Why did our love for storytelling disappear when it’s more necessary than ever?
Opinion
On World Book Day, the marketing director at Magnetic assesses the importance of storytelling in a world saturated by content.
Every year, I swear I won’t leave the World Book Day costume until the last minute.
And every year, inevitably, I do.
In our house, it involves cardboard, glue, last-minute improvisation and a child explaining in great detail why the costume has to be exactly right because otherwise the story doesn’t make sense.
What always strikes me is the conviction. You don’t just get told who the character is. You get the entire plot and motivations, delivered with complete confidence that if they explain it properly, you’ll understand why it matters.
Children never worry about whether storytelling is appropriate. They just assume that if they tell it well enough, you’ll listen.
But somewhere between school and work, we decide the opposite. We step into professional life and gradually replace stories with slides. They feel clearer and safer, yet often harder to follow.
Looking back across my career, the moments that actually changed outcomes rarely came from the most detailed explanation. They came from the clearest one.
If I had to name the skill that shaped my career most, it would be storytelling.
Not in a theatrical sense, but a practical one.
Early in my career, someone told me that I spoke and wrote “simply”. I took it badly – ”simple” felt like a polite way of saying unsophisticated. But they meant something else. They meant people understood me. It took me a while to realise clarity isn’t dumbing things down. It’s actually a sign you understand.
I’ve sat in rooms where a detailed, logical explanation changed nothing, then watched someone describe the same idea through a single example, and the room shifted. People leaned in, the questions changed, and ultimately, decisions followed.
The work hadn’t changed. What mattered was how people understood it.
And yet, storytelling is often hugely underestimated in the business world. It’s seen as something soft, an afterthought, rather than a core skill. But it’s usually the thing that decides whether an idea goes anywhere.
The great unlearning
Somewhere along the way, we begin to unlearn what once came naturally.
At school and in our early careers, we’re rewarded for being right. We’re taught to present the facts and show our working to back up our claims. As we progress, the stakes rise and so does the pressure to sound credible. Our language becomes more technical, slides become denser, and the safest version of an idea wins.
So, in trying to be taken seriously, we strip out the very thing that makes us persuasive.
In professional settings, storytelling can feel risky because it relies on emotion and asks you to take a point of view. It asks you to interpret rather than simply present. And in environments that prize certainty and control, that can feel uncomfortable.
So instead, we default to information. Which don’t get me wrong is important, but it’s rarely enough to move anyone to act.
Why storytelling matters more than ever
The irony is that we need storytelling now more than ever.
We operate in a world saturated with content. Every day brings another report, another opinion and more AI slop into our feeds.
In that environment, the differentiator is the ability to shape the information into something coherent and compelling.
When everyone has access to similar facts, the advantage comes from the narrative around them. With stories recalled up to 22 times better than facts alone, when every competitor sounds similar, the thing that stands out is the meaning built around them.
You see this most clearly during change. A leader can walk through 20 slides explaining what is happening, yet afterwards, people rarely repeat the details. They talk about whether it made sense and how it felt.
What people carry with them is not the wording, but the confidence or uncertainty it creates.
That is what determines what happens next. A strategy document might outline a three-year growth plan in meticulous detail, but a team only moves when they understand where they are going and why it matters to them.
It is usually the point where ambition becomes believable.
Reclaiming the instinct
The encouraging part is that storytelling isn’t something we need to learn from scratch. We already know how to do it. We learned it in playgrounds and classrooms long before we stepped into meeting rooms.
The challenge is confidence. We need to give ourselves permission to bring more of that instinct into our professional lives. Often it’s a relatively small adjustment – replacing jargon with plain language and explaining not just what we are doing, but what it changes.
Because ultimately, in a world awash with information, the people we remember are not those who said the most, but those who helped others make sense of it.
Perhaps we didn’t grow out of storytelling. We trained it out of ourselves. And at a point where work has never felt more complex or uncertain, the skill we once used to captivate a classroom may be the very one organisations quietly need most.
Amelia Shepherd is the marketing director at Magnetic