Since the beginning of time, stories have been tasked with carrying complex messages across time and space. As storytellers, we love to point at these meanings in the grand stories we tell: epic sagas of heroes and heroines committing to perilous adventures to save the world. 

But what happens if we turn our lens to the tiny everyday stories we tell about ourselves and those around us? Well, the epic frameworks, with their broad strokes and good-versus-evil setting, don't always fit so well, especially when reality is not as simple. Enter complexity science.

First developed in the 1960s, this is a wholistic approach to understanding the world. That is to say, in complexity science, we know the whole is often more than the sum of the parts. For the past five years, I have been working at the intersection of complexity and storytelling, trying to understand what science can tell us about the stories we hear and tell every day. In this talk we will look at nine concepts and how they relate to dozen of examples from real anecdotal stories collected through the WE Program. 

Then, in the workshop to follow, we all will take turns putting complexity to practice with our own stories. This is a sort of requirement for the talk and workshop, to bring a story of something happened to you recently that you find yourself stuck on. In small groups, we will share these stories, and see what the lenses of complexity science might reveal about your experience.

After sharing in small groups we will come back together for a collective reflection and check-out. 

A Little More About Connor, The WE Program, & This Talk

Hello there fellow story lovers! As a Story Engineer for the WE Program, I develop tools, systems, and processes to help people tell and make sense of stories. This can be anything from hosting small storytelling sessions on Zoom, to inventing new ways to visualize collections of stories on your computer. Most of the time this means working with Oasis, our Monitoring and Evaluation sense-making platform. This digital library currently have more than 3500 stories, with 4000 not far off. These stories are collected by members of the WE Program and shared to the platform, where we use the stories to guide regular storytelling and sense-making sessions. 

This is my third DISC_x Talk about my research, and I'm really excited this time to be bringing to you a workshop that will also be featured at the European Evaluation Society Conference in Italy, a few days you see it here in The Hague! Looking forward to spending an afternoon of storytelling with all of you!