The importance of origin stories

Last week I made scouse (pronounced like house) for dinner. 

Whilst I was making it, my son (as all children like to do when they’re thinking with their stomachs) asked me what I was making. So, like my parents once did with me, I bored told him the origin story of the dish.

Originally called lobscouse (from the Welsh lobsgows) it is a dish linked primarily with sailors who would throw every bit of vegetable and leftover scraps of meat (typically beef and lamb) that they had, into a pot and cook it up.

You would probably call this a stew, but in Liverpool we call it scouse. Liverpool became synonymous with the dish not only because of its sailing and port heritage, but also because of its ability to grow potatoes (the predominant ingredient).

When Liverpool fell on hard times, we would make ‘blind scouse’, that is, vegetables without the meat and serve it with bread instead. A tradition that has remained since.

Mum would usually make it for us on a Monday with the leftovers from Sunday lunch and it was one of my favourite dishes of the week. In fact, in Liverpool, 28th February is still Global Scouse Day (a great time to visit the city!)

To this day, Liverpudlians are called ‘Scousers’ thanks to our penchant for this dish.

Origin stories are something that I use in my leadership workshops and they are one of the most effective ways of bonding people together. They activate powerful neurochemicals - cortisol during moments of tension and oxytocin during connection - which create the biological conditions for empathy and trust.

Yet, too often, organisations throw people together (usually based on their expertise) and expect them to find some way of working together that produces the results that we’re looking for. Some organisations spend tens of thousands on team-building workshops and never achieve this.

I’m always clear that the exercise is not an oral biography. We don’t want someone standing up for 20 minutes talking about the time that they cut their finger open on a tin (this actually happened). 

Instead, it’s about providing enough information to be able to see, hear and appreciate them as a human being first. Who they are, based on where they are from, what they have experienced and what their aspirations for the future are.

It doesn’t matter if you are 18 or 80, everyone has a story to tell. A little bit of knowledge about each other can not only create unbreakable bonds, but it can also bridge the age/gender/experience/personality divisions that inevitably raise their ugly heads during times of stress, when we forget we are just humans trying to do the best job that we can, in the environment we work in.

Social cohesion - the glue that holds teams together - tends to arise from exercises such as these. Without this, you may just be left with a group of technically competent strangers who know each other’s names, but not what their Mum’s made for dinner.