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I am a huge fan of Tara McMullin.

Tara writes and teaches about work and identity through a systems lens. During a sprint on business model design she taught last year, she made a throwaway quip that made me sit up straight:

“...If I could beam this course to you fully formed…”

She was making the point that she would have to start somewhere, but since a business is a system, no starting place is inherently better than another. It’s all connected.

One reason I’m still thinking about this line more than a year later is that I had been struggling with, but had not yet articulated, what a bizarre task it is to translate a web of understanding into a linear narrative.

How many choices must be made.

How many different options there are.

How arbitrary any one choice can feel, but how overwhelming it can be to try and think through all the options.

I think this is why so much of the writing process seems like pure intuition: better to just throw all the information in the pot and let the strand emerge like aroma.

Storytelling has become a bit of a buzzword, but it’s true that people’s brains need to be primed to receive and integrate knowledge. There’s something about being guided from point A to point B that helps information stick.

In the movie The Matrix, humans can download abilities instantaneously. But simply hearing Neo tell us “I know kung fu” would be unconvincing. So we get a vignette of Neo sparring with Morpheus so that we, the viewers, can experience it for ourselves.   

To linearize the nonlinear, we need to make decisions about what’s in and out of scope. Often, those choices depend on where we begin and where we want to land.

Imagine someone asks you where water comes from. Depending on your audience, your purpose, and their goals, it may make sense to talk about municipal systems, treatment plants, aquifers. Or you might gently suggest that they turn on the faucet.

Here’s the truly sick thing: once we transmit the information in its lovingly crafted narrative format, someone is just going to pick it up and add it to the mess of their brain, and the process will start all over again.

Tara could have sent us a giant, slowly-loading system map illustrating each part of a business and all their possible combinations. We could have zoomed in on the tiny text on our own time. 

But that wouldn’t have fit the format of the sprint, which was a couple weeks of interactive webinars. It also wouldn’t have been that effective for the sprint’s purpose, which was for people to come away with an understanding of business models that they could apply on their own. So linear format it was. 

I don’t have much of a point to make here except to say,

Isn’t it weird?

And also,

Where shall we begin?

Check out:

• Tara McMullin’s podcast What Works

• Abby Covert on confronting scope and scale, from How to Make Sense of Any Mess

• Tamsen Webster on the throughline that connects your thinking to your audience’s beliefs

• Susan D’Agostino on misinformation feedback loops, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

• Tsering Yangzom Lama on how to change our politics by changing narratives, on Mongabay Newscast