Story as the driver for Exploration
I’ve always been a fan of Antarctic exploration, from when I was in Shackleton house at Telford Primary School and Robert Falcon Scott was number 26 in my collection of Brooke Bond Tea cards. I recently went to The International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, NZ and on my journey back I picked up a copy of Madhouse at the End of the Earth, which tells of the less-known Belgica expedition of 1897.
The expedition met with storms, mutiny, starvation, an unknown illness and as the ship was locked into the ice for the long winter, the crew were in darkness for months, and descended into madness.
So why would explorers go to Antarctica which had no minerals to extract, no wildlife to be catalogued, no civilisations to be discovered? What was the pay-off?
In the absence of easily accessible natural resources stories were what explorers extracted from these barren icescapes.
These explorers paid back investors by writing their memoirs and going on lecture tours. And the more dramatic stories were the most valuable. This search for stories that would sell lead to high-risk decisions. The leader of the Belgica knew that trapping his men in the ice could lead to terrible suffering, but he also saw that this suffering could be a down payment on future income streams.
Danger, death and mutiny became the Clickbait to the Victorians.
There are a few things we can learn.
Stories are as valuable as gold
In the corporate world good stories are rare, and the ability to find, refine and tell them seems to be often undervalued. Companies might produce thousands of PowerPoint slides, but no-one gets emotionally involved in a 5-bullet slide. They want to hear of people like them, with similar problems, and how they overcame them.
The best stories have drama.
The story of the Belgica, and subsequent stories of exploration have suspense, drama and danger. Shackleton and Scott sold more books, and became more famous than the oh-so-competent Amundsen, who seemed to find getting to the South Pole a matter of logistics and technology. Frostbite, scurvy, starvation and death sells more books than an explanation of the correct wax to apply to skis.
You may need to go to the end of the earth to get the best stories.
Who are the Shackletons in your business, those who are seeking out new stories? The best stories are unlikely to be close at hand: they will likely have been filtered by lawyers and PR people. You are unlikely to find them on slide 49 of your company’s “positioning deck”. Get out, talk to end users, people on the shop floor, at the mine. Listen for examples of unexpected problems, adversity, when things didn’t go well. Listen to them unfiltered, and tell those stories.
