An extraordinary individual can challenge what we believe about one person without changing what we believe about everyone like them.
Every organization has one: the person whose story seems to prove the whole point. The student from an under-resourced school who makes it to an elite university. The person who experiences homelessness and goes on to build a business. The immigrant who arrives with almost nothing and becomes a surgeon. The person who leaves prison and eventually leads a major organization.
These are extraordinary people, and their stories are worth telling. But there is a problem with asking an extraordinary person to carry an argument about an entire population: audiences don’t necessarily generalize from the individual. Sometimes they do exactly the opposite. They decide the person is exceptional.
The story changes what they believe about the hero without changing what they believe about everyone else.
When proof becomes exception
Organizations understandably gravitate toward their biggest success stories. Narratively, they have everything we want: enormous obstacles, clear transformation and a satisfying ending. They make abstract issues human and give audiences someone to root for.
But consider what happens when that story meets an existing belief.
Someone believes that students from a particular neighborhood aren’t academically competitive. Then they meet the student from that neighborhood who made it to Harvard. They can reconsider their belief about the students—or they can conclude that this student is unusually gifted.
Someone believes immigrants are a drain on the economy. Then they hear about an immigrant who built a company employing hundreds of people. They can reconsider their assumptions about immigrants—or admire an exceptional entrepreneur while leaving the broader assumption untouched.
Someone believes people with criminal records are risky employees. Then they encounter someone who served a lengthy prison sentence and went on to become a highly successful executive. They can reconsider what a criminal record actually tells us about someone’s potential as an employee—or decide they have just met a remarkable exception.
The story has provided contradictory evidence. But people don’t have to abandon the rule to accommodate it. They can simply create an exception to the rule.
And the more extraordinary the person is, the easier that can be.
A story about one person is still a story about one person
This is where storytelling and narrative strategy begin to diverge.
A compelling individual story can establish that something happened. It can create empathy, surprise an audience and disrupt an assumption about the person at its center. But an organization advancing a broader social or policy argument usually needs the audience to make another leap: this person’s experience tells us something about the rule.
That leap isn’t automatic.
Take second-chance hiring. The story of an extraordinarily successful formerly incarcerated person demonstrates, at minimum, that this particular person was capable of enormous success after incarceration. But that isn’t the same as demonstrating that employers systematically underestimate people with criminal records, that a criminal record is an inadequate proxy for someone’s potential as an employee, or that second-chance hiring produces good outcomes across a broader population.
Those are claims about the rule. The individual story is evidence about one person.
Without a narrative that explicitly connects the two, an audience can admire the person, celebrate their redemption and walk away with exactly the same assumptions about hiring everyone else with a record.
The bootstrap trap
Consider the student who grows up surrounded by inadequate schools, limited resources and economic instability and eventually graduates from an elite university. An organization might tell that story to demonstrate what young people from under-resourced communities are capable of when given an opportunity.
But the story can also become a bootstrap story. If this student made it, perhaps the barriers aren’t really determinative. Perhaps other students simply need the same determination. The exceptional outcome hasn’t indicted the system. It has demonstrated that an exceptional person can overcome it.
The same narrative reversal can happen with poverty, housing, immigration, disability, incarceration and countless other issues. The hero’s success is supposed to show us that our assumptions about a population are wrong. Instead, their success becomes the reason we don’t have to reconsider those assumptions at all.
They aren’t evidence that the rule is wrong.
They’re the exception that proves it.
From story to argument
This doesn’t mean organizations should stop telling extraordinary stories. Individual stories do something data often cannot: they make possibilities visible. They give abstract issues human stakes and allow audiences to encounter people they may otherwise understand only as categories.
The point isn’t to make the hero less extraordinary. It’s to make clear that the argument doesn’t depend on his being extraordinary.
Before choosing the most impressive person available to represent an issue, organizations should ask a more difficult question: What does this story actually require the audience to reconsider?
Narrative strategy is the work of closing that gap. It connects individual experience to the larger pattern, supplies the context necessary to interpret it and makes clear why one person’s story should change how we understand something beyond that person.
Because an exceptional person can change our minds about an individual while leaving the rule completely intact.
And sometimes the most important work of the narrative is making sure the audience understands that the rule—not the exception—is the point.
COJA helps organizations examine not only the stories they tell, but the conclusions those stories make available to an audience. If your communications are meant to change how people understand an issue, institution or population, we help make sure the larger argument survives the story. Book a call with us to learn more.
