From The Head Of Zeus Jones

Back in the 90s (like everyone else), I got interested in storytelling. One of the books I picked up at the time was The Springboard. In it, a World Bank employee talks about his experiences in attempting to convince his organisation to take action. He found that the traditional methods of building fact-based arguments failed over and over again, and turned to storytelling as the solution. One of his insights was that stories create relationships between facts and enable listeners to understand context.

I sometimes think that my (our) momentary fascination with storytelling was a last gasp attempt to make sense of an increasingly fragmented world. As postmodernism tore apart the traditional hierarchies and relationships I had been brought up with, I felt a strong need to create new ones. To tie things back together into a new story, to help make sense of the world again.

I think this sense of feeling adrift was quite widespread. One of the books that I felt captured this phenomenon very accurately was The Protean Self. I haven't read it for a long time, but the main thesis was that one reason for the resiliency of humans is our ability to become very fluid and adapt to "dislocations" by re-creating ourselves rather than by trying to recreate our world.

If these are two responses to postmodernism, it feels to me that the latter has won out. Rather than attempting to weave together a new story or structure to explain the world, I think we have all become more adaptable, more fluid and less concerned with structure and hierarchy. This is one of the defining characteristics of Generation Y and it has led to the mashup culture that we all experience today.

It's now well accepted that relationships are and fluid and more, that our ability to create entirely new contexts by re-assembling various bits and pieces together in entirely new ways is a good thing rather than a bad thing. Instead of feeling adrift because relationships between things aren't constant, I think we now feel liberated.

In fact, I'll go even further to say that our ability to move forwards is based on our ability to tear apart the remaining rigid structures from the past and make them more fluid.

I was reminded of this yesterday when after my post on ripping up the brand model, I read David's post on doing the same thing with user-centered design process. It was based on thinking and feedback from a fantastic presentation Matthew gave (above).

Marketing has created more meaningless structures than most disciplines in its attempt to disguise what is essentially a creative discipline as a "scientific" one. To me progress starts by tearing these apart and allowing the relationships between the various concepts we use to be more fluid and more dynamic.