Applying the Hero’s Journey Restorying Intervention
Last week’s podcast with Ben Rogers was filled with insights that we want to apply! Ben told us how framing our efforts in the hero’s journey can help us find meaning in them. Since our quest at FlexPoint includes helping clients – businesses and individuals! – navigate inflection points in their growth journeys, we wanted to model this approach using the resource Ben provided.
We’re using this two-pager: Hero’s Journey Elements and Restorying Intervention Prompts, shared with permission from Ben and fellow researchers’ article, Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
For context, here’s the full podcast audio and transcript.
If you’re in a hurry, here are the key points:
Michael Daehne talked with Ben Rogers, Assistant Professor of Management and Organization at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, where he teaches and conducts research around management and organizational behavior.
They discussed Ben’s research around the meaning of work and narratives in the workplace, and specifically how the hero’s journey is a way for us all to find meaning in our work. Ben shared how using the seven hero’s journey elements that he and fellow researchers identified – protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, and legacy – can apply from large-scale business transformations to our everyday lives.
And if the hero’s journey, is a new concept, here’s a graphic that Ben and team included in their materials that gives a quick snapshot.
Classic and Modern Hero’s Journey. Graphic credit: Kevin House
Okay, let’s jump in to applying the framework Ben shared!
Hero’s Journey Restorying Intervention Prompt
Ben and his fellow researchers created a hero’s journey restorying intervention prompt – a series of seven questions – to help us all find meaning in our stories. The prompt is: reflecting on the various aspects of yourself and your story, describe how you might see yourself as a hero on an epic journey.
This includes seven elements:
Protagonist: What makes you you? Think about your identity, personality, core values.
Shift: What change of setting or novel experience prompted your journey to become who you are today?
Quest: What overall goal were you striving for that led to who you are today?
Challenge: What challenge or obstacles, such as nemesis/rival or negative event, stood in the way of your journey?
Allies: Who supported or helped you in your journey?
Transformation: How did you personally grow as part of your journey to become who you are today?
Legacy: In what ways has your journey left a legacy?
Lord of the Rings
Let’s start with a warm-up round using the Lord of the Rings, one of my favorite epic stories.
Our main protagonist is Frodo, a hobbit. He lives in the Shire with his uncle Bilbo, since his parents passed away in childhood. He is devoted to his friends, including Sam, and he has a mischievous streak – though not as foolhardy as his cousins Merry and Pippin. He has heard about his uncle’s grand adventures and wants to have his own adventures.
The initial shift for Frodo is a series of unusual events: his uncle Bilbo makes himself invisible, which we find out is thanks to a peculiar ring he has. A wise wizard, Gandolph, determines that the ring is very powerful and coveted, sending Frodo and Sam out of town for their safety.
(Like life and business, the Lord of the Rings story has many sets of the hero’s journey elements. There’s never just a dragon to slay or merely one set of allies. Frodo encounters several shifts in the course of the tale.)
After determining that the ring is terrifyingly magical, Frodo says yes to a quest of destroying the ring by throwing it into the lava river at Mount Doom. His initial aim is to save the Shire, his hometown, and then it grows in magnitude to saving the world.
Epic, right?!
He encounters countless challenges on the way to destroying the ring. He gets lost again and again, he battles truly nasty creatures, he gets captured, the list goes on. His nemesis is Sauron, the evil being who created the ring and needs it back to come to strength and take over the world.
Frodo also battles himself: he finds himself being changed by the ring, and he has an internal battle raging for much of the quest.
Thankfully Frodo has several allies, chief among them his friend Sam, his cousins Merry and Pippin, and a motley crew of men, elves, and dwarves who have agreed to accompany him to Mount Doom. (Each member of the crew faces their own hero’s journey, which makes for a rich tale.) The allies come through for Frodo many times, though the fellowship fights battles within, too.
Frodo comes through the quest truly transformed. The young man seeking adventure for himself realizes that he’s been prideful, selfish, and foolish at various points on the journey. He realizes that community matters far more than he realized, and he becomes far more willing to sacrifice for others than he was.
His legacy includes saving the world (no big deal!) and creating the conditions for many communities to flourish. In one of the final moments of selflessness we see, Frodo realizes that he didn’t save the Shire for himself: he no longer fits in there. Rather, he’s worked on behalf of his community, and he trusts them to steward it going forward.
Sam provides the best summary of this journey in the moments after a near-death experience. He says, “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
“But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
“Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
Frodo asks, “What are we holding on to, Sam?”
Sam finishes with forcefulness (and some tears), “That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for.”
Here’s a clip of this scene.
Business Transformation
Now that we’re warmed up (and maybe a little teary-eyed), let’s practice using the hero’s journey restorying interview prompt in business.
The protagonist in a business transformation story can be filled by a company (or, rather, the team behind the company) and/or specific individuals.
We can tell meaningful stories about our team – “we’re in this together!” – where we’re confronting shared challenges, transforming together, and sharing in a legacy. We can also tell meaningful stories about individuals involved in the business effort, and this is an important step in finding meaning for each of us. I can confront a specific challenge, I can transform, and I can appreciate the legacy I’ve worked to create.
For this illustration, let’s start with the team as protagonist and then zoom in to a product manager and a customer service representative as our individual examples.
Let’s say our company faces a challenge, our corporate shift: a new competitor has just caught our eye, and they are delighting customers with a compelling set of products, delivered intuitively, with excellent resources for customers to quickly understand how to use them. We’ve seen some of our market share go to the new competitor, and we want to fend off further decline.
We can see how this would be a shift for plenty of individuals at the company, too. The product manager may need to see what they’re delivering through a new light. The customer service representative may be prompted to rethink service level goals and best practices. The list can go on.
Our quest will be more impactful if we identify a positive goal than a negative one: rather than not losing market share, let’s set our goal as being a trusted partner to x% of the addressable market, or growing y% in the next year, or improving our net promoter score by z% this quarter.
Individual quests will slot into this company-wide quest. The product manager may aim to identify and deliver the set of features that will enable our best-fit customers to do an additional set of high-value activities. The customer service representative may set out to understand customer needs more deeply and provide a set of resources that prevent x% of calls through effective self-service.
Our challenge includes but isn’t limited to the compelling performance of our competitor. We will need to embrace the internal challenge, too, team-wide and individually. We may have some firmly held beliefs that no longer apply; we can dislodge these with humility, curiosity, and learning from new information and insights. Our culture may have been perfect for delivering our current set of products, but it has more centralized control than will be helpful in a season of experimentation and learning. It will require courage, coordination, and continuous improvement to get from here to there.
Each individual will likely have their own internal challenges, too. The product manager may have been really excited about the previous product roadmap and trajectory. It will take addressing some ego and definitions of success to embrace a pivot. The customer service representative may be an expert at navigating the current set of resources; updating and adding to these will bring them back to learner mode, with its discomforts.
In the face of these challenges, identifying allies will be essential to success. At the company level, this may include trusted partners sharing expertise and lessons from experience. Board members, investors, mentors, coaches, and more can be excellent allies in tackling a new challenge. Individuals within the company can be each other’s allies, taking turns presenting challenges and providing support.
We see particular value in enlisting allies with different perspectives, for instance, from a different team, function, line of business, even company (with prudent safeguards). The product manager and customer service representative can be allies to each other, sharing learnings, advocating for each other, providing encouragement when the next breakthrough seems far off, and reminding the other of the value of this quest.
This process, if followed far enough to achieve a significant portion of the question, is likely to yield transformation for the group and the individuals in it. The team will have persevered through a challenge together, reaping perspective, satisfaction, and character. The company (we hope!) will have achieved worthy goals, even if these look quite a bit different than they were initially conceived. Part of this journey is learning together, and often the finish line is in a different place than we thought at the beginning.
Individuals who contributed to the quest will have considerable experiences to mine for meaning. The product manager may have shifted from a focus on features and internal capabilities to a focus on intently listening to customers and solving valuable challenges they have. With some introspection, this likely includes things like building character, leveling up discovery and visioning skills, and deepening the rigor of analysis.
The customer service representative may have shifted from answering questions clearly and correctly to giving customers resources to prevent them from calling in the first place. Upon reflection, this may include a greater focus on team success than individual achievement, a shift in perspective to understanding the customer and how they use the product, as well as adding a customer advocacy element to their role.
With hard work and a bit of good fortune, these efforts will contribute to quite the legacy for the company, team, and individuals. Delighted customers, solving important challenges, and a team that’s ready to meet today and tomorrow’s needs are just the start. Each individual will have the opportunity to reflect on how they’ve contributed to a product that’s greater than the sum of its parts. And the learnings gained through challenge are even sweeter than those that came easily!
Now It’s Your Turn
What aspect of your life or work would benefit from uncovering meaning? I invite you to walk through these questions and see what you learn about yourself and/or your team.
Protagonist: What makes you you? Think about your identity, personality, core values.
Shift: What change of setting or novel experience prompted your journey to become who you are today?
Quest: What overall goal were you striving for that led to who you are today?
Challenge: What challenge or obstacles, such as nemesis/rival or negative event, stood in the way of your journey?
Allies: Who supported or helped you in your journey?
Transformation: How did you personally grow as part of your journey to become who you are today?
Legacy: In what ways has your journey left a legacy?
If it’s helpful to talk through thoughts on your own hero’s journey, please set up time with me. I’d love to connect!
