The strange death of storytelling  Let’s kill business babble and start communicating persuasively

Let me start with a question. How many hours do you spend giving presentations, reading documents or creating communications; or, more likely, enduring them through gritted teeth? And on the ‘glass-of-Malbec to dentist’s-chair’ spectrum, how do most of them rate? Thought so.

Over the course of these columns, I’ll range across this landscape, look at how we got here, then explore some possible escape routes. Think of it as a manifesto, or something closer to therapy, if you so desire. Let’s start with some backstory.

Many moons ago, I studied the classics (Latin, Greek and ancient history) and revelled in the motivational power of great stories. (Even now, I spend a lot of time with Homer, Virgil and Nero – see figure 1). Then, when I started my career in the ad industry as an account planner (aka strategist), I was dismayed to discover that stories played a very small part in advertising strategy. This baffled me. How did we get here, I wondered?

Numbers numb us…

Management and business have become swallowed up by a system I call the arithmocracy, a system where power resides with numbers and those that control them. This has its origins in Pythagoras’s belief that “numbers are gods” and FW Taylor’s scientific management, which led to the engineering monotony of Fordism, and is based on ideas of control, power and uniformity.

We are becoming dependent on metrics and at risk of turning into (apologies to Grace Jones) slaves to the algorithm. Arithmocracy – in the form of league tables and metrics – dominates everything from the NHS and our education system, to policing targets. This creates a runaway system of measurement, prediction and control that seeks certainty above everything and leaves an arid rationalism in its wake.

The dependence on metrics can lead to a “race to the bottom” (or “race to the average”, perhaps). It may explain why we see such a high level of failure in new product development, and increasingly homogenised comms campaigns.

In scientific circles, this fear of uncertainty is often known as ‘physics envy’ – the Panglossian aspiration for all human behaviour to aspire to the absolute predictability and certainty of atoms in the realm of classical physics.

Arithmocracy has accelerated with the onset of Big Data and algorithms, which have tended to reinforce the rampant reductionism of runaway measurement and the deification of data.

And this has been exacerbated by the likes of management consultants importing spurious techno-language (aka jargon), which too often acts as a shield against meaning, honesty and authenticity – creating unwitting in-groups of those who can’t face admitting that the emperor has no clothes.

Yet, the body of thinking emerging under the heading of behavioural economics makes it clear once and for all that human beings are subject to a variety of processes and biases that are dependent on emotional, unconscious forces and the effect of other people and contexts.

…but stories stir us

Back to communications. We must abandon our dependence on the logical, computational theory that sees comms as simply the efficient transmission of information from sender to receiver. Too often in presentation decks, pre-reads, information packs, pitch documents and proposals we fail to distinguish signal from noise. We parade “one damn chart after another” (to paraphrase Toynbee’s view of history). It is our goal, surely, to be signal-minded.

Behavioural economics (again) reminds us that the brain demands coherence (aka structure) and that memory, emotion and meaning are inseparable.

In the same way, because we are born to tell and listen attentively to stories, we are hardwired to use stories to share social information in a way that is designed by evolution to maximise meaning, empathy and long-term memorability. Scientists and philosophers like Joseph LeDoux and Daniel Dennett point out how much of our identity and sense of self is bound up with the idea of stories: that we are best seen (at least in one light) as the accumulation of the stories we tell about ourselves and that others tell about us. (This is arguably not a bad definition for brands, too.)

Stories breach the defences of information and circumvent the tendency of material to get remaindered in ‘attention spam’. (More on this next time). Stories stir us because they work with the raw material of human emotion: they move before they prove.

Because the brain prefers cognitive ease, we need to help it by creating a golden thread: a sense of coherence and structure that it can latch on to and use as a comforting guide on its journey of tedium-free exploration.

So, again – as so often with the findings of behavioural economics – we find that in our business lives we are acting against rather than in line with the way our brains have evolved.

If we continue down this path, we risk creating a generation of passionless deckheads.