Business Storytelling: Three Professional Sources (and a Warning)
This is Part 1- It is fun to know what the professionals do, but these ideas are hard to implement. We'll follow up with more practical ideas.
I think I’m OK at business storytelling.
But, I lose my confidence when I hear people say business stories should use Pixar as an example. Yikes! My business storytelling is nothing like that. Do my presentations need more drama and hero who struggles? Would that even work in a business setting?
I think my confusion comes from two facts and a misleading conclusion.
The two facts are that communication is important in business and that humans remember stories. A perfect conclusion from this is that if we want our business communication to be remembered, we should tell more and better stories.
However, the misleading conclusion, and too big of leap, is that business storytelling should be just like professional storytelling. I don’t think that business storytelling should be just like movies, books, or fairy tales.
The reason I think this is misleading is that it doesn’t translate to most business meetings. First, you don’t have permission to take the time to tell a story like that. Second, you won’t have the time to prepare every story. Third, do you really think you have professional storytelling skills? Without the time and true skill, likely you’ll botch it. The story will end up sounding corny and cringe-worthy. Remember, well-paid people who make movies make a lot of duds.
I think there is a better way to look at this: Learning about professional storytelling is interesting. It could enrich your life. You might pick up a few good ideas for business storytelling. However, the warning is that these ideas are hard to directly implement. In future blog posts, we’ll steal ideas from here to give practical ideas for business storytelling1.
Enough warnings, here three of my favorite and fun sources to get you started.
First up and a great place to start is Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 5-minute “Shape of Stories” lecture2
This lecture outlines the arcs of stories— how they start, how they build drama, and how they conclude. It is almost a requirement to know this lecture if you are talking about storytelling.
My second recommendation is Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks. (Here is a podcast interview with him for a good overview of the ideas.)
This is a fabulous book about how to think about and tell the stories of your life. He honed his skills telling 5-minute Moth Stories3. He claims that all good stories are about the 5-seconds when a human goes through a change. He claims that we all have at least one story per day, and our lives will be richer if we see this. The book is full of good advice for telling stories— some of which you may also find helpful in a business setting.
Third, you’ll often see a storytelling framework that looks like this fill-in-the-blank story from the book, The Pixar Story:
Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
I’ve done group exercises with this framework. It is fun. And, it really does make it easier to tell a story. I would encourage you to think about this framework to help tell better stories.4
These three sources should give you a start to understand professional storytelling.
(Edit: here is the next blog in the series, Business Storytelling- Four Practical Tips.)
The big exception here is that if you are the leader of an organization and want to energize your team at annual meeting, it is worth spending the time to implement these ideas more directly.
You can easily find many other YouTube videos of this talk from different periods in his life. This one was from later in his life. He definitely got a little spicier and uninhibited as he got older!
The Moth is a storytelling organization. They have a podcast and do local live events. If you want great stories, this is the place. My family has listened to many hours of Moth podcasts on long car rides— with laughter and tears. And, a piece of trivia: I was selected to give a talk at two live events in Evanston. I prepared a talk ahead of time and was lucky enough to be picked— it was good fun.
I have to thank Claire Slattery for first introducing me to this framework in a storytelling session we had at Opex Analytics. Claire reminded me that this fill-in-the-blank is called a Story Spine.