Category: Blog

Want more engaged employees? Tell a story

Posted on by Jack Roberts

Every leader wants the best from their team. We know of a way to engage and unite your team, accelerate performance, and inspire your employees all at the same time. We are watching companies become the best versions of themselves every day and it starts with something simple that requires your attention. We’ve seen organisations rally behind seemingly impossible journeys.

With turnover rates and the cost of turnover rates higher than ever1, as leaders we must do more than foster a culture that stays engaged. We have to create it. We have to shape our story around it. It is no secret that it can be difficult to shift the culture of a company. To do so requires a change in the mindsets of our employees. Just take the recent moves at Microsoft to engender a growth mindset into the company’s DNA.2

We’ve found that it takes the power and influence of storytelling to make a real shift and create lasting change. Yes, story, the thing that tucked us in at night, entertains us when we tell ourselves, “just one more episode and then I’m going to bed.”

Did you know that storytelling is good for our bodies, too? It both physiologically and psychologically makes us happier. According to multiple studies of the mind, good stories can physically release the ‘love’ and ‘happiness’ hormone oxytocin in our brains.3 In one particular study published by the Harvard Business Review, Dr. Paul Zak and his lab studied the oxytocin levels of their participants as they were exposed to different forms of narrative storytelling and found that a character-driven story did cause more happiness hormone synthesis.4 The study also revealed that oxytocin production was directly correlated to how much a participant was willing to help others. This means the better the story – particularly where there is an element of struggle or endeavour that’s been overcome – the more engaged your employee. And leaders can use this tool to great advantage, to build empathy and trust amongst their teams in order to bring them with them on challenging journeys of change and performance improvement.

What would this be like? To experience work like we were living a great story? Like we were a part of something bigger than ourselves? A happier employee is far less likely to leave during your next wave of changes, dropping those turnover rates and their many costs. It also brings a renewed energy into your business and that impossible journey seems possible. One of our key learnings has been that authentic leaders, equipped with the the right story for their goals, their strategies, and their business, have a huge impact. We’ve watched teams achieve goals that only months before were discounted. We’ve seen people retract their resignations. We’ve seen attrition drop – often dramatically – together with absenteeism levels that are so often a symptom of disengagement.

Most importantly we’ve seen leaders embrace change and inspire truly remarkable stories. Because the secret is that its not always a culture problem or an operations problem, but a story problem. Indeed, our professional culture is a collection of stories our employees believe about our company.

At The Storytellers, we are watching renewal as our crafted storytelling inspires sustainable productivity, unites disparate teams, and accelerates individual and team performance alike. The change a good story makes sticks. Because, the simple truth is that people remember stories before facts.5

What could you accomplish if your employees really knew what you were building, how you were building it, and why? What could be created if everyone was inspired by what you were working towards? At The Storytellers this is the change we are creating for our clients. We are helping people make the impossible possible by telling a better story. We’ll help you give your employees the journey they need to give you the results you want.

At The Storytellers we build those journeys.

 

 

1. Hinkin, T. R., & Tracey, J. B. (2000). The cost of turnover: Putting a price on the learning curve. Link

2. Weinberger, Matt. (2017). How Microsoft’s CEO Showed His Employees Tough Love. Link

3. Stillman, Jessica. (2016). The Fascinating Thing That Storytelling Does to Your Brain. Link

4. Zak, Paul Dr. (2014). Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling. Link to source. Link

5. Callahan, Shawn. (2015). The Link Between Memory and Stories. Link

Visions of the Future: VHack

Posted on by Joe Mackay

When the Vatican announces a hackathon, you know there’s something up.

The ‘VHack’, held in March this year, called the world’s brightest students – from all ethnic, social and religious backgrounds ­– to ‘harness technological innovation to overcome social barriers and embrace common values’. Its 36-hour event would emphasise social inclusion and ‘human-centric values’ in an increasingly isolated, tech-driven world; interfaith dialogue, in the face of increasingly sectarian global narratives; and migrants and refugees, whose continued need for relocation and effective integration is ever more threatened by Europe’s populist moment.

Unsurprisingly, it was not a typical event. Yes, there were students, coding furiously through the night on a high of pastry and espresso. But there the similarity ends – and not simply because they hacked in rooms usually reserved for choosing Jesuit generals, or Cardinals dropped in to play with the VR headsets. In every walk of life, diversity is sorely lacking. And it is in our most celebrated hubs of mind-bending innovation that this issue becomes most acute – and the implications, for the solutions on which we are increasingly dependent, most profound. Hackathons tend to replicate this imbalance. Yet the Vatican, wielding a pretty hefty moral mandate – and, presumably, a healthy measure of self-irony – chose more inclusively. As a result, the final cohort of students represented over 30 countries. They came from every faith. And they were a 50:50 gender split. This, in the quest for effective new-age problem solving, is a big deal.

The results present us with a future world that uses technology to bridge divides, not widen them: from Credit/Ability: a ‘credibility’ scoring application that gives refugees a way to collate their history and build the trust they need to gain easier access to services like housing – to Vinculum­: an app that leverages machine learning to reunite families lost in relocation through the upload of a single photo and advanced face-recognition technology, or Faithstrings: a VR journey into different religions to create space for meaningful inter-faith dialogue.

This is empathy in design. It’s also a model for the VUCA world we’re in: nebulous, ambiguous, accelerating. A place where to succeed means to design at pace and think as a collective mind, across systems and disciplines and world views. Where to tolerate hierarchies, to divide generations, is to waste potential; where to dig your heels into your own assumptions, to privilege one perspective, just won’t cut it.

In a world where true diversity remains a box ticking exercise, and strong, speedy decision making is still the way we’re taught to gauge and demonstrate value experience, this can feel an awkward state of affairs. But at The Storytellers it’s one we’ve built into the core of our business: creating connection points to exploit the difference in skills, backgrounds, expertise and perspectives, and helping our clients to do the same. Like every muscle, collaboration needs work. But it’s worth remembering that our brains have evolved to think this way.

We are The Storytellers. We exist to move more people to do great things through the power and influence of storytelling.

What story will move you and the people around you to do great things in 2018? Share your story with us.

Moving more people to do great things

Posted on by Joe Mackay

I visited a client last week and on discussing outcomes for the meeting, two key questions came up: “how can we motivate our people to do more extraordinary things? How can we get more of our people to believe that what seems impossible today, could just be a conversation or an action plan away?”

Their view was that their company’s legacy (as well as their own as board members) would be defined by the number of good ideas (great and small) that they were able to turn into action in the next few years. As with most companies, pace was a key theme – how quickly could they turn passive understanding into action? Could they inspire people to act now before the opportunities were seized by more agile competitors?

It is a conversation we have had with many boards over the past 15 years. Most have asked similar questions which can be summarised as, “how can we move more of our people to do great things?” It’s a question that lays the foundations for the most remarkable business journeys.

The Storytellers exist to move more people to do great things. It is a purpose that enables us to work with leaders all around the world to inspire change, transform their organisations and accelerate the journey their business is on.

In defining the story of an organisation we often come across ‘moonshot’ goals – now described in the dictionary as ‘an extremely ambitious and innovative project.’

There has been plenty written about moonshots over the last few years – articles harking back to Kennedy’s “landing a man on the moon” speech, ambitious scientific collaborations to cure cancer and tech organisations planning to disrupt long-standing industries. These are the headline-grabbing examples, but the truth is while most organisations have ambitious visions, few are able to spark a movement to realise them.

Many of these organisations fail to create a wider context, a rational and emotional understanding of the journey a business is on, a belief in the ability to change and the inspiration and commitment to contribute. This sense of personal and collective connection to a business journey provides leaders with fertile ground to empower teams to define the goals that will enable them to play their part.

One of our key learnings has been that authentic leaders, equipped with the capability and tools to inspire action, have a huge impact.

We’ve seen organisations rally behind seemingly impossible journeys. We’ve seen teams achieve goals that only months before would have been discounted. Most importantly we’ve seen leaders embrace change and inspire truly remarkable stories.

Of course, these stories are now helping to breed new cultures, reinforce a unique mindset and encourage behaviours that enable these organisations to rally again, to embark on their next journey to the moon…

Robert Tennant

Visions of the Future: plastic-free world

Posted on by Bex Felton

On a daily basis, we are bombarded by news that requires action, but doesn’t drive us to act. Consuming colossal numbers about colossal issues, we become fixed points, unmoved by the baying demands on our empathy. Climate change, the ultimate colossal issue, perfectly captures the battle between know and do, think and feel. Our sluggish global response, a litany of non-committal grunts from our world leaders and bombastic counter-narratives, persists even as the evidence becomes incontrovertible and the real human suffering – from people on other shores, driven, increasingly to our own – becomes abundant.

But something is shifting, now, with a momentum that’s by-passing all the usual blocking points: breaking domestic habits; declaring itself in the manifestos of our most powerful businesses; redesigning the way we shop; declaring itself in entire UK towns. It’s even taken up residency in the Queen’s estate. That thing is the narrative being built against single-use plastics.

It goes like this: plastics are choking our oceans, destroying our sea life and poisoning the food chain on a catastrophic scale – and it can and must be reversed, by us, now.

Plastic isn’t a new story. Recycling has now reached the status of mass social etiquette, regulated by reliable waste collection and friendly colour-coded bins. We recycle committedly, if inconsistently – ‘mixed recycling’ remains our Everest – and participation rises slowly, year on year. But this low-level anxiety has taken years to accrue in our consciousness, more sediment than sweeping change. And though it’s now mainstream, the real impact is still hard to quantify.

Why has it been such a hard sell? If behaviour change needs motivation, means and the momentum of visible progress to sustain itself, recycling is making it easy for us. It’s not hard to recycle when the means to do so exist on every street corner and in our homes. We’re not being asked to change anything fundamental about the way we sell and consume. But if it’s not asking much, perhaps it’s not giving much either: neither offering us anything concrete in terms of emotional motivation (we know recycling is good, but when do we feel it’s good?) nor momentum: the seas are still clogged, the landfills still grow… councils are broke, recycling costs… and isn’t it all shipped to China anyway on vast, oil-guzzling trawlers?

Compare this to the plastic-free movement. Suddenly, people are going out of their way to embrace inconvenience. They are rejecting assumption and reinventing how they live. In just four months, public declarations of war on wasteful norms – from average consumers to senior politicians to business leaders – have already affected fundamental change in the way we produce and consume. Targeted campaigns – on plastic straws, on plastic bags, on plastic bottles – are carving focused, attainable action into the heart of the movement and bringing a new, purposeful character to the cause.

And yet, once again, plastics-free is not a new narrative. But something has happened to make it powerful enough to change mindsets and behaviour, rapidly and on a mass scale. So where was the tipping point?

Sensationalist headlines across the major papers left little room for ambiguity. ‘In one of the most powerfully emotive TV sequences to ever have been broadcast, Sir David Attenborough made the case to end plastic pollution in Sunday night’s Big Blue episode of Blue Planet II.’ ‘The scourge of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans must be tackled, Sir David Attenborough said as he launched the second series of Blue Planet II’. ‘David Attenborough urges action on plastics after filming Blue Planet II.’ ‘Michael Gove “haunted” by plastic pollution seen in Blue Planet II. ‘Blue Planet 2 behind BBC’s new promise to ditch single-use plastics’. ‘People are giving up plastic for Lent and it’s all because of “Blue Planet II”’.

It’s hard to imagine a more celebrated, unifying, or iconic series, fronted by our most national of treasures. But in an age of targeted, network-based influence, it feels unlikely that this tipping point could be something so mass, so mainstream, so familiar in format.

But look closer, and we see a collision of narrative techniques that exemplifies the way that storytelling is used by the world’s most effective social change leaders.

We all know that empathy is a powerful emotional driver, motivating us to act in extraordinary ways for those we feel connected to. Its limitation is its inability to operate on a mass scale; but by connecting us to an individual experience, storytelling bypasses the apathy of mass statistics and rational information, funnelling our emotional energy into a series of narrow storylines. Harnessed correctly, this singular focus can affect mass change. No surprise then, against a backdrop of sweeping environmental damage, that it was two distinctly human narratives that unleashed an outpouring of empathy from viewers: a pelican unwittingly feeding her chick plastic; and a mourning pilot whale, refusing to let go of her stillborn calf, poisoned by toxic build-up.

Coupled with Attenborough’s powerful closing address – a soft-spoken rebuke which, in three lines, challenges us as individuals, bonds us together in our shared humanity, and calls us to action in the face of immediate danger on a global scale – Blue Planet II suddenly has the narrative prerequisites of history’s most effective social movements, capable of transcending its form to galvanise a moment of rare, collective possibility.

And the impact of this trigger has been profound. We have taken to the internet in droves. We have reached out and found others who feel the same. And as our motivation builds, we discover new means: innovators offering plastic-free products, easy tips for a plastic-free life – means we never cared to discover until now. We realise that action can be targeted or wholesale, the choice is ours, but we have the power to choose it. And the momentum feels real: we share our stories, the difference we’re making, and we know that we can make a difference too. Every action reinforces the values that unite us and the belief that drives us on. And then it starts to become real: declarations are made, policy is passed, the conversation is permanently changed.

If we take anything from the anti-plastics movement it should be this: storytelling is the most powerful tool we have to change even the most engrained behaviour. The leader who learns this lesson today will be the leader of tomorrow.

If we’re lucky, it might even be Attenborough.

We are The Storytellers. We exist to move more people to do great things through the power and influence of storytelling.

What story will move you and the people around you to do great things in 2018? Share your story with us.

Visions of the Future: Time’s Up

Posted on by Bex Felton

September 3rd, 1944. Montgomery, Alabama. Recy Taylor, a 24 year-old woman, wife and mother is kidnapped and raped by six armed men as she walks home from church. She is black and they are white. Left by the highway. Threatened with death if she tells her story.

But she tells it anyway. Even when they firebomb her home, terrorise her family.

I can’t help but tell the truth of what they done to me.

Her words find their way to seasoned NAACP investigator and activist by the name of Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks, a young woman who fights an old injustice, who has built her life on the power of personal narrative:

I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man’s inhuman treatment of the negro.

Who as a child, facing down schoolyard bullies, already knows this much:

I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it’.

They call her agitator, trouble-maker. Send death threats. But no matter. Freedom fighters never retire, she says. Stories must not be left to lie.

And when Recy Taylor’s attackers walk free – her case thrown out by an all-white, all-male jury – Rosa Parks is ready. Gets organised. Inspires a movement. Recy Taylor’s story spreads 1,055 miles, through churches and barbershops and the pages of the black press, to the streets of New York, where it grows to a clamour in the mouths of activists.

Justice does not prevail, this time. But a million drops of water are stronger than a stone wall. A groundswell has begun. The infrastructure of change has been forged in the steady flame of her testimony.

I can’t help but tell the truth of what they done to me.

And so Rosa Parks strives. Documents, with steady-eyed rigour, an epidemic of sexual violence; telling the stories of the women that history will try to forget.

Women like Gertrude Perkins. Raped in 1949 by two white Montgomory police officers. Whose two-month protest reaches the front pages of the Montgomery Advertiser and a Grand Jury hearing. Justice does not prevail, this time. The groundswell grows stronger, but it does not burst the dam.

December 1st, 1955. Rosa Parks rides the bus home. The books will tell of her tired feet, but that’s not what she’s tired of. Enough is enough, this day. Her story travels. The boycotts begin. Successes are won.

But where is Rosa Parks? History will call her meek and mild; an elderly seamstress, defeated by another backbreaking day. Courage laced with the message of frailty.

People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired. But that isn’t true. The only tired I was, was of giving in.

Successes are won, but new walls are built. New injustices done, new stories unspoken.

Winter, 1998. Wisconsin. Danielle McGuire listens to her radio: to Joe Azbell, the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, talk about Gertrude Perkins. Gertrude Perkins, who’s never mentioned in the history books, who has as much to do with the boycotts as anyone on earth.

History is a patchwork of absence, she realises: of missing stories waiting to be told.

And so she writes a book for these women: for Recy Taylor and Rosa Parks and Gertrude Perkins. She finds many more. And now we have a new history.

And now, slowly, the dam starts to burst. Now the world is a network of narratives. Now there are voices that say ‘Me Too’ in their millions and cannot be silenced.

And now there is a flood: now there are cracks in the corridors of power. There are changes, real changes, that feel different, somehow, this time.

And now there is not just a flood. There is a sea change. There are voices that say, Enough. Time’s Up. Trickles that become a stream, then a river, then an ocean of shared experience. Now there are new networks, and new powers, and a promise of transformation.

The Golden Globes, January 7th, 2018. Oprah Winfrey – black woman, woman, billionaire, rule-breaker, queen-and-king-maker, ground-shaker – takes to the stage and tells the story of Recy Taylor. And now the whole world is alive with her name. 

For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.

We are The Storytellers. We exist to move more people to do great things through the power and influence of storytelling.

What story will move you and the people around you to do great things in 2018? Share your story with us

Visions of the Future: James Webb

Posted on by Joe Mackay

November 21st, 1962. James Webb – the man who will lead NASA to put man on the moon –– sits with JFK in the Cabinet Room of the White House and tells him to go to hell.

Ignore the race with the Russians, he urges the President.

The race is not the priority. See the opportunity.

We can crack the universe wide open if only we take the time to really look.

We can hold the laws of nature in our hands by looking backwards into the galaxies.

We can know infinity. We can know ourselves.

James Webb – a man, not of science, but of law and government – is a man of rare vision. In his tenure, he will invest in robotics that will pave the way for human space travel; he will give us the first strange glimpse of Mars, and in 1965 he will begin his fight for a NASA-funded telescope so large it will pierce the unknown with the light of human will. His inspiration will accelerate the innovation that has transformed our world. It will move generations to do great things in the name of exploration.

And what a world it is. What an age of impossible realities we inhabit. We stand daily on the shoulders of giants, rewriting the boundaries of our own potential at such a pace that we’ve become immune to wonder.

We forget that there are still new things and new ways to see, or think, or know.

But when the James Webb Telescope launches next year – travelling one million miles in thirty days, until it reaches deepest space – we’ll see the vision of its namesake made real and his story told in the fabric of infinity. We’ll witness the birth of our galaxy 13.5 billion years ago, preserved in waves of light that have faded into infra-red. We’ll see the embers of the burning fires where our atoms came into being. We may find new life. We may rewrite the rulebook of the universe. When we ask why, the cosmos might just speak back to us. And the deeper we look, the further back we’ll see; the bigger we’ll think; the more we’ll dare to seek.

That’s worthy of a little wonder.

We are The Storytellers. We exist to move more people to do great things through the power and influence of storytelling.

What story will move you and the people around you to do great things in 2018? Share your story with us.

Cake Matters

Posted on by Joe Mackay

At The Storytellers, we are passionate about moving more people to do great things. Recently we teamed up with Macmillan Cancer Support to take part in the ‘World’s Biggest Coffee Morning’, a campaign to raise money to help nurses provide medical, practical and emotional support to people living with cancer.

For the event, we transformed our weekly team meeting as we swapped notepads and business reports for carrot cake and coffee in a bid to raise £100 for the charity. The team were inspired as we surpassed this target by some margin, raising an impressive £245.07 for the cause.

The coffee morning is a small example of how we at The Storytellers are united in our belief that through engagement we can enrich people’s lives for the better. Our core values do not just apply to business – they apply to everything that we do. A testament to the power of engagement lies in the Macmillan campaign’s success. By uniting people behind one common purpose, Macmillan Cancer Support have raised over £9,500,000 globally, helping to change the lives of some of the 2.5 million people living with cancer in the UK.

What has The Book of Mormon got to do with us?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Well, nothing really. Except that we had a terrific evening as a team at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Leicester Square last week, the evening before our annual company day. For those who haven’t seen this rip-roaring show, it recounts the challenges of two young Mormon missionaries who have been despatched to Uganda to baptise the locals into their faith. And you need to go in eyes wide open. Irreverent, funny, shocking, politically incorrect, outrageous, camp, insulting, entertaining, over-the-top, brilliant, eyebrow-raising…it’s one of a kind, and if you can get past the ridiculousness of it all you might see the serious message(s) that sit behind it.

Anyway, fast forward 16 hours and we are all (minus a few key players who sadly couldn’t make it due to client commitments) back at the theatre standing on what is actually a deceptively small stage to reflect on what had gone on the evening before, marvelling at the complexity of this fast-paced, precise production and the teamwork that exists to make it happen so apparently effortlessly. With Jaime, the theatre’s General Manager, giving us some fascinating insights into what it takes to put on a Broadway show in a London venue, what looked quite simple was quite evidently, er, not that simple. Politics, managing expectations, logistics, teamwork, collaboration, creative interpretation, courage, laser-sharp timing and delivery….well, you might just have been looking in at The Storytellers to see just how our programmes develop for our clients!

Of course there was a serious theme to all this. We had gathered at the theatre to launch our own Story in all its technicoloured glory, and to introduce the business plan for the next year. “We have pioneered storytelling in business…” the Story starts proudly in Chapter One, going on to recount the challenges and opportunities we face as a business, and focusing on what we need to do to grow in what is a challenging and uncertain world.

The overriding theme of the day though, was teamwork and collaboration (now perhaps you are starting to see the relevance of the theatre production). We just cannot exist or do business for our clients without an immense amount of belief and trust in each other. We all bring different skill sets to the business – strategic planning, creative, project management, consultancy, facilitation, writing, relationship-building, administration – and it’s the blend of these skills that makes magic happen. Our Story, which was presented by members of the team at every level, is OUR Story. It belongs to all of us, and without every single one of us playing our part, we are nothing. And we planned the day exactly as if we were planning it for a client. For those about to join the team (and who were invited to participate on the day) it was a remarkable insight into how our clients launch their own strategic narratives, as well as witnessing the amazing culture we have developed as a team. Our Story provides the framework for our business plan, and our business plan provides the framework for the many initiatives, plans and new ways of working we are currently embracing. Our company day gave people an opportunity to absorb some of this, interrogate it, feel proud of what we’ve achieved and excited about the future. Indeed, it’s a future worth being excited about.

I’d like to go back and see The Book of Mormon again, just to see the bits I missed (either because I was laughing so much or because there was just so much going on). Next time though, I’ll look at it through a different lens, with just a little more appreciation as to what it takes to make the complex look simple, and, as always, with a huge amount of appreciation for our amazing team.

Ways of rescuing

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Many of you will be familiar with the writer, art historian, thinker and artist John Berger, most famous for the essential “Ways of Seeing”. As Berger approaches his 90th birthday, I found myself reading a few articles that celebrate this great figure of critical thinking – and a few shared thoughts on the power of storytelling.

First of all, I saw the following quote from Tilda Swinton on Berger:

“He always calls himself a storyteller rather than a writer – to recognise the stories woven around people, to bear witness to them, and simply identify stories good for the reader’s health.”

There is so much in this last part, a definition of storytelling vs. mere writing, that resonates – firstly, the notion that the stories that matter are almost always the ones focused around people. This is as true at a company level as it is on the individual level. At The Storytellers, we constantly strive to show how real people live at the centre of the overarching narratives we produce, putting them at the heart of our stories, our creative endeavours and our large-scale events.

The second part of this quote is also interesting, the notion of ‘bearing witness’. When it comes to winning the hearts and minds of an organisation, a compelling narrative is simply the first step. Compounding the belief that the business journey is the right one is indeed often a question of ‘bearing witness’ along the way – appreciating, sharing and celebrating the stories that attest to the contributions people make amplifies and corroborates the journey that everyone is on.

Finally, the notion of stories being good for people’s health should not be underestimated. Making sense of the world around us, making sense of the events that happen in our lives, bonding with others, framing a personal narrative for our own life and ambitions… these are all things that make us feel better in ourselves, and storytelling can play a vital role in fortifying these mental pillars. To put it plainly, stories make us feel good, in ways that we have only just begun to understand.

After reading Swinton’s great words on Berger, my interest was piqued and I read on, finding the following quote from the man himself:

“A story is always a rescuing operation.”

Now these words really got me thinking, not least because at a recent employee conference for one of our clients we touched on and discussed just this – the notion of ‘rescue stories’. In that particular context, we identified the value of looking for stories that not only celebrated great achievements, but also stories of when a situation or a person had been rescued from disaster by one or more colleagues. It’s a great idea – this means being brave enough to accept failure, celebrate the positive contribution of the people that rescued the situation, and being open to learning from any mistakes made.

But could it be that a story is always, in some way or other, about something or someone being rescued? To be rescued is to be saved, to be freed, to recover… and it’s not easy to think of many stories where this kind of theme is not present on some level.

So the idea of rescue being thematically an essential part of any story is certainly an interesting one… but I sense that Berger meant something different.

Considering the previous quote from Swinton, I can’t help but feel that it is the act of listening, of telling, of observing, of storytelling itself that is a rescuing operation, and this comes back to the notion of ‘bearing witness’. Without telling the story, the story is lost. Without storytelling, the endeavours we make towards our shared goals and ambitions never happened. Without storytelling, progress simply does not exist – it never happened.

To tell a story is to rescue something good from oblivion – and unless you tell it, oblivion is where the story, with all it’s human endeavour and personality, will go. Berger does not explicitly mention the fact that a good, but lost story tends to be replaced by something far more ugly… but I cannot help but think that this is another reason why Berger chose the word ‘rescue’ when musing on the power of storytelling. In telling a good story, we are rescued from the bad ones too.

As ever, storytelling shows itself to have a seemingly inexhaustible range of uses and applications. Salvation certainly can come from a story, and sometimes a story specifically about a phenomenal rescue is just what is needed… but Berger’s words tell us that on a deeper level, there is something about storytelling, in and of itself, that always saves.