Cautionary tales - or Motivation by Fear

‘Matilda told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch ones eyes’ –

We’re hooked, aren’t we, and we are intrigued to know what happens as a result of this flaw in Matilda’s character. Things go downhill fast, as you can imagine; Matilda has some fun summoning the Fire Brigade to a spurious fire, there is a universal sense of humour failure at this lapse and Matilda is punished for her lying ways.

But then! Oh No! There really is a fire in the house …

You should have heard Matilda Shout!

You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,

And throw the window up and call

To People passing in the Street, ?….? but all in vain!

For every time She shouted 'Fire!'

They only answered 'Little Liar'!

And therefore when her Aunt returned, Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

?(Hilaire Belloc 1907)

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I have been thinking about cautionary tales and their place in our lexicon as storytellers. Of course we don’t describe the stories we tell as Cautionary, that’s too old-fashioned – but: ‘I’m just sharing this information with you all’, followed by how a team made a big mistake and what impact it had – is a cautionary tale dressed in sheep’s clothing.

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Hilaire Belloc’s tongue-in-cheek series of cautionary tales for children was a back-lash against po-faced Victorian morality tales designed to keep the younger generation quiet and obedient; ‘Struwwelpeter’ was another masterpiece in the ‘horror for 4 year olds’ oeuvre and a gift for what would become Edward Scissorhands.

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Whatever our stance on whether stories like this traumatise our little ones or simply prepare them for brutal reality – do we want to use this sort of story to our fellow adults? And, if so, how can we make them work?

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It turns out that stories are fundamentally different depending on your culture. We can blame the Ancient Greeks for our western mindset; they created stories in three acts where, more often than not, somebody faces and overcomes a challenge. The protagonist generally wins through, or at least they learn something. So this is what Western minds have come to expect from a satisfying story. But Eastern stories focus more on personal sacrifice for the good of the community, and tribal stories can simply stop dead in the middle of the action eg ‘And then the skeleton head rolled down the hill’ … The End.

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The master storyteller Jan Blake told a story that has stayed with me ever since – it irritates my brain, it doesn’t satisfy, it’s disruptive. The gist of it is this:

‘A widow lives in poverty with her two children. They tend their garden and scrape a living, and the one thing of beauty in the house is a dinner service that the widow has managed to keep through all the lean years – the only souvenir of her happier past. ‘

(What a set up – full of foreboding and opportunities for things to go badly wrong).

I won’t tell the whole story, because it isn’t mine to tell, but the children are tricked into being ‘very naughty’ in order to win a birthday present for their mother. Bit by bit they destroy the house, the garden and the precious dinner service.

And … and… what do we want to happen? Our minds have been trained to want some redemption, we want something to happen to stop them, to take away the enchantment they’re under, to bring all the things back..

But it doesn’t happen - their mother leaves them and they are turned into a couple of twirling figures trapped on a musical box.

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Whaaaat? No!

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What are we supposed to do with that? Most people are ill-equipped to absorb a story like this and make sense of it. We want it to be tied up neatly and then we can move on. Or we want to be part of the solution. Our Western brains are hard-wired for that. Otherwise, the story stays there, incomplete and nibbling at our consciousness.? This is why the received Storytelling wisdom is to simplify, make it 3 acts, resolve the problem, state the conclusion. Chat gpt does this well – there’s always a little summary at the end, the equivalent of ‘thus we find…’ like a school essay.

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And yet – we also don’t want to be spoon-fed the message. At some level we know we’re being patronised and short-changed if we’re told what to think about a story. And then (or maybe it’s just me) we’re likely to rebel. We don’t want to be told off and treated like naughty children.

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This also applies when a problem is so great that we don’t believe we have any agency to resolve or even influence it. Climate change and environment destruction is a case in point. Did you notice how Sir David Attenborough’s mind-blowing series about the natural world our used to end with a section that was pure cautionary tale? ?– typically starting ‘Sadly there are only 2 penguins left – a direct result of our impact on the planet…’ We were left feeling hopeless and guilty. Now I will bite anybody who questions my deep-rooted passion for the natural world, but even I began to switch off at that point. It wasn’t that I didn’t care – I cared too much. I couldn’t bear to face the reality, especially as I had no agency to change it. Burying your head in the sand can be a factor of caring too much. I only recovered when I had given myself a good talking to and decide to do tiny things in my own sphere of control. (Viz I cut any plastic loop from cans and cartons to prevent their strangling some poor vole in the future.) You may laugh, but it’s helping me take some action, and – crucially – feel better about myself for doing something.

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In his later series Sir David is more gentle with us – maybe he’s holding our hands through these frightening times. But he has certainly noticed that the cautionary tale wasn’t making the difference he had hoped it would.

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Steve Denning, in his Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, spoke about which stories to use in which situations; our own world contexts have changed enormously since he wrote it, but it is still a very springy springboard for considering how to use story in our own organisations. ?

‘my stories were designed to motivate people, and Dave’s were designed to share knowledge. Stories might describe how and why a team failed to accomplish an objective, with the aim of helping others avoid the same mistakes. (To elicit such stories, Dave often had to start by getting people to talk about their successes, even if these accounts were ultimately less useful vehicles for conveying knowledge.)’

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When I have watched the car crashes that are leaders trying to use storytelling to convey how bad it’s got and what might happen if we don’t pull our socks up I see two things happening:

• The speaker is letting their fear/ annoyance/ frustration about the situation leak through the words – as opposed to harnessing it and weaving it into the story.
• The listeners start expectant ‘ah good – we’re going to be told a story’, then glaze over in a ‘oh no here we go, I’ll put on my game face’, and finally start shifting from foot to foot and thinking about dinner.

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Nobody wants to be told off and made to sit on the naughty step until we’ve really thought about our behaviour.

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Here are some ways through the literal minefield of cautionary tales in organisations:

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What not to do

Don’t let your own fear colour the story - If you paint it too black, or the challenges seem insurmountable people will give up – we need a sense of personal agency for motivation

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What to do

Be straight and transparent about why you’re telling the story

Make it a story against yourself – the audience will perk up considerably with the delicious element of schadenfreude

Have them decide the solution

Make it a form of acknowledging feedback

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Or – we could revert to Rule by Fear – otherwise known as Slavery, which was a lot simpler and didn’t involve mastering that pesky art of Storytelling.