The Alchemy of Storytelling: Crafting Narratives for a Changing World

In 1944, two psychologists, Fritz Hailer and Marianne Simmel conducted a fascinating experiment. They showed a short animated film to students and asked them to describe what they saw.

Let’s repeat it now: watch the video and think about how you would describe it.

Only three of the 114 people who watched the video reported seeing geometrical shapes moving around a screen. The rest of the group, 111 people, described a soap opera. They talked about good versus evil, doors slamming, love, courtship and foiling a predator.

In other words: two-dimensional, lifeless shapes were turned into a story.

My son saw an ambulance parked in our street yesterday. During the cycle ride to school, he told me someone had fallen downstairs, broken their leg, and fainted.

He made up a story to explain what was happening.

Stories are how we make sense of the world. They are the signposts that create order in a chaotic world. When the early man saw the sunrise and fall in the sky - he made up a story of a god called Helios who rode his chariot across the sky. When Dutch cartographers didn’t know what lay beyond the horizon, they made up a story of monsters. If we feel a lump under our skin, we make up a story to explain it.

We are a storytelling animal, a claim no other species can make.

Which begs the question, why? To understand that is to unleash the real magic of stories. We are familiar with their power to entertain, educate, and inform. But let me give you two more aspects to storytelling.

Firstly, we have already touched on this: they create structure.

In 1843, Karl Marx, in an introduction to his book ‘Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right’, said that “Religion was the opiate of the people.” He argued that people constructed religion to calm uncertainty over their role in the universe and society. Marx called it religion, a meta-narrative that holds together stories that try to make sense of the world. You could replace the word religion with the word story. Stories are how we create structure and calmness in our lives. At some point, Magellan decided to sail beyond the horizon and discovered no monsters. In the past twenty years, we've seen how the meta-narratives that held the world narratives together have been undermined by people daring to ask questions. People who dared to sail beyond the horizon. Empire, organised religion, white dominance, dictatorships, them and us. These stories have crumbled. Most recently, we see the story of an oppressive Islamic regime being physically challenged in Iran. Not Islam, but the people who twist it to their own means and use it to oppress women. Who can forget the image of the girl in Kabul who stood outside the university with a sign that said ‘Read,’ the first word revealed to Muhammad?

As these global stories collapse, they create space for more personal stories to grow and evolve. Like the old trees in the forest that fall, they make space for new trees to grow in their place. This is the reason we’ve seen a resurgence in storytelling. We’re returning to our roots, creating new narratives that make sense of a new world. Stories about me, what I want and the difference I want to make. Stories that put my family and me at the centre, not religion or my employer.

Secondly, stories are how we create (dare we say manifest?) a new reality for our species.

A lot is written in corporate communications about whether stories should be true or need to be true. Personally, I’m not sure it matters. What is clear is that fiction has a far more significant impact on our brains than fact. Look no further than religion verse climate change if you want further proof.

I recently spoke at a conference and asked the audience why Gorillas, our closest living relative, had not invented the iPhone. Someone quickly shouted the answer: because their thumbs were too big. I had security remove him, of course.

One can’t disagree with the logic. However, I would suggest another reason. Gorillas do not believe in fiction. To a gorilla, a banana is a banana. To my son, a banana is frequently a gun he can run around the house with. Human Beings love make-believe. We have written nearly 130 million books. Fiction is our superpower. When Steve Jobs had the idea of combining an iPod, a diary, the internet, and a telephone, it was pure fiction. But because people believed, it became a reality. When JFK told congress in 1961 that we would put a man on the moon, it was pure fiction, but people believed. When Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park,

it was fiction. We are now on the verge of returning the thylacine from the dead.

Because of our childlike belief in make-believe, in monsters, in fiction, we have become far and beyond the most advanced species on our planet. Stories are not a bedtime nice to have; they are a daytime superpower for rewriting the future of our organisations, our species and our planet. The only question is, what story are you going to write?

The world is in flux: people are scared, unsure, and, perhaps for the first time in a century, face an uncertain future. Climate change, the role of the West on the geopolitical stage, the role China will play as a global superpower, the future of the Euro as a valid currency, and the future of Europe as a valid bureaucracy. We’ve been here before, and we will be here again. But how we survive and thrive in the coming ten years will be down to those now fictitious stories we create about a new future.

It’s a blank page; what would you like to write?