Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

value story
is king. And the value of a
value story starts in psychology and spans the full spectrum of why we say yes.
The Information Temptation
The challenge Workiva faced—the challenge we all face—was to resist the
temptation to try to close the gaps with things like features and functions or
capabilities and advanced technologies. No one is immune from the temptation
to complicate the journey across the value gap. Not even the local gelato shop.
When my family recently took a beach vacation, as most beach vacations
require, we stopped at a gelato shop on our walk home after dinner. We’d been
there many times before, and it was always packed with a line out the door and
spilling into the street. But what was typically jolly summer vacation chaos had a

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subtly different tone on this particular trip. People seemed agitated, impatient,
and there were noticeably more parents speaking in terse tones to their children.
When it was finally our turn at the counter, I understood why.
Instead of the rows of colorful frozen treats on display with slices of
corresponding fruits or chocolate candies to signify the flavor you would
typically expect from a gelato shop, there were two rows of round metal lids
sitting atop what one could only hope were buckets of gelato. Gone was the
luxury of picking the brown one or the pink one or the pale green one with
crumbled pistachios on it; instead, you now had to read the flavors from a list
posted on the wall behind the gelato-scooping staff.
Scan a variety of pretty colors and fruits and choose the flavor that looks
most delicious: easy.
Read flavors from a list, mentally compare each option, logically assess
which one might taste best: hard.
Add in the additional challenge of having to read off the flavors to kids who
can’t read and then repeat those flavors because what child can process fifteen
different flavors in a list, and the struggle was real. In just five minutes in the
shop I heard three sets of agitated parents threaten their children that if they
didn’t decide, they didn’t get anything at all. (I may or may not have been one of
them.)
While more information may seem like the way to make an obvious decision
more obvious, the reality is this approach often muddies up an otherwise easy
yes. And while more data or details or logical explanations are often what the
audience expects you to say, if your goal is to convince them of the value you’re
offering, the facts may do more harm than good. Why? Because they simply
make our brains work harder than they need to or, for that matter, want to.
One Brain, Two Systems
In his 
New York Times
bestselling book 
Thinking, Fast and Slow,
2002 winner of
the Nobel Prize in economics Daniel Kahneman discusses in great detail what he
refers to as the two systems of the brain: System 1 and System 2.
System 1 “operates automatically and quickly with little or no effort and no
sense of voluntary control.”
1
System 1 is responsible for automatic answers to
questions like, “What is 2 + 2?” This first system is the reason we know to look

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to the sky when we hear thunder or a passing jet and not the ground. Based on a
lifetime of cues, System 1 allows us to take in information, assimilate it, and
make judgments on it simultaneously and effortlessly. Do we get it wrong
sometimes? Sure. For example, how many of each animal did Moses bring on
the ark? System 1 says two. Of course, that’s incorrect. Moses was more into
burning bushes; Noah was the ark guy.
That’s where System 2 comes in. System 2 “allocates attention to the
effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The
operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of
agency, choice, and concentration.”
2
Whew. If you’re as tired as I was just
reading that, it means your System 2 was at work. System 2 requires
concentration and effort. System 2 processes new information. System 2 gets
involved once System 1 determines the issue at hand is too complicated.
Simply put, System 1 is characterized by