The stories we tell in moments of crisis

A story that’s not relevant to the audience might as well not be told.

Building relevance is finding where a story belongs in the moment it is released, and whether it respects the emotional weather its audience is currently living through. When a major event shifts the collective mindset, we often reshape stories to meet it. Stories do not exist in isolation; they exist inside time, place, and shared experience. When the ground moves, socially, politically, and environmentally, stories that ignore that movement risk feeling hollow, performative, or worse, indifferent.

When Sri Lanka was shaken up by the disaster of Cyclone Ditwah, several stories being produced in our studio for the island's audiences were paused and carefully reconsidered to assess whether they were appropriate, necessary, and true to the moment.

In situations like this, we talk to our clients to understand their genuine responses to the ongoing situation, and refer back to the values of their brand articulation framework before reshaping stories to be relevant, sensitive and respectful to what’s happening in the daily lives of their audience. This process is about maintaining honesty and sensitivity in stories, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than rush to fill silence.

For some businesses, the stories were a direct channel to support relief efforts and offer solidarity. Our role as story makers was to extract their genuine sentiments and efforts and bring them into story formats that matched their most successful communication platforms; seen in this example is one such story made to call for relief support through Instagram. It channelled Black Cat's Caregiver and Lover archetypal persona.

In the aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka, we reshaped or completely restructured planned stories to imbue sensitivity, relief efforts and helpful insight into the stories of client businesses; to give shape to their grief, empathy, and solidarity through stories, while staying true to their voice and values. This didn’t mean turning every story into commentary or every business into a spokesperson. Stories can acknowledge loss without exploiting it. They can offer support without centering themselves. They can point toward relief, resources, or collective care without pretending to be heroes. Stories should be genuine acts of participation rather than declarations.

Often, this means slowing down production, stripping stories back to their core intention, and asking what role, if any, they should play right now. Sometimes the answer is to offer support, relief, or insight. Sometimes it is to step aside altogether. And yes, this process costs us extra in production time, but we’d rather do more for better stories than maintain strict build cycles for so-so outcomes.

In some cases, it was about offering insight; in Rithihi's case, being a brand with a dominant Sage archetype, offering insight into the culture of giving was a genuine response that stemmed from the business itself. We only create the longform stories for the Rithihi blog, while their in-house team handles the blog formatting and what's published on social media. But, we always offer capsule versions of the longform stories designed by us, to point their audience to the blog; like this one.

Being able to express, connect, and mobilize is important for entrepreneurs and businesses in moments of collective crisis. Not because businesses must suddenly become moral authorities, but because they are part of the social fabric. They employ people, serve communities, and operate within shared systems that are also affected by disruption. This is because the work they do always starts as a response to the society and the world they inhabit. No business is created in a vacuum. Products, services, and ideas emerge from specific needs, tensions, and cultural conditions. When those conditions change, responding thoughtfully is not a deviation from the work; it’s a continuation of it.

That’s what makes responding to the realities of our world an extension of the work of a business; it’s not CSR, it’s not charity, nor is it being exceptional. It is simply being alive and responsive to the world a business shares with its audience. Responsiveness is not about virtue-signalling; it is about relevance, respect, and responsibility.

Stories that a business tells are a big part of these living, real, and relevant conversations that it has with its audience. Stories are where values become visible, where intent is tested against reality, and where trust is either strengthened or eroded.

Folktales: treasures from unclaimed terrains

A folktale is shaped by many voices across time. They echo generations. Rarely written down, but remembered and retold. Never owned, but carried. A folktale is a story that lives in the oral tradition of a people, passed from mouth to ear, from elder to child, from stranger to another. It is shaped not by a single author but by the collective imagination of a community. And like all things born in the wild, folktales resist being contained.

They feature ordinary people, animals, spirits, moral dilemmas, and natural wonders. They carry the weight of local wisdom, shared fears, communal humour, and codes of survival. Folktales were used to share everyday wisdom, explain the inexplicable, and warn without scolding. They entertain with meaning. Traditionally transmitted through oral storytelling, later adapted into print and digital forms. Oral roots shape its rhythm, repetition, and memory-friendly structure.

A folktale is

• Mostly translated through oral origins, with growing print and digital transmission.

• Anonymous authorship, evolving with each retelling.

• Rooted in culture, shaped by rituals, beliefs, and the worldview of its people.

• Uses symbolism, using simple characters.

• Adaptable, changing slightly depending on who tells it and where.

• Voices vary, but gravitate towards overarching, all-knowing, genderless ones. 

• More often detached from personal bias, folktale narrations usually observe, guiding listeners through the story while allowing the lesson to reveal itself. Sometimes, didactic lessons are brought in, directly judging.

"Folktale narration often takes the form of an omniscient, timeless voice; one that is neither male nor female, neither young nor old. Folktales usually use simple language, rhythmic structure, and moral lessons."

In cultures with strong oral heritage, folktales preserve history, tradition, and identity. They encode ancient knowledge, how to read the stars, how to listen to the wind, how to live in harmony with the land. They teach through metaphor, not instruction. Through wonder, not doctrine.

Folktales are mirrors of the collective psyche; unclaimed because they belong to no one storyteller. They allow people to process awe, fear, grief, longing, and love. They are the wild stories of shared terrains. And like the flowers that bloom without permission, they remind us that wonder, meaning, and truth often grow accessible, unclaimed, uncontained, but entirely necessary.

Read another blog story featuring a Sri Lankan highland folktale drawn from that shared well.

Why the typo changed from a public embarrassment to an endearing sign of being human

A personal story from PW co-creator, Shamalee

The other week, when we were wrapping up an intense period leading up to travel overseas, I couldn't proofread a story that my partner published for our studio newsletter, and it went out with a grammatical error. Now, this was not the first time our studio has made a little mistake, but seeing it on my screen still brought up a bad taste at the back of my throat. Unlike all the previous times, when I would torture myself and question my credibility as a writer, the bad taste subsided almost immediately, because the calm voice in my head said, “Well, it leaves no doubt that this newsletter is written by humans and not AI.”

This got me thinking about how creators will most likely start seeing errors or other slips in perfection more as a hallmark of the humanness in their work, and less as embarrassing things to camouflage. It’s not just when it comes to mistakes; it’s interesting to consider how AI—or the perception of it—will influence creativity around the idea of ‘perfection.’

Just a few weeks ago, I read how the em dash—probably my favourite punctuation mark, because I like to introduce offshoots of ideas into sentences—is starting to get the reputation as a sign of AI writing. And it’s not entirely unfounded; ChatGPT seems to have a habitual devotion to the em dash, giving unnecessary significance to pauses and breaks in common sentences. Because of this, I found myself consciously holding back on the em dash, forcing myself not to bring my layered thoughts into sentences. Soon enough, I realized that I was compromising my mind’s mechanism just to distance my work from what’s perceived as a sign of AI-generated creativity. As much as we are used to prototyping and shaping AI, it will also undoubtedly shape us—the way we create, and our distinction of what makes our creativity ‘human.’

I recently visited my old university at the invitation to critique an undergraduate project on designing stories for Sri Lankan cities in predominantly visual aspects, with some written language components. Here, I became highly aware of how I judge the value of creative work against what I consider to be genuine human creative output versus AI-generated. In 70% of the work presented, the written components of the story, such as slogans and promotional texts, reeked of ChatGPT. And I’m not talking about sentence structure or an overuse of the em dash. Although I couldn’t put a finger on what was so distinctly ChatGPT about those works at the time, now I can. It’s best explained as “saying a lot without saying anything”: words that are strung together to create a sense of (subjective) beauty, but utterly hollow of lived experience and a viewpoint. They are not directional. Words that have logical and even aesthetic coherence, but don’t communicate a point of view in an idea; that have the micro-connections, and the many emotional and sensory associations that we humans make with things in our mind and things we perceive in the outer world. They lacked the many dimensions that seep into the writing of a human who has genuinely experienced the subject. For those students, I didn’t think mediocre writing posed a great threat, particularly because their course was more focused on the visual elements of storytelling. However, I was concerned that they were missing out on the accidental wonder of creativity by using ChatGPT for creative writing.

An idea is not limited to one form of expression; the same idea has many forms, such as visual, linguistic, sonic, etc. When you approach an idea from many directions, your view of it becomes richer and more distinct. As a design student many years ago, I discovered the joy of writing simply through attempts to describe ideas as best as possible. Although my projects were not being marked for writing per se, my attempt to use language to articulate an idea gave me a different hold on it—something more concrete and definitive that visuals didn’t deliver. Ultimately, it led me to a career focusing more on writing designed for commercial outcomes. But I wondered if the students who used ChatGPT for their project writing were missing out on the chance to get a different grip on their idea—or even a breakthrough into an entirely different career path in creativity. I don’t know; too soon to tell. Who am I to judge? Each to their own life and times, isn’t it?

I’m not against AI; in fact, I think it has the potential to rid us of meaningless or tedious tasks. I use a trained version of ChatGPT to draft emails, formal letters to the city council, project proposals, notes to the lawyer, follow-ups, lists… things that I don’t care to excel at. But when it comes to creative writing, AI is more of a technical assistant than a substitute: to cross-check whether a new story contradicts an old one in a series; to proofread and grammar-check drafts. I look forward to the day when AI can do everything I don’t want to do: filing taxes, laundry, groceries, bookkeeping, managing employees—even if it’s at the cost of another machine having an enormous influence on my life. Anything to escape doing chores so I can read and write more, really.

Until then, I just have to watch how the world evolves, understand our parts in shaping it, and hold on to what I like about being human a little closer.