Nostalgia, Nirvana and Now Narratives for Navigating Change

Dua Lipa Future Nostalgia album cover used as a reference to narratives about the past present and future.

Nostalgia Narratives

Nostalgia Narratives are stories about how things were better in the past. In doing so, they suggest that we should go back to the good old days. Jason Feifer wrote an article about the phenomenon in which he describes them as stories about how “today’s changes ruined a glorious yesterday – that a golden age is ours to reclaim”. He goes back and researches various golden ages and makes an interesting discovery. Regardless of the golden age, there are always people telling their own nostalgia narratives. Thus we always recall our past as being better than today. All the way back to 3500 BC, when people first began writing down stories!

This explains one challenge with organisational transformations regarding people’s resistance to change. They often cling to how things were done in the past, remembering only the positive aspects and conveniently forgetting the negative ones. This behaviour reflects a form of retrospective coherence, where individuals construct a narrative about the past to align with their desired beliefs.

Nirvana Narratives

There is also an equivalent that I am going to call Nirvana Narratives, which are more focused on the future. (There is probably an established name for this already, but let’s go with the alliteration!). Thus Nirvana Narratives are about how today’s changes will create a glorious tomorrow – that a golden age is ours to attain.

This explains another challenge with transformations. People try and implement a future state which is not appropriate or achievable. In doing so they ignore the reality of the current situation and create resistance by imposing changes that won’t work. This is because the gap between the present and future states is too big to traverse in a single step.

Now Narratives

The alternative approach is to ask people to tell “Now Narratives” which are focused on the present. (Again, please humour me with the alliteration!). By sharing stories about what is happening at this time, we can more readily identify aspects of the here and now. Those are the things that we can target to change today. That could be identifying Obstacles with Agendashift‘s IdOO pattern. Or it could be identifying Constructors and Constraints as defined by Estuarine Mapping. Thus Now Narratives are about how today’s changes will create a more glorious today – that a golden age is ours to conceive.

In other words, Now Narratives help us work towards an Ideal Present. And in doing so, they address the three reasons why you should use Strategy Deployment. Namely, strategy is not deterministic, static or mechanistic.


The image above is the album artwork for Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, which seems like a relevant concept for this post!

Three Cynefin Ahas

Over the last year I’ve been increasingly influenced by ideas from Cynefin, created by Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge. If you want a good introduction, Liz Keogh recently blogged a good explanation. I’ve realised that there are 3 key changes in my thinking, some completely new, and some reinforced by a better understanding of cognitive complexity. None of these are unique to Cynefin, and Cynefin contains much more. This list is my take, rather than any official list, although if you know Dave’s work I’m sure you’ll recognise a lot of the language!

1. Evolutionary Potential. Even though I’m a fan of Systems Thinking, I’ve realised that in complex situations, defining a future state and closing the gap isn’t the right approach. I still find system archetypes such as Tragedy of the Commons useful, but more in understanding the current situation than defining a future one. Instead I prefer to explore the evolutionary potential. There may be many different answers, some of which are not yet know, so experimenting, in a safe to fail way, helps evolve to the potential. An interesting case of this is exaptation, where a function is used for a purpose it was not originally adapted or selected for. My most recent aha related to evolutionary potential was that even though complex systems aren’t controllable, they are dispositional. In other words, while we still might not be able to know what the outcome of a change will be (let alone the output or activity to get there), but we can determine whether a change has a positive or negative impact on the overall system.

2 Sense-making. Cynefin is primarily a sense-making framework. This means that the data precedes the framework, as opposed to a categorisation framework where the framework precedes the data. Thus, rather than trying to figure out where an example should go in a matrix, examples are positioned relative to each other based on some criteria, and then boundaries are drawn subsequently. This makes sense-making much more dynamic, and what becomes interesting is not the classification of whether something is complex or complicated, but how things transition across the boundaries. No domain is better than any other as each is contextual. Moving from complex to complicated may be appropriate when optimising or exploiting. Equally, moving from complicated to complex (via a shallow dive into chaos) may be appropriate when wanting to innovate or explore. Further, any scenario is often in multiple places at the same time (after all Cynefin translates from Welsh into “place of our multiple affiliations”). Elements may be simple, complicated and complex, and narrative becomes an useful tool for understanding the differences.

3. Narrative. One of the main benefits of Kanban Systems that attracted me was the power of the contextual approach. A Kanban System is something that is overlaid on top of an existing approach to better understand and improve it and narratives are a great way of discovering, exploring and understanding aspects of a context. Collecting a set of anecdotes about best and worst experiences in a context creates a form of knowledge against which to pattern match for similarity of new situations, leading to better insights and decisions as to how to manage those situations.

Putting those three ahas together, I can imagine applying them through working with organisations to collect a range of narratives, help make sense of them by contextualising them with Cynefin, and then facilitate the creation of appropriate actions to make an impact on the business. Those actions might be safe to fail experiments, based on lean and agile principles, to explore the evolutionary potential for complex problems, or a more direct application of lean and agile practices for complicated problems. Or more likely a hybrid of both!