Summary
Street narratives are the stories and running commentary that pass between people in everyday life – at work, at home, online – as opposed to the accounts people give when a researcher asks. The phrase came up in our interview with complexity thinker Dave Snowden; we haven’t found it in his published writing.
His narrative work starts from the same idea. The Cynefin wiki describes its focus as narratives “in the wild”: “the small stories and anecdotes that are already being told and circulating, rather than larger, purposefully created stories”. Formal research, the argument goes, tends to miss these. Snowden’s method gathers many and has the tellers interpret their own.
Rationale
Where would the “always-on listening and sensing” that Part 1 calls for actually listen? Street narratives suggest an answer: to what people say to each other unprompted, not what they tell a survey.