By Alex Holmén, CEO, Essen International Each midsummer, half of Sweden gathers around a pole dressed in birch leaves and wild flowers, and someone, often an uncle, will explain with calm authority that what we are really dancing around is a fertility symbol. A phallus. A pagan relic from a time when we worshipped the sun and prayed for a good harvest. The revelation comes with a small smile. Everyone nods. The story is too good to check. It is also wrong. Jonas Engman, an ethnologist at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, finds no support for it anywhere in the museum's archives. The idea of the midsummer pole as a phallic symbol is not ancient. It is young. It surfaced in the late nineteenth century, fed by a national romantic longing for a pagan past and later by Freud and psychoanalysis, which saw symbols of that kind everywhere. Even the shape, the one said to resemble an inverted phallus and routinely cited as the proof, only spread in the last century. The real history is humbler. The custom of dressing and raising a leafy pole reached us from the continent, probably by way of Germany, sometime in the Middle Ages. The heart of it is the decorating: adorning something with greenery and raising it anew, every year. It is worth asking why the false version won. It did not win because it was true. It won because it was better. "Ancient fertility rite" is a story. "Medieval imported custom for decorating with leaves" is a piece of information. One gives the ritual depth, age and a faint forbidden charge. The other gives it the value of a footnote. Set the two against each other on a midsummer meadow and there is no doubt which survives to the next summer. The myth endures not despite its lack of evidence but, in a way, because of it. There are no awkward facts to weigh it down. This is where those of us in communications ought to feel a quiet unease, because it is exactly what we do for a living. We manufacture stories that stick. We know how to take something complicated or modest and give it depth, charge and a sense of necessity. We are very good at it. The midsummer pole shows where that skill can lead when it is left unsupervised: the story that sticks is not always the one that is true, and with enough repetition the difference stops being noticed. In the end everyone stands around the pole believing the uncle. That unease is worth holding on to right now. Producing a confident, plausible and endlessly repeatable story has never been faster or cheaper than it is today. The supply of persuasiveness is no longer the bottleneck. What has become scarce is the judgment to tell what sounds right from what is right, and the willingness to do that work even when the duller version sells less well. That judgment is not a technical capability. It cannot be scaled at the pace at which stories are now produced. It sits in people who have seen enough to recognise when a story is too neat to be true. That is what the craft comes down to. Not delivering the handsomest pole, but knowing what you are actually raising. And every summer we raise it anyway, as we should. The tradition is real even if the explanation is invented. The herring is real, the dancing is real, the rain will most likely be real. The only thing made up is the story we tell about why. That is perfectly easy to live with. It is just worth remembering, in our line of work, which of the two we are really selling.