Don’t hate me, but storytelling is not the answer to everything—and I’m someone who teaches storytelling for a living!
At the Message Design Institute, we do a lot of work with story. And for good reason. Story is incredibly effective at helping people connect—to you, to an idea, to a moment in time. It makes abstract ideas more concrete. It gives information a sequence. It helps people understand how things fit together.
Story does a lot. But it doesn’t do everything.
And when the goal is CHANGE—especially behavioral change—it helps to widen the lens beyond storytelling alone.
Where story helps … and where it starts to struggle
Most of the time, we talk about story as a tool for helping people understand and connect ideas. And it is good at that. Story builds empathy. It creates emotional resonance. It lets people experience something rather than be told what to think, which can be a much more successful way of creating openness to new ideas.
But understanding isn’t the same thing as alignment.
And alignment is what change actually requires.
To explain why, I want to borrow a line from organizational psychologist Kurt Lewin, who argued that human behavior is a function of (a) the person and (b) the environment (Lewin, 1951).
That distinction matters here.
Because story, by its nature, mostly shows us that behavior from an external view. It shows what happened and who did what. It shows events unfolding over time. When we tell stories, we’re usually presenting an outside view of the person acting in their environment. We may get occasional peeks into their internal motivations, but it’s the action, the behaviors, that move a story forward.
What often gets left behind—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—is the internal story. The interpretation. The “what this means” part.
And that’s where things get tricky.
Inference is doing more work than we think
When we rely on story alone, we rely heavily on inference. And since I’m feeling a little sassy today, I’ll say this outright: inference is the enemy of clarity.
Honestly, it almost doesn’t matter how great a storyteller you are, or think you are. Two people can hear the same great story, told by the same great storyteller, and walk away with two entirely different interpretations.
We often assume people will draw the same conclusions from a story that we do. But very often, they don’t. And not because they aren’t listening! It’s because stories—and messages, and ideas, and content—don’t land on neutral ground. The meaning we make of new information is shaped by the experiences, beliefs, and interpretations we already have…and the meaning we’ve previously made of it all.
This idea isn’t new. From John Dewey to Jerome Bruner, scholars have long argued that meaning is actively constructed by the listener or reader, not transmitted intact from one person to another.
That’s a real problem if what we’re trying to create is shared understanding that leads to shared action.
Stories are excellent at showing what happened. They’re unmatched at creating emotional connections between people.
But they don’t automatically create alignment. And alignment is what change depends on.
The smaller story inside the story
Here’s the part we don’t talk about often enough:
That internal interpretation, that meaning-making process, is also story. But a much more compact one. It’s a story that lives in the fast, automatic processes of the brain. It’s instinctive. Pattern-oriented. Shortcut-driven.
This idea isn’t new, either. It goes back (at least!) to Aristotle—we see this idea clearly. In Rhetoric, he describes how persuasion works through implied arguments—what he called enthymemes—where listeners instinctively fill in the missing steps: IF this is true, and that is true, THEN this conclusion must follow. (Side note: HOW DID ARISTOTLE COME UP WITH ALL THESE GREAT WORDS?! Sheesh.)
But this idea isn’t just Western, either. It’s human. Similar ideas appear in classical (Indian) Buddhist epistemology where scholars like Dignāga and Dharmakīrti argued that much of what we experience as perception is actually fast, automatic inference—a compact internal story the mind uses to make sense of the world. (Zen Buddishm and Daoism also have corresponding concepts of this).
In fact, it’s the shortest possible form of the story we tell ourselves: a theory—an argument that satisfies us—about why something makes sense and what to do next.
That’s why I often say from the stage that a story is an argument in disguise: any time we tell a story, there’s an argument underneath it. It’s our interpretation—our theory—of why whatever happened, happened. But unless we make that argument explicit, the audience is unlikely to walk away with the same interpretation, because they’re listening to the story with their own pre-existing set of theories and assumptions.
Why story alone doesn’t always lead to change
A story is what we see or hear on the surface. But the underlying argument is what actually drives meaning, alignment, and ultimately, action.
Stories only work when we share the assumptions underneath them. And all too often in today’s world, we just don’t.
- When a story “works,” it’s usually because the audience’s internal argument lines up with the one the storyteller intended.
- When it doesn’t work, it’s often because that argument stayed implicit—and when the argument is implicit, people supply their own.
That’s how you can tell a compelling story, get nods of recognition, and still watch nothing change afterward.
The issue isn’t that the story, or the storyteller, wasn’t good enough. It’s that the reasoning stayed hidden.
Pairing story with what actually drives alignment
So if we want our stories to do more than connect—if we want them to create understanding and alignment around new ideas—we need to make sure BOTH stories are explicit.
First, the external story, which follows the classic (Arisitotelian!) narrative arc most of us are familiar with, what I call the Red Thread:
- Goal
- Problem
- Truth
- Change
- Action
Second, the internal story, which follows classic (and, again, Aristotelian!) reasoning logic that explains why the story makes sense to us in the first place, what I call the ITBA or Core Case:
- IF
- THEN
- BECAUSE
- AND
And guess what? You can start with either one! You can begin with the narrative arc and uncover the logic underneath it, or you can start with the logic and wrap a story around it, because here’s how they line up (note how the “THEN” moves to the end in the narrative version):
- IF→Goal
- BECAUSE→Problem
- AND→Truth
- THEN→Change
- [Here’s how:] Action
Even better, when you use both, something important happens: you (a) reduce uncontrolled interpretation (aka inference), (b) increase clarity, and (c) make adopting the change easier—not because you pushed harder, but because you made the change make more sense than whatever someone is doing now.
That’s the work we teach at the Message Design Institute.
Not just better storytelling, better reasoning—made visible—so people can move together.