Regenerative Listening
Collective Journey Narratives Require Genuine Engagement
What on Earth do Rod Stewart, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Chicago Cubs 2016 MVP Kris Bryant have in common?
Resonance
On New Year’s Eve, 1994, Rod Stewart held a free concert on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By the time he broke into “Hot Legs” that night, 3.5 million people had shown up. It took several seconds for the song to reach the speakers at the back of the crowd over a mile from the stage.
Five years earlier, an estimated 10.2 million people gathered to pay last respects to Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, in Tehran. It would be the largest percentage of a country’s population ever to attend a funeral.
In November, 2016, nearly 5 million people attended the Cubs World Series parade in Chicago, Illinois. It would be the largest peaceful gathering outside of Asia in history.
Arriving in endless waves, what all these people had in common wasn’t that they had good seats, or even that they would find themselves anywhere near the musician or athlete or religious figure that they loved.
Rather, there was something in the songs, the sport, or the belief that stirred their souls. These storytellers had awakened deep inner yearnings held by massive numbers of people, and they would come by the millions to share their response.
We call this resonance.
We Can Be Heroes
The stories being told in these three examples are Hero’s Journey narratives. In each case, through unique talents and rarefied skills, one or a few heroes set themselves apart from their communities to achieve glory.
Because the people saw their aspirations, their hopes and fantasies realized in the actions of these men, they transitioned from a passive audience to active fans. In tandem, they moved. Resonance.
The problem with this is that when the hero goes away, the cheering eventually dies down. The massive amount of energy generated by the event, by the heroic deed, by the hero’s presence…it dissipates.
We have to await our hero’s return if we want another tasty hit of resonance. Or we need to wait (sometimes quite a while) for someone else equally talented to take the hero’s place. Either way, we need the hero.
But while it’s certainly true that you can move an audience, generate a loyal fandom, even worshippers, by resonating with people, what if we told you that you no longer have to wait? What if we told you that we don’t have depend on a hero?
In Collective Journey storytelling, Rod Stewart is no longer required. Yes, we will always need good storytellers, but it’s now possible for us to tell powerful, resonant stories that actually leverage the energy of our audience’s response—reapplying it to empower ourselves and our audience—without the need for an aloof, godlike figurehead.
There’s nothing magical about pulling this off. It takes work. It takes execution. But most of all it requires a method of communication we call regenerative listening. This is the aspect of Collective Journey storytelling that creates resonance.
The Collective Journey Engine
In the Collective Journey model of storytelling, we are positing that this kind of leaderless mating dance between story and millions of people is happening faster and far more frequently than ever before. Seismic events, the actions taken by millions of people, major shifts in attitude across entire nations—we are watching these happen on almost a daily basis.
And while many of these developments have been unfolding spontaneously, we are witnessing the arrival of new methodologies, such as transmedia population activation and multilateral narratives, that can intentionally trigger exactly this kind of mass response.
Over the course of the next four posts, we will examine the basic components of the activation engine at the core of the Collective Journey. They are:
- Regenerative Listening
- Superpositioning
- Social Self-organization
- Change-making
By taking apart this engine and examining these components, we can better understand how Collective Journey storytelling works. When we do, we’ll be better able to identify these unique, powerful narratives even as they happen around us—and we’ll make better decisions about how we want to participate in or respond to them.
When we better understand Collective Journey as storytellers, we‘ll also become capable of generating highly participative mass communications. We’ll be able to generate fierce brand loyalty. We can solve complex problems. We can move an entire people to better themselves.
Most startling of all, we will be able to accelerate the process of turning what we can imagine into what is real.
Storytellers Must Now Also Listen
Think of how many people in your life truly listen to you. How many people look directly into your eyes and want to know how your day went, what your dreams might be, who you really are as a person? You can probably count them on one hand.
When we encounter a narrative, whatever the form, if it appeals in specific ways to our fundamental wishes and desires, the values ingrained in us as children, it’s as if we feel heard. It feels right. We believe it in the story, because it reinforces our sense of what is right. We become loyal to it. We’re not going to leave it.
Strangely, there is also a need within us to share this bond with others. We want to share what we love. This is how fan bases are born, how brands are cemented. Followings expand, movements rise, and religions spread.
In traditional broadcast media, there were a limited number of ways to “listen,” which effectively meant, measuring how successful your stories were: sales, ratings, box office, media buzz. With the advent of the digital age, we now have more tools:
- Social media
- Customer service
- Review posts
- User-generated content
- Personal data
- Likes and hits
For the most part, however, this information is still being received by companies and organizations as raw data. We are making decisions by breaking down the numbers in search of meaning. This is the equivalent to talking to that friend who is looking at you with feigned interest, but is really busy making up something to say.
The difference, from the standpoint of Collective Journey, is that we must now acknowledge that story has become porous. It is now participative. That friend of ours is now demanding to be genuinely heard.
We are seeing this every day in social media. Hundreds of millions are talking about everything from movies to the most critical of social issues. We influence and reinforce one another. What we have to say is actually changing the course of the stories that are being told to us by huge corporations and political leaders.
Each of us has become a stream, pouring into a river of story, and it doesn’t take all that many of us to be able to alter that river’s course.
To this end, regenerative listening gives us a capability that is potentially far greater than that of any rock star, celebrity, athlete or world leader.
Remember what struck fear into the hearts of Freud, Roosevelt, Hitler, and Putin alike: a crowd of many millions that had a mind of its own.
Regenerative Listening Creates Intimacy
With Regenerative Listening, we are holding a caring conversation with our audience. We are studying their language and integrating it into our own. We are acknowledging their hopes, concerns, and complaints. Our interaction is purposeful and intentional.
We are proving our genuine interest by demonstrating an understanding of the issues, as well as what audience members are trying to say. We are then directly addressing them with sympathy, humor, and candor.
By engaging in regenerative listening, we will far more easily be able to address audience misconceptions about ourselves and our stories. We can concede to criticism that is actually valid (and implement corrections when possible), and we will be capable of boldly confronting direct opposition.
Regenerative listening is the equivalent of looking your audience members in their eyes, conveying your shared values and aspirations, and acknowledging one another as human beings worthy of being heard.
By doing this you are generating energy that supercharges the conversation. You’re forming real bonds, earning loyalty, solving problems, bolstering your narrative. Instead of dissipating, the energy reenters the system. Your audience starts spreading the word. Together you become activated, and your collective power dramatically increases.
Turning Your Audience into Storytellers
The result of regenerative listening is that the storyteller is both seen as a peer by the audience, and rises in their esteem. Storytellers and audience members (participants) find themselves on the same team, as opposed to being divided between screen and seat, individual and institution, corporation and consumer. The system energizes itself.
Think of the brands people love most: Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Lego, Disney. (We’ll be doing case studies later in this series.) They don’t just sell you good products or services, they engage you in their stories.
They give you the impression that they care about how you feel about them. They’re responsive. They take care of the problem. They take care of you. That’s regenerative listening, because in return, you become an advocate, a member of their tribe. And you feel compelled to bring others to them.
Think of the stories you’re seeing every day on your social media feed. They’re not just floating there by accident. Your friends are finding and posting those stories—but they are also framing those stories with their own opinions. And you can reframe them right back.
Together we’re amplifying, even reshaping those stories not by a million, not by ten million, but by many, many millions. With that kind of power anything is possible. And so we have these rapid trends, skyrocketing or crashing brands, and remarkable, seismic events.
Ways to Use Regenerative Listening
No one is saying that the practice of regenerative listening is easy to execute. Getting started, however, has little to do with securing the best technology, or the finest data analyst.
Instead, it has everything to do with becoming confident enough in your story to be willing to share it and invite unadulterated feedback. In our tests of Collective Journey, this has been one of the toughest aspects to negotiate with our clients. They say:
- “Consumers don’t really know what they want.”
- “Doing this opens us to attack or ridicule.”
- “We don’t want to get caught up in an argument on social media.”
- “If we get it wrong, our message, our brand can be damaged.”
But in each case, once the core narrative was discerned from the company, and carefully finessed with buy-in from all stakeholders (including a cross-sampling of audience members), the benefits of the method would quickly become obvious. The risk proved to be well worth taking.
The method far better prepared the storyteller to handle the uncertainties levied by a participative audience.
Here is how regenerative listening works:
I am criticizing you and I’m mistaken!
A certain number of participants criticize or even attack your story, but after investigating you realize this is the result of a misunderstanding. You haven’t communicated clearly enough, or there is an outside influence or circumstances beyond your control.
You respond candidly by acknowledging the problem, describing it clearly from their perspective. You are reiterating back to them what they told you.
Then briefly you offer an explanation, and then do something about it (e.g., make up for it). Even if it takes you time to clarify or fix the problem, the acknowledgement has bought you good will.
Once you’ve fixed it, point out the fix and credit the audience as if they are members of your team…because they are.
I am criticizing you and I’m right!
A certain number criticize or attack your story, and after investigating you realize they’ve got valid points. Chances are, your narrative has somehow drifted from the foundation that created resonance between you and your audience; those values and aspirations.
Time to fess up. Communicate your understanding of where the participants are coming from, and acknowledge, briefly, that they’re right. Then explain how you’re going to move to correct it, and stay true to your word.
It can take a while, and it can be costly to course correct in this way, but again, the acknowledgement has bought you good will.
Be sure, again, to validate your audience for their contributions. They’ve made you better for their participation.
I am directly opposing you!
A certain number criticize or attack your story. After investigating you realize they want to take you down. They stand for the opposite of your values, your aspirations, your message—and against those, in fact, of the vast majority of the community you’ve been building.
Your job then is to reiterate your story, placing an emphasis on the elements that make you unique, universal, and resonant with your audience, the community you’ve built.
Make it clear that the attackers don’t agree with those values, or that they are trying subvert your message in some way. You can be bold with them: What you are saying is not who we are. Feel free to go and find that elsewhere.
But also welcome their return. If you maintain a sense of certainty in the underpinnings of your story, there’s no need to wage rhetorical war. By continuing to apply regenerative listening, you might find it easy to convert your attackers into allies: If you decide to stay, you might find something special for yourself in the story we’re sharing.
And so, your story spreads, your base is energized, and your community grows to the point where serious, even systemic change can happen.
Next: The exponential, fractal power of story-spreading that we call Superpositioning, the second component of the Collective Journey engine.
The Collective Journey Series:
Intro: Why is This Happening?
A New Narrative Model Explains it
Part 1: The Hero’s Journey is No Longer Serving Us
Classic Storytelling Models Are Faltering in the Digital Age
Part 2: When It Comes to Story, You’re Not Getting It
The Drama & Disquiet of Old-Fashioned Storytelling
Part 3: The Collective Journey Story Model Comes to Television
Thrones, Dead, Orange & Others Are Subverting the Hero’s Journey
Part 4: Big Brands and the Awakening of the Docile Consumer
In the Collective Journey the Peoples’ Voice Now Levels the Playing Field
Part 5: Story Can Assert Control Over the Masses
The Power of Propaganda & Multilateral Narratives
Part 6: Regenerative Listening
Collective Journey Narratives Require Genuine Engagement
Part 7: Superpositioning
Each of Us Can Now Be in Five Places at Once
Part 8: Social Self-Organization
Story Can Take What We Imagine and Make It Real
Special thanks to Alan Berkson, Jordan Greenhall, Maya Zuckerman, and Chrysoula Artemis for their valued editorial input.
