One Story. Many Doorways.

Every Tuesday, The Productive Disruptive delivers storytelling science, message makeovers, cultural commentary, and a little rebellious hope for anyone still stubborn enough to believe communication can change the world.

Author

Dorian Johnson
January 20, 2026

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Stories can come in many formats.

And oftentimes, we communicate as if there’s one default way humans learn and retain information.

as if we can’t try other formats

There isn’t.

Think of the standard means of communicating messages.

A flyer. A slide deck. A carousel. A bullet list.

Herein lies an opportunity.

Because learning doesn’t have a single standard format.

Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, says what real life already proved: people need different pathways into the same idea. Different ways to connect, different ways to understand, different ways to use it.

Which means if you’re trying to influence people, you have to stop thinking like a publisher and start thinking like a translator.

Because the medium isn’t just where the message lives.

It shapes whether the message can even be received.

The medium you pick to tell stories is the translation.

Music tells stories.
Art tells stories.
Movies tell stories.
A sermon tells stories.
A meme tells stories.
A one-line quote in the group chat tells stories.

Storytellers and narrative builders don’t just “share information.”

We deliver meaning in a form our audiences can actually carry.

🧠 Story Science Side Note: Stories teach, therefore listeners of stories are learners. UDL is a research-based framework built on one simple truth: learners vary. So if you want people to learn, you don’t design one “perfect” message and hope it fits everyone. You anticipate barriers and design multiple pathways into the same idea so more people can access it, engage with it, and use it.

One-pager on the benefits of UDL

 

📝 Message Makeover:

Before: “They tuned out.”
After: “They got locked out.”

This puts the onus back on the storyteller. Perhaps something could be clarified here. Not in a guilt way. In a design way.

🛠️ The PHacilitator’s Corner:

Pick your message and ask:

What barrier might stop my audience from receiving this?

  • Too abstract?

  • Too long?

  • Too emotionally flat?

  • Too academic?

  • Too “I’m talking at you”?

  • Too much at once?

Now redesign the story to reduce that barrier.

Try this: take your same message and translate it into another format.
One visual. One story. One sentence. One voice note. One meme.

UDL calls this anticipating barriers and proactively designing to minimize them.

Maybe we don’t “lose” people in our stories.

Maybe we never had them in the first place. There can be many reasons for this, but multiple forms of your story can help.

Stay classy(or don’t. Either way is fine).