How Structure Transforms Our Ideas

A podcasting client recently asked me how I think about choosing topics and structuring the episodes of a longer podcast series. Another asked about how to structure individual episodes. Apparently, thinking about structure is in the air!

On top of that, I recently read Byung-Chul Han's essay “The Crisis of Narration." In it, he argues that because we're living amidst an excess of information, stories, and messages, we've lost our ability to narrate. For Han, narration is how we construct meaning across time—how experience is passed and built on from community to community and person to person.

Trust me: structure and narration are related. And that's what I'd like to explore in this week's installment of This is Not Advice.

How can carefully considering the structure of the work we do make our work more remarkable and help fill our desire for narrative?

A Tsunami of Information

First things first, I want to tell you more about Han's perspective on our ‘crisis of narration.'

We can think of how Han uses narration as an overall story arc of meaning-making and sense-making. We narrate our lives when we turn disparate events into stories that shape who we know ourselves to be and how we fit into the past, present, and future. As Han sees it, we're rapidly losing the ability to narrate, thanks to the tsunami of information we drown in daily.

"Bits of information are like specks of dust, not seeds of grain," writes Han. Specks of dust are something to be brushed away, removed from whatever surface it's gathering on. But seeds of grain are storehouses of future plants, future food.

Most of the information—the headlines, content, data, etc.—we encounter daily are mere specks of dust. They float into our perception for a moment before they're swept away on the breeze or wiped up with a microfiber cloth. We may feel informed by this information, but we don't feel satisfied by it.

Information accumulates rather than satiates.

Making this information—something we all do in one form or another—is also unsatisfying. Even if we're having fun making TikTok videos or podcast episodes or articles, at some point, we realize that we've accumulated a thick layer of dust without sowing any seeds for future harvest.

The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening.

Han uses the example of how we've learned to document our lives rather than narrate them. We feed our life events into the machine so that the smallest detail is recallable. But in feeding the machine, we neglect telling stories about those events. We communicate rather than narrate.

Your extended family and old high school friends know when your baby was born or that you got a new job or that you moved into a new house. But they don't know—can't know—what each event reveals about you or the story you tell yourself about your self. A Facebook profile or Instagram account is a dataset, not a narrative.

Rethink work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. Become a free or premium subscriber today!

An Evolution of Structure

When I first started podcasting, I would fly from central Pennsylvania to the CreativeLive studio in Seattle and sit in a small room for two days to record eight to ten interviews. This was 2015, and I'd been absorbing podcasts and talk radio for over a decade. But in terms of practical experience, I had almost zero.

So, those first couple of recording sessions were my best attempt at overcoming fear and finding some rhythm when it came to interviewing. But by the third session or so, I started to relax. Instead of white-knuckling it through an interview, listening so intently in the moment that I felt like a wrung-out mop by the end of a conversation, I could pay attention on another level. I still listened intently, but I also started to sense how one conversation fit with another.

I noticed the narrative forming across interviews.

Each set of eight to ten interviews had a unique flavor. Sometimes, the connecting thread was a question I was interested in or a trend I'd noticed with clients. Other times, the narrative emerged from unseen links between my guests. Once I saw the tendency of a narrative to form, I could approach each set of interviews with the intention of finding that narrative and building on it.

Later, I chose the narrative I'd pursue. I created four to six-episode vignettes exploring topics like managing uncertainty, designing a business model, or finding support as a small business owner. Most of the time, I identified the broad topic my audience wanted to learn about. Then, I'd brainstorm a bunch of different angles or exciting questions that I could shape episodes around. Once I had that list, I moved on to identifying guests. I wanted to talk to people with specific experiences or stories that would illustrate bigger lessons.

In 2022, after I'd made more than 360 podcast episodes, I took the next step. I made my first 8-part series, “Time & Money."

It wasn't just that this series was longer than the ones I'd done previously. This series was the first in the style of podcasting I do today, something we at YellowHouse.Media like to call "public radio lite." The beginning of the process—choosing a broad topic and brainstorming episode ideas—looked the same as before. But in the production phase, things got more interesting.

Now, I think of my interviews as research. In the same way I'd incorporate ideas or data from a book or paper I read, I used ideas, storylines, or information from an interview to support the thesis of the episode.

In my last series, “Decoding Empathy," my thesis was that the folk understanding of empathy is based on projecting oneself into the experience of another and that this practice makes it difficult to see how others perceive and experience the world differently than we do. True empathy, I wanted to argue, came from recognizing the profound otherness of other people. To support that thesis, I did my research—reading, for sure, but also talking to incredible people whose work intersects with this idea of accepting difference for what it is.

From a practical standpoint, this narrative-building process led to six podcast episodes, six essays, and six visual essays (i.e., Instagram posts)—18 total pieces of content. Each of those pieces of content interlinks with the others. They provide multiple ways into the narrative, multiple ways to move deeper into the narrative, and multiple off-ramps into related ideas that aren't part of the narrative of the series.

Information Cancels Wisdom

In the second section of Han's essay, he explores how our excess of information degrades our ability to pass on wisdom. This insight, building on Walter Benjamin, names a phenomenon that I think many of us sense but few could name—especially if we use social media or digital tools for work.

Communicable experience passed on by word of mouth is becoming increasingly rare. Nothing is passed down; nothing is narrated ... Wisdom is embedded in life as narrative. If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving techniques.

Imagine your social media feed of choice—maybe LinkedIn, Instagram, or Substack Notes. Of all the information in that feed, how much is wisdom? How much is advice lacking in context or even deep experience? And how much is ephemeral, offering a moment of cuteness, laughter, outrage, or shock before scrolling on by?

Advice and problem-solving, like information, are not wisdom. But the are legible and marketable commodities in neoliberal capitalism.

In her essay “Against Advice,” Philosopher Agnes Callard contrasts three modes of assistance: advice, instructions, and coaching. Instructions, she says, are appropriate when a task has a consistent procedure (e.g., publishing an article to your website or tying your shoes). Instructions apply to anyone who wants to complete that task regardless of context or relationship with the person offering the instructions. Coaching, on the other hand, is assistance that is deeply contextual, based on a trusted relationship, and focused on transformation.

Advice, claims Callard, tries to combine the impersonal, contextless nature of instructions with the transformational goal of coaching. And it just doesn't work. By Callard's definition, even someone with a lifetime of experience and a proven track record of success can't offer useful advice (e.g., her example is Margaret Atwood giving writing advice).

Now let’s layer Callard's framework on Han's. Coaching is situated in narrative. The coach and the person being coached co-create a story that evolves over time and integrates a range of experiences into the overall narrative. Instructions don't need a narrative to function, but they're best used within a greater strategy or project.

Advice is the commodification of coaching. It turns a relationship into a product. It doesn't offer wisdom; it destroys it. It doesn't connect to a narrative; it separates us from the narrative.

Producing advice—the work many of us do either for a living or as marketing to support our businesses—makes us complicit in the neglect of meaning and the destruction of narrative. We feel the crush of information but seem to be able to respond only by adding to it.

So, how do we resist?

Structure.

That's right, I didn't forget about the actual questions this piece is supposedly based on.

Thoughtful structure can help reclaim the narrative we long for. When you incorporate thoughtful structure into an online course, a consulting proposal, a podcast episode, a coaching package, or any other offer, you help others orient themselves to both the past and the future. Well-structured work helps us make sense of the world or our goals in a way that mere advice or information cannot.

When our podcasting client asked me how to organize and structure a longer series of episodes, I told them that it starts with an idea and a big, unorganized pile. The idea inspires research—which connects the work I'm doing to the work of others and situates it in an existing narrative. The research goes into a pile. And by pile, I mean a computer folder of notes, papers, quotes, and other odds and ends I think might be useful.

As my pile gets bigger, I start to formulate either a thesis or a question. That thesis or question inspires additional research—including looking for the guests I'll interview to help me flesh out the narrative. At that point, I can finally start to figure out what the episodes are going to be.

Most of the ideas I cover don't fit neatly into linear arguments. So I like to think of the structure for a series as "Pose and Poke." I can diagram a series at this stage by posing my question or thesis and putting it at the center of the diagram. Then each potential episode becomes a "poke" at that question or thesis.

I proceed from there by looking for connections, identifying any gaps in my research, and starting to figure out the order of pokes I'll use to explore the central idea.

If all of that sounds like a lot of work, you're right. It is.

But it's also a lot of work to operate outside of narrative and keep up with the pace of a platform-mediated workload. However, taking a step back to thoughtfully embed your work into the tradition of meaning-making and sense-making is ultimately much more satisfying than churning out information.

While I've used my own work scripting podcast episodes and writing this newsletter as an example, using structure and plugging into narrative applies to much more than "creating content." It's an orientation to work that looks beyond the day-to-day slog and invites others to do the same.

A final thought: applying structure is risky.

Or at least, it feels risky. That's because structure reveals your project, your agenda. Structure is the organizational schema of theory. When you build a structure for your work, you're implying a theory of the thing you're narrating. You build an argument or dismantle one. You connect the dots or disconnect them. You offer an explanation or refute another.

Neither producing more information nor offering up a nugget of advice poses that risk. Feeding the algorithm doesn't pose that risk. But these actions also make no impact. Information and advice might help you stay afloat, but they won't help you break through.

Go ahead, take a risk. Tell us what it means. Help us make sense of what we see or feel. Offer us a structure that changes our perception. Whatever your work, it deserves narrative—and so do you.