The Power of Story – Episode 2 Transcript

The following is a transcript of the second episode of This Human Business, a new podcast that represents the growing movement seeking to re-assert the value of humanity in business. You can listen to the podcast on Castos, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and iTunes.

Jonathan Cook: Welcoming to This Human Business, a podcast about the growing movement to restore balance to commerce, celebrating those aspects of our work that can’t be performed by any machine.

Digital technology is great at recording facts, but it’s just plain terrible at performing acts of fiction. Human beings have evolved to be cultural animals, not just computational problem solvers. That means that, although we’ll engineer our way out of practical challenges, the motivation that leads us to confront those challenges comes from the way that we imagine the world.

This podcast is built around a story of sorts. It’s the tragic story of how, in the pursuit of efficiency, the world of business efficiently cut itself off from the sources of enchantment that drive commerce in the first place. Just as it seemed to be too late, however, a movement of professionals dedicated to the restoration of human value in business assembled to turn the tide.

Is it just a fairy tale? If it is, maybe this is just the fairy tale we need.

This week, I’ll be talking with business experts about the power of story.

I spoke to Jonah Sachs about this recently. Jonah, the author of the book Winning The Story Wars, argues that marketers have taken over the role of generating mythology in our society, giving us our sense of collective identity when they’re doing their job right.

Jonah encourages us to delve deep in search of business storylines, down into the bedrock where our awareness meets our subconscious mind. It’s at this boundary that we find the most fruitful ideas. They’re powerful not in spite of their fictional status, but because of it.

It’s along this boundary that Kristian Aloma finds his work. We bumped into Kristian briefly in the last episode, but let’s learn a little bit more about him now.

Kristian Aloma: My name is Kristian Aloma. I am the founder and CEO of a marketing design firm, what I call a narrative design firm, called Threadline. I have been in marketing for my entire career in some aspect or capacity. It was when I actually started getting my graduate degree in psychology when I started to see the greater role and importance of narrative.

In understanding narrative and its role at a cognitive level in regards to how we define ourselves, how we manage and manufacture and manicure our identities, I started to realize how everything we do gets integrated into those narratives. So now, what I am looking at and studying most closely and trying to apply to the way business is done is how we can take that understanding, how can we, knowing that consumers are narrative machines, that they are meaning making machines, how can we run businesses, design products, and design services that play a role in that narrative, in their narrative, that help them make meaning out of it, help them reframe some concept or idea about who they are, because of either what that product or what that service does for them, or what it means for them to own that thing?

Jonathan Cook: Threadline uses the narrative structure of story to help businesses align their practical efforts with the underlying meaning that makes it relevant to people’s lives.

There is no mathematical formula for meaning, of course. So, how can it be applied in business? The conventional approach to business frequently lectures that if something can’t be measured, it can’t be managed. The storyteller asserts something quite different, letting us know that what we are about to hear is untrue, and yet, essentially important. It’s a playful act that taunts our obsession with data, breaking the clear delineation between what’s valuable and what’s not.

In reaction to the play of stories, some people in business lash back in defense, arguing that stories are irrelevant, or, as designer Stefan Sagmeister said recently in a video called “You Are Not A Storyteller”, that most people can’t be storytellers, because if their work were to tell a story, it would be “bullshit”.

Stefan Sagmeister: I am actually quite critical of the storytelling theme. I think that all the storytellers are not storytellers. Recently, I read an interview with somebody who designs rollercoasters, and he referred to himself as a storyteller. No, fuckhead, you are not a storyteller! You are a roller coaster designer. That’s fantastic, and more power to you, but why would you want to be a storyteller if you design roller coasters? Or, if you are storytelling, then the story you are telling is bullshit! It’s like this little itsy bitsy thing. Yes, you go through space, and yes, you see other spaceships, and yes. That’s your story?!? That’s a fucking bullshit story! That’s boring!

[Editorial notes: This comment from Stefan Sagmeister is not from an interview that I conducted with him. It’s from a YouTube profile of him produced by FITC at a conference in Toronto.

Also, in the audio podcast of this episode, I’ve censored Sagmeister’s profanities using the classic technique of placing beeps over the words. I don’t want to create a podcast that falls into the lazy habit of trying to create a sense of edgy energy with the unrestrained use of foul language. Genuinely edgy ideas don’t need the crutch of vulgarities to communicate their importance. Nonetheless, I’ve included these words here, because I’m not really any more fond of censorship than I am of verbal profanities. I’m trying to strike a balance by including the full language here in this text transcript, which listeners can read if they want to get the full, coarse version of what Sagmeister has to say.]

Jonathan Cook: The “more power to you” comment here is completely undermined when Sagmeister tells people who aspire to tell stories through their work that they are “boring” people doing “bullshit”, calling them “fuckhead”.

I asked Kristian Aloma what he thought about Sagmeister’s comments, here’s the conversation that followed.

Kristian Aloma: So, the first thing that comes to mind is an idea that I’ve been grappling with since I started Threadline, which is what we mean when we say story, and how often we use it. I think a lot gets packed into the word story nowadays that doesn’t belong there, and it reminds me of actually the very same issue that I have with the word “brand”.

There is a book that’s called, I think it was Thinking on Brands, and Malcolm Gladwell was interviewed in it, and he says that the issue he has with the word “brand” is the same issue that he has with the word “African”, which is that there are so many different distinct cultures and countries within Africa that a lot of it gets packaged into one word because that’s the word we’ve given it, and that’s the word we’ve given it and we’re not willing to go beyond that.

Stefan, I think he is criticizing the use of the word “story”. I disagree that a roller coaster engineer can’t feel like a storyteller or isn’t a storyteller, because I think it’s just the wrong word. I think that a roller coaster engineer can create a narrative experience where someone feels a rise in tension and this journey that they go through that they have experienced, and they feel as if they are no longer in the real world. They’re in this setting and scenario that this person has created where they almost feel as if they are, in fact, traveling to Mars, where they are, in fact, on a spaceship, and going, feeling the ups and downs and trials and tribulations of being, mind you perhaps in 90 seconds, but you are for a moment living the experience of being on that spaceship, and that’s where I think that roller coaster engineer is, the term that I am using, a narrative designer. He has created a narrative for someone to experience. They are experiencing it with the dressing of a roller coaster.

Now, I do think, I listen to music in the background, and there is a song that keeps coming on called The Conversation. It’s instrumental, and every time I hear it, I think they have created a conversation out of nothing but musical notes, you know. They’re back and forth, and there’s this tension, and there’s this narrative that this composer has created that you could not truly call it a story. You can’t watch it, and identify or watch it on screen or read it in a book, but you experience the music. Are they storytellers? I don’t think so, not in the traditional format of storytelling, but they are narrative designers using music as the dressing on that narrative.  

My mother used to tell me that when we told her as children that we were bored, she would say, “I wish I were you.” She felt as though she was never bored, she had so many things to do, what a wonderful thing it would be to be bored, but I do think I agree with that sense that boring is in the eye of the beholder, or in this sense, where I do think it’s insulting is that he suggests, and again, I’m going to try to give him more benefit of the doubt than maybe you expected I would, but I think he’s trying to suggest that it’s okay to be small, and there’s a part of that I agree with. You don’t have to be a superhero, and this is going to be tied to your idea, which is that I don’t think you need to be a superhero in order to be something meaningful.

You can be small and be meaningful, but with the way he’s describing it and the way he’s talking about it, he is stripping meaning out of it. He is stripping that sense of meaning making from both the act of doing the thing and the meaning making that a person might be providing to others, or giving them the opportunity of making meaning from, and that is where I think there’s an issue there, because you can do something that’s on a scale of its impact in the world might seem small and minuscule, but is still extremely meaningful, and is meaningful to the person doing it, and is meaning to the individuals, perhaps a small population of individuals, that are impacted by it, and that’s where I think it’s wrong to take that value away.

I think that if an individual, if this roller coaster designer sees himself as a storyteller, yes, perhaps he is using the semantics, depending upon, even as I agreed upon the semantics, but the idea is that he is finding more meaning in his job than simply assembling tracks, and putting a cart on top of them. He is finding something more to it than that, which I think is your point. That’s the shortcut term to use, which is storytelling.

Jonathan Cook: Yes, you’ll hear some people like Stefan Sagmeister sneer at the idea of storytelling in business. They’ll say it’s just a trend, a fad. Take a look at the alternatives to story that we’ve been given, though, and you’ll see they’re pretty dreadful. They’re a dull and dreary return to scientific management that’s devoid of imagination.

It’s true that attention to the framework of story is relatively new in business, but that’s because conventional business culture has been so dead set against the idea that commerce could have a meaning that’s higher than making money.

This is what story ultimately boils down to: Meaning, the idea that our activities aren’t just tasks to be labored through, but that they’re aiming in an important direction. Story tells us that what we’re doing is about something.

If we pursue a storytelling strategy in our business just because it’s the latest fad, we’re missing the whole point of effective storytelling. Stories that work aren’t just about people who do things. They’re about people who struggle for something that matters. Without this larger meaning, story is empty.

Martina Olbertova: The real impact of meaning on business is about an absolutely fundamental shift in the way that we conceptualize organizations and what they should be doing, how they should create value and what that value should contribute to a larger scheme of humanity, rather than, let’s just apply anthropology because philosophers have cool ideas. You know that’s just a fundamental way in which corporations trivialize things and also when something becomes a trend, it gets emptified very quickly.

Essentially, you’re shrinking your own leverage space rapidly with every new word because the market jumps at everything new and then it stops being cool and stops being ‘the thing’. But it’s still a thing, whether or not you talk about it, it’s still so important. So, I just hope that meaning doesn’t become a buzzword, because without meaning, if we emptify meaning, then what else are we supposed to do?

The meaning of life is meaning. That’s how we operate. That’s how we navigate the world and that’s how we structure our thoughts and the kind of stories that we create, how we build our identities and create culture. So, if meaning becomes a buzzword, such as “purpose” has become, and that is now quickly becoming rather out of date so we must quickly find something else to concentrate on, we’re screwed. Without meaning, we cannot do anything.

Jonathan Cook: These words come from semiotician and strategic consultant Martina Olbertova. Let’s hear a little bit about her professional story – the creation of Meaning.Global.

Martina Olbertova: Meaning.Global is a new breed of a strategic consultancy that I created last year, with the idea to create a new kind of strategy that’s powered entirely by meaning. My background is in Media Studies. It’s something like a sociology of media almost, looking at communication and media production in a larger context of culture and society. It derives inspiration from things like semiotics and linguistics, cultural anthropology, history of media and theory of mass communication and looking at all the different theories of human communication throughout the centuries. With this rich academic knowledge, it was a challenge to find a place how to best position myself in the commercial market. My career path has therefore been liminal, I wanted to try different things to learn and understand the industry from many different perspectives to find the right fit. With this whole journey, what I ultimately realized is that it’s all very nice, but there is one absolutely fundamental thing missing in all of this, wherever you look, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s research, whether it’s advertising, strategy, brands, consulting, and that one thing is meaning.

So, I created a consultancy that focuses purely on meaning and making brands and organizations more meaningful in order to create and encapsulate value from the inside out. Because, if you don’t have anything to say, no matter how nicely designed your logo is, how beautifully devised the campaign is, you ultimately still have nothing to say. You need to make sure that the meaning is there, and then you can communicate, but without it, no matter how much you spend on advertising and communication and design, it’s not going to have the impact that you are looking for.

The first thing you need to do is to assess the scope of the situation properly – to really understand the cultural context, what the brand is saying and how the meaning lives in the world. A lot of brands make the mistake that they create a strategy, and that strategy is good, but only in theory, because we don’t live in a world of vacuum. In a vacuum, the campaign might actually be very successful, but once the strategy meets the real world, there are many different ways in which the cultural context and the brand can clash that neither the agency nor the client actually has the power to foresee. So, that’s why you call people like semioticians or cultural strategists or cultural anthropologists to understand these potentially flammable ideas.

Jonathan Cook: Flammable ideas – it doesn’t get more relevant than that. Fire alone isn’t enough, though. An open flame burns without meaning. Story is an engine of meaning that contains ignition, giving structure to our burning needs, propelling us forward in the direction of our intended destination.

Careful design of this engine is essential, though. Constructed without attention to detail, an engine becomes a bomb that can blow a business to smithereens. Story isn’t just about telling any old tale. It’s much more than a trick for getting people’s attention.

To tell a story, you have to understand who you are, and even more importantly, where your audience is coming from. A story can’t be told outside the cultural context in which a business is embedded. 

Martina Olbertova: When you want to explore the cultural relevance of let’s say brand narratives or stories or even innovations and how they tap into the zeitgeist or the sort of mood of the now, semiotics is, in my perspective, absolutely the best way how to approach such research. Essentially, as semioticians, we look at the three most fundamental contexts of a brand.

The first one is actually the brand itself and the communication that it has created historically. We would look at the dominant brand codes, different trends in the setting of storytelling, the tonality and the tone of voice. We would look at what kind of people are there, what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, what they embody on the symbolic or ideological level, and what those stories are signaling about the larger context of the culture and society as we see it and as we live in it.

Then, we would look at the category. Let’s say it’s a banking brand. In the banking category, we would look at the entire landscape of all the other banking brands and the kind of narratives and linguistics that go hand in hand with the storytelling about banking and finances. Then, we will look at the third order, which is the Culture, where we inspect the cultural and ideological landscape of branding and the larger implications of history, politics, economics and our society.

Jonathan Cook: The work of storytellers in business is the work of taking industrially-produced objects, designed by committee in offices far, far away from the people who will consume them, and finding ways to connect those objects to the intensely emotional journeys of real human beings. The objects, and the companies who produce them, won’t often be major characters in the human stories in which they are embedded, but that doesn’t mean that their role is insignificant, or as Stefan Sagmeister would say, “boring”.

Boring isn’t an objective quality of an object in the world. Boredom is a state of mind that reflects a lack of imagination. A more subtle, perceptive, and appreciative understanding can grasp big ideas in small things. That’s the kind of mindset that Bhavik Joshi brings to his work, connecting ancient stories with contemporary commercial objects. Let’s meet Bhavik.

Bhavik Joshi: I am a brand builder. That is essentially what I am, what I like to call myself, maybe even aspirationally want to be that. So, in other words, designation-wise, at LPK I am a strategy director. The role that a strategy director takes could be varied, and it’s also kind of left up to your devices and strengths and the kind of material and depth that you want to tap into to build that strategy.

I tend to lean into storytelling, into mythology, into trying to understand the various levels of the psyche, not just the conscious and rational, but also the irrational and subconscious, to the role of dreams and Jungian archetypes, and then try and manifest that into a narrative that makes sense into the birth and development of a brand. That’s what I like to do, that’s what’s I would love to do more of. Now, of course, not all projects that come across my table allow me to do that, but because this is my interest and has been my interest for some time, I try to infuse at least some of it even in the projects that don’t necessarily allow me to do a lot of this with time and budget constraints.

So, that’s where I’m at right now, and what led to the creation of this, the creation of me, rather, is that ever since, I am from India. That is where I was born and I was brought up and lived there most of my life until I was 28, when I moved to the United States, and I was surrounded by all of that. I was surrounded by mythology. I was surrounded by some great fiction writing, some poetry, philosophical points of  views, not only Western, in fact way less Western, but also Eastern. I think that kind of planted the seeds of being curious about the human condition, and understanding how the human experience can be better when they put their faith in containers of meaning.

Now, those containers of meaning could be religious institutions like church and faith, etc, but it could also be something that is slightly more prevalent of the commercial nature, which is brands. So, I think that is what I started to understand, and want to build brands that have more of a depth and dimension to them, that kind of activated a larger self-discovery within the human being, instead of just being transactional, that was limited to just the product interaction. I think that’s where my aspiration to become a brand builder came into being.

Jonathan Cook: The idea that a commercial brand could be just as much a container of meaning as a religious institution will strike some people as blasphemous. If that’s so, then maybe we should engage in blasphemy. The mythologies of ancient religious traditions bring us fascinating stories, but they’re from long ago. We can, and should, seek metaphors for our current challenges in those mythologies, but we also need to recognize the sacred quests that are unique to our own times.

Bhavik Joshi: Growing up, we used to listen to the Ramayana, which was a massive, really influential epic in India and many other parts of the Eastern world as well. There is a character, a very important character, which could be linked to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the Hero’s Journey, there are always those magical characters who are the hero’s friends who help you along the way and in that sense the Ramayana has a magical friend called Hanuman. He is a worshipper of the Lord Ram, but also his helper, and kind of gives him the power and the strength and the magic he needs to go and fulfill his destiny. I was always subconsciously attracted to that character, and it felt like it’s kind of like the role of Scottie Pippen to Michael Jordan in a way.

This person, this character, this archetype is really important in the moment of the narrative arc of the epic, but also in the evolution of Lord Ram himself. I think I don’t know if I ever would have made that link consciously or rationally, but I think somehow I felt like those kind of wings, because Hanuman can fly, those kind of wings are what a brand should be for the evolution of the human being through their lives. I think subconsciously that was what was playing in my mind when I thought about that.

Jonathan Cook: How is Hanuman like Scottie Pippen? It’s a crazy question, but the best stories have their origins in odd comparisons, in ideas that don’t seem to fit at first, but then become appropriate through the elevation of the characters involved. Bhavik’s point, I think, is that there are eternal patterns in the struggle for meaning that transcend the particularities of any specific spot in time and space.

Bhavik Joshi: I feel like this is maybe my perception on the brand as an archetype. I feel like all the consumers are actually all heroes who are on their hero’s journeys, on their respective quests, and somewhere along that path, they meet or interact with a brand or different brands in different capacities, each of which fulfills a different role.

So, there might be guidance, but there might also be a challenge. There might also be seduction. There might also be some healing. There might also be some holding of opposites to realize the transition from one realm to another, from one threshold to the other, and I think all of those roles, symbolically, metaphorically, need to be embodied by the brand, and done in a way that resonates with the consumer as people for them to find a deeper meaning that goes beyond just the product purchase interaction.

If I may give you one of my examples, I also taught branding at the University of Cincinnati for two years. I would use this example quite a bit: Patagonia as a brand, and I know it’s easy to use Patagonia and Apple as an example, but it happens to be one of my favorite brands that could activate these deeper meanings in people. One example of that is that it stands for sustainability. It makes gear that helps you be outside in a responsible manner, making sure that your footprint is as small as possible, making sure that you’re very conscious and very aware of the impact that you’re leaving on the environment.

At the same time, I have seen, in fact quite popularly so, a lot of people wearing Patagonia gear who have probably never set foot on a hillside in their entire lives. They are probably in a coffee shop writing their script, writing their comedy or whatever it is, but they’re wearing Patagonia. One of the reasons that they’re doing that, and there could be several reasons why they’re doing that, but one of the reasons is that the meaning that is encapsulated in Patagonia goes beyond the product. It goes beyond the having of a jacket or being outside. In fact, there could be many hikers like me who have been outside who have not owned more than one gear from Patagonia. The experiences that we have while we are outside, or the things that we think about when we come across, let’s say, a yak or a coyote or something, links us back to some fine thread that came from the roots of Patagonia as a container of meaning.

So, even though I am not in a situation where I am purchasing the brand or interacting with the brand, don’t have the brand on me, near me anywhere, the meaning of the brand surrounds me in the environment that the brand probably wishes for it to surround me with.

Jonathan Cook: Bhavik gets to an important idea for storytelling in business. By helping us to think metaphorically, stories build ideas that transcend the merely functional benefits of a product, and the literal differences between brands. The physical differences between most brands, in truth, are usually not very significant, but the stories that develop around brands connect with our larger aspirations, and build experiences that transcend the act of consumption itself.

The stories that have the power to build a business aren’t about a Jobs-To-Be-Done kind of problem solving. A consultant I met a few months ago explained how the most effective stories connect to a larger purpose in which a business can participate, even though the purpose doesn’t center on its brand.

David Altschul: I’m David Altschul. I’m the co-founder of Character. It’s a consulting group based in Portland that is built on the idea of using story as a strategic tool. My partner and I spun it out from an animation studio that I was running at which he was a commercial director in the summer of 2000. We had done a lot of character work which is why we adopted the name starting back in the 80s when we produced all the California Raisins and then in the 90s when we produced all the animated M&Ms, and as a result of that work advertising agencies came to us for help developing characters for ad campaigns.

What I realized was that when we applied our creative talents to our work in entertainment when we were developing characters for feature films or TV shows, we had a great time, we were very successful, and we knew what we were doing. When we tried to apply those same talents to our work in advertising, it was almost always a pain in the ass and I didn’t understand why that seemed necessarily to be true.

The breakthrough came one day when my executive creative director came out of a meeting with an advertising agency team and a brand team and he looked terrible. I asked him what was wrong and he said oh, I just wasted half a day in another 12 people sitting around a table arguing about the size of the nose meeting. And now, you know, probably twenty-five years later, we still talk about size-of-the-nose meetings and size-of-the-nose problems to describe what happens when an otherwise accomplished, talented, successful group of people gets gridlocked because they’re trying to solve a tactical problem, they’re trying to solve a problem at a tactical level, and they don’t really have an understanding of the story. They’re trying to solve a tactical or executional problem and they don’t understand the strategy, and in the case of developing a character for advertising what was really missing was story. What was missing from that size-of-the-nose meeting was story and I don’t mean the backstory.

I don’t mean, you know, there’s a little leprechaun and he comes from a magical parallel universe where amazingly, marshmallow bits are nutritious. I mean, what is this story about? What does this brand exist in the world to do besides making money for its shareholders?  And we began to understand that our clients didn’t have an appreciation of story.

Jonathan Cook: The kind of story that David is talking about here isn’t just a tactical tool to get people to pay attention while messages about competitive advantages are slipped into the message, as we see happening in the humorous, but disconnected, advertisements for insurance brands like Geico and Progressive. He’s talking about stories with big ideas, because those big ideas address the burning questions that concern people the most. These stories are strategic.

The audience for these stories isn’t just consumers. The narratives used in marketing are stories that businesses tell to themselves. They’re stories about what business is, and about what business really wants.

David Altschul: There are a couple of large kind of umbrella metaphors within which business takes place. I think of the principle three as war, science, and story, and both classical brand management and the management of modern commercial enterprise of any kind tends to be built around the first two. Modern brand management is really about war and science.

The war metaphor is a tool set that you use to operate in a competitive landscape, and the science metaphor are the tools that you use to operate analytically to understand the metrics that are necessary in order to organize and control and manage a large business with a large number of employees and a vast number of customers, and those are very legitimate. I mean, you need to understand how to operate relative to your competition in a market environment and you need to understand how to figure out the things to measure, to measure them, and analyze the data that you get in order to operate a business of any size.

So, those are necessary, but neither the analytical tools nor the competitive tools get you to a relationship. It’s a very clunky way to get to relationship and the brand is nothing except a relationship between the consumer and the enterprise. It’s a fictional relationship, I understand, but a brand is a useful fiction and the member of the audience, if you’re relating to a brand and the story feels true then just as a member of an audience watching a drama, you suspend your disbelief, and you feel connected to the brand in spite of your awareness that it’s kind of a fiction. So, that’s why I think story is important particularly for the relationship piece.

Jonathan Cook: Unlike the war metaphor, which divides people, and the science metaphor, which objectifies them, the metaphor of business as story connects people into communities of common purpose. While competition and analytical precision lead people to spend their money in whatever way brings them maximum advantage in the moment, community fosters the kind of loyalty that endures inconvenience. Stories, by helping to define communities we can belong to, enable us to get beyond the triviality of habit, encouraging us to stand firm even when the going gets tough.

When a business decides to tell stories instead of just repeating facts and gathering data, it is stretching the truth – in a good way. Here’s the thing: Stories aren’t just tools marketers use to trick people. They stretch the truth to make the truth better than it has been. They ennoble the act of consumption and marketing alike.

What if we were to stick with the facts about business? Let me tell you, it wouldn’t look pretty. The facts are that businesses take lots of money, and concentrate it in the hands of a few greedy people at the expense of everyone else. The facts are the businesses pollute the world. The facts are that, despite the Silicon Valley hype, something like 95% of tech startups fail miserably, dragging people down with them when they go. The facts are that Bitcoin has the distribution structure of an oligarchy, and is used to prop up the most heinous crimes. The fact is that business helped elect Donald Trump.

Had enough? We could go on for a long time like this, but the thing I want you to remember is that facts don’t tell the story. To tell a story is to imagine that things could be better.

This podcast series tells the story that business doesn’t have to be an ugly, abusive thing. We can imagine that business can become a reflection of the best that humanity has to offer, and by imagining it, we can start the work of making our story real. David Altschul says it well: Stories connect us.

David Altschul: Story is a sequence of events that communicates meaning, and the storyteller and the audience are connected by a common effort to find meaning in things. Story is the way the human brain has evolved to deal with issues of great complexity. A storyteller is nothing if not connected to his or her audience. So, that relationship piece is integral to story.

If you’re telling a story effectively, you are connected to your audience, and if that story rings true, then members of your audience will identify with the protagonist of your story, and suspend their disbelief, understanding that it may perfectly well be fictional, but it’s the truth of the story that they ultimately connect to, the sense of meaning. If it resonates, if it’s built on a belief that they share, then you’ve made a connection.

Jonathan Cook: David advises us to craft stories that ring true, but as systems of data analytics have come to dominate corporate decision making, what rings true is being replaced by what can be proven to be factually correct. Driven by the old adage that we can’t manage what we can’t measure, businesses have become data-driven to a fault, deciding to measure absolutely everything that they can, to the point that they lose the ability to discern the measurements that matter from those metrics that are merely simple to produce.

Not everybody in business is ready to think in this way, but those who are will gain the advantage of relevance. The movement to restore human business doesn’t need to appeal to everyone, David explains, in order to begin making a significant impact.

David Altschul: The people in business who find their way to us or who find themselves drawn to this approach don’t have to change who they are. They come to us because they already have an appetite for doing business in a way that seems both more meaningful to them and more meaningful to the people they work with and the people that they do business with, and all of that is a function of story. Whether they have previously articulated it that way or not.

So, people who are deeply dedicated to the science metaphor would love to believe that if they could just get the data right they would never need to deal with storytelling or creative agency people again. By and large we’re not working for that because they’re not you know they’re not drawn to what we do, and people who are dedicated to the war metaphor who really believe that it’s you know everybody’s every business is like a racing car and they’re just going to drive faster and more skillfully and more aggressively than the next guy, and that’s how they’re going to win.

They may not have an appetite for this either, but by and large, the people who have been in business the longest, who are the wisest, who have the most perspective, understand, whether they understand what’s missing or not, they understand that something is missing if the only tools you’ve got are the analytical tools and the competitive tools.

Jonathan Cook: So, storytelling is effective in business because it’s centered around the project of defining a fundamental vision of the world that consistently determines all the details of how we should behave. Stories tell us about who we are, and how we can rediscover our purpose when we get off track.

The question remains: How do businesses actually accomplish this? How do they get the material out of which we build the stories from which brands are born?

Doug Grant, the founder of Inqui Research, explains how thick, emotionally vulnerable human-to-human contact enables elements of a business story to emerge.

Doug Grant: Sometimes I feel like I’m there with them when you kind of step into their shoes and you hear these stories and some of them are quite you know they’re quite private sometimes they’re, you know, it’s when they have these moments of vulnerability. And I think for some people when you get the stories that are most meaningful when they really get to something interesting, I think it’s a relief in some ways. I think that when these people are going through it, they think they might even have a little bit of reflection on their selves for a little bit of self-discovery.

Jonathan Cook: Step into people’s shoes, as Doug suggests, and you’ll quickly realize that Stefan Sagmeister got it backwards. Storytellers aren’t some elite class of artists with an exclusive right to tell enchanting tales while the rest of us are cursed with being boring. Human beings are all born storytellers. We just need to listen to what they’re saying, and the story will emerge.

The trick is that, when a story is as big and complex as a businesses can get, no single individual has the whole story — not the CEO, not the product manager, not even a favorite customer.

To get the whole story, a business needs a purposeful method for gathering the bits and pieces of the narrative that are already being told. This isn’t a task that data mining, survey research, or superficial qualitative methods such as focus groups can perform.

In the next episode of This Human Business, we’ll explore the alternative to the machine-directed systems of data mining that gather more facts than we could ever know how to use. Next week, we will consider the potential for new, uniquely human forms of business research.

Come back then.