The Power and Limits of Storytelling
Posted by Allison Fine on March 30, 2009
I love this video about telling the story of Red Riding Hood with social media:
Each one of us, and certainly the orgs that we work with and for, have the power to tell our stories in more visual and powerful ways using social media. YouTube is filled with compelling videos by causes, Witness does a majestic job of using video to document and share human rights abuses from around the world, and NPR is using a variety of tools, voices and mechanisms to enhance it’s storytelling ability. Andy Goodman has long been an advocate for and teacher of good storytelling for causes as well.
Everyone loves a good story, especially one told in vibrant, expressive and visual ways. Everyone that is except for evaluators. Although I am not a full-time evaluator any more, I still walk the talk at times, particularly as it relates to the need for causes to participate in creating ongoing learning systems for their efforts.
The limits of storytelling for learning are that they so easily skew an overall effort to learn about what’s working and what isn’t. When you pluck out your best, most compelling or heart string plucking, story to tell the world about your cause, you often forget about the other experiences that folks are having. This may be intentional or unintentional, but the bottom line is that powerful stories often drwon out the real story of what’s happening within a cause effort. It’s easy to listen to the loud voices because they’re, well, loud, but much harder to listen to the quieter ones who probably represent the norm of the experience with your effort. It’s similar to the effect in politics of the extreme ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum drowning out the middle as Morris Fiorina wrote in his slime volume, “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.”
Causes need to practice balancing the power of storytelling with the need for careful listening and learning. The key to doing this, in my opinion, is to lead with learning and follow with storytelling; it may not be as immediately rewarding, it may mean that the development and communications folks at your org are a bit frustrated at having to wait a little while to get to that amazing YouTube video posted, but the results will be truer to your cause and will enable you to focus on your true goal; improving your social change efforts over time, not just selling your effort.
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This entry was posted on March 30, 2009 at 5:21 am and is filed under Social Media. Tagged: * Video File * Quick Capture Slagsmålsklubben, Andy Goodman, Morris Fiorina, npr, witness, youtube. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
3 Responses to “The Power and Limits of Storytelling”
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Rebecca said
Very thought provoking. As I was reading I felt something was missing…first question to me was ‘learn what?’ How does that change the story? Or does it change which story I tell or how I tell it? I start with listening, then learn what people are saying, how they are saying it, what moves them, and then tell my story in that context. Right?
And then finding the hook, to be able to tell even the little story with enough passion and personal insight so its just as powerful as the big story.
Allison Fine said
Thanks, Rebecca, your comment made me realize that I should have been more explicit about the difference between learning and storytelling. Learning is my shorthand for orgs developing a clear plan that makes clear the assumptions that their programs are based on; meaning that we are going to do these activites because we assume it will lead to these particular sets of results (e.g. number of people served, and these people will be happy, healthier, more aware of our issue, or better able to help themselves in these ways) Learning is the art of testing these assumptions – did our efforts lead to these particular results. This is what you’re trying to learn about — and some of those results are the basis for your storytelling. Hope that makes sense, thanks for reminding me to tell a fully learning story!
Allison
Twitter Storytelling by Dan Baum « A. Fine Blog said
[...] I love the idea of using social media tools for storytelling and have posted before about both the power and limitations of doing so. Here’s a great example of ways we can challenge ourselves to look at the variety [...]