Tamsen Webster argues that storytelling alone doesn't change behavior. She pairs Kurt Lewin's framework with two narratives: an external "red thread" (goal, problem, truth, change, action) and an internal "prime narrative" (if, then, because) to move people toward collective action.
Don't hate me, but story and storytelling is not the answer to everything. I'm Tamsen Webster. I'm the founder of the Message Design Institute, and I've created a community and learning resource center where you can learn to design your best message in a way that works best for you. And we do a lot of work with storytelling. And I like it and it does a lot, but not everything. Most of the time we're talking about story in the context of using it to help people adopt ideas. And it's really good from a standpoint of connecting people with you and with the storyteller and with the subject matter, with making it more concrete, with putting it in a temporal or time-bound chronological order to help people understand how everything fits. But when it comes to change, and particularly behavior change, it can help to expand our view a little bit beyond just the storytelling circles. And for this, I'm gonna go to the work of Kurt Lewin, or Lewin if you wanted to be all German about it, who famously said as an organizational psychologist that behavior, human behavior, is a function of the person and the environment. Now, how does this relate to story? Because story essentially tells the external version of events. It shows you, particularly when you are telling somebody else, it's showing you what happens. It's showing you it from the outside. And we're leaving a lot, though not all of it, of the internal story up for inference. And inference in this day and age is not really a good thing to count on. In fact, if I'm feeling really sassy, I'm gonna say that inference is the enemy. Of clarity because different people take different meanings away from different stories. Even the same narrative, even the same string of events, two people can interpret two very different ways. So stories, as important as they are for showing what happened and for creating that emotional connection, won't always lead to a change because interpretations are individual. I may intend one set of meaning while you infer a completely different one. That's problematic if we're trying to get everyone on the same page and we're trying to get to a shared understanding that leads to shared and collective action. That internal interpretation is a kind of a story as well, but it's much more compact because it lives in the automatic processes of our brains. It's more instinctive and pattern-oriented. And because it's more instinctive and pattern-oriented and kind of shortcut-oriented, It has a shorter form. In fact, it's the shortest possible form of a theory, which back to the days of Aristotle, yes, he also of the three-act storytelling structure, tells us that if two premises are true, if this and this are true, then the conclusion is true. So anytime we tell a story, there is an implied argument, that internal story that's actually driving it. One way I've talked about this from the stage when I give keynotes is that a story is simply an argument in disguise. So that actually leads us to the answer. If we're trying to figure out how to make our stories even more powerful, particularly when we're using them to encourage the understanding and alignment around new ideas, we need to pair the stories for power, the external story, that narrative that we're familiar with, but also that prime story, that prime narrative, the internal argument for what that story is actually about. The good news, you can start in either place. If you start with the external story, I call that the red thread, and it follows a very predictable set of elements: goal, problem, truth, change, action. Or you can start with the internal story, that prime narrative of if, then, because, and. We teach both at the Message Design Institute, and we're always happy to teach you so that you can build better stories and help make the change that you wanna see in the world.
