It’s Time to Call B.S. on Storytelling
Once upon a time, people worked in a wide variety of noble occupations. Recently, however, lots of folks across all different sorts of professions have come to insist their work as fiduciaries, architects, roller coaster designers, contractors, doctors and marketers can be subsumed under a single meta-description: “storyteller.”
Under this banner, architects are storytellers who simply use bricks instead of words to “make a space into a place.” When it comes to neurosurgeons or invasive cardiologists, think storyteller first, physician second: “The storytelling is really where the medicine is.” Need to entrust your life savings to a financial advisor? You need a storyteller not a stockbroker (and hopefully one who is not too effective at spinning a Bernie Madoff-style fairy tale). Bakers tell stories through sweets. Not only are bankruptcy lawyers storytellers, there are specific books to advise them on how to become even better storytellers.
No profession has embraced the storytelling conceit as wholeheartedly as marketing. It is actually somewhat of a shock to find someone who works in marketing who does not reference storytelling when describing her or his craft. A colleague who recently attended a global marketing conference in Bangkok relayed that every single presentation at least touched on storytelling. There’s data storytelling (“turning numbers into narratives”!). There’s a sold out “ Brand Storytelling Content Expedition.” There’s an “invitation only” conference on the Future of Storytelling. And so on. One self-proclaimed storyteller has gone so far as to assert that “ storytelling is the source code of our humanity.” If so, perhaps it is time for the robots to take over.
Source code of humanity or not, of course we all do tell stories. But not all stories are of equal merit or interest. Virtually everyone has the experience of being on the receiving end of repeated renditions of the same (bad, boring, offensive, apocryphal, etc.) story being told by a family member or coworker. In these cases, the sobriquet “storyteller” is more of an insult than an accolade.
At the same time other professions self-identity as storytellers, we have literal storytellers, that is, writers of fiction, crafting stories in which characters describe themselves as storytellers. In “ The Naturals,” novelist and short story master Sam Lipsyte creates a real estate developer who asserts, “The main thing is we’re trying to tell a story here. A lakefront narrative.” He then adds a professional wrestler who notes, “You don’t get it at all, buddy. It’s not about wrestling. It’s about stories. We’re storytellers.” The proliferation of ersatz storytellers also has the perverse effect of making storytelling much harder. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides laments in a review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiography that writing “‘something exceptional’ . . . is hard to do right now because the world is awash in stories.”
As life imitates art, CEOs are now retaining fiction writers to craft Potemkin corporate and personal hagiographies. The celebrated creative consultancy Wolff Olins has gone so far as to hire Mohsin Hamid, one of the world’s most gifted living novelists as its “Chief Storytelling Officer”! And he’s not alone. LinkedIn lists scores of corporate scops who claim the title.
Acclaimed Austrian graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister has a hilarious (albeit NSFW) harangue about the recent storytelling groundswell that he attributes to “all the people who are not storytellers who kind of, for strange reasons because it is in the air, suddenly want to be storytellers.” And who can blame them? There are national storytelling festivals put on by the International Storytelling Center. With storytelling taking grip of the zeitgeist, there are even 100+ TED Talks (that’s big TED, not TEDx) on storytelling.
Is the storytelling bandwagon simply silly as Sagmeister decries or is something more insidious going on? Admittedly, “storyteller” is a much cooler title than “salesperson” or “shopkeeper.” But storied storyteller George Orwell cautioned the over use of storytelling, as opposed to straight talk, is problematic. In his polemic against the political storytelling of his day, Politics and the English Language, Orwell rails against what he sees as vague and meaningless language designed to obscure the truth. Orwell declares, “ The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” In other words, say it, don’t cliché it.
Hamid acknowledges that in his work with CEOs, the stories may start by being grounded in reality, but come to incorporate a mix of fact and fiction. Instead of eschewing the made up parts, Hamid argues to embrace fiction as a tool for change: “ If you find that the story that you want to tell isn’t true right now, well, that gives you a strategy. You have to do what it takes to make that come true so that you can tell that story in the future, because that’s a future story of your company.” Telling people where you want to go is one thing. Telling them you are already there is entirely different. Some may call it storytelling, but there is another, more accurate word for it: lying.
The blending of fact and fiction, to call on another great story, embraces the sophistry of Cyrano de Bergerac: “ Call it a sort of lie, / If you like. but a lie is sort of a myth, / And a myth is sort of a truth.” Another practitioner of this sleight of hand is none other than Donald Trump: “ I play to people’s fantasies … I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.” But this dynamic can prove dangerous to the storyteller. Just ask Brian Williams. The misuse of storytelling also makes obvious points sound profound, mediocre products seem exceptional and terrible services appear wonderful. Talking up a product, service, executive or company is always going to be a part of branding, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of telling the public what a product, service or company actually is or does.
Fighting the storytelling juggernaut right now will likely prove as rewarding as spitting in the wind. But amid the corporate fables and fantasies, consider an alternative. In 1912, the H.K. McCann Company trademarked the world’s first agency tag line: “ Truth Well Told.” A century later, it’s still a powerful approach for building brands without concocting yet another corporate yarn.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
