Introduction
Dispatches from a World of Stories

Scene I: A Small Club in Nashville, Tennessee

"Are you sure this is the place?"

As I pull into the cramped parking lot, my wife Robbie isn't confident.

"This is the place," I assure her as I seize upon the last parking space, and it's not hard to imagine every first-timer asking the same question. Seeing it situated in a generic strip mall between a dry cleaner and a furniture store, one would never guess that this suburban Tennessee retail space would be home to one of the most influential venues of the modern music industry.

This is the legendary Bluebird Cafe, and in Nashville where songwriting is a sacrament, the Bluebird is the high temple. This cramped 90-seat club has launched the careers of country music stars like Pam Tillis and Garth Brooks while also supplying them with many of their greatest songs. It is a nest where stories are nurtured and then released into the wild.

I lead Robbie past the locals and tourists who line the sidewalk, bundled against the cold and hoping to score a seat inside. We head straight to the VIP entrance. Tonight, we're here at the invitation of my friend Billy Kirsch, who has written songs for Wynonna Judd, Faith Hill, and many others. His songs are rich in storytelling, and one of them-titled "Holes in the Floor of Heaven"-was named the Song of the Year by the Country Music Association a few years ago. As we find our way to our cramped table, we wave to Billy, who is just a few feet away from us, along with three other songwriters who are tuning their instruments and sitting in a circle facing one another. In the round, they call it.

As people find their seats and the show begins, there is no rowdy laughter like one hears in other clubs. The audience at the Bluebird Cafe is respectful and hushed, like parishioners waiting for church to start. With only minimal instrumentation-often just an acoustic guitar or a keyboard-these accomplished songwriters will take turns sipping their beers, singing songs, and telling stories.

Billy begins the evening by picking out just a few chords on his keyboard. The crowd immediately applauds in recognition and, as Billy starts to sing, people quietly mouth the familiar words:

One day shy of 8 years old

When grandma passed away

I was a broken-hearted little boy

Blowing out that birthday cake . . .

It is spellbinding. The audience members bob their heads in unison, creating an effect of waves rippling through the room. And when Billy sings the chorus-there's holes in the floor of heaven, and her tears are pouring down-some people cry, some people merely close their eyes, but everyone is moved simultaneously. I watch this room full of strangers who have become an instant community through shared experience, and I am overcome by the strong sensation that we are a single organism.

It is a sacred experience-one that many here in Music City fear may be in danger of getting lost.

Marcus Hummon is another one of the great modern songwriters; a Grammy-winner who has penned chart-topping hits for the Dixie Chicks, Rascal Flatts, and many others. It's just a few days after my Bluebird epiphany, and we are seated in a hip coffee house frequented by health-care executives and students at nearby Vanderbilt University. Marcus and I have been talking about the unique role that story plays in classic Nashville songwriting. We talk about some of the great story-driven songs: Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" and Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler." Sipping lattes and talking about our favorite music is fun, but then Marcus' tone turns serious.

"You don't hear as many story songs as you used to," he says.

I ask why that is.

"People have a different relationship with music today," he says. "With the Internet and streaming, music is so available. It's everywhere, and now it is disposable. So today's writers are all chasing the pop hook; something that can grab listeners immediately. I don't think this will be permanent. I hope it isn't. But it is certainly the age we are in."

"So, you're saying that people are less engaged with their music today," I say, trying to process the implications.

"Generally, yes."

"And songs that tell stories require more engagement."

"That's right. Stories demand a bigger investment and more participation from the listener."

The implications of this are fascinating. After all, my work is to advocate for stories in organizations and this is a contrarian perspective that has simply never occurred to me: If people don't value engagement, don't tell stories! The idea seems alien, and yet it is echoed by screenwriting legend Robert McKee. In his classic text Story, he suggests that Hollywood, too, has entered an age of impoverished storytelling because the public has lost its appetite for wrestling with life's biggest questions.

And yet this is precisely the opposite of what I keep encountering in my organizational world, where everyone is seeking greater engagement. Leaders want it. Employees want it. And although I suppose there will always exist corners of the marketplace where people demand disposable transactions, consumers are asking for greater engagement, too.

Indeed, the continued success of Marcus' and Billy's art in this chaotic music industry offers hope. It suggests that a market still exists for music that meets its listeners in a place of deep humanity. Storytelling may be vulnerable in today's entertainment industries, but story never truly goes away. And sometimes it just finds new homes, where it can find new ways to exercise its mysterious capacity to connect, engage, and bring people together.

Today, that new home is in the world of organizations. I've told Billy and Marcus, "Leaders are all looking for what you have." Billy has made precisely this shift by developing a storytelling and songwriting experience that he now brings to organizational teams all around the world.1

Story never goes away. It is always here. And today in the organizational world, storytelling has become the hot, new idea that isn't new at all.

Are these the first recorded stories? Images discovered in Chauvet Cave are more than 30,000 years old.

Scene II: A Cave in the South of France, 1994

A wall of ancient stone gives way, raising a cloud of dust in the cold December air. Three explorers lift their lights, throwing yellow beams into a cavern that hasn't been disturbed by light in more than 30,000 years. Through the fog of their frozen breaths, the three astonished explorers first spy tiny footprints in the sand, left by some Paleolithic child who could never have dreamed they would become a source of wonder to these future members of the race.

Then they point their lights to the walls . . . and are immediately transported into a world of stories. Marvelous stories; stories that require no special skills for translation, depicting narratives of hunting and survival, animal mating cycles, and shamanic rituals; all presented in movements that a novelist or screenwriter would now refer to as scenes.

Chauvet Cave, now a designated World Heritage Site, gives us our very earliest glimpses of the human capacity for storytelling. What is remarkable is how well-formed the ancient capability appears to be.

When the Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered in 1853 on clay tablets that were merely a few thousand years old, we found that the ancient practice of what we might now call story theory had made astonishing advances. There are sophisticated narrative arcs with themes; heroes and villains; drama and intrigue; sexual betrayal; surprise twists.

If we were to time-travel across the ages, wherever we landed we would find communities of human beings: in circles, gathered around scrolls, around cave paintings, around campfires. And they would be telling stories. I imagine the child who left those footprints in Chauvet Cave, sitting in the circle as the tribal elders narrate the cave paintings, listening with rapt attention, her upturned face illuminated by flickering light, her imagination ablaze.

This is how it's always been. Across the ages, across cultures, across contexts, stories are our first path to community, to connection, to survival, to the collective act of meaning making.

And today's tribes are asking if stories are capable of doing even more.

Scene III: A Conference Room Somewhere in Paris

Jump forward 30,000 years. I'm in a brightly lit conference room where an iPad is connected to a digital projector that allows participants in the audience to stream images to the wall, bringing spontaneous, crowd-sourced meaning to our storytelling.

But, at its core, nothing has changed.

This international group of executives is sitting in a semicircle, their faces all relaxed in universal expressions of unselfconscious wonder that are common to all cultures. They are listening to one of their own-a soft-spoken woman who doesn't like speaking before a group and who earlier told me she wasn't a storyteller.

Oh, but she is! She is here from the Asia-Pacific affiliate of...