Circle of the 9 Muses

Chapter 11

Use these frameworks when you wish to exercise leadership by defining the bigger story that your people are living, and bringing their individual stories together into a greater whole, or metanarrative.

For this exercise you will need:

• A space for story circles (as described in Chapter 2)
• A large whiteboard or wall with butcher paper
• Multiple stacks of sticky notes with markers

A fractal is any structure that shows similarity at different levels of scale. In this fractal image you can see how smaller branches are structured with the same pattern as the larger ones. A healthy culture is one where the stories have a fractal structure.

The exercise Twice-Told Stories (as described in Chapter 5) makes an impactful and important point: The stories that people in organizations tell do not exist in isolation. They are always part of a bigger, shared story.

Fractal Narratives builds on that idea and takes it one important step further: It is the role of you, the leader, to shape and define what that bigger story is. This is a significant act of leadership. A role of the leader is maker of meaning, which means defining and narrating the larger story that we are all experiencing and living into.

Fractal narratives is my term for describing stories that are purposefully ...