Storytellers, the future needs us
“Data is the new oil.”
Not quite.
According to professor Birju Shah, data is more valuable.
The Game of Thrones finale told us that “nothing’s more powerful than a good story.” That’s what data is—a collection of stories. Stories about health, habits, movement, dreams, beliefs, relationships. Each of us contains trillions of interacting data points.
Yuval Noah Harari wrote in 2016 that the mainstream religions of the past are fading. They are being replaced by a new, secular religion: the belief in big data. Many of us—more every day—live by the stock market, the Fitbit, the LLM.
(My Oura ring tells me I need to reduce my stress score and improve my recovery time. I am not sure how it knows that, but I believe it. I suspect my health insurance provider will buy that data and use it to determine my premiums.)
Some people say that data, unlike oil, is an infinite resource. Theoretically, sure. There are always new stories to share. But their being shared or understood is not an inevitability.
There is a growing skepticism towards Silicon Valley, which we increasingly understand is tracking our every move online. I deleted my Facebook soon after the Cambridge Analytica fallout. I switched to VPNs. I can recognize what I’ll call AI slop—LinkedIn posts or university essays with the exact same format and content, obviously written by ChatGPT. I’m worried about ‘dead internet theory’, which suggests that most of what we see online is bots talking to themselves.
More people will grow dependent on LLMs for writing their blog posts (hello, LinkedIn!), answering their questions (hey, Perplexity!), and telling them how to become better salespeople or good dates (what’s up, Yoodli?).
But this dependency will be disastrous if we stop adding to the sum of our collective knowledge and cede our creativity to summaries of what other people have already said.
For valuable data to keep flowing freely—not just what my Oura ring reports, but my deeper feelings about my health—we need to have spaces to share.
That’s why I’m entering springtime with a renewed sense of pride and purpose in my speech coaching work.
I’ve been leading storytelling workshops with focus groups. My job is generally to help subject-matter experts communicate data in a way that others—their clients, their bosses, their colleagues—can appreciate.
Running these groups isn’t easy. Participants have to feel comfortable enough to tell the truth, become clear enough for these narratives to be understood, and be engaged enough to see the value in adding to the conversation rather than reiterating what their group-mates have already said.
Without the space to share these stories, they go unheard. The data is never gathered. And important decisions are made without the inclusion of this new information.
Oil barons didn’t make their fortunes on CREATING oil—they did so by processing the oil into a form that had value to the rest of us.
In years to come, the quality of honest data rooted in creativity, novel research, and lived experiences will determine the value of this trillion-dollar industry.
Cheers to the storytellers. Cheers to the fact-finders. Cheers to the speech makers. Tell us about facts we haven’t heard, in formats we haven’t yet seen, in styles unique to you.
That’s what I’ve been doing for my whole professional life, and I’m very excited about the opportunity to hone a skill that will become even more valued in the decades ahead.
