Stories Mean Business - Nick Warren

I'm going to take a step back today, to focus on why storytelling is so powerful...

In The Usual Suspects (1995), Special Agent Dave Kujan struggles to uncover the identity of mythic underworld monster, Keyser Söze.

If you've seen the film, you'll remember its final reveal...

It's a movie about the persuasive power of story. As the agent picks his way through the complex, conflicting accounts of a shooting, he struggles to sort fact from fiction.

But in a critical sense, everything in life is fiction...

Yesterday, I hinted at the storytelling insight hidden within Jordan Peterson's book, Maps of Meaning.

We'll get to that, but first let's get some context from neuroscientist, David Eagleman...

"... our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across the vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world..." ...

Reality – Eagleman says – is literally the story our brains piece together from the data it receives...

But not all the data. We only process around 40 pieces of data at any one moment. 40 pieces from an estimated 11,000,000 data points that our senses are collecting every single second...

Which is why, reality can only ever be a simplified story.

Or, as Peterson said yesterday, our most fundamental maps of meaning "have a narrative structure..."

For better or worse, we humans experience, understand and navigate the world through stories...

Which is why the right story in the right place at the right time can change our experience of the world. Not metaphorically. Literally...

Powerful communicators know this. Here's Steve Jobs, a leader with his own mythology...

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” ...

In the final moments of The Usual Suspects, the 'story' falls away to reveal the truth, and we gasp as reality crashes in.

Nick

This is Business Storytelling Technique 8/30. Follow me to see the series.

-------------------

The Netflix juggernaut, Stranger Things, is built around the concept of the Upside Down – a dark, twisted reflection of our world.

Yes – today, we're talking CONTRAST.

In his first book, Maps of Meaning, Professor Jordan Peterson describes how contrast motivates us.

"Our most fundamental maps of meaning – maps which have a narrative structure – portray the motivational value of our current state, conceived of in contrast to the hypothetical ideal, accompanied by plans of action."

If you need to read that twice, go ahead.

The insight is simple. Our actions are relentlessly driven by the contrast between where we are and where we want to be ... whether what we want is a coffee, a new job or a new relationship.

Robert Fritz (who I mentioned in post 4) calls this imbalance "structural tension".

This is why the best business storytellers, influencers and persuaders understand that they are in the contrast creation business – the real world versus the Upside Down.

What would you prefer?

Your life as it is, versus your life with this new product, position, knowledge, talent, ability, respect or status?

Remember, great business stories FLOW towards audience action. Flow is powered by TENSION. Tension can be engineered by asking questions and creating clear contrast.

But there's something else going on here, something hinted at in Peterson's words above ...

It speaks to the foundational power of storytelling, and we'll get into it tomorrow ...

Nick

-------------------

Business storytelling techniques: 6/30

ASK QUESTIONS

Friends begins when a woman in a wedding dress stumbles into a Greenwich Village coffee shop...

The huge bestselling novel, The Lovely Bones, begins with the line:

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."

Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher novel, begins:

"I was arrested in Eno's diner. At twelve o'clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way from the highway to the edge of town."

In each case the writers – David Crane & Marta Kauffman, Alice Sebold and Lee Child – are toying with us.

From the first moment, they want us asking questions.

In the Jack Reacher opener, Child is making us wait. Building the suspense while our questions get louder.

There's a foundational insight here. In his best-selling book, Pre-Suasion, psychologist Robert Cialdini highlights the reason we struggle to resist a mystery.

"That desire—which also pushes us to return to incomplete narratives, unresolved problems, unanswered questions, and unachieved goals—reflects a craving for cognitive closure."

Questions trigger TENSION. Tension triggers attention and action.

But there's a second, more powerful way to create tension in a business audience ... and we'll reveal that tomorrow.

(See what I did there?)

This is Business Storytelling Technique 6/30. Please SHARE this post and follow me to get the whole series.

-------------------

Business storytelling techniques: 5/30

START WITH THE END

Most movies resolve their TENSION in the final act, but in 1999, a low-budget film swept to success by doing something different...

The Sixth Sense had one of cinema's great, unexpected endings, but it didn't resolve all the tension.

In fact, it created more.

The audience kept talking long after they left the theatre, and word of mouth powered the movie to multiple box-office records.

Here's the lesson...

When we seek to influence or persuade, our job is to create tension that ONLY RESOLVES when our audience takes action...

Which is why it is so important to START AT THE END. What do we want our audience to do?

In this list, the tension required grows with each level...

Every action has costs and consequences, and the harder they are for our audience to foresee, the harder our story has to work.

But when we are clear on our goal, we can work backwards and build a persuasive chain of tension and belief...

Consider a simplified chain I need to sell my storytelling course...

My audience needs to believe that:

Tomorrow, we'll consider two techniques to create tension – questions and contrasts.

This is Business Storytelling Technique 5/30. Please SHARE this post and follow me to get the whole series.

Which part of the simplified chain above is this series 'telling'?

-------------------

Business storytelling techniques: 4/30 - Tension

Yesterday, we saw the power of FLOW in storytelling. Without it, we sacrifice momentum and persuasion.

But what creates flow?

According to award-winning filmmaker and creative consultant, Robert Fritz, it's the force that powers all change.

Tension.

"A basic principle found throughout nature is this: Tension seeks resolution. From the spiderweb to the human body, from the formation of the galaxies to the shifts of continents, from the swing of pendulums to the movement of wind-up toys, tension-resolution systems are in play."

As we've seen, strong stories begin with a TRIGGER that throws the world out of balance.

At the start of Casablanca, Ilsa walks into a bar owned by the man she loved and abandoned.

Cue huge tension.

Over the next 100 minutes the tension ebbs, flows, builds to a climax and finally releases with one of cinema's all-time greatest lines.

It's a brilliantly constructed story, but IN BUSINESS STORYTELLING, we do it differently.

Great business stories – emails, presentations and speeches – build to their climax and leave the tension right where it is.

Because when we seek to influence or persuade, we want the final resolution to be in the hands of our AUDIENCE.

Along with a simple promise.

If you do this thing, your tension will release.

Which is why ENDINGS are so important.

And why we'll get to them tomorrow.

—

This is Business Storytelling Technique 4/30. Follow me to get the daily series.

If Fritz is right, every action we take (from getting our coffee to choosing our soulmate) is driven by tension. Is that true?

Business storytelling techniques: 2/30

FLOW

Season 1, Episode 2 of The West Wing is titled "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc".

After this, therefore because of this.

The episode opens with President Bartlet complaining that his staff are falling for this logical fallacy – assuming that one thing led to another just because it came first...

Humans seem especially vulnerable to this mistake:

The critical insight for storytellers and persuaders is this...

We are drawn to simple stories powered by cause and effect.

Good stories FLOW.

This > led to this > led to this > led to this.

When we leverage causation, we create persuasive chains that are hard to resist. Here's Yoda:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

See how that feels? Powerful, right?

Whether we are building an argument or a story, we want to build it brick upon brick. It's not just better persuasion, it's better thinking.

In 2004, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint...

"... The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than 'writing' a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related."

This is Business Storytelling Technique 3/30. Follow me to get the daily series.

Try a chain of persuasion for your business. Here's my example. "Story skills build better stories, stories build persuasion, persuasion builds success."

-------------------

Business storytelling techniques: 2/30

TRIGGERS

I'm writing this the day after the sad death of Robbie Coltraine. Fantastic actor. For me, he'll always be Cracker, but as Hagrid, he's a fantastic example of today's thesis.

Stories are about change.

Yesterday, I talked about POINTS OF NO RETURN. Today, we're focused on where to start our story ... the triggers of change.

In each of these cases, something happens that throws the normal world out of balance and starts the chain of CAUSE AND EFFECT.

Whether you are writing an email or making a quarterly presentation, triggers have dramatic power. They give your 'story' its momentum.

So, when you sit down to write the email (or whatever) ask yourself this simple question:

WHAT'S CHANGED?

And start there.

Because change isn't just the engine of story, it's THE WAY WE GET NOTICED. It's right there in Robert Cialdini's NY Times bestseller, Pre-suasion.

"Whenever we first register a change around us, our attention flies to it."

And storytellers know this.

"This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers." - Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling.

In business, we don't make things up, we optimise what we have.

When you find the trigger for your story, don't bury it, avoid it or pussyfoot around it.

Use it.

—

This is Business Storytelling Technique 2/30. Follow me to get the daily series.

What change triggered your business journey?

-------------------

Business storytelling techniques: 1/30

-------------------

Here's something you haven't thought before.

You are powerless to resist the storyteller inside your head

This picture nails the point...

If you've never seen Game of Thrones, it's a fairy-tale wedding. If you have, it's a visceral knot of tension and dread.

And whichever is it, you have no choice. The voice inside you roars ahead, freighting the image with inference, meaning and story.

And that story changes reality in a way you can't resist.

Which is why storytelling is such a powerful skill.

Every human on earth has the same storyteller inside their head, automatic, effortless and involuntary.

When we learn the tools and techniques of storytelling, we can harness that power to focus attention our audience, and change reality around them.

Like yesterday, when I laid out the 3-line story that accelerated my digital agency back in 1999.

(https://medium.com/@nick-warren/how-a-story-saved-my-business-ba9cc6cae8db)

Nothing changed ... but everything changed.

I didn't talk about lower prices or agile working ... I let their storyteller do it for me.

This is the best kind of persuasion for a very simple reason. No one likes to be sold to ... but everyone LOVES selling to themselves.

And that's what the storyteller does.

Over the next 30 days, I'm going to post 30 storytelling techniques you can thread into your business, content or personal brand .

For extra fun, we'll illustrate them with TV shows, movies and other geeky stuff.

-------------------

A good story can save or make your business.

Here’s a true example.

It’s three lines long, but it changes reality…

Back in the late 1990s, I had a problem. I'd quit my IBM job in a temper tantrum and accidentally started a web agency.

In reality, "agency" was a pretty grand title for what we had. The company had just two employees.

For most of the brands we wanted to work with, this was a problem.

"How big is your team?" they'd ask.

"Two."

"Two?" The inevitable tone of surprise.

"Uh... yes."

"Well ... thanks for coming in."

It was a classic catch-22. We needed clients to grow our headcount and headcount to grow our clients.

Or did we?

In the end, I stumbled on the story that reframed the whole thing.

Before IBM, I'd worked at a TV production company. The advert had sounded glamorous, but most of the time, it was two or three of us sitting in a basement.

Zero glamour.

Then some project would come up and BOOM ...

Camera operators. Lighting people. Sound engineers. Actors. Make-up artists. Runners. Floor Managers. Caterers. Editors.

The list went on and on.

But the company only hired people it needed to do the job on the day. No wasted time. No wasted money.

There more I thought about it, the more this seemed relevant to my micro-agency. The next time we met a prospect, I tried something different.

"How big is the team?" they asked.

"Two full-time – others as needed."

"Isn't that risky?"

"It's the business model I used when I worked in TV production. Rather than paying for people you don't need, we put the money where it matters."

"Well ... thanks for coming in."

The last line was the same, but the result was hugely different.

We won the account of a major UK theme park. Then another. Then another.

By 2018, when I sold the business, we had clients in the UK, Europe, Asia and America.

By then, we had graduated to a whole different set of stories, but I'll get to those another time.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about an aspect of this that's critical, but easy to miss.

-------------------