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// You can tell the truest story in the world and still be ignored — if you tell it in the wrong shape.
Why do people not see this…?
Why do we craft — then promptly settle — on a story?
And not just a story — but a certain way of telling a story?
It’s Everywhere.
Most depressingly… it’s found in the appeals that deeply inspiring (courageous, incredible, and every other positive adjective possible) changemakers make to world leaders.
Tears locked, crackling throat loaded, changemakers walk to the podium (or their platform of choice). They strategically look left, pause, look right — as if assessing these individuals — these ‘true’ decision-makers in summits, in conferences, in front of phones capturing X-shared snippets — as if passing judgement upon them.
(As though sincerity were a universal/common language!)
Why-oh-why-oh-why!
It isn’t. Tell the wrong kind of story to the wrong audience and it doesn’t merely miss — it offends. The listener reads it as manipulation, as an attack in a tongue they never agreed to speak.
Using such a Story Frame to scold a dictator with feeling is about as effective as scolding a cat: you yell, and still, paws cocked, they glance deep into those fiery-eyes-of-yours, and gently (ever-so-gently) push your Fabergé egg to the floor. You yell, again. It does it, again.
Story vs. Story Frame
Here’s the distinction that matters:
A Story is a way of seeing a certain slice of the world in a certain way.
Storytelling is how we tell those stories to others to convince them of the story’s ‘truth’.
A Story Frame is the shape you pour it into to pass it on — and a single story can be framed/Storytold (communicated, spread, suggested) in a near-infinite number of ways, most of them wrong for any given listener.
A Narrative is a different beast, a chaotic Pandora’s box with no rhyme and reason except belief. (That’s for another read).
The story can be true, urgent, righteous. If the frame doesn’t speak the listener’s language, the truth dies on delivery.
The flaccid cycle repeats.
We then, like magpie-lemming hybrids, proceed to share that same Story to all. Handing it out with the grace of a rich Girl Scout, spilling cookies as she skips, in it only for the ‘experience’.
Perhaps that’s where the 5-Second Rule comes into play. For onlookers and ‘target audiences’ (that dreadful, cookie-cutter word that I can imagine Dahmer whispering to himself in a scum-soaked mirror), those spilled cookies are appetising for a moment or two, before we realise they’ve been tainted.
They’re not for us.
That Girl Scout dropped them, leaving crumbs in her wake.
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So the changemakers weep at the podium, and the status quo licks itself clean after each disaster, and the cycle repeats — not because the story was wrong, but because the frame was.
I ask the changemakers: if the sweet tooth ain’t even stimulated, why would victims target audiences follow the sugar-bricked road to you, the Storyteller? Why would we believe — be convinced of your vision, your product, your idea — when you toss it off with such reckless abandon (and lack of strategic thought) that it turns our desire to know more completely (and utterly) flaccid?
Alas, dictators don’t spare the dramatic. Why do we keep handing it to them?