Why Religious Stories are Interesting and your PowerPoint is Not

Why Religious Stories are Interesting

And your PowerPoint is Not

By Sean Bellamy McNulty

Ra, the Egyptian sun-god, travels through the underworld and battles Apophis, the god of chaos, but rises again. Zeus, a god of ancient Greece, reaches manhood and with his mother’s assistance, challenges and ultimately overthrows his father, Kronus. Siddhartha Gautama, later Buddha, was the son of a king who at 29 left his kingdom, wife and son in search of the answer to human suffering. After living a humble life as a carpenter, Jesus meditates in the desert for 40 days and nights, resists the Devil’s three temptations, proclaims himself the Son of God and King of the Jews and is hammered to a cross. Muhammad, after riding Buraq to the various heavens to meet the earlier prophets and Allah and preaching the many revelations revealed is harassed, assaulted, tortured and forced into exile in Medina. There he unites the tribes and returns to conquer Mecca.

These stories and similar ones, modified and adopted by people of different races and cultures everywhere, have been retold in oral traditions for an estimated 50,000 years and written tradition for 3,000 years. Why do these religious stories persist for millennia but you lose your audience's attention in five minutes?

Archetypal Stories and Human Psychology

Religious stories are timeless because they are archetypal true stories. All enduring narratives follow one of an extremely limited set of themes that we seem to be preprogrammed to find interesting. Within these archetypal stories are archetypal characters. The hero, mentor, the everyday man or woman, the innocent and the villain. Within every archetypal story we map ourselves onto these characters, usually the hero, which allows us to have empathy with the storyteller.

Recently, the advancement of text recognition software and data analysis techniques have enabled quantitatively capturing six of these arcs which were the subject of a recently published paper:

The data science approach is new, but the relative interestingness of archetypal stories is not. The psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote extensively on archetypes in the early 20th century, Jung’s work has been built on by the University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson, Kurt Vonnegut wrote his master’s thesis in anthropology on the universal shapes of stories and Aristotle analysed how “plots must be constructed if a poem were to be a success” in 335 BC.

We behave as if we know that stories must be told in an archetypal format. Even a mundane story about your commute to campus, if you pay attention to how you tell it, will follow one of the metaplots above. Your story may take the form of man in the hole, perhaps you encounter some bad traffic but somehow overcome and make it to the lecture on leadership on time. Or it could take the form of a tragedy, in which case you’re likely explaining to the professor how your day started in relative happiness, but through a series of unfortunate events, now find yourself in a state of relative unhappiness. And when you tell your story, your classmates (and hopefully professor) can instantly relate, as they have been in a similar archetypal tales and can identify the heroes and villains.

This mental model is helpful in understanding a number of different phenomena.

It explains how no matter the affluence of the MBA batch, there is no shortage of tales of hardship and triumph. Not only do we tell stories following an archetypal plot, but we are the hero in the archetypal story of our lives. This is for good reason, as life is tragic. We all must cope with this somehow, so we design our lives around narratives to bring order to the chaos of reality. We live and die, and in-between become heroes.

And the desire for archetypal stories helps explains the lure of the dichotomous world. It is much easier to attribute one causal factor such as the patriarchy, sexism, racism, bigotry, the system, government or corporations rather than building a higher resolution model of reality and identifying the multiple causal factors to outcomes and their interrelatedness. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discovered in ten years in the Russian Gulags, there are no evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds who we can eliminate creating a utopia, the line of good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. The attempt to force your experiences into simplistic categories to control the chaos around you typically results in inappropriate or extreme emotional reactions associated with borderline personality disorder.

Applying Archetypes to PowerPoints

Knowing all of this, why do we insist on disregarding this fundamental fact of human psychology in the structure of MBA PowerPoint presentations?

I think it’s due to the false dichotomy that business presentations are factual and “real” whereas stories are myths and “not real”. But anyone who has taken an in-depth look at the calculation of GDP can see the dubiousness of that claim, and many of the fundamental truths inherent in humanity's oldest myths speak to the most profound revelations ever discovered.

Unfortunately, MBA students are taught to fill their presentations with engaging graphics but no archetypal plotline. There are no heroes, villains, mentors, everyday men and women and innocents, just interesting economic and business stories turned into almost unwatchable presentations with endless blabber about growth rates and policy. Lost are the stories behind the numbers.

There are PowerPoint presenters that manage to break the mold and make their presentations interesting. One of the most notable is the late Hans Rosling, who gave some of the most watched Ted Talks ever. He makes his presentations come alive by personifying the data with compelling visualizations AND incorporating archetypal metaplot and characters. When he speaks of rising living standards in Mexico, it is a rag to riches tale, and you as the viewer are cheering for the hero “Mexico” as it climbs the chart and becomes more prosperous. The embodiment of the hero doesn’t necessarily have to be flesh and blood humans. Infant mortality statistics can be personified as a villain much like a ruthless dictator.

Your Next MBA PowerPoint

When constructing your next PowerPoint, think of how you make the boring tales of your life interesting and use those same techniques in your presentation. Industrial productivity didn’t just increase X percentage, there was a heroic struggle with heroes and villains, but the hero prevailed. Or Argentina, after being one of the richest countries in the world, lost its way and went through chaos, but now with the election of Mauricio Macri economic freedom has returned and hopefully future abundance with it.

We are all preprogrammed to be interested in archetypal metaplots. For the sake of your next PowerPoint audience, take advantage of this.