Nice little Fast Company article on storytelling.
I'm fascinated by how many people (mostly younger, I find) are totally skeptical of storytelling. I think they misinterpret it as some kind of theatrical exercise. Which it's clearly not (the performance aspect is part of it, but the furthest down stream). Or maybe they've never spent time in an organization that values the skill ... reminds me how valuable my Ogilvy years were.
Particularly liked this point in the article ...
What is going on here? Why are we putty in a storyteller’s hands? The psychologists Melanie Green and Tim Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s studies shows that the more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. Highly absorbed readers also detected significantly fewer “false notes” in stories--inaccuracies, missteps--than less transported readers. Importantly, it is not just that highly absorbed readers detected the false notes and didn’t care about them (as when we watch a pleasurably idiotic action film). They were unable to detect the false notes in the first place.
And the Trojan Horse idea...
Guber tells us that stories can also function as Trojan Horses. The audience accepts the story because, for a human, a good story always seems like a gift. But the story is actually just a delivery system for the teller’s agenda. A story is a trick for sneaking a message into the fortified citadel of the human mind.