When Everyone Tells a Story, Does Storytelling Still Mean Anything?

Storytelling has become one of the default clichés of modern communication. Perhaps that is precisely why we need to become more careful about what we call a story.

I seem to come across the word everywhere now. There is the brand story, the founder story, the sustainability story, the customer story, the impact story and, increasingly, the story behind almost anything an organisation or individual wants us to notice. None of these descriptions is necessarily wrong. I use the word myself. I write stories, photograph them and spend a great deal of time looking for them in places, people and organisations. That is also why I have become increasingly curious about how casually we use the term.

At what point did almost everything we communicate become “a story”? And if everything is storytelling, does the word still help us understand what we are actually doing?

There are, of course, very good reasons why storytelling has become so valued. A good story takes us somewhere that information alone often struggles to reach. A fact may tell me that a wetland has disappeared. A story can introduce me to someone who remembers walking through it as a child, the muddy road that later altered the flow of water, the flocks of birds that gradually stopped arriving and the first winter when the frogs were no longer heard. The essential information may not have changed, but our relationship with it has. There is now a before and an after. Something has happened, and somebody experienced the consequence.

Researchers have spent decades trying to understand what is sometimes described as narrative transportation: the way in which we can become mentally absorbed in the world of a story, imagining events and responding to the people and circumstances within it. There is substantial evidence that narrative communication can affect people's attitudes and intentions differently from purely factual information. The point for me is not that every piece of communication should therefore become narrative. It is actually the opposite. If story has particular qualities that give it this power, then surely we should be more cautious about what we call a story in the first place.

Something has to happen

I tend to come back to a fairly simple question: did something happen?

I don't think a story needs a hero, a villain or a planned three-act structure. Life is rarely experienced in such convenient form. But there does need to be movement of some kind. Somebody makes a decision. A condition changes. Something is gained, discovered, threatened or lost. One event creates consequences that did not exist before it. Without that movement, I am not sure we have a story at all.

Take a commonly used sentence such as, “We believe travel should have a positive impact on the places people visit.” It may be an important belief, even an ethical objective, but it is not a story. “We create meaningful journeys into wild places” may be positioning. “We protect 20,000 hectares of habitat” may be a fact, and perhaps a very important one. None of these needs to be turned into something else simply to make it more valuable.

Corporate communication has long used the idea of “story” much more loosely than traditional narrative theory does, often encompassing the wider ways organisations construct meaning around their identity, values and development. That may be entirely useful in a business context, but I think we create more confusion when story becomes another word for communication itself.

A story is not simply information made more attractive. Something has to happen.

The challenge begins when organisations believe that because storytelling is powerful, they therefore need a story for everything.

Having many stories is not the same as knowing what matters

I have seen variations of this problem many times over the years, but St Helena Island remains a useful example for me.

Over time I encountered a number of tourism plans, consultants and discussions concerned with how the island should promote itself. There was no shortage of material. In fact, almost the opposite was true. St Helena carries an extraordinary density of history, community, landscape, isolation, surrounding ocean life and human experience. There were stories everywhere.

What struck me, though, was how often the same familiar ones came forward. Certain attractions, historical references and recognisable tourism images repeatedly became the shorthand through which the island was explained. They were valid stories, but they were being asked to represent something much larger and more complicated.

The problem, as I saw it, was not really a shortage of storytelling. It was deciding which narratives mattered most and how they related to one another. There was no obvious central pivot around which all these different pieces could gather without flattening the complexity of the island itself.

That experience matters because organisations often assume that when people do not understand them, they need more or better stories. Sometimes they do. At other times the problem lies much further upstream. They have not yet decided what matters most, which parts deserve emphasis or what somebody encountering them for the first time should understand before everything else.

A place or organisation may have dozens of interesting stories and still lack a clear sense of itself.

I don't think storytelling can solve decisions an organisation itself has avoided making.

Yet once we believe that a story is required, we naturally begin looking for one. A founder's complicated history becomes an origin story. Years of uncertainty begin to look strangely inevitable when viewed backwards. A customer's experience is selected because it happens to demonstrate exactly what we want others to believe. A destination becomes a collection of the characteristics that are easiest to promote. A conservation project moves from difficulty to hope in just enough steps to create a satisfying arc.

None of this automatically makes the story false. What interests me is the act taking place underneath it.

We are selecting.

What lies outside the frame

Photography makes this particularly obvious to me because I increasingly look at the whole picture rather than simply the subject within it.

The story of an animal is rarely only the animal. It is also where it stands, what surrounds it, what it is doing and where it appears to be going. If something is moving through the frame, I will often leave space in front of it rather than behind it because that space becomes part of the movement. The background, position and relationship of the subject to everything around it can tell me as much as the subject itself.

At other times I deliberately do the opposite. I move much closer and remove almost all context because one detail has become the point: an eye, the texture of skin, the curve of a nail, the folds of a trunk or some small mark of character that would disappear in the wider scene.

Both approaches involve selection.

I lift the camera and point it in one direction. Something enters the frame and something else disappears from it. I move a metre, change the lens or wait another few seconds, and the meaning of the resulting photograph can alter completely.

The photograph can still be truthful. But it is not the whole truth of everything that surrounded me at the time.

For me, storytelling works in much the same way. I choose where to begin, whose experience to follow, which detail matters and where the story should end. I decide what deserves attention and what can remain outside the frame. Without that selection there would be no story at all; there would simply be everything, and everything is very difficult to communicate.

Selection itself is therefore not the problem. The more interesting question is what our selection has done to the truth.

A place rarely has one story

The longer I spend in a place, the less comfortable I become with the idea that it possesses one simple story waiting for somebody to discover it.

A visitor may see wilderness, beauty, escape or history. Somebody living nearby may see home, employment, restriction, opportunity or ordinary daily life. A conservationist may see habitat, ecological pressure and the relationship between species. A historian may see land use, settlement, displacement, memory or conflict. A tourism business, quite reasonably, also has to understand what might make somebody want to visit.

All of these perspectives may be truthful. None of them is the place in its entirety.

This is one of the reasons I see storytelling in tourism, conservation and heritage as both a complex and necessary craft. At its best, story can deepen our understanding of a place and take us beyond its most obvious attractions. But that same power demands care. The more effectively a story shapes how a place is understood, the more conscious we need to be of what we choose to emphasise, what we leave in the background, and how confidently we allow one narrative to stand for the whole.

What worries me most about the way organisations use storytelling today is how closely the stories are often required to align with marketing objectives, brand construction and the image an organisation has already decided it wants to project.

Real stories are rarely obedient.

They emerge from activities, interactions, histories, personalities, environments and circumstances that continue moving whether our brand plans accommodate them or not. They overlap. They contradict one another. New events alter the meaning of older ones. A community changes. A landscape changes. An organisation changes.

That is why I struggle with the idea of a story as a fixed model or a single neat continuum. To me, story is more organic than that. It grows as experience grows.

A place does not finish telling its story because somebody has written the tourism strategy or agreed on the organisational vision.

Sometimes people simply need an answer

There is also another reason I have become increasingly wary of turning everything into story. Sometimes we make communication work much harder than it actually needs to.

Someone arriving on a website may simply be looking for something specific. A potential investor may be trying to work out what an organisation actually does. A donor considering a conservation programme might want evidence. A traveller may want to understand where a lodge is and what the experience will really involve.

None of these people necessarily needs to be taken on a journey.

Sometimes a fact should remain a fact, a statistic should remain a statistic and an answer should simply answer the question. I don't believe story becomes a superior form of communication merely because it can be more emotionally engaging. Clarity has its own purpose and value.

I sometimes wonder whether some of the blandness we encounter in organisational communication is caused not by too little storytelling, but by asking story to do work that should have been done earlier. Before deciding how something should be told, somebody first has to decide what actually matters.

That part is not particularly glamorous, but I suspect it is often where the real work needs to be done.

Yet there are things facts struggle to carry

For all of that, I would not want to live in a world made entirely of clear propositions and accurate information. There are things facts establish beautifully, and there are other things they struggle to communicate.

A number can tell me how many hectares burned in a fire, but it cannot tell me what the ranger saw when he drove through that landscape the following morning. A date on a wall can tell me when a building was abandoned, but it cannot tell me what leaving it meant to the last family who lived there. A species count can record a decline, but it cannot recreate the strange and empty silence left by an animal that no longer appears where people had seen it for generations.

This, I think, is where story earns its place. It can bring consequence down to a human scale. It allows us, however briefly, to enter another person's position and understand not only that something happened, but something of what living through it might have meant.

Facts do not become less important when this happens. The story gives them context, movement and, sometimes, meaning.

Perhaps the problem, then, is not that we tell too many stories. It is that we have become too quick to call things stories before asking what they actually are.

The question before the framework

Much of the discussion around storytelling eventually moves towards technique: how to open, how to create tension, how to make somebody care, how to build an arc and how to land the ending. Those things have their place, but I increasingly think there is another question that belongs before all of them.

Should this be a story at all?

Before deciding how to make something compelling, I want to know what somebody actually needs to understand. What happened? Did anything change? Whose experience are we describing? What evidence matters? What are we in danger of overstating? Would a story reveal something that would otherwise remain difficult to see, or are we simply asking ordinary information to wear the clothes of narrative?

There isn't a particularly simple framework for answering those questions. They depend upon context, experience and judgement. They also require us occasionally to resist the pressure to make everything more dramatic, more emotive or more memorable than it needs to be.

I don't think storytelling has become less valuable because everybody is talking about it. If anything, its real value becomes easier to see when we stop expecting it to address everything.

When something genuinely happens to a person, a place, an organisation or an idea, story can help us understand the movement and consequence that bare facts may leave unseen. And because those stories continue to change as the people and places within them change, perhaps our responsibility is not simply to package them well, but to keep paying attention.

And when there isn't a story, I think we should have the confidence simply to say what is.