“Humans think in stories”, Yuval Noah Harari.
The story is probably one of the earliest and most powerful mental models. A mental model is exactly that: a model of the world — a compressed prediction that the brain uses to navigate the everyday unknowns and uncertainties of life.
In Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari describes humanity’s standout capability: to imagine and believe in a shared story. This shared dream has powered our ability to collaborate at scale — to build cities, launch ships, and shape whole civilizations, even despite the setbacks of floods, droughts, plagues and attacks, that early man couldn’t forsee or understand, but wished to counter.
The same model of the shared dream applies within a team.
The shared dream is often referred to as a goal or vision and the team’s role within that ‘story’ – often referred to as the team’s mission. And within this shared story, every member can envisage and manifest their role.
The shared story envisions an achievable (but often ambitious) valuable future state, and acts as the attractor. The everyday actions towards that goal are often unpredictable and arduous and without a shared narrative there would be no thread for the disparate actions and no justification for the long-term effort invested. With the shared dream, every challenge, every iteration, threads into a meaningful whole.
The dream also compounds with greater intricacy and complexity at scale and over time. One dream doesn’t just fulfill a mission, it creates the fertile humus for the next dream to seed, the next shared story. Stories don’t just inspire, they compound to a collective holistic growth driven by collaboration, resulting in a positive sum game for wider humanity.
The shared story is as applicable now to an AI tech team, as it was to a handful of dreamers and stonecarvers in Çatalhöyük, ten thousand years ago.
A guest post by Uttiya Hazra