by Ron Ploof | Sep 6, 2016 | Business Storytelling
Sometimes storytelling lessons come from the most unlikely of places. One of mine came from an IRS agent at a tax seminar. “Does anyone know why the government allows homeowners to write off their mortgage interest?” he asked,
Our collective blank stare answered his question.
“Because landless peasants tend to become revolutionary,” he said.
While the line made the audience laugh, it also made me think. People’s behaviors are influenced by incentives.
Great storytellers are incentives experts. They use them to influence both the actions of their characters and the perceptions of their listeners. But using incentives is tricky. Human behavior is only influenced when the proposed incentive aligns with the recipient’s desire.
Parents are incentive masters. If Suzy wants to go out and play, but her chores are incomplete, Dad may point to her messy bedroom. If Suzy’s desire to go outside is stronger than her need to procrastinate, she’ll likely start tidying up immediately.
Companies use incentives, too, but they frequently misalign the incentive with the desire. Consider the case of a utility company that wants to entice its customers to convert to electronic billing. Customers motivated by ecology will respond to stories about saving trees, but what about the skeptics who question the transparency of the company’s altruism? While paperless billing will certainly reduce tree-killing, skeptical customers also know that the company will also enjoy a windfall of expense savings in the form of ink, paper, and postage. Such customers will be easier to motivate by passing a percentage of the savings onto them in the form of a monthly discount.
People are complex beings that make choices based on their own self-interests. Therefore, if you want to motivate someone to do something, make sure that your incentives align with their desires.
Photo Credit: Library of Congress
by Ron Ploof | Aug 29, 2016 | Business Storytelling
John Lewis, a UK-based retailer has used storytelling in its annual Christmas adverts since 2007. In this post, we deconstruct one of them by studying the storyteller’s choices.
First, watch the following John Lewis 2011 Christmas advert called The Long Wait.
The Long Wait’s foundation was built upon five story-choices:
- Story-choice #1: What’s the message? The purpose of any story is to deliver a satisfying ending that inspires an audience to do something. The storyteller chose to achieve this through delivering the proverbial message: It is better to give than to receive.
- Story-choice #2: How should we deliver that message? The storyteller chose to deliver the message through the pre-Christmas actions of a little boy.
- Story-choice #3: How should we order the events of this story? The storyteller chose to tell the story through a linear series (A,B,C) of events that demonstrate the slow passage of time. Such events include drumming fingers, staring at a clock, tossing and turning in bed, and the boy’s unsuccessful attempt to make the clock move faster.
- Story-choice #4: How should the audience interpret the little boy’s motivations? The storyteller chose to obscure the boy’s true motivation by relying on the audience’s preconceived notions about a child’s anticipation of receiving Christmas presents.
- Story-choice #5: How will we reveal the boy’s true motivation? By having the little boy prioritize his parent’s gift over his own, the storyteller simultaneously reveals the little boy’s true motivation and delivers the main message: it is better to give than to receive.
Storytelling is a series of choices that determine what to say, when to say it, all while being cognizant of how the audience will interpret those things. When done correctly, it’s magic.
Lastly, if you have a copy of The StoryHow PitchDeck (if you don’t, why not?), here’s a list of the cards represented within this story:
The StoryHow Method begins with the following definition: A story is the result (events) of people (roles) pursuing what they want (influences.)
Roles:
- Protagonist (#2): Little Boy
- Antagonist (#3): Time (#5) plays the role of antagonist
- Minor Characters (#4): The boy’s parents and sibling
- Time (#5): Time doubles as the role of antagonist (#3)
- Setting (#6): Little boy’s home at Christmastime
Influences:
- Response: Instinctive (#36): The audience’s instinct to assume that the little boy’s motivation is selfish
- Throughline (#40): The boy’s altruistic motivation to give his parents a Christmas present
- Who Knows What (#42): The storyteller knows the little boy’s motivation, but hides it from the audience until the very end
Events:
- Recurring Event (#18): Scene-after-scene reveals the slow passage of time
- Conflict: External (#20): Time is the only thing separating the little boy from the joy of gift-giving
- Conflict: Internal (#21): The little boy must demonstrate the discipline to wait until Christmas day
- The Twist (#27): The final revelation that the boy’s motivations were altruistic all along
And finally, the storytelling techniques that accompany the roles, events, and influences.
Techniques:
- Context (#45): By showing the boy’s actions in the context of Christmas, it’s easier to misdirect the audience from his true motivation
- Purpose (#46): Deliver the message while attaching it to the John Lewis brand
- The Big Idea (#48): It is better to give than to receive
- Scenes (#50): Show events that demonstrate the slow passage of time
- Challenges (#53): Little boy enduring the slow passage of time
- Shared Experiences (#55): The storyteller used the audience’s preconceived notions of children at Christmas to obscure the boy’s true motivations
- Symbolism (#57): The little boy represents youth; snow, presents, and decorated trees represent Christmas; and clocks represent time
by Ron Ploof | Aug 22, 2016 | Business Storytelling
“This is heresy, high heresy,” Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism said on This Week in Google. “If…I get shot at a journalism school, this is why. Journalists are not storytellers. We think that’s our highest art–our great value is we tell stories. No! We impart information and we help people get to their own information…”
Journalists are not storytellers. They are narrative-writing experts whose code of ethics precludes them from using storytelling techniques such as opinion and emotion. Storytellers enjoy many more freedoms than journalists, such as the ability to guide an audience’s perspective with emotions. The sooner that companies understand the difference between narrative writing and storytelling, the easier it’ll be to incorporate a storytelling practice into their communications.
Storytellers Are Communications Architects
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. He ruled over his creations with an iron fist, dictating everything from a structure’s orientation to where it would be located: like over a waterfall. Rather than presenting future occupants with empty floor plans to furnish willy-nilly, Wright told them where to put his custom-designed furniture. His unwavering focus on every detail helped him control how visitors felt when they walked into one of his rooms.
Like Wright, storytellers are architects who account for every communication detail. They too rule their creations with iron fists, determining what the listeners hear, when they hear it, and what they feel.
The skills for storytelling and writing are different. Great writers aren’t always great storytellers and great storytellers aren’t always great writers. My grandfather was the best storyteller that I’ve ever met, but he couldn’t write. He only had a sixth-grade education. Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t need to be a great craftsman to be a great architect. He just needed access to talented carpenters, masons, and artisans who could transform his visions into reality.
Lastly, while the skills for writing and storytelling differ, they don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Once in a blue moon, companies will find individuals who can weave facts within the context of the human condition to create powerful prose directly, rather than handing the story blueprints off to someone else.
Are you a writer, storyteller, or a writer-storyteller?
Photo Credit: Library of Congress
by Ron Ploof | Aug 15, 2016 | Business Storytelling
In last January’s post, How to Make Memorable Stories with Trigger Words, I described how people remember beginnings and endings over middles. But, just because we don’t remember middles, it doesn’t negate their importance. You see, we bond over the middles.
Middles separate us from the machines because they hold the common experiences of the human condition. While we may remember our first kiss and not our twenty-seventh, we know what it feels like to be kissed. The details of our individual memories may differ, but we’ve all felt embarrassment, have woken from bad dreams, and have been drawn into a bakery by the scent of freshly-baked bread. Master storytellers use middles to bond with their audiences.
Memories, Middles and the Chicken Men
My friend Dano Steinhardt is a talented street photographer who finds his subjects through unorthodox ways. For example, with a few spare hours before his flight out of Portland, he programmed his GPS for PDX, but rather than following the machine’s advice, he chose to do the opposite. If it told him to take a right, he took a left. If it told him to go north, he went south. Dano says that the more the voice protests, the closer he is to a “Dano shot.”
His anti-GPS method brought him to the Urban Iditarod (a.k.a. IDIOTarod), an event where costumed teams of liquored-up participants push shopping carts through the streets of Portland. He soon found himself in the company of the Chicken Men.
Humans commonly separate themselves into two groups: us versus them. When we’re part of the us group, it’s easy to gawk at the Chicken Men as the them group. But, what if we switched our point of view? What if it were us wearing the chicken heads and them were the gawkers? Not only would we bond as a group through the shared experience, but that bond would likely be stronger because of our small size compared to the larger them group.
Master storytellers connect with their audiences by simulating these bonding moments. They’re experts at finding ways to make us feel like them. For example, if I were telling a story about life as a Chicken Man, I’d need to find a common experience to build upon. With the odds that my audience had never donned a rubber chicken mask in public before, I’d need to uncover a middle–a common experience that could act as a surrogate. One simple way to uncover a common experience is to ask a “Have you ever…” question.
“Have you ever been in a situation where the world labelled you as odd, but you felt part of something special?”
The “Have you ever” technique uncovers middles to bond over. I use them frequently while presenting:
- “Have you ever been in a situation where time stood still?”
- “Have you ever looked around the room and wondered, “What the heck am I doing here?”
- “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to…?”
The “Have you ever” technique reveals a common experience that can bridge the gap between a new concept and an old one.
Give it a try. The next time you’re conveying a new concept to an audience, find a middle by seeking a “have you ever” moment.
Photo Credit: Both photos used in this post are courtesy of Dano Steinhardt. Check out his Between Meetings photo blog for more Dano goodness.
by Ron Ploof | Aug 8, 2016 | Business Storytelling
An old boss once told me, “When you go into a project-planning session, make sure to note the sign on the door. If it says cost, you’ll discuss slipping the schedule. If it says schedule, you’ll discuss adding cost.” The quote is a good reminder that business, like life, is filled with little tradeoffs.
Yet, most first-time business storytellers gloss over such realities by writing simplistic stories with predictable endings.
ACME, Inc. had a problem to solve. So, the company purchased our world-class, leading-edge, seamlessly integrated solution and lived happily ever after. The end.
Most case studies (or “success stories”) fall flat because perfect “solutions” only exist in fairy tales. Typical business decisions result from difficult tradeoffs between an ideal case (what the client wants) and the actual situation (what the client is willing to settle for). In other words, the game of business is a perpetual struggle to find optimal answers to difficult questions.
Consider the following business situation:
ACME Inc’s arch rival just released a superior product, forcing the company to accelerate the release of its next-gen product. To do so, however, ACME must retool its well-tuned manufacturing line and retrain employees–all without missing a beat on a shortened schedule.
The situation will be messy:
- ACME will likely pay more than its preliminary budget estimates.
- With a compressed schedule, the project will likely start before all of the variables are understood.
- ACME employees will feel pressure to learn a new system on the fly.
- Unanticipated problems will happen.
Lastly, successful vendors will address these issues creatively through proposing optimal answers as opposed to the “right” ones.
A cakewalk is neither interesting, memorable, nor persuasive. The best success stories are built upon imperfect plans. Therefore, characters in your business stories must earn their happily-ever-afters. You must acknowledge their dilemmas by having them travel down cluttered paths fraught with risk.
Without addressing these real-world situations, you won’t have a business story. You’ll have a fairy tale with an unsatisfactory ending.
Photo Credit: Library of Congress
by Ron Ploof | Aug 1, 2016 | Business Storytelling
Parents have intimate knowledge about the relationship between story structure and the ability for children to learn new things. We’ve marveled at how newborns enter the world with no knowledge, yet somehow bootstrap that nothingness into the ability to walk, talk, go to school, find occupations and eventually live on their own.
I think of an infant’s brain as like a computer running an operating system with no apps. I call this operating system RFE (pronounced ARR-fee) because the human brain believes that there’s a Reason For Everything. RFE is the driving force behind human thought as we observe patterns, associate those patterns with “normal,” and try to understand the reason for any discrepancies.
I’ve written quite a bit about Kendall Haven’s assertion that the only way humans learn is through story structure. I’ve also described Kenn Adams’ Story Spine as the ultimate structure for a story. So, is there a way to demonstrate how humans use RFE and story structure to extrapolate knowledge out of nothingness? Let’s give it a try:
Once upon a time there was a baby girl.
Everyday, someone comforted her when she cried.
Then one day, she cried and nobody came.
And because of that, she cried louder.
And because of that, she cried even louder.
Until finally, she noticed something. When it’s light outside, people comfort her. When it’s dark outside, they don’t.
And ever since then, she learned to sleep through the night.
Storytellers are RFE programmers. We understand that the information we choose to present will only be accepted by an audience after it passes RFE-ish tests:
- Why is the storyteller telling me this particular fact?
- Does the information fit with my understanding of “normal?”
Great storytellers respect the brain’s incredible power to fill-in the blanks. Instead of spoon-feeding their audiences, they deliver just enough information for the RFE to piece together the meaning. Sometimes a business storyteller will choose to deliver a fact in an unorthodox way for the sole purpose of initiating hyper-RFE activity, then follow-up those odd tidbits with concepts that allow the listener to bridge-the-gap between the conflicting ideas. The worst storytellers, however, lose their audiences by presenting non-sequitur information that sends the RFE spiraling into an infinite loop as they try to “wrap their heads around” the concept.
Want to become a better business storyteller? Learn how to write code for the RFE operating system.
Photo Credit: Library of Congress
