In an increasingly diverse and vibrant but also complex and fragmented cultural landscape, what stands out as "universal" in storytelling?
People want to become better. They want to move from pain to solution, from being mediocre to being their best selves. The drive to become is, as far as I can tell, universal. Whether in a novel or a 30 second spot, the stories that speak to us the most make us feel like we're in the midst of a positive change somehow. If you focus too much on the positive -- the value prop -- or too much on the negative -- the painpoint -- you lose the transformation which is the whole point of the story.
I work in climate tech. In the early days of communications around climate change, a lot of the messaging was driven by fear. It makes sense. People had failed to pay attention to climate change for so long that the shock of showing how dire the situation was became necessary. We needed the doomsday clock. We needed the jump scare. The problem with only telling stories based in fear, however, is that the fear begins to paralyze. People get overwhelmed into a standstill when action is what it needed most.
I think the best story telling in climate is happening right now, all around us. Over the last handful of years some outstanding storytellers have begun to emerge. I'll loosely refer to them as the pragmatic optimists. They are realists, they aren't overly idealistic, but they aren't stuck in doom either. They lay out, in painful detail the complexity and breadth of the challenges facing us, and then, in practical tangible terms, show you how to break down that tangle into something you can address. I'll leave a few here if you're interested...
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and her new book, "What if we get it right?"
John Doerr whose book Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis, breaks down climate change into a set of major levers that are so elegantly simple they can be written on a napkin
Hannah Ritche and her book "Not the end of the world".
Christiana Figueres, all of her writing but especially her podcast Outrage and Optimism (because you need both.
None of these experts are overly idealistic or naive to what's ahead of us. On the contrary, they see the challenge better than most, but they are more interested in walking toward it than cowering before it.
