the science is very preliminary.  No such concerns seemed to have ever bothered Zak.

KABOOM –  Cut to this past Sunday where John Oliver uses the dubiousness of Zak’s work to cast general aspersions at TED Talks as a whole, ending up with The TODD Talks as a parody.  The highlight of his parody is a scientist asking a volunteer to rub butts with him to unleash oxytocin.

“OUR YEARNING FOR CERTAINTY” AND THE POWER OF STORYTELLING

You wanna know what’s at the core of Zak’s popularity — the same thing that works for religion and confidence men — certainty.   In January I raved about Kathryn Schultz’s great article in The New Yorker on the popularity of true crime shows.  What I loved most about her article was the phrase near the end about “our yearning for certainty.”

That’s the human weakness that The Love Doctor is guilty of exploiting.  People are desperate to understand what drives our behavior — so much that they are vulnerable to anyone in a white lab coat or handsome enough to be believable who is willing to explain how it all works WITH CERTAINTY.

If you look at this Youtube video by Dr. Paul Zak all you hear is certainty.  There’s no words of qualification, limitations of confidence or tenuousness in the narration.  It’s all as certain as the sun will rise every morning.  Which is fine, until Ed Yong puts in the detective work, like a good private eye, and reveals that none of it is that certain.  End of story for now.

STEVE GOULD WOULD HI FIVE JOHN OLIVER

I was a graduate student at Harvard in the years when legendary evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin were at war with the founder of the new field of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson. At the core of sociobiology was a lot of wonderfully fun stories about how so much of our behavior today is the result of things that natural selection “selected for” back in the early days of hominids.

But Gould and Lewontin came at them with the accusation of “Just So Stories” referring to Rudyard Kipling’s bedtime tales for children such as “How the Camel Got His Hump” where the story would give a silly explanation for the origins of animal anatomy (the camel was punished with a hump for being lazy).  They tore up much of sociobiology and left clouds of doubt over the field that persist today, serving as a monument to this weakness we all have for “good stories.”

Steve Gould would love what John Oliver did on Sunday night.  Sociobiology was underpinned by the basic assumption that pretty much everything about us today is there because “it was selected for.”  What Gould taught us so well (I was a teaching assistant for him twice) was that a great deal of pattern that exists in nature today is due to random, chance factors rather than the result of some orderly selective process.

The main thing with The Love Doctor is that there may eventually be fascinating stories to tell about the role of oxytocin in our bodies some day, but for now, as both Oliver and Yong pointed out, the jury is still out.  So while the jury is still out, the doctor ought to be a little more restrained on the storytelling and not be giving TED Talks full of tall tales.