Stop Drumming. Start Storytelling.

Stories have a meaningful effect. They succeed in what psychologists call "contextualization". Stories connect facts with a red thread and weave a meaningful context around individual pieces of information. Like a jigsaw puzzle, stories combine information, facts, and data to form an overall picture. They make it easier for the listener to grasp fragments of information, understand them, and recognize their overall meaning.

As a lecturer, you should always keep in mind that listeners are looking for this connection—and context. If a speaker does not provide a red thread, recipients become irritated. As a result, the audience becomes unfocused, turns away, or tries to construct something themselves. If the audience decides to make a meaningful connection themselves, you “lose” them.

Hungry Triangles and Jealous Circles

The fact that people are always looking for connections and explanations was demonstrated as early as the 1940s by the two psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel with a tiny experiment. Over the past 70 years, their study has been repeated again and again—always with the same astonishing result:

Heider and Simmel showed their students a short, animated film with geometric figures—two triangles and a circle moving around a square. Then the scientists asked their audience to describe what they saw in this movie. Surprisingly, over 70 percent of the viewers claimed to have seen a story.

They reported love dramas and jealousy scenes; some saw a fight and power games, while others said they saw a sibling couple or Hansel and Gretel having to defend themselves against a wicked witch. Only a minority—almost 30 percent of the audience—reported what was actually to be seen: a large and a small triangle and a small circle moving unrhythmically around a few strokes.

Actually, I have already betrayed way too much, because you should watch the film yourself.

The Heider-Simmel experiment marks the beginning of what is called "attribution research", with which psychologists explain how people use individual pieces of information to derive causal explanations. This is especially true when dealing with other people. When we see someone frowning, we involuntarily look for a reason—for example, disapproval or rejection. The fact that a person’s frown might be random is something we do not consider, because—according to Heider and Simmel’s research—we put all our observations into a meaningful context and look for an explanation for our observation.

Beware of Story Bias

The Swiss writer and entrepreneur Rolf Dobelli, known for his commitment to the "art of thinking clearly" (that’s the title of his book), points out that we even put coincidences in history into explanations and "stories", and thus often draw wrong conclusions. He calls this "story bias":

“Life is a tangle worse than a ball of wool (…) We twist this chaos of details into a story. We want our life to form a strand that we can follow. Many call this thread ‘meaning’. (…) We do the same with details of world history. We force them into a story without contradiction. The result? Suddenly we ‘understand’, for example, why the Treaty of Versailles led to World War II or (…) why the Iron Curtain had to fall or Harry Potter became a bestseller. (…) We construct the ‘meaning’ into something afterwards. So stories are a questionable thing—but apparently we can’t do without them.”

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Therefore, the danger of providing information—facts and figures—without context and "story", and leaving it to the audience to do the interpretation, is a great one. But the danger is even greater when speakers believe they are conveying a coherent story, while the audience is actually only hearing unrelated pieces of information.

Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist at Stanford University, illustrated this in her dissertation in 1990 with a fascinating test: Newton divided a group of volunteers into teams of two. One member of the duo was to drum the beat and rhythm of a song by tapping on the tabletop. The other participant should listen and try to recognize the song. The drummer had to choose from a number of songs that everyone knows, for example "Happy Birthday", a well-known children’s song, or the national anthem. The drummer (or tapper) chose the song without telling the listener. The listener, in turn, was supposed to guess the song solely by the tapping of their partner.

Before the experiment started, Elizabeth Newton asked the drummers whether they believed their listener would recognize the song. On average, the drummers—men and women—guessed a 50 percent chance. Men were even slightly more optimistic (57%) than women (43%).

Reality, however, produced an entirely different result. In fact, it proved to be extremely difficult for the listeners to recognize the song. Only 3 of 120 attempts were recognized. This corresponds to a rate of 2.5 percent. While the drummers assumed a 1 in 2 chance that their drumming would be understood and recognized, the real result was 1 in 40.

What is the reason for such a massive misunderstanding?

“The tapper(…) subjects in this study were so embedded in their own imaginations—so caught up in the richness of the melodies they were ‘hearing’—that they could not recognize how impoverished the same stimulus was from the perspective of the listener,” comments Newton.

Chip and Dan Heath, who draw attention to Elizabeth Newton’s experiment with their book "Made to Stick", see similarities to presentations and speeches. They compare this situation with CEOs who present in front of their employees, marketing people who communicate with customers, teachers and professors who lecture to students, and politicians who talk to voters. Because they all drum.

They drum with a melody in their head, which they know personally very well. Executives know the corporate strategy, which they have developed over months and which they now present to their employees. Marketing managers know the product and corporate brand they work for and which they bring closer to the consumer with core messages, advertising strategies, and campaigns. Teachers and professors quote in their lessons and lectures from a personal treasure trove of knowledge they have acquired over the years. Politicians draw on a wealth of complex background knowledge and have numerous different agendas in mind, which they represent to voters.

And what does the listener hear? Incoherent tapping and drumming.

No matter how hard both sides try—the drummer knocks even more emphatically and decisively, the listener listens even more intently—the result always remains the same: incomprehension.

What’s missing is a story. A story that combines individual pieces of information, that brings logic to data and facts, and that transforms "drumming and tapping" into an "understandable melody". A story that gives meaning to pure information.

So don’t drum. Tell a story.

TIP: Watch the video by Jeff Walker, in which he explains this phenomenon called "The Curse of Knowledge".


Explore the art of storytelling for leaders in Between the Lines – A Guide to Storytelling by Petra Sammer. Available as an eBook on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0ax3rLfy

This text was written by a human; AI tools were used for spelling and grammar checks. Photo by Morgan Skinner on Unsplash