‘Complaining that people are succeeding at telling misleading stories is like quibbling about the rules to a referee that doesn’t exist.’
This is one of those insights that made my heart sink – because yes, I know I do this all the time.
Many thanks to James Ball, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, for this moment of recognition; and also to John Yorke and Rob Broomby for a brilliant discussion at BRIGHTHINK last night.
It may be hard to defeat appealing fictions, when we’ve got powerful, important, true things to say.
But that means have to devote ourselves to the art of making the truth, rather than looking down on storytelling as artifice.
If we’ve got complex, difficult journeys to take people on, we instinctively don’t want to remove the nuance. But we have to be dedicated to creating simple narrative structures which motivate people to get there.
Like it or not, we live in an era where storytelling is disproportionately powerful.
The slippage between how we think story works, or how we wish it worked, and how it actually works, is glaring.
There are people who are better adapted to instinctively thrive in this moment, because they think more simply, more flexibly, and more emotionally.
And if you’ve got an important, complicated, difficult story to tell, you don’t have to become the same as your opponents.
But you do need to understand that the narrative struggle is real, and no-one is coming to save us.
We need to take hard truths and wrap them in simple, emotive, stories that bring people along for the ride.
Because as John Yorke described: a story is a unit of knowledge that is weaponised for maximum impact. And without that impact, knowledge remains unknown.
Links to James and John's books in the comments...
