Narrow Results

Organizations stumble and fail for many reasons. One is that a dominant narrative, in the form of a story a company tells itself, one it shares with its audience/ market, or both, does not jibe with the lived experiences of a significant number of its employees and/or customers. This chapter is predicated on the idea that co-created stories are a way communities, organizations, and individuals can ease or eliminate the negative outcomes of dominant narratives. I propose that a basis for the structured co-creation of stories is what I call “game,” and that a definition of the game that can be applied to any co-created story is ERGO, an acronym for environment/roles/guidelines/objective. To explain the concept and its genesis, I take the reader through a community storytelling workshop I conducted in 2013, in which participants practiced applying the ERGO game structures to co-created community stories of drug abuse prevention.

A paradox of self-reference in beliefs in games is identified, which yields a game-theoretic impossibility theorem akin to Russell's Paradox. An informal version of the paradox is that the following configuration of beliefs is impossible:Ann believes that Bob assumes thatAnn believes that Bob's assumption is wrongThis is formalized to show that any belief model of a certain kind must have a “hole.” An interpretation of the result is that if the analyst's tools are available to the players in a game, then there are statements that the players can think about but cannot assume. Connections are made to some questions in the foundations of game theory.