Storytelling: time for a reboot

The backstory

For a number of years, storytelling in business seemed to be all the rage.  A decade ago, I attended numerous leadership conferences, seminars and strategy workshops where some enigmatic speaker would have the audience completely captivated, as they unpacked the “three beats of the leader’s story”, or espoused the value of sitting cross-legged around our imaginary campfires to explore the mystery and magic of the storyteller’s art. 

In leadership workshops, jaded executives were encouraged to re-imagine their corporate resume as a “leadership journey”, illuminated with moments of personal “epiphany” and hard-won “life-lessons”.  As a welcome relief from the usual death by PowerPoint, storytelling seemed a rich seam to explore.  I discovered at one workshop that almost all business and personal challenges could be better understood through some cleverly curated clips from a movie.  Most memorably, through a deconstruction of The Shawshank Redemption, I learnt about true friendship, personal resilience, working under pressure and the enduring value of knowing a good accountant. 

Some of the conference speakers were as extraordinary in the flesh as they were in the best-selling books they had written. Bear Grylls (broke his back, but climbed Everest before age 21), Joe Simpson (survived catastrophic injuries on a mountain, but made life and death decisions that haunt him to this day), John McCarthy (held captive in a basement in Beirut for five years, but emerged as man of great warmth and unbelievable tolerance) and Ellen MacArthur (solo-circumnavigated the world in 94 days, but emerged an articulate public champion of sustainability, before it was de rigour). 

These days, though, if I attend a business forum, the inclusion of a storyteller on the agenda is now more likely to prompt a world-weary sigh rather than a standing ovation.

The alchemists

Advertisers and marketers used to embrace storytelling to sell their products. There were some wondrous and memorable moments where classic story themes were fused with brand campaigns  Apple’s ‘1984’ Mac launch (evoking Orwell’s dystopian vision) and Guinness’ ‘Surfer’ (narrating Melville’s Moby Dick) were each brilliantly done; smart, imaginative and thought-provoking.

Two of cinemas’ great directors started their careers selling colourful PCs and dark draft beer. 

Surfer’s director Jonathan Glazer went on to make Sexy Beast, with Ben Kingsley, described by Martin Scorsese as the best British film he had ever seen.  Apple’s 1984 was the breakout moment for Ridley Scott, who went on to create iconic blockbusters like Alien, Blade Runner, The Martian and the Academy Award winning Gladiator. 

The idea of the advertiser as storyteller par excellence may have inspired the writers of the TV series Mad Men, where its anti-hero creative genius Don Draper uses brilliant storytelling to pitch his campaign ideas.  In The Carousel Pitch, his heartfelt epithets and tear-inducing sincerity wow the executives from new prospective client Kodak-Eastman.  Draper’s successful pitch rescues his firm’s tenuous place among the big agencies on Madison Avenue. 

But like many of the best stories, there is, of course, a twist.  The real genius of the pitch was that for Don, it was nothing more than an act.  A charade.  He had left all authenticity outside in the trash.  I implore you to watch it and be amazed by the power of the master (and duplicitous) storyteller.  

I am less sure the advertisers of today use storytelling with such conviction or skill.  Their objective is not the memorable story retold, but the widely distributed meme or gif. The allegorical and metaphorical wit found in adapting Melville or Orwell seems to be seldom bothered with.  We are, without much ado, asked to Bet365, or Compare The Meerkat, or more simply, Go Compare. 

The advertisers’ goal is to gain a momentary mindshare, a nanosecond span of attention, and the creative solution is to treat the audience like kindergarten consumers, grasping for the screenshot-friendly marshmallows on offer.  The writer and cartoonist Hugh McLeod summed up the dumbed-down approach beautifully: “If you spoke to people the way advertising now speaks to people, they would punch you in the face.”

Death of the story - and who killed it

Technology has played a part in making stories both unbelievably easy to access and simultaneously too easy to ignore.  While we can readily access more than 30 million books via Amazon, we are a mere thumb-swipe away from the distraction of instantaneous stories of global importance and/or celebrity gossip, super-condensed into a few hundred characters on Twitter. 

Worse still, the long-form story version of the tweet starts with the soul-destroying tease “Thread”. 

On Instagram, a story is now described as “slideshow that allows us to capture and post related images and video content, so we share more of our lives with those we are close with”. 

Another thumb swipe and Facebook sends us photo-montage stories of our colleagues’ enviable holidays, our half-remembered second-cousin’s birthday and our pet’s best escapades.  Not much room then for Melville’s 585 dense pages.

TED Talks are the modern equivalent of storytelling.  In a puritanically branded event, an over-rehearsed speaker has up to 18 minutes to enlighten, persuade and inform – and hope that their nuggets of knowledge will be worthy enough to be shared by millions online.  Depending on your perspective, TED Talks is a medium that has either saved Western thinking and the promulgation of new ideas, or alternatively, it hasn’t. 

TED has created a whole industry of training, books, videos and professional tutors to help you Talk Like TED, Own The Room and Rock it Like TED.   Airport bookshops are packed with TED’s alum. 

As you’d expect, in the myriad of eclectic topics and more than 3,000 official talks now available, there are duds and some gems.  But one of the very best is just five minutes in length, one of the shortest TED talks ever shared.

The story is called Save The Shoes, or sometimes titled A life lesson from a volunteer firefighter, by Mark Bezos.  Like all the best stories, Bezos immediately ignites your imagination. His mode of telling has a theatrical wow factor. He seems genuine and authentic, making the story both personal and universal. 

In its punchline and Bezos’ brief epilogue, there is a sticky reminder of how powerful lessons can be found in real-life experiences and how great storytelling can still blow up a room. 

Time to reboot storytelling?

Perhaps in Bezos’ wonderful tale there are some clues to how storytelling can be made more compelling and fresher for business audiences again.   Re-hashing the familiar “heroic endeavour” now seems outmoded. A more authentic and humbler tale of ordinary achievement and learning could be more meaningful.  Film-maker Peter Guber wrote in The Four Truths of the Storyteller that authenticity is crucial. 

For Guber, the story has to be true to the teller, sound true for the audience, ring true in the moment and be true to the mission the storyteller is trying to impart.  If it’s not, we see right through it and never suspend our disbelief. 

Authentic smaller stories of collaboration and partnership, of learning, tolerance and listening might trump stories of success hard-won through perseverance, fortitude and single-mindedness.  In business education we need more stories that illuminate real learning about innovation without the “hero” always being a man growing up in Silicon Valley grafting for 10,000 hours in a suburban garage to crystallise his cunning plan for global tech dominion. 

What a shame then that the best business book of the past few years, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, is merely a damning portrait of Silicon Valley ambition and hubris gone very wrong.

If these kind of business books were more nuanced and showcased the eponymous business heroes and anti-heroes more realistically, with many shades of grey – rather than as angels or devils – that could offer a better learning opportunity.   

A helpful shift to a greater diversity of storyteller, different cultures, accents and outlooks shared mean we also must listen more attentively to learn. 

Amid aggressive non-discourse via Twitter, spiky media soundbites and political put-downs, it might seem odd to go to politics to replay a story that might provide us with some clues of where powerful storytelling might find some inspiration.  But it’s out there if you take time to take a look.  Whatever your political persuasion, after taking a peek at Don Draper and Mark Bezos, I urge you to watch a beautifully told story about an unremarkable 60-year-old lady called Edith Childs.

On a freezing night in November 2012, in Des Moines, Iowa, Barack Obama stood before thousands in a town square on the eve of the election. With many hundreds of tales to choose from, after a long brutal campaign, Obama told the story of how Childs, whom he only met once briefly, was the “one voice that changed a room”, prompting him to change his outlook, his behaviour and his campaign team’s strategy.  If the story he shared doesn’t move you (even a little) then I guess the days of crafting human stories to inspire, energise and ignite others might well have had its day.