Plot

Happy Sunday {{first_name|friend}}!

Being married to an actor means you end up seeing a slew of local productions you might not otherwise choose to see. That happened a couple weeks ago when Amalia brought me to see a show her friends were putting up: an immersive piece staged in an empty retail building in a hip neighborhood.

One of the creators welcomed us and said “This show is more about the process than the product” which made me chuckle. God bless artists. Then we walked into a mostly empty room with some props set up to resemble rooms in the corners. Four female actors emerged and did their things simultaneously in their respective corners. You could walk wherever you wanted based on what you wanted to watch.

It was chaos. After getting a sense of the vibe in the first few minutes I thought to myself: I would be totally unsurprised if at some point an actor just didn’t move for several minutes, and I would likewise be totally unsurprised if they took off their clothes. This premonition proved correct on both counts later in the show, with one actor lying in the middle of the room with her head fully under a large TV while another actor took off her clothes in front of a mirror. Then all the actors gathered and performed a ten minute dance movement, which concluded the show.

To be fair, everyone really gave it their all, and how amazing is it to see humans doing vulnerable human things in front of each other for an hour? And to be fair, they did warn us at the start that we should not evaluate what we were seeing based on the completeness of a finished product. But even so, my overwhelming feeling the whole time I was there was just…

what…

is…

the…

POINT??!?

I knew I wasn’t supposed to care about the plot of the show but I so desperately wanted to figure out what was going on. Where were we? Why? What is happening next?

Our need to understand where we are in the story is an exceptionally powerful force. So much has been written about this yet it still seems undervalued. Perhaps even more than achieving our goals, we yearn to know what is happening next, what came before, why it matters, and what our role is in all of it.

Which brings me to leadership: a big part of a leader’s job is to tell a compelling enough story to engage the team in shared mission, align decision making through shared values, and make confident pivots when needed.

I think I’m decent at this part of my job but I’d like to be better. Last week I happened to see this quote on the cover of a book Amalia was reading:

I read that line again and again. I realized that was the language I have been looking for in trying to describe the ways I want to improve as a storyteller.

When it comes to my work, I think I’m pretty good at the poetry part. I can write up beautiful visions of what the world could look like in the future. I can weave together a sharp narrative of what’s currently happening and how people are feeling about it. I love to find the underlying meaning and hidden patterns in connecting two disparate ideas, as I try to do in these emails.

I don’t think I’m particularly great with the Plot part of things. I find myself procrastinating on making decisions about what should come next. This is especially visible when it comes time for us to set quarterly OKRs.¹ I find it so hard to engage with them and try to offer input on what we should focus on next. I want to say “Who knows? Let’s just get into next quarter and look around and see what there is to do that day.” That is, obviously, a bad way to lead a team of people hungry for purpose and alignment.

So when I saw the line “capable of delivering both poetry and plot” I thought: yes, I would like to be “one of those special writers” who can deliver both. And when I was processing my frustration with the immersive theatre piece, I thought about how it must feel on an emotional level to try and work with a leader who doesn’t seem to have any particular care on where we go next.

People want to know what the point is. And that is a beautiful, natural, species-level biological desire. It matters less what the actual plot is and more that there IS a plot. And whether I like it or not, at some level as the company owner it is up to me to write that plot.

This is Part 1 of this topic - next week I’ll share a couple great frameworks I’m turning to these days for how to illuminate the plot.²

Do you consider yourself stronger with poetry or plot? Write back and let me know!

Have a great week.