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Human beings are natural meaning makers. Like it or not, we simply can’t help but create connections and make meaning of our experiences.

Story is a fundamental component of the human meaning making process. Having narrative brains, we are predisposed to use elements of story to organize and store information.

By employing even simple nouns and verbs, humans communicate meaning in a nutshell and create a sort of mini-story, which Dr. Renée Fuller identifies as a basic unit for organizing information. She calls this organizing unit a story-engram and points out that, “bits of information cannot function as thinking units unless we make story-engrams with them.”

These stories or narratives, intrinsic to our thinking, help us to organize and make sense of stimuli and make connections between seemingly disparate things. Narratives, or stories, actually help us think and learn.

Back in 2001, when I started working with philanthropic organizations to document and share stories related to the work they fund, the Internet was just beginning to change how people access and share information. The possibility for digital storytelling to deliver wide-reaching awareness campaigns was tremendous; and the potential for digital story-learning to make strategic connections in support of positive change seemed unlimited.

But I soon came to witness that these organizations limit how they think about, gather, and share stories. Most often stories are only valued as an emotional appeal—a way to generate donations or influence public opinion—and not vital learning tools that directly support the mission of the organization.

This narrow view of stories overlooks the fact that they are fundamental to how we think; central to everything we do. Stories are so ubiquitous to our thinking and communication that we simply fail to notice them. Of course they appeal to our humanity, but not just our emotions. They connect our thoughts; give context to concepts and meaning to data.

When it comes to organizations that seek to make a difference in the world, stories help them understand the impact of the work they support. Stories don’t replace statistics, but they give meaning to them, and they help people understand why a particular effort works or how it works or could work better, because stories provide explanation or connotation that statistics alone do not.

A robust approach to storytelling, or what I’ve come to call story-learning, takes advantage of opportunities to make all sorts of vital connections…

• Connecting siloed parts of an organization to cross-pollinate ideas and efforts
• Connecting and encouraging separate grantees to work synergistically
• Connecting complementary approaches to the same issue
• Connecting lessons in one area to serve another area
• Connecting disparate audiences to a unified mission

Over the years, my team and I have used stories to make every one of these types of connections. Although it is not usually what was expected, because people’s expectations of stories are very limited, time and time again I’ve seen a strategic, skillful use of story-learning reveal important new perspectives, deliver valuable insights, and communicate complex issues in succinct, memorable ways that support an organization’s mission.

Any organization with a mission to bring about positive change must prioritize learning and then share that learning. If you want people to learn, you need to communicate in ways that help their brains process, store and understand the data you’re sharing. This is the role of story.

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