Welcome back to Sunday Stories! We took a break to honour the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, followed immediately by Canadian Thanksgiving. Both were deeply reflective to our team for different reasons, but the theme of gratitude came up both days - we are grateful to be in the place we are. We are grateful to the resilient cultures that have been the keepers of this land for millennia for their stewardship and sharing their stories - especially the difficult ones - that illustrate the great harm wrought by the legacy of colonialism. These stories help us learn; by learning we know better, and when we know better we can do better. We are grateful to have fresh food on the table from another successful harvest season, and we are grateful to have been able to share that food with our loving family (Including Nan, all the way from Ontario!) in our very humble tiny home. And we’re grateful to be back, sharing another Sunday Story with you. This time, we wanted to share something very special to all of us as humans - the Story of Stories.
Storytelling is fundamentally human. In fact, there’s a whole body of knowledge that suggests stories are the reason we are who we are. We’ve been telling each other stories for as long as humans have existed - going back to our earliest ancestors of anatomically “modern” humans 200 to 300 thousand years ago, it is likely that sharing stories came around not long after the first human beings walked the earth. Sharing stories was a way of communicating important survival information - how to hunt, what foods were safe to eat, and how to avoid danger - as well as culturally important concepts like myths and legends. Our brains are evolved in such a way that makes us exceptionally good storytellers - language and symbolic thinking are one of the defining features of our species, and both of those are critical for storytelling, and the nature of our evolution means that as we came to rely more on storytelling, our brains changed to be better at it, so we relied on it more - thus went the cycle all the way up to today.
Oral traditions are still alive and well today; many indigenous cultures rely on oral storytelling to convey information, some of which has been passed down through countless generations. Archeological evidence from Australia suggests that some Indigenous Australian oral traditions date back 65,000 years. Yes, Sixty Five Thousand Years. And these stories are believed to be told today in much the same way they were. That’s an estimated TWO THOUSAND generations - and that’s a lot of “Greats” before the Grandpa or Grandma! For a more modern example of the efficacy of oral traditions, in Canada the Inuit people had oral histories of the doomed Franklin expedition that set sail in the mid-1800s. Modern archeologists and historians tried for decades to locate Franklin’s lost ships, but it was only in 2014 and 2016, after researches implemented the Inuit stories into their search efforts, that the ships were actually found - right where the local Inuit people say they were! For those of us who struggle to remember the details of the often dull, agenda-driven (and story-free!) meetings we were in last week, these examples of Oral Traditions should clearly illustrate that stories are powerful, and fundamentally human!
The first written stories date back tens of thousands of years - much younger than Oral traditions, but ancient all the same. In France, cave paintings in the Chauvet cave have been dated to 36,000 years old, and tell us stories of the animals our ancestors hunted (and in some cases,were probably hunted by!) like lions, mammoths, and rhinoceroses. There are similar sites throughout France an Spain, and while we can’t say for sure these are the oldest written stories, they do reinforce the idea that we’ve been doing this for a long time.
Fast forward a few thousand years - full of cave paintings, Sanskrit tablets, hieroglyphics, the Greek epics, the teachings of religions around the world, and enter the modern world: We are surrounded by stories - Hollywood, TV, and media are feeding us stories 24/7. The global industry of storytelling is worth an estimated $2 trillion dollars a year. Thats a lot of movie tickets! And from Star Wars to the evening news, stories draw in people and connect us locally, globally - and to galaxies far, far away!
So what’s this got to do with Authentik? It’s pretty simple: Stories - true stories - are fundamental to Restorative Justice, and our flagship course teaches leaders how to use restorative justice in their context, so that you can leverage the power of stories to solve problems, bring people together, and create psychologically safe environments where people can thrive. Contrast this very human storytelling with the opposite approach - facts, figures, and objective evidence. Those things are absolutely important, but if the focus of your leadership is on the objective, you risk ignoring the subjective experience, and that’s what stories are: They are a way for us to communicate our experience. And if you ignore that as a leader, you might as well ignore the human entirely - and when humanity is ignored, leadership fails.
Stories - as this post illustrates - are fundamentally human. In a world that is being faced with disruption of norms at a pace never before seen in the history of our species, it becomes more and more important to cut through the disruption and connect with each other, human to human, just as all of our ancient ancestors did around the campfire as they shared the tales of their successful hunt, or as they honour the Mammoth or Lion on the walls of a cave, or as they put quill to scroll to share an odyssey, or as they told us about a kid from a moisture farm on Tatooine that would eventually bring balance to the galaxy. As leaders, we have an obligation to connect with the humans we share space with an have the honour of leading, and the best way for humans to connect is through stories.
See you next Sunday.
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