The story got there first
Why your clearest sentence still loses to a joke you weren’t there for
Twenty-odd years ago I spent far too long reading transcripts of people talking to each other inside 3D virtual worlds, waiting for a joke to catch. It ended up with me in a doctoral program in communication at UniSA.
That was the work. You watch a group. Someone tells a small dramatised story about something that happened somewhere else, and most of the time it lands on the carpet and dies there. Then one time in twenty it doesn’t. The tempo lifts, three people pile in, someone adds a detail that isn’t true and nobody corrects it because the accurate version would be less fun, and for about ninety seconds a room of eight individuals becomes one animal enjoying itself.
Ernest Bormann called that chaining, and built a theory on top of it: symbolic convergence theory. It was the theoretical spine of my doctoral research. Which is why I read Sven Brodmerkel’s opening piece on the c-word with the particular pleasure of watching someone else say the quiet thing out loud.
Sven’s argument is that communication isn’t one thing; that most of us are running an unexamined transmission model inherited from Shannon and Weaver; and that a great many workplace breakdowns are two people operating different theories of communication, with neither of them aware there is a theory in the room. He’s right. Underneath the theory clash there’s a mechanism with a name, a literature, an unfortunate central term, and forty years of people arguing about it.
A theory with an unfortunate word in it
Bormann’s term for the dramatised message is the fantasy theme. Fantasy. He put that word into the organisational literature in 1972 and it has been making HR departments uneasy ever since. I’ve always thought it the most honest naming decision in the social sciences, and possibly a small act of sabotage, since no company will ever agree to print it on a wall.
Nothing racy about it. A fantasy theme is a story about something happening away from the here and now: last week’s outage, a customer from three years ago, a competitor’s new logo, the restructure that was announced by accident. The story itself matters less than what the group does with it. When one catches, people repeat it, embellish it, argue about the details, and eventually compress it. Bormann called the results composite dramas that ‘catch up large groups of people in a symbolic reality’ (1972, p. 396).
Then comes the compression. A forty-minute saga becomes two words. Someone says ‘the printer’ and eleven people laugh, and the twelfth, who started in March, learns her exact standing in that company from a laugh she isn’t inside. Bormann called that a symbolic cue. Most of us call it an in-joke and assume it’s harmless, which it is, in the way weather is harmless.
Clarity isn’t the currency
Chained stories accumulate into what Bormann called a rhetorical vision: a shared drama with a cast, a plot, a setting, and a sanctioning agent, that last one being the authority the whole production answers to. In most offices the sanctioning agent is The Market. Occasionally it’s The Founder’s Story. In the advanced cases it’s four words on a wall, in a typeface chosen by someone who left in 2019.
A rhetorical vision holds a workplace together in the way a plot holds a soap opera together. Completely, and with no obligation whatsoever to the facts.
Which is the part I’d hand to Sven’s readers, the quiet high-processing ones who keep being told to say it more simply. You can be perfectly clear and still be standing outside the vision. Your careful sentence arrives in a room where the story got there first, took the chairs, and worked out who the characters are. They can hear you. They’re also inside a story you weren’t there for, and the story is doing the interpreting.
The plain word for how that feels is lonely. It gets written up as a communication issue, because lonely doesn’t fit in a performance review.
There is a sharper edge to it. When a story is chaining and one person declines to join in, the group notices at once, and registers it as a failure of belonging rather than as disagreement. So the colleague who says ‘sorry, is that actually true?’ halfway through a good chain has committed a social offence with no relationship at all to accuracy. They’re usually right. Being right at the wrong point in the plot is one of the more reliable routes to being called difficult, then managed, then reviewed, then moved sideways into a role with a longer title and no staff.
Meanwhile the all-hands works exactly as designed, provided nobody in it needs to learn anything.
Visions don’t have to be true
Nothing in the theory requires the drama to be accurate. Stories chain because they satisfy, and satisfying has never needed evidence. That is how a company converges, with genuine feeling, on being a family, in the same quarter the family made forty of its members redundant, and how the one person who names the gap becomes a morale problem instead of a witness.
The small-group work underneath all this began with Robert Bales watching students in rooms (Bales, 1970). More recent research has found groups running two rhetorical visions at once, in tension with each other, which is Sven’s theory clash with the paperwork attached (Zanin et al., 2016).
Zoom out and it stops looking like an office problem. We are hominids who sat around fires telling each other about the leopard. The story did two jobs at once: it moved the information, and it told you who was in the circle. The fire is now a Teams call and the leopard is a competitor’s product launch, and the circuitry hasn’t been updated, because there was never a maintenance window. Three hundred thousand years old, still running, still deciding who belongs on the basis of who laughs in the right place.
Even the theory had a theory clash
None of this is settled, incidentally. Mohrmann (1982) argued that fantasy theme critics reasoned in circles, assuming they had found a compelling social reality when all they had described was a dramatistic construct, and that they had borrowed Bales badly on the way through. Bormann and his colleagues spent the following two decades answering him, at length (Bormann et al., 1994). A theory about people converging on a shared drama, defended for thirty years by three men in a journal, is either a weakness in the theory or the strongest evidence for it yet published.
The bit I didn’t plan on
The industry I was studying stopped chaining. My doctoral candidacy didn’t survive. My research question focused on whether 3D virtual worlds—Second Life in particular—had a viable place in business. I was progressing well. Then, within a matter of weeks, the entire 3D virtual worlds industry collapsed. The platforms folded. The user bases evaporated. The companies shuttered. And my research question—could 3D virtual worlds be of value to SME businesses—disappeared with them. The answer to my research question was now, unambiguously, ‘no’—and it is difficult to write ninety thousand words when the answer is a single syllable.
Embarrassing, mostly. Not the hot kind. The slow kind that arrives when you work out you were inside the vision the whole time you believed you were watching it from a safe distance, notebook out, professionally detached, coding other people’s enthusiasm, entirely immune.
The second-order thing took longer to notice. I had a theory that explained precisely why I’d believed it. Explanation isn’t consolation, though it’s better company than ‘you should have seen it coming’, and that’s about the size of it.
So, when Sven gets to ritual, and asks why the pointless Monday meeting survives: somebody has to say ‘the printer’, or we stop being a tribe for a week. The information was never the load-bearing part. The calendar invite was never going to admit that, and neither, in my experience, is the bloke who scheduled it.
References
Bales, R. F. (1970). Personality and interpersonal behavior. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Bormann, E. G. (1972). Fantasy and rhetorical vision: The rhetorical criticism of social reality. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 58(4), 396–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335637209383138
Bormann, E. G., Cragan, J. F., & Shields, D. C. (1994). In defense of symbolic convergence theory: A look at the theory and its criticisms after two decades. Communication Theory, 4(4), 259–294. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1994.tb00093.x
Mohrmann, G. P. (1982). An essay on fantasy theme criticism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68(2), 109–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638209383598
Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. University of Illinois Press.
Zanin, A. C., Hoelscher, C. S., & Kramer, M. W. (2016). Extending symbolic convergence theory: A shared identity perspective of a team’s culture. Small Group Research, 47(4), 438–472. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496416658554