It’s telling how telling a telling can be | Are.na Editorial

about another person, a group of people, an entity of some kind, a culture, an industry, or even an object. In a business story, the thing that changes might be the company, the product, the type of service, the leadership, the platform, the life of the customer, and so on. For example:

In a perfect world, the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its author’s eloquence. But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes. If you look, I think you’ll find that wherever information is exchanged—wherever there are products, companies, careers, poli

designing for narrative is very different from designing for information seeking.

While there are certainly a lot of bad storytellers, the real problem is that many people don’t understand what constitutes a story. Instead, they simply report on their lives. Reporting amounts to recounting events over an arbitrarily chosen period of time. It feels like storytelling because it often includes location, action, and dialogue, but it

stories are told and retold because they contain wisdom. Stories are effective teaching tools. They show how context can mislead people to make the wrong decisions. Stories illustrate causal relationships that people hadn’t recognized before and highlight unexpected, resourceful ways in which people have solved problems.