When they were little, my daughters’ least favourite time of the day was when I walked out of their room at eight o’clock, abandoning them to darkness. They delayed this moment as long as they could, and I am a hopeless sucker, so when they were just two and four years-old we settled into a routine.
I read to them and then, when the lights were out, I told them a story.
(To keep up our French, I usually read Astérix books)
When I was exhausted or when I had a glass or two of wine I tried to tell them how smart and funny and beautiful they were, how proud I was. I tried explaining things to them, about business and bison and the French language and Mexican cuisine. It never worked, not longer than thirty seconds. They were not interested in facts or information presented simply as facts or information, especially if any of it had the scent of being good for them.
One or both would interrupt me and say, “That’s not a story!”
To my daughters, a story has a problem state, an unfortunate status quo. They adore being the heroes in a story, so let’s say it’s a rainy day and they’re bored. Then something happens: an inciting incident. Ideally it’s something they have chosen to do. We ask them not to open the back door in the rainstorm and — naughtily — they do it anyway. And a fox runs in the house!
The story begins.
Now, they have to find a way to solve this problem. It involves chasing the fox, coaxing the fox with chips and hummus, pretending to be foxes, barking like a fox, and introducing the fox’s natural enemy: a British aristocrat named Lord Swallowedabee.
(Lord Swallowedabee?)
The heroes have two competing goals, to rid the house of the fox and possibly a lord before mom and dad find out, or to make the fox into a pet. They have unconscious goals as well: to learn a lesson about naughtiness and to feel the way we feel when we decide to let a wild thing free. All of this culminates in a difficult decision they have to make, at the end, and then they bask in the glow of a happy resolution — a foxy, lordless dénouement.
I did not teach classical story design to my children. They had not seen the arc I saw on the overhead transparency in grade nine. But they had a sophisticated, critical understanding of narrative. They were born with it, wired with it.
As complex as we try to make our areas of specialization with clubby language and torturous processes, we’re all wired for narrative. At its simplest and most elegant, a story is about change and it’s about choice. It’s about a human being or many human beings making a deliberate and difficult choice and taking a risk, doing something to achieve a clear goal, and succeeding and failing. A story is an invitation: come along with me. Together we can solve a problem, create something special, change someone’s life.
(luckily, no one has to explain this to a child… they’re born with an instinctive understanding of story design)
At the heart of every religion that lasts is a story. Great nations, magnetic cities, enduring companies large and small are built on a single, compelling story that creates an endless tail of anecdotes — for example, for example — that support it. Leaders with a story sneak into our brains and rest there for hours, days, lifetimes while those who recite facts and jargon and abstract visions for the future blend into boring, shapeless, and colourless blobs.
A decade ago Story Engine worked with a group of neuroscientists from three universities, keen to join forces and create a “superhighway” of brain science. It was daunting. They weren’t only smart. They knew what it meant to be smart, down to atomic detail. We worked with them to take all of that science and boil it into a simple story, in plain language, that is not an easy feat with academics. Many of them were sceptical about this arty thing we were doing with them at a mountain retreat. Luckily, a few of them knew colleagues who had explored what narrative actually does to our brains.
(don’t worry, Ramón, everything’s fine, we just want to poke your brain with stories)
In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg. The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological reactions are stimulated.
(Paul, Annie Murphy. “Your Brain on Fiction.” The New York Times. March 17, 2012.)
This feels instinctively true. When we read a novel or watch a fine movie we are not only in the castles and shacks and Mercedes Benzes and foggy moors with the characters. We are in their heads. We become them. I have felt pain along with Jake Barnes, Harry Potter, Lisbeth Salander, and Wilbur the pig.
If you slide a person into an FMRI machine that watches the brain while the brain watches a story, you’ll find something interesting—the brain doesn’t look like a spectator, it looks more like a participant in the action. When Clint Eastwood is angry on screen, the viewers’ brains look angry too; when the scene is sad, the viewers’ brains also look sad.
(Gottschall, Jonathan. “The Science of Storytelling: How Narrative Cuts Through Distraction Like Nothing Else.” Fast Company. October 16, 2013.)
It isn’t difficult to convince business and political leaders of the value of storytelling. Again, it’s a word we use all the time. We operated with a literal definition of narrative. What about those leaders? When potential clients reached out to Story Engine, we never knew what they meant when they used the word story. It’s just as confusing as brand.
(if we make brands seem really complicated and abstract, maybe our clients will be intimidated by our big words and pay more!)
The problem with storytelling in business is that it’s almost never… storytelling in business. When someone in the corporate world says, “We have to tell our story,” what they almost always mean is, “We have to clear up distortions and get the facts out there.” And in any big city in the world, you can find hundreds, thousands of agencies and consultancies that are in the business of getting the facts out there.
Out there or not, if you don’t embed your facts in narrative, your audience will forget them. They will be too polite to say so, but they’ll be thinking, “That’s not a story!”