Storytelling and communication

In the UK, the school system is set up so that you choose only a handful of subjects to study in your last years of secondary school. As a mathematically inclined teenager, I jumped at the chance to drop the arts and humanities subjects at age 16. “No more essays* for me” I thought, “Life would be blissful from here on!”

Over the next decade I studied Engineering and Computer Science. I solved page after page of maths problems. I made observations and measurements during practicals, writing them meticulously in my logbook. I wrote code to crunch the numbers. I dived into machine learning and crunched the numbers even further. Over the years I learned to communicate in the language of numbers, facts, and the cold undeniable logic of computer code.

But, after a while, I began to question whether logic and numbers really resonate all that well in the wider world. Not everyone shared my love of numbers, and facts didn’t really seem to win the argument.

I got a lesson in communication when I watched a presentation a colleague gave at a conference. I was there to help out, and so was my colleague’s brother, Pete, a professional speaker. The talk was great I thought, convincing and full of interesting datapoints. In the car on the way back to the hotel, Pete quizzed me on the contents of the talk. What was the percentage error on the 3rd slide? How many reasons for bad model performance could I recall from slide 5? Where was my colleague when he had a panicked phone call from his wife? Only the last of these could I clearly remember from the talk! It was a small detail that was part of an anecdote my colleague had told.

“We don’t easily remember facts and figures, but stories stick with us”

Pete’s point? We don’t easily remember facts and figures, but stories stick with us in a very different way.

So over time I’ve come to believe that, despite what my technical training taught me, great communication is rooted in storytelling. Storytelling runs through everything we do. Think of famous art masterpieces, the best TED talks, memorable songs, even adverts that have stuck in your mind. I bet there’s a strong element of storytelling in the examples you remember. They make you think, question what you know about the world, and wonder what happened next.

It takes time to undo the conditioning of a technical education. It’ll probably take me a lot more years! But I make more of a conscious effort now to tell the story, and every time I think I get a tiny bit better at it.

If you want to learn more about crafting stories, I recommend two books:

• The Science of Storytelling / Will Storr
• On Writing / Stephen King

And one song:

• The Pina Colada Song

* this is not strictly true as I studied music until I was 18, but I slacked off on the essays