April 21, 2021 Most people, including leaders don’t understand how important storytelling really is to the art of leadership. One reason for this deficit in deep knowledge has to do with how technology especially our smartphones has gutted out the whole storytelling experience and replaced it with a very confused mish mash of reality. So much so that these days if a movie is going to succeed in the box office, it needs loads of CGI (computer generated graphics). As a result many young people these days are very confused about their goals and roles and probably everything else. At the heart of storytelling is a very simple Simon idea of painting where you are and where you are headed…it feeds into the whole idea of man’s primal need for identity and a sense of belonging and destiny, without this trilogy lubricating and nourishing the everdayness of life, its impossible for those in a tribe to perpetuate their way of life coherently. People who lose these narratives, don’t just lose their history, culture and their traditional hunting ground, but like the sad story of the Red Indians who were herded into reservations in the mid West and aborigines in Australia who were forced to live in brick and mortar communes and work nine to five jobs in factories, many eventually took to drink became lackeys and died off like flies, so losing one’s narrative is life threatening, its like living without your spleen or liver and that idea of storytelling and how it nourishes the idea of leadership may seem odd…but when you consider the image of the shaman recounting stories to the tribe seated around a communal fire and begin to let the idea seep into your soul that this is not a plastic idea, but it is something really significant and as old as ancient cave paintings, then you will realise that we all need stories to make sense of who we are, where we are and most importantly where we are headed.