I’ve written here several times about storytelling as a sustainable marketing tactic. As an offshoot of content marketing, storytelling provides a narrative – about your customers, about you or your company – your stakeholders can understand, share, and act upon. Any story of your customer solving her problem with your product will convey meaning more powerfully than a list of benefits or other jargony marketing copy. Good stories pass the sustainability test in that they can enrich people’s lives. Stories are how we communicate.
There’s a problem, however. In her comment on the post “Will a sustainable economy be boring?”, Bernice Paul pointed out how the language we use is linear, which serves us poorly in communicating about sustainability, which plays with closed loops. “We think and speak in lines, not circles – which is what is needed in systems thinking.” Since I consider stories as the primary use of language, Bernice’s comment got me thinking.
Stories are, indeed, linear. A good story prompts you to ask, What happens next?, and then it answers it. First, this happened. Then, something else. Next, that. The story structure – exposition/problem, conflict/crisis, rising tension, climax, falling action – follows a linear, uni-directional path.
Sustainability’s difficulty in telling its story may well be another barrier to its mass adoption. But if narration is linear and sustainability is circular (no, not loopy), does that mean storytelling is unsuitable for sustainable marketing?
An easy way around this problem is to rethink the direction of stories. Even in the narrative arc, the line ascends, reaches climax, and then falls as the initial conflict is resolved. All that sustainability needs to do is to take the end of the line and tie it back to the beginning. After all, a circle is a curved line with no beginning or end.
Something tells me closing the loop on stories may be just an intermediate solution. I recall Clive Barker’s novel Weaveworld, part of which takes place in a parallel world woven in a rug. If sustainability’s story is that of systems, that story must consist of a myriad of strands intersecting and connecting and looping in many places. The strands would then combine into something new altogether, a meta-narrative if you will.
Here’s what I mean. Take the forest analogy that Joshua, another commenter, suggested. The stories of trees, plants, mushrooms, animals, insects, creeks, rocks, and so on weave the story of the forest. A whole another world.
Is this trying to solve new puzzles with old methods? Answer new questions with old answers?
What do you think? What happens next?
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Image credit: soylentgreen23
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
System thinking is sooooo important in growing a better world. Look a the “hero’s journey” in movie scriptwriting for the loop you’re seeking. These are the steps: Start with the current problem. Try several things that could solve the problem. Face a reallllly big problem, finally, and solve it…and learn a big lesson. Then TAKE IT BACK to the community as a new solution. The end! That individual quest turns into a community quest when the leader, visionary shares a better way. We have the real world “Hero’s Journey”… let’s figure out how to construct these magical, mystical, real life solutions. Carolyn Allen, California Green Solutions
@Carolyn Allen: Thanks for sharing. I guess we all are the heroes of our journeys, and we all weave the story of sustainability.
Hi Peter, thanks for the post. Interesting what @Carolyn notes about the hero’s journey in script-writing… in terms of storytelling, some of my favourite movies ARE systems exposed. Top of mind – the Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, Syriana [nothing linear about the last one in particular... in fact maybe that one was too circular!]
@Bernice Paul: To your list I’ll add “Let the Right One In”, which I watched last night and which also closes the story loop nicely (the beginning is the end is the beginning).