Third Generation Storytelling Beta v1 - 0 Nov2016 PDF

Third
Generation Storytelling

Ask Agger

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 1

Third Generation Storytelling
Meaning, Involvement and Leadership in our Complex World
2016 Ask Agger
All rights reserved.

Special Beta-version

Cover illustration:
David McKean
Illustrations:
Sofie Bangsgaard
Translation:
Per Fisher and Ask Agger

Disclaimer:
This document is an early beta-version of the English translation of Third Generation
Storytelling. Nothing is finished and additional editing, revisions, proof-reading and layout is
needed. The final version of the translation will be ready and published in 2017.

Contact:
Ask Agger
aa@workz.dk
@askagger
2 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Contents

1. Preface

WHY
2. The Hunt for Meaning
3. First Generation Storytelling the Totalitarian Scheme of Things
4. Second Generation Storytelling the Postmodern Chaos
5. Third Generation Storytelling Joint Ownership and Involvement

WHAT
6. A Mind for Stories
7. Monomyths and the Heros Journey
8. The Master of Ceremonies

HOW
9. The Battle for Attention
10. Politics and the New Citizenship
11. Leadership and Trust
12. With the Carelessness of a Samurai

Thanks
References and Inspiration
Notes


Preface
What do we see in the mirror? Are you your fathers son? A good Christian? A good Social
Democrat? Who are we and how do we create meaning and identity in life? To whom do we
turn when we need answers to the big questions of existence?
My six-year-old son, Storm, asked me thoughtful: Dad, is it possible to believe in both Jesus
and Thor? We were just coming back from his cousins christening, and the whole episode in
the church, with psalms, sermon and absolution, had made a deep impression on the little guy.
The previous week, we had been reading bedtime stories from the Norse Mythology and both
Storm and his younger brother, Sne (Danish for Snow), had been particularly fascinated by
Thor, the god of thunder, and his hammer. For Storm, one story does not rule out another.
Without much thought, I just blurted out: You can believe what you like. Storm thought about
that for a short while and replied quietly: Okay. Thats what Im going to do, then. It was only
later that I began to ponder his question. Just a few generations back, this kind of wondering
would have been unthinkable. Belief was not something children could pick from or decide on,
it was something definitive, something that was passed on to you. You were born into a
worldview and there you stayed from baptism too grave. Storm would above all be son of Ask.
Period.
Today all opportunities are open. Storm is free to decide for himself, create his own identity
and believe what he wants. He is no longer a passive spectator to other peoples stories he is
an active co-narrator: he is the main character. However, with this freedom comes a great
responsibility. What are the correct decisions? And what if you make the wrong decision? And,
not the least: What is true? As parents, we have spent some time explaining to Storm and his
younger brother that superheroes, monsters and smurfs are not real. They are fairy tales. In
terms of Santa Claus, pixies, the Easter Bunny, ogres and Jesus, we are leaving it open for the
time being. Even though Storm is no longer a slave to the fundamentalism of the past, he still
needs meaningful stories in his life. Stories that can help him to understand and navigate his
world.
This book is about the need for meaning and how we, as human beings, use stories in order to
understand ourselves and our place in an increasingly complex world. We begin with the big
WHY, and a historical look at civilisation and how humanitys use of stories has gradually
developed since Antiquity. From passive audience to active storytellers. The following part of
the book is about WHAT. About Storms generation of co-narrators and the rules for the meta
stories (stories about telling stories), which influence our present and future more and more.
The final part of the book is about HOW. We take a closer look at how you can work specifically
with creating meaning and co-ownership through meta stories and involvement within
marketing, politics and management. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann has been a key source of
inspiration for me over the years. He once wrote that humanity never has been able to

understand or control development in its age. It is only years later that we, looking back, are
able to begin to understand the changes that created an epoch.
The progress is like walking backwards every moment we enter an unknown future, and, at
the same time, we are looking back at the past in an attempt to comprehend where we have
been, and what the next step might bring. Life is a continuous series of moments where a tiny
bit of future passes through present time and becomes past.
This book is my retrospect of the things that have inspired and helped me understand and act
in a time of great and accelerating changes. It is also a mess. My personal mess combining
theories, models, observations, tales, cases and tools from 20 years as a consultant, and even
more years being enthusiastic about dramaturgy, game design and involvement. We are going
to cover a lot of ground, from the great social movements to examples from home and abroad
as well as a number of specific methods and practical advice.
I have no illusions about this book containing something new or ground-breaking. Sociologists,
historians, philosophers and others have already, and much more elaborately, described the
trends I emphasise. Where I hope to be able to inspire, is within the connection between
abstract theories and specific applications. My main point is precisely that knowledge is not
enough we also need action. To act and create meaning through the difference we are making
together. That is why I hope that this book encourages action.


WHY

The Hunt for Meaning
Sha naqba muru He who has seen everything, I will make known to the lands, is the first
sentence in the worlds first work of literature.
The epic about Gilgamesh was written on clay tablets around 1800BC in Mesopotamia, todays
Iraq, but has roots that go back several thousand years in history.
The story is about the Sumerian king of Uruk who befriends the wild man Enkidu.
On their adventure, they accidentally provoke the gods by killing a sacred bull and Enkidu dies
as a punishment.
Out of sheer despair, Gilgamesh embarks on the hunt for the source of eternal life.
The journey takes him to the edge of the world, where he receives this admonition about the
meaning of life while visiting the innkeeper Siduri:
Gilgamesh, where are you wandering?
The life that you are seeking all around you will not find.
When the gods created mankind they fixed Death for mankind and held back Life in their own
hands.
Now you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full! Be happy day and night, of each day make a party,
dance in circles day and night! Let your clothes be sparkling clean, let your head be clean, wash
yourself with water!
Attend to the little one who holds onto your hand, let a wife delight in your embrace. This is the
(true) task of mankind.1
Since the beginning of time, humankind has literally hunted meaning and answers to the great
questions of existence:
What am I doing here?
Why am I alive?
What is death?
Who am I?
These same existential questions confronted Gilgamesh 7,000 years ago, and have been
pondered by humans ever since. We try to find the answer within ourselves, but it is not
satisfactory that I am me, that Ask is just Ask. We need more meaning, an answer from outside
ourselves an abyss that we can look into to satisfy our thirst for meaning and clarity.
Siduris answer was simple:

Dance, eat, party, make love and appreciate your children. Perhaps it is that simple.
Nonetheless we humans have spent millennia ever since on making everything even more
complicated for ourselves and each other.

I and Me
For centuries, philosophers and psychologists and brain researchers in our time have been
trying to decode the nature of the mind. What is it that takes place behind the frontal lobe?
In the hunt for an answer, we have been interpreting dreams, meditated, starved ourselves,
eaten mushrooms, measured skulls and thought long and hard. But the answer is difficult to
find because the question points back to the thinkers themselves we are only able to
understand our own mind by using the brain we do not understand. And if we want to
understand ourselves, we are faced with having to explain our own role in the world and with
that, what the world is. And that is quite a thing.
One of the most thought-provoking and quirky explanations I have come across is by the
American philosopher and psychologist George Herbert Mead.
Mead describes consciousness as an inner dialogue between I and Me. In parallel with
Freuds idea of the ego, I is the spontaneous and impulse-driven voice of the personality,
while Me is the generalized other that represents our perception of how we think our
surroundings expect us to be. Who we are as opposed to who we ought to be.
There is a constant inner dialogue in our mind where the evaluating and reasonable Me is
trying to civilise and moderate the unruly and impulsive I. I would like more chocolate, while
Me is reminding me that we should follow the doctors advice to eat a carrot and do more
exercise. According to Mead, life is like a ride with a loud and monitory mother-in-law in the
back seat.
When I am observing my two sons, I can almost hear this inner debate going into overdrive in
their little heads when father or mother are trying to pull them away from their LEGO, candy
drawer or dressing up, with demands for brushing teeth, dinner time and getting dressed.
By now, they know what is expected of them, but the child world is still a cornucopia of
temptations and displacement activities. Fortunately, you can sense how the responsible Me
gradually gains influence. Hopefully.
There are especially two things that I like about Meads 100-year-old model.
Firstly, I like the metaphor of the inner dialogue; that consciousness and personality is not
something fixed, but rather an ongoing discourse that is constantly updating and adjusting our
personal compass, along with challenging old attitudes, ideas and prejudices with new
impressions and experience. Our personality is an ongoing story that we will never finish.

Secondly, I think that the generalising other, Me, is the very picture of how our consciousness
constantly tries to find meaning outside ourselves. In other words, we externalise the answer to
lifes big questions through stories with idealised hero figures, which we compare ourselves to
and try to live up to. Our personality and self-perception emerges in a reflection of the
surrounding world, and our perception of the world is similarly influenced by our story about
ourselves.

Blindness
But stories make you blind.
In 380BC, Plato lets Socrates present an allegory about three prisoners in a cave.
The prisoners have never been outside the cave, and their only impression of the world comes
from observing shadows on a rock wall. For them, the shadows are reality. Plato imagines that
one of the prisoners escape and discover the outside world. After living in the twilight of the
cave, it takes the prisoner a while to get used to the harsh sunlight outside.
When the prisoner turns to his fellow inmates to explain their delusion to them, they refuse to
believe him, and since his eyes still have not adjusted to the darkness of the cave, the fellow
prisoners conclude that they will never dare to leave the cave since it makes you blind if you do.
For Plato, the enlightened prisoner was the philosopher who, in vain, was trying to bring
enlightenment to the ungrateful masses.
Plato was one of the first to describe the limitations of our subjective perception of the world:
we believe we are seeing the big, objective whole, but in actual fact we are only seeing our own
small, subjective reality. We are blind towards what we are not seeing, and blind towards our
own blindness.
Ever since, a vast number of philosophers, among others Ren Descartes, have lingered over
the challenge of the blindness:
All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I
received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled
us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have
even once been deceived.2

The fear of being misled by senses and assumptions made the French thinker and
mathematician come up with his famous Cogito, ergo sum I think, therefore I am.
The only thing he dared to be absolutely certain of was the fact that he existed.

The German systems theoretician Niklas Luhmann is another great thinker who was absorbed
in blindness and opinion formation. It is worth having a closer look at his quirky thoughts.

Observation and self-reference
Read on, even though it does not make sense. Such were the instructions the first time I was
exposed to Niklas Luhmann at university in the early 1990s.
Luhmann was one of the most well-read people in the 20th century, and managed to complete
the most ambitious grand theory within sociology before his death in 1998. A key point of his
theory is that you are only able to understand the theory by using the theory itself, which,
unfortunately, has made his works somewhat inaccessible. That was why I, as a young student,
was asked to read incomprehensible texts in the hope that all the internal references would
gradually make sense. I do not think that I will ever seriously understand Luhmann, but it did
spark a lasting fascination, and to me his theory still stands as the best and most coherent social
analysis in our time.
Luhmanns theory is based on observation. No observer is able to observe everything at the
same time. Therefore, every observation begins with a distinction, which is used to filter what is
being observed from what is not.
Luhmann defines a social system as any social contact and claims that a system in its
observation is delimited from a surrounding world precisely through its observing distinction.
Thus, a justice system uses the distinction lawful/unlawful to observe its outside world. Other
well-known distinctions are, for instance, true/false within science, or good/evil within ethics.
Luhmann himself chose to use the distinction system/ environment. In that way he is looking at
how social systems observe and what distinctions they are using in their observation. Thus, the
systems theory becomes observer of observations. Luhmann is concentrating on observing
societys own observation, instead of trying to observe society. His systems theory is about
looking by the second glance.
Have you ever experienced joining a meeting or party in an unfamiliar place and trying to enter
into the ongoing conversation at the table? The conversation is private, and it is impossible to
understand the internal references or jokes. And when you try to intervene, it quickly leads to
misunderstandings and confusion.
In my consultancy work, I have the pleasure of visiting lots of different organisations and
people, from proud manufacturing businesses and pragmatic officials to enthusiastic
researchers and ambitious finance people.
It is always fascinating to observe how each organisation has its own unique, company culture,
which is linguistically embedded in terms, phrases and anecdotes. It often takes a couple of

meetings before I can begin to understand anything at a new client. It is like visiting a strange
planet as a humble guest who initially is only able to observe and wonder.
Luhmann borrows the concept autopoiesis (self-creation) from biology to describe how social
systems become self-referential in their internal opinion-forming. In the same way body cells
create what they need in terms of amino acids, etc., from the physical parts already present in
the cell, social systems are self-sufficient with meaning in the sense that all new impressions
can only be understood based on the existing meaning in the system. We are only able to relate
to something new based on what we already know, and we are only able to describe the
unknown with the words and concepts we already know.
As individuals, groups and organisations, we are isolating ourselves from our surrounding
environment by becoming self-referential within the private stories we use to understand
ourselves and our surrounding world.
Everything on this page is a lie. This sentence is a classic example of a paradox: a statement
that at the same time is both true and false, and that cannot be unequivocally defined or
determined. There is a paradox hidden in any observation when we try to look at ourselves with
our own means of observation. We are all blind towards the distinction we are using in the
observation. We are not able to see that there is something we cannot see, and obviously we
cannot see what we do not see.
Similarly, organisations become blind to their own self-perception and culture. We assume that
our own subjective perception of reality is the big, objective whole, and we are blind to how
our prejudices and prior understanding colour our self-perception and view of the world.

Stories as Lying Maps
I have always loved maps, and as a boy I spent countless hours drawing detailed maps of super
villains bases, gloomy castles and far away fantasy worlds. What makes a map magical is the
scale: by setting a scale, you are able to create order from chaos by simplifying the complex and
make sense out of it. It is a delicate balance; if the scale is too large, you lose crucial details, and
if the scale is too small, you lose the overview.
As individuals and organisations, we use stories as maps to navigate life. Just like the scale of
maps, the straightforward explanations in stories offer a necessary simplification of the worlds
complexity. We are able to get an overview and be relieved to know who we are and what our
purpose in life is. The problem with all maps and stories is that they are also lies.
I never forget when I was seven years old and travelling to South America with my father. I had
to show a local friend where I came from and to my dismay discovered that on his map,
Denmark had been reduced to a northern bump on top of West Germany.

The scale of maps and the straightforward explanations in stories suppose harsh simplifications,
generalisations and misrepresentations. The Bibles story of the creation of the world in seven
days is sheer brilliance in terms of simplicity and explanatory power, but also leaves behind a
few questions.
In the following chapters, we are going to take a closer look at how humanity, through the
history of civilisation, has utilised stories to create meaning, and how these worldviews have
been gradually challenged and replaced by new stories.
To fathom our own time, in order to shape the future as active co-narrators, we first have to
understand the past.


First Generation Storytelling
the Grand Totalitarian Narratives

A Place Around the Fire I Am, Because I Am One of Us
Going all the way back to the dawn of civilisation, the first great story was the close-knit
community unified in the struggle for survival. Being a member of the family, the tribe, and
later the city state, was paramount. The alternative to a place by the campfire was death by
starvation. The close community of the family the clan was essential, and the world was
strictly divided into the known and the unknown.

Us and Them
We can only guess what the first human beings were thinking and adapted tens of thousands of
years ago, facing ice ages, wild animals and other humanoid species.
I would like to believe that our predecessors were good democrats who handled conflicts
amicably over herbal tea at big meetings in the tribal cave. It is, however, rather more realistic
that a tough hierarchy prevailed within the first tribal societies, similar to, for instance, what we
observe among herds of lions and monkeys. Among most monkeys, the price for safety and
comfort within the community is unconditional loyalty to the alpha couple, who will chase all
potential challengers away without second thought.
Whether a cosy basic democracy or dictatorship prevailed, our predecessors all belonged to the
tribe, from cradle to grave. The sheer thought of a life outside the community was
inconceivable and the demand for loyalty absolute. I was my fathers son and had no further
identity as an individual in a modern sense.
Through the centuries, the tribes gradually grew into settlements, city states and later the first
true nation states.
The first written sources describe early societies that were worshipping a narrow understanding
of culture and identity, often through alienation of and hostility towards everything outside the
community. Foreign people were seen as barbarians, and the tribe perceived itself as the
chosen people or the origin of civilisation. Naturally, we were the heroes in our own stories.
The association of the social community to the clan or tribe, rather than all humankind, shows
in the relationship to slaves: in many cultures, slavery is a perfectly natural thing that few would
bat an eyelid at.


The Demand for Loyalty
Devotion to the community was a prerequisite for membership and a place among the chosen.
We find one of the purest demands for unconditional loyalty in the ancient Greek city states,
where all male citizens were obliged to participate as soldiers (hoplites) in the so-called phalanx
in defence of the city. This was not only an obligation for young people. The philosopher
Socrates participated in the battle at Delium, 45 years old.
The phalanx was a tight, military formation, where soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder armed
with shields and spears. The big shields were carried in the left hand and were protecting not
only the soldier himself, but his fellow citizen next to him as well. Thus, the soldiers' life
depended on each other. The phalanx was an extremely efficient formation, but only as long as
each soldier fulfilled his role and held his position. If a soldier lost courage and broke the line,
everything could fall apart and the battle would be lost. To strengthen loyalty, the Greeks made
sure to place citizens in formation with their closest friends and relatives. Today we would call
this trick nudging, it maximised the shame and the consequences of disloyalty.
Among todays clans, the demand for unconditional loyalty is still crucial. This goes from the
oath of allegiance in gangster families to biker gangs distinguishing between good or bad
standing.
The close-knit community within the tribe and the clan, often linked to a particular location
where the land was farmed, was a strong and meaningful story for centuries. The clear
distinction between us and them created a worldview that made it easy to navigate.
This black and white worldview of the story, however, was challenged by population growth,
migration and rising complexity. A significant factor was the rise in trade with, among other
things, grain across the Mediterranean. Better ships and new trade routes created greater
integration and interdependence.
Civil wars were another factor.
The Greek city states, fronted by Athens, were united in a common battle against the Persians
from 490 to 479BC, but this unity collapsed and was replaced by bitter internal dispute in the
Peloponnesian War, which ended with a victory for Sparta over Athens. Similarly, Antiquitys
other empires, Rome not the least, were tormented by civil wars and internal fighting.
Alongside the challenges to the tribe story, a new, strong competitor emerged: the totalitarian
religions.

My Invisible Friend I am, Because I Serve God
After the tribe and the clan dominating the storytelling for tens of thousands of years, religion
arrives as a supplier of a more comprehensive and meaningful life. Gradually, the mysticism and

worship of nature by the primitive tribal societies were replaced by early civilisations
ingeniously constructed mythologies.
Every aspect of life and nature was explained through personification as goddesses and gods,
from the animal gods of Egypt, over the family of gods on Mount Olympus in Greece, to the
Viking gods of Asgard. The religions were offering simple explanations on all lifes big and small
questions. In Asia, the Vedic religion (the predecessor of both Hinduism and Buddhism) called
itself Sanatana Dharma, The Eternal Order.
Religion was a fabulous invention for reducing complexity and organise the world in a
meaningful way.
Gods as stories created by human is nothing new. In 500BC, the Greek poet, philosopher and
satirist Xenophanes wrote: If oxen and lions had hands and could paint with their hands and
produce works of art, as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses and oxen
like oxen. Each would represent them with bodies according to the bodies of each.
A decisive change happened in the Middle East around 2,000 years ago, with the invention of
the monotheistic religion. The nature of faith changed and became all encompassing.
Simply put, where the early religions supported the clan or the tribe as the definitive story, faith
was now elevated to being the purpose in and of itself. The big religions, led by Christianity and
later by Islam, showed remarkable efficiency in the competition to reduce complexity
effectively. No matter what kind of doubt or question, the priest could calm his congregation
with references to the parables in the Bible, and gods omnipotence.
Life as a farmworker in Europe in the Middle Ages was harsh, but every morning you woke up
to a totalitarian and all-encompassing worldview within which everything made sense.
The explanatory power of religion lasted from cradle to grave, generation after generation, and
the advance of the big religions went hand in hand with the construction of comprehensive
ecclesiastical institutions.
For centuries, the Catholic Church was honed to become an efficient marketing machine, with
its headquarters in Rome and sales offices in each and every hamlet across Europe. The
influence of religion in Europe was all-embracing and totalitarian at a level that even todays
Saudi Arabia can hardly match. The church and the faith held a dominant position in everything
from courts of law to science and art.
This was no less true after the Reformation. As an example, in 1569, the Danish king Frederik II
published the so-called Foreigner Articles, which required all foreign nationals in Denmark to
swear allegiance to Denmarks Lutheran Christianity. Those who refused, had to leave the
country within three days, or face execution.
Religion as the grand story, however, did not bring peace and tolerance to the faithful.

As one of my good friends, a historian, described it, Europeans began to kill each other by the
millions over whose invisible friend was most right.
One of the darkest chapters in the history of Europe was the Thirty Years War, which started
with internal fighting between Catholics and Protestants in Germany. The war was triggered in
1618 in Prague, where a group of Protestants hurled two representatives for the German-
Roman emperor, and their secretary, out of a window. They landed on a dunghill and survived
the fall, but the entire episode triggered a number of retaliations that developed into a
European-wide war. Even though the dispute began as a clash between Protestants and
Catholics, it all ended as a battle between superpowers France and the Habsburg Empire, both
Catholic. When a peace treaty was agreed in 1648, the so-called Peace of Westphalia, two
thirds of the population in southern Germany, where most of the battles took place, had lost
their lives.
In many ways the end of the Thirty Years War determined Europes later development.
Firstly, the peace pushed a shift in power, where religious leaders and heads of the church were
replaced by sovereign monarchs. The peace established the principle of cuius regio, eius
religio whose realm, his religion the ruler dictated the religion. Religion continued to have
an enormous influence on culture and society in Europe, but the church was now under the
kings control, and not vice versa.
The shift made room for new ideas, and facilitated the Age of Enlightenment and the following
centuries of new thinking within science, philosophy, art and politics.
Another decisive consequence was the birth of the national state, which became the driving
force behind the next big story: nationalism.

Mother Nation I Am, Because I Am Danish, and Not Swedish.
Not counting Germany, with all its small principalities and trading cities, the Thirty Years War
had consolidated homogenous and connected territories on the European map, each with a
strong central power.
Unlike earlier, the new rulers were now recognising each others sovereignty:
If you do not interfere in my internal affairs, I will not interfere in yours.
And the new rulers furiously consolidated their positions, especially in France, Sweden, the
Netherlands and Denmark. In Denmark this led to absolute monarchy in 1660, where the king
strengthened his divine authority and role as head of the church.


The State is Born to Serve the Army
The new sovereign states in northern and central Europe initiated a vigorous military build-up
in competition with each other. Previously, princes had controlled relatively small armies of
nobles and mercenaries, but now large standing armies were being organized and equipped. To
secure enough money to cover the huge expenses to pay and feed these large forces, the states
initiated substantial land and tax reforms. It was necessary to create advanced bureaucracies
and large bodies of civil servants, in order to implement these reforms. The modern state and
the public sector was born.
This development was forceful. The number of appointed civil servants in France, for example,
the so-called officiers, grew from 8,000 in 1520 to 45,000 in 1604, and was around 250,000 at
the time of the French Revolution in 1789.
Another testimonial to the development of the national states is the construction of castles and
fortifications in Europe. In France, for example, where castles and fortifications earlier has been
spread around the entire country to enable local nobles to secure their position against their
neighbours, all new fortifications were now built along the countrys outer borders.

The Exceptions in Europe
As an interesting side story, a number of European countries, for various reasons, were not
included in these dynamics of state creation, which have left their mark on Europe today.
One of these exceptions was Spain.
The discovery and subsequent looting of Central and South America resulted in a steady flow of
gold across the Atlantic Ocean, which undermined the local Spanish economy and created a
tremendous inflation. The gold meant that the Spanish king could afford to buy loads of
mercenaries and thus avoid to institute the new, troublesome reforms, which were instigated
further north to support new, large land armies.
The fact that Spain missed the necessity of having to establish effective tax systems and land
reforms, can be seen today in Spain, and the rest of Southern Europe, being a bit behind in
terms of developing effective government institutions and a sustainable welfare state.
Another exception was England.
Due to the Channel and a strong fleet, England was able to do without a big land army, which
the other European super powers felt obliged to invest in. Combined with a large income from
a growing colonial empire, this meant that England was able to skip a number of reforms.
Among other things, the English nobility have hung unto many of their privileges until this day.
Last, but not least, Greece should be mentioned as an exception.

At this point in time, Greece had been side-tracked in relation to the European development
and had to accept being a subject of the mighty Ottoman Empire towards southeast. The
problem of creating an effective tax collection system in modern day Greece was created
several hundred years ago, where tax fraud was considered a patriotic act and sticking it to the
Ottomans.

The State Becomes National
A problem for the new states was securing internal obedience among the population, along
with creating a reasonable basis for recruitment to the army. Thus, nationalism was invented as
a new grand story.
And I am using the term invented on purpose, because national identity was not something
that emerged by itself or by coincidence. It was a deliberate, political project, which was
efficiently implemented by the new state bureaucracies. Where the enemy image earlier had
been painted with the palette of religion, now national contrasts came into use.
Thus, the story about one motherland, populated by one, homogenous people speaking one
collective mother tongue, was invented. The new, national stories were initiated and reinforced
by well-organised cultural policies, which encompassed poets, writers, priests and school
systems.
The recipe was the same, every time: We had to become proud of things we did not do
ourselves, and hate people we had never met.
Other new inventions were dictionaries and spelling rules.
Where there had earlier been a diversity of languages (in Napoleonic France, only around 15
per cent of the population spoke French as in Paris), it now became important that the entire
nation was unified around one mother tongue and one national identity. Language became a
nationalistic battle field. The newly established school systems were focusing more on national
self-understanding and discipline than on academic knowledge.
The national project quickly became a success and went into self-perpetuating navel-gazing
the full power of Luhmanns self-referencing autopoiesis. The past was changed and re-
imagined to support the new, national stories.
The most supreme achievement of nationalism was the First World War. This was the pinnacle
of national self-glorification. Across Europes new parliaments, even the new worker partiers
voted for taking part in the war and millions of young men voluntarily walked into death under
the nationalistic paroles.
Stories are deadly serious.

The Birth of the Class Struggle I Am, Because I Am a Worker, and A Socialist
The sovereign national states and nationalism as grand stories were a success, but right in the
middle of this success, the seeds of their future demise were sown.
The growing bureaucracy and the rise in trade, accelerated by the new colonies, created a new,
strong middle class: the bourgeoisie. The proletariat, the new lower class in the growing
industrial sociality, closely followed. Along with the middle classes, a new challenger to the big
story emerged: the ideologies.
Liberalism and the demand for civil rights became the first ideology pivoting around the French
and the American revolutions, and soon other isms followed: from the working classs Marxism,
socialism and later Social Democratic movement to counter ideologies like conservatism and
fascism.
The reason for there being space for nationalism and ideologies as new, grand stories at all was
primarily because religion and the church had lost their previous totalitarian positions. The
Enlightenment and the advance of natural science were challenging the old dogmas of the
church, and the clergy became busy modernising their story to make it fit the spirit of the
time.
One ironic offshoot of this process is evident in todays Denmark, where most Danes will argue
that the current democratic welfare state is built on Christian values. But that is
misrepresentation of facts. Historically, the church has strongly opposed any initiatives in terms
of civil rights, from universal suffrage to equal rights for women. Luther was not a democrat. He
was preaching both anti-Semitism and total obedience to the king and, within the family, to the
man. The church has always been, also in Denmark, a conservatory force, which only
modernized itself long after the rest of society had moved on. The position on homosexuality,
divorce, abortion and female priests are only but a few examples.
The advance of the ideologies was channelling the frustrations within the two new, growing
classes: the middle class and the working class.
In many ways, this was a young peoples revolt. The protests were against the totalitarian
systems of the past and the ruling nobility/elite. The industrialisation and the tremendous
migration towards the cities helped unbalance the power structures, and from these ashes rose
the modern democracies of Europe. In some places, in Scandinavia, for example, the change
happened relatively peacefully, while in other places in Europe there were bloody civil wars and
inconceivable suffering.
The battle between the ideologies did not mean the fall of nationalism, but nationalism was
incorporated and re-written into the stories of the ideologies, from Stalins national
communism to the fascists worship of race, blood and nationality.

Where the First World War was the war of nationalism, the Second World War became the war
of ideologies. An epic drama between the fascist Axis powers against totalitarian communism
and the liberal capitalism of the West.
While the wars of the past between superpowers under the nationalism story were relatively
rational affairs, where long-term advantages and disadvantages were taken into consideration,
the fights between the ideologies were driven by a never before seen merciless madness and
bloodlust. It was truly Totaler Krieg, total war.
From the Nazi mass killings and Stalins purges and deportations to Japans self-eradication and
the allied terror bombardments. Where earlier the army had to serve the nation, it now
became the people who had to sacrifice themselves for the ideology.

The Victory of Capitalism and the End of the Class Struggle
The decade after the Second World War became the last of the grand stories.
The growth engine of capitalism in the 50s and 60s, along with the emerging welfare states in
Western Europe, contributed to soften the ruthless divisions within the class struggle, which
had fuelled the hatred between the ideologies in the past. Along with that, the original enemy
of the middle and working classes, the old reactionary nobility, was being pushed back by the
new, privileged elite of capitalism.
The young democracies slowly and hesitantly began to loosen the pasts suppression and
paternalism. In Denmark, we got freedom of religion in 1849, women and poor got the right to
vote in 1915 and the Danish authorities, in the 1960s, reluctantly put an end to forced
sterilisation of the mentally ill, Greenlanders and hysterical women.
The youth rebellion in the late 60s became the swansong of the ideologies as the big story.

Generation I
Let us call our ancestors who lived under the totalitarian stories for Generation I. I was born in
1972, so in my case, they are my great grandparents and their ancestors.
It is not that long ago.
My grandmothers big story was political. She was a Social Democrat and had lived through
both poverty and the tough side of the class struggle in her childhood and youth in the 20s and
30s. For her, it was unthinkable to vote anything but Social Democrat, even though she in her
old age became more and more worried about non-white immigrants, and easily could have
been sympathetic towards the right-wing populist parties of today, like the Danish Peoples
Party.

She was well until she died, two days before her 100th birthday. The congratulations from the
Queen was already in the mail.
Today, it is almost impossible to imagine the total dominance the big stories had on Generation
I. They were all-encompassing worldviews that left no aspect of life to personal freedom. The
stories were mental prisons from cradle to grave, generation after generation, similar to a
lifelong all-inclusive holiday stay in terms of opinion. For the common people, it was almost
impossible to think about new alternatives and there was no language or terminology to put
scepticism or new, heretical thoughts into words.
But at the same time, while it was terrible, a dumbing down and oppressive, it was also secure,
manageable and safe. Because the world made sense and there were ready answers to almost
any question. The priest in the church or the patriarchal leader controlled the truth. There is
clarity when there is only one paternal voice to fear inside your head, cf. Mead.
Here is a brief summary of Generation I:
The world was true
The grand stories simplified the complexity of life to something simple and meaningful.
One holistic package with explanations for all lifes questions.
There were truth and wisdom in the world. Rarely, you were in doubt about what was
expected of you, which punishments and rewards were waiting for you in this life and
the next.
You were among people with the same worldview, which you mutually helped to
confirm among you.
You were your fathers son

You were nothing in and of yourself, but only by virtue of your parent.
You were your fathers son and could never forget to honour, obey and protect the
community.
Your family name was a brand of duty and honour.
Only expulsion, perdition and hunger waited for you, should you turn your back on the
family.
Everything was determined
Your life story was not up for debate.

Your personal view and happiness was not important.
You had to serve the authorities and maintain the big story.
Everything was dictated by tradition and necessity, from your job, whom you should
marry, where you should live and what you should think.

There was a plan, and your success in life depended on following it.
Life was evil
Life was hard and violence was a natural part of everyday life.
You were punished physically by the authorities, and as a grownup, you were expected
to punish.
Children were punished into obedience, women into submission and subjects into
apathy.
Violence drove back doubt and rebellious thoughts.

Towards the Next Era of Storytelling
We have looked at four grand stories in our outline of the history of civilisation the clan,
religion, nationalism and ideology which have succeeded each other.
This is, of course, very much a simplification.
Firstly, the grand stories have continuously been developing internally Christianity in the
Roman Empire was something completely different to Christianity during the Renaissance
and, secondly, the grand stories have influenced each other and intertwined. Both religion and
ideology have been painted in the colours of nationalism and the clan mentality is by far dead
and gone.
One might rightly argue that there are other candidates for grand stories that should have been
included, such as science, capitalism or the Enlightenment. Perhaps that is true, but in my view,
most of the candidates fall under the ideologies, which were placeholders and battlefields for
new trends during the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s.
My presentation also has been quite focused on Europe from Antiquitys Mediterranean to
Northern Europe as the hotbed for the industrialisation. Although there have been significant
developments in other parts of the world, which have followed other routes than those I have
described, Europe has, for better or for worse, dominated the development of modern society
and the creation of states worldwide.
From the spread of Christianity, via the paternalism of the colonial era to the global market of
capitalism. Europes history has become the history of the world.
What can we expect after the grand totalitarian stories?
Are they gone, or are new ones emerging, which we have not yet managed to put into words?
In the next chapter, we will delve into our postmodern times and investigate the possibilities
and the challenges that come with mental liberation from the totalitarian stories.

How do we create meaning when we are responsible for it ourselves?

Second Generation Storytelling
the Postmodern Chaos

The Individual Discovers Itself
What was common for the grand totalitarian stories were the subjugation of the individual in
relation to the community. Your identity, status and legitimacy were in your ancestry, your faith
and your nationality. You were worth nothing as of yourself, you were your fathers son. The
stories have served the governing authorities as channels for social control and indoctrination
of youth.
A new individualism slowly emerged alongside the grand stories gradually losing their
infallibility and overall power. The meaning of life became a private matter: I can choose who I
am, how I see myself in society and how I think the world works. The mental chains came under
pressure and finally broke. It was no longer enough to clock in at baptism or with your party
membership in an all-encompassing worldview. Suddenly, you had to find the answer to lifes
great questions yourself.
There have been rebels and freethinkers since Antiquity, but becoming independent as a freely
thinking individual, which gradually came forward and accelerated from the Enlightenment in
the 1700s, was a relatively new experience for common people.
Similar to other fads, individualism only initially set in among a small group of first-movers, in
this case the privileged at Europes royal courts and the well-off bourgeoisie.

From Common Hearth to Personal Fireplace
Which technological advance has been the most significant for the development of humanity?
Is it the wheel?
The steam engine?
The printing press?
Or perhaps the Internet?
It might be the chimney.
No home without a fireplace. In the beginning, the fireplace was at the centre of the home. You
might say that the home began with the fireplace, the hearth.

We know from archaeological excavations that the first hunters and gatherers lived in tents and
huts that were constructed around a simple fireplace in the middle, and a hole in the roof,
which allowed the smoke to escape. Here they cooked and huddled together during the long
winter nights, in order to keep warm.
When we began to farm the earth and created the first permanent cities, tents and huts were
replaced by stone and adobe walls, but the fireplace stayed where it was: at the centre of the
home.
Throughout the history of civilisation, our houses grew bigger and mankind developed
sophisticated decorations and pompous architecture, but in terms of our fireplaces,
development was almost non-existent. The entire household, from the royal seats of the Viking
age to the castles of the Middle Ages, gathered around the same, central source of heat in the
middle of the house. Even the lord of a manor did not have his own heated room. His private
life was often limited to an alcove, only separated from the rest of the household by a fur or a
blanket. Everyone had to gather in the big hall with the central fireplace. The farm animals
joined in when it was particularly cold.
An open fireplace in the middle of a room, with a simple hole for smoke in the ceiling, is,
engineering-wise, a miserable solution. The heat utilisation is lousy and smoke and soot create
a terrible indoor environment.
That is why it was a ground-breaking achievement when the first fireplaces with real chimneys
were introduced. One of the earliest examples is from 1185 at Conisbrough Castle in Yorkshire,
but it was not until the 1700s and 1800s that fireplaces with chimney became prevalent in
Europe.
The special thing about a chimney is that, on top of better heat utilisation, it makes it possible
to individually heat smaller rooms. Suddenly, members of the privileged classes, initially the
nobility, later the bourgeoisie, were able to have their own rooms. And with the private,
physical room came the private, mental room individuality.
Alongside the chimney, two other technological developments played a defining role in the
acceleration of modern individuality.

The Book as a Mass Medium
The invention of the printing press created the first mass medium: the book.
Where books of the past had been written and illustrated by hand, incredibly expensive and
reserved for a small elite of nobility and clergy, Gutenbergs printing press from 1440 made it
possible to mass produce the written word (in China and Korea, this had already begun
centuries earlier).

The new, printed books became an instant hit in Europe, and in 1500, more than 20 million
copies had been produced in over 200 European cities. The accessible and relatively affordable
books made it possible for a larger part of the population to read, write and acquire new
knowledge and, not the least, rebel against this knowledge.
Beforehand, the Bible had only existed in Latin, to be read only by the clergy. Now it was
translated to ordinary languages and became a bestseller. It was now possible for people to
relate to the holy scripture, and it was possible to ask questions and think differently about the
world.
The art of printing, like other technological breakthroughs, became both liberating and
oppressive. The dissemination of books inspired critical thinking, but was also used for
propaganda and indoctrination by the new, protestant clergy and by the more and more
powerful kings.
Without Gutenberg, we would hardly know the name of Martin Luther today, and the
Reformation, which broke the Popes monopoly on power and split Europe into two, would not
have ended up the way we know it. Rarely has one mans ingenuity put such a mark on the
history of the world.

From Post to Public
Another important new development was the modern post service.
The modern post services were established as part of building the modern state system under
the sovereign kings of Europe. Suddenly, it was possible to post letters, regularly and reliably,
across countries in a few days. It quickly became popular to correspond at a distance from
political discourses to romantic flirting. In combination with the book, and later the newspaper,
it created the foundations for nationalism and what one might call public discourse a public
debate about society and the world emerged.
In the beginning this debate was faltering and strictly censored by the power of the king, but
nonetheless the seed that would eventually kill off the grand stories had been sown.
At the same time, a new situation emerged, which allowed noble ladies and members of the
bourgeoisie to sit in their own heated rooms, contemplating life and existence. And they were
even able to exchange these thoughts with like-minded through letters or books.


The Flirt as Accelerator
In modern times, there are several examples that development has been dictated by the porn
industry. It meant, for example, that the VHS video format pushed aside the technologically
superior Betamax in the early 80s. Towards the end of the 1700s, it was also the forces of love
that accelerated development. The invention of romantic love helped to accelerate the growing
industrialisation.
Letter correspondence made it possible to flirt at a distance, and the utopian and tragic love
story about the one and only (sitting out of reach in her chamber in a castle across the
kingdom) became a fad that spread across Europe like wildfire. Some of the best examples are
Pierre Choderlos de Lacloss letter novel Dangerous Liaisons from 1782 and The Sorrows of
Young Werther by Goethe from 1774. The latter became a huge public bestseller and was
banned, among other places, in Copenhagen due to fear that it might inspire young men to
commit suicide.
The new, strong bourgeoisie class, tried to copy the status symbols and culture from the old
elite, the nobility. People were chasing a romanticised image of the nobilitys love life, in much
the same way the bourgeoisies new uniform, the suit, was a simplified copy of mens fashion
within the nobility.
The new, romanticised image of love was worshipping the individual, personal reflection and
the clash with authorities.

From Gods Bible to Pixi Books
The demise of the grand stories marked the end of an epoch with thousands of years of mental
slavery, but also left behind a vacuum in terms of meaning.
This vacuum was no longer able to be filled by one single authoritarian worldview, but instead
had to be managed by every individual, who now had sole responsibility for answering lifes big
questions. Another generation of stories had stepped in: the postmodern chaos.
This generation has been dominating since the end of the Second World War and until today.
When people woke up in their cold bed in the Middle Ages and had to find their place in the
world, they only had to think about the Bible in the church to make everything make sense.
Reality was dictated, and it was not up for discussion what was right and wrong.
When you wake up today, it is a much more complicated task to make sense of life, because
you do not only have the freedom to do so, but also the responsibility to create meaning. And
we still have the need to find meaning outside ourselves it is not enough for Ask simply being
Ask.

The vacuum after the demise of the grand stories has been filled by the enticing siren song of
capitalism. Meaning and identity has become a commodity with numerous salespeople.
Many surveys have shown that we on a daily basis are being attacked by thousands of brands
advertising signs, online banners, newspaper ads, NGO-salespeople, trying to sell us meaning in
small grab-n-go-packages.
This is not unlike waking up each morning with 10,000 Pixi books (tiny children's books,
especially popular in Germany and Denmark) at the end of the bed, not being able to continue
with our daily life until we have pieced together a worldview of a handful of tiny stories.
Ask is Ask because I wear Hugo Boss, buy organic vegetables, use a Mac computer, support
Doctors Without Borders, drive an old Mitsubishi, and so on.

The Society Without a Centre
The end of the first generation of stories is also about a power shift in society.
The grand authoritarian stories have always been used in order to legitimise the position of the
ruling powers, from the Pope as Gods spokesperson, over King by the grace of God to Hitlers
command. Throughout history, the development of ever more advanced forms of organisation,
combined with the legitimacy of the big stories, have made it possible for the rulers to
institutionalise and centralise the positions of power to an extreme degree. This development
culminates under the European absolute monarchies, symbolised by the French Sun King Louis
XIVs arrogant statement: Ltat, cest moi I am the state.
It is difficult today to imagine how extreme the centralised power was at the time.
Under the absolute monarchy in Denmark, established in 1660 under King Frederik III, the
hierarchical control of society was so all-encompassing that a ranking was introduced to keep
an eye on how the different public institutions and positions related to each other. The ranking
showed, for example, that the Dean of the University of Copenhagen was slightly higher ranked
than the Kings Master of the Royal Stables, who on the other hand was more important than a
Bishop or Colonel in the army. The place on the ranking ruthlessly dictated who had to bow to
whom, and who should let others pass when meeting in the narrow streets of Copenhagen. In
fact, this ranking still exists. It dictates, for example, who are allowed to join the Queens fancy
parties in Denmark to this date.
But in the 1800s, the central powers grip on society began to crumble, and in Denmark it
culminated with the abolition of absolute monarchy in 1848. The increasing complexity of
society during the Enlightenment and the early industrialisation fuelled powers, which gradually
diluted the monarchs direct control.

Luhmanns autopoiesis term, which we briefly mentioned earlier, describes this process very
sharply. In other words, it became impossible for the king and his close allies to decide on
everything themselves, and gradually a process of delegation and sharing of duties emerged, in
which many public functions became autonomous as independent domains and institutions,
which again began to define themselves and create their own meaning. From courts of law and
national bank to parliament and state church.
The king was no longer able to choose what was beautiful art, true science, spiritual salvation,
right and wrong, etc. Paradoxically, this leaking of formal power has led to a situation where
Denmarks official head of state, the Queen, today only has the right to be portrayed on a
stamp. Her realm, the nation of Denmark, has become overall much more powerful and
efficient, but her own actual power has disappeared in the meantime.
The modern society has lost its centre. There is no elevated position from where to control and
get an overview.
But what about the prime minister and the parliament? They are in power and have the say in
what happens in a democracy. Yes, they have the power to create laws and make decisions, but
truth is that the ability of the government and parliament to control long-term development of
society has become relatively marginal. Politically, we are unable to foresee, understand or
control the most significant threats against society, whether it is the financial crisis and the
lacking ability to create economic growth, or climate change and the current challenges in
relation to migration into Europe.
Even when politicians try take on a declared problem, it is almost impossible to achieve the
desired effects you only have to look at the attempts in the last decade to get the European
economy growing again, to do something about youth employment in the south of Europe or to
handle the immigration issues in the US.
Historically speaking, it is a unique privilege to be born in a time where we, as opposed to our
ancestors, in fact have the freedom to choose and define our own worldview and identity. That
is a blessing after more than 400 generations of mental slavery. But with the freedom also
comes a great responsibility: the curse of modern life.
Because what if I make the wrong decision? And how do you know what the right decision is?
Let us take a closer look at some of the downsides.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall...
The first problem is narcissism, the fact that we come more occupied with how other people
perceive us than what is actually meaningful in itself. Narcissism is nourished by doubt and
insecurity. Because modern life is without certainty. There is no God to dictate the truth. This
means that we are always carrying a doubt in the back of our minds:

Am I doing the right thing?
Am I living the life I should?
Who am I?
And when we become insecure, we are looking for certainty and recognition outside ourselves.
We find an audience, Meads generalised Me, which we can use as a mirror and arbiter of
taste.
If I struggle with finding out who I am, or what I am supposed to do with my life, it is reassuring
to gauge myself based on reactions from family, friends and the outside world. I am trying to
second guess what others are expecting from me, and live based on that.
A certain amount of narcissism is probably a basic condition in modern life, but for many people
it goes too far. The utopian beauty ideals in advertising, the omnipresent rush of
acknowledgment in social media and the self-presentation in reality TV all contribute to the
cultivation of doubt and the need for external acknowledgment.
Recently, I was in Venice, for the first time in this amazing city. As could be expected, there
were many tourists, but what surprised me was the widespread popularity of selfie sticks. They
were being sold in every alley and were extremely popular. Every time you turned a corner, you
faced the danger of being impaled by a smartphone on a stick, which was carried like a
bowsprit. It was striking that for many tourists, it was much more important to take pictures of
themselves in Venice, rather than experiencing the city itself.
To use Meads terminology again, in the past we had to battle in our minds against an
authoritarian Me, which had been dictated by the grand stories, via our parents. World
literature is full of precisely this fight for liberation and the struggle to find I, our own
existence within ourselves.
Today, too many people spend their energy on replacing the missing authoritarian Me with a
constant stream of immediate acknowledgments. The consequence is that it becomes harder
still to feel what actually has meaning to us we lose the sense of our inner I.

When Everything Makes No Difference
Another problem is nihilism, indifference. Today, all our big and small choices are an expression
of our identity and attitude to life. If you criticise my hair or my shirt, you are not targeting my
hairdresser or tailor. You are attacking my very identity. Thus, we easily become sensitive and
vulnerable to attacks.
Sometimes we agree to an informal truce in order to protect ourselves against criticism: if you
do not criticise me, then I will not interfere with your affairs. We are turning our backs on each

other and are accepting a nihilistic premise that nothing matters. You have your opinion and I
have mine, and we are renouncing any attempt to influence each others position.
It is possible to positively view this nihilism as healthy tolerance we all have to be here and all
attitudes are essentially equally good. In my opinion, this is a dangerous path, because
democracy, and life, is not about a mutual truce, it is about giving in to each other and discuss
our opinions in order to influence society and each other.
More and more I see a troublesome tendency: people are lacking a deeper rooting of their
values. They do not know their own moral and attitudinal compass and are therefore easily
pushed off course.
This tendency shows in recent European and American elections, which have seen surprisingly
large fluctuations within the electorate. From the surprising election of President Donald Trump
and the success of Bernie Sanders to Brexit.

In Denmark good examples could be the success of the right-wing Danish Peoples Party at the
Election for the European Parliament in 2014 (where it became the biggest Danish party
represented) to the new Danish left-green political party The Alternative (which swept into the
Danish parliament in 2015 with nearly 5% of the vote, only two years after its inception). Voter
loyalty certainly is not what it used to be.
Another aspect is the shift in opinion in Danish politics and in the Danish population regarding
refugees and integration. The Danish Peoples Party has been able, within a decade and with
good help from the governing liberal party and the Social Democrats, to push an agenda, which
has pushed Denmark away from its own past and the rest of the Nordic countries. Opinions and
phrases, which outside Denmark would be considered both racist and deeply controversial, are
fully legitimate and widespread in the Danish political debate.
The left wings lack of interest in the real frustrations and xenophobia among many ordinary
Danes, alongside the Danish non-Socialist parties effectively protecting the Danish Peoples
Partys position and rhetoric in relation to refugees, has altogether moved the countrys values.
An example of this change in opinion is the Danes reaction to the refugees from the war in
Syria. In the 90s, a time where Denmark had a considerable higher unemployment rate and a
weaker economy, the country accepted 22,000 refugees from the war in Yugoslavia. Today,
nearly 20 years later, it is politically contentious to accept only 1,000 refugees from Syria.
Nihilism has consequences when misunderstood; intolerance makes us blind to values plunging.

A Life on the Surface
A third problem is the lack of contemplation.

When I grew up in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, in the 80s, I tried all sorts of
hobbies: I participated in swimming, athletics, music, recorder, karate, aikido and football. I
even tried sail boat racing and walked around in a boy scout uniform. I only stayed on when I
eventually discovered role-playing games and later Philippine martial arts.
All the more momentary activities I participated in had in common that I initially found them
fun, but quickly lost interest, especially if it became a little hard and demanding. It was like tiny
children books: quickly read and then you grab another.
I believe that many people are able to recognise this pattern. Many activities are initially fun,
but when you have tried things, often another and more interesting offer comes along. It is
difficult to keep going and concentrate. We become impatient.
One consequence of quickly substituting tiny stories is that we begin to identify ourselves with
the turnover of stories by itself. Within fashion, it used to be the case that a particular piece of
clothing created identity in high school I imagined that I would become just a little bit more
cool in a rebellious rock n roll kind of way, by wearing Levis jeans. The trademarks delivered
meaning and identity via their brands. This happens today as well, of course, but for many
people it is shopping itself, the turnover, which has become the central story. It is more
important to buy something, than what you bring home to your wardrobe.3
Something similar is happening within entrepreneurship. When I finished high school, I spent a
fumble year, where I was working and engaging myself in the cultural entrepreneur-milieu in
Aarhus called Frontlberne (Frontrunners), from which the KaosPilots International School of
New Business Design and Social Innovation originates.
We were creating a lot of different cultural projects, from concerts and big parties to weird
cultural events. I was at the bottom of the hierarchy as a roadie, scene builder and bartender. It
was lots of fun, but afterwards it struck me how little the actual content of the different
projects meant. We were project creators, and in reality could be bought by anyone with an
idea and a little money (it nearly went wrong once, where we were helping the trade-union
movement arranging First of May festivities, and one thoughtless activist had managed to get a
sponsorship agreement with McDonalds, who the trade-union opposed openly at the time).
Once upon a time, inventors and entrepreneurs were driven by their passion for their idea.
They were eager for their project and the project made sense. What I experienced at
Frontlberne, and many times since, was that the definitive story was getting something
started. We become blind project creators and serial entrepreneurs who love to be passionate
about a project any project whatsoever.
Unfortunately, turnover as the meaningful story is also something you see in romantic
relationships. For many people, the flirt itself is the most interesting part. It is more important
to be part of the romantic game than whom you actually end up with under the sheets.

There is a danger that, no matter in which part of life, the turnover of stories takes precedence.
We are becoming worse and worse at holding on and contemplating, and we become distant to
ourselves and each other. Everything becomes an indifferent game a game where it matters
to participate and where nobody is bothered thinking about what the game is about or how it
should end.

The War on Meaning
Modern life is a paradox. We all want to be unique individuals, something special, and by that
we all look alike. We are competing to be outside the competition, and our attempts to be
different make us all the same. And the thirst for meaning and knowledge is quickening.
Capitalism has grown into an experience economy, where today every aspect of life and society
is part of the battlefield where millions of brands are fighting formidable battles to steal our
limited attention. The message vendors are getting louder and louder, and are employing more
and more dirty tricks, in line with that we all become more and more immune to traditional
marketing.
From content/native marketing (another word for advertising, which cannot look like
advertising) and product placement (advertising, which we should not be aware of) to cross-
media, where the advertising messages hopefully are catching our attention in a crossfire
between all media platforms.
But the merchants of capitalism are not the only ones with something to sell.
The grand stories from the first generation may have been dethroned, but they have not given
up the struggle, far from it. Especially religion and nationalism are tenaciously trying to rise
from the grave, like vampires by night.
In line with the fact that the wider population, in what we slightly condescending call the Third
World, are slowly but steadily becoming less and less fundamentalist in relation to religion (the
best example being Indonesia, with a quarter of a billion inhabitants and the worlds most
highly populated Muslim country), the belief in invisible friends have experienced a revival in
the developed world.
In the US today, it is impossible to become elected as president without being a declared
Christian, and the religious right-wing today has such a degree of influence within the
Republican party that they were able to bully the Speaker of the United States House of
Representatives, and third-highest in the US state hierarchy, John Boehner, to step back.
Similarly, religion is a growing influence in Russia, where the orthodox church has endorsed
president Putin and his offensive foreign policy warmly.

Other examples are Israel and Turkey, where religious fundamentalism is on the rise in
societies, which only few decades ago were more secularised.
Observing the Middle East, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that religious fundamentalism is
on the rise among the wider population. I doubt that is the case. What we are seeing is rather
that rebellious groups like Daesh (Islamic State) and the ruling dictators see an advantage in a
more and more extreme and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, in order to harvest
legitimacy when becoming under pressure. They pretend to be carriers of the religious story,
but are showing a completely different set of values in their actions.
Increasingly, nationalism is also showing its well-known face. After decades of European
brotherhood and cooperation, the EU is beginning to crack because of the Greek debt crisis, the
civil war in Ukraine, the British exit and the growing pressure from migration.
In many countries, Denmark included, there is now focus on the European differences, rather
than on what we have in common. The European community has become a party, where
everyone is trying to get the most out of it without ending up having to do the dishes.
In parliamentary terms, nationalism is on the rise, led by strongly nationalistic political parties
Golden Dawn in Greece, Front National in France, UKIP in the UK, the Danish Peoples Party in
Denmark, Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden and Alternative fr Deutschland in Germany. The
ascending of Donald Trump and his promises of wall-building in the US follow the same
trajectory.
Even though nationalism is getting more and more influence and space in the media, there are
decisive differences between the situation today and during the first generation of stories.
Today, most fundamentalists are well aware of the existence of alternative worldviews. They
have not been raised in totalitarian chains, where the sheer idea that the world was created in
more than seven days was unthinkable. To a wide extent, it has become an active choice to
become a member of the authoritarian stories, in a search for wisdom and community in a
chaotic world with far too many choices.
For many people, religion and nationalism have become a snack size story to quench the
immediate thirst for authenticity and meaning. Copenhagen gang members play jihadists on
weekend trips to the Syrian civil war, and return to their previous life with alcohol and partying
when they get back, in direct opposition to the Korans messages of tolerance, respect and
helpfulness. Or when ordinary nice people cover their faces in war paint to feel the rush for a
couple of hours by chanting hymns at a soccer or football stadium, and fight the other teams
supporters after the match.
For some, the flirt with the old, totalitarian stories is a short, youthful digression, while others
get completely drawn in. The Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, the left-wing
Blekingegade gang in Copenhagen and the Charlie Hebdo shooting are all scary examples of
how bad it can turn out.

Generation II
Lets call us, who grew up in the privileged world after the Second World War, for Generation II.
Vi were born and shaped by the postmodern chaos. Some, like my grandparents and parents,
lived through the very liberation from the totalitarian stories in the decades after the war, while
my own generation came later, in the aftermath of the youth rebellions in the 60s and 70s. In
line with the decline of the grand stories, the branding machines of the market forces hit us like
a tsunami. Consumer society was born.
Important characteristics for us who grew up in Generation II:
Nothing is true
The great truths have collapsed and nothing is certain or given anymore.
The truth has become a battlefield, where politicians, companies and interest
organisations are fighting.
Natural science is constantly breaking new ground, which adds to the complexity of the
world.
We never experience complete certainty or absence of risk.
You are yourself
You are free from your family, free to be lonely.

The old communities mechanisms of inclusion, which functioned as an authoritative,
but also convenient autopilot, have been replaced with powerful centrifugal forces.
The community is not a given and if we take a wrong step, we are allowed to fall.
Nothing is decided
What do you want to do with your life? What are you going to study? What do you want
to do? Who do you want to love? Infinite possibilities are open to us, but nevertheless
we feel unable to do anything.
We are flooded by choice in a world of questions and only few answers.
We are constantly being held responsible for our choices, towards each other and
ourselves.
Life is empty
We are privileged and isolated from the atrocities and harsh necessities from the past.
Life is no longer a fight for survival. But what is life then?
We have to be responsible ourselves to fill up our day and inner space.
And there are no directions to help us make the right choice.


We Need a Third Generation of Storytelling
No matter how we measure it, we live in golden times with unique possibilities to live the good
life. Only a few generations back, our ancestors would have shaken their heads if they had
heard that some of the biggest problems for people of today are obesity (too much food),
stress (too much work) and old-age loneliness (too low mortality).
We are not only living in privileged times in Denmark, Europe and USA (even though growing
inequality continues to be a growing problem), amazing progress is happening on a global scale:
Infant mortality is record low, millions are leaving poverty behind and more and more people
get an education. The fear of the past of becoming over-populated has changed into concern
about too low birth rates.
It is only looking truly gloomy when it comes to climate and environment we have created the
biggest threat to our welfare and survival ourselves. The good thing is that there is nothing
preventing us from dealing technologically and resource-wise with the climate and
environmental challenges. Only our own reluctance to take responsibility and pay our part of
the bill prevents a solution.
But why are we not happier since everything is going so well? Why are two Danes committing
suicide every day? Why are millions of children and young people world-wide on anti-
depressive medication? And why are happiness surveys showing a significant decline since
2006?4
I believe a major part of the explanation for this can be found within the chaos of the second
generation of stories.
Young people especially find it hard to navigate life, being bombarded with the tsunami of small
stories from the market and the grand totalitarian narratives alluring siren song from the
grave. For many in Generation II, freedom is a curse.
But there is reason to be hopeful: a new generation of stories is marching forward. A new
generation, which is turning the relationship between sender and recipient on its head, is on its
way, and it heralds a fundamental change in the way we should be thinking about citizenship,
cooperation, management and marketing.
Welcome to the third generation of storytelling.

Third Generation Storytelling
Joint Ownership and Involvement

The Eye of the Dragon
You can show a dragon in two ways. The Hollywood way is to fully show the dragon in the
middle of the big screen. Built by papier-mch or computer-generated. It may be done more
or less convincing, but despite the quality, it will never be possible to present the ultimate
dragon to everyone in the audience. Because we each have our own unique vision of the
perfect dragon.
Is it green or red?
Has it got one or three heads?
If we show a specific dragon, we will never get it right.
The other way is not to show the dragon at all. It is lying in the back of the cave, covered in
shadow. We notice the eye, which glows in the dark, and hear the faint sound of a scaly tail
against a cave wall. We just have enough information to get our imagination into motion and
finish the dragon on our inner screen. And now the dragon is perfect for every member of the
audience.
When imagination is allowed to be co-narrator, things become real to us.
This is roughly how I remember film director Lars von Trier shared a metaphor at one of our
early work meetings. In 1997, I had moved from my birthplace Aarhus in Denmark to the
coveted capital of Copenhagen. Yet another guy lured by the call of the big city.
My plan, which was not thought through, was to finish my last course at the university, finish
my dissertation in political science and then look for those jobs in public administration that my
parents back home in Aarhus would understand.
That was not the way things were going to turn out.
After only a few weeks in the metropolis, I got a call from the film company Zentropa, who
wanted to know if I would like to help Lars von Trier as a creative consultant. They were not
interested in politics, but von Trier was involved in some projects where he needed help with
regards to interactive storytelling and game dynamics.
I have been an enthusiastic role-play, board game and video gamer since I was a small boy, and
at this point in time I had written a lot of role-playing scenarios and published a game system
together with a friend.

Somehow I had been recommended to Zentrope as one who knew something about game
design in Denmark, and together with a handful of other young enthusiasts from the Danish
gaming scene, I was shanghaied to the small team that was going to aid von Trier. That became
the beginning of the next 10 years of my working life, where I was part of or associated to
Zentropa, eventually the biggest and most successful film company in Scandinavia.
During this time, my unfinished dissertation in political science was hibernating, and I am sure
that in periods my parents were wondering what exactly I was doing, and when I was going to
leave all the creative hubbub behind and get a real job. I was busy searching for and creating
my own story, instead of entering the classical career track as a would-be civil servant.

Meta Stories
The metaphor with the dragon is a small, but powerful, example of what can happen when
stories invite their audience inside, when imagination becomes a fellow player and you as the
sender of a story take your recipient seriously. The communication changes from persuasion to
involvement.
The third generation of stories is about meta stories. Stories about storytelling.
It is directly at odds with the power and supremacy of the sender. We are creating the meaning
ourselves by participating and making a difference.
The Bible of the first generation, or the second generations mountain of Pixi books, has been
replaced with a notebook with blank pages. The reader is a co-creator with a pen in hand.
Where we during the second generation were using our new-found freedom to choose
between other peoples stories, we now take the opportunity to create our own meaningful
narratives.
The third generation of stories has been on the way for a while, but has only begun to gain
momentum in the last decade. It was earlier living in the shadows of the other big stories, but
now it is beginning to rival the second generation as the driving force of our time.
Let us take a look at some of the places where this is most apparent.

Tracks in Time: From Sourdough to Maker-Labs
Identity no longer is something you can buy. You have to get to work.
Some years ago, it was all about the sourdough; real Danish men from the creative class do not
just go to the bakery. You also had to brew your own beer and experiment with cascade hops
and over-fermented IPA in dark cellars in Copenhagen, together with your small guild of co-

conspirators. You should no longer buy your bicycle in the supermarket either. These days it has
to be hand built with specially imported parts from the San Francisco, Australia or China.
Today, my friends are devoted to designing their own board games, and when we are able to
afford it, I am sure we are going to build our own drones. Plus, when you become a parent,
your kids present themselves as an inexhaustible project, offering identity and self-realisation
24/7.
Both among men and women, there are strong traditions for meaningful stories about creating
something yourself. From my fathers stamp collection and my mother's knitting to my
grandfathers lathe in the basement under the terraced house in the small town of Hjrring in
Northern Denmark. Many of these pastimes started as practical necessities, after which they
developed into being something more and more recreational hunting is only one example
among many.
The latest offer in the field of personal creativity is the so-called maker movement, where
enthusiasts meet up in special maker or hacker labs. Imagine something like your old schools
woodworking workshop, but with added 3D printers, computer-controlled milling machines and
advanced scanners. There exists today a global network of such labs, where thousands of
enthusiasts are developing and building advanced things, which only a few years ago were
reserved for big companies. The latest addition is bio hacking, where DNA is being programmed
instead of software, and where schoolchildren suddenly are able to create their own luminous
fern by adding some DNA from algae.
What makes the make movement special is the fact that the internet is connecting the whole
global network. It is possible to develop a new, innovative mini bicycle in So Paulo on Monday,
refine it in Brooklyn on Tuesday and 3D print it in Berlin on Wednesday.

The Web as Accelerator and Liberator
When the Internet arrived among ordinary people, we used it primarily as a one-way
communications channel. We were surfing around with our 24K modem, searching for
knowledge on passive home pages, which initially were scanned newspaper pages or over-
elaborate business cards. You went on the web after information, just like you went to the
bakery for bread.
Later, the surfers discovered each other and the web was flooded with news boards and chat
rooms. I never forget my first online experience in 1994, where I was participating in an online
party in the US. There were no graphics, but we were very excited when we were able to see
the small chat window and ask the virtual bartender for a beer, please. The meaning was
created by participating, be part of a community and be seen. The first social network emerged
and soon you were no longer surfer: now it was called customer, user or friend.

It did not take long before we all grew tired of meeting just to meet. Something more powerful,
with meaning, was lacking. The answer was the possibility to make a difference and be seen,
while contributing.
The web is becoming more and more about creating, and most of the popular service providers
offer exactly this opportunity to contribute to some kind of product, which may be used or
acknowledged by others. From the billions of videos and photos daily being uploaded and
shared on services like YouTube and Instagram, over sharing of playlists on Spotify to
crowdfunding services like Kickstarter. The web has become a place where we are harvesting
our identity and recognition via what we do. It is no longer sufficient just to be a part and we
have replaced the title as customer or user with backer, contributor or member.

Activism from the Middle East to Wall Street

It is not only online that we want to make a difference and create our own stories. Lately, we
have witnessed the blossoming of global activism, where citizens gather in protest against
injustice or abuse.
The Arab Spring started in 2010 with public demonstrations in Tunisia. Less than a month later,
president Ben Ali was forced to withdraw and subsequently the protests spread like a wildfire
to the entire Arab world. The protests differed from country to country, but had in common
that it was young people who were entering the streets to protest, and that the established
opposition groups and parties only controlled the revolts to a lesser degree. In only a few
months, greater changes happened in the Arab world than had happened in the previous
decades.
The revolution in Tunisia was followed by revolutions in both Libya and Egypt, the most
populous country in the Arab world. Two of the most powerful men in the region, Libyas
Muammar Gaddafi and Egypts Hosni Mubarak, fell from solid positions of power, which every
expert had deemed impregnable. The protests in Syria did not lead to the fall of president
Assad, but instead initiated a bloody civil war, which is still ongoing and today is the direct
cause of the migration situation that the EU struggles to relate to and deal with.
The Arab Spring was to a large extent made possible and accelerated by social media, especially
Twitter and Facebook, which broke the media monopoly of the authorities and enabled the
protesters to coordinate and inspire across borders and censorship.
Across the Atlantic, we have also witnessed a spread of activism on both sides of the political
spectrum. On the left, the Occupy Wall Street movement gained momentum in the aftermath
of the financial crisis in their protests against the countrys rich elite, the 1%. The movement
culminated 15 October 2011 with 951 demonstrations in 82 countries worldwide, but has since
died down. The popular support for Bernie Sander in the States is a more recent example.

In the opposite political corner, the Tea Party movement has put its deep marks on the political
landscape in the US. The movement began in 2009 as a protest against the stimulus packages
proposed by president Obama in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and quickly grew in
influence with leading figures such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Marco Rubio.
The movement covers a lot of ground in terms of views, but its baseline is a conservative
interpretation of the American constitution and the dream about returning to the form of
government envisaged under the founding fathers. Even though the movement appears
strongly anti-intellectual and anti-establishment, it is being funded by some of the most
powerful right-wing endorsers, the immensely wealthy Korch brothers.
The Tea Party movement has achieved enormous influence within the Republican Party by
affecting internal nomination elections. If a Republican candidate opposes the movement, a
rival internal candidate, who gets huge organisational and economic support, is quickly put
forward. The Republican Party was thoroughly shaken when its chairman in the House of
Representatives, Eric Cantor, lost his seat in June 2014 to the Tea Party-supported outsider
Dave Brat. The rise of Donald Trump is another example.
Activism is also marching on in the virtual world.
In 2004, the anarchistic network Anonymous arose from the internet forum 4chan, which was
primarily an image sharing service. The network (or movement) came into the public eye for
the first in 2008 when it took action against the church of Scientology with hacker attack and
other forms of harassment under Operation Chanology. The trigger was Scientologys
attempt to remove material from the internet regarding its celebrity member Tom Cruise.
Anonymous considers internet censorship a serious crime, especially when it comes to
entertaining material.
The movement has since completed several ops, sometimes against state institutions and
other times against companies or other parties. This has affected, among others, Sony, VISA,
Israel, the US Senate and websites with child pornography.
Anonymous has no fixed membership body or ideology, but is strong anti-authoritarian and in
many ways considers itself as the Robin Hood of the internet.
The last example of activism that I would like to pull forward, is more contemporary and actual.
In the summer of 2015, the pressure of migrants moving towards Europe, especially from the
civil war in Syria, triggered an escalating crisis situation. From drowned boat refugees and
exhausted families on the beaches of Greece, to migration flows on their way through Europe
on foot or by train, only to be met with harassment and assaults on the way.
Thousands of refugees made it to Denmark, where there were confrontations with the Danish
authorities since many of the refugees wanted to continue to Sweden, and were afraid of being
registered in Denmark.

While the Danish authorities and politicians were stalling, hoping the problems would
disappear by themselves, a public movement that refused to just stand by and watch emerged
in record time. Containers of clothes were collected, volunteers did what they could on the
beaches of the Greek island of Lesbos where many refugees landed in small boats, and a
growing number of refugee friends helped at the Danish border, providing emergency aid and
transport to Sweden. The voluntary work was in complete opposition to Danish politicians
demanding tougher refugee policies and cuts in development aid.
Somehow my first and last examples of activism are connected.
Because it was exactly the public protests under the Arab Spring that initiated the civil war in
Syria and now, six years later, with flows of desperate refugees is catching up on Europe, which
for years hesitated to become involved in the humanitarian catastrophe further south. Things in
our small world are connected, and most problems return if you try to ignore them.
Activism and public protest is not new. Since Antiquity, ordinary men and women, with varying
degrees of success, have tried to fight injustice and oppression, and there are fortunately many
examples of heroic acts where volunteers have risked their lives to help people they do not
know. For example, Danes volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, and helped Jews escape to
Sweden during the Second World War, as well as went out with Doctors Without Borders.
What is interesting and uplifting about activism is that it continues to engage and unite people
despite the confusing and alienating chaos of modern society. And it is impressive how a few,
committed people are able to change things substantially, for better or for worse.
We will return to activism in chapter 10 when we take a closer look at the uncontrollable state,
the crisis within the traditional political parties and the need for a new and active citizenship.

The Inner Ape
You may try to understand the third generation of storytelling from a sociological birds-eye
view, as a source of the increasing complexity within society and the gradual absence of the
traditional authorities.
You may also go the other way and zoom in closely, to the inner ape.
Even though we have lost most of our fur, we are still walking apes, and there is a small monkey
inside all of us.5 To be able to understand the dynamism within meta stories and their spread, it
is worth looking at what makes our inner ape happy on an instinctive level.


Foraging
If you observe a monkey in the jungle, it is never resting idly. The monkey is constantly hunting
for a snack. It is searching for nuts in the ground, fruits in the trees or a nice louse on a fellow
money. It is constantly inquisitive and trying to discover something surprising, perhaps a small,
unexpected gift.
Foraging is a fundamental instinct in monkeys, and most people have it as well. That is why we
love to explore a big lunch buffet or chase an overlooked treasure at a car boot sale.
Looking at popular websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest, some of that,
which fascinates us is that you are able to click around and find such a small gem or surprise
that you really did not expect to find. Hey, I have not seen that cat video before, and, oh, there
is an old school pal I have not seen for five years.
We love when our inherent curiosity and foraging instinct is stimulated.

Desire for procreation
Another one of our fundamental instincts is our procreation gene, our desire to reproduce and
make a difference. To become just a tiny bit immortal by making a mark on the world. For apes,
it is mainly about procreation, but in humans it is more versatile.
Besides becoming parents and the desire to procreate, most people also feel a huge satisfaction
by creating something. From the joy of doing your best drawing a picture or painting a door, to
great life projects such as creating a company or developing the local community.
Hence, it is no surprise that advertising agencies today are releasing campaign after campaign,
where they are trying to build relations to customers by involving them as co-producers or co-
creators.

Courting
A final instinct in both monkeys and humans is courting, which is essentially about taking pride
in yourself, towards the other sex and towards the group. It is about positioning yourself within
the community and find out about expectations and social hierarchies. Social accept is
incredibly important in both humans and monkeys, in order to be able to relax and thrive.
Not only do we want to create something, we also would like other people to see it and
recognise us for it. That is part of why most of us can be entirely addicted to the
acknowledgment of social media. We receive instant feedback and acknowledgment in the
form of likes, retweets and followers.

The instincts above are part of the explanation for the rise of meta stories and their attraction.
It is exciting to be able to make your own choices, it is satisfying to be able to create something
instead of being a passive audience, and it is affirming to be part of a community that
acknowledges our contributions.
The third generation of storytelling is a return to something fundamental and natural inside us
all.

Generation III
Let us call people who feel at home in the third generation of storytelling for Generation III.
They are able to embrace the possibilities of modern life and dare taking the drivers seat
instead of sitting comfortably in lifes backseat. I do hope that my two boys, Sne and Storm,
grow up to be among those.
The important characteristics for Generation III are:

I choose the truth
Generation III has found comfort in uncertainty and realised that they are each
responsible for how they perceive the world.
Instead of blindly subscribing to other peoples interpretations, they try to get to know
things themselves and actively make decisions.
Openness, transparency and trust are of crucial importance.

I am, what I do
Identity comes from action.

It means less where I come from, how wealthy I am or what I dream about, than what I
do.
What makes the moments and existence as such important are making an effort and a
difference, for yourself or for others.

Everything is up to us
They have put gods and belief in authorities behind them.

They believe that it is possible to change destiny and the world, and that they are the
ones to do it.
Life is there to be lived it is not a waiting room before happiness waiting in Valhalla or
Paradise.

Life is good
They are basically naive optimists. Their childhood has been privileged and protected
against the kinds of violence, war and poverty, which always were in the background for
their ancestors.
They dare to take chances, break taboos and boldly go, where no one has been before.
For better or for worse, they are history-less.

The youth rebels and the civil rights activists in the 60s and 70s were in many ways the
predecessors of Generation III, but there are decisive differences. The hippies and other rebels
of their time had their attention firmly at the past and were confronting the authorities in
society and the social control that had survived from the totalitarian stories in the first
generation. It was a showdown with Christianitys sexual and female oppression, ultra-
liberalisms raw exploitation, Marxisms dictatorship and nationalisms racism and
warmongering. They were united by a common cause about freedom, but it was in fact more a
showdown with the past than looking forward at the future.
Generation III people do not fight against the stories from neither the first nor the second
generation, they are fighting their own struggles, turned away from history and facing the
possibilities and challenges of tomorrow. They may never entirely understand that the freedom
and the possibilities they take for granted have been gained in struggles through centuries of
generations before them. And that is fine. Nostalgia, heritage and the shadows of the past have
already taken up more than enough space in human history.

A Growing Force in Society
Quite possibly, there have been members of Generation III since the dawn of time, but it is not
until recent years that they have become a real force in society.
Where members in the past were odd idiots, heretics and misunderstood geniuses, we are now
facing a situation where Generation III is accelerating with every generation, and is slowly, but
steadily, becoming more and influential in all aspects of society. From politics and business to
citizenship and family. And it is not a Danish, European or Western phenomenon.
Generation III is possibly gaining most momentum in Asia and Africa these years, as opposed to
Europe, where the populations are already ancient, the former colonial territories are full of
youthful enthusiasm.

In Denmark, the median age (the age separating the oldest and youngest halves of society) is
41.6 years, while it is 23.5 years in the Philippines and 15.5 years in Uganda. There are more 21-
year-olds living in Indonesia than inhabitants in all of Denmark.
Some of these young people are still trapped in the second, and even first, generation of
stories, but a large part has already entered the third generation or are about to. They are
liberating themselves from traditional families, they are studying and utilising the possibilities
of the internet and globalisation as entrepreneurs and activists.
When I was studying political science a long time ago, wise people told me that theory is about
being able to make predictions. If it is not possible for a theory to be able to make predictions
that can be tested, then it is not worth the academic paper it is written on, and not science.
I have no illusions that this book is a scientific theory, but, nevertheless, I would like to go out
on a limb and put forward a number of predictions about the near future, perhaps as
inspiration, and maybe even provocation, with regards to how we need to re-think both
marketing, politics, management and citizenship in the light of the third generation of
storytelling.

Teen predictions
1. Traditional publicist media will continue to decline. The few survivors will become
narrow niche media for the chosen few members of the congregation.
2. User-driven news and debate will sky-rocket, but invisibly.
3. Traditional marketing will continue to lose its effect.
4. Campaigns that really engage and create relationships will be successful, but also create
new demands and expectations.
5. The engagement among voters within the traditional political parties continues to fall.
6. More and more activist movements emerge, often spontaneous and short-lived.
7. It will become more and more difficult to manage the public sector with traditional tools
of control.
8. We will see more and more examples of locally created solutions by citizens and public-
sector workers where the formal systems fail.
9. Companies with traditional, hierarchic management structure will struggle more and
more to engage their staff and implement necessary changes.
10. New companies with radically different ways of managing and engaging will increasingly
outmatch traditional corporations.
The trends, which the 10 predictions try to isolate, are happening in an interaction between the
decline of the second generation of stories and the emergence of Generation III, who meet the
world with fresh expectations to involvement, freedom and co-ownership.

We will go deeper into the predictions and their causes in the final chapters of the book, where
we will also gather inspiration from solutions home and abroad.
Coming from the broad strokes and wide tendencies in society, we are now going to zoom all
the way in. We are going into the brain to take a closer look at what brain research has to say
about the interaction between stories and our consciousness.
If we want to accommodate Generation IIIs demand to be active co-narrators, we have to
understand why meaning and identity are created in the brain and, not the least, how we can
create new meaning via engaging stories.


WHAT

A Mind for Stories

Let us begin with a small experiment. I am going to ask a question, which you then answer
quickly and intuitively. And do not worry, it is about a thing you do every day.

How does your front door look?
What colour is it?
How does the door handle look?
If the door has a window, how many panels does it have?
What colour is the doormat?

For most of us, these questions are difficult to answer. Even though we are looking at our front
door every day, it is difficult for us to visualise it in our mind.
The reason is that our memory is controlled by emotions. And stories are key to working with
our emotions. Stories are able to create identification, expectation, conflict, tension and
release, which all engage us emotionally, creates meaning and controls our memory.

Our Selective Memory
Modern brain research is slowly driving away the guesses of the past with real, scientific results.
Because of scanners and sophisticated measuring tools, we are now able to look into the brain
and observe the processes. From the exchanges in the neurone connections and the impact of
the chemical signal substances, to the role of DNA in personality and intelligence.
These are extremely complex dynamics to begin to understand, and even though we now have
efficient tools, the task is similar to being an ornithologist trying to understand the advanced
eco system of the rainforest, while she is only able to observe the jungle at night with a tiny
torch.
Even though we are beginners when it comes to understanding the brains chemical and
electrical processes, research is already showing that we have to dispose of a number of
traditional assumptions about how the brain works.
Firstly, it is now clear that the old idea about the brain being split in a left, analytical, part and a
right, creative, part is nonsense. Our two halves of the brain are working closely together, and it

is not true that some people are using one part more than the other.6 You are no longer able to
take a quick test on the internet to see whether you should quit your job and become a painter
instead.
It is also time to kill the myth about us being predisposed for certain ways of learning. It is not
like some of us are absolutely good at listening, while others have to touch or see before they
are able to learn something new. On the contrary, research shows that we all benefit from
varied training styles, where more senses are being stimulated.7
Another old idea, which we need to bury, is the one about our brain only developing when we
are young; that our entire personality was shaped in childhood and that it is harder for us to
learn something new when we get older. The brains so-called neuro plasticity is larger than
first thought, and even though it does decline with age, it is never too late to learn new things
or, for that matter, change personality.8 You are no longer able to blame your lack of ability on
not learning it while you were young, and you are no longer able to put the entire blame for
your personalitys darker side on your parents.
The last idea is about memory.
In our traditional view of memory, it is like an archive system. When we experience something,
it is then neatly stored in a small box, which is then categorised by the brain with a
Honeymoon, Crete 2007 sticker and placed on an inner shelf in our head. There the memory
lies, untouched and waiting for us to revisit it, in which case the brain quickly retrieves it and
unpacks it for us. Unfortunately, this is not how it works in reality.
Memories are not something we have; they are something we create. When we recollect
something, the brain produces a memory for the occasion. And it is to a large extent influenced
by the actual situation we are in when the recollection happens. If we have experienced a
divorce in the meantime, for example, then the memory of Crete is probably substantially
different to if we had been happily married ever since.
That is also why most of us struggle remembering trivial things like the colour of our front door.
The memory quickly fades away if we have not attached it to an emotional experience, an item,
a person or an event.
Strong emotions, especially when we also get adrenaline in the blood because of fear or anxiety
is our way of telling the brain to remember what is happening right now, because it is
important.
Let us take a closer look at how we decode the world and how memories and stories interact.
We have to understand what is going on behind the frontal lobe, if we want to be able to work
consciously and constructively with small and big stories in our everyday life and society.


The Pink Elephant
We create meaning and decode the world via what brain researchers and psychologists call
framing.
When we, for example, observe a photo of a grey elephant, our brain instantly checks
thousands of directories to decode what it is we are observing. In the directory with animal
forms, the trunk helps us to choose the elephant instead of the rhinoceros, and in the colour
directory, the grey colour is quickly identified. The brain combines the two directory finds in a
framing, and we decode the animal in the picture as being a grey elephant. All this is happening
in a split second.
The brain is made of numerous of such directories, which we are continuously adding stuff to.
When a few years ago my two boys were very engaged in learning all kinds of animal sounds, it
was targeted practice in order to establish these directories.
When meaning is created though framing, very complex networks of brain cells, neurons, are
activated. These neurone connections work in the same way as the rest of the body, i.e. to
make often repeated things easier.
Because we, for example, often combine elephant in the animal form directory with grey in
the colour directory, the neurone connections between these two terms gradually strengthen.
A physical change is happening in the brain, similar to when the muscle fibres in my triceps
grow when I do many push-ups. The body is adapting to our biology, making us better at what
we do most, and at the same time we become worse at what we rarely do. A strong neurone
connection between elephant and the colour grey is created over time, and it becomes intuitive
to connect the two of them. They go hand in hand.
We normally call such connections associations, concepts that we instinctively connect to other
concepts.
So what happens when suddenly one day the elephant is pink? Then the strong link between
the elephant form and the colour grey becomes a handicap. It takes us considerably longer to
decode the picture and we are almost able to feel how our brain is working on overdrive, like a
4x4 driving off-road, to establish an untested connection. Suddenly, our expectations,
prejudices and associations become opponents instead of fellow players.

Have You Spoken to Your Inner Racist Today?
It is actually possible to measure how our prejudices and expectations influence our thoughts
via association connections.

One way of doing it is by using the so-called Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has been
developed by Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek, to measure racism.
In short, the test measures how quickly participants connect chosen words. If you have to
combine two words that the brain is not used to connect, there is a remarkable slowdown. The
neurone connections are simply not equipped to enable us to make the connection quickly and
intuitively.
Large-scale measurements using IAT in the US show that 80 per cent of Americans find it much
easier to connect words like bad, evil and fiasco with black faces than with white faces.
Many people, who consider themselves tolerant and anti-racist, reveal in the test that their
intuitive notion of black people is predefined by negative stereotypes. Racism has been
embedded in our brains at a biological level. 9
And prejudices not only apply to skin colour. I have had the pleasure of using the IAT method a
couple of times work-related, where we, among other things, have examined how big
corporations brand and reputation are embedded in peoples associations.
It was though-provoking to see how strong brands such as the global shipping company Maersk
and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk are perceived differently when it comes to soft
values, such as equality, sustainability and corporate responsibility.

The Battle for Language
George Lakoff, professor in linguistics, is a highly regarded authority on the American left wing
and one of the worlds leading experts in framing, especially in political communication. His
bestsellers Dont Think of An Elephant and The Political Mind have inspired scholars and
communicators around the world.
I got the chance to meet Lakoff, who is now an elderly gentleman (he started teaching at
Berkeley the year I was born), when I was facilitating a workshop during a conference at
University of California, Berkeley. We mostly talked about the political development in Europe,
where he is absolutely opposed to the way the Social Democratic parties have handled the
financial crisis and the rise of the nationalist parties. It was a very awkward situation to have to
defend the political landscape in Europe against an American. Typically, it is the other way
around when Sarah Palin and Donald Trump make us in the old world smile.
Lakoffs main point is that language and concepts mean something in politics and that you can
move the entire political landscape and the electorate if you are able to define the central
concepts in the political debate. In his books, he describes how the American right wing since
the 70s laboriously has built an infrastructure of think tanks, news media and campaign
organisations, which systematically have been able to shift the position of American people in a
number of areas, one of them being tax.

Why do we call it tax burden and tax relief? Why not tax contribution?
A burden is a fundamentally negative association, and who would not like a relief?
The right wing in the US has been able to redefine the linguistic terms used in the debate by
both Democrats and Republicans, and thereby established a discourse over a couple of
decades, which has made it an impossible political project to raise taxes in todays US, no
matter the need or purpose.
You have to respect the influence of stories if you want to work politically, and work dedicated
with the terms and words that are being used. Many politicians forget that words are not only
tools for communicating with the voters; they are also, consciously or subconsciously, an
influential power in terms of attitudes.
Opinions change over time through language.

The Biology of the Brain
Imagine a lemon.
A big, yellow, juicy lemon that has just been sliced in half and is lying dripping and fresh in your
hand.
Imagine taking a bite of the lemon, sinking your teeth in the sour, juicy flesh...
What happened in your mouth when you read the last couple of sentences?
Did you feel the mucous membranes in the mouth contract?
You have probably tasted lemons before and your mucous membranes in your mouth
remember the sour experience all too well. There is a clear association between yellow lemons
and sourness built into your neurone connections. Our memory, our prejudices and our body
are one.
It is easy to fall into thinking about the brain as physical computer hardware and our thoughts
and consciousness as immaterial software. But that is not accurate. Our thoughts,
consciousness, memories, personality and identity are defined by the brains physiology. Ask is
Ask because of the way my neurones are connected and how cells have grown over the years in
my skull. My brain has built an inner infrastructure with high-speed motorways between the
associations I use the most, and on the other hand pushed the connections I rarely activate to
secondary roads or paths.
The brain thus makes up its own closed autopoetic system in Luhmanns sense. I am only able
to decode and understand new input from what I know already, and my personal creation of
meaning happens in a closed, self-referential system.

Every time we experience something, recall a memory or think, we are sustaining, but also
changing, our brain physically.
I have never been a fan of running, but if I put my mind to it I could probably accomplish a half-
marathon next summer. I would, however, have to start regular training to tell the muscle cells
in my legs that running is here to stay, and that they better start growing bigger in order to be
ready for future challenges.
In much the same way, the brain needs repetitions to be able to adapt. We are only able to
stimulate the brain into constructing a new motorway if we persistently and over a prolonged
period of time activate new association chains.
One small clarification:
When I mention the brains directories and motorways above, it is a misleading metaphor
that might beguile us into believing that our different memories or prejudices are placed in
specific locations in the brain. We could easily believe that there is one specific area for the
grey colour and another for animals with trunks, and that there is a direct route of neurones
between the two areas. That is not quite the case.
The brain is an infinite myriad of 100 billion neurones, which are connected via 60.000 billion
connections called synapses. A memory or an association is stored in the brain as an activation
of a network of thousands or millions of neurones that collectively remember. When an
association is strengthened, more neurones are participating in this collaborative memory
work, which thus becomes archived in several places in the brain.
It is, among other things, this work sharing that makes it possible for people with memory loss
due to brain damage to be lucky enough to recover some of the loss over time. Even if part of
the brain stops working, it is sometimes possible, partly or completely, to re-establish
memories if they have been stored other places in the brain that are undamaged.

Mental Laziness
What is 10 plus 10?
What colour is the European flag?
Which sound does a cow make?
Your brain effortlessly delivers the answers. You do not even have to think about it, the
answers are coming to you intuitively and lightning fast.


What is 187 plus 78?
What colour is the Belgian flag?
Which sound does a fox make?

How fast did the answers come to you now? The brain is not ready to deliver an intuitive
answer. Suddenly, we have to concentrate, and only with a focused effort are we able to figure
out the small sum and dig out the colours in the Belgian flag (hint: they are the same colours as
the German flag).
Were you even able to answer the third question about the fox, then I am impressed. I do not
have a clue about the answer.
Our little quiz illustrates what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls slow and fast thinking,
respectively. The American/Israeli Kahneman, who has won the Nobel Prize10 in economy, and
his colleague Amos Tversky have come up with Behavioural Economics, which criticises the
assumption in traditional economics that human beings are rational and benefit-maximising.
Kahneman describes how the brain is working on two levels: fast thinking (also called system 1),
which works lightning quick and intuitively, and slow thinking (system 2), which is slow,
conscious and thoughtful. In numerous examples and experiments, Kahneman illustrates how
human beings decision-making abilities are very subjective and impressionable.
Applied to framing and the neurone connections, fast thinking is similar to the brain running on
autopilot. We lean back and use the main road of associations every time. The elephant is grey.
Slow thinking is when we take the wheel ourselves and focus on controlling our though
processes. This is when the elephant is pink, when we try to be critical of our own prejudices, or
when we consciously create new connections that the brain is not prepared for.
The problem with slow thinking is that it is very tiring indeed. The brain is the most energy-
demanding organ and it is hard work to switch off the autopilot and steer consciously and
manually.
Kahnemans perhaps most famous research is from a court of law in Israel that considered
releases on parole. The judges automatic reaction is to say no, which is the autopilots quick
solution, while it is mentally hard work to study every individual case to find grounds for a
release. Kahneman documented that the most important factor for a convicted to get a yes or a
no was not their factual case, but instead the time of day when their case was presented to the
court. Cases that were presented immediately after a lunch break got a yes in 85 per cent of the
cases, while cases that were discussed while the judges were tired and hungry got a no every
single time.

The effect is called ego depletion: We can only manage to be conscious and focused in our
thought processes for a limited amount of time, before we cannot cope any longer and let the
autopilot take the main road of associations.
Overload of our consciousness not only happens gradually over time. It can also happen if we
are asked to consider too many things at the same time. In another classic experiment,
participants are asked to remember a seven-digit number for a couple of minutes.
While they are trying to remember the number, they are offered a snack. They can either
choose a delicious chocolate cake or an uninteresting fruit salad.
When compared to a control group that did not have to remember numbers, significantly more
number remembering participants choose the chocolate cake instead of the fruit salad. The
explanation is quite simply that our slow thinking is busy remembering numbers, so the
autopilot in fast thinking gets to decide when it comes to snacks. And our neurones like
chocolate.
When working with stories, it is important to understand our tendency to mental laziness.
When the autopilot in fast thinking gets to decide, the brain always takes the motorway when
establishing meaning through framing. We are not able to think new and are stubbornly sticking
to traditional enemy concepts and the most established and intuitive notions.

Your Feelings Are My Feelings
One of the major breakthroughs in brain research was the discovery of the so-called mirror
neurones, which were found by Italian scientists who were examining macaque monkeys.11
Apparently mirror neurones have the ability to use the same signals when we act and feel as
when we observe others act or feel. Perhaps that is why hippopotamuses all yawn together,
and you pull your hand away when you see someone else hit their finger with a hammer. It is
probably also why we men impulsively bend over if we see someone in a film get kicked in the
crotch, and that football fans are able to feel the ball touch their own foot when seeing Messi
score a goal.
The meaning function of mirror neurones are still being debated among scientists, but there is a
lot to indicate that mirror neurones help us to become emphatic and able to establish an
emotional connection to other creatures. When we observe other people being sad, we
become sad ourselves. When we observe other people in pain, we feel the pain ourselves.
The interesting thing is that we feel other peoples actions, emotions and pain precisely the
same way as we feel our own. These are the same signals that are activated in the brain.
What is so intriguing about mirror neurones is that they may help to explain how our prejudices
and notions interact. If we, for example, observe other people being racist, then our brain

mirrors their prejudices and fear. In order to understand how they feel, our brain tries to copy
their framing and association chains.
Even though, on an unconscious level, we do not want to think negatively about people with
darker skin, our brain nevertheless unconsciously starts to lay down a fast road of associations
between dark skin and crime or terrorism. Perhaps that is why 80 per cent of all Americans in
an AIT test point to that they relate some negativity to black people.
Even though I was born in a hippie collective, have a black brother-in-law and have lived in a
multi-cultural neighbourhood in Copenhagen for many year, I still show signs of unconscious
racism when I take a AIT test.
Prejudices and culture are contagious.

Stories as Framing
The numerous associations in our brains are directly connecting to our language and ideas.
What has historically driven the development of our big brains is the need to communicate as
social herd animals. What actually happens is that, when we talk about and thereby put words
on an experience, it helps move the memory from the short-term, episodic memory to what is
called the semantic memory, which keeps much longer.12 As social apes, our brain has learned
that the things we talk about are important to remember.
When our association chains become more complex, we complement words and ideas with
narrative models to keep track of meaning. Stories are the brains way of creating a overview.
Simply put, very young we establish a number of central directories with narrative structures.
These are storytelling building blocks and frameworks, which we later in life use in our framing
of social experiences.
If, for example, we experience an argument in the schoolyard, where a smaller boy is up against
a bigger guy, then we will intuitively perceive the smaller boy as the underdog who bravely is
fighting the bigger baddie. This is even though the argument could have been started by the
small guy teasing the big guy. Unconsciously, we create a classical story with a conflict, a hero
and an opponent. It is David and Goliath once again.
Our self-regard, our memories and our dreams use narrative structures to establish meaning.
As human beings, we are only able to understand the world around us through stories, often
with ourselves in the role of the hero.
If you observe children playing, then it is these narrative directories they are trying to
establish. They are creating inventive role-playing games in which they play through numerous
narrative sequences, and they are imitating the social games of the adult world. Children have

an insatiable desire for stories, which every parent who thinks they can get away with one
bedtime story can testify.
The big totalitarian stories of the first generation masterfully used narratives to establish
meaning and legitimise social structures. The Bible, the Books of Moses, the Quran, Tripitaka
(the Buddhist scriptures) and Hinduisms written tradition (Shruti and Smriti) are all treasure
troves of epic accounts, moral dramas and fabulous tales.
Later, indoctrinating ideological and nationalist dramas were added to the religious parables.
National hymns, be it Rule Britannia or Deutschland Uber Alles, or the Danish national
hymns, are propaganda art from a nationalist canon.
We will take a look at narrative craft in the next chapter.


Monomyths and the Heros Journey
The Heros Journey
As newly appointed at Disney in the mid-80s, Christopher Voglers task was to make sure that
the new, and incredibly expensive, animation films the company was producing would be a
success with audiences around the world. Vogler had to make sure that the films dramaturgy
would appeal to families with children across all kinds of cultures. Not an easy task.
Fortunately, Vogler came across the myth researcher Joseph Campbell, who had spent his
career to collect and analyse legends, myths and folktales from all over the world. Vogler found
what he needed in Campbells book Hero with A Thousand Faces, which was a universal
narrative model that outlined the ancient classical drama about a hero who has to travel the
world to find himself, before he is able to return.
The name of the model was The Heros Journey.
Initially, Vogler wrote a brief seven-page memo13 about The Heros Journey for internal use at
Disney, but news about the model quickly spread to other Hollywood studios, and it soon
became a must-read for any ambitious screenwriter. Vogler later wrote the bestseller The
Writers Journey and has since worked as a script consultant on films such as Lion King, Fight
Club and The Black Swan.
I had the pleasure of being taught by Christopher Vogler at the Danish film school about 10
years ago, and I was quickly fascinated by The Heros Journey and Joseph Campbells system of
concepts. The American Campbell was trying to, alongside European scientists such as Vladimir
Propp and Algirdas Julien Greimas, break the narrative code in the classic folktales, legends and
myths. Does such a monomyth exist one narrative form common to all mankind, which is
present across cultures, time and geography and which all human beings decode as a good
story?

The Monomyth as Travel Guide
Earlier on we looked at how humans use stories as complexity-reducing maps, in order to
create meaning and overview through simplification, and in the previous chapter we got
inspiration from brain research in order to understand how the brain establishes meaning via
framing and association chains.
Within these processes, narrative structure become especially important as travel guides that
can help us understand the map and plot a viable course. We use the archetypical stories with
heroes, villains, accomplishments and redemption to understand how to act as human beings.

If we go back to, for example, Christianity as a totalitarian story from the first generation, the
Bible contains a number of adventurous parables, which like a Lonely Planet guide help the
Christian to act in her life.
A good example is the story about the prodigal son from the Gospel of Luke:
A young man, the younger of two brothers, asks his father for his share of the family fortune.
The young man travels to a foreign country and squanders his fortune on gambling and
prostitutes. A great famine hits the country and he ends up herding pigs and so poverty-stricken
that in the end he is envious of the pigs food. The young man decides to go back to his father
and shamefully admit his sins and work as a hireling.
The father receives his son with great joy, dresses him in the best clothes and throws a big
party. The older brother, who stayed behind, complains about the discrimination and the fact
that he has been working hard all the years without any special rewards. In reply, his father
says:
My child, you are with me always and all that is mine is yours.
But now we should party and be happy because your brother here was dead, but is now alive
again. He was lost and was found.14
There are many interpretations of this parable, but to me it is about loving your neighbour and
that love is not something you have to earn through work.
The hunt for the monomyth is interesting because it can help us identify some of the
fundamental narrative tools, which humankind has utilised throughout history to navigate their
lives. It can help us understand the fascination of the totalitarian stories and their dominance
for millennia, but also be a helpful tool if we want to become better at letting people tell their
own stories today.

Conflict and contrast as an Engine
The most important teaching from the myth research is that all stories builds on a conflict.
There has to be something at stake.
The starting point is always meeting the main character who has to make a tough choice and
live with the consequences. It is how the main character handles the conflict that creates
identification and empathy. As the audience, we feel what the main character is feeling when
we, consciously or unconsciously, are considering what to do in a similar situation.
Stories are also about contrast. The hero is only this good because the villain is this evil. The
heros courage is strongest when he has just been scared. The lovers kiss during the end credits
is only this redeeming because everything seemed lost shortly before.

To be able to understand a situation, a development or a person, we need to be able to
compare it with something, we need a sounding board. That is why there are always lots of
oncoming cars when Hollywood creates car chases. Without those, it would be harder to create
the illusion that the hero is driving at breakneck speed.
The old totalitarian stories were masters in creating conflict and contrast. That is their DNA.
Who would read the Bible without the struggle between God and Satan, between sin and
salvation? What would nationalism be without mocking songs about the enemy country? How
would communism define itself without the clash between the proletariat at the bourgeoisie?
How would Hitler have been able to mobilise the masses without anti-Semitism?

The Actantial Model and the Core Model
Personally, I have always favoured the semiotician Greimass actantial model when it comes to
creating an overview of the central conflicts and opposites in a story. The model considers six
positions, or actants, which each have their own special function and who work in pairs.
We have the relationship between the Hero and the Object of the story, (the treasure), we have
the delivery from the Sender to the Receiver and we have the opposition between the heros
Helper and the Opponent.
Here is a classic fairy tale described in the model.
The knight as the Hero, the king as the Sender, peace as the Object, the country as the
Recipient, the dragon as the Opponent and the magic sword as the Helper.

There is only one thing that I miss in Greimass model and that is a more nuanced view of the
enemy.
When I worked for the film company Zentropa, I had the pleasure of working as a script
consultant, and dramaturgy typically works with both an internal and an external opponent and
conflict.
The external opponent is the tangible enemy whom the hero knows she has to overcome, while
the internal conflict is a battle that the hero has to fight within herself, for example by
confronting her biggest fear.
To get this nuance, I split Greimass opponent into two actants: The Dragon, which symbolises
the external enemy, and the Troll, which symbolises the internal enemy or weakness.
I called this nuanced model the Core Story Model, and have had the pleasure of using it
together with colleagues in more than 10 years, on a wide range of projects from development
of new beer concepts for Carlsberg to communicating the Streamline strategy of the shipping
company Maersk Line.

The point of the model is that it is able to catch some of the underlying messages, which belong
to an intriguing story, with its more nuanced view of the enemy. Nobody cares about a story
over time if the main character is not going through an internal, personal journey that you are
able to identify with.


Let us take a look at the first Star Wars film, A New Hope, in order to illustrate the structure of
the model.

Luke Skywalker as the Hero, the Alliance as the Sender, a New Hope as the Treasure, the Galaxy
as the Receiver, Darth Vader as the Dragon, Obi Wan Kenobi (the light side of the Force) as the
Helper, and Fear (the dark side of the Force) as the Troll.
Via Darth Vader as the Dragon and fear (the dark side of the Force) as the Troll, we exhibit the
crossfire that Luke Skywalker is captured in, and which his father also faced before him.
Darth Vaders role is especially interesting, which brings us to the next section about
archetypes.

Archetypes and Role Models
Dramaturgy is about personal development. It is about people who face hard conflicts, make
choices, face the consequences and learn something in the process. We identify and are
engaged when we are following the main characters doubts, choices and development
journeys.
There is a special room for archetypes in the dramaturgy toolbox: the young hero, the innocent
maiden, the fortune teller, the black knight, etc. Every archetype has its own special function in
the story and a responsibility to push the plot forward. Some are role models with whom we
directly identify, while others are designed to repulse or give our hero partnership or
opposition.

The gallery of archetypes has roots all the way back to Gilgamesh and the tragedies of
Antiquity. Through the entire history of civilisation, it has been a pillar in the great totalitarian
stories. Similarly, to how the central conflicts are formalised in our internal directories", the
archetypes are a central reference point for all of us.
Many lists of archetypes have been created over time. Vogler uses eight archetypes, which he
gets from Campbell (who was inspired by Carl Jung), while Vladimir Propp identifies seven
archetypes from his work with Russian folktales. You can find numerous lists of archetypes in
books about scriptwriting as well.

Here is my take on the most central and useful ones:

The Hero (the Protagonist)
Our main character and central point of identification. Good heroes have faults and that is what
makes them human and loveable. Most heroes do not know their own full potential this is
what they have to find out in the story.
We all know numerous heroes Ulysses, Moses, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Frodo and
Wall-E and there are a number of hero variations, from the martyr to the tragic anti-hero who
populate many westerns and crime novels.

The Shadow (the Antagonist)
The shadow is the heros mirror image. Not an inhumane monster, but a black knight who

symbolises the heros contrast. The Cyclops is not the antagonist in the Odyssey, but instead
Antinous, the most outstanding and most daring of the courtiers who have been besieging
Odysseuss wife back home in Ithaka.
The function of the shadow is to show the hero how bad the consequences may be if you make
the wrong choice. The clearest example is perhaps Darth Vader, the heros own father, who
chose the dark side of the Force instead of the light side.
Tyler Durden from Fight Club, Gollum in The Hobbit or the traitor Judas are other classical
Shadows.

Mentor
The controlling voice of the super-ego, which helps the hero recognise her destiny.
Often personified in a mysterious, all-knowing character, like Gandalf, the wise old lady or
Yoda.
Most mentors are actually a bit annoying they know the story from the beginning, but only
reveal few and opaque hints to the protagonist, who then has to suffer a great deal only to
realise that the mentor knew it all beforehand.

Guardian
In order to grow, the hero has to have something to fight and hurt herself against. This is where
the guardians come in. They are obstacles along the way, which the hero has to overcome
through cunning or bravery.
Dragons, giant spiders and dangerous women are classical guardians.

The Norm (Witness)
The Norm is the human equivalent of roadside trees. They help us to perceive our own speed.
Many dramas use the Norm as a fixed reference point to help the audience perceive the
development arc of the hero. The Norm is a person who, no matter what is happening in the
story, does not learn or develop. It is often a brother, a sister or a colleague.
Sometimes the Norm has the special task to witness and comment the development of the
protagonist.
My favourite Norm is without comparison C-3PO in Star Wars.


The Jester (Trickster)
Numerous classical stories feature a teasing character or fool, who challenges the hero on the
journey. The jesters task is to help the protagonist to realise her inner conflict and meet her
internal troll.
Classical examples are the crazy cat in Alice in Wonderland, Han Solo in Star Wars and Loki from
Norse mythology.

Shapeshifter
The shapeshifter is perhaps the most abstract archetype a person who surprises everyone on
the heros journey by changing gender/form/alliance.
The role of the shapeshifter is not only to conserve some uncertainty and excitement in the
story, but also to remind the hero that the world is not always what it seems and that we
humans may change.
The meeting with the shapeshifter often catalyses that the hero is able to change herself and
take on her rightful position and role.
There is also a sexual and gender side to the changes, which are playing with the feminine and
masculine sides in the hero. Often, the point of the story is for the hero to realise both sides
within herself to be able to become whole and redeemed.
While some stories feature very tangible shapeshifters like werewolves or vampires, this
function nowadays is often connected to betrayal and change of alliances, as we see it in every
new James Bond film.

Archetypes are functions of a storys dramaturgy, sometimes personified in a single character
and other times shared among several characters.
It often happens that a character fills several different functions in a story: for example, Eddie
Murphy almost always plays both the jester and the hero, while many young adult novels
feature heroes who are also shapeshifter.

The Story as a Journey
Besides conflicts and archetypes, the storys own chronology and build-up is also important.
In this regard, Voglers version of Campbells The Heros Journey is for me the best tool to grasp
a story and work with the central steps in a monomyth, which most people are able to
understand and decode.

For Campbell, all stories are basically a Grand Tour about the child becoming grown-up. The
story follows a cyclical movement that begins in the well-known world of the home, moves on
to an unknown, magical world to find new insight, only for the hero to return to the beginning
with the solution to the problem that initiated the whole journey.
Let us quickly run through the 12 steps:

Step 1 - The Ordinary World
The beginning of the story. We meet the hero in his (sadly, classical stories are mostly featuring
men) home. We empathise with the hero and understand his background and character. We
sense that something is pent-up and tense.
A lot of American films handle this part right after the credits with a short breakfast scene with
the hero at home, where he shows his abilities as a nice family father and where you sense an
inherent tension between him and his wife.

Step 2 - Call to Adventure
There is a storm coming that threatens the harmony in the home. It is either an external threat
(Sauron has awakened in Mordor) or something fundamentally wrong in the home itself.
No matter what, it is clear that a hero is needed to solve the problems.


Step 3 - Refusal of the Call
Real heroes often play hard to get and do not just grab the sword and run out the door at the
first given opportunity.
Neither Bilbo nor Frodo were in a hurry to get going.

Step 4 - Meeting the Mentor
The protagonist gets help to find his inner hero from a mentor. The archetypical version is the
white-bearded wise old man (think Gandalf, Dumbledore or Obi-Wan Kenobi), who provides
instructions and good advice.
The term mentor derives from Homers nearly 3,000-year-old epic about Odysseus who leaves
behind his son Telemachos in the care of his friend and advisor Mentor.

Step 5 - Crossing the Threshold
The end of the first act, where our protagonist leaves the known world and travels into
unknown territory. The transition is often very tangible, like crossing a river, passing through a
gate or across a bridge.
The transition to the unknown world is often guarded by an opponent or test that have to be
overcome.

Step 6 - Child in an Unknown World
Our hero is in a foreign place and meets new friends and enemies. He is still only a child in an
adult world and is tested. This is often where archetypes such as the shapeshifter come into
play.
In many western fairy tales and films, this part takes place in a bar, which is the symbolic
contrast to the safety of the home. Think The Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings, the smugglers
bar in Mos Eisley in Star Wars or any western.

Step 7 - Approach
The story intensifies and our hero is closing in on the first real confrontation with the main
villain. In the classical tales, this is often about overcoming ones fear and crawling into some
caves.
This is where Theseus enters the labyrinth to fight the Minotaur.


Step 8 - Death and Rebirth
The central turning point of the story, where our hero seeks out a particularly sacred place and
confronts his opponent or his biggest fear. Our hero is going through a symbolic rebirth, where
the child dies in order for the man to resurrect.
In many stories this turning point is often symbolised by the hero becoming submerged under
water, enters into darkness or changes his clothes.

Step 9 - The Reward
After rebirth, the hero is rewarded with a symbol of his new masculinity. This may be tangible
in the form of a sword or other weapon, or it may be important knowledge or the favour of a
woman. Typically, the hero now gets the chance to show off his new talents.
This is where Luke Skywalker really becomes a young Jedi knight instead of a confused farmers
boy.

Step 10 - The Road Back
Our hero is now ready to leave the foreign world and make his way home again. But the story is
not over yet, and the plot thickens, often through a dramatic chase scene.

Step 11 Resurrection
The third and final act has begun. Our hero is nearly back home, but still has to face a final test,
in which he will have to use everything he learnt on the journey.
This is where Odysseus returns from his long journey, only to find out that he has to overcome
the evil courtiers who have been besieging his wife, Penelope (who has been waiting for him for
20 years).

Step 12 - Return with the Elixir
Our hero is almost home and has brought the solution to the problem that initiated the entire
story. The son has returned as a grown-up man.
Many Hollywood films follow The Heros Journey slavishly step by step. If you open a film script
half-way through, you can often read the big death and rebirth scene.


Lessons from the Art of Storytelling
The dramaturgic toolbox we have briefly looked into was established during the grand
totalitarian stories from the first era. Since its baby steps in the beginning of civilisation, the art
of storytelling has been developed and refined in order to secure, hand over and reproduce
culture and worldview. It is targeted indoctrination that has been product developed for
millennia. Comprehensive systems of rituals, ceremonies, traditions and symbols have been
established around the art of storytelling. Ingenious staging, scenography in marble and
wooden churches, to secure the right associations entered the minds microscopic library in the
heads of young people.
Naturally, dramaturgy was also used against rulers in pamphlets and forbidden books, but the
art of storytelling was mainly a weapon of mass distribution of political values, used by the
rulers to sustain their position and social control.
Along with the first generation of stories having to make may for the second generation's post-
modern chaos, the dramaturgic toolbox was taken over by the markets new, commercial
sellers of identity and meaning. The branding and marketing people diligently used the belief in
authorities and the narrative infrastructure left by the grand stories. From advertising in which
doctors recommended cigarette smoking to activation of the protestant working culture when
housewives fear of not being good enough had to be converted into buying cleaning products.
It became a billion-dollar industry to speak to our inferiority and anxiety.
The time has come for us to take the dramaturgic toolbox into our own hands. It is time for us
to take responsibility for our stories and become active co-narrators.


The Master of Ceremonies
I went to more than 100 lectures as a young student in the early 90s. From national economics
and statistics to administrative law and sociology. Countless of hours in an auditorium where I
was trying to take notes while a lecturer was presenting the knowledge.
How much do I actually remember from these never-ending afternoons at the university?
Broadly speaking, nothing.
Some of the teachers, led by Professor Curt Srensen, were such engaging communicators that
bits and pieces stuck in my memory, but that is only trifles.
On the other hand, I remember nearly all the assignments I wrote and all the presentations I
gave. That knowledge has been embedded in my memory the last 20 years.
Why?
Because I was involved.

The Ruthless Sorting by Consciousness
What many of us experienced while studying is now gradually being proven by research.
Traditional teaching at the blackboard and lectures have a very negligible learning benefit and
only stays marginally in the memory.
An American study found that students use 78 per cent of the time during lectures on irrelevant
thoughts or passive thoughts about the subject, while only one per cent of the time is spent on
problem solving or connecting what is being listened to with other knowledge.15
The reason for this is that our brain is working overtime to keep us alive by sorting rigidly in
what we sense and what we remember. From nature, the prioritisation in terms of sorting is
tough as nails is what is happening right now something I have to comprehend and remember
in order to survive?
If it is not important for survival, then we quickly forget about it afterwards. And a slightly
boring lecture on national economics at Aarhus University was not something that my brain
perceived as crucial survival skills. My subconscious confidently concluded that Ask will never
need this, and stored the memory in the same drawer as bills and government information
campaigns on health eating and safe sex.
If we take a look at the brains sorting mechanisms, then a lot of sorting happens in the actual
sensation. Through our senses, our brain is constantly receiving an enormous amount of
impulses. The brain uses around 25 per cent of its combined resources controlling vision alone.

When handling the data from the optic nerves, the brain has to perform a rigid sorting into
what is important and what is not. And since we used to have to be on our guards for predators
back in the jungle, our vision reacts especially to sudden movements. Our inner Neanderthal is
still walking around every day and keeping an eye out for a sabretooth tiger jumping out of the
bushes.
If we become afraid and get adrenaline in the body, then the brain instantly reacts by limiting
our field of vision. Our peripheral vision disappears to enable the brain to use all its processing
power to decode the enemy right in front of us.16
Those sensations or signals that get through the filter and become an experience are also rigidly
prioritises when the brain is deciding what to keep. To factors are vital for whether we keep an
experience: are adrenaline and dopamine present in the body?
Let take a closer look at the hormones adrenaline and dopamine. Both substances are so-called
monoamines and work as signal chemicals in the brain. They help to control the central nervous
system and influence many bodily functions and mental processes. Among other things,
adrenaline increases metabolism, pulse, pain tolerance and breathing, and it makes us relax our
bowels and bladder. That is why it is possible to shit oneself in horror.
Adrenaline is a combat substance that is released when we are afraid and which makes us
better at being in a fight. Adrenaline also results in the release of dopamine.
Dopamine is more peaceful and, simply put, works as a reward when we have a positive
experience, for example if we win in Chess, have sex or are socially acknowledged. Dopamine is
the brains way of giving us a chemical snack when we have been a good boy.
Dopamine is addictive, which is aimed at helping us to keep to a positive behaviour. The
downside is that dopamine also makes us disposed to different addictions, including an
excessive urge among men in their 40s to accomplish an ironman.
Do you recall the three monkey instincts from earlier?
What is common for foraging, courting and desire for procreation is that it is behaviour that is
highly rewarded with dopamine. It is the bodys way to encourage monkeys and humans to look
for snacks, seek social acknowledgement, secure sexual reproduction and take care of their
young.
The interesting part about dopamine in relation to this is that the substance is a catalyst for
preservation and renewal of our neural networks, i.e. our associations about how we
understand the world and ourselves via framing.
Danish researchers from the Panum Institute at the University of Copenhagen have
demonstrated how dopamine milliseconds after a good experience is spread as a treat from
the base ganglions, who are the dopamine producing cells inside the brain.

The dopamine is both vital for the preservation of existing framing, for example when a
Christian gets a positive experience during the ritual communion, which acknowledges and
strengthens the religious story, and it is a prerequisite for the creation of new connections and
thus new learning.
Dopamine is released as a result of adrenaline being present in the body, or as a reward for a
positive experience. Here probably lies the explanation for the limited learning benefit from my
lectures: I was far from adequately engaged to experience fear, tension or social
acknowledgement.
Strong stories, horrifying or pleasant, activate our emotions, release dopamine and preserve
our memories.

The IKEA Effect
In 2010, a research team from Harvard, Yale and Duke University performed an experiment
with IKEA furniture. They asked a group of test subjects to assemble a number of pieces of IKEA
furniture and afterwards examined how much the participants were willing to pay for the
furniture they had assembled themselves, compared to similar IKEA furniture that had been
assembled by others.
The researchers found that the participants were willing to pay 63 per cent more for the
furniture they had worked hard to assemble themselves. The researchers were able to
document similar results with, among other things, hand-folded origami figures.
Now you know why you for too many years have been dragging your old Billy shelves with you,
move after move. It is because you assembled the thing yourself.
Later experiments have shown that the IKEA effect only applies if you experience that your
work is useful and makes a positive difference. If you assemble the things incorrectly or leave
them unfinished, then the positive effect disappears.17
Active involvement is the way forward if you want to influence the brain. That is the magical
recipe for releasing adrenaline and dopamine, which can accelerate learning and impact on
identity and opinions.
It is all about getting past the indifference and break with the role as passive audience. The
things we create and experience ownership towards have a bigger value to us. People have to
take responsibility themselves in an active role as co-creators or co-narrators.


Prerequisites for Efficient Involvement
Let us take a look at what is needed to work efficiently with involvement.
The story has to be engaging and create identification and expectation

It is a prerequisite that story, which frames the involvement, is relevant and interesting.
This is where the classical dramaturgy can be of assistance: there has to be
identification, a dramatic conflict and a dynamic plot populated with archetypes that
ensure suspense and thrust. Remember that we have to get people so engaged in the
story that the suspense boosts their adrenaline and make sure the storys resolution is
rewarded by the brain with a dopamine fix.

The story has to be consistent
If we want to influence the participants in a certain direction such as, for example,
shifting their image of the organisations customers from patients to citizens, it is
important to activate the new associations several times. If we want to create a new
lasting framing within the participants, then we have to get their brains to create new
synapses, i.e. connections between the neurones. And this only happens if the new
associations get activated over and over. It will take some time and demand a conscious
consistency in terms and choice of words.

The story has to be open
Similar to the example with the dragons eye, there is a rule about less is more. Good
stories leave space for the participants imagination when we are allowed to write
along and ponder how the story will end, the activation of the relevant frames
accelerate drastically. Remember the monkeys curiosity. Here we want the participants
to dream about the story.

The participants have to experience that something is at stake
We want to experience that we have a real influence, that we are able to influence the
outcome of something important and meaningful. It has to be so exciting, and
competitive if possible, that we get adrenaline into the body. That is why people engage
better with meta stories stories about storytelling, where the participants themselves
make a difference. If you have an agenda you would like to drive home, it will have to be
presented as questions instead of answers. More on that later.

The participants have to experience success and be appreciated for it
We need acknowledgement and appreciation. Did I do it well enough? Am I doing
alright, mum? In Meads metaphor with the internal conversation between I and
Me, I would like to satisfy Me. As documented by the IKEA effect, we experience
satisfaction and ownership when we get the chance to finish a task. This point is also

found in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis theory about flow, where the positive experience of
being in a flow disappears if the challenge becomes too hard or too easy. We want to
be challenged, but only so much that we are still able to succeed.

From answers to questions
I have for decades watched CEOs and other executives try to explain a corporate strategy to a
small group of senior managers or to a much larger group of staff.
For the most part, it has not been a pretty sight.
In the case of senior managers, I usually hear 3 or 4 different interpretations of what the boss
said, or disagreements about what they thought he or she said.
In either case, no alignment at the top.
In the case of a larger group of staff, often many people look on blankly during the presentation.
They may appreciate a CEOs willingness to share crucial plans. But because they dont have the
context or experience, they cant even begin to understand what is being thrown at them in a
thick PowerPoint deck.
And what they do see certainly doesnt make them want to get up in the morning and come to
work.18
Professor John Kotter, leadership and change guru.

Within traditional communication, we prefer to deliver the ready-made answers. We present
the truth and try to convince or persuade our passive listener. We are preaching downwards
from an elevated, secure and powerful position. The problem is that is does not work very well
on anyone but the speaker herself.
If I am seated among the audience, it is limited what I can understand and, even if the
presentation is good and engaging, it is not something I claim ownership to. It never becomes
my story.
The alternative is to communicate with questions instead of answers. We are not used to it, but
it works. Working with open stories where the participants are involved via questions is not
about keeping your mouth shut or leaving everything open. On the contrary. It is about
initiating a drama, establishing a conflict, staging the participants as the heroes of the story and
then dare to be quiet. It is all up to the heroes how they will approach this task and what route
they will choose.

As initiators, we are able to define the why and the what of the starting point, but the
participants themselves have to take on the tactical how.
If we look at classical dramaturgy, we have to accept that we are not playing the role of the
hero ourselves. We have to step back into the role as Mentor and, if necessary, the Jester who
teasingly are directing the heroes towards the right way.
A central point in The Heros Journey is that the Mentor can only be there on the first part of
the journey. If the hero is going to change, he or she will have to face the challenges alone and
make her own mistakes. It is for a reason that Gandalf disappears and is presumed dead after
the battle with the Balrog in the Mines of Moria, and that Obi Wan Kenobi has to die in order
for Luke Skywalker to step into character as a Jedi knight in Star Wars. Dumbledores martyr
death was a prerequisite for Harry Potter overcoming Voldemort.
Instead of the grand oratorical demagogue, we need a master of ceremonies. A person who
takes on the responsibility for the shared experience and story, but orchestrates and frames
from the side-line instead of standing on the podium herself.

Doxa Areas and Staging
The totalitarian stories from the first generation were masters in rituals and staging. From
Stonehenge and Aztec pyramids to Catholic cathedrals and Hitlers opening ceremony for the
Olympic Games. Nothing was left to chance when worldviews and identity had to be built and
maintained. It was world class ceremonial leadership. And it was not only passive
communication.
Masters of ceremonies in the past also understood the need for a glimpse of involvement to
give the stories authenticity and weight. One actual thing we can take away from the masters of
the past is their ability to create special rooms and occasions for different forms of meaning
creation and involvement.
Let me briefly present the Doxa areas, which are inspired by the Danish doctor in philosophy
Ole Michael Jensen, as an efficient working tool from the semiotic toolbox.
Doxa is ancient Greek and means something along the lines of common meaning". We know
the word today from terms such as paradox and orthodox. In this context I am using Doxa to
describe three different Doxa areas or stages, each of which present alternative ways of
establishing meaning.


The Three Doxa Areas

The first Doxa area is the First-ness, the belief. It is the sign itself, something bigger than
ourselves and which we can out words on. It is a meaning that we cannot but bow our heads to
and confess to.
If we look at how the church room is constructed, the alter has been a product developed to
precisely this kind of creation of meaning. On your knees in front of God on the cross there is
no room for discussion, doubt or objections. We are nothing and should be grateful for even to
be allowed to whisper yes and amen.
The First-ness is communication to the soul or the stomach, it is something that just feels right.
Communication within the First-ness area is often seen at people we typically call
fundamentalists. They are the saved ones who know they are right, and where practical
arguments or personal opinions are irrelevant. Rhetoricians would often use the term ethos
about the kind of appeal that belongs in this Doxa area.
The next Doxa area is the Second-ness, truth. It is a sign related to another sign. Here it is all
about logic, rationality and reasoning. It is communication to the brain, the logos of rhetoric.
The audience must be convinced through poignant parables, logical explanations and reasoned
points.
Within the church room, the pulpit is specially designed for precisely this form of
communication where the priest can stand in an elevated position and relay the truth to the
congregation. The pulpit has since become the role model for both university auditoriums,
school classrooms and the traditional conference room. What matters the most for this staging

is the fact that the speaker talks from an elevated, authoritarian position and that the audience
are facing him instead of each other. There is a degree of involvement, but the authority tightly
controls it.
The final Doxa area is the Third-ness, my opinion. Here it is a sign related to another sign on a
background that points back to the observer like a mirror. The third Doxa area is about me, my
opinion, my position, my doubt and my taste. It is pure subjectivity and navel gazing.
Arguments such as I feel like or it feels right are valid. Communication is from the heart. It is
about emotions, or pathos, as the rhetoricians would call it.
Within the church room, the Catholic confessional box is constructed exactly in order to stage
the Third-ness. It is the ultimate self-coaching when a member of the congregation sits alone in
the darkness and thinks about her own doubt or sin. This is complete involvement, but in a
shielded world to make sure the rest of the congregation is not infected.
Skilled speakers and masters of ceremony are able to remember all three Doxa areas. They
manage to hit both the heart, the brain and the soul, and they make sure to stage setting and
space where the three areas for creation of meaning can play their roles.
In my own work, the Doxa areas have been very helpful as guidelines for designing
communication, experiences and involvement.
They have helped me develop new concepts for meetings, design exhibitions, plan
management conferences and write speeches for chief executives. The hardest part has often
been to include the First-ness we are no longer used to worship the solemn and unsaid.

Involvement Through Play and Games
During the battle at Kniggrtz in the Prussian-Austrian War in 1866, the Prussian king
witnessed his elite guard division suffering great losses on the battlefield.

The monarch complained to his adjutant: Why did we spend all this time on field exercises and
strategy games?
The adjutants reply was: That was where we learnt all the mistakes, Your Majesty.
Since the dawn of mankind, board games have been used to create meaning from complex
contexts and train princes in the craft of strategy. The first known educational game is The
Royal Game of Ur, which goes back to the earliest civilisations more than 7,000 years ago. The
game tradition since spread to both India, Egypt and China. Tutankhamun had a board game
with him in his grave.
Many of Antiquitys educational games were both training in strategic warfare and in more
spiritual wisdom. They were closely related to divination and were used to transfer worldly

wisdom from generation to generation. Later in history, board games were used in China in the
7th century to train civil servants in political science and in Europe chess and other games were
the highest fashion at the royal courts.
The Prussian military, under Helmuth von Molktes command, used so-called Kriegsspiele
(war games) to train the officers to independently navigate complex situations in a flexible
manner (the so-called Auftraugstaktik doctrine).
The Prussians had no illusions about being able to learn to predict the outcome of the battle,
but they were training what modern training researchers call scenario competence.19 The
ability to, at the same time, understand and relate to open possibilities.
Why did the first educational game about strategy appear several centuries before the first
book about the subject? I might dare to say that it is because games communicate much better
than books. They do that because they are more involving and create co-narrators.
Games are interactive, collective stories where the participants are in the centre as active
protagonists who have to handle difficult choices and conflicts. Games are fundamentally
exiting and we are rewarded with plenty of doses of dopamine when we cut off reality and
immerse ourselves in a well-designed game experience.
In modern organisations, people are generally very skilled and professional. You see yourself as
skilled, you are being seen as highly competent and between yourself you are confirming each
others competence. The problem is that, typically, you are not very competent when you have
to try something new in fact, the first couple of times you are typically pretty lousy at it. And
it can be anxiety-provoking to have to be lousy among all this professionalism and competence.
The consequence may quickly become a built-in conservatism that obstructs innovation and
learning. We stick with what we are good at and comfortable with.
One of the things games and simulations are able to help with is to remove some of the
competence pressure. Because in a game you are only playing.
Even though the focus of the game may be quite serious and professional, the simulated
framing is able to act as a safe sandbox where there is room to experiment and address the
difficult questions. You may draw costly lessons with Monopoly money and game pieces
without having the consequences hit customers, colleagues or budgets.
Alongside my colleagues, I have had the pleasure for two decades to design game-based
training and involvement tools for a variety of Danish and international companies. From
strategic war games for the top management to concrete training tools about subjects like
safety culture, change leadership or sustainability for the wider group of managers or
employees.
Our approach is to see educational games as designed conversations. They are a way to stage a
common cognitive process that is controlled, but still open. Good games draw on classical

dramaturgy and create identification and engagement through conflicts, difficult choices and
uncertainty about the outcome. Something is at stake and there is an uncertainty, which invites
the imagination to participate in guessing.
Over the years, it has been interesting to witness a development where game-based training
alongside the emergence of Generation III gradually has gone from being something new and
exciting to become generally accepted and widespread. The scepticism has disappeared
concurrently with the games proving their ability to create learning and engagement through
involvement.
In many ways, game-based tools or gamification, as it is also known are an optimal
approach to Generation IIIs demand for inclusion and active participation. Especially board
game-based concepts where the participants are playing together in the same physical room
make it possible to stimulate all the monkey instincts we talked about earlier: curiosity, focus-
orientation and the need for social acceptance.
It is a thought-provoking development that the board games, which for 7,000 years were
reserved for the education of royalty in terms of strategy and wisdom, today have become
something for everybody. They are no longer reserved for the ruling elite to reflect on complex
questions.
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Heraclitus (535-475BC)


HOW

The Battle for Attention
The clothing brand American Apparel was founded in 1997 by the Canadian Dov Charney and
got off to a flying start. The company was young and urban and was different from mainstream
chains like H&M, Mango and Zara, due to an extreme sexualisation in its marketing.
American Apparel hit Generation II right in the middle of its nihilistic and narcissistic heart. Here
was the opportunity to buy the youth dream about the liberated, free from worries and
hedonistic Los Angeles life. One of the great hit songs at the time was Baby One More Time
with 17-year-old Britney Spears.
The companys ads borrowed from the language of porn and went so far that several
campaigns were banned in the US, because under-aged youngsters were shown in sexual
poses. But it worked, and in 2007 American Apparel was the biggest clothing company in the
US, with 260 stores in 19 countries. Then it went the other way.
A number of accusations for sexual harassment led to a replacement of Dov Chaney, but it was
not the companys only problem. Young peoples attitudes changed in the 00s and suddenly
especially women became very tired of being objectified and sexualised by others. Led by pop
stars like Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, the 10s were about owning your own body
and use it as an expression of empowerment.
American Apparel had been at the very top of the pile of Pixi books with the glossiest and risky
front pages, but it was not enough any longer. The customers wanted to participate in filling
those pages. American Apparel became a short-lived wonder, which rode the last waves of the
second era and the postmodern chaos, but had nothing at all to offer the co-narrators of
Generation III. Today the company is fighting for survival.20

At the Mercy of Advertising
Who in the history of mankind is responsible for most deaths? Is it perhaps Hitler? Stalin?
Chairman Mao?
Hardly.
The evidence suggests that the biggest mass murderer is the American Edward L. Bernays.
Bernays was the American PR and advertising guy who in 1929 helped American Tobacco
convince American women to smoke. Very few women were in fact smoking at the time, but
Bernays soon changed that when he came up with marketing cigarettes as a symbol of equality
under the slogan torches of freedom.
20 years later, Bernays, who happened to be Sigmund Freuds nephew, got another
assignment. He was going to help Beech-Nut Packing Co. selling more bacon.

At the time, no American would even dream of eating bacon for breakfast, which typically was
very light with a cup of coffee, a little orange juice and perhaps a roll. But Bernays decided to
change that. He managed to get a doctor to state that a heavy breakfast is healthier than a light
one, and after his study had been confirmed by other doctors, he placed the medical
recommendation in the media. Shortly thereafter, the sale of bacon exploded and since that
time a large part of the world wakes up to pork on the table.21
The calculation is hardly fair, but if you look at the number of victims of women smoking since
the 30s (in Denmark, about 6,000 women die from smoking annually) and obesity caused by the
shift to a heavier breakfast in the US, then Bernays is responsible for the loss of around 100
million lives.
But advertising can also be a force of good.
Do you have coffee breaks at your workplace?

If yes, then you should probably thank John B. Watson. In the 1950s, coffee was falling out of
fashion and sales plummeted. In order to stop the decline, the lobby organisation Pan-
American Coffee Bureau hired the sociologist John B. Watson.
Watson invented the coffee break inspired by the short breaks used at certain factories
during the Second World War to drink coffee, in order to stay awake during night work. The
new break was marketed as an established tradition in big ads, even though he just came up
with the idea. And it worked.
After only a few years, coffee break had become an established term in the American
language and an established tradition in most work places.22

The Golden Age of Advertising
The rise of capitalism after the First World War triggered a golden age for the advertising
industry, which started in the US and since spread to the rest of the world. This was a
development that helped to confirm the breakthrough for the second era of stories.
The combination of new mass media, a global market and a population who were still naive and
believed in authorities after centuries of oppression by the totalitarian stories, made the ads
extremely effective.
Printed ads were complemented by radio spots in the 1920s, and from the early 50s TV ads
became the launch pad for a number of golden decades, where even the most stupid, sexist
and patronising ads were able to get the consumers to fill their baskets.
Most ads more and more explicitly played on the dream of liberation from the grand stories of
the past: the dream of wealth and thus liberation from the low self-esteem of the working

class, the dream of easy-going freedom as opposed to the protestant guilt, the dream of
liberation from the matriarchal tyranny of the nuclear family and the dream of free sexuality
liberated from the churchs fear of lust.
The ads consciously and skilfully played against the opinionated straitjackets of the grand
stories, which Generation II had turned their back to.
As early as in 1925, the advertising budgets were 2,9 % of the American gross domestic product
and this level has not fallen since.
Gradually, more and more platforms and channels became available to the advertisers. In the
80s, cable TV entered the US and at the end of the 90s, the internet kicked open the door to a
promised land of banner ads, pop-up windows, search engine optimisation and cat videos.
Every time new kinds of media join, the time spend watching grows. The average weekly media
consumption in the US has risen from 28 hours in 1960, over 50 hours in 1980 to 80 hours in
2013. Some studies estimate that every American today has a daily media consumption of more
than 15 hours.23
This means that many Americans more or less are in front of a screen or listens to radio all the
time when they are awake.
And media consumption has not only been increasing steadily in the US: In Denmark, children
on average spend eight hours on different media from TV to video games.

The Party Is Over
Alongside the rise of the overall media consumption, the battle for the audiences attention has
escalated. In the myriad of the 10,000 Pixi books, the competition for being at the top of the
pile is fierce. The consequence has been that the number of ads has grown in the last couple of
decades, while the consumers have become more and more immune to their influence.
Only by stepping up the advertising war with more and more platforms and bigger and bigger
exposure, the advertisers have partly been able to compensate for the declining impact.
One place where this development has been clear is within media pricing the price for an ad
has fallen 30-40 % from 2005 to 2014. From 2004 to 2011, the amount of advertising on TV in
Denmark increased by 89 %.24 We get more and more advertising with less and less effect.
One of the reasons for this is that ads are becoming worse and worse in their struggle to be on
top of the pile, where everything is reduced to be about the glossy front page. The good story is
being overlooked.
Where for 7-15 years ago the advertising industry celebrated successes with creative
advertising universes, which were expanded over several years for example,

comparethemarket.coms Compare the Meerkat, Apples Get a Mac, Old Spice's "The Man
Your Man Could Smell Like most of todays ads are short-term gimmicks with no real impact.
If we look at the TV ads that are performing best in viewer tests today (among others, KitKat,
John Lewis and IKEA), it is striking that all of them are based on concepts that are story-based
and which have been developed over a number of years.
We are back at framing and the need to use the narrative toolbox consistently over time, if it is
to be possible to influence peoples association chains.
But the crucial reason is that the viewers and consumers no longer want to play the role of the
passive audience. As we saw in the story about the rise and fall of American Apparel, a change
happened in the 00s. Generation III entered the stage and they are no looking at themselves as
consumers, viewers or customers in the mirror. They want to decide themselves and take
responsibility as active co-narrators.

This Is Not a Game
In 1999, small video clips about a missing film crew and an old myth about a witch in the woods
around Burkittsville in Maryland, US, began to appear on the internet. Alongside other clues on
the internet, the short clips were part of a clever marketing plan for the horror film Blair Witch
Project.
The film was a low budget found footage movie disguising itself as an authentic story about
three film students who disappear without a trace in the woods. As opposed to traditional
Hollywood launch campaigns that try to tell as much as possible and as loud as possible, the
Blair Witch Project chose to withhold information in order to build suspense and tease
curiosity. That was the point about Lars von Triers eye of the dragon in a nutshell. And it
worked.
The internet exploded with interest and even after the film had premiered with the actors on
the red carpet, there were fans still insisting that it was a true story. The Blair Witch Project
became the most earning film compared to the original budget. Despite lukewarm reviews, the
25,000-dollar film earned 248 million dollars.
The Blair Witch Project was a seminal example of an advertising campaign that invites its
audience to become actively involved. They played hard to get and forced the participants to
become actively involved in order to get the next clue in the mystery. The new possibilities of
the internet for creating mass engagement were used to their full potential and Generation III
were thrilled and excited.
Shortly after the success of The Blair Witch Project came a number of resourceful launch
campaigns that tried to exploit the audiences thirst for becoming co-narrators. A new genre
had seen the light of day: ARG Alternate Reality Games.

There was a hidden phone number in the trailer for Steven Spielbergs film A.I. and if you tried
calling it, you received an answering machine message, which opened the doors to a
comprehensive online murder mystery. The mystery comprised more than 40 specially
designed web pages, nicknamed The Beast by its fans, due to its enormity and the difficult
riddles.
Later came I Love Bees, which helped to promote the computer game Halo II. In this game,
players had to, among other things, cooperate to find pay phones across he US and be ready to
be there at certain times to receive voice messages. More than three million people visited the
games website and thousands of players across the world spent countless hours to break the
codes.
Since then, hundreds of ARGs have been produced, from unpaid hobby projects to commercial
subscription models and ingenious marketing campaigns.
When I was working for Zentropa, I was part of trying to introduce some of these ideas into the
launches of Danish films. The possibilities were mind-blowing, but we only ever managed to
scratch the surface.
The central point about the ARG genre is the credo This is not a game. All the fun and
fascination are lie in the fact that everyone is trying to forget that it is only something we play.
That is why it is the both the duty of the game masters (the puppet masters) and the players
to keep the illusion alive by hiding clues or looking the other way in terms of what may expose
the fiction.
Today, the ARG genre has become mainstream and slightly tired. It is never a good sign when
the EU Commission jumps on the concept (in 2008, they tried to create an ARG about language
education). But the interest for involvement lives on and the concepts of the genre have been
very influential within entertainment, advertising and education.

The Bleeding of the Old Media
The changed patterns in media use and the falling revenues from traditional ads have
particularly hit the conventional publicist media. Big newspapers have been struggling for a
while in Denmark, the circulation of regional daily newspapers peaked in the late 60s and the
national newspapers hit their peak in the 80s. Since then, it has only been one direction:
downward.
The effects from declining readership have been enhanced by falling revenues from ads, which
particularly came into play after the coming of the internet in the 00s.
The downturn has not stopped yet; revenue from ads in printed newspapers in Denmark, which
were nearly half a billion euro in 2014, is expected to fall to about 350 million euro in 2019.25

Newspapers have been closed, journalists have been sacked and millions have been spent
thinking up new business models, without much luck.
In order to be able to understand the development and the challenges, I am borrowing a
formula from one of my good colleagues, Michael Thomsen.

Michael Thomsen has a background in computer programming and has been working on the
forefront of digital innovation since the early 80s, including as head of development for the
LEGO group and as head of research for Interactive Institute in Sweden.
Michael developed Thomsens Formula when he was heading LEGOs development office in
Boston, which was working closely with the digital pioneers at MIT Media Lab. The formula was
originally for digital development, but I would like to use it in a wider sense.
In short, Thomsens Formula describes the most fundamental business dynamic of capitalism:
You earn money by producing something cheap and create a large perceived value, which
customers are willing to pay for.
Where profit is the possible surplus, the virtual value describes the value perceived by the
participants: quality, authenticity, aesthetics, identification, etc. It is the symbolic added value
that is often connected to the story of a brand.
Below the fraction line we have the real value. This is the hard reality of the physical world:
materials, commodities, means of production, etc.
How do you become a wealthy merchant?
By, for example, producing spring water. The real value here is a raw material that covers 70 %
of the Earths surface. In Denmark, clean water can be poured directly from the tap for less
than 1 cent per litre. It is probably impossible to make it any cheaper below the fraction line.
Above the fraction line, you try to promote the story about how splendid the water is. You call
it spring water (where else would it come from?) and create feel-good associations to well-
being, wellness, health, etc. via design and marketing. Something along the lines of an old
spring beneath a monastery, birch trees and some Scandinavian girls in yoga clothing who look
energetic and hard working. To give the whole thing a bit more oomph, you do not add hot air,
but instead carbonic acid and perhaps a slightly green or light blue colouring of the bottle.

Altogether: We take a large virtual value and divide it by a low real value and the result is
considerable profit.
And it works. We all gladly pay 2-3 euro for half a litre of spring water at a filling station or 7-
11. This is several times the price per litre for milk.
Think about how grotesque that comparison is. Milk contains protein, vitamins, fat and calcium
and it takes hard work form both the cow and the farmer to produce, it has to be chilled
constantly and it does not keep very long. Water, on the other hand, is readily available from
the tap and it can be stored for years. Someone is obviously better at understanding the
dynamics of the experience economy than the milk farmers.
Back to traditional media.
In a historic perspective, the traditional daily newspapers have benefitted from Thomsens
Formula. During the first generation of stories, most newspapers hung unto a strong class
identity. There were newspapers for the Social Democratic worker, the conservative employer
and the radical academic. The newspaper subscription went hand in hand with the party
membership and that raised the virtual value substantially.
The real value, however, was relatively modest. The reader paid for getting something tangible
in her hand, while industrial printing presses and large circulations reduced the production
costs considerably. While the second generation of stories took over after the Second World
War, the virtual value of newspapers got an extra boost. The readers thirst for inspiration,
stories and identity increased while the siren song of the market via advertising exploded. So
far, so good.
The rising problems for newspapers from the 90s are both based above and below the fraction
line in Thomsens Formula.
Below the fraction line the newspapers got caught up by one of the fundamental rules in
mathematics: You cannot divide by zero. Then the entire formula falls apart.
The problem of the newspapers was that the emergence of the internet was erasing the real
value below the fraction line and hence the willingness to pay. I can understand that I have to
pay in order to get a freshly printed physical newspaper, but why pay for news on a website in
the virtual no-man's-land on the web?
To make matters worse, the emergence of freesheets (free newspapers) in the middle of the
00s meant that readers perception of the real value of printed paper was undermined. When
every commuter train is overflowing with free newspapers, it takes away some of the pleasure
from a newly bought broadsheet.
Above the fraction line the newspapers were hit by a wave of four attacks.

The first problem occurred right after the decline of the big stories. The role in the past as
publication for different groups in society became gradually diluted, especially on the worker
front. The Danish Social Democrat newspaper, Det Fri Aktuelt, closed in 2001 and ended 130
years with a Social Democratic press.
The second problem was the rising resistance to advertising among the population, which since
the beginning of the 00s has reduced the effectiveness of traditional marketing and with that
the advertisers willingness to pay for ad space in the newspapers.
The third problem is the readers perception of speed. Where newspaper front pages used to
be breaking news, the printed papers of today have to rely on reporting yesterdays news. TV
and the internets 24/7 news coverage have overtaken the newspapers relevance as
communicators of fresh news. They have to rely on background material and reactive
commentary.
The fourth and final problem is the newspapers meeting with the co-narrators of Generation III
and their expectation of involvement. It is not attractive to be put in the role as passive
subscriber or reader, and you want to read about yourself or things that closely relate to your
own area of interest.
The conventional newspapers are fighting for their lives, with four problems above the fraction
line and two challenges below it.
The profit in Thomsens Formula, which looked reasonable earlier, is under tremendous
pressure and the business model might collapse as a house of cards alongside the
disappearance of the real value.
But there are also bright spots. If we look at the daily newspapers, it looks like some niche
newspapers have been able to find a moderate, but stable, level. The afterglow from the big
stories are skilfully utilised and the role as a niche publication for each special segment is taken.
Another bright spot is digital-only newspapers and magazines, which are liberating themselves
from the shackles of paper with an ambition to create a new kind of relevance and
involvement. The Danish digital publication Zetland's live events are exciting attempts to try to
create an experience of something real below the fraction line, which may be able to replace
the destructive zero of the internet.
Future success within the world of media and marketing depends on leaving the traditional
business models behind and acknowledge the fundamental change from Generation II to
Generation III even the most beautiful Pixi books in the world fail when the audience want to
be co-narrators instead of passive consumers.
Below are listed six virtues as a practical inspiration to developing new sustainable solutions.


Six virtues in order to engage Generation III as co-narrators:
1. Make the audience the hero
Conventional marketing, branding and propaganda have been trying to sell ready
messages to a passive audience. If we use the dramaturgic toolbox from chapter 6, then
customers, voters or readers are staged as Recipient, while the company or the
politician pulls on the hero cape. But people are tired of playing the timid princess in the
tower, who has to wait patiently to be rescued. Instead, it is necessary to change the
dynamic in such a way that the audience takes on the active hero role themselves, while
the company and the politicians step back and make do with the roles as Helpers or
Senders. The patronising and pacifying Let me tell you what we are able to offer you!
is replaced by the encouraging and acknowledging What would you like to do and how
can we be of assistance?. The relation has to be mutual and equal. Generation III is not
content being someone elses backing singers.

2. Less front page and more content
In the battle for attention we have been focusing too much on glossy front pages and
not enough on the actual content in the stories. We are simplifying and trivialising the
stories until there is not a single ounce of suspense, mystery or originality left. We are in
fact undermining our own stories when we, in our eagerness to sell, accidentally reveal
that the butler is the murderer on the front page of the crime novel. If you want a
concrete example, then watch any trailer for a current Hollywood film. I bet that you will
be able to predict 90% of the film experience you can expect from the two-minute high-
speed montage. We must not forget the Eye of the Dragon.

3. Remember to understand both what people want and what they actually need
All stories both have an internal and an external conflict something we desire and
something we do not yet know that we need. Skilful communication understands both
levels and how they interact. An excellent, and frightening, example of this is Barneys
cigarette campaign with torches of freedom he understood how to exploit American
womens unspoken desire to rebel against the male chauvinist oppression of the day.

4. It has to be authentic
Our bullshit radar has become so sensitive that we quickly lose interest for stories
without real depth and authenticity. The stories have to be authentic and keep their
promises. The Danish business Aarstiderne (The Seasons) delivers boxes with organic
vegetables and other stuff to thousands of Danes and Swedes and sit on a very strong
position within the food industry, because the founder, Sren Eilersen, both believes in
and lives according to what he is saying. It is what it is, and his opinions have not been
shaped by a PR agency via focus groups or big data analysis of Twitter feeds.


5. Play hard to get
Remember our instincts for foraging and courting. We are forever curious and are
especially drawn to what we cannot immediately get. We want to be flirted with, be
tempted and roused. Far too much advertising is vulgar in its brutish directness - it is
spread legs and key selling points from the outset. Even though it is often wishful
thinking that we want to believe we are the only tourists in Venice who have found this
authentic family restaurant where all the locals come. We want to feel unique.

6. Action is the strongest communication
You rarely get very far with words and communication alone. The important thing is
what you actually do, what you prioritise and where you spend your money. The LEGO
Group sets aside more than 100 million euro to develop bricks without oil, or IKEA in the
US raises the minimum wage for employees, communicates more clearly and more
effectively about community spirit and social responsibility than all the expensive
campaigns in the world. That is also why Volkswagens scandal around the cheating
software, which was covering up the high pollution from diesel cars, hit the company so
hard. Generation III wants to see action before they believe the words and they do not
tolerate hypocrisy at all.

This was a look at what the third era of stories and Generation IIIs demand for involvement
mean for how we approach marketing, attention and media. Another area where the
development has had an even bigger impact is in politics.
We will look closer at that in the next chapter about the new citizenship.


Politics and the New Citizenship
As a hippie child, I experienced the world of politics quite young. I was brought along in my
pram to anti-nuclear marches, I was collecting bottles under the red flags at May Day
demonstrations and as a school boy I helped in a human blockade against the city buses in
Aarhus to protest about cuts in support for public education, at a time where the Danish
minister for education was a right-wing liberal. I have since tried to keep the world of politics at
a distance, perhaps because I was exposed to it so early.
The interest has been there, but I have never felt I wanted to fully spend all my energy on
politics. I guess my faith in the states ability to govern is too weak for me to become a socialist
and my lack of faith in the markets ability to self-regulate keeps me away from the political
right. Instead I have now and then worked as an advisor when needed. I have primarily been
advising Social Democrats, but also a couple of Liberal Democrats, one from the Socialist
Peoples Party and one liberal.
In my experience and I want to believe it is true there are reasonable and kind people within
all parties, who are fighting to reinvent a political system under pressure.
But before we take a look at the challenges for party politics in Denmark, let us quickly jump to
the UK for inspiration.

Project Preston
The areas north of London have always been secure Labour turf. Here was the heavy industry,
the big docks and the coalmines. The Conservatives were able to get votes in the capital and
South England, but in the north, the workers stuck together. Therefore, it was a shock when the
Conservatives in 2009 ended 28 years of Labour rule in Lancashire and won the post as council
leader. This was a very clear indication that something was not working in the old workers
party.
Arnie Graff has been working with local organising and involvement through 50 years as a part
of the American civil rights movement. He comes from Chicago, where he trained a young
Barack Obama long before he quickly rose within the Democratic Party.
In 2010, Arnie got a call from the UK and was asked if he would like to come to London and help
the newly elected Labour leader Ed Miliband. Arnie jumped on a plane and for the following
years became advisor for the British top politician.
Arnie quickly realised that Labour had huge internal problems. The party went from one
election defeat to the next and only had 200,000 members in a country with 60 million people.

Arnie spent his first time listening. He travelled around the country and listened to hundreds of
local Labour people and random voters. He quickly came to the conclusion that Labour had
turned the back to its ordinary members and its traditional voters, through its closed nature,
top-down management, bureaucratic culture and an absence of dialogue.
His critique and ideas for active involvement at the grassroots level were not easy to swallow
for the party inner circle of professional party office-holders, but they let him try out his ideas
at the next local election in Lancashire. Perhaps the thought was that the old Labour seat was a
lost cause anyway, and where the 70-year-old American had everything to win and nothing to
lose.
I met Arnie myself a couple of years ago, when he was visiting Copenhagen, and Ill never forget
how calmly and underplayed he told about the local Labour organisation he met when he went
by train the first time to Preston, the main city in the Lancashire council.
The proud workers party was able to muster 20 active members in one of the largest councils
in the country and they were almost all as old as Arnie himself. The party had become a
pensioners club that soon was going to be extinct along with its last activists.
The few party soldiers, however, were doing what they could. They were canvassing, trying to
sell Labours messages to everyone willing to listen.
Arnies initial advice was to get them to stop talking. And instead start to listen. He sent them
out in their local areas to listen to what the voters were concerned about. Their task was not to
try and sell Labour, but to listen and understand.
The next step for Arnie was to arrange open meetings where local citizens were invited to talk
about what they were concerned about. Party membership was not required and none of
Labours local politicians were allowed to speak from the platform. The meetings were about
the citizens, not the politicians.
There were only few attendees at the first meetings, but more and more joined at each of the
following meetings and soon hundreds of citizens attended each time. Most of them had never
been politically active before.
Closer to the election, a large meeting was held where the participants, through a democratic
process, formulated the manifesto the local party would go to the polls with. Empty phrases
were replaced with actual local key issues and priorities.
The local involvement showed its value during the election campaign hundreds of activists
were canvassing and calling their friends to get support not for Labour the party, but for the
political platform they had been involved in creating themselves. Compared to the previous
election, the number of dialogues with the voters went from around 12,000 to more than
150,000.

The result was clear. Labour won 23 mandates and got the council leader post back. Only three
Labour councillors more and the party would have had an absolute majority.
The success became known as Project Preston and the party was working hard to make the
grassroots tactics spread to the whole country.
Arnie collected his experience in a number of proposed amendments
The existing bureaucratic structure should to be replaced by a relational culture where

new members would experience trust, attentiveness and engagement.
The party had to give up its leadership style where the top leaders in London were only
considering the rest of the party organisation as an implementation machine.
The party should open up and shelve its widespread scepticism towards outsiders. You
would have to be forthcoming to voters who were sympathetic towards Labours
positions, but who were not yet ready to become members of the party. The closed
party had to stop.
The party had to engage and inspire its members. The meetings were simply, on a
whole, too boring and there was a few to open up for political discussions that could
challenge the official party line.
The final and most drastic proposal was that the party should arrange so-called primary
elections, where voters, who were not party members, also could help decide the
partys local front runners. It should also be possible to be a supporting member and
other associations would be able to become collective members.
The many suggestions were met with enthusiasm in some parts of the party constituency, but
there was also scepticism. Great scepticism. Arnies proposals were a direct confrontation with
the well-established power bases and influence at the old bureaucrats in the party.
And it was an internal struggle that Arnie lost. His direct engagement with Labour stopped at
the end of 2013 and the party fell back to its old, top-down nature in the run-up to the
parliamentary elections May 7 2015.
Ed Miliband ended up losing the election to David Cameron, who continued as Prime Minister
with a strengthened mandate. Ed Miliband has since stepped down as Labour chairman and has
been replaced by Jeremy Corbyn from the partys left wing.

Generation III Passes
The story about Preston shows the crisis that political parties around the world are going
through. Membership is falling, scandals are appearing everywhere and the political new
thinking is at a standstill, while a new generation of political movements are stealing young
peoples engagement. The relations and the involvement have been forgotten.

The old parties emerged during the first era of totalitarian stories, in the end of the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th century. They are parties who were born from the strong
professional identity and narrow attention to interests of the class struggle, and which rested
on two legs: firstly, an active, local involvement of members with strong relations and,
secondly, establishing effective party organisations that copied the hierarchy and functionary
culture of the civil service.
The parties were designed by and for Generation I, based on a strong class identity and
bureaucratic representational thinking by becoming a member of a party, I am able to vote a
member into a local constituency, which then has influence on a regional committee, which
then at a party conference can vote for members of an executive committee, which may or may
not exert influence on a parliamentary group, which occasionally may enter a deal that means
something for society.
The influence of the individual member was in fact only symbolic at everything but the local
level.
The crisis within the political parties began when they forgot about relations during the 80s and
90s. As the hierarchical party bureaucracies became more and more centralised and
professional, the work in the local organisation and the close relations became more and more
neglected. Members were to a larger and larger extent seen as voting fodder and election
campaign resources, who preferably were in a torpid state between the elections.
The top-down party bureaucracies particularly failed in the meeting with Generation III. For
them, the meaning lies not in being able to elect representatives to take care of their interests
though committees and board work; they want to decide, get involved and act themselves. It is
no longer enough just to pay a membership fee or hand out a few roses every second year.
In Denmark specifically, the downfall of the Conservative Party has been particularly sad to
witness. What was once the countrys biggest party, is now only a shadow of what it was in the
past and struggling to stay above the minimum percentage. The popular party, which under the
leadership of Poul Schlter was backed by more than a fifth of Danes in the 80s, has been
transformed into the old man of Folketinget (the Danish parliament). Today, the party only has
less than 10 % of the 140,000 members it was able to gather in the mid-60s.
The Social Democrats have come through in a better shape than the Conservatives, but the old
workers party has also experienced a violent bleeding of members since its heyday, from
around 300,000 members in 1947 to a little more than 40,000 today. Before the Second World
War, the party nearly had an absolute majority under Thorvald Stauning (the first Social
Democratic Prime Minister of Denmark), while the average support for the party in
parliamentary elections from 1946-71 was 39 %. At the latest Danish national election in 2015,
the party got 26 % of the votes, which was a slight progress from the previous lection.

Historically, the decline in membership in the four old parties the Conservatives, the Liberals,
the Social Democrats and the Liberal Democrats is dramatic. Collectively, the party
membership has fallen from 600,000 in 1960 to around 100,000 today.
The development reflects the change from the first generation to the second generation of
stories after the war, plus the emergence of the third generation in the last 10 years.
The days of the peoples parties are numbered.

Protest Parties
Three newer Danish political parties deserve a closer look.
The Danish Peoples Party is the big success story in Danish politics. In only 20 years, it has risen
like a Phoenix from the ashes of the former Fremskridtspartiet (The Progress Party) to
become the second-largest party in Denmark. In my view, the success of the party tells about
the frustrations many Danes are experiencing in the transition from the first to the second era
of stories. The security and orthodoxy of the past have been replaced by an unpredictable
nihilist chaos where many have felt lonely, afraid and unseen.
It is within this vacuum of values that the Danish Peoples Party have launched themselves with
an elegantly staged socially conservative nationalism. Where the other parties have become
more and more technocratic in their communication within the logical Doxa area, the party
founder Pia Kjrsgaard and her fellow party members have dared to push all the keys in both
the first and the third Doxa area. They have not shied away from the sentimental and have
communicated with both pathos and ethos.
Even though the party has regularly changed its point of view and has gone against election
promises, for example regarding early retirement benefits, unemployment benefit and public
sector growth, it has been able to establish an understanding among its voters that it does not
matter.
This Teflon protection, envied by all other parties, is in fact well described in research. If we
have a strong emotional opinion in an area, then we are able to filter out new information that
goes against this view of the world. Experiments have shown that we become strikingly worse
at maths if an arithmetical problem arrives at a result that goes against our attitudes, for
example regarding global warming.26 It seems that the association chains in our brains may be
so fortified that even logic is not able to create new connections.
Simply put, The Danish Peoples Party has been very good at getting support from many voters
in Generation II who are longing for the safety under Generation I.
Liberal Alliance is also a modern success story. In only seven years on the political right wing in
Denmark, party leader Anders Samuelsen & Co. have been able to conquer and keep their own

Liberal territory, and Liberal Alliance is today the fifth-largest party with more than double the
MPs as the Conservatives. The party has created a penetrating story with strong concepts of the
enemy (with campaigns against the unemployed and the less well-off) and tax relief as its main
choice of weapons. The party has support from both Generation II and Generation III and has
been very good at creating interest and engagement, especially among the young voters.
The Alternative is the latest addition to the Danish parliament. In only two years, Uffe Elbk
has managed to turn around his downfall as failed minister of culture for the Liberal Democrats
into a surprising success as chairman of a new party with nine seats in Folketinget (one more
than his old party). It completely surprised the political establishment and commentators that
the party even managed to get elected to the parliament. The whole project had been declared
dead and gone long before the election.
The Alternative is a pure attempt to establish a party for Generation III. It considers itself as a
movement and tries to redesign the way the old parties approached membership and
development of policies. The party has been particularly effective in creating a new political
story about other objectives than growth and tougher asylum legislation, and has been able to
catch the grassroots engagement around sustainability and entrepreneurs that used to exist
outside the established party systems. It is going to be interesting to follow over the coming
years whether The Alternative will be able to handle its success and create a stable and lasting
movement.
Regardless of whether you have personal convictions for or against The Danish Peoples Party,
Liberal Alliance or The Alternative, their success is cause for optimism on behalf of democracy.
It is heartening that the working democracy still is able to cause new departures, catch public
feelings and survive the sceptics from body of commentators. One misses that the traditional
parties will be able to renew themselves and regain their old relationship work among local
members.

The Uncontrollable State
The crisis in the traditional parties has not only been caused by aged narratives and a lacking
ability to include Generation III. The development within the state itself also adds to the
challenges.
Common for both traditional political parties and state bureaucracies is a fundamental belief in
control and planning. The belief that you are able to investigate a problem, find the best
solution, deposit the necessary funds in the budget and secure a successful implementation by
the country's ready civil servants. Controllability is part of the DNA itself.
My old political science course at Aarhus University has fostered many top politicians and civil
servants; the courses logo is a ships rudder with the motto Navigare necesse est it is

necessary to steer. The belief being, that not only is the world controllable, but it is also your
duty to take the wheel.
The problem is, however, that modern society and the modern state has become gradually less
and less controllable. Modern society has become increasingly complex and at the same time
more and more decentralised.
Instead of a sovereign and infallible king on top of a militaristic state apparatus, power within
society has now been shared between a number of functional systems banking system, legal
courts, church, universities, etc. It is no longer up to politicians to define what is right or wrong,
true science, good Christianity, etc. The state has become a super tanker with a very small
rudder and considerable play in the steering wheel.
A good example is the Danish state school system. A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of
helping to design and arrange a traditional annual conference hosted by the Danish Ministry of
Education. The conference was instituted by the then Minister for Education Bertel Haarder and
is held every summer at Sor Akademi, a well-known private boarding school.
One of the speakers was Sren Hansen, former top government official in the ministry and now
local council chief executive. Hansen looked back at his work in the central administration and
when he, as a young civil servant, believed that the lights in all the schools around the country
went out when the central switch in the ministry was turned off. He later got a more realistic
understanding of how difficult it actually is to control the day-to-day work in Danish schools. If I
remember correctly, Hansen listed 11 reforms hitting the state schools within a period of 16
years. And none of these reforms had had an impact worth mentioning on their objectives, one
of which was an academic boost in relation to the international PISA surveys.
It is by no matter certain that you achieve the desired results, even when you allocate the
required funds, make the necessary political groundwork and hire McKinsey consultants.
And there are many more examples. In Denmark, the armed forces acquisitions, the state
railroads and the health sector.
The old parties approach to politics depends on an inherent belief in controllability. If you win
the right to govern, you are able to fulfil your election promises to the voters with the state as
an effective implementation machine. But the entire division of labour between parties, state
and voters is beginning to falter when the state no longer is able to convert the political
priorities into changes in citizens lives.
Ritt Bjerregaards time as Lord Mayor in Copenhagen comes to mind. One of Ms Bjerregaards
key issues in her election campaign were better conditions for cyclists and public transport.
After her election, she managed to acquire funding for more cycle paths in her first budget and
a newly elected Lord Mayor.

Four years later, when she handed over the reins to Frank Jensen, the current Lord Mayor, most
of the budgeted funds were still unused. The citizens still had to wait in vain for their cycle
paths.
The old political parties need to leave their naive civil servant approach to government behind.
They need to show more humbleness and pragmatism. And then it is necessary to rediscover
the pasts close involvement of members and relationship work. The parties have to rethink
their own organisation and governance before they are able to become better at governing
Denmark.

We Have Become Self-Sufficient in Problems
When the welfare was born, public officials and politicians were entering new territory. There
were lots of problems in society to turn to and even the less good solutions were better than
nothing. The only way was forward.
Today we are facing the completely different situation with many of the welfare state problems
being self-created. We have to make environmental policies to protect nature against our own
overly efficient farming policies. To protect the environment, we have to do something about
the emissions from fossil fuels in the industry that our business policies have carried forward.
Our educational system is struggling to handle ill-adjusted boys, whom the school system itself
has alienated. Our health system is busy handling the side effects from our growing use of
medication and the effects of the lifestyle diseases we have been able to afford. We have
difficulties integrating the young descendants of our own failed integration policies in the 80s
and 90s. With foreign policies, we try to contain the terror groups that our own war efforts
around the world have provided a breeding ground for. We use billions of tax payers money on
public IT projects, which are supposed to solve problems created by other public IT projects.
And it goes on and on.
The modern society is facing its own self-created problems every single day.

When More Money Always Was the Solution
When every solution brings on a new potential problem, the states and the parties traditional
delivery model becomes extremely challenged. The modus operandi of state and the
centralised democracy is to allocate tax money to solve most problems in society.
Most politics are based on a strong story about controllability, which tells you to give more
money to what you want more of, for example better home care or faster cancer treatment.
And you cut funds where the governing ideology wishes to distance itself, for example aid to
developing countries, ecology or integration. Reward and punishment.

The challenge is that many of todays problems are not necessarily solved by pouring more tax
money into them. You may even claim that there are areas where more money even makes the
problem worse.
One example is the Danish state schools, which have been bombarded with reforms and
projects for decades. I know a lot of teachers who would prefer a halt to new funding and pilot
projects if only there would be some space to concentrate on the main task.
Another example from Denmark is a deduction for repairs done by professionals, which was an
election promise by Prime Minister Lars Lkke Rasmussen under the slogan Keep the invoices
during the 2015 election campaign. Calculations have shown that such an initiative is one of the
most inefficient ways of stimulating employment. You are subsidising projects, which typically
would have been done anyway, and pours money into a business sector with low
unemployment. Socio-economically, it would create more jobs for the same money to drop
cash from low-flying planes over suburbia.
What the politicians and the civil service have trouble understanding is that most problems in
society today are not only complicated, but also complex. And the difference is crucial.
Complicated problems may have many factors, but they behave relatively consistently over
time. A traditional complicated challenge is, for example, to build a bridge. There are many
important factors, but the load capacity of concrete, the strength of steel and the movement of
the water in whatever sea you are building your bridge across, are relatively consistent over
time. Complicated problems may be solved by solid calculations, reuse of old tested solutions
and strict planning.
We humans have over time become incredibly skilled in solving complicated problems most
bridges are completed and do not collapse, and they are relatively within budget and schedule.
Complex challenges are completely different. They are characterised by the fact that relevant
factors change unpredictably over time. This might be, for example, patients expectations of
service, the motivation of newly trained nursery teachers or the ability of resourceful parents to
project the problems of their child onto the nearest teachers inadequacy.
Complex tasks are not possible to plan in detail beforehand. It is not possible to fall back on
yesterdays best practice and you cannot make linear linkages between deposited funds and
end results. The IT problems in the tax service would not have disappeared if you had spent 100
million euro extra on more IT consultants.
You have to find humility and curiosity when faced with the complex reality. You have to try
step by step, learn from mistakes and work with short-term plans, which are constantly
adjusted depending on what works best. In no time it all looks a bit messy and fits badly in the
spreadsheet calculations, but at the end of the day, this is how real change is created.

Our civil service and large political parties need new governing stories, which support a new
realisation that our shared future cannot be decided in a zero sum game about getting funds
for your own key issues during the annual cat and mouse play in the budget negotiations.

Self-Referential Bubbles
Another challenge is the absence of common references. For only a couple of decades ago,
most Europeans were updated via the daily evening news on TV. We would gather in front of
the TV after dinner, where the last 24 hours news would be presented to us. If a story was not
on the TV news, it was not important. It almost did not exist.
This has been different for many years. Today it is only the upgrades of the operating systems
for our smartphones that are synchronised. The common shared reference has disappeared.
Our shared fireplace has gone.
More competing TV channels have arrived, but what is most important is that large parts of the
population have stopped watching traditional flow TV, which neither Generation III or III are
interested in. Instead we now have a decentralised coverage of news and civic discourse. We
are now gathering in smaller groups with people who share our views, where we are confirming
each other in exactly our version of the truth. These groups often happen around one or more
media and use the social media as sounding and discussion board.
An example from America is the Breitbart News Network, which was gathers parts of the right
wing (especially Donald Trump supports) around a worldview, which internally makes sense for
the initiated, but from the outside looks a bit potty and paranoid. This is once again Luhmanns
autopoeisis: we create small, self-referential systems that are closing around themselves and
can only be decoded from the inside.
And there are many other examples. From the extreme left wings autonomous environment
and the Guardians faithful readers to the community that still believes that 9/11 was a hoax.
Algorithms are important here. All the social media and online news all use advanced
algorithms to tailor the content we face when we use the internet. They are doing it to provide
us with a better experience, but first and foremost, of course, they want to sell targeted
advertising to us, which breaks through our usual ad-resistant armour.
The problem when we are talking about citizenship and democracy is that the algorithms are
mainly designed to show content that confirms what we preferred earlier. In this way,
Facebook makes sure that we primarily see status updates from people we have liked updates
from earlier, and YouTube suggest new videos for us based on what we have watched before.
The consequence of this is that the web is creating a virtual bubble around each and every one
of us, which is confirming our existing views of the world.

If you go to Google and search for a term, then most of us will probably assume that the search
result is neutral and objective. We assume the search is independent of who is searching and
from which computer it happens. But that is not the case.
Google is tailoring what you see from all the information they have about you. If you, for
example, begin to search a lot for conspiracy theories about 9/11 on Google, YouTube and
Facebook, and if you share and like the things you find, then it will not be long until conspiracy
theories begin to take up more and more space in your digital life. Quickly, you might begin to
think that there might be some truth in this, since everyone else seems to debate whether the
Israeli intelligence service was behind the attack.
The self-referencing bubbles in our society create isolated cells of opinionated ghettos where
views are allowed to spin completely out of hand. This is rarely healthy in a democracy and it
makes it even harder for the traditional parties to understand and get into a dialogue with the
people. It is no longer possible to address the entire nation via a performance on the TV news
or an editorial in a newspaper.

The Red School
January 31 2008, Copenhagen.
The room is filled to the brim and the media have blocked the entrance with an army of
broadcast vans and journalists who were dramatically reporting about Ritt Bjerregaards rebel
Social Democrats. Every time someone went through the swing doors to the room, the press
photographers with their tele lenses outside tried to get a peak of what was happening inside.
The Red School began as a loose idea I was discussing with my good friend Kasper Fogh in the
autumn of 2007. It came from a wish to create a better setting for political new thinking and
involvement.
The idea was revived after the third election victory in a row by right-wing prime minister
Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the parliamentary elections 13 November 2007, because of the
unwillingness and inability by Social Democrats leader Helle Thorning Schmidt to take
responsibility for the defeat and learn from it.
More people got involved in the initiative, which initially was to create a small, closed debating
society with space for blue sky thinking and focus on idea development instead of short-term
spin tactics. And then it all exploded.
At the time, Kasper Fogh was the press adviser for Ritt Bjerregaard, how at the time was Lord
Mayor of Copenhagen, and things go fast when she puts her mind to them. Suddenly we had
organised a number of meetings during the winter, hundreds had signed up and the media
were completely aware of the Social Democrats who wanted to debate politics. At

Christiansborg, the Danish parliament Borgen - Helle Thorning Schmidt and her inner circle
were less than thrilled.
My role was to design the process of involvement and function as a facilitator during the
meetings. I was on playground duty.
The concept was quite simple: we arranged four meetings about key social issues (traffic,
housing policy, etc.) and each theme was introduced by a short presentation, after which the
participants could debate is small groups each placed at tables in a large common room. Each
group summarised their discussions in a main point, which was then documented and brought
forward.
These were the rules presented at the beginning of each meeting:
1 No bullying: We do not bully each other and we do not speak condescendingly about
people who are not here.
2 We only discuss what is important:
We discuss politics and ideology, not election tactics or opinion polls.
3 Everyone contributes to the debate to the best of their ability.
4 Nobody is merely listening.
I am especially happy about the fourth and last point.
The traditional hierarchy of the political parties was gone and everyone was sitting equally at
the same table. From former Prime Minister Anker Jrgensen, a handful of MPs and union
representatives to ordinary party members and citizens who got their political baptism of fire.
All the input was later collected in Essays from the Red School, a small pamphlet that aimed
to inspire a new political discussion.
For me, The Red School stands as a small attempt to hand the political debate back to the
citizens along the same lines as Arnie Graff was practising in Lancashire. But looking back at the
initiative, it probably did very little to influence the Social Democrats under Helle Thorning
Schmidts leadership. I do not recall that things became less top-down afterwards but rather on
the contrary.
But I do think, nevertheless, that we were able to create a bit of inspiration in the world of
politics and help to make ordinary citizens, voters and members more interested in
participating and speak their mind when they become involved.

The New Citizenship
It all began with a humble Facebook group in a small Danish town called Hjrring, which wanted
to meet asylum seekers and refugees with friendliness instead of worry. Local meetings were
held, furniture was collected and people attempted to contribute where it was needed. The

initiative quickly spread and within a few months there were local branches across the country,
with more than 70,000 supporters and activists. This was a public mobilisation that gathered
Danes across geography, age and party divisions around an important cause, outside the
established political parties or organisations.
The initiative Venligboerne (the friendly neighbours) managed to create a movement for like-
minded people in record time, accelerated by the unique possibilities of the internet. And it was
a movement without traditional leadership, membership contributions, statutes or strategies.
Venligboerne started as a place where you act and contribute actively not a forum to debate
what others should be doing.
Another Danish example is Cykling uden alder (Cycling Without Age), which gathers
volunteers who would like to accompany their elderly fellow citizens on bike rides. Since the
first ride in 2012 by the organiser Ole Kassow, the idea has spread to other countries and 60
Danish local authorities. More than 2,500 volunteers are pedalling in 130 cities in 27 countries.
Everything is unpaid, with a minimum of bureaucracy and more or less self-organising.
Outside Denmark, there is inspiration to find with Citizens UK, which is trying to spark some life
into civil society across the entire UK. The movement describes itself as a hub for community
organising and is directly inspired by Industrial Areas Foundation in the US, which, by the way,
is the organisation where Arnie Graff has been active for a generation. Citizens UK trains and
supports local activists and coordinates national work around urgent needs, for example getting
help and housing to refugees.
And there are many more examples of people who get up from the sofa and act. Both in
Denmark and abroad.
It is Generation III: they want to do something and being involved carries the meaning itself.
They are spontaneous communities where the inner ape experiences satisfaction by making a
difference, making a choice and being acknowledged by its like-minded for the work.
Generation III is not just leaning back and waiting for the established parties to break down the
hierarchies and start taking their members seriously again.

The Loyal Rebels
Engagement and local activism also exists in Danish workplaces, especially in the public sector.
And we should appreciate that very much. Perhaps Denmarks greatest competitive advantage
is our ability to be loyal rebels. Simply put, this is about whether people are only doing what
they have to or what is necessary. The difference is crucial.
On most public sector workplaces where citizen-related work is being done, employees have to
navigate within an impossible crossfire between the systems complicated understanding of its
tasks and the complexity of everyday life.

The planning, the budget, the control and leadership follow-up are based on the assumption
that it is possible to predict problems, needs, solutions and results, but the experience from the
machine room of the welfare state tells us that challenges often lie in completely difference
places than we expected. The employees feel they are failing their key tasks if they follow all
the systems demands precisely. If they do what they have to do, they are not able to do what is
necessary.
Some handle this conflict by choosing the system. They strictly adhere to the rules and turn a
blind eye to inconveniencies and neglect.
Others choose their fellow citizens. They become invisible rebels who cut corners to keep it all
together.
The high amount of stress and sick leave in some parts of the public sector shows what happens
when we as human beings expose each other to impossible pressure from all sides. Very few
are able to sustain it in the long term.
The traditional control thinking was born in the first era of totalitarian stories, where the
unconditional obedience of the subjects in Generation I was taken for granted.
Later, under the second era, this perspective was supplemented by the blackmail thinking of
the New Public Management school. It was believed that Generation IIs motivation, hard work
and loyalty could be bought with rewards and strict target follow-up. The inspiration came
from, among others, the Russian psychologist Pavlov who showed in his experiments with dogs
that behaviour can be controlled via strict reward systems. But there is a long way from hungry
Russian dogs to Generation III, who would like to do something themselves.

The Disservice of the Union Movement
This chapter was written in a cohousing flat in Nrrebro, central Copenhagen. A safe and cosy
district where you can buy a cafe latte on every street corner and where even societys less
privileged are so well of that the biggest everyday problem may be finding a parking space.
A hundred years ago, this was not the case.
Back then, Nrrebro was a humanitarian catastrophe along with the rest of Copenhagens
worker districts. Today we have nearly forgotten the real face of capitalism and suppressed the
appalling conditions our ancestors had to endure during the early industrialisation, when the
population moved from countryside to the cities.
In terms of quality of life for the wider population, the late 1800s and early 1900s were
probably the lowest point in human history. A hard and dangerous working day from 6 am to 8
pm, six days a week for a salary that could not even keep hunger away. Appalling housing

conditions, no holiday, extremely high infant mortality and widespread alcoholism. Without
constrains, capitalism is a psychopathic, immoral monster.
Fortunately, opposition appeared and the union movement painstakingly fought for the rights
we all take for granted today. We live in a wealthy society, where journalists working for the
national Danish broadcaster DR who have eight weeks holiday and a starting salary of 4,000
euro per month, strike to defend their paid-for lunch break. We all have a lot to thank the union
movement for.
But the union struggle has had some unforeseen consequences.
The union movement was born out of powerlessness and defiance and was later expanded to
function as representative organisations during the transition between the first and second era
of stories, in an attempt to copy and match the employers associations.
Through the decades, new privileges and rights were negotiated. But along the way the
controlling logic of the employers got copied and the unions themselves became carriers of the
Pavlovian reward thinking: work was fundamentally a burden that you only accepted in return
for a suitable monetary compensation.
In fact, the union movement became the biggest fan of New Public Management and the belief
that behaviour and motivation is controlled via rewards. The movement fought in the name of
solidarity for collective rewards instead of individual, but the logic is the same and the answer
to all challenges is more money.
While the central bureaucracies of the unions became more and more professionalised, the
importance of local organising and the close-related work in each workplace faded away. SiD,
the old Danish union for skilled workers, had more than 1,300 local branches before 1970.
Today, 3F, which SiD became a part of in 2005, has 67 local branches. The good comradeship
has been forgotten.
The union movement was created by Generation I in an ideological struggle for survival and
later transformed into a marriage of interests with Generation II in the 80s and 90s. The tag line
for HK, a union for trade and office workers, Show solidarity towards yourself, shows this
concession to the blackmail logic.
The union movement is still struggling to free itself from its reward logic and is therefore finding
it hard to be a constructive co-player in the development of the public sector, where more
money to a lesser and lesser extent means better solutions.

The Death of the Political Stories
What do the Social Democrats want?
How does the Danish PM Lars Lkke Rasmussen see Denmark in 2025?

What do the Liberal Democrats dream about?
What do the Conservatives want to say?
I do not know and I do not think most other Danes do either. The traditional parties stopped
many years ago defining a normative vision for the Denmark of tomorrow. They do not have a
coherent analysis of where things are going and what is needed to create a good society in the
future. They do not even know what good is any longer.
The long-term and visionary Why and What have been replaced by the short-term How. The
liberals want lower taxes, but cannot say much about why besides that it has to be financially
worthwhile to work. If lower tax is the solution, then what is the problem?
The Social Democrats talk about welfare and employment, but are less concrete when the
vision has to be fleshed out.
In relation to the dramaturgic toolbox and the big sagas from the first era, these Pixi books that
the Danes are being offered are tediously boring.
I believe there are several reasons for this.
Firstly, politics is the art of the compromise and when there needs to be broad support among
the partys many interests, it is easier with more diffuse visions. There is more room for
interpretations under airy empty slogans like responsibility, freedom and competiveness. You
do not want to push away possible voters or create expectations that are hard to fulfil. The
consequence of this is that it all ends up as trivial stories without real conflicts or clear
communication.
Secondly, the inner circles of party officials and PR people who advise the top politicians
continue to believe they have to sell easily digestible messages to a passive audience. They
have no comprehension of that Generation III is about to overtake Generation II and hence they
think that politics is like an advertising circular where you have to outbid the competition.
Who is best able to charm Miss and Mr Middleclass on the political playing field? In that game
nothing works better than tangible special offers: deduction for professional work, benefit pay
for the elderly, half price in buses, etc.
We must not forget to criticise the media either. The political journalists and the commentators
of the big media are skilled professionals who have less and less time to deliver more and more
content. In that game the losers are deep debates and long-term visions, while the winners
usually are single issues and fast special offers.
The journalists want tangible promises to hold the politicians to, and the politicians are
therefore forced to either waffle and vaguely answer or come up with something concrete and
measurable.

When a party spokesperson presents a new policy proposal, the journalists are not lining up to
ask in-depth questions why. They would rather like to know where the money is going to come
from or how the party is going to negotiate with the other parties in the parliament.
The worst thing that can happen to a politician is that he or she has learnt something and
changed their mind about an issue. In other areas this would be called learning. In politics it is a
defeat and a lack of character.
Finally, the last reason is found within the bureaucracies of government. Today, most of the
political ideation happens within the civil service. When a new government takes over, the civil
servants have willingly prepared a large catalogue of ideas, naturally filtered to fit the ruling
political colour.
And they do it well, loyally and professionally. They often do it so well that the leadership of
politicians is undermined.
The work share between the politicians and the civil service ought to be that the politicians
think long-term and visionary, based on values and opinions, while the civil servants play the
role of the pragmatic voice of reason that think implementation, financing and Realpolitik.
The politicians ought to shout:
Saudi Arabia is a totalitarian dictatorship that suppresses women and it is a disgrace that they
have been given the chairmanship for UNs work with human rights! And the civil servants
ought to reply:
But they buy a lots of feta cheese and are friends with the US, where after, hopefully, the
politicians would retort:
Women are being decapitated for driving cars. Screw that export of Danish cheese and lets
boycott these arseholes!
Instead, what happens is that the civil servants say:
The US wants us to diplomatically support Saudi Arabia in their formal role in the UN, and the
employers organisation also says that it is good for our export interests, whereto the
politicians reluctantly mumble:
But what the decapitation of women ...? And the civil servants reassure:
That issue is covered. We are already bombing Syria as we were told by the Americans to do.
I do not think that you can blame the civil servants. They are playing their part just as well and
strongly as they are allowed to. The mistake lies with the politicians who are too wary to rise to
the occasion and stand up for their opinions.


Six Virtues
Here are six virtues, which hopefully may inspire the traditional political parties in their efforts
to understand and embrace Generation III.

1. Talk less and listen more
Do like Arnie Graff. Begin by listening. And this time, do not listen in order to provide an
answer, but to understand. There is a huge difference.
Be interested in your members and your fellow citizens and try to actually understand their
everyday life and worries. Try to listen without judgment or instantly coming up with solutions.
And remember the two levels of conflicts in dramaturgy: What people want and what they
actually need. Listen to what they want, but also understand what they actually need.
Today many citizens express fear in relation to more refugees and it is easy to categorise them
as stupid racists. But perhaps their xenophobia is just a symptom of other worries and feelings.
The experience of loneliness when old colleagues are removed due to effectiveness? The fear
for not being able to cope professionally in a workplace under constant change? The frustration
over feeling ignored by politicians and the media?

2. Find and share the story about why
Raise your sights and look at the future in 20, 50 and 100 years. Which developments are going
to define our future possibilities and threats? What kind of world are our children and
grandchildren going to inherit and what kind of life would we want them to have?
Create a core story that unites and bridges a thought out analysis of the future with the
challenges that are on peoples minds right now.
And leave your calculator at home. There will be plenty of time later for the civil servants to
calculate it all through.
And, most important of all, choose your words and terms carefully. You will not win the war by
stealing the enemys slogans and songs.

3. Free the members and the citizens
Relations have to come back. When nearly all, larger companies today work with co-creation
and user involvement in their innovation processes, why are the political parties still unable to
figure out how to involve their members in their idea and policy development?
Occasionally I receive a newsletter from a large Danish political party. Every time the newsletter
is drafted according to the same recipe: one or two MPs try to justify the partys position on a
policy area to the members. Things are only communicated when they have been decided.

I do not recall a single occasion where the letter has asked from input from members regarding
worries, ideas or experience. It is paternal and alienating old-school communication from a
time long gone.
Dedicated people who are burning for a project, which they regard as their own, are a hundred
times more efficient than people who are only playing the part as passive audience. Involve
people, not only to talk, vote or donate, but in actually doing something.
Remember the monkeys three instincts: Create choice, let people contribute and acknowledge
their work.

4. Stop believing that the voters can be bought
The recipe for the handbook for new governments is clear:
1) Begin with a budget review that concludes the country is lacking funds.
2) Implement comprehensive cuts with the previous governments irresponsibility as an excuse.
3) If unpopular decisions are necessary, get them out of the way early in the term.
4) Create economic leeway.
5) Use all the money you are able to, and a bit extra in the last year of your term for presents to
selected groups of voters.
6) Hope that the world economy gives you a period of growth that you can take credit for.
This is how the handbook has looked since the 80s and it has worked, with more or less success,
with Generation II. But Generation III knows better.
Drop the handbook, reveal your hand of cards, tell the voters what the situation is and speak to
their community spirit instead of to their inferiority and selfishness.

5. Respect the public employees
I spend most of my working life as a consultant in private organisations, where the top
leadership go out of their way to engage and motivate their employees. Here there is an
awareness that very little will succeed without the support of the employees.
The contrast to the public sector on this point is tremendous. There it frequently happens that
the political leadership, in the form of ministers, mayors or coalition partners, chastise their
own employees in public. They are being accused of being fat, lazy or too expensive when they
express concern about having to root up their family in order to move to the other end of the
country with the job.

It is obvious that the management regards the employees as part of the problem instead of part
of the solution. It is never a way forward, whether in leadership or when bringing up children,
to create new behaviour and good results by humiliation, overruling or scorn.
I wonder what would have happened with the recent state school reform in Denmark if the
teachers had experienced it as their project instead of the politicians.

6. Put values above money
The best thing in the world is to refuse money.
A couple of years ago I was talking to an experienced consultant who told me that the highlight
of his career had been to turn down a well-paid job. He had been asked to bid on a profitable
task, but had been forced to turn it down because of a military element in the project. The
consulting firm where we were employed was founded by a pacifist and now it was written in
the statutes for the foundation that owned the company that it was not allowed to work with
the military. The consultant explained excitedly that, at first, he had been disappointed to have
to turn his back to the task, but that he afterwards had been incredibly proud by having put
value above money.
A couple of times in my working life, I have had the opportunity to turn down tasks that I was
not able to accept with regards to my values, among others one from the tobacco industry, and
I do recognise the old consultants pride.
I wish there were more politicians who would openly put values about finances. To admit that
doing the right thing can have a price, instead of claiming that a decision does not have
economic consequences. To refuse to sell a national energy company to an unscrupulous and
criminal investment bank would be a good place to start. The civil servants will soon enough
suggest what is the most financially advantageous. As a politician, it is sometimes the task to
say no.

So far about the political arena and the trouble with the traditional parties.
But the challenges do not stop here, because leadership is also needed when the political
prioritisations and strategic visions have to be translated into action.
In the following, and final, chapter we will take a look at leadership and last but not least, the
need for more trust.


Leadership and Trust

The Blade Runner Curse
In 1980, the Briton Ridley Scott was going to direct the science fiction film Blade Runner, which
is loosely based on Philip K. Dicks novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
Scott was a young, ambitious director who had just had his big breakthrough with the sci-fi
horror movie Alien and he was determined to create a convincing futuristic dystopia, inspired
by Fritz Langs classic Metropolis from 1927. Therefore, he cared a lot about that the films
cityscape featured ads from companies that people would recognise.
He asked his designers to come up with a list of big corporations that business experts agreed
would be dominating in 2019, 39 years into the future. The companies were included in the film
and shortly after its premiere in 1982, people began to talk about the Blade Runner curse.
As it turned out, a surprisingly large number of the companies ran into difficulties during the
80s. Among those were the video game manufacturer Atari, the airline Pan Am and the
telephone company Bell.

The Accelerating Mortality of Companies
Several of the Blade Runner companies did not make it, but the general resilience among large
corporations is not much better. The mortality is in fact rising.
If you look at a list of the 500 biggest companies in the US (the so-called Standard & Poors 500
list), then the average time on the list has fallen from 67 years in the 1920s to around 12 years
today. If we forecast the gloomy odds, around 75% of the current top 500 companies in the US
will have dropped from the list in 2027. And remember that these are many of the largest and
best run companies in the world.27
The development in Europe and Denmark show the same picture, albeit less dramatic.
The boom in construction in Copenhagen during the last decade was founded on the remains of
the big industrial corporations, which were part of kick-starting the welfare state in the 50s and
60s, but are dead and gone today. For example, Ks old soya cake factory and the old B&W
shipyards. For every A.P. Mller, Mrsk, Novo Nordisk or Carlsberg, there once were numerous
companies just as promising, but long forgotten today.
Why does it go wrong?
How could Nokia jeopardise its leading position within the mobile market in only a couple of
years?

Why did Kodak allow itself to be pushed out of the market by the digital camera a technology
developed by the company itself?
How did Volkswagen dare to gamble its entire existence just to cheat with some environmental
measurements?
My message is that all these had forgotten to renew their story.

Stories as Organisational Nautical Charts
What defines the story about a company? Where does the brand live?
As we discovered in chapter 6, we have to enter the brain and its directories of connected
neurones. If we look at a global corporation like Volkswagen, billions of people are part of
carrying and reproducing their story. Everyone human being who carries around associations to
the companys name, logo or car models in their neurones are part of defining their story. From
customers, car enthusiasts and journalists to employees, critics and children playing with toy
cars. Volkswagens story is made up of this immense collective pre-understanding.
This story has millions of co-authors and it is constantly being reproduced, acknowledged and
revised. If it has to change, it requires physical changes in the brain of this huge target group.
That is why it takes decades to build global brands.
A companys story may be regarded from two angles:
The external part, which comprises of associations among customers, media and the public, and
the internal part, which is carried by management and employees. Sometimes there is
coherence between the two parts and sometimes they get out of sync, which happened for
American Apparel, as we observed in chapter 9.
A central part of the story about an organisation is the internal self-understanding, which is
defined by the collective associations among employees. These neuron connections determine
how the organisation understands itself, its customers and its competitors. We may call it the
companys nautical chart the definition of reality the company navigates according to.
Where are the dangerous rocks?
Where are the good fishing banks?
Where are the competitors pirate ships roaming?
If we were able to go 10 years back in time and ask Nokia, when they were at their peak, who
their most dangerous competitors were, then they perhaps would have pointed out PalmPilot,
RIM (BlackBerry) or Huawei. Pressured harder, they might have mentioned Sony, Microsoft or
HTC as well.

But they would not even consider Apple, the computer hardware company that two years later
introduced the first iPhone and initiated Nokias dramatic fall.
According to Nokias market analysis, Apple was not even on the radar at the time. Nokia
defined itself as a telephone manufacturer and only compared itself with other telephone
manufacturers. Their self-understanding made them blind to the attack that eventually killed
off what was the company then.
Something similar was happening to the LEGO Group in the beginning of the 90s. At the time,
LEGO saw itself as a player on the market for action toys and were focusing on competitors
such as Hasbro and Mattel. That is why it was a huge surprise when Nintendo launched the
Game Boy game console and suddenly became a tough rival, not in terms of sales of action
toys, but in terms of time spent in childrens rooms. The LEGO Groups self-understanding had
developed into life-threatening ignorance.
When a young company sets sail the nautical chart is usually up-to-date and accurate. You
survive the worst storms, overtake the competition and get a good catch.
But as time goes by and the self-understanding is haunted by self-sufficiency, nostalgia and
arrogance, there is a growing risk that the nautical chart gets out of sync with the rest of the
world.
It becomes outdated and suddenly all the fish have disappeared.

Success Makes You Blind
If you talk with people who have been in organisations that have gone under, then they all
describe an experience like hitting an unexpected iceberg, which suddenly appeared from the
fog. They are all competent and well-paid people who are doing their best, but despite that it
goes wrong. Not because they are not professional, but because they are so professional and
competent.
Professional leadership and strategy work is mainly about specialisation. You are focusing on
selected customer segments, you outsource peripheral business activities and you slim the core
business in order to keep the costs down. Everything is about strictly focusing on the core
business and a small number of must-win battles.
If you take a look at the names for some of the company strategies in the last decade, then
terms like core, one and clean are everywhere. You try to become really good at the most
important and zoom in on a very small area of the nautical chart.
But the better and more specialised you become, the more blind the organisation becomes to
developments that cross established industry, business and customer understandings.

Towards the end of the 90s, there were no executives within the music industry who had
foreseen that the entire business model of the industry only few years later would become
undermined by a manufacturer of computer hardware, which dropped a small music player
called iPod on the market.
Similarly, nobody at the top of the worlds biggest hotel chains could imagine that they would
be outmatched by a software company called Airbnb, which did not even own a single hotel.
Later we are going to take a look at how organisations make sure that their nautical maps are
up-to-date and not too narrow, but first we are going to take a trip in the time machine,
inspired by the British military historian and leadership expert Stephen Bungay, back to
Southern Prussia in 1806.

No Plan Survives Contact with the Enemy
Prussia and the young emperor Napoleon were at war and on the 14th October 1806, 87,000
French soldiers clashed with 143,000 German troops outside the German city of Jena.
Even though the Prussians were superior in terms of number of troops, the army was hindered
by a rigid system of command and a corps of officers made up of nobles in their sixties. The
Prussian supreme commander himself, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, was 71 years old. That turned
out to be fatal.
Already from the early hours, the battle was surprising the overly confident French marshal
Michel Ney risked a hazardous solo attack on one flank and was surrounded by the enemy
north of Jena. But the Prussian supreme command was too slow to exploit the situation and
marshal Jean Lannes made it through with the fifth corps to help his fellow countrymen.
Now Napoleon exploited the Prussian passivity by putting pressure on the enemy flanks, while
he let his personal guard, the elite force of the army, initiate an aggressive advance towards the
middle of the Prussian army. The Prussians did not react in time and their lines broke down
when their soldiers started running away.
On the same day, a bit further north near the town Auerstedt, the French General Devout
managed to beat a superior Prussian force, after which the Prussian king ordered retreat. The
French victory was massive and meant that the Prussian became subject to French supremacy
until 1813.
The philosopher Hegel, who witnessed the battle, was a professor at the university of Jena and
later described the meeting with Napoleon as seeing the "world spirit on horseback".
The defeat initiated a fundamental reformation of the Prussian military. The key figures in this
reform work were, among others, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Carl von Clausewitz and later
Helmuth von Moltke, who was born in Denmark.

The mistakes at Jena led to the realisation that it is only limited what you are able to control
when two armies collide on a battlefield. No plan survives the first contact with the enemy.
The Prussians identified three gaps that contribute to the friction that makes leading and
managing very difficult.

The first gap is the knowledge gap, which is understood as the difference in what we know
about the world and what are the facts. Perhaps we believe that the enemy has 10,000 tired
troops and plan accordingly, but in fact he has 20,000 rigorous soldiers. Our insight into the
surrounding worlds complexity is limited, especially when it comes to predicting the future.
When we try to execute the best plans we have been able to make, based on our limited
knowledge, we approach the next gulf: the alignment gap. This gap describes the difference
between the planned actions and what is actually being done in an organisation. Most people
will probably recognise situations from their working life where planned activities are not
happening, where unplanned things happen and where planned initiatives are carried out in a
completely different way than they were anticipated. There is quite a lot of play in the steering
wheel when it comes to implementation.
The third and final gulf is the effect gap. It meets us with surprise that the results our actions,
planned as well as unplanned, produce. Perhaps we assumed that the enemy would surrender
if one of our companies started to fire at them from a hilltop, but instead they might
counterattack or dig themselves in and wait for our ammunition to run out. It is very difficult
during planning to predict which concrete actions at the frontline are necessary to achieve the
desired results.

All things considered, it is extremely difficult to lead such a complicated organisation as an
army, when they are facing another army on a complex battlefield. The distance between
knowledge and planning to actions and results can be very, very far. How we handle and
understand the three gaps depends on the leadership approach and self-story running through
an organisation.

From Micromanaging to Radical Delegation
Before the battle of Jena, the Prussians regarded their military as a machine where every single
soldier was a tiny, controllable cog. It was a mechanical and authoritarian self-story. When
something was not working, the solution was to look at the detail.

It was an attempt to close the knowledge gap by making very detailed analyses and plans to
match the complexity of the battlefield. The more information and the more detail, the better.
The attempt to solve the alignment gap was through detailed instructions. It was thought that it
would secure a precise and expected implementation if very specific orders without possible
misunderstanding or improvisation were issued.
Facing the effect gap, all disappointments over lacking results were met with detailed control.
Did the cannons have the correct powder load? Was the correct shooting formation used by the
infantry? Were the prescribed formations used during advances in the field?
After the defeat, Clausewitz and his colleagues recognised that it is of no use to try and fix the
machine by going into detail.

Detailed instructions and detailed control can make sense as individual solutions, but on the
whole, the initiatives did not help the organisation become better at beating the enemy on the
battlefield. Instead of becoming better at handling high complexity, it only added even more
complexity.
So it was decided to do the opposite. The Prussians replaced the organisational story and
created an entirely new military academy, phased out the old officers with their fancy noble
titles and instituted a new pragmatic military doctrine called Auftragstaktik (order tactic).

In facing the knowledge gap, the idea that analysis and planning can match the complexity of
the world was left behind. If it is not possible to predict the future, then do not. Old plans were
replaced by a much shorter planning horizon, where plans are simple working documents that
are constantly being updated to reflect new knowledge.
In order to solve the alignment gap, the detailed instructions were replaced by simple orders
where the local officers and non-commissioned officers had complete freedom to do what they
thought was most appropriate in terms of achieving the objectives. The Prussians went so far
that insubordination became the officers duty. If on the battlefield they deemed something
was more appropriate in relation to the strategy, their duty was to ignore their orders and
follow their own conviction. Without asking for permission first.
It was a complete departure from the armys previous no-error culture and demand for
absolute obedience. A prerequisite for Prussian platoons to be able to operate autonomously
was that everyone knew the strategy. This was a distinctive departure from previous doctrines,
where the strategy had been top secret and only shared in small pieces after the need-to-know

principle. When the strategy had to be shared across the entire organisation, it was also
necessary for it to be concrete and operational, which aligned well with the solution to the
knowledge gap.
With regards to the effect gap, the Prussian solution was to give a clear mandate to the officers
and non-commissioned officers at the frontline to try out different possibilities in order to
achieve the desired results. It is very difficult, during the general staff planning, to predict what
precisely is going to work at the frontline. Therefore, the officers got extensive power they
might try bayonets or hand grenades if it was not enough to just shoot at the enemy.
It took the Prussians 40 years to reform their military and replace the dominating self-story, but
the result was that they, from the mid-1800s, had the most effective military in the world since
Gengis Khan and Alexander the Great.
Under Bismarck, they defeated the other great powers on the continent and the
Auftragstaktik doctrine later led to that the German platoons in the First and Second World
War, platoon for platoon, were superior to the allied forces.
The approach was later adapted by all other armies and in NATO it is known as Mission
Command.

Autonomy and Alignment
The Prussian reforms arose out of recognition that it is a complex, not a complicated, challenge
to manage an army of thousands of individuals, each with their opinions, feelings and
experiences. Leadership demands humbleness, pragmatism and the will to let go of power on
the operational level. Many leaders today still lack this understanding.
The focal point of the Prussians learning and reflections was the relationship between
autonomy and alignment. Normally, these two are considered complete opposites: command
vs. freedom, control vs. trust, centralisation vs. decentralisation.
This is the line of conflict that has characterised the debate in Denmark with regards to the
development of the public sector.

The Prussians concluded that an effective organisation simultaneously requires both a high
level of autonomy and alignment. We have to act independently, but in concordance.

This is made possible by creating a clear division of labour between the strategic, the tactical
and the operational plan.

At the strategic level it is all about Why and What. What are the strategic priorities and why are
they necessary? This is also known as the Commanders Intent. Here there is a need for total
clarity and alignment across the entire organisation.

On the other hand, there is complete autonomy on the operational level, where each unit
defines their own How individually. The objectives are fixed, but it is up to the people in the
field to decide how to contribute locally to achieve them.
The autonomy does have a limit, however, with regards to the common toolbox, also known as
the tactical level. Today you would call the tactical level for standard operating procedures
the small standard solutions, which the entire organisation utilises in its daily work. A Prussian
officer was not supposed to start developing how to erect a howitzer or how to best advance in
open terrain. The armys basic toolset of small routines had to be respected here was a
demand for 100 % alignment. The contents of the toolbox were based on costly experiences
and meticulous training at the military academies. They were a common language and common
frame of reference, which could not be questioned.
Thus, the autonomy of the individual officer or non-commissioned officer was all about how he
used the tactical toolbox to contribute to the common strategy in the best way.

Auftragstaktik Today
The battle at Jena took place more than 200 years ago and there are huge differences between
leading a modern organisation and a military force on the battlefield in the 1900s.
It is striking, however, how many of the Prussian experiences and ideas still are relevant when
you look at the challenges that both public and private organisations face today. Many
recognise the experience of overly complex plans that are only sporadically turned into actions,
which are then followed by detailed control work when the desired outcomes are absent.
The mechanic understanding of organizations and leadership is still prevalent. Why have we not
become wiser and moved on?
One of the reasons is that the Prussian knowledge was outmatched in the early 20th century.
At the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, the Prussian pragmatic and
decentralised approach to leadership and strategy was relatively prevalent and acknowledged,
also outside the military.
But then a counter doctrine arrived from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the
American Taylorism, which under the tagline scientific management reintroduced the
organisational machine metaphor that Prussians had thrown out in 1806.
Frederick Winslow Taylor was an engineer and in 1911, in the book The Principles of Scientific
Management, he presented a mechanical view of how to optimise the new industrial
workplaces in the US, which primarily employed unskilled workers from the countryside.

Taylor advocated specialisation, strict control and quality control and was not impressed by the
workers ability to work independently. Taylors recommendations inspired, among others, the
car manufacturer Henry Ford and they became hugely important in the US and later in Europe.
Scientific management has been very influential in Denmark as well. If you have ever come
across clichs like it is only possible to manage what you can measure or you get what you
reward, then you can thank Taylor for that. The approach has haunted the public sector under
the name new public management and its influence is still massive within the Danish state
administration.
I am in no way opposed to measurement, optimisation and systematisation in organisational
development, but as the Prussians experienced, Taylors principles are not sufficient when
problems are complex instead of complicated.
And if there is one target group that will not stand for being perceived as a cog in an industrial
self-story, it is Generation III.
Seven guidelines for business leaders today:
1) Define and communicate Commanders Intent
What is the situation, what do we want to achieve and why is it important? Who is the
enemy, what are we fighting for and why is it so important? It must be brief enough to
be written on a piece of paper that can be sent to the frontline with a carrier pigeon.
Ask the employees to repeat the task with their own words. That way you can make
sure that misunderstandings will not happen (also known as back-briefing).

2) Put up few priorities that everyone can contribute to
Nearly all organisations try to do too much, too fast with too few resources. Prioritise
hard and chose few initiatives, which on the other hand get maximum support and
momentum.

3) Allow the employees to decide how they best contribute
They will make mistakes and do things their way, but the commitment of being involved
fully makes up for your frustration of experiencing lost control and direct power.

4) Throw away the complicated plans and proceed by the method of trial and error
Unless you build nuclear power plants or container ships that have to sail for 40 years,
then back off the long-term detailed planning and concentrate on the next important
steps instead.

5) Learn from your experience and adjust the plan continuously.
Many organisations follow up on whether the plans have been adhered to, which is
foolish, really. Follow up if you are getting closer to a victory and update the plan

accordingly, alongside that you are learning from your mistakes.

6) Utilise and respect the common tactical toolbox and make sure it is clear and well
designed
If you delegate and give your colleagues freedom, then they will drop all systems and
tools that do not directly help them to achieve their goal. Good tools have to be helpful,
not a burden.

7) Show trust and strengthen the transparency within the organisation
It is essential that we dare to share our mistakes and what we have learnt. This requires
that people feel safe and respected. A good way to begin is to start talking openly about
your own failures and insecurities, and that you ask for help when there is something
you are not sure about.

Organising Complexity
Luhmann describes the development of civilisation as a battle for handling of complexity. We
cannot consider everything all the time, so there needs to be some kind of division of labour
(or, as sociologists would call it, differentiation), which helps to prioritise and structure what
is important and who is responsible for what.
In this regard, humanity has developed three organising principles that have helped us to cope
with and create meaning in the accelerating complexity.

First came the segmented differentiation where work was divided into smaller, unified units.
This principle dominated in the tribes and city states of Antiquity, men is alive and well this day
and age at the workplaces where small local branches, which solve the same type of task, are
created, but in each local area. As we learned in chapter 1, the prerequisites for segmented
differentiation are a strong feeling of unity and loyalty to the community. Being expelled is the
great fear.
Later followed the hierarchical differentiation, which was especially fashionable in the national
states under European absolutism. In the hierarchical division of labour, complexity is made
simpler by sending tough decision upwards in the system until an authoritative decision comes
back. This principle for division of labour is reflected in all organisations that determine
competences and responsibility in a hierarchical order. The prerequisite for the principle to be
effective is unconditional obedience and discipline. When the Sun King, the Director or the
Secretary of State has spoken, the case is closed and all talk ceases.
The last principle is the functional differentiation where the most knowledgeable decides: The
legal experts deal with the legality, the economists decide if we can afford it, the engineers
determine whether it can be built and the marketing people whether it can be sold. As we
learned in chapter 4, this principle became dominant in society from the beginning of the 20th
century. The functional division of labour can be a very good method to deal with high
complexity, but only if there exists trust between the parties. If the engineers think they know
more about law that the legal experts, or if the economists want to change the engineers
blueprints, then everything falls apart.

Who Solves the Problems?
Your workplace today is also organised according to the three principles, typically as a mix,
where one of the differentiation types dominates. The easiest way to determine which principle
is the ruling one is to ask: Who solves a difficult problem if such occurs?
If the problem is passed on to and handled by a specialist, who has the greatest professional
knowledge, then your workplace is primarily functionally differentiated.
If the problem is passed up the system to the boss, who makes a quick decision, then you are
hierarchical differentiated.
If you sit down to solve the problem among yourselves without blaming anyone, then you are
probably in a segmented differentiation.
Generally, the most efficient way to deal with high complexity is functional differentiation, but
there may be many good reasons for certain workplaces to be dominated by the other
principles.

On the whole, all political organisations, from the ministries to the unions and the political
parties, are based on a hierarchical differentiation. Similarly, many workplaces with a strong
professional culture are governed by a segmented differentiation. These are, for example,
teacher faculties, nursery teachers and the journalists of the press.

The Tough Gear Change Towards the Functional Differentiation
One of the general change trends on the labour market in the past 10 years has been efforts to
try and move organisations from a segmented to a functional differentiation. The motive has
been the desire for better innovation, more flexible cooperation and more openness towards
the outside world. But change is hard.
The first challenge is that the need to renew the organisational culture, the common nautical
chart, alongside the structural change is often underestimated.
A segmented differentiation uses loyalty as a cultural lubricant, while the functional division of
labour needs trust. If you pour the wrong lubricant into the tank, things stop working, which we
all witnessed when the state school reform tried to move the Danish schools closer to a
functional differentiation without the necessary trust.
Another challenge is the transition itself.
If you believe Luhmann, then it is not possible to change from a primarily segmented
differentiation to a functional differentiation without having been through a hierarchical
differentiation as an intermediate stage. Luhmanns point being that first you have to gather
and consolidate before you are able to spread out and delegate.
Let us take a newly started company as fictional example:
I am, together with three friends, dreaming about designing and selling a unique series of
monster teddy bears. We have big plans for export, especially to Japan.
In the beginning, all decisions are made at the joint partner meetings, where everything is
examined and debated until everyone agrees the segmented differentiation is dominating.
But, as time goes by, the meetings get longer and longer. It does not work. So we decide to
appoint one of the partners as director and another as second-in-command. With the
hierarchical differentiation, our small company becomes more dynamic on a daily basis, where
the director is able to put her foot down and make the necessary decisions. Our small venture is
growing and is joined by more employees. But soon new problems appear: Our director is good
at many things, but marketing and product design are not among those.
Therefore, an independent design department is set up, which is developing new dolls while
the marketing is handled by a new head of sales and advertising. Just to be sure, we also hire an

accountant and a part-time legal expert. The functional differentiation is rolled out of practical
necessity in order to be able to keep up with the growing complexity.
If we had tried to jump directly from the equal partner circle to a functional division of labour,
everything would probably have ended in chaos and discord nobody would take responsibility
for the VAT accounts or stock management and everyone would want to be involved in concept
development or go on inspiration trips to Japan.
Without an authority, the sales staff would argue that the product developers should make the
kind of toy animals that could be sold, and the product developers would complain about the
inability of the sales staff to sell the brilliant monsters they came up with.
It is easier with an authority who can delegate responsibility and secure a truce where there are
overlapping responsibility areas.

Trust Deficiency
Today, most organisations struggle with a trust deficiency. Perhaps there are attempts to pull
the organisation towards functional differentiation, for example by introducing project or
matrix organising with lots of cooperation across areas. The target is to increase productivity,
innovation and flexibility, but along the way the organisation runs short of trust.
Trust is crucial in functional differentiation, because the division of labour only works if the
different players dare to trust each other. Even though they can never be absolute certain, the
finance department has to believe it when the colleagues in sales recommend a price increase,
or when HR says it is their professional assessment that the companys leadership academy
should be replaced.
Trust means that we give each other the benefit of the doubt and trust helps us to find the
courage to try something new, which we do not yet know if we are able to.
How do you build trust?
You expose yourself. Trust is built through mutual giving and the thing that is given is
confidence. If I confide something to you, which will create problems for me if you tell it to my
wife, then I have shown trust. Hopefully, you do not abuse my trust, but instead repay it. Trust
is a personal relation that grows and is reproduced through mutual confidence.
Many leaders find it difficult to handle mistrust and create new trust, because they are not used
to expose themselves. They feel they have to live up to very high expectations from their
surroundings (and themselves) and that everyone expects them to always have an answer
ready if they are asked something.
The expectation that the management is infallible and powerful is embedded in the hierarchical
differentiation and is a leftover from the authoritarian stories of the first era.

Many leaders would benefit from using the following answers more often: I dont know, I
havent thought about that, No idea, what do you think?, Can you please help me with.

The Ceremonial Leadership
The third era calls for a new approach to leadership. It is necessary to say goodbye to both
Generation Is authoritarian control fetishism and Generation IIs superficial bribe culture and
opinion zapping. Leadership of Generation III demands authenticity, trust, humility, pragmatism
and, not the least, involvement. I have chosen to use the expression the ceremonial
leadership. We need more masters of ceremonies.
To me, the master of ceremonies is a person who takes responsibility for the community and
the meaningful stories, without having to mount the platform herself. A leader who
communicates with involvement and appreciation through questions instead of answers, and
who understands that the changing force of an idea is in direct proportion with the number of
people feeling ownership of the idea.
Finally, here are 10 leadership rules for the ceremonial leadership.
The suggestions are an attempt to combine an involving and trust-based leadership style with a
humble approach to how much it is actually possible to lead and govern in complex
organisations:
1) Understand that power is relinquishing power
The traditional power thinking is instrumental. I have power over my employees if I can
get them to do something they would not do otherwise. This power view is useless in
the meeting with Generation III. When I try to use my formal power as director,
instrumentally through force, the employees sense of ownership of tasks and the
company disappears. I might be able to bribe them to keep coming in with a high salary
until they get a better offer, but they have a blank stare. The engagement has gone and
there are only zombies left. As a leader, you have to relinquish power and you have to
be able to rest in and accept the sense of powerlessness. When the battle had begun,
Napoleon did not have much else to do than lean back and hope that the soldiers would
do what needed to be done.

2) Create trust via honesty
Trust is your most valuable resource as a leader. Not only the employees trust in you,
but also their trust in each other and your trust in them. The reason is that both you and
your employees need to take risks and act in uncertainty. We can never be 100% certain
about anything in complex organisations. And it is trust that gives us the courage to try
something new that we are not yet capable of, and talk openly about and learn from
previous mistakes. It takes time to build trust, but fortunately it is also something that is

contagious and self-reinforcing. The first step is to be honest and dare to expose
yourself.

3) Set a target
One of the most substantial ways of exposing yourself is daring to define an ambitious
target. This is what I want! This seems arrogant and heretic to Generation I, and daringly
vulnerable to Generation II, because what if I make the wrong choice or the others
believe that I am going astray? Do it anyway. Generation III is attracted to people who
want something. Do remember, however, that it is not vital that you actually reach the
target it is a point of reference, not a destination.

4) Give suggestions to be able to change them
Involvement may be perceived as limitless openness: what do you want to talk about?
What would you like to do? What are we going to do? To me, that is often shunning of
responsibility. Ceremonial leadership is daring to suggest something and invite people to
do it better themselves. Things have to be made concrete in order for them to be
changed, and as a leader, you cannot expect that others lead the way. Remember the
Heros Journey: as ceremonial leader, your role is often the mentors you have to push
Frodo out on his journey, but you have to let him find his own path and you cannot
expect that he will do things your way.

5) Create a common nautical chart and renew it
The organisations self-story is crucial to how we understand ourselves and the
surrounding world. Take ownership over the story and serve it, but make sure that there
are many co-narrators. Never forget that stories make us blind and every time we
reproduce our self-referential self-understanding, we become even blinder to
unexpected icebergs. When more people with different perspectives are part of the re-
telling and renewing of the nautical map, it is an insurance against stubbornness. The
neurones have to be kept active and fit.

6) Stay curious
The most fascinating part of working for Lars von Trier was to experience his curiosity.
His unyielding ability to challenge himself and to dare admitting that he did not yet
know what he was looking for. And if it became too easy, he would use obstacles in
order to force himself into new directions. Value your inner ape and follow your
curiosity. Go after sudden inspirations, seek the fortune and if in doubt, say yes. As a
leader, it is particularly important that you respect and stimulate the curiosity of your
colleagues. Remember that the brain is lazy by nature, it prefers business as usual in
order to save energy. Do not let it.


7) Communicate through action
As a leader, it is more important what you do than what you say. Generation III is tired
of empty talk without follow-up. Instead of trying to sell them a message, you have to
start on the journey and then ask if they want to join. The strongest form of
communications is action.

8) Activate emotions
Generation III do not want to shut off their emotions when they go to work. The work
because they want to feel something. Remember that the emotions dictate what we
remember and learn. An experience or message, which is not connected to positive or
negative emotions, will be forgotten. When you dare to show your own emotions, you
support empathy, understanding and trust among your colleagues via their mirror
neurones they feel your happiness and share your sadness. Involve people actively
when possible, in order for them to get their own emotions into play.

9) If in doubt, say yes
The closest I have been to a real boss in my adult life is Peter Aalbk Jensen, who
founded Zentropa along with his old mate Lars von Trier. One of the things I admire
most in Peter Aalbk Jensen, is his ability to say yes. Besides von Triers genius, the fact
that Zentropa grew from a small office in central Copenhagen in the late 90s to the
biggest film company in Scandinavia, is partly because of Aalbk Jensens insisting
optimism. I do not share Aalbk Jensens recklessness, but I do try to give optimism the
benefit of the doubt. In our hyper complex times, it becomes increasingly difficult to
judge things you have not tried yet.

10) You only get the fun you create yourself
Generation I and Generation II were used to others providing the entertainment and the
meaning. Generation III, on the other hand, has realised that we have the responsibility
for creating meaning though engagement. When life is no longer about pleasing a priest,
a party leader or a monarch, we are free to pursue what means something to us, we
think is fun. We do not need more martyrs who are suffering on our behalf.

Meeting Morpheus
Do you remember the first Matrix movie from 1999?
It was a roller coaster science fiction film with Keanu Reeves as the main character, who
discovers that his entire life is one big illusion. In reality, we are all slaves, kept artificially alive
by a malicious artificial intelligence that lets us live in a false, computer-generated reality, while
it utilises us as biological power stations. Everything we believe and know about the world is a
lie.

The sad thing is that this dystopian fiction is not that far from the real world.
Through large parts of the history of civilisation, human beings have lived as slaves caught in
ingenious lies that secured loyalty and obedience towards the authorities. Instead of advanced
computer worlds, it has been the stories that have taken care of the mental confinement. Less
spectacular than the robot oppressors in The Matrix, perhaps, but at least as effective.
And the tragedy is not over yet. Millions, of not billions, of people are still fighting to break
through the illusions. From the inhabitants in totalitarian regimes such as Saudi-Arabia, over
radical fundamentalists home and abroad to the systematic and invisible oppression of women
in patriarchal families.
In The Matrix, it is the character Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, who wakes the main
protagonist Neo and opens his eyes. Unfortunately, we cannot put our faith in the hands of a
bald guy with cool sunglasses that suddenly shows up to liberate us. We have to take the
stories seriously. They have the power to mould, maintain and change our identity, worldview
and life. They are far too important to let other take responsibility for them. Therefore, there is
a need for us to take responsibility and become active co-narrators. To free ourselves from the
slave role of being a passive audience and take responsibility for the stories we create together
with others.
There is an immense potential in this liberation, for both organisations and societies. A forceful
engagement and ownership that is able to deliver innovation, productivity, preparedness for
change and work pleasure. But it requires that we are able to dispose of our habitual way of
thinking within organising, governing, control and leadership.


With the Carelessness of a Samurai
The Japanese warrior caste, the samurais, lived an insecure life. Death was waiting around the
corner every day on the battlefield or by their own hand, should honour require it. The
samurais would probably not get much sleep, had they started to ponder these tough odds and
gloomy future prospects. To be able to cope with this pressure, they developed a special
warrior codex, later called Bushido.
One of the basic ideas of Bushido is that the samurai had to face the big questions in life with a
carefree ease: We are all going to die and whether it happens today or tomorrow, is without
meaning. Big decisions had to be taken straight on and without worry. On the other hand, the
samurais had to focus, with the utmost gravity, on the small decisions and tasks in life. From
brewing tea to wielding a sword.
The philosophy being that you had to find meaning in the things you were able to control and
do something about, right here and right now, and then in return let destiny handle the long-
term worries.
The samurais make me think of Generation III. They have been liberated from the big stories
oppressive burden of shame, duty and heritage and therefore have the potential to concentrate
on life as it is lived here and now. And that is, perhaps, the meaning of it all.
Let us conclude by revisiting Siduriss advice to Gilgamesh about the good life:
Now you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full! Be happy day and night, of each day make a party,
dance in circles day and night! Let your clothes be sparkling clean, let your head be clean, wash
yourself with water! Attend to the little one who holds onto your hand, let a wife delight in your
embrace. This is the (true) task of mankind.


Thanks
This book has been on the way for quite a while.
I did my very first presentation about meaning and the three generations of stories all the way
back in 1998, and over more than a decade I have attempted to collect reflections and
experience in a book.
But first I had to have my two lovely boys brought into the world, and then there was a delayed
dissertation that had to be finished. But now I have succeeded thanks to the help from a bunch
of lovely people.
Thanks to my great colleagues at Workz, both those working there today and those who have
moved on to something else. Many of the thoughts in the book have been moulded and honed
in interaction with them and without their inspiration, the book would have looked very
differently.
Thanks to good friends and debating partners who over the years, and during the writing
process, have contributed with examples and ideas as well as listened to many reflections and
delusions.
Thanks to my old teachers and beacon within the academic and real world: Gorm Harste, Nils
Mortensen, Chris Voegler, George Lakoff, Ole Michael Jensen, Vibeke Windelv, Lars von Trier,
Peter Aalbk Jensen and Ritt Bjerregaard.
Thanks to my youth hero Dave McKean, who found time to help with the front page, Sofie
Bangsgaard who did the illustrations, and Per Fischer who helped with the translation.
Thanks to Gyldendal, Lise Nestels and my editor Erlend Steen Thorvardason.
And a special thanks to my wonderful Helene and my lovely boys, Storm and Sne, who have
been keenly asking questions about what I was working on through the entire writing process. I
look forward to the day where they will be able to read what dad has been pondering.


References and inspiration

Chapter 3 - First Generation Storytelling - the Totalitarian Scheme of Things
Substantial inspiration from Niklas Luhmann and my lecturers in system theory and sociology at
political science, Gorm Harste and Nils Mortensen.

Chapter 4 - Second Generation Storytelling - the Postmodern Chaos
Substantial inspiration from Niklas Luhmann, Loytard, and my lecturers in system theory and
sociology at political science, Gorm Harste and Nils Mortensen.

Chapter 5 - Third Generation Storytelling - Joint Ownership and Involvement
Substantial inspiration from Niklas Luhmann, and B. Joseph Pine II.

Chapter 6 - A Mind for Stories
Substantial inspiration from George Lakoff, Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Kahneman. Also
special thanks to Andreas Lieberoth for assistance.

Chapter 7 - Monomyths and the Heros Journey
Substantial inspiration from Joseph Campbell, Chris Voegler and Lars von Trier.

Chapter 8 - The Master of Ceremonies
Substantial inspiration from Ole Michael Jensen and Jacob Schmidt-Madsen.

Chapter 9 - The Battle for Attention
Substantial inspiration from Niklas Luhmann and Michael Thomsen.

Chapter 10 - Politics and the New Citizenship
Substantial inspiration from Niklas Luhmann, Ulrich Bech, Arnie Graff, Kasper Fogh and Rune
Baastrup.

Chapter 11 - Leadership and Trust
Substantial inspiration from Stephen Bungay.29


Notes
1) Maureen Gallery Kovacs: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Stanford University Press, 1985.
2) Ren Descartes (1996): Metafysiske meditationer, i Dalsgrd-Hansen, Poul (red.):
Descartes De store tnkere, Munksgaard, s. 134.
3) See Elena Esposito for more about the development and influence of fashion seen from
a Luhmann perspective: I paradossi della moda. Originalit e transitoriet nella societ
moderna, Baskerville, 2004.
4) Source: Gallup. In 2006, 83% of Danes were in the top category for how they assessed
their own life. In 2014, this had fallen to 67%.
5) Perhaps a bit more biologically correct, we have a small proto-monkey inside. We are
not descendants as such from the monkey species that are alive today, but had a
common ancestor for five-six million years ago.
6) R.E. Jung, J.M., Segall, H. Jeremy Bockholt, R.A., Flores, S.M., Smith, R.S., Chavez and R.J.
Haier: Neuroanatomy of Creativity, Human Brain Mapping 31(3): 398-409.
7) Artin Atabaki et al.: How to separate learning myths from reality, McKinsey Quarterly,
July 2015.
8) The brains plasticity has, among others, been revealed in experiments with
mindfulness, see, for example, Omar Singleton et al.: Change in brainstem gray matter
concentration following a mindfulness-based intervention is correlated with
improvement in psychological well-being, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18.
February 2014.
9) On https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html you are able to measure your
own prejudices in a variety of areas from obesity, age and disability to religion, sexuality
and gender. It is food for thought and highly recommended.
10) To be entirely correct, there is no real Nobel Prize in economy. Alfred Nobel himself did
not consider economy as a worthy candidate when he founded the Nobel Prizes in 1865.
The real name for the Nobel Prize in economy is in fact Sveriges Riksbanks pris i
ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne (the Swedish national banks prize in
economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel) and it is a wannabe prize that was added
in 1968.
11) Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero: The mirror-neuron system, Annual Review of
Neuroscience 27 (1): 169-192, 2004.
12) Andreas Lieberoth: Hukommelsessystemer og oplevelseslring, Aarhus Universitet,
Psykologisk Institut, 2013.
13) The original note can be found here: www.skepticfiles.org/atheist2/hero.htm.
14) The New Testament, The Gospel of Luke, chapter 15.
15) Karl Kapp; Gamification of Learning and Instruction, Pfeiffer, 2012.
16) If you have any doubts about how selective our senses are, then take a look at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.

17) Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely: The IKEA effect: When labour leads
to love, Journal of Consumer Psychology 22 (3): 453-460.
18) John P. Kotter: Forget the Strategy PowerPoint, Harvard Business Review, April 2014.
19) Thorkild Hanghj: Playful Knowledge: An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming,
Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011.
20) Thanks to Camilla Stockmann for the inspiration for the story about American Apparel.
See http://politiken.dk/kultur/mode/ECE2882945/fra-pornochik-til-gammel-gris-stort-
modefirma-konkurs/.
21) You can hear Edward Bernays boasting about his achievements here: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLudEZpMjKU.
22) Kerry W. Buckley: Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of
Behaviorism. The Guilford Press, 1989.
23) James E. Short: How Much Media? 2015 Report on American Consumers, Institute for
Communication Technology Management.
24) Mindshares Advertising Analysis 2015.
25) PWC: Global entertainment and media outlook 2015-2019.
26) Dan M. Kahan et al.: Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government, Yale Law
School, Public Law Working Paper No. 307, 3 September 2013.
27) Standard & Poors historical data, Richard N. Foster Creative Destruction Whips
through Corporate America, Innosight 2012.
28) Rolf Hellebust: Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature & the Alchemy of Revolution, Cornell
University Press, 2003.
29) Stephen Bungay: Art of Action, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2011.


Third Generation Storytelling Beta v1 - 0 Nov2016 PDF

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Third Generation Storytelling Beta v1 - 0 Nov2016 PDF

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Third

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 1

2 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 3

4 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 5

6 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 7

8 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 9

10 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 11

12 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 13

14 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 15

16 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 17

18 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 19

20 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Your life story was not up for debate.

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 21

22 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 23

24 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 25

26 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 27

28 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 29

30 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 31

32 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 33

34 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

You are free from your family, free to be lonely.

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 35

36 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 37

38 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 39

Activism from the Middle East to Wall Street

40 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 41

42 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 43

Identity comes from action.

They have put gods and belief in authorities behind them.

44 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 45

46 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 47

48 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 49

50 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 51

52 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 53

54 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 55

56 Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016

Third Generation Storytelling - Beta-Version November 2016 57