Narrative breadcrumbs & false trails
“We’ve got to control the narrative.” How many times have you heard someone say something like that? It sounds right, somehow, but what does it really mean? At the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in 2024, Dr. Reed Tuckson gave a keynote where he observed “The stories we’re telling aren’t resonating.”
Narrative is meaning. Facts are just facts, events are just events, until they’re strung together in a certain order so that we can make sense of them in relation to each other. Author Will Storr (The Science of Storytelling) talks about horror movies. The thing that makes them work is that the scary bits are the result of a deliberate buildup. If you saw that climactic moment without any context, it might be creepy or gross, but it wouldn’t be so terrifying.
Humans are narrative-building machines. If you tell a person 10 facts, chances are good that they’ll try to find the connection, or invent one for themselves. But where many experts fall short is that they do two particular things wrong.
Leaving a trail of breadcrumbs
They lay out the facts as if they were leaving a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods for people to follow later. But that assumes that everyone will start in the same place, and that they will understand the relationship between the crumbs in the same way. But not everyone will see it in the same way you do.
Today you might share facts about the simultaneous push by the Trump administration to tank the economy and remove support for parents, young children, low-income families, and early childhood education, while simultaneously trying to get Americans to have more babies. But if all you do is lay out the facts, don’t be too surprised if someone reads all that and says, “Good.”
The weakness of evidence
Don’t misunderstand me: facts and evidence are important. If you’re in and evidence-based profession, it will be the firm backbone that helps your communication stand up. But if all you present are facts, you’re laying out breadcrumbs and leaving it up to luck that people will see it the same way you do (with your deep context and years of attention to the issues).
This is why you have to tell stories. A story is, at its core, a string of events threaded with the author’s interpretation, which provides the meaning, or at least suggests a starting point and direction for people who want to follow the breadcrumbs. Figuring out the kind of stories that will resonate demands that you put some real thought into who your audience is and what they want to hear, what they expect to hear, what motivates them, makes them comfortable (or uncomfortable).
A little daunting? Maybe, but the work pays off in impact—and the avoidance of unintended takeaways.