What if there’s too much story in the world?

Because it was a bank holiday, and I had time on my hands…

Everybody’s a fucking anthropologist. Stories about stories. Stories about storytellers telling stories. Why are they always about storytellers sitting around a cozy campfire?? Why is nobody sitting around the campfire simply because it’s cold? Or because it’s mealtime and they’re cooking something they just killed? Did stories only every get told when it wasn’t raining? And there was plentiful firewood? Why are they never stories about people trying to share something incomprehensibly terrible that they saw? Why are they never about people trying to make sense of something utterly awful that just happened? Where’s the dread and terrified and uncomprehending awe and the scrabbling to just stay (or just be) alive? Why do stories about storytellers telling stories always give the impression that we’re witnessing an episode of Jackanory? Why do stories about storytellers telling stories always imply the stories are safe and comforting? Or useful? Why do stories about storytellers telling stories never wonder if they’re just making shit up to keep folk entertained? Why do stories about storytellers telling stories always present these storytellers as benign and wise people?? Not grifters, bullshit artists, con-folk, fraudsters, or PTSD-survivors trying to shore up the crumbling structures of own their grip on reality?

Everybody’s a fucking storyteller. Success stories told by successful people about how they became so successful. Success stories told by people desperate to be successful or appear successful about how successful people became so successful. Successful people telling stories about how telling stories is the key to becoming successful. Oh wait, look! Here’s another story about Steve Fucking Jobs. Success stories told by successful people about we too can became as successful as they are if we just follow the same template. Or tell ourselves the right, motivating, self-actualizing story. Stories about how success stories aren’t success stories at all and what that story teaches us about success. And about stories. Look! Here’s that diagram again of the WW2 plane with red dots for where all the bullet damage was.

Look, don’t @me. The personal and social utility of stories is well, if not exhaustingly, documented. Yes of course stories are powerful things. Yes of course we are pattern-seeking, meaning-making creatures. Yes of course stories are the means by which we impose meaning and causality on events and experiences. Yes of course stories are brilliant at compressing and simplifying otherwise complicated information. Yes of course stories are potent vehicles for explaining, rationalizing or packaging up the otherwise seemingly the inexplicable. Yes of course stories by their nature of being memorable and distilled are efficient vehicles for the passing on of information. Yes of course stories are unparalleled for their ability to render things both memorable and persuasive. See Unleash the Power of Storytelling: Win Hearts, Change Minds, Get Results and The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better and Pixar Storytelling: Rules for Effective Storytelling Based on Pixar's Greatest Films and Design is Storytelling and The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human and The Art of Storytelling: Mastering the art of captivating storytelling and Storytelling for Leadership: Creating Authentic Connections and The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories and The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling and Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences… and, and, and…

No really, don’t @me. I’ve long been of the belief that story is the strategist’s tool because strategy is story. Strategy explains the world, projecting forwards and imagining an interconnected sequence of events. It imagines a world in which there is agency, causality, and consequence. And in doing so strategy imagines a different future. And I love crafting strategic stories. Particularly stories that help organizations see themselves more clearly. Understand themselves more clearly. That give them a shared language. A sense of shared identity. That work to clarify or elevate their place and value in the world. That give voice to their mission. That galvanize their people and work to gather up all their disparate parts and activities and resources and point in them in one direction. That open up new futures and possibilities for them.

Looking outside the world of business, marketing, and brands, the personal power of story is indisputable. And in as much as the stories we tell ourselves and each other are our reality, sometimes we’re trapped by those self same stories. Stories that don’t serve us. That hold us back. Or even destroy us. Recognizing the malleability of the stories we tell ourselves about where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through, who we were then and who were are now is for many an extraordinarily powerful means of liberating themselves. The psychotherapist Esther Perel has spoken about how her goal at the end of her 1st therapy session with people is that they "leave with at least pieces of a new story and a new story that also breeds hope. You come in with one script and you leave with another or at least the possibility of another. The goal is to transform from being stuck to movement. From repetition to possibility. From feeling defeated to openness”. We don’t have to be defined and constrained by the stories handed to us by society, our upbringing, our personal history, or our culture. We all have the freedom to author our own stories, and in doing so have the opportunity to shape our own lives. So yes, stories are powerful, and valuable.

The imprisoning and liberating potential of story operates at a societal and cultural level too. In her book We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent, the journalist and author Nesrine Malik argues that we need new stories. Carefully and ruthlessly Malik deconstructs the myth of gender equality, the myth of a political correctness “crisis”, the myth of virtuous origin (the tendency to airbrush history to construct narratives of national pride), the myth of a free speech “crisis”; the myth of “damaging” identity politics; and the myth of the reliable narrator (voices that refuse to acknowledge their privilege). All stories that hold us back. And obscure the truth.  As Malik puts it “there is no mainstream account of a country’s history that is not a collective delusion”. 

Yes, we need new and better stories. Not just about the past, and how we got to where we are. But about what we want. How we want to live. How we could live. We need better stories about what the future could look like. We need a better story about the future beyond the current binary choice of a dystopian hellscape or fully automated luxury communism.We need a better story about the future that goes beyond it being a singular destination and being a range of probabilities and desires. We need a better story about the relationship between capitalism and the dismantling of our biosphere. We need a better story about the relationship between the demand for open-ended, infinite growth based on the extraction of the finite organic and non-organic resources available to us. We need a better story about ‘sustainability’ that doesn’t want us to believe that the economy isn’t an open subsystem of a finite and non-growing biophysical environment, that the economy doesn’t grow in a physical dimension, and that the laws of thermodynamics don’t exist. We need a better story about the virtues of living in an open society, lest we simply gawp and comment from the sidelines as more and more people lose faith in the ability of a liberal, democratic political system to serve their needs, wants, and aspirations. We need a better story about who we are. We need a better story about who are that doesn’t insist we are only ever wholly autonomous economic units competing Hunger Games style against each other for limited resources and opportunities. We need a better story about what it is to be a public, with public goods, public values and public participation. We need a better story about what it is to be human in a world ever more mediated by technology. So yes, we need stories. And we need to tell ourselves better ones. Because as a solution set, the ones we are telling ourselves today are deeply ill-suited to solve the issues that are coming at us hard and fast. So like Rob Campbell says, don’t get me wrong.

But does everything, like everything always have to be a story all of the time? Cause and effect. If-This-Then-That. The reassurance that stuff will make sense. The comfort and warmth of knowing that there’s a bulwark against meaning-void chaos. The promise that we can figure it out. The reassurance that there is a pattern, and there is a structure to all of this.  That it is graspable. The comfort that the possibility of learning and anticipation is possible. The satisfaction of joining the dots. The satisfaction of closure. The satisfaction of causality. The need for causality. The promise that we can be agents of causality.  That we can not just understand, but shape and bend the world to our will and desires. Christ, we need this stuff so fucking badly. And let’s not forget the intoxicating knowledge that everything that can be turned into a pattern (and made to look like a pattern) can be replicated, codified, merchandised marketed and (praise be!) financialised (and infantalised) as Let Me Show You How expertise and sprayed over everyone’s LinkedIn feeds.

Conspiracy theorists - the Olympic athletes of storytelling -  iron out coincidence, happenstance, and accident, and excising unsatisfactory or inconvenient accounts weave ruthlessly elegant sense, causality, and intent from events. Chemtrails are evidence that the government is running a Secret Large-scale Atmospheric Programme and spraying us all with mind-controlling substances.  Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was hacked and remotely hijacked. Deepwater Horizon was sabotaged by environmentalists. George Soros secretly runs the world. The Twin Towers were destroyed by controlled detonations. Night-dwelling, multi-screened, Pop-Tart munching, basement-living weirdos, we scoff. Laugh at them, go ahead. Fact is that we’re all tin-foil hat-wearing narrative peddlers and theorists. Simplifying, selecting, editing, overlooking, denying, deleting, reordering, playing up, splicing, weaving, playing down, exaggerating, minimizing, we steamroller the unmanageable wildness and chaos of life, insisting that it submit to closure and surrender to our empires of order. We’re at it all the time.  Conjuring up in our skulls a model of “the world out there”. A simulation of reality for us to inhabit, magicking it into a cause-and-effect story, filled to the brim with actors and plots and heroes with challenges and journeys and goals and narrative arcs. Here’s a story about the world out there. Here’s a story about what happened to me the other day. Here’s a story about how I got to where I am today. Here’s a story about how I am the way I am. Here’s a story about what I’ve been through. Here’s a story about what I’m going through. Here’s a story about what’s going to happen next. Here’s a story about why the world is the way it is.

We are literally making this shit up inside our skulls as we go along, telling ourselves its real, terrified of what the author M. John Harrison calls “epistemological failure”, slaves to the conviction that there are answers. That there are always answers if we know where to look. That there are, that there must be rules, and patterns, and laws, and explanations. That there are answers to even to the stuff that defies an explanation and refuses to give up its answers. Even that which does not seek to be a story and delights in its absence is made to be a story. In a delightfully vicious review of a Brooklyn Museum show on Picasso’s legacy the New York Times art critic Jason Farago commented on the reduction of art that quite deliberately does not offer the “reassurance of closure or comfort” to a story.  We’re inhabitants it seems, of a culture held captive by the propaganda that life is some kind of mathematical problem to be solved, uncomfortable with contingency, ambiguity, wonder, mystery, the absence of hard and fast boundary conditions, and anything that has even the remotest whiff of the ineffable.

Story is not and does not have to be the only way we can experience life. Indeed there is a case to be made that subjecting everything  to the dominion of story commits us to a thinning out of that very experience. Annie Ernaux the French Nobel laureate and author of amongst others A Girl’s Story, Happening A Woman’s Story, and I Remain in Darkness has dedicated almost her entire writing life to resisting the colonising, subjugating forces of narrative. “I am not trying to remember,” she writes. “I am trying to be inside. . . . To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after.” She reminds us that there really is nothing like telling ourselves a story to take us outside. To ensure we are not there. 

Suspecting that I have lost the plot, I run this ramble past Rob Campbell. “I don’t think it’s career limiting” he messages back “but I do think it’s shouting at stuff rather than championing the other stuff. It’s a lot of what not to do but not a lot of what others are doing.” Unable to argue with him (damn him) I sit there glumly contemplating what suddenly feels like a 2,097-word stream of deeply unhelpful brain vomit. 

What is there to champion then? I admit to myself that the stuff that resists being easily packaged up as a story, or the stuff that we choose not to tidy up and experience a story has perhaps but marginal utility (as does this piece) in the building of strategy, brands, and new futures for client businesses. But perhaps it might have immense value in those parts of our lives which are not consumed with that endeavor. Where and what they might be is not for me to say. I already teeter dangerously I realise, on the edge of sounding like some wannabe Ram Dass or capitalist hippie. It is time to (finally) shut the hell up. My remit and dare I say it, my expertise, is strategic advice, nothing more. But like the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says in Frank Herbert’s Dune (yes, yes I know it’s a story): “The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.” 

The prospect of epistemological and explanatory collapse - if only ever occasional - is not a failure. It’s a fucking opportunity.