Storytelling Is the Most Valuable Skill Anyone Can Have

If you could hand your children one skill, and only one, what would it be?

Storytelling? It might be the single most useful thing a human being can do. Every organisation we work with, whether that's a police force trying to rebuild trust or a council trying to explain a difficult decision, ultimately succeeds or fails on the same thing: can they tell people the story of what's happening and why it matters?

There's a genuine evolutionary argument for it.

Storytelling didn't start as entertainment

A widely cited paper published in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science makes the case that storytelling exists because it was, quite literally, useful for survival. Before we had written records, the way one generation passed on which berries were poisonous, which paths were dangerous, and how to handle a threat wasn't through a list of facts. It was through a story someone could remember, retell, and pass on accurately enough that the information survived.

In evolutionary terms, the humans who told better stories were more likely to keep their communities alive. Topics in Cognitive Science, Wiley Online Library.

Business runs on exactly the same code, just with a different kind of survival at stake. Every entrepreneur is, at heart, a storyteller. They're not selling a product on day one, because on day one there usually isn't much of a product yet. What they're selling is a version of the future that's compelling enough to pull people, and their money, toward it. Strip away the pitch decks and the funding rounds, and what's happening is one person's story becoming believable enough that other people start acting as if it's already true.

We see the same pattern, just with different stakes, in the organisations we work with. A council explaining a regeneration project isn't just publishing planning documents, it's trying to help residents believe in a version of their own high street that doesn't exist yet. A police force isn't just issuing statistics, it's trying to help a community believe that the people protecting them understand what their daily life actually feels like and show them that they're making a positive impact. The mechanism is identical to the entrepreneur's pitch. The stakes are just about trust.

Storytelling starts with writing, even when the final output isn't written at all

This is the bit people tend to skip past. You can tell a story on video, in a speech, across a whole campaign built entirely on imagery, and it still starts with writing, even if nobody ever sees the words.

Joan Didion described writing as a way of working out what you actually think, what you're looking at, and what it all means, rather than something you do once you've already worked all that out. That's the part most people get backwards.

They assume you think first and write second, as if writing is just the transcription stage. In our experience, and in Didion's account of her own process, it's closer to the opposite. You often don't know what you actually believe about something until you've tried to put it into a sentence and watched whether the sentence holds up. If you want her fuller argument in her own words rather than our paraphrase of it, it's here: Why I Write, Lit Hub.

There's research behind why that happens, too. A 1977 paper by composition scholar Janet Emig, still cited regularly in writing and cognitive science circles, argued that writing draws on more of the brain at once than most other everyday tasks. Her account describes three things happening simultaneously: the physical act of forming the words, the visual work of scanning and shaping the text as it appears, and the deeper cognitive work of turning a half-formed thought into an actual structured sentence. Writing as a Mode of Learning, CUNY OpenLab.

But the practical upshot lines up with what anyone who writes for a living already knows instinctively: writing isn't a lesser form of thinking. It's one of the most complete forms of thinking available to us.

What this means for the organisations we work with

This is why, when a council or a police force comes to us wanting "content," we tend to slow the conversation down before we speed it up. The work isn't producing more words or more posts. It's figuring out what the organisation genuinely believes, what it's actually trying to say, and whether that holds up in a connected way once it's written down plainly, in a sentence a resident could read on their phone in ten seconds.

Most communications failures we see in the public sector aren't failures of output. Organisations put out plenty of statements, plenty of press releases, plenty of social posts. What's usually missing is the thinking that should have happened before any of it was written, the actual working-out of what's true, what matters, and what the audience needs to hear first.

Skip that stage, and no amount of polish on the final version fixes it.

We come at this from a journalism background, which means we were trained to believe writing and thinking are the same exercise, not two separate ones. A journalist doesn't fully understand a story until they've tried to write the lead paragraph and found out it doesn't quite work yet, and then rewritten it until it does. That's not inefficiency, it's a process of finding out what the story is.

Storytelling might be the most valuable skill because it forces clarity nothing else quite manages to. It makes you find out what you actually think before you ask anyone else to believe it.

That's the work. Everything else, the campaign, the channel, the format, comes after.

Why not work with us at JAM, see what we're all about.