On storytelling.
In a recent iteration of my professional life, I had the (mis) fortune to manage several vastly talented and hungry people. They’d typically go about their business of creating products and experiences, and for the most part, they were masterfully right in their intuition and execution. Every so often, they would come up to me with an idea that had the right intention at heart but seemed to underestimate the likely outcome and had the potential of unintended and frequently, undesired consequences.
And every so often, I’d tell these incredible people the story of the cobra effect. I miscategorized it as an example from When to Rob A Bank (my bad), but it went something like this. Under British Rule, the government in New Delhi offered a bounty for every dead cobra. The policy aimed at reducing the spread of venomous cobras and the logic was that people would kill cobras for money, thus reducing the overall number of the deadly reptile. Over time, however, the strategy had the opposite effect — it prompted more industrious folks to breed cobras. The policy had unintended consequences.
Even though we did build a generous number of products with unintended consequences, I was delighted to hear the story repeated back to me every time we had to consider the potential effect of what we planned to do.
To this day, I am not sure if the cobra story is true. What’s true, though, is that a great story is more powerful, remembered, and understood than a bunch of facts, examples, or recited experiments. Facts inform opinions. Stories change behaviors.
The first iteration of the internet allowed us to consume information. The second one, which in my view is at its peak, pushed us to create — from awkwardly-applied Instagram filters to equally awkwardly done TikTok dance-offs. Somewhere between ‘I am feeling lucky’ and AI-powered social feeds, we perfected the art of click-bait titles and we lost the ability to tell a good story. A story to remember, to share, and to learn from. A story with R0>1. (Not my concept — Neil Bearden, who quit his job as an excellent professor at INSEAD decided to build a company teaching people how to rediscover the lost art of story-telling. Check it out — Plot Wolf).
Story-telling is conceivably the most important skill you can learn these days. You might know how to work with p-values and sample sizes, but unless you can capture the imagination of why these numbers matter, the value of your work is lost.
In the corporate world, the market has rewarded visionary storytellers. So much so that Prof. G defines the skill as a strategic pillar that can suggest the performance of a company or a stock. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and even Shopify’s Toby Lütke barter vision for cheap capital, which turns their vision into a self-fulling prophecy. The better story you tell, the more resources you get. The more resources you get, the faster iteration to achieve that vision. Nobody gets inspired by what Exxon Mobile is trying to do, as long as we pump gas without breaking the bank. But we want to believe that we can get to Mars in our generation and prove that humanity is more than Black Friday flash deals and ‘shopping’ holidays.
In our personal lives, we have embraced all the calories of social media behavior, without any of the taste of muting a conversation or leaving a group chat. For the most part, our conversations have reduced to mirroring our social media mindless scrolling — short facts (tweets, pictures), mostly humble-brag, aimed at getting appreciation (likes). Today it’s all about what trendy restaurant I went to. Not about the sleepless nights of work I put in to be able to afford it. And yet, tomorrow (in a few years), I will remember a good night’s conversation with stories and forget what filter I used on a picture that got a few hundred likes.
I am far from being able to call myself a good storyteller. At best, I am awful-moving-to-average at it. I want to learn, and I even signed up for Neil’s short seminar next week. I hope there isn’t any cobra effect hiding in plain sight, but time will tell. Until then, as Naval put it, “Learn to build. Learn to sell. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”
