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What Changed? Start There.
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.
Dorian Johnson
October 06, 2026
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One of the fastest ways to make storytelling harder is trying to create the whole thing at once.
Remember that it’s perfectly okay to segment.
Stories raise endless questions. Who’s the main character? What’s the conflict? Setting?
It’s quite easy to get bogged down in all of this, and before you know it, your brain has like 14 tabs open and you can’t focus on any of them.
Here is another way in:
Start with an archetype.
Archetypes are recurring roles we recognize across stories.
The mentor guides.
The rebel challenges.
The caregiver protects.
You’ve seen versions of these characters hundreds of times, even if nobody stopped the movie to announce, “HELLO, THIS IS THE MENTOR.”
That familiarity can give you a useful starting point when your own story still feels fuzzy.
Today, meet one of my favorites:
The Herald.
The Herald announces that something has changed and a response is needed.
Think about R2-D2 in Star Wars: A New Hope.
Luke Skywalker is living his ordinary life on Tatooine when R2-D2 arrives carrying Princess Leia’s message:
“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”
Suddenly, Luke knows there is a rebellion, and Obi-Wan is called upon.
R2-D2 disrupts the status quo and creates the conditions for movement.
That is what the Herald does.
It introduces information, an event, or a realization that makes the next part of the story possible.
And your Herald doesn’t need to be a droid.
Or even a person.
It could be a diagnosis.
A phone call.
A community member speaking up.
Public health stories are full of them.
The trick is learning to recognize them.
The Herald gives that moment a narrative job.
Instead of treating it as one more fact to squeeze into the story, use it to mark the moment the status quo gets interrupted.
And once you find that moment, ask one more question:
What did it demand next?
🧠 Story Science Side Note: Researchers have studied how people use familiar story structures, sometimes called story schemas or story grammars, to organize and understand narratives.
In one classic study, psychologist Perry Thorndyke found that story structure affected both comprehension and recall.
That matters here because structure helps us make sense of information.
Instead of treating every piece of a story as equally important, we can look at the job each part is doing.
An archetype gives us one way to do that.
The Herald’s job is simple:
Something changes. The audience notices. The story unfolds accordingly.
📝 Message Makeover:
Before:
“Rates increased by 18% from the previous year.”
After:
“After staying relatively steady, rates jumped 18% in a single year.”
The first version reports the change.
The second gives that change a little tension.
Now the reader naturally wonders:
Why did rates jump? What changed?
That curiosity gives the story somewhere to go next.
A useful Herald makes us want to understand what caused the change.
🛠️ The PHacilitator’s Corner:
Where could you use The Herald?
Ask:
What changed?
Who or what made that change visible?
What happened because of it?
That moment might come through data, a diagnosis, a community member, a report, an emerging trend, or something unexpected that happened in the field.
That is where your Herald may be hiding.
Once you find it, try building from there.
L8r!