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Why Storytelling Matters

How This All Started

Every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the story of how I came to write this book follows that same structure. Back in 2013 I was invited to speak at a conference in London and proposed a talk about design and storytelling. My dad and I have had many chats about our respective lines of work, and during those talks I was often struck by the many similarities between writing books, as my dad does, and working on digital products and physical experiences, as I do. When it was time to put together my storytelling talk, I gave my dad a call to ask what he considered to be the key ingredients when he writes his books. It’s said that “Good things come in threes,” and my dad says that three elements should be present in a good story.

First of all, he said, a good story should capture your imagination. Just as the books dad would read to us when we were kids sent us to places we didn’t know existed, a good story should be engaging and should get your imagination going by creating pictures in your mind. Brad Fulchuk, the co-creator of American Horror Story, says that “If you can imagine yourself in a situation, it’s infinitely scarier.”1 Though you let your audience see some things, you leave the rest to the imagination. Whether it’s a horror story or a fairy tale, one of the powers of a good story is its magic of making us see.

Second, according to my dad, is the dynamic of the story. Every single story has events and people that tie it together. The dynamic of the story is about how these develop, from the beginning to the end. Does the story start by looking back, or is it set in the present, or perhaps the future? No matter how it begins, in a good story things happen for a reason. There are causal relationships, and ―a common thread or theme—or röd tråd as we call it in Swedish—runs through and connects them all. It is both the overarching theme of the story as well as the little details and how they make up the whole.

The last and third element of a good story, my dad identified, is the element of surprise. Fulchuk captures this perfectly:

In general, there should be a basic idea of where the story is going, but not for every character. You don’t know who’s going to die and who’s going to start becoming more important. Big picture-wise, there’s a basic idea, but you need some surprises too. It’s like driving from New York to LA: you know you’re going to get to LA, but there’s 10 different routes you could take.

This quote encapsulates all three elements of a good story. Just by reading it, you can imagine yourself sitting in a dark theater, watching the scary movie he is talking about. Your heart beats slightly faster than normal. The music is intense, and your hand is going back and forth between the popcorn bag and your mouth. You know something is about to happen and that someone most likely will die. Whether you like it or not, you start to imagine who it might be and how it might happen. You know the basic plot of the story, and as the story unfolds, the dynamic becomes clear. You start to identify the little details that shape the red thread. Piece by piece, your idea of how the story will unfold becomes stronger, but you don’t want to know who will be killed, or who the killer is, at least not just yet.

As my dad and I continued talking about what makes a good story, I began to recognize the many parallels between what he does as an author and what I do as a UX designer. In our day-to-day jobs as UX designers, we need to capture the imagination and attention of the people we’re working with and for, and the users we’re designing for. Though we’re not out to scare our users and customers, if they can imagine themselves using our products and services, and if they identify with the story we’re telling them, then our products and services will be more successful.

Being able to capture the imagination is also key for creating empathy in the users for whom we’re designing, as well as for getting buy-in from clients and internal stakeholders. This ability plays a role in everything from making them see what we see when it comes to the value we can offer and the vision we have, to the nitty-gritty of what we communicate verbally and “on paper.”

As for the dynamic and that red thread, there needs to be a clear narrative and structure to what we’re designing. Every piece of content and every feature should be there for a reason. As we’ll look at in Chapter 11, “Theme and Story Development in Product Design,” it should serve a purpose in asking the user to do something.

And last, with regard to the element of surprise, although that red thread and structure should run through everything, we shouldn’t signpost every single call to action (CTA) or restrict the experience too much. Instead we should let the users find their way around. There’s a great opportunity in including elements of surprise in the products and services that we work on, whether that’s something that brings users back in and captures their attention as they scroll down a page, or something that turns a typically burdensome process like sign-up or checkout into a pleasant surprise.

These were just some of the thoughts that sprung to mind after the conversation with my dad. As I began to research traditional storytelling techniques, it became clear just how powerful of a tool storytelling really is. So many aspects of it—from the role that storytelling has, to the different ways to structure, tell, and bring a story to life—can be applied to various aspects of designing and working with digital products and experiences.

In this chapter we look at the role of storytelling throughout history, various storytelling mediums, and the role storytelling plays today. If you’re familiar with the history of storytelling, feel free to jump to the end of this chapter, where I talk about storytelling today as well as its relevance to product design.

The Role of Stories Throughout History

When you look back through history, you can see that stories have always played an important part in our lives. In this section, we take a look at some of the roles of storytelling.

Storytelling as a Way to Connect and Pass on Information

Long before the written word was invented in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC,2 we’d tell stories about the moon and the stars, battles that’d been lost and won, and tales of the world out there that’d we’d not yet discovered. Telling stories was our way to pass along information across generations to make sure that history, facts, and customs like how to live off the land weren’t lost. It was also a way for us to make sense of the world around us.

Storytelling helped us find a way to explain what we didn’t understand, the things we feared, and that which we desired. Storytelling in various forms offered security in the explanations it provided. Stories helped make what we were going through more tangible and fostered and maintained a sense of community by connecting the past, the present, and the future. Through telling stories, we were able to give others a glimpse into what had happened and share our beliefs about the world we lived in.

Storytelling as a Way to Instill Moral Values

While storytelling in the early days was mainly used to explain and pass on information, fables—succinct fictional stories written in prose or verse that feature animals, plants, and mythical creatures that are given human qualities—are one example of how stories have been used throughout history to communicate moral values. Even to this day, Aesop’s Fables, a collection of fables credited to the slave Aesop who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE, continue to teach us lessons about life. But fables have also been used for other purposes.

In medieval times, they were used as a way to make fun of and satirize tribal events without the risk of retribution, and in Ancient Greek and Roman times, fables formed the first of the progymnasmata–a training exercise focused on prose composition and public speaking. Students were asked to learn a variety of fables, expand upon them, make up their own, and then use them in persuasive arguments. This has a close connection to the role that storytelling can play today in design and the workplace overall, whether for delivering presentations, giving a talk, or simply presenting your work.

Storytelling as a Profession

Whether it’s used for increasing sales or coming up with a best seller, mastering storytelling, in whichever form it takes, is a real art. During the Middle Ages, it was highly regarded, and being a storyteller was seen as one of the finest professions one could have. Troubadours, or bards, traveled from town to town and village to village and were in great demand as entertainers and educators. Storytellers from different tribes would even compete with one another to see who could come up with the most compelling and captivating tales to tell.

Just as students in ancient Greek and Roman times used fables to improve their prose composition and speaking skills, practicing the art of storytelling and presentation skills is something we see today in the globally run PechaKucha nights. In these events, presenters show 20 images, spending 20 seconds per image before it automatically moving to the next one. Now run in more than one thousand cities, PechaKucha was invented in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture as a format for architects to show and share their work while not talking too much. Today it has expanded well beyond architects where anyone can present. Many companies run their own internal PechaKucha events to practice presentation skills in a fun and informal way that also brings the company or team together outside normal day-to-day responsibilities.

Though being a great storyteller doesn’t take the same form as it did in the Middle Ages, the ability to present with impact or run a successful workshop with clients or internal stakeholders are skills that become ever more important the further up the career ladder you move. And these skills are closely related to being a good storyteller.

Storytelling as an Early form of Branding

Storytelling has played a key role in fostering and maintaining a sense of community. It has also had a role in creating an identity that those in the inner circle could relate to and that outsiders would recognize, similar to how indigenous groups passed on customs and the prowess of their tribes.

Branding as we know it today started to take shape in the 1950s, when the images and characters that appeared on packages started to have personalities and backstories instead of just being decorative. The Marlboro Man is a good example. Clarence Hailey Long, an ordinary cowboy, became the face of the cigarettes and helped the Philip Morris cigarette company increase the sales of its cigarettes, originally aimed at women, by 300%.3

Today identity and values are key aspects of a brand. In Tell to Win, author and Hollywood producer Peter Guber says we’re increasingly told that “without a compelling story, our product, idea, or personal brand is dead on arrival” and that “if you can’t tell it, you can’t sell it.”4 In a world so full of noise and competition, whatever your view on storytelling is, there’s no denying that these quotes hold true. In the words of Linda Boff, CMO at General Electric, “Audiences are looking well beyond what you sell. They want to know who you are and what you stand for.”5 They want to be able to relate.

The Medium of Stories

Just as the role of storytelling has changed across the 200,000 years that human beings have been on this earth, how we’ve shared and told our stories has also evolved in a way that has shaped society.

Oral Storytelling

The earliest forms of storytelling were oral and combined gestures and expressions to communicate the narrative. It is believed that many oral stories were myths created to explain natural occurrences, from thunderstorms to solar eclipses, and that others were told as a way to express fears and beliefs as well as to share tales of one’s heroism.

Oral storytelling would often take place with the audience seated in a circle, creating a close connection between the storyteller and people in the audience through the story they would share. Much of the power of the story would lie in the storyteller’s ability to adapt the story to the needs of the audience and/or the location. Because each storyteller had a different personality, no single story would be the same. This still holds true to how we tend to tell stories today.6

Rock Art

Other early forms of storytelling revolved around hunting practices and rituals and took the form of rock art. Rock art has played an important part in many ancient cultures.

The Aborigines in Australia used rock art not only as part of religious rituals, but also as a way to tell stories of now extinct megafauna such as Genyornis (a large flightless bird) and Thylacoleo (also called the marsupial lion). More recently, the rock art told of the arrivals of European ships. All of this helped bring meaning to various aspects of human existence.

While the Aborigines often told their stories through a combination of oral narrative, gestures, singing, dancing, and music, the pictures they painted on the stone walls were there to help the narrator remember the story. Similarly, the images we use in presentations today help us remember the points we are trying to get across.

Portable Materials

In addition to rock art, people used carvings, sand, and leaves to tell stories before developing a way to write. These materials allowed us to leave our stories behind and share them with others. As the written word began to evolve around 3200 BC, stories could be transported and shared over larger geographical areas. We used whatever we had on hand and started painting and carving out our stories in wood, bamboo, leather, clay tablets, ivory, skins, bones, textiles, and more.

However, despite having a way to document our stories, oral storytelling retained an important role and ensured that the tales we were telling could travel even further and live on. Aesop’s Fables is a good example of this tradition. His fables were kept alive through oral storytelling and written down only three hundred years after his death from the sixth century BC.7

The importance of stories being portable is something we’ve observed with the rise of the internet. Smartphones especially enable us to read, listen to, and watch stories almost no matter where we are.

Movable Type and the Printing Press

Though there have been ways to reproduce a body of text with reusable characters since 3000 BC (through the punches used to make coins in ancient Sumer and later on stamps), the first known movable type system for printing paper books was made of porcelain and invented in China in 1040. The world’s oldest extant book printed with metal movable type was Jikji, a Korean Buddhist document, during the Goryeo dynasty in 1377.

Around 1440, the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg. The German inventor created a complete system that allowed for both rapid and precise creation of metal movable type. This system allowed prints to be made in large quantities, and over the next several decades, the printing press spread from a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, to around 270 cities across Europe. By 1500, it’s believed that more than 20 million volumes had been printed. During the 16th century, the output increased tenfold. This gave birth to a completely new industry that took its name after the enterprise of printing itself, the press. Gutenberg’s system was also the birth of the printed book, which is believed to have been in universal use from around 1480, and the rise of best-selling authors. This has some parallels to the growth of blogs and professional bloggers today.

The Rise of Mass Communication

The introduction of mechanical movable type meant that the need for oral storytellers almost disappeared. This invention also led to an era of mass communication that altered society in Renaissance Europe. Think about how social media enabled movements like #MeToo (which encouraged women to speak out publicly about their experiences with sexual harassment and assault), to shake up not only the music and film industries, but also politics and academia. Similarly, the printing press enabled mass-produced information to circulate relatively unrestricted, and threatened the power of both political and religious authorities.

The printing press also made possible a rapid growth in literacy, which made learning and education something that no longer was limited to the elites, but instead bolstered an emerging middle class. The printing press also gave rise to a community of scientists who circulated their discoveries through scholarly journals. Authorship became both profitable and more important. Previously, authorship had not mattered― as much; a copy of Aristotle’s work made in Paris, for example, would be different from a copy made somewhere else. But now, all of a sudden, it was important who had said or written what and when. As a result the rule “One author, one work (title), one piece of information” was established.

In the 19th century, the hand-operated Gutenberg press was replaced with steam-operated rotary presses. Printing reached an industrial scale, allowing millions of copies of a page to be printed in one day. The mass production of printed works flourished and dominated the way we consumed and shared information, until the radio was introduced to our homes in 1910. Each medium of mass technology that was subsequently introduced, including the television and the internet, altered the way we told and experienced stories, as well as the role that stories played in our lives. While storytelling had previously been much more about passing on information and explaining the world around us, the introduction of the printing press, radio, and later TV and the internet, increasingly changed the focus to entertainment.

The Role of Personal Storytelling in Day-to-Day Lives

Over time, the way we tell stories and the role they play in our lives have changed. But what hasn’t changed is the need for, and the art of, storytelling itself. Human beings are storytelling creatures by nature. In fact, storytelling is one of the many things that define us.

Every day we create stories of our own, from daydreams to actual dreams at night. Though they are easy to brush off as just “stuff,” we can learn from them and even and draw from them in our professional life as well.

Dreams

Dreams have always formed a big part of our personal day-to-day storytelling that we share with family, friends, and colleagues. The earliest record of documented dreams stems from Mesopotamia approximately five thousand years ago, when dreams were recorded on clay tablets so they could be interpreted.8 Many people today have positive associations with dreams, from retelling the “you-wouldn’t-believe-what-I-dreamt-last-night” dreams to fascinations around what it all might mean.

Back in the Middle Ages, however, dreams were seen as evil, with Martin Luther (among others) believing that dreams were the work of the devil. He wasn’t the first to believe that dreams were messages from “someone” else. In ancient Greece and Rome, people believed that dreams were messages from deities and that they predicted the future. This led to some cultures practicing dream incubation in order to cultivate dreams that would reveal prophecies.

While there have been many theories and speculations about why we dream, many scientists now endorse the Freudian theory of dreams, which stipulates that they reveal hidden desires and emotions. Another well-regarded and prominent theory is that although some dreams are simply random creations by our brain’s activity, in general dreams assist in problem-solving and memory formation.

Daydreams

For many years, daydreaming was associated with laziness and seen as something that could even be dangerous. This view primarily came into play when the work we did moved into assembly lines and was dictated by the motions of the tools that we were using. These tools left little room for zoning out, and the short-term detachment from the immediate surrounding that daydreaming inherently involves.

Today daydreaming is widely accepted as a way for the mind to ease boredom and consolidate learning. In fact, daydreaming is the default state of the mind, and we spend about half of our waking hours in fantasy land, the equivalent of a third of our lives. Whenever the mind isn’t busy with something important or when it gets bored, it wanders, and this happens about two thousand times a day, lasting on average 14 seconds.9

For many, daydreams involve happy associations, hopes, and ambitions of things coming to pass. It’s now commonly acknowledged that rather than being a sign of laziness, daydreaming can lead to constructive results, including the development of new ideas, both creatively and scientifically. In this sense, daydreaming is not too different from visualizations that are used to create mental images of what we want to happen or feel in real life.

Visualizations

Visualizations are another form of powerful day-to-day story creation that is used by many professional athletes as part of their training process before big competitions and events. By going through and narrating in their minds how they would like an event to unfold or feel, the athlete is doing a mental rehearsal that is scientifically proven to cultivate a competitive edge and increase mental awareness as well as a heightened sense of well-being and confidence. Research has found that this mental rehearsal has positive effects on both mental and physical reactions, and it is as powerful in business as it is in sports. Through visualizations that involve the visual, kinetic, or auditory senses, we step right into the story we’re creating, which also positions us better for passing on and communicating our desired outcomes to others.10

The Power of Personal Storytelling

Dreams, daydreams, and visualizations all help us to put things into context, to process what we’ve experienced and learned, and to test ideas that are new or that we may fear. Just as the books dad would read to us took us to new places in our imaginations, the stories we create consciously and subconsciously in our minds take us on journeys too. They create emotional responses in our minds and bodies by making us see and feel things, not just in the moment, but for hours to come.

Igniting an emotional connection and sparking the imagination are both key desired outcomes for all great stories and storytellers. Whether we keep our dreams, daydreams, and visualizations to ourselves or retell them to friends, family, or colleagues, they are tools that help us process and learn. They also engage our imaginations and can help us practice retelling our experiences, which is something we can bring with us into our work.

Storytelling Today

In addition to the dreams we create ourselves, we’re surrounded by stories created by others—from films and series that we watch on TV and on demand, to both shorter and longer narratives in the form of text, visuals, and audio. While stories back in the day traditionally were something we would observe or passively listen to, today’s stories invite active participants.

We see it in traditional storytelling like films that have introduced interactivity. In the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, for example, viewers make decisions for the main character (Figure 1-1).11 We also see it in product or services campaigns that ask users to contribute with their own stories in the form of content, and that provide interactive mediums and platforms for the user or audience to influence the next turn of events in the narrative. With virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) still far from being mainstream, but gaining traction, we’re at a point where we’ll soon immerse ourselves right into the world of the stories that are being created.

Figure 1-1

Screenshot from the film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch depicting one of the decisions the viewer has to make for the main character

Our exposure to storytelling isn’t happening just through the more traditional platforms of TV screens, books, and magazines, however. We’re increasingly seeing the art of storytelling being picked up by politicians on TV, CEOs and leaders in their speeches, and even in the restaurants, exhibitions, and open spaces we visit. We’re living in a world that’s increasingly being curated to help cut through the noise and wealth of information out there so that we can find what we’re after more easily.

If you look at it from the seller’s point of view, there’s an increased need for a way to stand out from the competition. Whether it’s a restaurant owner, an exhibition organizer, a CEO, or a store, they are all looking for interesting angles and different ways to get their story and their product and service offering across.

This shift toward curated experiences is not just something that is driven by brands. It’s also reflected in consumer behavior and what we call the experience economy, people spending less money on clothes and food and more on holidays, cars, entertainment, and eating out.12 This change in consumer spending behavior is partly what is driving the rise of curated experiences and content marketing and strategy overall. And it’s all with good reason. Although immersive experiences are nothing new (nor content marketing or storytelling overall, for that matter), the need to excel at connecting with our audience has increased. This is where the importance of mastering the art of storytelling comes in, whether it’s for us as individuals, as leaders, startup founders, brands, or as designers.

Stories as a Persuasion Tool

For a long time, we were able to only speculate about the persuasive effect of stories. But over the last several decades, people have studied how stories in their various forms affect the human mind and how we process information.

These studies have revealed that when we read dry, factual arguments, we read with our guard up. In other words, we’re skeptical and critical. When we’re presented with a story, on the other hand, something happens to us. We lower our guard and are moved emotionally, and this somehow seems to leave us defenseless. In a Fast Company article from February 2012 titled “Why Storytelling Is The Ultimate Weapon,”13 Jonathan Gottshall, the author of The Storytelling Animal writes:

Results repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.

It’s not surprising, then, that brands and organizations are increasingly paying attention to the importance of storytelling in relation to connecting and engaging with their customers. But how much truth is there, really, to the persuasive effects of stories? And to what extent can we use it in design?

Stories as a Means to Move People to Action

In addition to serving as a communication tool and entertainment, stories have been used throughout history, from tribe wars to activists, to move people into action. Storytelling been used as a way to get behind a cause and to drive people forward, whether it’s to move past enemy lines, fight for a cause, or go on a pilgrimage.

Peter Guber talks of purposeful stories and how they are essential for persuading others to support a vision or a cause. He defines a purposeful story as “a story you tell with a specific purpose in mind,” and draws the parallel that it can be as simple as the laughter you want at the end of a joke you tell.14 Whether it’s a laugh we’re after or something else, every single story we tell, is driven by our a desire for an action and/or a response from the person or people on the other side. What many of us fail to do is be clear about what this action is, or even one step before that, to stop and identify the purpose of our story and determine how to best tell it to get the action or response we want.

Purposeful Stories

While in any good story there tends to be a promise of something to come, inherent in purposeful stories is a goal that the story is leading up to and that the storyteller is trying to get people behind. Whatever purpose we might have with the story we tell, actions form a big part of how we tell that story, from the subtle actions that we ourselves take in how we tell and communicate our story, to the actions we ask the person on the receiving end to take.

Actions are particularly important when we talk about purposeful and persuasive stories in relation to design and business. Purposeful stories help us get internal team members, stakeholders, and clients to buy into UX, for example, and the other solutions we’re proposing. These stories also play a key part in how we design experiences and the actual calls to action that we include and direct users to in our products, from the primary one to the secondary and supporting ones. These CTAs need to resonate and correspond to what matters to users, not just in terms of what they need and where they are in their journey and their own story, but also in how the language used on the CTA reflects that. Only when all these requirements have been met will the story be something that moves the user into action.

The Role of Storytelling in Product Design

A large part of what we do day to day at work is tell stories, whether we’re aware of it or not. We might use a metaphor to explain something, for example, or talk about the experiences we’re designing through the eyes of the persona or user journeys we’ve defined. As UX designers, we’re used to using storytelling in various forms for defining and designing our work. At times our storytelling is more explicit, and other times it’s something we’re not really aware of but just do without giving it too much thought.

As the complexities of what we design for are increasing and users’ interactions move beyond the paradigm of the screen, tangible and measurable benefits can be gained by applying storytelling principles in a more active and explicit way, from the start to the finish of a project. The rest of the book will cover this topic in more depth.

Storytelling as a Tool for the Product Design Process

The most obvious way that storytelling can help us is in ensuring that we’re designing a good experience narrative for our products and services. Learning from the traditional methods that are used when writing novels, plays, and scripts for TV and film can also offer many more tangible benefits to the process of a project. These benefits range from providing frameworks and tools that help us understand how things are and how they should be, to ensuring that we think through experiences holistically, addressing the increased challenges that we’re facing with a growing number of devices, touch points (ways consumers interact with a business, e.g., via website, app, or other form of communication), and input methods, and, importantly, thinking through who we’re designing for.

Storytelling as a Tool for Getting Buy-in

In addition to being a great tool for helping us understand, define, and design products and services, storytelling is a really effective tool for getting buy-in to user-centered design, agile ways of working, and our proposed solutions. As UX designers, strategists, marketers, and product owners, we’re used to defining who our target audience is. To varying degrees, we develop personas, pen portraits, user journeys, flows, and other deliverables to help us, the rest of the team, and key stakeholders keep the users in mind. We define, among other things, what matters to them (needs), what they want to accomplish (goals), what may worry them (concerns), and any obstacles (barriers and risks) in the experience.

However, we often forget to apply these same principles and tools to the people we work with and, more importantly, the people we report to and present our work to. Whether it’s a client or an internal stakeholder, the higher up the food chain you go, the more time-poor the person in question is and the more critical it will be to understand what really matters to them. Failing to do so will result in misalignments and miscommunication, and in really severe cases it can damage collaboration and relationships, be they internal or external. “Death by PowerPoint” is a(n almost) real thing, and more often than not we overdeliver in actual work deliverables, but underdeliver in the value that the work brings to our clients, and at times users. This is where the importance of storytelling comes in and where simple frameworks and principles can help ensure that you’re telling a clear and well-structured story that is relevant and tailored to your audience.

Storytelling as a Way to Understand the People We Design For

As for the customer on the other end, whether the user is just finding out about your product or service, or has been a loyal customer for a while, each and every user is different. Though users’ journeys can be similar, each journey is also different, no matter how much we’d like to plan out the user’s journey from A to B to C and so forth.

When you look at these journeys and break down what a user may think, feel, need, and worry about, and how they may have ended up right there, and where they may go next, then each and every journey also becomes a story. It’s a story that the user is right in the middle of and a story that we, no matter how trite it might sound, are trying to control.

In order to achieve that control and to make sure that the user cares about the product story we’re telling, we need to ensure that the two are compatible. Turning to traditional storytelling can help ensure that we both understand the people we’re designing for better, and align the product story we’re telling with the user’s own story.

Summary

Looking through the history of storytelling, we can see that the role and value that stories have had in the past remain relevant today. In the product design process, one of the key roles, no matter whether it’s used in the design process, for buy-in, or for presenting, is for us to use storytelling in a purposeful way, focusing on an action or outcome. This isn’t, however, about using storytelling as a marketing tool. It’s about how we can better connect with the people on the other end.

Stories have a persuasive effect on us because they connect with us emotionally. They may tap into something that’s already there, like an interest, passion, or subject that matters to us; or the story itself may convince us of something. Either way, the key to the persuasive effect lies in the connection the story and storyteller make with the person on the other side—just as oral storytellers always have done.

In traditional storytelling, the author has control over each turn of events. But when it comes to our users and customers’ experiences today, we have very little control of how they get there and where they’ll go next. That said, even if we can’t completely dictate these parameters, it doesn’t mean that we should leave them to chance. The more complex the experiences we work on become with regard to multiple entry and exit points and touch points overall, and the more sophisticated technology becomes, the more offline and online will connect. As much as we talk about digital products and experiences, nothing is purely digital anymore. Everything is connected. With the increased implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into products and services, the more curated our world will get. Therefore, it becomes even more important that we create products and services that not only resonate with and work for our individual users and customers, but also for the business. This is where learning from traditional storytelling comes in.

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