Kayfabe on the street - Why community stories matter

WrestleMania 32 - the 2016 professional wrestling pay-per-view event in Texas drew over 100,000 viewers. Kayfabe rules matter - photo Miguel Discart CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Larry Leach 

What lessons can we learn from professional wrestling? Kayfabe is the long-standing convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic. Pro-wrestlers historically adhered to kayfabe so strictly that they would not socialize or travel with those on the opposing side. If you were a babyface or hero, you were never seen in public with a villain. 

Malcolm Gladwell describes this concept as the overstory. In Gladwell’s usage, an overstory is the shared narrative people agree to treat as real, even when everyone knows, at some level, that it’s constructed or selective. It’s the story that makes coordinated social behavior possible.

Similarly, Kayfabe works because people remember the rules of the story and we need to pay attention to this dynamic when we think about community building.

We tell ourselves and each other stories. Some true, some not true, but most that have elements of both. Deep down we think the grass is greener on the “other side”. The people in that other community, city or country have elements to be admired. The weather, the people, the scenery, the government and how they structure their society are all elements that make a place great. But because we have this envy, we tell ourselves that our place is either greater than it actually is or is awful and needs to be torn down and rebuilt. There seems to be no happy medium

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics at Luzor - for millennia, community storytelling has been part of the transformative arts - photo Asta, Public domain, Via Wiki Commons

The stories we tell ourselves matter a great deal in community-building, and we’ve written on this before. For example, I blogged about the behavioral economics concept of nudging which is the idea that we can steer behavior by design and by a community narrative, not by force. 

Consider the role of community storytelling described in Mateja's blog during our work with the UK National Storytelling Laureate, Katrice Horsley, while attending our SafeGrowth Summit in New Orleans

KAYFABE ON THE STREET

Marketers and politicians try to read this kayfabe and use it to their benefit. We read it every day as politician "X" speaks to his or her base. For us in the SafeGrowth blog team, we continually ask ourselves about our audience and our message. Will our message resonate with our audience? What stories can we share to help or hinder the motivation to take action? 

Teachers helping students with artistic storytelling in a SafeGrowth program

What is your personal Kayfabe? What is your community Kayfabe? What is your country’s Kayfabe? For my country Canada, we are known for being kind, apologetic and welcoming, yet would you be surprised to know that people cut me off in traffic every day and that I have friends who spend HOURS daily complaining about the government?

In my community, one political flavour targets the Federal Government while the other flavour targets the Provincial Government. I recently had a discussion with an Alberta separatist. (For those of you who may not know, recent polls put Alberta separating from Canada at 19 % support. This is a minority political sentiment that has existed for decades.) This separatist shared opinions about how Alberta is getting “screwed” by the federal government of Canada, many which I agreed with and many which have been talked about for 50 years. 

That narrative, whether right or wrong, is not going to change. I asked this separatist some simple questions: What does a separate Alberta look like? Do we have our own currency? What about the military? Simple, and legitimately honest, questions like this can confirm the reality of narratives and show whether they are thought through properly. 

To test whether a narrative is on thin ice, ask the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why and, for good measure, the faux sixth W: how. Any narrative kayfabe must withstand those questions if it is to earn genuine community buy-in for a community-building project.

Places, urban design, and community art also helps convey community stories

STORIES IN COMMUNITY BUILDING

Bringing this back to CPTED, SafeGrowth, and community development: you may gain quick support by echoing how poorly residents believe their city or national government has treated them. You may even agree. But if you don’t understand the local kayfabe about how the community sees itself, how others see it, and what story holds it together, then you are doing little more than repeating the latest Facebook post. 

Communities need solutions to real, often negative issues. But before offering solutions, we must first understand the local challenges and the local kayfabe, or overstory, that shapes them.

My father used to ask his friends: “Do you want to be right or do you want to have friends?” A SafeGrowth spin on the question is, Do you want to be right or do you want community support? You might want both, but gaining the latter will help discover the former. As Greg comments when he quotes Steven Covey’s maxim: “We move at the speed of trust”. 

And since stories move societies forward as much (or more) than facts, you can only earn trust after you understand the Kayfabe.