Nothing but story . . .

I’m a sucker for a good story - but who isn’t? Humans, after all, have been sharing stories since we could speak - possibly as long as 200,000 years ago. We’ve been sharing written stories for almost 65,000 years. Cave drawings and pictograms were the earliest forms of written stories that captured tales of hunting and battles. Since the creation of the printing press, we’ve been able to disseminate that written word. Today we share stories in the form of video, text, speech, dance and photography. Stories bring people together, build culture and establish common values and morals. Stories inspire. Stories entertain and teach. We read and hear stories to help us to make sense of the world and to navigate complexity. We tell and write stories to share something of ourselves that we value and want others to know. Stories and being human are inextricably linked.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stories since our team selected this year’s newsletter theme as The Power of Stories back in May, and it was amazing to see what happened when I opened myself up to receive stories - suddenly everything was a story with an opportunity to learn - about others or myself. I began to wonder if there is nothing but story in the world and that just about everything we experience is simply a story told from our own or others’ perspectives. When is our sense-making of the world around us not a story? And with this lens, I spent much of the summer in “story mode”.

At the beginning of the summer I got sucked into The Retrievals - a podcast collaboration between Serial Productions and The New York Times. It tells the story of a group of women receiving treatment at the Yale Fertility Clinic and who experienced an unexpectedly excruciating procedure. Because the L+D team had just settled on the newsletter theme, I found myself more attentive to the many strands of the story, beginning with the overarching storyline of what happened at the clinic, but then into the individual stories of the women, each of whom woman had a story about why she was undergoing fertility treatment. Then there was the story of the nurse, Donna, who in the depths of her own opioid addiction, had replaced the patients’ pain medication with saline and pocketed the fentanyl for her own use. While we never heard directly from Donna, she too had a story that was tragic in its own way. The Retrievals contained many stories beyond those of the individual women. It was about the frustrating processes of fertility treatment, the devastation of the opioid crisis, and how women’s pain - both physical and emotional - is often dismissed and ignored. Like the best stories we hear and tell, this one had no perfect resolution. It generated more questions than answers. It was complex. And it gave voice to those who had not been heard.

At our program for Heads of Schools this summer, The Reset, we engaged participants in a different kind of storytelling as a way for them to get to know one another and the location of Sonoma CA, and to practice telling stories visually. As educators, we sometimes default to the written or spoken word, but there are so many ways to tell a story and those without words are tangible and intimate in ways that writing and speaking can’t always be. Our team member, Antonio Viva, devised a Life Magazine Photo Essay Project in which our participants went out into the field (literally) in Sonoma to capture a story at an assigned winery. They had to find a story to tell and share it in a series of 9 photographs. Wine-makers are, at the heart of it all, farmers. They are connected to the land. The final product we enjoy is really only a small character in the story. Wine makers are fascinating - they are invested in sustainability, they are faced with dangerous threats of fire and invasive pests. In addition, they are in a massively competitive industry where they need to distinguish themselves from the winery down the road - sound familiar? Our participants brought back the most beautiful photographs and stories about these wineries and their people. I hope the assignment allowed each of them to make connections to their subject matter, to one another and to a different way to tell a story.

Lastly, I’ve been really enjoying a personal storytelling project of my own that is not really related to L+D, but is tangentially connected to work in schools. It’s a collaboration with my closest friend from high school, Jessica Slade. With our 35th high school reunion just about 18 months away, we’ve created a podcast about the Albuquerque Academy class of 1989, hoping to interview all of the members of the class - and even a few of our teachers. “Jessica and Carla’s High School Reunion” is not about our stories from the “glory days” of high school, but rather the journey the members of our class have taken. Everyone has a story to share, and we really wanted to learn more about the remarkable people we knew 35 years ago and their stories of becoming the people they are today. It’s been an amazing and heartwarming experience where we have explored some of the most pivotal moments and key inflection points in their lives and the surprises and delights they are experiencing now at 50. Our classmates are loving hearing about each other and who we have become. What has been surprising for us, has been the gratitude of those interviewed - having the chance to tell their story. When one person listens hard and intently to another person and surfaces their story, it is an act of love and validation. “I see you and you matter.”

From my more conscious dive into stories this summer I deepened my belief that leaders must be storytellers and also story-listeners and story-surfacers. Of course, these aren’t really words but I wish they were. Nothing but story. How can we tell the stories of our school and of the people in it in new ways and not just in the mediums we always tell them? One example I just love is the micro- podcast format that Mark Silver (Head of School at Hillbrook School in Los Gatos - and my partner in life) has used to chronicle the school's expansion into a JK-12 new high school and to share stories each week about the school using the platform JAM (Just a Minute). Also, stories can build empathy - the most essential skill of the human-centered design thinker. What if we looked at the angry parent or the struggling child as just someone trying to express their story in some way?

This year Leadership+Design will celebrate its 10th anniversary. Hooray! Formed from the merger of two like-minded organizations, The Santa Fe Leadership Center and Leading is Learning, we officially launched L+D at the NAIS conference in February of 2014. This year, we are excited to showcase stories from our journey as an organization and also to share the stories of our school and industry partners, L+Doers Unite members, past program participants, and the many school leaders with whom we are honored to work. We look forward to a year of beautiful stories and conversations about stories with all of you!

P.S. If you are interested in writing about your own story, be sure to check out our fall Santa Fe program, Write Your Journey. Learn more and register!