The Pulteney StreetSurvey
THE HEART OF THE STORY
What would you build if you weren’t limited by gravity or space or time? If you had every tool to create something that no one’s imagined before, what would you create? We have amazing tools and technology, but to do something extraordinary, to imagine something no one’s imagined before, is incredibly hard. How do you begin to imagine this thing? That’s where storytelling — more importantly, story-finding — helps people tap into what they haven’t dreamed of yet. It starts with a conversation, which I think of as a mutual path of discovery. Working in journalism, I learned over time to just stop and listen, to be deeply curious and ask questions for which I had no answer. It’s listening and curiosity and empathy and humility that enable us to create businesses of the future with the tools in front of us. We may worry about technology, that it’s moving too fast, that we can’t quite make sense of it or catch up to it, but I think it frees us to be more deeply human than we had time to be before. It lets us ask: “What can I do, now that I have one less limitation?” That’s the possibility at the intersection of technology, storytelling and business that’s so delightful: it’s not just about what I can build, but what I can build that’s good for humanity, that will honor humanity and make it better.
Kristen Adams ’86 is Chief Storyteller and an associate vice president at Cognizant, a Fortune 500 IT services company. She is a former producer at CNBC and ABC.