Who’s Telling Who? The Power of Stories and Storytelling

Who’s Telling Who? The Power of Stories and Storytelling

Where do Stories come from?

Who gets to decide where they go?

At Argonaut Productions, storytelling is our passion.

That’s because we’ve seen the power of story with our own eyes.

We’ve seen stories fuel growth and progress for our clients in every way imaginable. We’ve seen stories help clients raise awareness about important issues, events, and causes. We’ve seen stories help them raise the funds they need to pursue their missions. We’ve seen stories connect our clients with volunteers, benefactors, supporters, and partners.

Retracing My Steps

For the past few months, I’ve been sharing my thoughts on storytelling with you through this series of articles. I started off by recounting a conversation that I had with a new client at our agency. They wanted to know how we work and if it would work for them. That turned into a reflection on the productive tension between creativity and curiosity in the Discovery Process that we use at Argonaut.

From there, I went on to explore the essential elements of a story in the series of articles. I looked at humanity and heroism as the productive tension in character development. I examined narrative structures through the lens of suspense. I asked whether place or “scene” deserves consideration as more than a backdrop.

Good characters, suspenseful plots, and vivid scenes are things that a story should have. They tell us what stories need. But they don’t do much to help us understand what stories do. Or, for that matter, how they do it.

I guess I dig a little bit deeper into the details of storytelling than most. It’s indeed a professional necessity. But this is the profession that I chose. And I chose it for a reason.

In Search of the Spark

“Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.”

- Arthur C. Clarke

To me, the study of storytelling doesn’t get really interesting until you get beyond the “elements” of a story and begin to explore what’s left. After you identify the characters, plot, and setting, you’re left with what seems like odds and ends. At the same time, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve missed something important.

Why does it seem like something’s missing?

A good story is more than the sum of its parts. Mixed up in all of the moving parts and different pieces, there’s a spark that can’t be traced to an individual element. It’s this spark that gives a story the power to do what good stories do. You can have all of the other elements of a story. But without the spark, it won’t have the power to move an audience.

Whenever I get to this point, I can’t help but think about Alchemists and their pursuit of the secrets that would allow them to turn base elements into gold or distill the elixir of life. They worked in the spaces between magic and science. They held onto their belief in the impossible until science progressed to the point where they’d run out of territory.

Narrativium

“We learn about ‘narrativium’ very early in our development, and we use it and promote it for the whole of our lives.”

- Terry Pratchett

It’s inevitable. At some point in these articles, my thoughts always turn to the work of Terry Pratchett. Not only is he a great practitioner of the art of storytelling but he’s also one of the few folks who’ve taken the time to think about the nuts and bolts of storytelling in terms that anybody can understand.

Unlike the alchemists, who tried to turn actual lead into actual gold, storytellers try to turn the base elements of a story into metaphorical gold. Storytellers don’t want to find a way to make humans immortal. They want to tell stories that will outlive them.

It’s a shame that most people place a higher value on the precious metal gold than they do on stories that strike gold with an audience. After all, if it weren’t for stories, we might not place any monetary value on gold at all.

In the universe that Pratchett created, stories get equal footing with the other elements. Narrativium is the base element of stories. It is an element that supplies both power and purpose to everything else on the Discworld. Thanks to Pratchett, we can more easily imagine a world where stories have the same value as precious metals and the same presence as individual people.

We Are Pan narrans

“We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man . . . We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.”

- Terry Pratchett

Thanks to the discovery of narrativium, it is possible to study storytelling as a science. Of course, taking advantage of the scientific process forces us to accept the demands of scientific rigor. That might not seem like a big deal at first. But at some point, we have to acknowledge the “big scientific problem”.

How can evolution get so quickly from an ape that can’t compete mentally with a chimpanzee to a godlike being that can write poetry as good as Shakespeare’s, and has advanced so rapidly from that point that it will surely soon erect (drop) a space elevator?

Pratchett, Stewart, and Cohen recognize that “something that dramatic needed a new trick” and that “that trick was the invention of culture”. To them, that means that “any individual ape” can “make use of the ideas and discoveries of thousands of other apes”.

The authors go on to describe the suite of tricks that make up “culture” as extelligence. They note that “extelligence is like our own personal intelligence but it lives outside us”. While “intelligence has limits; extelligence is infinitely expandable”. So, “extelligence lets us pull ourselves upwards, as a group, by our own mental bootstraps”.

The universe itself is still in the process of becoming whatever the “Big Bang” began. How that happens and why it happens that way is the purview of physics. But similar “becomings” are taking place here on Earth. Biological evolution is a question of genetics. Cultural evolution is a question for memetics.

Emergent Dynamic Systems

The interplay of intelligence and extelligence is an example of what Pratchett, Stewart, and Cohen call an “emergent dynamic system”. They argue that “Roundworld history is like biological evolution: it obeys rules, but even so, it seems to make itself up as it goes along”.

Culture is a system. That much seems self-evident. It doesn’t take much more than a quick look around to get to the point where we can say that culture is not static. From there, we need to look for the “rules” that govern cultural change. In the language Pratchett, Stewart, and Cohen use to describe culture as a system, “a dynamic is a rule that takes the system from its present state to the next one”.

The authors go on to distinguish between “deterministic” and “emergent” systems. While a conventional dynamic system is deterministic in the sense that the rules are simple and precise, an emergent system is complex and chaotic.

This leads the authors to conclude that “if the dynamic wasn’t emergent, then we wouldn’t need to tell stories about the system, because we’d all be able to understand the system on its own terms”. They go on to say that “when the dynamic is emergent, a simplified but evocative story is the best description that we can hope for”.

The Power of Story

The organizations that Argonaut Productions works with all have one thing in common. They’re working to steer the cultural “becoming” or emergence in some way. We work with them to help them harness the power of stories to make that happen.

They might be working to make sure that people who are hungry today are fed tomorrow.

They might be working to open up new horizons to students with developmental disabilities and their families.

They might want to bring new medical technology to the market or make sure that quality medical care is available to everyone.

No matter what your organization’s mission is, your pursuit of that vision is, at the most basic level, an attempt to influence the emergence of a particular dynamic from all of the potential dynamics that could emerge.

Story is the lever that allows intelligence to impact extelligence—and vice versa. Story is the best we can do when it comes to marshaling and managing the possibilities. Story focuses our attention on what is happening and what we can do to make our preferred vision happen. Story isn’t a part of the material world. It’s a force that can shape the material world through its ability to influence our actions.

Bringing It All Back Home

When it’s done well, storytelling can reach the hearts and minds of an audience. It can make a complex and chaotic system make sense in all of the important ways. It can become a part of someone’s memory and the basis for lasting loyalty. In fact, it can work so powerfully that it can seem like magic. Storytelling has the power to make us question whether we’re driving or being driven.

That’s exactly what you want your communications strategy to accomplish.

You want to be the focal point of a simple idea about a lot of really important ideas. You want the audience to see you as the opportunity to act and, through their actions, accomplish some kind of influence on the outcome. To do that you have to have a sense of purpose, a vision, and a strategy. And it has to arrive at the audience in a form that is sweet, simple, and satisfying.

When you do the work to get to the point where your story is ready for primetime, the telling becomes a simple matter of making sure that it’s dressed for the occasion.

We Can Help You Get It Right

At Argonaut, we’d like to think that we’ve gotten pretty good at discovering, designing, and delivering stories that get the job done.

We don’t focus on the “video” part of video storytelling until we’re sure there’s something worth turning the camera on for. We take a lot of pride in the work we do to help our clients cut through the everydayness of their stories to find the spark that has the power to bring the whole thing to life.

When you’re ready to take your storytelling to the next level, we’re ready to help.

Everything starts with a free initial consultation. If you like what you hear, we’ll get you booked for a Discovery Session, where we’ll grab our pickaxes and shovels and go mining for Narrativium. Once we know your WHY, we’ll come up with a plan to get it all on film. From there, we’ll help you get your story out to the world so that it can truly Amplify Your Mission.