Chapter 4
For this exercise you will need:
- Awareness of a specific story that you would like to improve.
- Note that this exercise works even better if you share your progress with a trusted friend. Consider finding someone to share feedback as your story evolves through a series of incremental improvements.
Elsewhere in Circle of the 9 Muses, I have made the point that it is better to tell the right story, the strategically chosen story, than it is to tell the story well. That's true.
But a killer, beautifully delivered story would be even better, right? This is especially true for leaders who communicate directly with the marketplace or the media. And if the CEO is going to be in the audience of your next presentation, it would be nice if you could knock it out of the park.
Fortunately, in our quest to develop knockout stories, there is no shortage of material to draw from. Professional story makers in Hollywood invest in a high-stakes pursuit of understanding which stories connect and why. (And it is a testament to the endless nuance of the craft that they still get it wrong so frequently.) Increasingly, organizational leaders are also tapping this deep body of knowledge as a path to influence, and screenwriting gurus, such as the legendary Robert McKee, are now presenting their insights to packed audiences of corporate executives.
For insight we can look back even further to the year 1863, when German playwright Gustav Freytag proposed a classic structure in his Technik des Dramas.
Freytag's classic five-act story structure. It may be common sense . . . but in many organizations it is not common practice.
His definitive five-act structure for drama—which includes exposition (setup), rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement (wrap-up)—is so pervasive that it may strike modern story consumers as self-evident. And yet how often have you heard leaders fail to set up their story with audience-tailored exposition, articulate the most critical sequence of events in the rising action or climax, or bring the story to a satisfying close? Violations of this basic structure are epidemic. You will notice that Freytag's framework informs many of the techniques and templates provided in this chapter.
Throughout this chapter, we will travel across time and cultures to find wisdom that we can connect to your storytelling. And, of course, we will draw from my colleagues' and my own experiments in helping leaders all over the world tell better stories.
Although there are many, many paths into the world of stories, for the sake of simplicity we will explore it here in a step-by-step process in which you will consider one of your stories through a series of lenses.
Ready to get started?
Clarify Your Intent
Intent is the invisible driver behind everything you do. Your people may not see your intent, but they will always respond to it. Great leaders develop an ever-present self-awareness around their intent, and they habitually pause to clarify the authentic why behind every action they take.
To tell great stories, begin with intent. Why are you telling this story? What outcome do you expect? There are endless reasons to tell a story to your team or audience, but ultimately it is because you want them to know something, to do something, or to feel something. (Or some combination of the three.) More specifically, here are some of the most common outcomes that storytellers desire, with examples of the audience's possible responses:
Connect Your Story to Universal Plots
There are no new stories. Human beings keep telling and living the same stories over and over. This may sound limiting, but the opposite is true. Once you begin to recognize the universal stories that surround us, it is tremendously liberating as a storyteller. For example, you may recognize that your last sales call was actually a reenactment of the classic David and Goliath theme. Or perhaps your failed project was the story of a winged Icarus flying too close to the sun (with only the names and a few other details switched out). When you tell your stories with that kind of archetypal awareness, you elevate even the most modest stories and connect to your audience's primal need states. Story theorist Robert McKee says, “Stereotyped stories stay home. Archetypal stories travel.”1
Many story theorists have proposed frameworks that suggest that a fixed number of dramatic plots keep reoccurring in stories. For example, in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, author Christopher Booker makes a persuasive case that every story falls into one of seven plots. In the influential Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, Blake Snyder says that movies all fall into one of 10 basic frameworks.
These attempts to create a story taxonomy aren't limited to modern-day Hollywood. In 1895, the French dramatist Georges Polti presented a more nuanced framework with les trente-six situations dramatiques—the 36 dramatic situations.2
If this were a class in screenwriting or novel writing, all of Booker's, Snyder's, Polti's, and others' material would be fair game. However, my experience in leadership storytelling suggests that most of the time we will draw from a more limited palette. That's because leadership stories tend to be aspirational. They don't typically deal with, oh, adultery, the accidental murder of your brother, or finding out that your mortal enemy is actually your father in disguise. In our efforts to create organizational alignment, there is far more power in the stories of virtue rewarded than there are in the shadowy tales of the salacious, the unseemly, or the macabre.3
On the following pages you will find my library of leadership story frameworks, informed by the great thinking of those I've already mentioned, and cultivated through my experiences applying the frameworks to leaders. This list is certainly not comprehensive, but I find that it covers most of the leadership bases.
It begins with the granddaddy of leadership storytelling, which drives all the examples that will follow. This master template, called The Quest, flows like this:
Note how the The Quest is built on two movements of conflict and change. In fact, these are the core building blocks of all storytelling.4
Michael Margolis, chief executive officer (CEO) of Get Storied, says that if you can find the conflict in your narrative, you find the hook to grab your audience. “Your greatest source of untapped power,” he says, “is the place in your story that needs to be reconciled.”
Every living creature with a limbic system and an instinct for self-preservation experiences its world through the lenses of conflict and change. Influential Hollywood story guru Bobette Buster says that our insatiable appetite for transformation is what draws us perpetually to the movies. Simply pausing to consider your story through these primal lenses will elevate its urgency. In my story, where is the conflict? What are the forces that are working against me/us? What are the stakes? What is changing (or how are you being changed)? What will be different when we win (or lose?)
In business stories, the conflict may come in the form of a competitor, a tough customer, or a difficult boss. But dig deeper and you'll find that the real source of conflict is probably us: our beliefs, mental models, and behaviors, which got us into this mess and which must now change.
What was the conflict? What changed? If your intent is to tell better stories, answering those questions is your first point of leverage.
Again, the simple Quest template as laid out on the previous page never seems to become tiresome. You have seen it, heard it, and read it countless times and it is endlessly evergreen. It is also open to tremendous variation. Let's expand our palette of choices with the following archetypes, and see if you can think of examples from your own experiences.
Note that the following examples are all positioned in the collective first person: we. This is for the sake of illustration. Let your story dictate whether the protagonist is them, you, me, her, and so on.
Other Story Structures: FWA*
Story theory is deep. There is no shortage of plots, frameworks, and structures to think about. If you wish to step away from the plot archetypes described in this chapter, there are other ways to go. Here are some acronym-driven approaches that are simple, memorable, and easy to act upon.
In Lead with a Story, Paul Smith makes a good case that the easiest way to shape your story is with the acronym CAR. It stands for:
| Context: | Action: | Result: |
| So, there we were, sitting in the conference room on the eighth floor, when the door burst open . . . | Amy shouted, “We won the Epic account!” And then . . . | . . . In the end, all of our hard work paid off, and here is the new innovation we produced . . . |
Does your memory have room for another letter? Dr. Karen Dietz offers another acronym called STAR, which reminds you to bring conflict (Trouble) into the story:
| Situation: | Trouble: | Action: | Result: |
| So, there we were, sitting in the conference room on the eighth floor, when the door burst open . . . | Amy shouted, “We won the Epic account!'' But then she said, “there's just one problem . . .'' | So we spent all night reviewing the code, the project plans, and the budget . . . | . . . In the end, all of our hard work paid off, and here is the new innovation we produced . . . |
Dr. Dietz also suggests adding two more elements to turn STAR into STARQE (pronounced “stark” as in “the stark data and truth”). The Q and E stand for Quantification and Evaluation, and they bring data-driven discipline and learning to your story.
| Quantification: | Evaluation: |
| In total, that was more than 100 labor hours of troubleshooting that resulted in more than $3 million in added revenue . . . | So I learned from all of this that even the most established processes are vulnerable, and we must never be overconfident . . . |
So next time you need to construct a story quickly, just remember:
- Context
- Action
- Result
- Situation
- Trouble
- Action
- Result
- Situation
- Trouble
- Action
- Result
- Quantifi cation
- Evaluation
Other Tips and Techniques for Better Stories
You just took a rather broad approach to thinking about the form of your story. Of course, you can take many other steps to make your story truly unforgettable. Here are a few tips that are low-hanging fruit: easy to implement, while delivering big a impact.
As you consider these techniques, determine which ones might bring even more punch to your story.
Technique 1: Throw 'Em Right into the Action
I hear a lot of new storytellers begin their stories with long, agonizing preambles in which they tell their audience about the story. “Well, my boss asked me to tell a story, so I'm going to tell you about something that happened at our last regional meeting in Atlanta. Everyone here has been to those meetings, right? So you will know what I'm talking about. And you'll appreciate how unexpected this was. I know I didn't expect it. So, okay. Here's what happened . . .”
Agonizing, right? Nothing loses an audience faster than telling about a story without actually telling it.
Instead, invite your audience into the story immediately. Just put them right into the action! This is easy to do. Think of the beginning of your story. Close your eyes and imagine the scene. And then just start describing it. To orient your thoughts in a specific sense of place, you may find it helpful to use the phrase (or some variation) “So, there I was . . .”
So there we were, still finding our seats at the regional meeting in Atlanta. The lights haven't even gone down yet, and suddenly someone starts yelling something from the back of the auditorium . . .
I was dead asleep in my bed, 4:00 in the morning, and my phone rings . . .
It was just after breakfast and the temperature was already 103 degrees Fahrenheit in Saudi Arabia, and there I was sweating on the street corner in a full business suit . . .
Notice how each of those draws the audience into the narrative immediately. No preamble. No explanations or clues of what you're about to hear. Place them in the story and trust the audience's imaginations to engage.
Technique 2: Add Emotion (“The King and the Queen”)
Stories are containers for emotion. There is an important opportunity here that many leaders miss.
I've seen many leaders go to great lengths to strip out any emotion from their stories. They fear that emotion is too unprofessional, too self-revealing, too soft, or too vulnerable. My European colleagues fear that using emotion is too American.
And yet, more than any other detail in your story, emotion is what engages your audience. If you strip out the emotion, you remove engagement. It's that simple.
E. M. Forster, the great English novelist and essayist who gave us A Passage to India, A Room with a View, and more, famously said, “A story is nothing more than a fact plus an emotion.”6
Forster illustrates this memorably. If I were to say to you, “The queen died and the king died,” that is a fact.
But if I said, “The queen died and the king died of grief,” that is a story.
See how the simple addition of an emotion transformed the data into an experience? Perhaps it triggered your own experiences with grief. “Yes. I remember. I know how that feels.” A flood of emotional information arrives in an instant.
Your mind experiences emotion in the amygdala, which is the brain's fight-or-flight center; the amygdala then signals the hippocampus—the seat of executive functioning—with the message, “This is important. You'd better save it so that we can retrieve it later.” This is why your dog won't tangle with a skunk a second time.
This emotional experience also has the effect of lifting the audience out of the present and putting them in a different shared experience that Graham Williams describes as “narrative transport.” This is a powerful effect, and at its best it bears similarity to a trance or hypnotic state. Graham says he recalls watching the movie The Elephant Man in a theater and being unexpectedly seized with sobs that he could not control. “At some level I had entered the story,” he says. “Perhaps I identified with Joseph Merrick's ugly duckling situation. I certainly experienced overwhelming empathy with him, and anger at what society can do to individuals.”
Granted, your goal may not be for your audience of leaders to become overcome by an uncontrollable fit of crying. (Although think for a moment about what a powerful event that would be and the opportunity it would offer to disrupt mental models and redirect action.)
Many leaders avoid enhancing their stories with emotional declarations—especially with the vulnerable emotions, such as uncertainty, anxiety, or fear—because of the unpredictability of emotion. But rather than compromise your strength, it becomes its own unique source of strength and credibility.
In terms of your storytelling, this can be very easy to do. Simply include short, declarative statements of emotion:
See how simple that is? Notice how each of those short statements provides powerful triggers that indicate how your audience should process your story emotionally. Emotion brings the audience along with you.
Earlier in Circle of the 9 Muses, we shared the Zappos 10-hour customer service call story. That story did not include any emotional statements. Here it is again with some emotional statements (with new content highlighted in bold text):
In the example above, note that the emotional statements are applied to the customer service protagonist (“the customer service guy is just relaxed, and smiling”). They also connect to the storyteller (“I couldn't believe it,” etc.). Thus, the audience is allowed to empathize with the values-driven customer service agent, as well as the storyteller who is calling out his or her own reaction to the tension in the story. In the process, the storyteller gives voice and validation to the invisible reactions of the audience.
You can imagine how an effective delivery of the above story might also include facial expressions, body posture, and verbal inflections to help bring the emotion to life even more!
Technique 3: Add Sensory and Motion Information
Similar to the use of emotional statements, when you add sensory or motor information to your story, it activates the parts of the brain called, respectively, the sensory cortex and motor cortex.
I already suggested this in my example about Saudi Arabia a few pages back, which is a story from my own experience that I told to a group. In fact, let's add a little more sensory information:
Similarly, notice how these quick statements of smell, sight, touch, taste, and sound activate the corresponding regions of your sensory cortex. Pay attention to how you experience these statements:
For our meeting they led us to the basement of this old building, where it smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke . . .
When the auditor shook my hand, his grip was like iron and his skin was tough like a farmer's.
Every time the elevator outside my office went ping! I just knew the doors were about to open and unleash another angry customer on us.
Her office smelled like that fancy lavender soap from bathrooms.
This also works with action statements, which create a little adrenaline release by triggering the motor cortex of the brain:
| I handed the engagement survey results to Denise, but instead of looking at it, she just threw it toward the trash can like this . . . | So there we were, this team of sales reps, huffing and puffing and running down the concourse at LaGuardia at top speed in our heels . . . | I asked Gerald if he remembered to get the blueprints, and he slammed on the brakes, and I hear the car tires squeal, and my heart stops because I'm thinking, I'm gonna die. |
Notice how that last statement is a triple hit of motor, sensory, and emotional information!
Story thought leader Annette Simmons advocates mixing sensory information. These sensory mash-ups create a moment of surprise that prompts your mind to take an extra step to reconcile the metaphors:
My mentor reassured me, with his velvet voice . . .
When she told her story, the room was electric!
She kept tossing out recommendations, and each had the substance of cotton candy . . .
Technique 4: The “MacGuffin,” or Gleaming Detail
The great film director Alfred Hitchcock (“the Master of Suspense”) often constructed his films' most dramatic moments around some visual object that became the physical embodiment of the film's action and themes. He called this item the “MacGuffin,” and he said that it didn't even matter what it was. In North by Northwest, that film's most suspenseful moments hinge on a metal cigarette lighter; and once you've seen Notorious you never forget that key to the wine cellar, and its dangerous journey as it is passed from Ingrid Bergman to Cary Grant.
A few months ago in Paris, an executive in one of my story programs held up a pair of socks and said, “I want to tell you about a leader who changed my entire perspective of leadership with this pair of socks.” (Aren't you intrigued? Our audience certainly was.)
Another leader told a story he called “the white box,” which was a box in the break room of a manufacturing facility in which employees could make anonymous donations that would later be distributed to other employees in times of great need. His telling of the story was powerful, as he allowed the audience to follow the white box from the break room to a hospital where an employee was in intensive care. Today, thanks to that memorable telling of the story, one can simply say “white box” anywhere in the manufacturing division, and it is a universally recognized metaphor for the company's culture of caring for its employees. (And likewise, for my group in Paris, one can now simply say “gym socks,” and everyone will smile in instant recognition.)
Is there a MacGuffin (or “gleaming detail” as Bobette Buster calls it) that can become the embodiment of your story? Perhaps it is a crystal paperweight from your desk; a label that says, “Hello My Name Is . . .”; an old floppy disk with faded writing on the label; or a handwritten thank-you note from a customer. If so, describe it, use it, show it, and build your story on it. The image of the object will become an easy-to-recall metaphor that cements the story indelibly in your audience's minds.
Technique 5: Play with the Timeline
Christopher Nolan's movie Memento is famous for starting at the end of its story and working backward in time as an amnesiac seeks to discover the cause of his wife's murder. And Quentin Tarantino's influential Pulp Fiction thrillingly leapfrogs back and forth across its timeline in a way that disorients but somehow feels just right emotionally.
I'm not suggesting that your business story attempt the same dazzling acrobatics as those innovative movies. But I have certainly heard storytellers make some simple leaps across the timeline to great effect.
For example, you might start with the end and then go back and tell the story sequentially:
The above story, by telegraphing the ending first, creates a tension that the remainder of the story will resolve.
Another approach: Tell the beginning. Tell the end. Then fill in the middle.
Set up parallel timelines:
Make dramatic leaps across time and settings. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, contains the most famous jump cut in the history of cinema, from a bone flung violently into the air by a prehistoric ape to a similarly shaped space station floating in the heavens in some unimaginable future. The jarring shifts in time and setting prompt the audience to search for the theme or connecting idea. You may recall that I did something similar in the introduction of this book, which begins with me on a date with my wife before catapulting back 30,000 years in time.
I heard one leader begin a story about his team by saying, “The story of our new safety initiative actually begins 150 years ago at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, with the first shot fired in the American Civil War.” The entire room leaned forward in anticipation, hungry to hear how their story connected to that historical event.
Technique 6: Make It Shorter!
This is an easy one. Are you sure you need all of those words? You probably don't.
Remember that although there are notable exceptions, leadership storytelling is often rather brief. (Note that many of the examples scattered across the chapters of this book are no more than a paragraph in length.)
In his memoir, On Writing, horror novelist Stephen King exhorts aspiring storytellers to edit their own beautiful words mercilessly. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings,” he says.
Capture your story in a word processor. Make note of the word count.
Can you remove 25 percent of the words?
What would happen if you cut it by 50 percent?
Give it a try. Or even better, let your spouse or partner do it for you. Weep for your brilliant words that have been forever lost; then marvel at the improved product that results.
Bringing It All Together: Geoff's Story
Let's take one last look at where Geoff's story landed. I like how it takes an easy-to-overlook moment in the life of a team and transforms it into a nice moment of learning and shared identity for the organization.
Where Do I Go from Here?
I think you're ready to tell your knockout story!
Go find an audience or occasion to tell your story. Test it out, make note of the response you get . . . and, if necessary, adjust it again to make it even stronger!
If you would like additional tools that can enrich your storytelling, check out leadership story archetypes (Chapter 8). This will offer richer insight into the identity and role of the protagonist of your story, or provide insight into your role or the unique voice of the teller.