11.4 The Downsides of Stories

Missing What Lies Beneath

In delving into the dark side of the power of storytelling, it helps to remember that stories have much greater appeal than other forms of communication such as scientific data. It is because stories are so engaging that it can be hard for audience members to recognize problems. Sometimes a story is like a catchy sing-along tune: you might get so caught up in the fun side of it that you don’t stop to think about what you’re singing.

Let’s look at a story that has been repeated in many organizational textbooks: the tale of a brave IBM security guard that first appeared in William Rogers’ book Think.^[1]

The young woman, Lucille Berger, was obliged to make certain that people entering security areas wore the correct clearance identification. Surrounded by his usual entourage of white-shirted men, [IBM board chairman Thomas] Watson approached the doorway to an area where she was on guard, wearing an orange badge acceptable elsewhere in the plant, but not a green badge, which alone permitted entrance at her door. “I was trembling in my uniform, which was far too big,” she recalled. “It hid my shakes but not my voice. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him. I knew who he was all right. ‘You cannot enter. Your admittance is not recognized.’ That’s what we were supposed to say.” The men accompanying Watson were stricken; the moment held unpredictable possibilities. “Don’t you know who he is?” someone hissed. Watson raised his hand for silence, while one of the party strode off and returned with the appropriate badge.

The reason this story shows up in organizational books is clear: it’s a great way to illustrate the theme “Everyone has to play by the rules, even the big wigs.” Ms. Berger is the hero, and Mr. Watson becomes a hero for responding in the right way rather than pulling his rank (which would send the opposite theme, that rules are only for “little people”). IBM loves the story because is shows how rules are more important to them than power, and the “little people” should love it because it puts them on the same level as the most powerful people in the organization.

Critical scholar Dennis Mumby, however, looks at the power dynamics hidden in the story. He points out that the badge rule is part of a

formal system of rules created by the corporate elite (of which Watson is the head) to protect their own interests [including] to protect corporate secrets…. The corporate rules that the story deals with, then, are in place for the benefit of people like Watson, and not for people like Lucille Berger.^[2]

The story’s moral could thus be reframed as “low-level employee does risky thing with no benefit to herself.” Mumby also notes that the story is only “story worthy” because it’s an exception to the much more common rule: big wigs don’t have to follow rules (represented by that “Don’t you know who he is?” comment that someone hissed). In a way, then, it reinforces the more basic lessons that most organizations are not egalitarian and rule-bound. The way in which the story is told also emphasizes the “bigger than life” features of Watson as a person: the fact that he just has to raise his hand and underlings jump to fulfill his wishes, whereas Berger is scared to death to follow a company rule.

This is all meant to illustrate the point that many stories reinforce power structures. The trouble is, they do so in such a subtle way that people don’t realize it’s happening.

As an example, during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, there were countless news stories about heroic employees risking their lives to provide vital services to the public: nurses and doctors who were improvising how to save patients without ventilators, grocery workers who worked long hours so people could buy food, delivery drivers who put in an inhuman amount of overtime. While it was great to acknowledge their contributions by calling them “heroes,” some people began to realize that “hero” was serving as a code word for “people who weren’t provided the basic necessities to do their job.” Comedian John Oliver pointed out how irksome it was for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to thank his employees for working so hard while also making it impossible for them to maintain social distancing, not giving them adequate protective gear or hand sanitizer, and keeping them on such a tight schedule that they didn’t have time to wash their hands.

Driving service Lyft featured a story about a driver who was far along in her pregnancy but decided to put in a shift right before her due date. During the shift, she began to experience labor pains and headed to the hospital, but she received a ride request and stopped to pick up that passenger before delivering her baby a few hours later. Lyft was proud to put that story on their website to show how dedicated their employees are — but Lyft drivers aren’t employees, they’re independent contractors who don’t receive medical benefits.^[3] Think of the inspiring stories you hear about people who need an expensive medical procedure and are able to get it through an outpouring of GoFundMe contributions … which wouldn’t be necessary in a society with adequate health insurance.

Truthfulness in Stories

Turning to the truthfulness dimension (the T in the TARES test), many issues arise with stories. It seems impossibly simplistic to ask “Are stories true?” since some are and others aren’t. But as noted above, Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm theory says that we evaluate fiction and non-fiction stories the same way, and that the word “fiction” not only means a genre of literature but also is a synonym for “lie.”

There is an Italian expression, “Se non è vero, è ben trovato” which can be translated as “Even if it’s not true, it makes a great story.” This can be interpreted in different ways,^[4] but the point is not that people don’t care whether a story is true or not; it’s that they can’t always tell. A pack of lies may benefit from the same advantages as a completely accurate story, especially if the story teller knows how to tell it well.

As Chapter 3 points out, factually inaccurate statements are not the only kind of lie. Also on that list was “lies by omission,” and there was a brief discussion in that chapter of the famous witness oath: “swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” That implies that leaving something out of the story is dishonest. But the problem should be immediately apparent: the act of storytelling is, by its very nature, an exercise in imposing a framework around the continuous stream of life, and leaving out things that don’t fit is an inherent part of the process.

Lies of Omission

Another fundamental task for any storyteller is deciding where their story begins and ends, which has an enormous impact on the meaning of the story. Different parties can have wildly different interpretations of where “the beginning” ought to be. Imagine a boy and girl playing in a room with a parent in an adjacent room. The boy starts to cry, so the parent comes in to investigate, asking, “What happened?” The boy says, “She hit me!” — implying that his sister’s attack was completely unprovoked, so naturally it’s the beginning of the story. The parent asks “What happened before that?,” and the girl responds “He stole my toy” — in other words, she has a different starting point for the story, which makes him to blame for the conflict. But he replies, “I had to, she broke my toy.” And she says, “Well, he broke my toy last week.” And he says, “I broke her toy because she called me a jerkface,” and on and on. A wise parent knows how pointless it is to try to trace the story back to “the beginning;” each child wants the story to begin with the other sibling so they are not at fault.^[5]

Endings, on the other hand, determine whether the story is a happy one or a sad one, a tragedy or a comedy. A recurrent theme in the 2011 film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is “Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, then it’s not the end.” The opposite view is expressed in this exchange:

“Tell me a happy story.”

“There’s no such thing. All stories have a sad ending.”

“Then tell me a sad story but end it in the middle.”

If you want to read an incredibly heroic tale, I recommend the story of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 polar expedition, a survival saga involving a crew of 28 men stranded on the ice off of the coast of Antarctica for months, their ship destroyed by ice. While most of the men stayed behind on a barren rock island, six men set sail in a small lifeboat on an 800-mile journey to reach civilization, followed by an arduous mountain climbing trek. In the end, all 28 men survived and returned home. That was the end of the expedition, at least. When the crew got back to England in 1917, they discovered there was a world war going on, so they never got a heroes’ welcome, most were immediately recruited to join the war effort, and two died on the battlefield. Shackleton himself was frustrated that he never reached his goal, so he organized another expedition five years later, but died of a heart attack the night before they were due to depart and the expedition was scrapped. Where would you end that story?

Choosing a beginning and ending is not the only way in which lies of omission creep into a story: a storyteller must also decide which details are relevant and irrelevant. This raises big questions about how to make those decisions, and makes it easy for a storyteller to leave out anything that doesn’t make the hero look heroic or the villain look bad. Autobiographical stories, for instance, are inherently self-serving: if you tell the story of dealing with a horrible bureaucrat at the DMV, you’re not going to tell it in such a way that you look just as bad as the clerk behind the counter. There are numerous websites that look at biographical movies and point out the “inconvenient” details that were left out because they would spoil the theme of the movie. Those are just biopics: what if you tried to make a narrative out of something broader than one person’s life? Makela and Mitoja say that “While narratives are ideally suited to conveying human experiences, they may simplify and misrepresent — or simply fail to depict — complex social interactions or material processes that have a timescale that goes beyond an individual lifetime, such as climate change.”^[6] To put it bluntly: stories are too neat and packaged to capture the messiness of life.

The problem with this neat and tidy packaging is perhaps most strongly felt in the world of news coverage, where a reporter or writer deciding what the story is in advance can significantly alter what they see, how they interview people, and what they print. One reason people are losing faith in news organizations overall (see Chapter 9) seems to be the perception that this kind of narrative focus leads to confirmation bias: once a reporter has decided that a particular election year is “the year of the woman,” they will make that the story regardless of how well it fits the actual data.

Representation

Another issue with stories is that audiences often derive universal life lessons from them, but for a lesson to be universal, the implication is that the story is representative. In Makela and Mitoja’s words, “universal lessons are being drawn from random experience” (p. 203). A parent of a child with a rare disease might do such a good job testifying about their child’s condition that the legislature passes a law to research that disease — ignoring the fact that that condition is so rare that it doesn’t merit drawing resources away from more widespread problems. This is an example of the vividness effect discussed in Chapters 2 and 6: a one-time event told in a compelling way can create the inaccurate impression that “This happens all the time,” or at least, “When it does happen, it’s so bad that we should do whatever we can to prevent it.”

On the positive side, a few examples of a great outcome can create the false impression that “it can happen to you”: read a story about someone who won the lottery twice in one day, and you might be convinced to blow all your earnings on Powerball tickets. Sometimes the “winning” is in the form of making your fortune as a musician, writer, or TV show creator in the post-gatekeeper world (see Chapter 18). In the old days, if you wanted to achieve success in those fields, you had to get signed on to a record company, publisher, or TV network, but William Deresiewicz complains that the “techno-utopian narrative” in the 21st century implies that “anyone can make it if they try,” and everyone promoting that narrative goes back to the same examples over and over, like Chance the Rapper, who won three Grammys without a record deal; Andy Weir, who published his novel The Martian on his own website; and Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, whose show Broad City began as a self-produced web series.^[7] The issue is that those shining examples are as rare as Powerball winners, and the vast majority of musicians, writers, and would-be TV auteurs never make a decent living at their art.

A related issue with stories is hindsight bias — the presumption that people should have been able to foresee the future before it happened. People make books and movies about successes, so this is a universal problem with biopics: of course those foolish record executives should have been able to recognize that “a six-minute quasi-operatic dirge comprised of nonsense words” by a weird band called Queen would be a major hit. Naysayers who don’t believe in the protagonist’s dream automatically become the villain. This completely ignores the cold, hard fact that most artists, inventors, and geniuses don’t achieve success no matter how brilliant they are. Consider as well the tens of thousands of books that have been published about leadership, most written by leaders who achieved success and think you can too if you just follow their formula. These stories are inspirational, but people who follow their model precisely can be disappointed that it doesn’t work out the same for them.

Stories and Science

Taken together, these issues show why many people feel that storytelling and science are natural enemies. Both strive for the same goal — understanding the world we live in — but scientists argue that storytelling is less reliable and trustworthy, and leads people astray. Just because a story “makes sense” doesn’t mean it is true, and one of the roles of science is to show us that common sense ideas are often wrong.

On the other hand, stories have so much more human appeal than scientific data that scientists often feel like they are fighting a losing battle. Take the beliefs about whether vaccines cause autism. The scientific basis for that causal connection has always been extremely weak: an English doctor named Andrew Wakefield published a single study in 1998 in the medical journal The Lancet, the article was later found to be based on fraudulent data and fully retracted, and the doctor lost his license. Subsequent studies have consistently shown that there is no link at all between vaccines and autism,^[8] yet the idea has stubbornly refused to die. Why? Because the stories of children developing autism shortly after receiving vaccinations — a classic example of the Faulty Causality or Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy discussed in Chapter 7 — continue to “ring true” and “hang together” for many people. And they coexist with the story Wakefield told after losing his license, which could be phrased as “the establishment is trying to stop me from telling you the truth.” Meanwhile, the opposing story, “doctor makes up data and is contradicted by all legitimate research,” doesn’t gain as much traction.

Viewing storytelling and science as enemies unfortunately creates the impression that science shouldn’t include stories, and thereby shouldn’t take advantage of their power. Not all scientists think this way, and there is a growing recognition that science should instead capitalize on the power of stories. Science has many good stories to tell, and people like Lucy Hawking encourage scientists to embrace stories instead of avoiding them. In regard to teaching science, she says, “School science tends to suffer from a failure to generate a sense of anticipation around an unfolding narrative.” If her last name sounds familiar, it’s because she is the daughter of one of the most famous scientists in recent history, Stephen Hawking. Her TED talk is worth watching: