Here is the full transcript of Anthony Tasgal’s talk titled “Why Stories Make Us Care When Numbers Don’t” at TEDxNewcastle conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Power of Storytelling
Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, I was on a train, idling the time away, and I got to wondering, “I wonder how many presentations I’ve written, I’ve created, and how many I’ve actually witnessed, stroke, endured.” And at the back of an envelope, I’m allowing a bit for inflation. Yeah, it’s quite a big number.
And then I got to thinking, “I wonder how many of them I remember, how many of them have had an impact on me.” And that number was vanishingly small; it’s probably like six to 10. And I got to thinking, I didn’t think that ratio is that atypical. And how have we ended up in that situation where we’ve created so much content which is dry, anemic, and forgettable?
Why? Because I think we’ve lost, we’ve forgotten the art of storytelling. Now, just something about me, I’m a latched classicist, which means I’ve spent a lot of time with Homer, Virgil, and Nero. And apart from that, it gives me a rather unhealthy obsession with etymology, where words come from.
The word “authority,” we’ve forgotten what’s behind that word. We are designed to give credibility, to give meaning, to look up to authors or storytellers, because they tell us about the world, they tell us about who we are. Now, one such storyteller, somebody who’s not given, I don’t think, enough recognition, is a man called Abram Games. He was a poster designer in the Second World War, worked with Churchill.
Communication and Influence
And amongst other things, he has what I consider to be an extraordinarily powerful motto. “Good communication,” he said, “was maximum meaning, minimum means.” And in my many decades of working in the communications world, I’ve yet to see a pithier, more eloquent summary of the art of persuasion, of influence, of communication, than those words.
So, I want to look at a number of different arenas, the public sector, politics, education, the corporate world, because I want to see how we can improve our communication by applying storytelling. So, my first example is going to take us back to, if we can go back that far, to the era of Brexit. Yes, I’m sorry.
I want to make purely communications points here, by the way, not politics, just to be clear. Why do I think that was such a successful piece of communication? Three reasons. Firstly, control. Who doesn’t want to sense that they are in control, that they can influence the world around them? Secondly, it’s not just about taking control, it’s about taking back, implying something has been taken away, we’ve lost something. There’s a sense of grievance, a very emotional, psychological truth behind it.
And thirdly, it uses the form of the verb called the imperative, “Take it back.” In the communications world, this is sometimes called the call to action. “Do it, do it now,” a sense of immediacy and urgency. The other side, the Remainers, well, I’m afraid they had just a series of incoherent facts and details that didn’t really hold together.
I want to move on now to education, which is also now prey to what I call “edubabble.” I’m going to hear about scalable, rubric-based assessment. Me neither.
The Challenge of Jargon and Edubabble
Or children talking about when they’re six or seven, coming home to their parents, “What did you do today?” “Well, we started off with the non-negotiables.” What? Now, someone said about history, “History is just one damn fact after another.” And I think that’s the problem with an awful lot of our communication, it’s the mindless and endless repetition of facts and figures and details and information.
By the way, just talking about jargon, please, I know it’s hard, but let’s try and eliminate as much jargon as we can. Jargon is the enemy of storytelling. It is the thief of meaning. Just one example, please in my company, if you ever meet me or come to see the book signing afterwards, please do not use the expression “lean and agile.” The only people who should use the term “lean and agile” are people who describe gymnasts.
And my last example is, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Barney the Purple Dinosaur. Yes, a few parents there. I want you to keep that image in your head, but also Guantanamo Bay. Yeah, interesting juxtaposition. Because this came out a while ago.
Storytelling vs Repetition
The Americans were using various forms of mental and physical torture to try and elicit information from the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. So they were using like death metal, but they also played the Barney song, “Yes, I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family,” on a permanent 24-hour loop to inflict the maximum possible mental torture on people at Guantanamo Bay. Parents are nodding here.
But that for me is, again, an analogy with what’s happening to too much of our communication. The mindless and endless repetition of things, however trivial or meaningless, after a while, it becomes a form of torture. How have we ended up in a situation, and then more importantly, how do we get out of it? We’ve created a system that I call arithmocracy, an obsession with numbers and measurement.
The belief that there is somewhere divine infallibility in numbers. We deify data. We’ve created a class who owe much of their influence to their ability to control these numbers, these metrics, these KPIs, key performance indicators, be it in health, policing, or in education. But let’s look back and see what storytelling can actually do.
It’s been shown, again from science, it’s been shown that when people listen to or even tell stories, a molecule in the blood called oxytocin is released.
And oxytocin is associated with care and connection and trust. We are literally, chemically designed to trust people who tell us stories. Also, it can help release cortisol, which focuses attention. These things are not accidental. They seem to be part of our biology, our chemistry. And there are many, many other ways in which storytelling can benefit us.
Here’s an experiment about memory. When people are asked just to remember a list of various words, they can only remember about 13% of them. But if you give it embedded in a story, that figure rises to like 90%. There are so many reasons why storytelling is underappreciated. But also, it’s universal. There is no demographic group, no race, no culture on earth that doesn’t have storytelling. The same, however, cannot be said of PowerPoint or Excel.
Anthropologists have delved deep into the Amazon jungle and discovered a tribe that doesn’t use spreadsheets. Sorry to David. But also, storytelling is brilliant because it identifies and amplifies emotions. Now this is the Phoenix Cinema in North London, the oldest continually running cinema in the country. I was a trustee of it for many years. Again, going back to what it was like during COVID when we couldn’t go to the cinema or the theatre or see a gig.
What was it we missed? We missed sharing emotions, laughing and crying together at a Richard Curtis rom-com. Squeezing up next to someone when there’s a scary movie. Or coming out of a Wes Anderson film and agreeing, “That was the most Wes Anderson film he’s ever made.”
But there’s one other thing I want to talk about, which is that we do this naturally. I don’t really have to teach people about story because it’s something our brain naturally does. It sees the world in the form of storytelling. I’m going to show you a very old clip now from an experiment carried out by some German psychologists in the 1940s called Heider and Simmel.
And they showed their subjects this film and just asked them to describe what was going on. I’m going to get you to do that now. You’re going to see some things in a minute. I just want you to sort of look at what’s happening.
Now, if you’re like the subjects of this experiment, your brain is just looking at these shapes. But you’re doing more than that. Your brain is spinning a story. It’s saying, actually, the big triangle and the little triangle are fighting, and maybe they’re fighting for the affections of the circle, and the circle is…
Because you don’t just see a story in there. You construct it. You construct characters with motivations, with drives. Your brain naturally thinks in the form of a story, and in particular, conflict, which I’ll come back to later.
Combating Arithmocracy with Storytelling
So how do we thwart the evil empire of the arithmocracy? Let me give you three tips. I’ve mentioned take back control, but three is everywhere in storytelling. Beeny, beedy, beaky, liberty, equality, fraternity. Three wise men, three blind mice. The number of times you’re a lady. A surprising amount of Commodore fans in tonight. Note that for next time.
My first tip is empathy. For me, empathy and caring has become one of the major casualties of our industrialized and commoditized communication. And that’s what stories are. They are empathy engines. We go into a world. We imagine what it’s like to be in the heads and the world of another person, their fears, their hopes, their challenges, their hurdles. And surely, empathy is what we want to create in our communication. Not just to browbeat people and bludgeon them with bullet points, but to get them to care about what it is that we’re saying, and maybe even who’s saying it.
Empathy, Threads, and Conflict in Storytelling
Let me tell you another story. So a few years ago, I was working with an ad agency, and they had a problem. Their creative department were not getting on well with their planners, the strategists. So they asked me to interview the creative people.
And one of the senior art directors, she said, “Here’s the way I define a good planner and a bad planner.” She said, “A good planner is like a radiator. They radiate light or heat or insight.” But a bad planner is like a drain. When they come into the room, all of your life force and all of your energy drains away. Yeah, you know, so many of you know drains in their lives? Okay, that’s the name, and you can see me later. And again, I think that’s what storytelling is good at doing. By the way, the worst thing you can be is a drain who thinks they’re a radiator.
My second tip takes us back again to my classical background. Theseus and the Minotaur. Ariadne gave Theseus a golden thread to help him find his way into and then safely out of the labyrinth where the Minotaur was. A good story has a thread that holds things together.
It can be a point of view, an argument, a hypothesis, or what if. But you need that to avoid the possibility of just giving people one damn fact after another. And I’ll give you a tip. Here’s a great tip about using storytelling and golden threads. Storyboard it.
The Essence of Storytelling
Creative people do all the time. Post-it notes. No facts, no numbers, but just storyboard the logic of your thread. I did one recently for a client where I said to them, “Look, the problem you have is if you don’t listen to our advice, your brand will be dead in five years.” That was the thread.
And talking about threads, and again going back to my favorite topic of etymology, it’s amazing how much that language appears everywhere. We talk about weaving a tale or spinning a yarn or fabricating a story. But there’s also another word which is hewn from the same etymological cloth which is everywhere we go, but we’ve forgotten where it comes from.
The word “text” comes from the word “textile.” It means what has been woven together. So, empathy, the golden thread, and as they say about PowerPoint, you’re never more than five slides away from a cat. So, I want to tell a story actually about John Le Carré, the famous spy writer, who was asked, “How do you define, how do you begin, how do you construct a story?” And this is his tale.
He said, “The cat sat on the mat is not the beginning of a story, but the cat sat on the dog’s mat is.” Isn’t that great? “Cat sat on the mat,” your brain goes, “Well, that’s what happens, cats are notorious mat-sitters.” But you hear “the cat sat on the dog’s mat,” there’s going to be blood. Conflict. Yeah, a lot of pet owners in today.
Too much of our communication is “the cat sat on the mat,” nothing to see here. We need to make more, which is “the cat sat on the dog’s mat,” to build that tension, anticipation, suspense. So, I’d like to say that numbers inform, but stories stir us. I’d like us, whether we’re talking to our citizens, our colleagues, our clients, our children, to worry a bit less about prove, but a lot more about move.
Because there’s evidence that storytelling can put us in that moment of flow, and flow can contribute to happiness. So maybe storytelling won’t just make us more efficient and effective as communicators, it might even make us a tad happier. And that, I think, is something of which Abram Games would approve. Thank you.