The narrative animal
In order to think about something as complex as social change – and that is what we are interested in here – we need to simplify. We need mental models that will make it possible for us to discuss strategies, ideas and problems in a clearer way. And we need more than one such model – if you are stuck in one mental model you are unlikely to be very successful in a complex environment.
We will start out talking about stories.
In this simplified model societies are nothing else than a broad set of stories – stories about nations, companies, individuals. Stories about justice and unfairness, stories about winners and losers, right and wrong, true and false. These stories are always about specific people, companies or institutions, but they reflect underlying narratives that recur over time and these narratives are possible to classify and understand. Some even argue that there are just a couple of narratives in the world, and we will look at those archetypes as well. Narratives in turn are patterns, and there are even fewer patterns – negative or positive, offensive or defensive. As we look at patterns we start to see underlying mechanisms like conflict and resolution or problem formulation prerogatives.
There is a reason that storytelling is an important mental model for us when we try to understand advocacy and government affairs. Storytelling is one of the core ways in which we think. In his book On the origin of stories, Brian Boyd, a professor in literature, explores the evolutionary origins of storytelling and suggest that not only do we use stories to persuade each-other, we also have to understand the world as a story – it is simply not possible for us to order our experiences in any other way. We are hard coded to see the world through narrative glasses.
Stories are essential, he notes, to social learning. Not only are they the way we make sense of the world, they shape how we learn about new things in the world. That is why it is so essential to frame our work in the terms of stories and narratives.
There are simple insights that follow from this, and help us understand what makes a story effective. Boyd writes:
”Storytellers need to balance audience benefits against audience costs in time and comprehension effort. Homer ensure the popular appeal of the Odyssey not only through the features of character and plot already considered, but also by merely simplifying his plot, dividing characters the easiest way of all, into ”goodies” and ”baddies”. He focuses overwhelmingly on one hero, the foremost of the goodies, and contrasts the singularity of this hero with the often anonymous rabble of the suitors.”
Boyd, B On The Origin of Stories
There is a lot to learn from Boyd’s analysis here.
The obvious point about audience benefits and costs is often overlooked in trying to communicate a company’s standpoint. More often than not statements and messaging is crafted to satisfy internal stakeholders, not an audience – and the notion of audience cost, or more crudely why anyone should care, rarely enters the equation. To make a message comprehensible also means that we often have to leave out some of the good arguments and focus on the best argument. This is the core of message discipline.
Boyd’s other point may be distressing to us, but it is true: the simplest way of telling a story is to have what Boyd calls ”goodies” and ”baddies” and if you fall on the side of the ”baddies” you have your work cut out for you. It is often surprising to relatively young companies to find themselves on this side, since they have been enjoying the honeymoon of the entrepreneur, but the reality is that for most of our history corporations have been viewed with suspicion and criticism.
Companies, nowadays, start out in the baddies camp, and if we ignore this we risk losing credibility.
Discovering your story
But let’s start with stories, and let’s start with you. Here is an uncomfortable truth: there are stories about you. Not just a single story, and sadly not just your story, but a whole weave of stories that create you. Stories told by friends, enemies and lovers. Stories handed down by your parents and stories slowly built around you by your children, if you have them.
Now, you can have more or less control over these stories. No-one has complete control over their story, but some have more control than others. And if you tell no story about yourself, you can be sure that others will anyway — in fact, this will be a part of your story.
Stories are a bit like armies. Clausewitz once noted, wryly, that all countries have an army – their own or somebody else’s. The point is well taken — and brings us to our first observation in this model.
Your work as a lobbyist is about enabling the company to control as much of its own story it possible can. For smaller companies this is simpler — especially successful startups. A startup not only gets to build its own products, it has almost complete control over its own story. The one thing it needs to watch out for is being built into a symbol for an issue or, worse, a symbol for change and – here is a word we will return to later – _disruption_. There is temptation here: almost all entrepreneurs want to think that they are – ugh – ”making the world a better place”, and in doing so they are cleaning out the old and bringing the new. The challenge with that from our perspective is that the old usually is the networked and well-entrenched incumbents that employ millions of voters and have paid their taxes for decades.
Surprisingly, when told that they are old, they don’t curl up in a ball and die. They start telling another story: a story of irresponsibility, of a playing field that needs leveling, of arrogance and lack of responsibility. And before you know it you have left the honeymoon of the entrepreneur and dived into the long dark night of regulation, enforcement and antitrust.
The narrative conflict here is between your narrative about the new world coming and the much stronger narrative of ”a stranger comes to town”. When you are the stranger you suddenly find that all the sympathy you had access to as a startup mysteriously vanished when your intentions were called into doubt.
This is one of the core patterns you need to study closely – and there are plenty of examples to learn from – and it is one of the conflict of the new with the old, or the established with the upstart.
But let’s back up a little. What we are seeing here is how quickly a company can get caught up in a story on the basis of a few, well-recognized narratives. In our craft we had better look closely at what the story really is.
This is one of the most important questions we can ask – at least in this model. What is the story about my company right now? Lay it out clearly, and try to see where it connects with other contemporary stories. Are you an American company in Europe in a time of transatlantic frost? Are you a technology company in a time that has started to worry that the future is nothing but a place where the kids will be worse off? The weave of stories lock you into a trajectory, and unless you understand this you will not be able to start shaping your own story.
The first step, then is to lay out the story – coldly, analytically and as robustly as you can.
Once you have done this, you can get a sense of how you can move. Corporate rhetoric is far from magic. It cannot lift you out of a set of stories, but it can shape those stories in different ways by helping you tell a story that is credible in context. This credibility in context is key – and sometimes you will encounter a rare opportunity to create a proper plot twist and turn everything around, but usually you will have to maneuver within the space the story gives you.
This is not well-understood by all other professions. Sometimes executives will ask for a completely different story, often inspired by their own understanding of all the good the company is doing. This narrative dissonance is a real threat against getting anything done at all in government affairs. If your company’s leadership insists that it should be viewed as a great benefactor to the people, when the story is one about a stranger coming to town, well, the narrative dissonance is going to make it almost impossible for you to get anything done.
This brings us to a key point that we will come back to again, and again: your role in government affairs or corporate rhetoric faces both inward and outward. You have to translate between two different worlds, and craft the story at the nexus of the internal and external. If your internal stakeholders are stuck in one narrative and the external stakeholders stuck in another, you are in for a long slog in which the external story almost always wins – and without you having any ability to influence the outcome.
Government affairs is a negotiation of a company’s internal stories with the external stories about it.
The mechanics of storytelling
So how do you do this? First, you have to assume that you will be colored by the internal story, so the first thing you have to do is to reset your expectations – and this is hard. You need to seek out trusted critics. These are actors that sympathize at heart with what the company is setting out to do, but finds fault with the ways in which it goes about its tasks. They are willing to talk to you because they believe that if you just get it right, you will really make a difference.
These trusted critics exist in the most varied of places – academia and trade associations, but you will also find them with customers and competitors. It is important to ensure that you and your team have access to a trust critics board that can help you get a sense of the external story.
Here are the frustrations this will give you.
First, you will feel that they get all the facts wrong. They don’t represent what the company does accurately and seem to just lazily adopt the criticism they have heard elsewhere – why are they not making their own minds up?
The answer to this is quite simple: this is how minds are made up – lazily and with the help of others. A big part of your task in advocacy is to identify the few people who do indeed make up their own minds, and they are key points of influence in any story, but don’t expect them in large numbers. And they are not facts if you have not made them into facts, shared them, hammered them in and made them the basis of a discussion. When did you last google all the facts about a company before you criticized them?
Second, you will be defensive. Why don’t they like you? Are they not a little bit excessive in their criticism? And hey, what about the tobacco companies – they surely have to be worse, right? (Not a great sign if you end up at this point, frankly).
This is natural, but you have to combat it to the greatest extent possible. If you can receive criticism like a gift (a cliche, for sure, but a useful one), you will learn faster – and in this game, as in many, many others, the ones that learn fastest are the ones that last.
Third, you may start believing them, and what if you could be a force for good and reform the company from the inside? Faced with the criticism, you explain that you have joined because you agree, and that you will try your best to fix this from the inside…giving yourself a little story in which you can quit if you start agreeing too much and simply say that ”you tried”.
This is unprofessional. Government affairs certainly should inform leadership and strategy and if we can identify problems that should be solved we should point them out. But the job is to figure out the truth between the external and internal. This kind of behavior is often hailed as courageous, but really is nothing more than an example of reverse drinking of the kool aid. Instead of believing the company’s story – you start believing the external story. That is not the job. (What about whistleblowers? That is different. If you believe your company is doing something illegal or immoral you should take whatever measures you can to stop it – of course.).
Fourth, you may be tempted to devalue and dismiss. This intellectual move, described by economist Tyler Cowen as a key intellectual flaw, is a move that simply takes new information and when it contradicts what you want to believe you devalue the person who brought it and dismiss them.
This sometimes happens in policy teams, as they rally around the flag and want to dismiss their external critics, and we have certainly also been guilty of calling so-and-so a hack, but it is ultimately not helpful. The problem is that devaluing and dismissing people feels good for you, but does nothing to diminish their influence over your story – so suddenly you end up ignoring what could be a very real threat.
Your trusted critics will make you react in all of these ways. Put it aside. Write down the story that they are telling you and try to understand how it conflicts with the one you are told internally – and what you believe. Where are the negotiation points? What ways forward can you find here?
Advocacy is a negotiation, and the first step in a negotiation – as Daniel Kahneman points out – is to understand where the other side can move. What views can they hold, given their story? How can they change their story? What is a credible way for the story to unfold in the best possible way for you?
And who is telling the story?
The storytellers are everywhere. Your competitors, of course, will be telling a story about you. And your employees. Increasingly, employee advocacy has turned negative and it becomes enormously powerful as it feeds external stories – here the internal is telling the external it is right! This is also the case with those who have left and choose to reinforce the external story about your company (again, whistleblowing is a virtue – don’t get us wrong).
Politicians tell stories too — and they need conflict. Any real story contains conflict – and this is something most skilled politicians get instinctively. And a conflict always reflects well on the person taking on the biggest monster – so not only is a big company an attractive target, it also has to be made into a monster so that slaying it will be all the more of a brave deed.
This dynamic represents another pattern – conflict – that is key to understand. We will return to this later in this chapter.
Who tells your story? Well, you of course – and your team. But this is not enough. Remember that we are all caught in our stories – and a government affairs professional is as caught up in a story as anyone else. The story about government affairs and corporate rhetoric is the lobbyist story. Politicians will view most people engaged in our craft as advocates rather than executives. A few companies have succeeded in building a role that mixes the executive decision making with advocacy, but that is rare. This means that part of the story telling is building a portfolio of voices.
Now, this does not mean that you and the team do not tell the story, of course. Just that you need other story tellers too. They come in a couple of different categories.
At a technology company, the engineer is king. Bringing an engineer to a political debate may seem a bit like brining a fish to a nuclear war, but nothing could be further from the truth. Engineers are experts at what they do, and so in any exchange with them, the politicians feel that they are getting the best possible exchange rate for the influence that they are willing to grant. Remember the basic equation of corporate rhetoric: influence for knowledge, and the deeper the knowledge, the better the exchange rate.
Your work here is to prepare the engineer – we will speak about engineers, but this holds for all experts – by explaining a few basic facts and tactics.
First, this is an educational setting. The expert is teaching, and there is no such thing as a stupid question. Everyone needs to be treated as a promising student, interested in learning more. The more aggressive the questioning is, the more this is true. An expert that starts to shame the listeners or sigh or roll their eyes is a disaster in any political setting. Avoid phrases like ”Obviously not…”, ”Naturally…” and other phrases that will make people feel as if they have lost face.
Second, assume the audience knows as much about the issue as an elderly grandparent. No acronyms, no techie lingo, no inside jokes about HTML. They want to know, but you need to find common language. If that means you have to explain with images or analogies that are less than exact – so much the better! No points for exactness if you don’t get the audience to understand what you are saying.
Third, lean into not being a political professional. This is an extra value. If you have never been at a hearing, or if you are unsure – show it. It helps establish sympathy as well as honesty. Don’t try to play politics or make political references to seem savvy.
Fourth, if under questioning – answer briefly.
The second kind of internal voice that is helpful is that of the senior executive. Politicians aim for level – equating it with the seriousness with which a company takes an issue. They will often, routinely, invite the CEO or president of a company, and rarely get them. They can get other senior executives, though, and here you will need to work with colleagues in communications to build up as many senior executive voices as possible.
Having a stable of 4-8 senior executives that can help tell the story at events, in meetings, in articles is essential. They can come from all parts of the company, but all need their own story. It is far easier to get a meeting for a senior executive if they have been elected manager of the year, or if they were on the cover of a trade magazine. Now, this is actually important for really big companies too – since most companies are reduced to stories about their founders or their CEO. Test yourself: how many people on Jeff Bezos leadership team can you mention?
The more people you can rely on to tell the story the better, and senior executives built out to voices for the company are your best first line of defense.
External experts and customers
Other important storytellers include external experts like academics or think tankers. We will speak more about them when we talk about allies and third parties – but for now let’s focus on them as story tellers.
External experts do not need to tell your story. They need to tell a story that resonates with your story. A story that makes your story more credible and supports it. If they start telling your story the audience will quite rightly be suspicious and suggest that you are just employing shills. That harms your story rather than helping it.
An example would be an economist speaking about the way your industry is essential to a future need or core objective of the audience. In tech, economists arguing that technology companies, as platforms, underpin economic growth and innovation, help your story about your company as succeeding only if others succeed. And there is nothing weird going on here, either: you are just aligning the stories that agree with yours – and if you don’t, well no-one else will either.
Lastly, your customers telling your story from their perspective is perhaps the most important storytelling of all. This is hard, since many customers have a commercial relationship with you as well, and will want something in exchange — and what you want is simple testimony. The best thing you can do is to regularly poll and survey your customers, interview them and find out what they think. From that you may be able to construct a portfolio of champions that can help explain your story from their own perspective.
And don’t try to make it perfect. They should tell the story as it is, and if you are really delivering a net benefit to them, their story will help yours – even if they complain about something. Or especially if they complain about something too.
Customer testimony can turn a corporate narrative into a real, live and vivid set of stories. When we speak about third parties we will speak about organizing customers and what that means – but for now just remember that they are key to storytelling.
Aristotle reminds us in the rhetoric that the first rule of rhetoric – and indeed the first rule of storytelling – is character. Your arguments will matter little unless you can speak from a position of character strength.
Credibility and surprise
As a lobbyist you need to be obsessed with the question of what will change someone’s mind. How does this happen? There is no single answer to that question, but there are a few things that we need to keep in mind. Let’s look at a toy model of how people change their minds.
Let’s say that you believe that the moon is made of cheese. This is not as bad an example as it may seem. If you believe the moon is made of cheese, your belief is most likely not based on personal experience – you are not an astronaut – but it is a belief that you have come to based on what others have told you, what you have read and what you believe in general.
This last piece is important. We tend to believe things in a roughly consistent way – not that we are completely rational, but few people would believe that the moon is made of cheese and that it is a large rock of ice at the same time. We believe things that are roughly consistent – and this means that when you try to change someone’s mind you are not just up against a single opinion, but a web of beliefs.
We don’t believe single propositions. The object of belief is a web of opinions that serve several different purposes.
Our web of opinions expresses identity, and shows the world who we are. Some views are more like your choice of personal clothing style, and so very hard to change. Imagine convincing your conservative bow-tie wearing uncle to start wearing jeans – that is the kind of challenge that you will be facing in a lot of the cases you work on. Opinions signal our sense of self-worth – which is why the question ”do you care about privacy?” is so incredibly self-defeating – who would you be if you answered that question with no? Unless you are doing so to shock?
Our web of opinion also delineate out-groups and in-groups. We signal belonging with our views. When you change your views you risk losing friends or at least shift in their esteem. This tells something else that is important – views are held by groups, rather than by individuals. In the classic model of the Key Opinion Former – the dreaded KOF – we assume that the individual has views of their own that then also shape the views of others – the reality is that opinions more resemble emergent phenomena where a lot of people shift their views at the same time. There are no ”keys” to public opinion – you need to shift enough views at the same time to create a phase shift in the public sphere.
Our web of opinions has a very strong immune system, and when someone tries to change our views we will react badly. There are several studies that show clearly that if you bring evidence and facts and numbers, the target’s belief immune system reacts violently and brands you as annoying, and possibly even morally reprehensible. The rational model where we hear arguments, look at data and then make up our minds is deeply flawed. Our minds are made up, and anyone trying to mess with them will be viewed as a threat. What we need to remember is that when you change your mind it is a small rebuke of your earlier self, you harm your ego.
What this means is that opinions are much more stable than we usually recognize, and influence work is really, really hard.
What strategies do we have at our disposal then? What stories work?
Let’s start by recognizing that there is an easier case, and that is where I am telling you a story that aligns with what you already believe – but informs you in an area you had not previously thought about. This is usually a very effective way of building stronger allies. We spend a lot of time convincing critics and detractors – but it is worth considering if we should not look a little more closely at the positive-to-neutral stakeholders.
This serves two purposes. The first is that it makes it clearer to your allies why they are your allies – you help them see the rough consistency with their own views, and how this fits in with their group, identity and overall web of beliefs. The immune system is not triggered, so it also takes less of an effort. The other purpose is even more important: it arms your allies when they are attacked by your critics – if they then have the story right, they can rebut attempts to change their mind. Your story is – if we continue the immune system analogy – a kind of vaccine against the opposing opinions.
But this is the easy case. How do we even start to make progress on our critics? If the way they perceive evidence is simply as an attack on their egos?
The answer is deceptively simple – you need to surprise them.
Surprise seems so incredibly simplistic that we hesitate using that word, but it is an accurate description of what you want to do here – and here is why: when someone is surprised, they are experience a cognitive dissonance between the information they are given and the views that they hold to be true – but without the negative reaction. They are not attacked, they have discovered – hopefully by themselves – that the new information they are hearing is not even roughly consistent with what they already know. This, in turn, leads to a situation where they need to re-adjust their web of beliefs, and this is where that new information may actually change someone’s mind.
Let’s look at an interesting example.
In 2015, after two muslims had been arrested for terrorist shootings in the little town of San Bernardino, then-president Barack Obama wanted to address rising hate speech against muslims – worried that the attack would ignite hate crimes against muslims across the country. Evan Soltas and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz noted, in an oped in The New York Times, that his first attempt to do so fell flat. The way they measured this was by looking at searches in Google, monitoring how ”searches” like ’I hate muslims’ and ’are all muslims terrorists’ grew after the speech where Obama asked for tolerance and respect for different religions. The appeal to reason, the facts in the case, met with the belief immune system and hardened the views of those who thought all muslims were would-be terrorist.
Obama then changed tack. Instead of giving facts about Islam as a religion, and point to its peaceful doctrine and majority of non-violent believers, he instead said the following: ”Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.”. Legendary athlete Shaquille O’Neal was one of the people identified as a muslim, and now the searches changed from hate to curiosity.
Obama had surprised, rather than lectured, the audience – and now they needed to understand better who these soldiers and athletes were.
The simplified model where surprise leads to us updating our beliefs is far from perfect, but it is a starting point for thinking differently about what stories we choose and how we tell them. It also helps us check our messaging – with a simple question: is there anything surprising about what we say here?
Surprise is underestimated as a key element in our craft.
Grand narrative and small stories
As a storyteller your character is what makes people listen in the first place, and perhaps suspend, for a moment, their prejudice and preconceived notions about who you are. It may seem old-fashioned to speak of character in storytelling, but it is a key factor – and you ignore it at your peril.
Character is not a given, but needs to be shared and told as a story too. The human interest stories about executives are crucially important in this regard, they create a character that you can build on. And when the character’s personal story resonates with the corporate story, you can get amazing results.
The most well-known example of this, again, is Apple. Steve Jobs’ story and character enabled him to do and get away with things that other companies would have struggled to portray in a good light. Verticalizing hardware, software and services in a single silo and cutting others out would have been seen as a nascent competition problem if a weaker character had engaged in the practice, but Jobs’ character, relentless focus on innovation and customer benefit made it possible for him to launch models like that.
Jeff Bezos enjoys a similar standing, and it was interesting to see how regulatory problems started piling up during his divorce. This is speculation – but a messy divorce may well tarnish a character built around simple beginnings (”rags to riches”) and hard work. Jeff Bezos the playboy has a different character to stand on than Jeff Bezos the relentless entrepreneur.
The seven basic plots
Let’s look at a few classical narratives that underpin the stories we tell each-other. Journalist Christoper Booker suggested in his 2004 book The Seven Basic Plots that there are really just seven basic plots – we would call them narratives – in most stories. The seven all have an impact on corporate rhetoric.
The first is ”Overcoming the Monster” – and this is the classical story of a hero vanquishing a monster of some kind. Many large companies find themselves in this narrative, as the monster, and get stuck in it – trying to show that they are really just misunderstood and actually quite nice. If you are painted as the Monster that is not going to work and you have to find other ways to break free.
The second is ”Rags to Riches” – this is a story that people love telling about companies – about how someone rose from simple circumstances into great wealth. The story of the start up is really nothing else than this narrative. It works, until you grow too big and end up becoming – a Monster!
The third is ”The Quest” – a story in which you seek out to accomplish a mission. This is a powerful narrative rarely used by corporations. The closest we come to it is Elon Musk’s different corporate narratives. His quest for space, for renewable energy – both lend themselves to great story telling. A quest inoculates you against some public criticism, since the question has undertones of altruism.
The fourth is ”Voyage and Return” – and here we have companies that enter new markets, new innovations and more. The story about the voyage is usually underplayed – if corporations spent a little bit more time talking about the ”business of business” they would be better off. Usually all the conversation is about the ”return” in financial terms.
The fifth is ”Comedy” – and it may seem inapplicable in our context – but it isn’t. The thing is that most companies want to see themselves as happy stories, as comedies. The fun and play in the tech industry is about a company that sees itself as a comedy. A certain confusion is a part of this, and laughing about your own company – well, feels good.
The sixth is ”Tragedy” and this is the story about the corporate failure. Enron, Theranos — the tragedy narrative is about how a fatal flaw proves the undoing of a character – or corporation – and this narrative can easily and logically follow from the ”Rags to Riches”-narrative.
The seventh, and last, is ”Rebirth” – here again we have an interesting and little used story that we sometimes see in connection with very large companies. IBM had a re-birth narrative going for a while, and in the current market Microsoft is in the midst of a Rebirth narrative about how it is reshaping itself under the leadership of Satya Nadella.
Here is an exercise: which narrative would be most interesting for your company to explore?
The need for conflict
Now let’s talk about what narrative and storytelling is not. Since the idea of storytelling has become very popular, it is easy to find any number of books or workshops that will purport to be about storytelling, but omit important elements of what makes a good story.
First, and perhaps most challenging, a good story needs a conflict – and thus an antagonist of some kind. That means that it can never be storytelling to just speak about yourself and your values and why you are great. That is corporate narcissism – but unfortunately also quite common. In a story you have dynamics – tension – and if you are only talking about yourself, you get none of that.
The conflict can be with other companies. You can have set out to reform or revolutionize a sclerotic industry or change a corrupt system. That conflict is powerful but also quite dangerous. You will have to assume that the companies you attack will fight back.
Still, it can work really well. Remember Apple’s advertisements in which they compared a Mac to a PC. The cool young guy against the office slave who did everything in a horribly complex and unnecessarily clunky way?
These were attack ads in a way, and they set up a conflict that people loved – not between Microsoft and Apple, but between their two products – the Mac and PC. Microsoft never did find a good way to respond to that advertising and flailed in their own storytelling here. A large part of the reason was that Apple did not attack them openly, but attacked a generic product associated with them – because what PC did not run Windows?
Apple also provides another really interesting example in their 1984-ad about Big Brother and the related ”think different”-campaign. In this case the conflict is between the grey conformity of the old and the youthful rebellion. Again, by crafting an effective proxy-conflict, Apple managed to create conflict without creating any openings for counterattack. Because who wants to fight on the side of Big Brother?
Conflict with companies, products, values — all of these work. What does not work is a set of value statements about your company. Imagine Star Wars without the dark side – that is what you get when you remove all conflict from your messaging.
Now, conflict is risky – you will risk being called out and end up on the losing side in a conflict, but we would argue that it is even riskier not to have any conflict at all, because then you will find yourself the antagonist in somebody else’s story.
Storytelling comes with limits – you have to move within the narrative and respect its boundaries. If you are caught in a story about a successful company that became almost too big, telling the story about how you are really just a small startup barely out of the garage will not fly. The dissonance will make it impossible to shift the narrative you are stuck in. But if you start out by accepting the skeleton structure of the narrative, recognize your size but also emphasize that you are dealing with it and that it actually makes it possible for you to deal with the challenges ahead even better – you are “big enough to make a difference” as McDonalds put it – you may build on the story instead of creating massive dissonances.
This is especially important in a crisis. When you are under scrutiny or managing a crisis, your story needs to build from the story in the crisis – denying or lying or keeping quiet will not help your cause at all. The key insight often presented by experts on crisis management is to put everything on the table and not lie – but we rarely ask why that is a good plan. The reason is that it allows you to ride the narrative and get out on the other side. If you try to stop an avalanche crisis narrative, you will be buried under it.
Another limit to storytelling is that it is not hypnosis. You will not make people believe what they do not want to believe or are not a little bit susceptible to believing. Cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier has, in his book Not born yesterday, shown how advertising, propaganda and naturally storytelling requires a predisposition to believe and that without that you will rarely make any progress whatsoever.
As you think about what your story is, the point to begin at is not the story you want to tell, but the story your audience wants to hear.
Conclusion
Now, let’s back up. As we said in the beginning this is just one mental model that we can use when we talk about government affairs, corporate rhetoric or lobbying. It is not the only way and should not be the only tool in your toolbox. But if you learn to see, tell and understand stories you will have developed a powerful way to understand the challenges and opportunities in our craft.
The Craft Book 