Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 126
The numbers fit. The story does not.
Audiences judge consequential messages through coherence fidelity values and evidence rather than facts alone
Premise
Accurate data can fail to persuade when people cannot place it within a credible account of motives, responsibility, consequence, and value. Conversely, a compelling story can persuade while its factual warrant remains weak. Walter R. Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm explains why public reasoning has a narrative dimension even in strategy, science, policy, law, and organizational change.
Fisher described people as homo narrans: storytellers who assess good reasons through the accounts they encounter and inhabit. The framework does not turn every message into fiction or replace formal logic with storytelling. It adds a second test. Executives must examine both factual and inferential validity and the narrative through which audiences understand what the evidence means.
What the model is: Narrative Paradigm in Knowledge →
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What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Paradigms, Traditions & Metatheories
Provides a broad intellectual perspective within which multiple concepts, theories or investigations are developed. Traditions carry histories and commitments; metatheories examine how theories themselves are organized or related.