The Right Story: The secret to spreading your ideas

Stories are a compass for the heart.

And we started to prioritise the immediate benefit we wanted to get from the interaction. We neglected to build trust before sharing the message and instead obsessed over just delivering it. The result is that we have changed from purposeful storytellers, who care about how the audience or user feels, to pragmatic communicators who prioritise ‘gett

Whether our ideas, innovations, communities and societies survive and thrive is still dependent on our ability to unite and work towards shared goals. Equality, justice, fairness, sustainability, creativity, innovation and our collective prosperity rely on us trusting enough to come together.

to focus on what’s unchanging about people instead.

We spoke of targeting prospects and winning the war on attention. Our motivations changed along with our language, and naturally our strategies and tactics changed too. We collected followers. Created clickbait. Counted pageviews. Tracked open rates. The medium not only changed the message, it changed the messenger too. And in the end, the tactics

Before you begin to craft your message, you need to decide if the purpose of that message is to get attention or to deepen trust and connection. Is it to empower people to be open to persuasion or to act?

Communication isn’t only about finding the right words. It’s about finding the right way and the right time to say them.

These are some of the questions you need to answer about who you are hoping to change: Who do you want to influence? What’s the change you’re helping them to undergo? What do they believe? What do they want to do, but think they can’t? What’s the unmet need you’re helping them to fulfil? What are their unspoken desires? Who will they become in the

Facebook likes had value. Marketing goals changed. Now, instead of investing time to understand customers’ unmet needs and unspoken desires as successful companies had been doing for generations, we began to monitor their online behaviour, looking for patterns and vulnerabilities, gathering data to leverage later—sometimes to serve or oftentimes to