A new job for the taking!

“Fiction,” as Albert Camus put it, “is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

According to the great English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), enjoyment of fiction requires a “willing suspension of disbelief”—a conscious decision.

Even as organisations strive for competitive advantage in an eco-system where the difference between success and failure can be wafer thin, the story and its ability to spin it has taken on a new meaning and the art of telling it is even more important. Story Telling has found itself a place in curricula and industry may soon have a Chief Story-Telling Officer. Just think about it. I receive several requests by 'experts' to teach my students ' how to tell a story'.

However story telling has a dark side to it. If the story is strong, if the teller has charisma and ability, the suspension of disbelief?just happens, with or without our permission. Emotion plays a powerful role here. Great stories generate powerful feelings, and strong feelings act as a filter to our sense of rationale, logic and our skepticism. To put it positively, good stories—fictional or not—make us more open minded. To put it negatively, they make us a lot more gullible. People who are by nature optimistic and trusting are generally the fall guys. Let's look at Audrey Truschke's rather controversial book on Aurangzeb - Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth. He was, if one goes by Truschke, cultured, perpetually seeking to enforce justice, and not quite the Muslim fanatic he is made out to be. In support, she quietly slips in Aurangzeb’s gushing admiration for Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples in Ellora calling them “one of the finely crafted marvels of the real, transcendent Artisan (i.e., God).” This of course hides the fact that he by all accounts was a bigot and a bloody one at that. In more recent times we have Elizabeth Holmes, the architect of the Theranos scam, where a young and pretty Holmes so successfully misled the business world by telling stories. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) Right from General George Washington and his famous Cheery tree, history has been full of stories. The cause for concern is that corporations seem to have suddenly discovered the art.

All good leaders and corporations tell stories, but these stories must rest on fact and ethics. Cooking up corporate stories for the gullible masses is unethical and must be treated as a corporate offence, if not we will have story tellers in plenty who confuse fact with fiction, without a care.

As Holmes would say: Fake it till you make it!