Are we at peak storytelling?

If you’re a human, and let’s assume you are for now - you’re made for stories. Made to tell them, consume them, seek them. Storytelling has always been with us, and always will be. Democracy is a story. Money is a story. Nike is a story. Taylor Swift is a story. The exact shade of blue used by Tiffany is a story.

Stories built all the wonders of the modern world. They also led us into the compounding crises we face. Stories built every nasty nationalist movement in history, and the many struggles for equality.

But ‘storytelling’ - as the now-ubiquitous description for professional communication?? As a job description, or a point on a resume? Well, that’s quite a lot younger. And in 2023,? it’s everywhere.

A search on Linkedin generates over 29,000 results. Conferences, groups, job titles, businesses titles, resume points. You can even add ‘storytelling’ as a skill to your profile. Although you can also add ‘smiling’, so maybe that’s less compelling as a datapoint.?

But LinkedIn is not the best place to look for trends through time. So we went to the website of one of the World’s biggest marketing magazines. A text search for ‘storytelling’ allowed us to dig through decades of reporting. It produced 1197 examples, back to the very first appearance in September, 1997.?

35 years of prophets and pundits. 35 years of this year’s creative superstar. 35 years of smiling CMOs promising bold new action. Always in a jacket and shirt, tie optional, Y Chromosome mandatory — until around 2012. Then it was time to count. Every mention of ‘Storytelling’. From every year.

It started with a trickle — 2 or 3 mentions a year at the end of the last century. Slowly crawling up from single to double figures, reaching 16 hits by 2011. Then bigger jumps. 39 the next year, 66 the next, 68 the next and then Woosh! Tipping point! Suddenly, we were in the Golden Age

By 2015 and 2016 we were at over 150 references per year.? If mentions were money, ‘storytelling’ had an incredible CAGR of 34.2% over ten years. It definitely deserved a bonus that year. Storytelling had gone from rare to occasional to frequent to ubiquitous, peaking in 2016.??

But gravity always wins. By 2017, the mentions had plummeted to 84. Then bumped around the 60-70 range for the next five years. You would expect the next stage to be shift from overuse to cliche, meaninglessness, then the shuffle back into obscurity. But it didn’t happen that way. Because in 2023, the use of ‘storytelling’ rose abruptly again. It defied the death spiral, clocking 120 mentions by October. Which leads us to a theory and a hope.

That 5-6 year plateau started in 2016… hmmm… remember 2016? Remember America electing the world’s most lyingest liar as president? (The Washington Post recorded? 30,573 untruths during his presidency — 21 a day.) Remember that growing feeling that objective truth had somehow started to splinter? Stories didn’t feel like stories anymore. But more like close cousins to lies, misinformation, manipulation. The weapons of demagogues. How could we proudly call ourselves storytellers, when the whole world felt like a lie??

Which leads us to the hope.

In 2023 ‘storytelling’ is close to a peak again. So why should the resurgence of ‘storytelling’ in 2023 give us hope? Simply because it signals an underlying confidence - a willingness to reclaim a snoozing superpower.?

Despite the darkness, the lingering hopelessness of the last few years, and the serious choices we now face, we have the opportunity to choose the story. To deal with the consequences of unsustainable growth, or not. To face down hate, or not. To counter misinformation, or not. To slow the superheating of our one and only planet, or not.

It’s time to embrace the power of storytelling again. It can move the world. Bend the arc of history. It’s powerful.? And it’s time to engage with the responsibilities that come with that power. To own the consequences of our choices. Let’s tell the story of a culture that found ways to step more lightly on the land, that used technology to lift up all people, and build businesses, movements and moments that benefit us all.?

We found a quote buried in those 35 years of headlines that stayed with us: “it will be the storyteller who will become the critical link to consumers in the future....” Not a remarkable observation in itself, but remarkable because we found it in that first ever article that mentioned ‘storytelling’, back in August 1997.

So maybe we’ve known it all along.

Justin Moore is a founding Partner at Canary’s Revenge, an independent creative studio dedicated exclusively to projects that contribute to a more sustainable and equitable world. He recently added ‘storytelling’ to his Linkedin profile, but decided against ‘smiling’.

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