Novelist, award-winning journalist and author of The Science of Storytelling Will Storr talks to our Co-founder, Adam Penny, to get to the bottom of why storytelling is fundamental to purposeful business.

Beginning with 2017’s Selfie: How The West Became Self-Obsessed, Will has been mapping our cultural development from Ancient Greece to the modern day in order to understand what makes us tick. His latest book, The Status Game, delves into how our drive for status can dictate our worldview and behaviour.

Adam: Thanks so much for joining us. We feel connected to your work on storytelling and identity because they’re both at the core of how we think. In The Science of Storytelling you explore the fundamentals of how storytelling has shaped humanity’s development. Why are humans so compelled to tell stories?

Will: Humans are a species of ape that have solved the problem of cooperation. How did we ever figure out how to work together? The answer is that our brains are storytellers. And in its infant form, storytelling was gossip.

We tell morally drenched stories about each other and if you emerge as a useful person – essentially a good character – you rise in status. If you end up as a bad character, then you’re in danger of humiliation, ostracisation and the ultimate sanction: execution.

Adam: What I loved about The Science of Storytelling is you acknowledge that there’s a social construct around stories, but you also emphasise the incessant stories we tell inside our own heads. We tell different stories depending on how we’re feeling. Are we dependent on the stories we tell ourselves?

Will: In short, yes. The storytelling function is always going on, and if it isn’t, we struggle. We don’t want to get out of bed because we don’t feel heroic anymore, the world becomes unconquerable and we can end up feeling like we’re always going to fail. It’s good for us to believe these slightly illusionary stories that tell us we’re amazing and our enemies are terrible. That story is what gets us out of bed in the morning and it allows us to thrive; the mind is a sense-maker as well as a storyteller. It’s incredibly important. But we have to remember that it can also be dangerous, because it’s never wholly true.

Adam: I agree – from an individual’s perspective, their story, and therefore worldview, is the right one. Do you think conflict arises from a person’s worldview being challenged?

Will: Our storytelling brains aren’t interested in truth, they’re interested in defending the story that we tell about the world. When we encounter people that threaten that story, and therefore our status in the world, our storytelling brain kicks into gear. It starts separating the good guys from the bad guys and maximising the devilish deeds of people we believe have wronged us. We’re very good at justifying our actions.

I’m also very interested in the idea of a sacred flaw in a character. Everyone’s got a flawed idea about themselves or the world that has become sacred to them, and they arrange their entire life around that belief. Often, a good story happens when we see that sacred belief being challenged – for example, Jaws.

Everyone thinks it’s about a shark, but it’s actually about a police chief who’s terrified of the water. The shark forces him to engage with the water. The very last thing you see in the film is not the shark being blown up, but the police chief saying, “I used to be scared of the water.”

Adam: Yes – Jaws might seem popular because it’s got a killer shark and suspense and so on, but really it’s compelling because of the characters. You mentioned how defensive our storytelling brain can become when our status is threatened. How do stories and status contribute to creating our identity?

Will: The stories we consume can be incredibly powerful in shaping who we are and who we want to be. Gossip, the original form of storytelling, has two purposes: reputation – working out who people are and whether they’re good or bad – and strategy, which is learning how to become successful. How do I become amazing? How do I become the person that I want to be? Stories, particularly true ones, become magnetic because we all want to know the answer.

We tell a story about who we are inside our heads, but ultimately we want other people to believe that story in order to feel good about ourselves. That happens when we are connected in coalitions of like-minded people, no matter what form it might come in – company, religion, political party and so on.

Adam: Storytelling is the bedrock of communication for businesses, and we’ve been expressing purpose through stories for 20 years. Is something specific that led you to explore storytelling on a deeper level?

Will: I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller, and fundamentally that comes from a deep interest in how people work. In fact, I spend a lot of time worrying about other people: if I’ve upset them, what they think about me – I’ve got that neurosis.

I suppose that is the one thing that connects all of my books: trying to understand how people work, and ultimately, the idea that our identity itself is really just a story.

Adam: Let’s talk about purpose. Viktor Frankl believed there’s an inherent need for purpose and meaning in life – you call it goal striving in your book.

Will: Exactly. We’ve evolved to seek connection and status, and for me, they are the two driving forces of human nature. That’s what purpose is – we’ve evolved to seek the acclaim of people. That may sound cynical, but I think it’s the opposite: we’ve evolved a psychological mechanism that rewards us when we act virtuously.

When we do something selfless and amazing, we feel good about ourselves and we’re rewarded with status. Without status, I don’t think there would be progress.

Adam: Do you think there’s a cultural shift away from dominance and success as a sign of status, toward virtue as a sign of status?

Will: It’s definitely changing. Through the neoliberal era, success was the main cultural story that businesses told. But post-financial crisis, post-Blm, post-#MeToo, there’s been a shift towards virtue stories. And we’re very good at sniffing out authenticity.

We’ve been trying to manipulate each other with stories for tens of thousands of years, so we’ve become very good at detecting when something isn’t genuine. We need to show virtue, but we must be authentic about it.

Adam: I agree – I’ve seen success and dominance characterise the stories that businesses have told in the past. Now in an era defined by virtue, the danger has become disingenuous-ness. How do we find the balance between authenticity and attractiveness?

Will: My next book is going to be a business version of The Science of Storytelling, so it’ll be looking specifically at this question. There’s definitely a tension there. You have to ask, “What is this business for?” Virtue isn’t always found on the highest possible global scale. You can always find good stories to tell; your business doesn’t have to save the world, it just has to fulfil its particular purpose. 

There’s authentic virtue everywhere. Corporations are not seen as purely as money-making machines anymore. The mistake is thinking that they need to tell huge stories about how they’re saving the world, when actually making a small difference to clients or employees is enough – and importantly, it’s far more authentic.

Adam: We believe that we can change actions by changing the narrative we tell about ourselves. Do you agree – can stories really change beliefs and actions?