Leaders and Mental Models 

Part 1: The Story to Rule all Stories

The Story is not so much about God’s plans for your life as it is about your life for God’s plan.—Gregory Koukl

The universe is authored.

To understand the universe, one must first realize that there is an intelligence behind it, directing it, holding it together, moving it like all stories from a beginning, thru a middle, to the ultimate climax and resolution. 

Thus, all of life is storied or is a story.

And you and I need, as leaders, to embrace what one might call a narrative lens or narrative mental model. 

A Narrative Lens

In life and in leadership, we see /or should see/ thru a story-tinted lens. Everything we see and do and believe is colored by what theologians call a grand- or meta-narrative of an ultimate Author. 

And if that’s true, then all life and leadership is story-imprinted. 

This Story is a lens we can’t really take off. It colors everything.

Story—the Leader’s Primary Mental Model

Story is not only a lens we see thru, but it’s also the primary or overarching *mental model* we need as leaders.

These days, I’m doing a lot of reading on “mental models.” Lots of folks are working on “mental models and I’m confident that future Life&Leadership Letters will unpack some of these models I’m learning about.

But first: here’s the Basics of a Mental Models

A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a concept, a conceptual framework, deeply held internal images or worldview that you carry around in your mind to help you interpret the world and understand the relationship between things. 

Mental models consist of deeply held generalizations, assumptions or beliefs about how the world works and how we take action in it.

For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you understand how the economy works. Game theory is a mental model that helps you understand how relationships and trust work. Entrophy is a mental model that helps you understand how disorder and decay work.

James Clear unpacks the lens-like nature of mental models.

“Mental models help you understand life…guide your perception and behavior…give you a new way of seeing the world and can be extremely useful in making wiser choices and taking better actions.” Expanding our sets of mental models are critical to great leadership and good decision-making. 

Unfortunately, most models are not perfect, they are lenses through which we see reality. In this way, they model reality but they are not reality. 

And since most models are not perfect, they can block and distort information. When a certain model or worldview dominates our thinking, we tend to explain every problem using those default to models. It becomes like that proverbial saying: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 

But there is one mental model that is perfect.

Story 

Story is the one exception that proves the rule. It’s the model to rule all models.

Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.—Daniel Coyle

Story as a Mental Model

In the books I’ve read so far, no author uses story as a mental model. Coyle comes closest in claiming that stories “deliver mental models that drive behavior.” 

It seems to me, however, that a “story or narrative” mental model offers us as leaders a “model to rule all other models.”  A narrative mental model offers all the positives found in helpful mental models but none of the negatives. 

And at the top of the narrative mental model is this meta-narrative or grander story, mentioned above. To thus complicate things, the meta-narrative is the mental model over the mental models that rules all other models.

Ok, now I’m lost.

Here’s how I see it: 

1. The Meta-narrative or Grander Story is the overarching Mental Model. 
2. Narrative or Story is a mental model better than other mental models.
3. There are other helpful mental models, we should learn about.

What is the Meta-Narrative or Grander Story

The theologian N.T. Wright believes that Christianity serves as an over-arching storyline in which the Christian—and for our purposes the Christian leader—makes sense of the world. There is no part of the world which we can’t see through the lens of the “Christian story.” 

As Wright writes: story is the best way of talking about the way the world really is. . . in principle the whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world. It is public truth.

This “Christian or biblical story” is the meta-narrative or grander story by virtue of two things:

1. It answers the fundamental existential questions 

and

2. It provides the plot-line of all of history.

First, it serves as a comprehensive worldview by answering the following questions: 

Who am I? 
Where am I? 
What’s wrong with me and the world?
What’s the solution to what’s wrong with me and the world? 
and 
What time is it? (or Where do I/we belong in this story?)

This grander story answers to these question thru a narrative flow which is described fundamentally as four chapters. These four chapters form the basic lens that we will help us as Christ-followers and as leaders see the meta-reality before us. They are:

Creation: What ought to be?
Fall: What is?
Redemption: What could be?
Restoration or New Creation: What will be?

The Meta-Narrative and Leaders

Understanding the meta-narrative enables the leader to live and lead in a story bigger than him or herself. As we give Kingdom leadership, understanding the answers embedded in these four chapters will help us live in truth and lead in truth. We should, first of all, beware of the loss of story in our lives and in our leadership.

Leaders Should Live in Story and Beware of The Loss of Story

In our brokenness, we easily lose this sense of grander story and as a result, we lose all sense of meaning and of place and purpose.

We live in moments rather than in a world that going somewhere.

Or we think in cycles rather than in the linear flow of a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

We fall victim to the thought that “what is” will always be.

As a result, our identity becomes defined falsely by the lack of flow or progress, trapping us in the tragedy of our sin and brokenness. We enter a world where it seems like there is no escape, where “what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” (Eccl 1:9) 

But, if we live in a story, the story that is the story of the world, everything changes. 

This four-fold Scriptural meta-narrative of “creation, fall, redemption and restoration” breaks the cycle of “what will be will always be.” 

God has a purpose, a plan, a plot-line leading to the renewal of all things under Jesus as King. His story governs the world. So, as we connect and help others reconnect people to larger story, we and others become part of a universe that is authored and in that certainty we can live in faith, and love and hope. 

The implications of this meta-narrative are many.

Let me suggest a few, many of which I’ll unpack in the future.

1. Leaders live in a story bigger than them and their little story.

Leaders realize they live in an authored universe. God is writing a story in which we are invited to play a part. We are written into God’s story and we are to be like David “who served the purpose of God in his own generation.” In other words, we serve the purposes of God in our chapter or in our part of a chapter. 

2. Leaders are not the heroes of the story and life works best when they choose the right hero. 

In the true meta-narrative, there is only one true hero—Jesus. Everything is being brought under the sovereign rule of Jesus.

3. Leaders serve as guides or mentors or friends in this meta-narrative. 

We are friends or brothers/sisters to the one true hero who is making other heroes. We are thus hero-makers under the loving rule and reign of the one true hero. 

Think of being Gandalf or Samwise Gamgee to Frodo; or in the 20th Maine’s defense of Little Round Top, we’re Andrew Tozier the flag bearer to his regimental commander Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. 

4. Leaders realize that there is a universal antagonist to the Universe’s Protagonist.Every story has a protagonist and an antagonist. The protagonist wants something and the antagonist wants to stop him. Like every story, there’s conflict, a battle, a war. As a result, leaders are not surprised by life’s tension.

And knowing that every story must have a villain, leaders are not surprised that they face a demonic one, who’s real and is intent on destruction. 

So leaders must expect a fight. This conflict is at the heart of the story. 

Aristotle in his Poetics described how this tension, on the other hand, makes a great story. 

Aristotle said that a great story establishes what is and then establishes what could be thru the basic plotline of “beginning, middle and end.” The basic gap between “what is” and “what could be” is the tension found in every story. 

As Aristotle explained, it is the storyteller’s job is to close that gap and open a new one, over and over until the tale is done.

For our purposes, it is also the leaders’ job in the chapter being rewritten for him or her.

Leaders close the gap between what is and what could be and open a new one, over and over until the tale is done. 

———

I’ve got more to unpack, but I need to get this out. In the next life&leadership letters, I’ll talk about how leaders think and live “diachronically” and how they speak out of an historical/existential/eschatological flow. In other words, leader lead from a sense of “what was right and wrong” about the past, from “what could be true in the future” while retaining an unrelenting commitment to “act in the present.”