Good morning!
How’ve you been? And how was your vacation? Mine turned out to be grrrrreat!
Instead of working on a big writing project, like I normally do, I took my wife’s advice and took it easy. I read a couple of books, finally took a long road trip to the Finnish countryside, and spent endless hours playing video games.
At first, I was afraid that without a plan, I will run out of things to do, but the exact opposite happened.
And the best bit is that I have so many more stories to tell.
Like the time I spent with my 5-year-old daughter visiting her favourite neighbourhood park and we found her favourite leaf, my first ever trip to a trampoline park, and how I accidentally broke the handles off a very old lid cover of an old well.
Each experience taught me a little bit more about myself, and I loved it!
We think of what we do and what happens around us as mini-stories.
Recall your earliest childhood memory and now try telling it to someone. I bet you’ll end up telling them a story or even a series of meandering short stories.
Jerome Bruner, an American psychologist who is well-known for his contributions to cognitive psychology and learning, suggests that we start building our childhood memories once we develop the ability to form narratives.
And that’s why most of us don’t remember much from our infancy.
We make sense of our lives by thinking about the things we do and the events around us as small stories.
As story builders, we don’t record the world as much as we build it, mixing in the cultural and individual expectations by combining our sensory inputs and knowledge.
And sharing these stories with others is the best way to communicate who we are, where we have been, what we care about, and what we hope to become.
Listening to people's stories is the best way to get to know them.
But the challenge for anyone interested in understanding people through stories is to codify the chronological order, and perfectly string together the many mini-stories accurately.
Just ask someone a simple question like, ‘Who are you?’ and ask them to elaborate, and you’ll see what I mean.
Stories give us the means to achieve a sense of self by structuring events in time and by defining their relationship to the larger social context. But these stories aren’t always well structured.
That’s especially troublesome when you’re trying to make sense of stories from multiple people, like in the case of user interviews.
But there’s a way to simplify these meandering mini-stories into a skeleton plot. To form a skeleton plot, you need to break down individual stories into five dimensions:
Intentions
Actions
Consequences
Reasoning (behind the actions) and
Goals
This way, you can find the common threads that connect the separate experiences into a shared narrative that can give you meaningful insights into the collective experience of your target audience.
The best bit is that you can use the same method to understand yourself a lot better.
So, how was your summer?
Stay curious!
Aliyar