Is my cutting edge... actually dull?
What we can learn about cutting edges, paradigm shifts, out-of-the-box thinking, and explicit and implicit narrative from She’s All That and a learning design studio
When I was in middle school, I loved the movie She’s All That.
If you’re unfamiliar, high school hotshot Freddie Prinze Jr. bets that he can transform a clumsy, bespectacled nerd, played by Rachel Leigh Cook, into the homecoming queen.
I don’t have to dig deep to know why I loved that movie. It felt aspirational. I, too, was a nerdy introvert and wore glasses. I, too, lacked hand eye coordination. Perhaps my future also held some magical transformation. A girl could dream! But if you compare this photo of my eighth grade self with pre-transformation Rachel Leigh Cook, the contrast is pretty stark.
I’ll say it with total self-love: Rachel and me—we weren’t starting out on equal footing. Because post-transformation, she looks exactly the same, minus the taco hat and glasses. In fact, this teen genre of “not-really-an-ugly-duckling becomes a swan” movie became a joke trope of the millenial era. Rachel wasn’t transformed. She was repackaged!
Usually, when people talk about transformation in the social sector, I find the analogy holds. They’re doing something that is a variation of something that’s already been done, repackaging it, and stamping it with one of the following labels:
transformative
cutting-edge
out-of-the-box
paradigm-shifting
Last month, I wrote about the ubiquity of the word “equity” in the social sector. While the casual use of “cutting-edge” doesn’t hold the responsibility of throwing around a word with complex historical and social contexts, it’s similarly rendered the word meaningless. Case in point: off the top of my head, I listed ten prominent organizations in the education sector, then googled their name alongside each of the words. In the table below, I check off whether each org uses any of the above labels to describe its work.
Well, I guess everybody is transformative, or transformational, or transforming something! At least, all ten orgs make this claim. Some probably can back up their claim. Some of them can’t. And herein lies the importance of understanding the difference between explicit and implicit narrative.
Explicit narrative is what we say we do and are about. It’s easy to pop words like transformation and equity into a mission statement, or to describe a program as cutting-edge. These are the headlines of our storytelling. Implicit narrative is how we illustrate who we are and what we do, through the myriad unflashy but substantial little details in our storytelling. Basically, implicit narrative answers these questions, without ever using the words:
Transforming from what to what?
What’s the edge we’re cutting?
What’s the box? And what’s outside of it?
What paradigm are we shifting?
for example…
One of my partners, Franklin Street Studio, designs adult learning experiences for organizations ranging from schools and nonprofits to foundations and businesses. While Franklin Street does use explicit narrative to signpost their uniqueness for audiences—their experiences “transform work habits” and “break the mold”—their implicit narrative solidly backs up their claims.
For example, take these two excerpts from their website:
We won’t stick you in a conference room or run your team through long PowerPoints. We believe in learning by doing. We immerse you in all kinds of virtual and in-person experiences — like visiting a school that’s housed in a museum or shadowing a CEO who built a world class company culture.
Pose questions not answers. Working through questions, problems, and scenarios is critical to building the kind of self-reflection, trust, and curiosity that makes teams bigger and bolder in their thinking. Our facilitation style is all about asking questions, whether in large groups or in one-on-one coaching.
Each of these excerpts implicitly makes the case to an audience that Franklin Street does break the mold as they claim. In the first excerpt, the mold is Powerpoint presentations in a conference room. Franklin Street breaks it by bringing learners into the field. In the second, the mold is a consultant who provides answers and direction. Franklin Street breaks it by facilitating learners to navigate questions themselves.
long story short…
In the social sector, we need to learn how to balance explicit and implicit narrative. Explicit narrative on its own is just hot air—and let’s not delude ourselves; hot air is always apparent to our audiences. Implicit narrative is where we build understanding of and credibility in who we are and what we do.
It’s worth saying that, just because something isn’t cutting-edge or paradigm-shifting or transformational doesn’t mean that it isn’t good. My local food pantry distributes food to those in need. They’ve done this for decades. Nothing out-of-the-box about it—just people filling grocery bags—but it’s an important community service.
In fact, we set so much store in the social sector by innovation and newness, that we don’t take time to invest in and improve the good old things that work. A good old-fashioned impact story trumps a sexy “paradigm-shifting approach” story every time.