Why Storytelling is Good for your Business
Turn information into meaningful encounters
For the last few nights, my 5-year old has asked for the same story. Rumpelstiltskin.
If you don’t know it, a young lady is offered to the king for marriage under the pretense that she can weave straw into gold. Given a pile of straw and a deadline of the morning, she weeps. A strange little fellow appears and offers to spin the straw into gold in exchange for her locket.
The next night, the greedy king wants more gold. Crying in fear again, the strange man comes back and offers to do it for her once more in exchange for her ring.
The third night, with the biggest pile of straw to spin into gold, the girl has nothing left to pay the strange little man. He asks for the firstborn son. She accepts. And when the baby boy is born, the girl is in a dreadful predicament.
Fairytales are long held to be among the ways we can teach children to make sense of the world.
The ‘big bad wolf’ represents all sorts of danger. It is the archetypal villain. Straying off the forest path, the pitfall of accepting apples from strangers, are all plots to teach acceptable behaviour. Or else. These are the stakes. The tension of being eaten alive, locked in a cage, or trapped in a castle tower.
