Storytelling and System 1 thinking for leadership communication

I’m not keen on his approach to politics either, but when it comes to political and brand storytelling, facts do not win on their own

In a recent episode of *The Rest Is Politics*, Anthony Scaramucci tells a story about being on a plane with Donald Trump in 2015.

Scaramucci was reading an economic report about the likely consequences of Brexit. Trump asked what he was reading.

An economic report, Scaramucci replied. On Brexit.

Don’t bother, Trump apparently said. It will say the consequences are not good. And it will make no difference to the vote.

Whether every detail of the story is exactly right is almost beside the point. The instinct behind it is revealing.

Trump understood something many politicians, business leaders and campaigners still struggle with: people do not make consequential choices by reading the appendix.

They make them through a mixture of experience, identity, hope, fear, trust and belonging. The facts matter. But facts rarely arrive in people’s lives as facts alone. They arrive wrapped in a story.

And the story tells us who is to blame, what is at risk, what must be protected and whose side we are on.

The effort problem

Daniel Kahneman described two broad modes of thought.

• System 1 is fast. It is instinctive, emotional and efficient. It helps us make quick sense of the world without having to analyse every decision from first principles.
• System 2 is slower. It is the part of us that compares evidence, questions assumptions, holds competing ideas in our heads and works through complexity.

We need both.

The problem is that System 2 takes work. It asks us to pause when we would rather react. It asks us to deal with ambiguity when we would rather have certainty. And it asks us to accept that difficult problems do not always have neat villains or easy answers. It’s why the Intention / Action Gap described by my colleague Sally Tarbit is so real.

When a political argument offers us a simple explanation for a complicated problem, System 1 is ready to help.

It gives us a shortcut. It gives us a tribe. And it gives us the relief of feeling that we understand what is happening.

It’s also why we can rationally say we will do one thing, and then do the other.

Because decisions and thinking are complicated. We often would rather take an easy route out rather than confront the difficulties inherent in thinking through complex System 2 problems.

The immigration argument

Immigration is a good example – not because it is simple, but because it is so often made simple.

One side may tell a story of compassion: people have taken extraordinary risks to reach the UK; they want safety, work and a future.

The other may tell a story of control: The system has been exploited; rules are not being enforced; ordinary people are being asked to carry the consequences.

Both stories can draw on real human concerns. Both can be made emotionally powerful. And both can become less useful when they turn complexity into a weapon.

That is where leaders need to be more disciplined.

The evidence does not support the idea that immigration is the main explanation for stagnant wages or weak employment prospects for UK-born workers. Research generally finds small or no average effects on employment and wages, although those effects are not evenly shared and lower-paid workers can be more exposed.

But neither is it credible to claim that irregular migration has no consequence. The asylum system requires housing, processing, enforcement and public confidence that the rules are clear and fairly applied. The UK Border Security Commander put the direct cost of the asylum system at £4 billion in FY2024/25.

That is the point.

A serious conversation can hold both thoughts at once. A political slogan cannot.

I can feel people banging the table in frustration. That’s okay. That is what emotional storytelling does to us. It reinforces our bias.

Why experts struggle

This is why Michael Gove’s famous line during the EU referendum still matters. What he actually said was not simply that people had “had enough of experts”. He said that people had had enough of experts from organisations “saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”

That distinction matters. But not to those who want to believe he said that we are “tired of so-called experts.”

People are not necessarily rejecting knowledge. Often, they are rejecting the feeling that knowledge is being delivered at them by people who have not lived with the consequences of their decisions.

They are rejecting being patronised.

They are rejecting forecasts that feel disconnected from their daily reality.

And they are rejecting institutions that appear confident before the event, but evasive after it.

That does not make every anti-expert claim right. Far from it. The scientific evidence on climate change, for example, is not a matter of personal preference or political taste.

But it does mean that being correct is not the same as being heard.

If people do not trust the messenger, do not recognise their own experience in the message, or feel that the solution asks more of them than of everyone else, expertise can feel like just another form of power.

This is not new

We have always preferred a story that makes sense of the world to an analysis that makes the world feel more complicated.

In 1870, Napoleon III asked French voters to endorse constitutional reforms through a plebiscite. It was not a dry public seminar on constitutional design. It was a vote shaped by order, national confidence and loyalty to a familiar leader. The reforms won overwhelmingly.

Within months, France was at war with Prussia. The empire collapsed. The political settlement voters had endorsed was overtaken by events.

It is easy to look back and call such votes foolish. But that is too easy.

Voters were not choosing between logic and emotion. They were deciding in conditions of uncertainty, using the tools human beings have always used: what feels safe, what feels familiar, who feels like us, and which future feels imaginable.

That is not an historical aberration.

It is how people work.

What leaders should do

So what does this mean for leaders – whether they lead a business, a public institution, a political movement or a brand?

First, start with values.

Every successful movement has them. Including the ones you dislike.

Values determine what people notice, what they fear, what they protect and what they are prepared to forgive. A leader who does not understand the values in play will end up arguing with the surface of the issue rather than the source of it.

Second, do the System 2 work.

Know the detail. Test your assumptions. Understand the trade-offs. Be clear about what the evidence says, what it does not say and where there is legitimate uncertainty.

This is not about overwhelming people with data.

It is about having the intellectual scaffolding in place, so that your position does not collapse the first time someone asks a difficult question.

Third, translate the work into a story people can use.

Not a slogan. Not a trick. Not a manipulation.

A compelling story.

A story that explains what is changing, why it matters, what people stand to gain or lose, and what part they can play. A story that respects the fact that people do not leave their fears, hopes, identity or lived experience at the door when they are asked to make a decision.

And finally, remember that experience has the last word.

A government can say the economy is improving. A company can say it puts customers first. A football club can talk about ambition. A brand can promise that it understands people.

But if the economy still feels insecure, the customer experience still disappoints, the matchday experience still lacks joy, or the service still fails at the moment that matters, the story will eventually unravel.

Experience beats assertion. Not immediately. Not always neatly. But eventually.

That is why the best leaders do not choose between reason and emotion. They respect both.

They do the hard thinking. They tell the human story. And then they make sure that people’s experience proves it.