For more than 20 years I’ve been helping people tell stories about what they do: stories about their work, whether it’s their career or volunteer work. And what amazes me is how bad we are at it.

You’d think these would be the easiest stories to tell: “What are you working on?” or “Tell me about your startup”. After all, you are the main character so you know all the answers — it’s about the thing you do every day — and no-one can tell you it’s wrong because it’s your story.

But, if you’ve never had to do it — just try: the moment after you hear the prompt you will find yourself suddenly frozen, flooded with a thousand details and trying to figure out where to start. Now imagine you’ve been asked this question by a New York Times reporter and it will seem impossible to answer. Now imagine you’re telling this story to venture capitalists you want to invest in your startup, or philanthropists you want to donate to your nonprofit. Suddenly, telling a simple story seems an impossible task.

I’m a communications consultant, and people find their way to me when their story “isn’t working”. Usually, one of three things are happening: either the story isn’t having any effect on the audience, the story is having an effect but the wrong effect, or the story doesn’t feel authentic. In each case, the story looks like a story — it has a clear beginning, middle and end with characters and plot — and can even be written beautifully, but it’s not performing the way it’s supposed to.

Narrative scholars have coined these stories “instrumentalized stories”: stories that are used as an instrument to achieve a specific outcome. And with audience — and media — preferences for information in story-form, organizational leaders today need to be able to tell instrumentalized stories, and they need to work. But before I can fix a story, I need to identify what the problem is: what is the story doing — or, what is the narrative effect being created — and which parts of the story are creating that effect?

That’s where narratology comes in.

Narrative theory identifies and describes different types of stories, their features, and the functions of each feature. So, a narrative criticism framework can identify the features of a story that isn’t working — and their narrative effects — revealing the features that are creating unwanted effects.

An applied narratological approach to communications is always a new experience for my clients: unless you’ve published an autobiography you’ve usually never experienced someone critiquing your personal story about your own lived experience. It’s usually quite uncomfortable; it’s difficult to separate criticism of a story from criticism of your life choices. But a narrative framework enables you to step out of your experience and observe the story — judging it for coherence, not character — and tell better stories.

Communications — as a field of practice — is in trouble; everyone who works in communications knows it.

Digital media has changed both audiences and media channels, and as a result communicators are fighting for attention in an abyss of noise. In our desperation, we turned the emotional volume up so we might to rise above the din, manufacturing fear or outrage because the worst outcome in communications isn’t being misunderstood — it’s when nobody cares. We turned to storytelling to solve for attention — but that’s not what stories are for.

Stories are for creating a shared experience. The reason is obvious: when someone else shares an experience with you it’s easier to act collaboratively, toward shared goals. You think a similar way. You are in alignment. And stories don’t do that through persuasion, they do it through adding a new perspective. The defining feature of a story isn’t a beginning, middle and end — it’s a point of view. And the power of storytelling isn’t in convincing your audience that yours is the right point of view, it’s that your audience can experience another point of view — one that’s different to their own.

As technology has made the world more connected, we’ve seen the limits of communication. You can give two people the same information, and they can have completely opposite reactions — depending on their point of view. No amount of additional data or better facts or more compelling argument will change someone’s reaction to information if their point of view doesn’t change. And it’s impossible to actually change someone’s point of view because it’s the result of their life experience. But you can expand it by adding an experience — a shared experience: someone else’s story.

That’s what storytelling solves for — not for attention or persuasion, but for point of view. And that’s why leaders today need to be able to tell stories about what they do, for better collaboration and alignment. Because as the world gets smaller, and the problems we tackle get bigger, we’re going to need to communicate across borders, cultures and worldviews. And stories are how we do that.

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