Circle of the 9 Muses

Chapter 12

Use these ideas when you wish to define the team's or the organization's experiences in ways that connect with timeless and universally appealing patterns of meaning.

For this exercise, you will need:

• A whiteboard or flip chart with the Hero's Journey framework drawn on it in advance
• Sticky notes and markers

This is a continuation of the previous tool, Fractal Narratives. It is called out separately here because of the significance of this robust construct. To fully appreciate this process, you should review that previous chapter first.

Joseph Campbell was an anthropologist who studied the narratives that have defined cultures across the ages, and he identified the elements that were common to all of them. His resulting construct, the Hero's Journey (also known as the monomyth) represents the grand story that humanity keeps telling and living, over and over. It is a tremendous intellectual contribution to our understanding of what it means to be alive in this world. It is the underpinning of the world's great narratives, from religions to cultural touchstones, such as the Greek myths, that have defined civilizations.

But it's also a supremely intimate story. It is the journey each of us takes through this brief life as we struggle to become self-actualized beings.

Campbell wrote his classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces¹ in the 1950s, but it became a ...