I signed up for my first “bioeconomy” conference not really knowing what to expect. I had the vague sense that the “bioeconomy” had something to do with agtech, forestry, and energy because those were all topics on the conference agenda. But I’d also seen “bio” used to describe pharmaceutical companies, so I wondered whether they would be part of the event too.
When I got to the conference, I encountered so much bioeconomy jargon that things got fuzzier before they became clearer. I heard a lot of buzz about the “circular economy,” “biomass,” “biofuel,” and an impressive “biorefinery” near the convention center. And I still didn’t get which end was up.
Of course, I was attending the conference as an interloper, entering the “bio” world as a consultant, not a subject matter expert or an industry practitioner. However, the first panel discussion I watched indicated that I wasn’t the only person who found the bioeconomy concept confusing. More than once the panelists stressed the need to “change the narrative,” and that sentiment emerged as a theme in later discussions too.
By the time lunch rolled around, I’d started to get the picture, and the bio-jargon made sense to me. I could also understand the urgent call to tell a clearer, more compelling story.
Advocates for the “bioeconomy,” like so many other innovative thinkers, have fallen into the trap of futuristic storytelling. Intentionally shifting the story you’re telling out of the past and into the future can be a way of elevating it and attracting attention. But at the same time, it can also decouple your story from the familiar, leaving those who aren’t “in the know” out in the cold.
Let me explain by way of a story…
“Isn’t that just a paper mill?”
I joined the bioeconomy conference on the second day, which meant I missed the industry tour that happened on the opening day. When one of the speakers waxed poetic about the amazing “biorefinery” they’d seen, I developed a serious case of FOMO.
A “biorefinery” sounded like something out of a sci fi film. What had I missed?
I managed to collar a friendly chemistry prof and asked him to explain to me where I could find this state-of-the-art facility. I’d been to the city where the conference was taking place a half-dozen times in the past couple years. How had I missed this glowing example of innovative infrastructure?
It turned out I’d passed by the “biorefinery” several times: it was the paper mill across the bridge from the downtown.
“Why can’t we just call it ‘the paper mill’?” I asked my new acquaintance.
“Well, technically, it’s a ‘biorefinery’,” he explained. “It’s taking biomass [aka wood] and converting it into a product, adding value during the process.”
My disappointment over missing the tour evaporated. Instead, I felt disappointed in the way new-fangled language was detaching the historic mill from its roots and reframing it as a futuristic, and baffling, wonder.
Sure, “biorefinery” sounds more sophisticated and intriguing than “paper mill.” But elevating the narrative, and the language used to tell it, can also make it inaccessible.
When futuristic stories lose their connection to the present, they run afoul of three serious risks: they lose the realistic power of context, language, and values.
This is exactly what’s happened in the case of the “bioeconomy.”
Essentially, the “bioeconomy” is a new label for Canada’s oldest industries, those based on extracting and transforming natural resources. The novel language reflects technological advances in these domains, yet it also robs those fields of their historical meaning and their tangibility.
While the new story places Canada’s traditional industries at the heart of innovation, it lacks a human heart. This makes it hard for the uninitiated (such as citizens, investors, and policymakers) to relate to the bioeconomy narrative, get enthused about it, and help drive it forward.
Lack of context
We humans depend on contextual clues to make sense of the world around us and our experiences. We look to landmarks to help us navigate a landscape and to maps to find our way around cities, campuses, and large buildings.
We also rely on cognitive frameworks, constructed from earlier experiences, to process new experiences. Stories form especially strong mental frameworks because they anchor deep into our emotions and our memory.
A futuristic story that loses touch with the current day disengages from the stories that shape the audience’s reality. It makes it hard for the audience to identify with the action and themes of the narrative. And as I’ve explained elsewhere, drawing on the work of Kenneth Burke, “identification forms the essence of persuasion.”
Take my example of the paper mill. A mill is a relatable concept for me because I spent part of my childhood in Miramichi, NB, where the mill employed many of the townspeople. I hated the smell of that mill, but it’s stuck in my memory. Two of my uncles also worked in another “pulp mill.”
The concept of a paper mill isn’t something I associate with positive sensations or feelings (my nose still wrinkles at the thought). But because I can place the idea of a mill in a real place and a real time, I can relate to it.
In contrast, I have no context at all for “biorefinery,” although I might guess at some kind of connection with the oil and gas industry.
I suspect the dissociation with yesterday’s smelly, pollutant-spewing mills is intentional. The narrative-shifters want us to forget the old story and celebrate the new, sanitized version. But when you sever story and language from their historical roots, much gets lost in the translation from the outdated to the updated.
Inauthentic language
As the example of the term “biorefinery” shows, futuristic stories tend to incubate futuristic language. Such language may have the sleek, techno appeal of scientific lingo, but it lacks concreteness. It’s hard for nonexperts to hold on to and get excited about.
Tell me about “biomass” and I see nothing, touch nothing, smell, hear, and taste nothing. But tell me about “wood” and I can see a tree trunk or a pile of lumber, feel the surface of a freshly planed board, smell the sawdust.
I understand the usefulness of a categorical term like “biomass,” but the more abstract your language is, the more challenging it is for nonexperts to grasp. That’s problematic because nonexperts like language that makes them feel they can grab hold of a concept.
Yes, sometimes we need new language to articulate emergent concepts. But language that’s invented for a purpose often feels inauthentic to people outside the experts’ circle. If you want to attract and keep their attention, speak in solid, everyday language that’s easy to relate to and remember.
Anaemic values
When a futuristic story gets divorced from context and relatable language, it also loses touch with vibrant, human values. Themes of efficiency, innovation, and economic growth don’t connect with the audience at their core, at the place where their deepest, most cherished beliefs lie.
Compelling stories—the kinds of stories that transform culture—resonate with the audience at the level of fundamental values. They connect with essential human needs, like safety, security, love, and belonging. They remind us of what it means to be human and how those common threads of humanity bind us together.
The theme of the conference I attended was headed in this direction: “Fortifying Our Future: Security Through a Thriving Bioeconomy.” This slogan leans to the militaristic, though, rather than the humanistic. The real secret to making innovation sexy is to make it human.
As I listened to conference speakers talk about farming terms of “food security” and “economic development,” I thought back to a painting I’d recently seen at an art gallery in PEI.
The piece dated back to the first half of the twentieth century. In the foreground, it featured a young, sturdy farmer with muscular arms and a white shirt open at the neck. In the background, the rich farmland of a Quebec landscape spread out in vivid, geometric shapes—bright greens, rusts, and blues.
This wasn’t your traditional landscape painting, which typically shows tiny human figures against the backdrop of vast natural scenery. The farmer took up most of the canvas, with the farm in the background. His face was strong, intelligent, serious. You couldn’t walk by him without feeling the force of his presence, the strength of his character. He, not the trees or the hills or the river behind him, dominated the story.
I left the bioeconomy conference musing on this painting, wishing I’d bought a print of it. It offers a clue, I think, to what it will take to weave a new story about the “bioeconomy” that brings together technology, history, and humanity.
The “reinventionist” alternative
Several years ago, a client in the retail space gifted me a book I’d recommend to anyone who’s trying to craft a new story for their business or their sector: The Reinventionist Mindset by Joe Jackman.
Jackman, who’s led major “change management” initiatives for large companies, warns against throwing the old story out with the old bathtub. Instead, he guides organizations through a process that enables them to reconnect with the essence of their original story. Genuine innovation, he says, comes through “reinvention” rather than “invention.” It can happen only once the organization and its people recover their narrative roots.
Industries based in natural resources may seem far removed from the retail clients Jackman works with, but the notion of “reinvention” strikes close to home. As several speakers reminded us, the “bioeconomy” is not anything new—it’s just a modern way of thinking about traditional industries, which have grown and evolved along with the technologies that enable them.
To “change the narrative” about the bioeconomy, then, maybe we need to pause and reinvestigate the stories we used to tell about fishing, farming, mining, and so on. Maybe, to borrow the title from a futuristic novel published at the end of the nineteenth century, the key to looking forward is “looking backward.”
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