There is a groan the sector makes now, and it is the result of seemingly perpetually increasing disclosure. Frameworks, scope 3 line items, sustainability reports built to survive an audit rather than move a reader. We have gotten very good at being accurate and very bad at being heard. Somewhere in the last decade, in the reasonable pursuit of rigour, we let the story leak out of the work.

This is not an argument against rigour. It's an observation that rigour and resonance solve different problems, and right now the sector is only resourced for one of them. A good story travels - it gets repeated at dinner tables, forwarded, argued about, remembered. Greenpeace's KitKat ad didn't need a media buy; it spread because people couldn't not share it, and it moved a global brand faster than any regulator could. Republic of Everyone's Gruen-Greens ad worked the same muscle from another angle - a reminder that political communication can land its point using surprise, empathy and elegance. Both are proof the sector can make something contagious. So what's happened? Most of what is produced today doesn't even get read once, let alone retold. It sits, dense and correct, exactly where it was published.

This Supper Club is about the other kind of story - the kind that replicates. Not through a media buy or a distribution strategy, but because someone heard it and couldn't help but pass it on to someone else. That's a different discipline entirely, closer to folklore than to comms planning, and it's one the sector has largely forgotten how to practise.

We're joined by two people who've spent their working lives inside exactly this question, but from vastly different perspectives.

This is a night sharing food, stories and experiences built to include all voices and trying something new rather than just talking about it. We'll be testing what survives when a story is passed from person to person, and what's left when you strip a message down to the version someone would bother repeating. Come with your appetite, your questions, and something worth telling.

As always, Gus_tronomy will feed us properly. Places are limited.

Guest bios

Nadya Hutagalung
Nadya has spent three decades getting stories to move at a scale most communicators only theorise about. As UN Environment's Goodwill Ambassador she built #CleanSeas into a global campaign, and founded Let Elephants Be Elephants to take on the ivory trade. This was work that put her in front of the World Economic Forum and the UN General Assembly.. Few people have watched a story they made spread across the world in real time. Nadya has, more than once, and has since spent as much energy understanding what that scale costs the person telling the story as she spent achieving it.

Sarah Scorze
To say writer Sarah Scorze (she/her, they/them) has a multi-layered background doesn't quite cover it. They've made a career out of wearing a bunch of hats, and often being the square peg in a wall of round holes. Career highlights include building, owning and running a Sydney ad agency, before moving to New York, where they helped lead a 400-person, USD$150 million agency for over a decade, served as Jury President at Cannes, and were awarded a Clio Lifetime Achievement Award - about as decorated as it gets in the craft of making things stick. They then walked away from corporate life to paint and explore volunteer work, becoming an active member of Randalls Island Park Alliance and Critical Mass, and writing materials and video for Extinction Rebellion NY, before returning to Australia. Sarah understands the mechanics of contagion and the power of creativity from the inside, and is an expert in translating dense, difficult science and technical detail into language people can actually carry with them.

Contact the host of Right Story / Wrong Story - Why Sustainability Needs A Treatise On Storytelling