Patterns of Narrative

Dave Snowden discusses the importance of narrative in understanding culture and identity. He emphasizes that narratives are dynamic and evolve through interactions, rather than being simply created or told. Understanding existing narrative patterns is crucial for facilitating change in organizations and society.

culture as an assemblage, or more properly, an agencement, a more dynamic word.

narrative is one of the most fundamental sense-making capabilities. Our landscapes, relationships, interactions, and actions define us; narrative is critical to all of those.

narrative forms a substrate for identity, ethics, and, yes, communication, but far more than story-telling

So when I tell a story, I am in a complex and entangled dance with many other similar story threads; it is not a stand-alone process, and it is, to use some technical language, enacted rather than deliberated.

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Narrative work is far more than words alone and far more than the probabilistic techniques of algorithms.

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This brings me to a topic that I both love and hate, partly because the perpetrators are, in the main, well-intentioned. It’s the notion that we can create a new narrative.

A ‘narrative’ is not just a pattern but an agencement, a constantly evolving ‘entity’ that may stabilise for periods but destabilise in abrupt phrase shifts with litter or no warning. It’s not a static or engineered thing. It’s influenced as much, if not more, by your actions than your words and the enactment of any meaning by those around you.

you need to understand the current narrative patterns in which you live, the degree to which they have territorialised the domain, the lines of flight which would allow for the possibility of change and, ideally, a mechanism to deterritorialise the domain so that new patterns can emerge.