Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD November 26, 2014
We are storytelling beings, homo narrans, as anthropologists have it. Neuroscience indicates that our brains are hardwired to structure lived experience as ongoing stories. We come to understand our life journey as a narrative we tell into meaning, draft after draft. We are and become our stories in the everyday business of life.
Similarly, the goal of a business is to tell a clear and compelling story, leading end-users to believe they have come upon a boon, something special adding value to life. The limitation of story, however, is that is tends toward flatland. Most corporate stories feature static, lifeless nouns, one dimensional identities, and events that can be explained and controlled by analytics, case studies, or reports. As such, story functions like a sign whose message is immediately graspable and without depth. Story owns the surface and traffics in the literal.
Great organizations, on the other hand, are carried forward by Mythos, a special event that serves as its founding experience, incarnated in a primal individual as a hero and depicted in its logo. While providing excellent products or services, great organizations communicate meanings inherent in its Mythos, suggesting how we might live differently. Mythos is not an explanation or marketing copy but an occasion and a time for tapping the wellspring of innovative reality in narrative form, verbal, and visual.
Mythos arises from a highly charged, affective encounter with meaning and spirit, a transcendence of business as usual that we grasp as an idea and express as an image or organizational logo. Mythos traffics in the realm of active verbs, metaphors, and transformations, where meanings constantly compound one another into greater depth and where we are inspired. Mythos functions not like a sign but like a symbol, suggestive, enticing, and transpersonal. Mythos breaks surface of the mundane into the numinous. Advertising and promotional collateral can only suggest but never capture its energetic and spirit.
Story gives chronological account of experience lived along the path of everyday life. Mythos breaks through at a point along the horizontal vector, rising vertically as an eruption of depth above the horizontal flatland. It breaks through conventions in thinking in favor of vital new prerogatives. Mythos is the vehicle of inspiration by which we encounter creative intersubjectivity in relation to the organization’s mission and core objectives. It is the fountainhead of ongoing innovation.
As someone like Steve Jobs, or even a group, may ascend the vertical vector in a moment of transcendence that lifts him out of himself (ex-stasis), providing an endowment of ideals from which all may derive innovation and gravitas. Creators, designers, and artists appear as carriers of Mythos, larger than life figures, arousing our esteem and fear. Great leaders serve as operational stewards of Mythos, an organization’s soul.